110. EL, Berlin, 4-24-'12
Last time an imagination
was placed before our soul that liberated forces that can be of help to
us on our occult path. Today two inspiring thoughts shall appear
before your soul that can be effective in the same way. The essential
thing about such thoughts and questions is that we let them rest in
our soul for awhile, that we let them speak to us without doing much
with them.
People have occupied
themselves with these thoughts a great deal, but in a quite different
way, so that they've led men to impossible commentaries and disputes.
Grasped esoterically, they're of help to occult pupils. The
first of these inspiring thoughts is the “motherless human
being” who's called Adam in Genesis. Everything that
comes to meet us in the way of a human being is unthinkable if
he's not born from a mother. Adam is the only motherless human
being; only father forces were active in him. Of course we
mustn't place him before our soul as a sensorial, physical man,
or when Yahweh created the first earth man in his etheric body
present physical conditions didn't exit on our earth planet;
and namely he created him out of the earth-planet's substances,
as the Bible indicates. These substances or earth forces are still
present in every man today, so that we can say: Yahweh is the father
of us all, and the planet is our mother.
So father forces continue
to work in men today; they are an earth-bound, planetary force. They
work in everything that's on earth, and so also in men. For after the
conception of a child, the mother's forces work on it, but so
do the father forces; they go into the child from the earth via the
father and form the upbuilding forces there that are most strongly
active up to age 33.
Let's make it clear to
ourselves: what happens at the birth of a new human being? The mother
bears one part in her, but the other part is
super-sensible — invisible and is connected with the father. Place
yourself meditatively into this thought of a motherless human being,
try to grasp it purely spiritually, and place a second picture beside
it: that of the fatherless Christ.
Whereas planetary forces
coming from the father are mainly active until the Mystery of Golgotha,
forces of the cosmos, mother forces are added since then by Christ
Jesus. We know that this most important of all earth events falls in
the fourth cultural age of the post-Atlantean epoch. This was
preceded by the Egyptian age in which the perfected Isis culture was
cultivated in the Egyptian mysteries. Egyptians revered the nature
forces that come to expression in all minerals, animals and plants in
the figure of Isis. But an Egyptian soul looked at man sorrowfully
and told himself that he wasn't aware of these nature forces in
him, and that's why he thought that Isis was veiled. He said
that no mortal was allowed to lift her veil to press towards her.
What does this mean? Nothing else than that the Goddess lives in the
astral world and not in the physical one, and that only someone
who's gone through the portal of death can know her; no living
person could lift her veil. That is, the effect of the Isis forces
was denied to live people. And what were these Isis forces? They were
pure mother forces that a man could only be given in the spiritual
world before the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, when he had gone
through the portal of death.
People in the Egyptian
mysteries knew about this. Over Isis' picture were the words: I am
the I am, that I was and that I will be — the same Eyeh asher
eyeh that spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. An Egyptian
could only get a presentiment of the Mystery of Golgotha, through
which pure mother forces would also act upon living men. Pure mother
forces — out of the cosmos — can only work in men on earth
now because Christ Jesus, the fatherless human being, has completely
connected himself with the earth after he went through the portal of
death.
Let our modern scholars
laugh when they look at the Egyptians' worship of animals. It can only
fill us with the deepest reverence, for we know that what's
concealed behind it is the veneration of these nature forces that
were locked up for men. We look at the great wisdom that underlies
all these mysteries with great wonder.
Let's ask ourselves
how these two forces are active in men. The father force that's
transmitted from the earth to a child via his father works in an
upbuilding and strengthening way until age 33. Although the mother
force that strives downwards is already at work in man, the father
forces are stronger up to this time. If only the forces striving
downward, Christ forces, would rule a man, he wouldn't
incarnate on earth. Whereas if only the forces that strive up, the
planetary ones, would rule him he would always live on earth; then
there would be no death.
The sacred center of
forces that was Isis in the Egyptian mysteries is the Maria-Sophia
in John's Gospel in Christianity. It was only the union of
ascending and descending forces that took place in the Mystery of
Golgotha that enabled a man to also feel the activity of mother
forces between birth and death. Christ Jesus couldn't get older
than 33. From an occultist's standpoint, a man is only carrying
his body with him like a corpse by the time he's 33. Of course,
the effect of the forces and their change doesn't appear all at
once, but happens gradually. The mother and father forces are both in
man from the beginning, except that the upbuilding earth forces
predominate. During the father forces period, the life we lead is
conditioned by our preceding life. But from the time when the dying
mother forces predominate, we create karma for the next life through
this spiritual force. The father or upbuilding nature force works in
us without our help, whereas to become aware of the effect of the
mother force, we must strive and work in spiritual things ourselves.
We must become aware of this sublime force, for it's the force
that streams into us directly from Christ.
As so often before, we now
get an inkling of the deep meaning in the Rosicrucian verse: We're
born from the Gods — Ex Deo nascimur. The Adam force of
the motherless man works on the physical body in an upbuilding and
preserving way. Whereas what's working since the Mystery of
Golgotha is the fatherless man, Christ Jesus, the dying force, the
force that leads to the dying of the physical body here on earth and
that awakens spiritual life if we devote ourselves to it consciously.
In Christ we die, that is, die with all of our physical concepts and
the lower ego that was built up for us while the Adam forces were
active. And then we'll really experience the last line of the
Rosicrucian verse: We're born again in the Holy Spirit.
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