עברית "One must come in real life to experience and truly comprehend the mystery of love and compassion, to truly feel in one’s own soul the weak and helpless, wounded, mortal human being, and realize that all humans are like this—including you".
From the First lecture: The Fundamental Amfortas-Parsifal Duality and its Healiing
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement Since the Death of Rudolf Steiner
An Esoteric Study
‘Now tell me what thy name may be.’
‘As Parsifal men speak of me.’
Then sighs the aged man with groan,
The name to him is full well-known.
‘What thou unwittingly hast left undone
Has brought this sorrow as thy doom.’
Before I continue with the story of my life, I want to look back again at what I learned in these years about the essence of the Amfortas-Parsifal problem that is so characteristic of many honestly striving people in the age of the Consciousness Soul. I said above that my main problem was that I could not take the spiritualized cognitive forces that I extracted out of the forces of my bodies and soul and stream them back down into the lower bodies as healing forces. This riddle was all the more puzzling, because as a matter of fact I did spiritualize some of my lower forces, because this was necessary in developing my higher forces of cognition, as you can see from the etherization of ordinary thinking and sense perception which is the basis of The New Experience of the Supersensible and Cognitive Yoga. On closer inspection, I realized that the spiritualization of the lower bodies and unconscious soul forces created a replica of this duality also in the lower forces. It divided the bodies and Mind Soul forces into two: a higher stream, that supported the developing spiritual forces, and a lower, descending stream, that hardened all the more strongly in itself. That is, some parts of the lower constitution were spiritualized and used in the spiritual research, while the other parts remained stubbornly unchanged. This created a reflection of the whole human duality also in the lower bodies and soul forces. When I descended into my bodies, I could see the higher, spiritualized forces and the lower ones, there side by side, as well as the fierce attacks that the lower directed against the higher. Now this general duality was reflected also in the lower bodies and I faced two dualities: the general one and its reflection in the lower bodies. But this reflection became a reality in itself, that in turn acted upon and enhanced the general duality. My two natures, the higher and lower, became like opposite mirror images, and I was standing in the middle, unable to mediate and merge them into harmonious wholeness. I could not bring enough of the higher forces, extracted from my bodies in the intensification of thinking, feeling and will, to cross the barriers and the abyss in the middle of myself, and stream downwards to heal the dead parts of the bodies.
Furthermore, there was also another disturbing discovery, which made the divided soul situation even more complicated. I realized that any intensification of the higher cognitive forces caused an exact opposite and reversed intensification in the mirror of the lower forces. This means that in addition to my inability to turn the higher forces around in order to send them inward and downward, I also experienced that each positive intensification of my spiritual activity above was answered by an equally intense counterblow from below. It was really like a rebellion and insurrection taking place in the lowest organs and processes of the abdomen and reproductive system, that was actually using each new step of development outside the body above to intensify its opposition below, vehemently rejecting whatever I wanted to bring with me from the spiritual world back to the body. This remarkable discovery was, scientifically speaking, very important, because it helped me solve many riddles concerning the dual human nature. Let me mention however briefly some aspects of this discovery...
Let us look a bit closer at the subjective formation of the soul life in those years, under the impact of this growing duality and spiritual helplessness. My helplessness was exacerbated because my pride prevented me from asking for real help, which means, of course, to ask from the only state of soul that can open itself to receive the needed help. But precisely this state of soul was blocked by my pride! So, paradoxically, at the same time, I felt an intensified feeling of helplessness, because my spiritual forces could not bridge and heal my duality, yet the stubborn pride raised its head each time again. This pride, however, was only one part of an increasingly visible force of inner opposition, that was actually rebelling and fighting mightily against my higher will. This opposition had the effect of isolating and hardening my soul in itself. Now, because I was conscious of this pride, I also felt deeply ashamed that I could not ask for real help. This grew to become a strong feeling of guilt and was the cause of severe self-condemnation. Furthermore, the situation became even worse, because this guilt and the compassionless self-accusation and judgement caused increased anxiety and fear. Together, pride, shame, guilt, judgement and fear, became dense and coagulated in the feeling part of the middle Mind Soul. It was growing so intense and the feeling of helplessness grew together with it. A vicious closed circle was thus tightly established in the depths of my Mind Soul.
I could really say to myself, ‘Everything Rudolf Steiner says about the wound of Amfortas, and the way it is portrayed in the Grail stories, is becoming terribly concrete and real.’ But as concrete and real also became my helplessness, when I struggled to create the new forces of Parsifal that should be able to stream down, penetrate the dead and sick bodily and soul parts, heal the wound, and unite my divided human being. It was really my fate in those years, to be able to continue to see the Grail on a daily basis in my spiritual life and work, but to experience the bitter fact that I was not able to use these forces to heal my own wound. This was a most disturbing and painful riddle and mystery, which became the central riddle of my whole-split life in those years. And it was not resolved nor healed so very fast either...
Above I described the ahrimanic-luciferic merger in the feeling life of the soul, that creates a densely impenetrable layer through the sedimentations of pride, fear, shame, guilt and self-judgement. If you are able to observe and investigate your feelings in an objective way, from outside, silencing your emotional-personal reactions and entirely relaxing your astral body, you can observe the dense amalgamations and confluences of pride, fear, shame, guilt and judgement as if you observe the feelings of another person. In this way you can transform part of your feelings, sympathies and antipathies, passions and emotions, into organs of spiritual perception. When you use your feelings as organs of impersonal, objective, spiritual perception, they also become transparent, and you can see through them to the forces that work below the feelings in lower regions of the soul and bodies. Then you discover that below these impenetrable strata of feelings, a whole new soul world emerges, composed of our unbridled instincts, desires, drives and passions, that are nourished by these feelings and bind them to these lower regions and their beings, that feed on them and multiply through them. The lowest region of the soul world, described in Theosophy as the region of burning lusts and desires, opens up before you. You realize that while your attention was occupied with the emotional complexes created out of the feelings of pride and fear, shame, guilt and judgement— to name only a few—below them, in the unconscious depths of the soul, wilder instincts and passions were flaring up incessantly.
Now you can direct these organs of spiritual soul perception to observe and investigate what is taking place below the threshold of your feeling life, below what I called, in Cognitive Yoga, the ‘diaphragmatic threshold’. This region extends from the solar plexus down to the organs and forces of reproduction. The difficulties caused in the efforts to cross this threshold and investigate these forces are to be found, literally, in the lower astral forces of your own bowels. This is the reason why they are not easily over- come. In Cognitive Yoga, it is said that ‘this etherization [of thinking and sense perception] achieved a great deal in the transformation of our ordinary head and brain processes and kindled the first fully spiritual-scientific experiences of the cosmic, etheric world, through imaginative cognition. But it became increasingly difficult as we wished to descend deeper into the middle and lower parts of the body and was halted altogether when we tried to cross the barrier of the diaphragmatic threshold. And while the threshold consists of the dense amalgamations of conscious and unconscious soul and bodily experiences, below this threshold also exist those regions of the body and soul which are kept altogether outside any conscious experience.’
Among the forces below this threshold, that prove to be the most difficult to grasp and cognize, we find also the forces of sexual reproduction. In our ordinary soul life, we have absolutely no direct access nor experience of these wholly unconscious forces. We can only find them when we cross this diaphragmatic, or solar plexus, threshold, and penetrate through the whole complex of our sexual fantasies, passions, desires, lusts and instincts. These prove to be the most persistent and resistant among all other desires and passions. Once the conscious astral desires and passions are linked to the unconscious forces of sexual reproduction (and this happens, in the case of modern people, during puberty), they cannot be repressed and suppressed anymore, because they are nourished by the divine fountain of life that is the source of the forces of reproduction. When I grasped this in full consciousness, I realized that I was getting closer to the place in which the ‘wound of Amfortas’ begins to reveal its deeper origin, because Amfortas was using his sexual desires to extract and mobilize etheric and physical reproductive forces, to intensify his spiritual faculties, and use them to enter the spiritual world in an unjustified way. In other words, he misused the divinely protected, otherwise unconscious forces of reproduction, by an intensification of his conscious sexual desires, to energize and intensify his spiritual forces. In so doing, he ‘wounded’ himself in a deeper part of his lower bodies, because he deprived them of the protection of these divine forces. This means that he depleted and killed certain highly spiritual forces, taken from the reproduction system, that lay even deeper—spiritually speaking—in the etheric and physical bodies, than the generally dead parts, about which Rudolf Steiner spoke in the lecture about the Amfortas-Parsifal duality. But in doing so, he opened the way to the ahrimanic-luciferic forces, represented by Klingsor, to gain access to the otherwise strongly protected reproductive forces, which were not yet accessible to them in the Mind Soul age. And in this way, he actually reversed the rightful spiritual path to the Grail to its opposite.
Now, because the spiritual forces that underlie the reproductive system are still largely protected by the divine creator beings, Lucifer and Ahriman cannot attack and usurp them directly. But they do everything possible to open the way to still more powerful beings, who can use the forces of the Consciousness Soul in the present fifth cultural epoch, to penetrate, on the one hand, as deep as the reproductive forces, and on the other, to use them to penetrate into the spiritual core of the ‘I’. For this purpose, Lucifer and Ahriman are working together to enflame and intensify the astral passions and desires connected to our sexual life. Here we touch on profound mysteries of the future evolution of humanity, which are beyond the limits of our present lecture. In my book, Cognitive Yoga, you will find some concrete examples of the transformative and redemptive work with the forces of reproduction.
As you know, my whole spiritual work, from the beginning, is based on The Philosophy of Freedom, and when you develop pure thinking in this way, you give your spiritual activity the most solid unpersonal foundation. Therefore, I was always on my guard, never to let any influence of these forces of desire enter my spiritual research, not even in my unconscious soul life. The discipline of pure thinking makes it possible to exit your physical body entirely and observe everything that belongs to the bodily soul life from an objective, non-personal, perspective. This allows you to fully separate your spiritual perception and cognition from all the bodily and sensual forces, including the sexual desires. Therefore, also the supersensible investigations of these deeply unconscious bodily- and soul regions, in which the most complex and chaotic psycho-erotic and sensual processes intermingle, was always done in the same lucid state of consciousness that I used in all my other spiritual investigations. Though on the personal level this self-knowledge was becoming infinitely more acute and painful, yet spiritually speaking, it also became more objective and lucid at the same time. I could gaze deeper into myself and realize what lurks in the unconscious depths of each human soul in our age. I saw and experienced things that otherwise I would never dare even to glimpse, not to say observe, investigate, name and recognize in myself or in any other human being. Thanks to this disciplined schooling of pure thinking and active imagination through spiritual science, my spiritual faculties have continued with their rhythm of development, completely apart from all the events of my personal life.
Personally speaking, naturally, this could only increase the miserable feeling of being split and unable to become a whole human being. And this became a constant inner reproach in my soul, whenever I ventured to investigate the riddles of my Amfortas’ wound. I could see that there, the ‘wound was burning as never before’ as it is said in the Grail saga about the situation of Amfortas, when Parsifal comes to the Grail castle for the first time. Now I felt this as the source of my own misery:
‘Now tell me what thy name may be.’
‘As Parsifal men speak of me.’
Then sighs the aged man with groan,
The name to him is full well-known.
‘What thou unwittingly hast left undone
Has brought this sorrow as thy doom.’
And this situation was characteristic of my whole 40s and deepened itself towards my forty-ninth year of life. A first ray of light and hope was just becoming visible after I turned 50.
I remember very clearly that during my late 30s and early 40s, while trying to find clues to better understand my situation, I was comfort- ing myself with knowing that after 42, the forces of Spirit Self would be become available, and that with their help, I would certainly be able to conquer my lower nature. ‘Surely,’ I said to myself, ‘from my 40s on I can expect to experience a noticeable increase in my spiritual and soul pow- ers from one year to the next, as I will certainly experience the beneficial, healing forces of my Spirit Self!’ I was really looking forward to this, being on guard every day, to feel these forces stream into my soul. I could hope that, armed with these strong spiritual forces, I would finally be able to become a whole person.
And yet, nothing like this took place. On the contrary. Let me give you a concrete biographical picture of an actual event. I was sitting in my small study, surveying the above described situation, in light of the past failures and the coming challenges. It was right after sunset, which in Israel occurs so fast that you find yourself in the total darkness of night in the shortest time (there is no real twilight pause and relaxation time that you experience in the more northern latitudes, and the transition from dazzling daylight to pitch-black night occurs incredibly fast). I sat there rather helpless, not knowing what to do and where to turn, when a lecture by Rudolf Steiner fell into my lap, describing the future experience that some people, living in Eastern Europe and Russia, will have during the development of Spirit Self in their biography. In Israel I could naturally experience the meaning of being in the East, and in the time period I am describing now, I already had many opportunities to experience the west- ern and northern spiritual forces in my travels, to know the difference. Furthermore, because my parents came from Ukraine and Russia, I was always aware of the specific significance of the Slavic forces in my spiri- tual life. Now, in this lecture Rudolf Steiner says that these people, who have the role to prepare the coming sixth cultural epoch of Spirit Self, will experience the development of their individual Spirit Self, in the age 42 to 49 in a peculiar manner. The forces of Spirit Self will actually paralyze the forces of thinking and they will experience profound emptiness and helplessness. But then, if they persevere, into this empty grave of the Con- sciousness Soul, where the ordinary capacity of thinking dies, eventually the spiritual thinking of the gods will stream, and the challenge will then be, to resurrect their soul and spiritual being through these higher think- ing forces inspired by the gods. But in reality, he says, for many people in the East, this will become a deeply tragic experience for a long time to come!24 You see, this also was the kind of comfort I could find in those years!
I can tell you that until the end of my 40s, I was struggling to enliven and resurrect my spiritual thinking out of this grave. But when I entered my 50s in 2005, something truly began to change. I described it in the little book I wrote about how Cognitive Yoga came about.25 As Leonard Cohen said, ‘There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light comes in.’ However, the ‘thing’ under consideration here is the human heart, the hardest, toughest thing in the world, and to crack its stony core takes more than even the highest wisdom and strongest will power. One must come in real life to experience and truly comprehend the mystery of love and com- passion, to truly feel in one’s own soul the weak and helpless, wounded, mortal human being, and realize that all humans are like this—including you. Only then can one find the way to the Grail a second time and begin ‘to know through compassion or Mit-leid’, which is the new, Christ given, spiritualized heart cognition and wisdom of the future, that opens the gate that leads to the new Grail event.
This gate of ‘knowing through compassion’ must first be discovered in real life, if the search for the Grail is to be truly individualized. And if this is the case, one knows that this helplessness will become a positive force and that the forces of the real Christ can only be individualized, if one can truly say, from one’s innermost ‘I’, that one cannot become a whole being without Him:
When the union with Christ is achieved, we will know that all previous sufferings were necessary conditions. For the Christ union to take place, suffering must be there; this is an absolute factor in evolution. In that man overcomes suffering, he overcomes the feelings of depression and lameness. In this phenomenon man can see something good: how power grows out of helplessness.
The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
The History of the Michaelic Movement Since the Death of Rudolf Steiner