עברית The Time is At Hand!
From lecture 2: Michaelic Immortality
Stuttgart, 4 November 2017
Building the Global School of Spiritual Science at the Beginning of the Century
The Time is At Hand!
From lecture 2: Michaelic Immortality
Stuttgart, 4 November 2017
... haven’t you become by now an old man of 50? Have you not already consolidated your personality, habits, acquired knowledge and disciplines? And can you undo your development, to return to your fresh and innocent beginning?
After the ordeals at the end of the last century were over
and the turn to the beginning of the new century was com-
plete, I could feel that I had created a stable and secure bridge
to the spiritual world. Now this question became the central
challenge: How would it be possible, from the beginning of
the twenty-first century, to use the faculties and knowledge
gained in individual work, to build a community that would
perform this work together, as the main task of the School
of Spiritual Science? And what you realize, and this realiza-
tion comes about through inner testing and probations, is that
between your inner spiritual life and the people around you,
a seemingly unbridgeable abyss exists. In order to live and
embody this truth together with other human beings, you
must develop much deeper, stronger forces of love and com-
passion toward yourself and your comrades. As was the case
with the spiritual research in the 1980s and 90s, this task also
proved more difficult than imagined.
When I observed the small band of people who had read
my books and asked me to support their spiritual path and
community building, I realized that beside the fact that many
required faculties were missing, many obstacles were also
present in the form of deeply ingrained and mistaken hab-
its, norms and practices, which people brought from their
former anthroposophical life and work. I said to myself that
this situation required a somewhat radical approach. If we
are truly ‘to become like little children again to enter the king-
dom of spiritual science’, we must develop entirely new fac-
ulties and overcome deeply entrenched habits. Without this,
it is absolutely unthinkable that we would be in a position
as a community, to become competent in handling the art of
the bridge-building, which must connect in this century the
physical and spiritual worlds, the Michaelic school on earth
and the school of Michael in the etheric world.
But before you can do this with others, you must do it again
from the beginning, in yourself! I described some aspects of
the transformation of my spiritual research in the second
decade of the twenty-first century in the article, ‘My Way to
Cognitive Yoga’, published in Watkins’ Mind Body Spirit mag-
azine. To build the community of the School of Spiritual
Science you must do it as a human being among humans
and live this truth together with your peers. It cannot be
‘taught’; it is not a matter of transmitting acquired spiritual
knowledge, it is about becoming this teaching, growing and
maturing together in a community with human beings in the
present time. But this cannot be simply decided upon and
accomplished in one resolution. You must become human in a
far deeper sense than you previously thought is required and
possible. But haven’t you become by now an old man of 50?
Have you not already consolidated your personality, habits,
acquired knowledge and disciplines? And can you undo your
development, to return to your fresh and innocent beginning?
To begin with, I had to intentionally recreate the origi-
nal stage of consciousness from the beginning of my spir-
itual life. I was really striving to become in this respect ‘a
little child again’. What was described in my book Cognitive
Yoga came about through this process.
I said to myself: Let me go back in time and place myself again in Easter 1976,
reading The Philosophy of Freedom for the first time. In Easter
1976, this first reading led me to experience how it resonated
with the experience of the etheric Christ that I had under-
gone exactly a year before, in Easter 1975. As I described it
in The Three Meetings, my task in the coming decades was to
bring together the results of The Philosophy of Freedom and
the modern Christ experience, to create the fully conscious
faculties of Imaginative cognition on which the Michaelic
bridge is based. Now, 30 years later, I wanted to start the
work with The Philosophy of Freedom from the very first steps
of ordinary daily consciousness, from ordinary thinking and
sense-perception, and transform it step by step into Imagi-
native cognition without any support from the given super-
sensible faculties. I suppressed all the given and acquired
Imaginative faculties that I developed in the last 30 years,
to perceive the sense perceptible physical world and think
about it as ordinary people do. I wanted to make this process
accessible to my pupils and comrades, and to demonstrate
and minutely describe the path that leads from ordinary
consciousness to the first level of supersensible conscious-
ness. Because the formation of Imaginative consciousness is
grounded in the etheric body, I described its formation from
the spiritualization of the basic soul forces as organically as
possible, allowing the reader to participate in the whole pro-
cess with her and his ordinary thinking.
To understand this process in a deeper way, another per-
spective can be added. When my first two books were pub-
lished in 1993 and 1995, I was aware that in the first half of my
life I was supported by the forces streaming from the meeting
with the etheric Christ in Easter 1975 as well as the Imagi-
native faculties that it awakened in my soul. I was granted
the supersensible Christ experience and the Imaginative
faculties that perceived it, before I met anthroposophy, and
I used these forces to spiritualize the given contents and
forms of physical anthroposophy and applied its spiritual-
ized forces to my spiritual scientific research, as described in
The Three Meetings. But now, in my 50s, I felt a real passion to
reverse this process. Of course, I was working with my free
human forces all along; after all, The Philosophy of Freedom was
my first foundation. Nevertheless, the given Imaginative fac-
ulties were naturally active as well, and the outcome of the
synthesis between the given supersensible faculties and the
spiritual scientific work, constituted the content and form
of my work in the first part of my life and my first books.
This was necessary, and the work was fruitful, and had to be
undertaken in this way. But towards the end of the 90s, when
the forces of my consciousness soul were fully developed,
and then after the turn of the millennium, when the forces of
the spirit self were developing, I couldn’t rest content with
this accomplished work.
Also recall that what we bring with us from previous incar-
nations to the present life as given supersensible faculties as
well as ordinary talents, belong to the domain of Lucifer. Luci-
fer controls all spiritual achievements from the past, as long
as they are not transformed in the present. What we bring
from the past and use in the first part of life, must be wholly
transformed in the second part of life, to become achieve-
ments of the present life which means also of the epoch of the
consciousness soul in which the present Christ impulse takes
place. Otherwise, as so often occurs, in the second half of life
Ahriman harvests the fruits of Lucifer’s influence from the
first half and uses them to further his goals. This is the fate
of many creative people, who stop developing at the end of
their 20s. But if you overcome Lucifer’s heritage in the first
half of life, you can also confront Ahriman in the second half
of life. I was fully conscious of this during the end of the last
century and the beginning of the present century. But I still
had to struggle to find the way to make the transition and
transformation from the first to the second halves of my life,
and what I described above was the solution to this challenge.
I wanted to enter the etheric world and recapitulate the orig-
inal meeting with the etheric Christ, which was experienced
as a given grace, and attain it as a result of my free spiritual
scientific activity. And then I wanted to find the way to make
it available to the faculties of those human souls who wished
to join the School of Spiritual Science.