From the Introduction to the First Volume

From the Introduction to the First Volume

The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

The Second Edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible (1995).

The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

Volume 1: The Modern Christ Experience

In the introduction to the first volume a brief excerpt is given of some of the central subjects of the 4 volumes. It is recommended to study the introduction not only at the beginning of the first volume, but to return to it regularly, the deeper we venture into the complex investigations presented in the 2nd and 3rd volumes, to reorient ourselves on the go.

The 4 volumes of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming,  answer three major questions that arise out of the modern Christ experience. First, what is the essence of the given meeting with the Christ, which we call the modern Christ experience? This is described in the first volume, which expands the first four chapters of the first edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible (1995).

Second, what spiritual scientific method of research should be developed, to individualize this experience, and what are the main results gained through this development? This is described in the first and second parts of the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, contained in the second and third volumes. These volumes are an extensive expansion of the fifth chapter of the first edition of The New Experience of the Supersensible.

 The third question, addressed in the fourth volume, pertains to the creative social applications and consequences of the modern Christ experience and its knowledge drama. It expands chapters six and seven of the first edition, and is dedicated to the creative part of the knowledge drama: the formation of the earthly-human Sun, the new human meeting and the new Michaelic community.

In the introduction a brief excerpt is given of the some of the central subjects of the 4 volumes. It is recommended to study the introduction it not only at the beginning of the first volume, but also regularly, when we enter the deeper forest in the 2nd and 3rd volumes, to reorient ourselves on the go.

The subjects referred to in the Introduction are:

The Meeting with the Etheric Christ

Three Stages of the Meeting with the Christ

The Reception of the Christ-Ego at the Sight of the Holy Grail

‘Not ‘I’ but Christ in me’: The Inner Sun

The Sword of the Ego and the Keys of Death and Evil

The New Organ of Perception and Conception: The Etheric Heart

The Etheric Bridge of the Green Snake

The Knowledge Drama and the Creative Drama of the Second Coming

The Meeting with the Etheric Christ

 The most important aspect of the meeting with the etheric Christ in the etheric world is that it is a gift of grace because it is initiated and given by the Christ. Rudolf Steiner emphasizes the fact that there is a ‘tremendous difference’ between this meeting and the way an initiate perceives the Christ in the spiritual world:

There is a tremendous difference between what trained clairvoyants experience and what is described here as something that will come about in the natural course of events. Since time immemorial the trained clairvoyant experienced the Christ by means of certain exercises. On the physical plane, if I meet a man, he is there in front of me. With clairvoyant vision I can perceive him in quite different places and we do not actually meet. It has always been possible to see the Christ clairvoyantly. But to meet Him, now that He stands in a different relationship to humanity, that is, that He helps us from out of the etheric world, is something which is independent of our clairvoyant development. From the twentieth century onward, in the next three thousand years, certain people will be able to meet Him, meet Him objectively as an etheric form. That is very different from experiencing a vision of Him through inner development.

 (Lecture of 17 September 1911, GA 130).

This meeting is, therefore, a meeting face to face, and as we can also experience when we meet another person face to face, through the face, the whole being of the other person is revealed and experienced. In the fourth volume, we will describe the new human meeting, awakened, and transformed through Christ’s appearance between I and thou. There we show that what transpires in the etheric meeting face to face with the etheric Christ is also the Ur-phenomenon of the human meeting, because what remains unconscious in the ordinary meeting between people, becomes fully conscious in the etheric face to face meeting with the etheric Christ. What is more, in all the stages of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, this meeting also becomes the Ur- phenomenon of all conscious spiritual meetings with the beings of the higher hierarchies. In other words, as we showed in The Three Meetings, the gracefully given meeting with the etheric Christ, which has been taking place since the beginning of the Second Coming, is a resurrection of the meeting between man and the gods that took place in the most ancient mysteries:

The essential aspect of the ancient Mysteries was the way the gods descended from their divine thrones and came down to human beings, and the way those human beings who bore the priestly office within the Mysteries associated face to face, being to being, with the gods. Just as human beings today associate with one another being to being, so in the Mysteries of those ancient times did the gods associate with human beings and human beings with the gods.

(Lecture of 5 September 1924, GA 346).

 Naturally, this meeting has many, indeed, infinite aspects, and we would have needed more than four volumes to describe more of them. In this first volume, we describe the Ur-Phenomena of the modern Christ experience, and we limit ourselves to this single yet central aspect of this meeting, that is then transformed and spiritualized in the course of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, in the next volumes.

The Three Stages of the Meeting with the Christ

The given meeting with the etheric Christ in the modern Christ experience is differentiated into three clearly delimited stages or aspects, described in greater detail in chapter 4. It is instructive to compare our experience with what Rudolf Steiner said about it in reference to the Book of Revelation. Rudolf Steiner describes His appearance as ‘Christ in three guises: once through himself, then through his garment, and thirdly through the deeds he accomplishes for human beings on earth’. (Lecture of 14 September 1924, GA 346, and next quotations). In the first stage of the meeting, Christ, who ‘descends from the supersensible world, has a name written on him which he not only speaks solely for himself but which only he and he alone can understand; no one else can comprehend it’. Then the Christ unites His name, which represents His Ego, with our ‘I’, and becomes a source of the spiritual light of knowledge in our own ‘I’:

When the being who understands this name becomes one with our own self, enters into our own self, then within us this being will understand the name and with him we shall understand it too, for then with him in us we shall always be conscious of ‘Christ in us’. He alone understands the things that are connected with his being, but it is in us that he understands them; and the light that streams out in us through his understanding — because in us, in our own being he becomes this light — this gives the insight of the Christ-Being in our own self. It becomes an indwelling insight, an insight that dwells within the human being.

In the second stage, the indwelling Christ reveals itself as the power of the creative word, the Logos in us, and in the third stage, as the individualized power of creative love, working through the will. What is described in the Imaginative pictures of Revelation, represent actual stages and aspects of the meeting with the etheric Christ, revealed in His etheric second coming.

In the second and third volumes of the knowledge drama, we will describe how we individualize, through spiritual scientific activity, the three stages in man’s spirit, soul, and body. And when the knowledge drama is completed, and the threefold human constitution is spiritualized, it is revealed most distinctly in the formation of the threefold Foundation Stone of love, the future earthly-cosmic human being.

Thus he becomes the threefoldness of all existence: universal love reigning in human love; universal Imagination reigning in the forms of the human organism; universal thoughts reigning mysteriously below the surface in human thoughts. He will grasp this threefoldness and he will recognize himself as an individually free human being within the reigning work of the gods in the cosmos, as a cosmic human being, an individual human being within the cosmic human being, working for the future of the universe as an individual human being within the cosmic human being.

(Laying of the Foundation Stone, 25 December 1923, GA 260).

The Reception of the Christ-Ego at the Sight of the Holy Grail

The more the given meeting is individualized and transformed in the knowledge drama of the Second Coming, we realize that through the three stages of the given meeting the Christ offered us a graceful sacred gift, the seed power and essence of His own Self. This mystery event transpires between Christ’s Self and the human self in the face to face meeting. It can only be brought to the full light of spiritual cognition and knowledge, by following, as precisely and conscientiously as we can, Rudolf Steiner’s investigations, because in the present age of Michael, only through modern spiritual science can we attain fully conscious and elaborate knowledge of Christ.

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 The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

Volume 1: The Modern Christ Experience