Chapter 7 – Christ’s Appearance Between ‘I’ and Thou
We need a radically new social life. The abyss created by the fact that I forget the Spirit in every moment of daily consciousness, means that there is also a huge chasm between every two humans. I turn the other into my own projection. Before the Michael Age can really flourish, we must consciously experience these social reversals and transform them. This is the reason that the Independent School of Spiritual Science founded by Dr. Ben-Aharon is based on a new ‘social yoga.’ The tragedies of the 20th century (including the social failures of the Anthroposophical Society) have created an imaginative ‘dark sunspot’ in the heart and lung zone of the Earthly-human Sun. “The etheric crucifixion, resurrection, teaching and initiatory acts of the etheric Christ are nowhere more readily perceived – and, because of that, also ignored – than here [in the social encounter]...The more we turn away from its cruel...reality...we can acquire no conscious Imagination...in order to make the new Earthly-human Sun a truly productive and life-giving cosmic being.” (p 125) Meeting the other person can now happen at a deeper level than ever before. I can and must become conscious that every person in front of me is “my initiator, bearing and suffering my cross, awakening me from my death of soul, profoundly teaching me my mysteries of evil, and gracefully blessing me with the mutual penetration and creative reversal of karmic responsibility.” (p 126)
The other is my higher self. Rudolf Steiner’s work on the social question after World War I reveals how in each encounter with another person there is a rhythmic pulse of lightning fast sleeping and waking, conquering and releasing, attacking and defending, become sympathetic and antipathetic. There is an unbalanced pulse of too deep incarnation and too high excarnation in each moment of the meeting. Ben-Aharons describes it like this: “We actually strive to achieve unlimited space-infilling omnipotence by extending our physical soul might in order to conquer, by spiritually-spatially densifying ourselves, the body of another, sending him to sleep – and vice versa. In the one case, sleeping, we become too social; we efface our presence altogether...In the other case, we become fearfully awakened and antisocial, suppressing the other’s independent self-consciousness.” (pp 126127) We owe this alternation to the rhythmic activity of the natural sense we possess of the other’s ego, which gains knowledge of the other in a state of sleeping will, and then returns it into the nervous system in wakefulness. The process of sensing the other person therefore contains a strong element of crossing the threshold (unconsciously and in the blink of an eye) in a metamorphosis of the will in sleeping and waking poles. “Imaginatively...a real...life drama reveals itself here...motivating, moulding and destroying our social life. And into this drama the appearance, words, and acts of the Etheric Christ are most intimately woven.” (p 127)
We forget and deny our brothers and sisters; we forget our common spiritual origin; we deny our past bonds of spiritual loyalty. The necessary creation of our strong egos has left this wreckage in its wake and it continues in each moment of meeting: “When I am strongly impressed...by another person, I am immediately put to sleep. My abyss then surfaces in the twinkling of an eye. At that very moment, if I am quick enough and can remain conscious in the experience of excarnation...I can see and hear my shadow, or double, articulating itself right behind me. And out of him emerges a twofold picture. The first one is the physiognomical seed of my true moral form in the cosmos, which always surfaces out of the empty abyss of the Guardian [of the Threshold]’s centre of being. And within this picture I see, secondly...a future picture of my moral form in relation to the other person, related to this aspect of our shared destiny. This creates a burning desire to know why and how this future is what it is, and this desire pushes me towards the other...In that moment I am shaken out of my sleep. I find myself awakened in the other...and perceive my lower karmic past. It appears as the answer.” (pp 128129) A moral conscience can then awake, but also the powerful evil temptation to deny my sister in the face of the true future moral debt to her. The moment of choosing whether or not to be my sister’s keeper and to truly love her arises in the astral world. The reality of our recent history tragically shows us how we usually act in reality – we deny the other, and this means we deny the Christ at the same time. He writes, “Christ, who continuously approaches our maladjusted karmic chaos in order to transform and heal our unresolved karmic situations, is not at all recognized, nay, is even feared and pushed away from one’s being, and – this must be simply stated as a fact of our century – is crucified again and again...in man’s totally irresponsible moral excarnation and continuous sleeping far beyond the threshold.” (p 130) This burning riddle of moral responsibility and shocking moral betrayal can paradoxically serve as a wound or fire in our souls which is always lit up. Its ever-present pain can therefore establish a part of the power of spiritual memory. It can be condensed and woven into the etheric body as well and therefore serve to solidify a point of moral steel or a stone on which a future community can be erected. If a group of people wake up to this social-karmic reality, they can learn how to cultivate a totally new social breathing or social yoga.
This social dance built through work with the Etheric Christ has three aspects: 1] Imaginative - the first awakening from the death of soul in social forgetfulness (already described), [2] Inspirative - He teaches us to morally create a self-conscious bridge over the karmic transgressions and mutual denial that separate us, and [3] Intuitive - He provides the model to show us how to offer and exchange ourselves in new creative responsibility. This is also described in another way in the chapter of Mutual Essence Exchange from Cognitive Yoga. The Global Event College has spent years working on the beginning of these new exchanges with one another, under the direction of Dr. Ben-Aharon. We all can learn how to form a new common destiny out of our karmic relationships.
“When another person puts me to sleep, I awake, intuitively, with my will being in his higher being; I see in his Ego, our future. And at the same time, he...awakens imaginatively in my etheric body, seeing our past from my ‘point of view’...Through changing perspective, we gradually acquire the possibility to work consciously on the moral destiny form of our united karma.” (p 132) Slowly, the whole community can learn how to bear the karma of each one in himself.
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