Chapter 4 – The Modern Christ Experience – The Meeting with the New Initiator (and Its 3 Stages)
It is important to recognize that each step that Dr. Ben-Aharon takes in the book is tied concretely to explicit words of Rudolf Steiner that have been studied and brought to etheric, astral, and spiritual life in the biography and spiritual research of the author. To re-experience and create an individual version of what he experienced, it is very fruitful for the reader to dig into the extensive end notes, which serve as a golden thread through some of Steiner’s most important research. Hundreds of Steiner’s collected works are cited in the whole book. But this is not intellectual scholarship, it is rather an invitation to awaken the experiences that Steiner directly demonstrated in each word – Ben-Aharon has tasted and touched the fact that every word from Steiner IS a spiritual experience that the reader must freely and creatively (and painstakingly) resurrect from its dead shells. In this chapter, Ben-Aharon relates the three major aspects of the meeting with the Christ in His modern appearance and activity: 1) the etheric or imaginative, 2) the astral or spiritual speech of inspiration, 3) and the passing over of the seed of creativity into the physical being of man, through Christ’s appearance and activity in the Spiritual Will-Fire. The Imaginative appearance of the Christ is brought to consciousness by the forces of death that are active in the etheric body. The separation of the etheric head and heart at the source of the increased sensation of dying and emptiness in our times become a vehicle for intensified etheric sight. I can recognize in this stage how the Higher Self’s appearance is woven out of my own dying and dark etheric body. Before He lights up our darkness, we sense him as if we were in an underground cave, surrounded by flowing waters (the oil of our soul lamp). Christ pours new life and light into the whirlpool of the human being’s exhausted garments of life. Christ diminishes himself and awakens us from our death of soul. In this moment, the soul begins to pour clairvoyant light into the surroundings. The spark given by Christ ignites the oil in our soul lamp. During this experience, I can rise to see the light of the Christ Sun illuminating my life, much as it is experienced in the three days after death. Here I experience the merging of my life with the peaceful, divine life. This essential experience is the first stage of the Event. “Man feels the mightiest, irresistible upward attraction and is penetrated to the deepest core of his soul by lightness. Knowing himself in pure light, he ascends to the Sun-sphere and blends completely with its radiating abundance.” (p 51)
This is the content of the naturally given Christ experience, but an anthroposophical deepening and research of this vision brings about the painful knowledge of HOW this vision is formed: A dark cloud “sucks in the newly kindled, radiating soul light of man...In the disappearance of one’s newly gained soul foundations, one sees how a Being, stripped of all beauty and might, merges Himself...annihilates Himself – by surrendering His life-giving heart to darkness’s vacuum...Man observes that his sight actually grows clearer and more conscious the more...the Being sinks.” (pp 5354) The moral shock and responsibility intensifies, as one sees that the consciousness-soul radiates darkness and death in our modern times. This is the key to the transformation of the spiritual-soul into a soul that can see Imaginatively. Every act of of self-conscious knowledge, every concept and perception, must become a participation in the new Mystery of Golgotha. The second stage (the astral or inspirative reality behind the etheric vision) arises out of the deepened knowledge of the nature of evil in the world and in myself. During this intense soul process, the Christ begins to teach by speaking in living spirit words and gestures directly into the heart and soul. Man is taught how the nature of self-consciousness is constructed. The soul is broken apart, but this split allows the soul to reorganize and recreate its members (‘re-member’ its I AM) into a new self identity. “Man knows: the power that flows in me through His words unites my separated soul forces. That which must have been seen as the evil being in one’s own soul – the distorted, twisted form of the separated soul forces – is transformed and shaped by the magic power of the word gestures into a soul being of pure, quickening and remembered spiritual life.” (p 49)
The heart and head flow into one another and the moral and cognitive forces transform into one another; healing becomes knowledge. Man actually becomes two beings, polarized in a soul-tension. One part of myself crosses to the infinite horizon to unite with the resurrected Christ who appears objectively as Himself. Christ appears with his whole Being and every part of Him becomes expressive, silent speech. The other part of myself becomes conscious in the midst of ‘the den of thieves,’ where I now experience that the darkness of my radiating death in life and soul is actually a hostile group of multiplying evil beings. A full hearing of soul and spirit words awakens, and healing, living gestures pour down into the hostile beings from the yonder side of the abyss. They create a new form of my being. It speaks: “I am your true I-builder and preserver, through absorbing and carrying your evil in my heart of love; I am becoming your new I, recreated in the destructive core of your evil, shaped in the image of my eternal Life Spirit. Remember yourself in me.” (p 59) This reaches its climax when a seed is given by the Christ so that I can perform independent supersensible research that is self-motivated, creative, and voluntary. I can learn how to dynamically erase and re-create my own soul and spiritual consciousness. This shows me how to build the bridge of spiritual remembrance over the abyss where I forget the spirit, like forgetting my dreams as I wake up in the morning. The fabric of my being is rebuilt as a moral ground. I consciously live with my evil nature, but joyfully begin to accept it and work on it. The third stage is intuitive and spiritual to the highest degree, but this means that it also lies behind what I perceive as the physical world itself. I step out of myself totally and am penetrated through and through my another spiritual presence.
The inner touch of Christ plants the seed of responsibility for the future recreation of the whole Earth and humanity in my inmost life. The Higher Self on the other side of the chasm separating memory and spirit life now crosses back to my lower self. The Christ moves, acts, and passes through my physical being and leaves a fiery seed within me. I awaken in physical reality, but now this reality is fully interpenetrated by spiritual reality. Christ appears in the spirit-fire and a new form of consciousness is born in me, in my most opaque and dense parts. It is “crystal clear...ultimate creative freedom experienced in heavenly transparency, in the heart of absolute coarse density.” (p 61) As in the first stage, darkness became light, and in the second stage, my new being was shaped out of evil, in the third stage “the ground of all heaviness, streams lightly through its infinite zero point of transubstantiation in man himself.” It speaks: “In your bread of life that I broke in twain while passing and in the fiery spirit of your life I have seeded the fiery seed of My life. This you can assimilate into your being, and in it the world is resurrected from the dead. I thereby transfer to your creative hands and feet the responsibility to nurture and mother the Earth and all its kingdoms of life. I give to you that which until now was protected under My care alone: the future world-seed, containing infinite evolutionary riches and possibilities.” (p 61)
No comments:
Post a Comment