Christ Module 19 - experiencing the Christ

From Anthroposophy

The Christ is a high spiritual being and the regent of the evolution of Earth and humanity. But the Christ is also a moral compass for how to stand in life and in the world. How to balance between luciferic and ahrimanic influences. The 'golden rule' of compassion and brotherly love, because buddhi is love (see Schema FMC00.481). When buddhi is developed in Man, all astral desires (kama) are transformed into selflessness, into love.

Hence the experience of the Christ is an attitude of the soul, with which we choose to fill our hearts and minds, and what we radiate out to world and the people around us.

Rudolf Steiner explains the workings of the Christ Impulse in humanity, and individual Man. It is a blossoming of a divine seed in every Man. We are living in a most exciting era, after the end of the dark age (kali yuga, ended in 1900), in the period guided by archangel Michael (from 1879 onwards for some 350 years), and the start of the appearance of Christ in the etheric. The latter means the slow emergence of new faculties of clairvoyance and memory in Man. At the same time we are in the midst of a challenging period of attacks by Ahrimanic and Soratic counterforces.

This module complements the other modules about the Study of spiritual science as a reverse ritual (Module 15), and the experience of the year, and also what is on this site about Initiation. The focus is on the attitude and state of soul, and the actual Christ experiences.

Aspects

Christ Module 19.1 - our state of soul during life

  • wonder, compassion and conscience: from the ability to appreciate everyday things of life with awe or wonder, to the love for our fellow men and the golden rule which is the foundation of every religion (see Golden rule and Charter of compassion), see Schema FMC00.371 and lecture reference extracts below.
  • the importance of the genuine deep religious feeling towards the world and people is the way to true Christianity, as opposed to intellectualism of science today (1921-09-30-GA343)
  • more quotes: Christ Module 19 - experiencing the Christ#State of soul

Christ Module 19.2 - appearance of Christ in the etheric

  • from the 1930 onwards, for a period of 500 years. See Christ in the etheric for an in depth coverage, and table Schema FMC00.081 below.
  • the work of the angels in Man's astral body, and what is required for the development of Man: if Man does not pick up the spiritual activity as required by the age and as enabled by the Christ Impulse, then the angels could have to perform this work during sleep when Man is unconscious, but this would have major consequences for humanity at large (see 1918-10-09-GA182 on What takes place as we sleep)
  • See also: Christ in the future cultural ages and next epoch

Christ Module 19.3 - workings of Christ impulse in the world

  • can one discern a growing moral responsability in the development of initiatives such as Medicins sans frontieres, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and other movements, such as human aid in case of disasters? Just as conscience and empathy arose earlier but have not always been part of the human soul and consciousness.
  • see also: Humanity and the Christ Impulse

Other relevant aspects covered in dedicated modules

Inspirational quotes

The 'problem statement' is already put clear in 1917-08-14-GA176

Many secrets are connected with an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

People often ask: How can I find a relationship to Christ? Certainly it is a question that is justified.

But anyone with insight will know that it is a question that cannot be answered just like that. Let me make a comparison: we see objects by means of our eyes, but the eyes we do not see. For the eyes to be able to see they must be unable to see themselves. They see mirror images but not themselves. That which does the seeing cannot itself be seen. Since the Mystery of Golgotha man must see the spiritual world through the impulse coming from Christ just as he sees external colors through his eyes. We do not see the eyes through which the colors, etc. are seen, nor do we see the Christ impulse through which we see the spiritual world. This is why the Mystery of Golgotha is veiled in mystery and the history of the event is also veiled. Since the Mystery of Golgotha the historical event associated with it cannot be discovered by historic means. To seek for Christ historically like any other event in history would be like trying to induce the eye to see itself.

Then, from 1917-08-28-GA176

How can one approach the Christ impulse, how does one come near the Being of Christ?

In one form or another this question is asked again and again, and rightly so.

It is essential to realize that seeking Christ is deeply connected with the nature of the human ‘I’ and is therefore something inward and intimate. .. Because of the inner relationship between the Being of Christ and the human ‘I’, the Christ Being has for us the same intimate character as our own ‘I.’

All the impulses of feeling and will which stir within us when we contemplate the Mystery of Christ are actual means by which we draw near the Christ. It is through feeling- and will-filled contemplation of Christ that we have reason to hope we may find Him.

Historically, the present is a significant moment in time. Few are aware of its full implication ..

On this quote: Our life of mental images and concepts, our intellectuality, is closely connected with the astral world, our life of feeling with lower spirit world and our life of will with higher spirit world (1911-11-18-GA130). 1912-05-30-GA155

Compassion, sympathy are those virtues that in the future should bring the most beautiful, most wonderful fruits in human relationships, and for those who correctly understand the impulse of Christ, compassion and love, compassion and sympathy, accordingly, arise, for from this impulse feeling is born. ..

Another short quote from 1914-07-16-GA155

When the soul of Man really lives into Christ, feeling that Christ is the living Being who from the death on Golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of the Earth and can flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly vivified through the Christ. The soul feels a transition from death into life.

1920-02-06-GA196 is about Matthew 18:20 "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

...one of the most important and significant aphorisms that Christ spoke, which goes something like this:

When two or three people are united in my name, then I stand among them.

In other words, when someone is alone, the Christ is not there. You cannot find the Christ without first feeling a connection to collective humanity. You must seek the Christ on a path that brings you together with all of humankind. In other words, being contented solely with one's own inner experiences leads one away from the Christ-impulse

1909-04-18-GA110

Let us take a Man who has voluntarily received the Christ. Christianity is only at its beginning .. but let us take the Ideal; the Man's ‘I’ has voluntarily, with complete free will, allowed the Christ's force to flow into him. When the I has progressed so far that it has filled itself with the Christ, then this Christ force irradiates the astral body also. In that same astral body, into which the Luciferic powers had formerly implanted their deeds, the Christ power is now radiating from within outwards.

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.371 shows how our state of soul brings us closer to the Christ Impulse.

FMC00.371.jpg

Schema FMC00.082 shows (linking into schema FMC00.047), the evolving relationship Man will have (or be able to develop) with the Christ

FMC00.082.jpg

Schema FMC00.081 gives an overview of some of the expected faculties related to the appearance of 'Christ in the etheric' due to the arising new clairvoyance. As depicted in the GA191 BBD (see eg FMC00.013) this clairvoyance will be a mixture of wisdom with moral consciousness, hence the elements related to karma in the table below.

FMC00.081.jpg

Lecture coverage and references

State of soul

See quotes on:

and

1909-12-22-GA166 is about reverence and devotion, see: Virtues#1909-12-22-GA116

1911-12-27-GA134 covers The training of thinking to Wonder, Veneration and Harmony with the Universe.

1912-02-03-GA143 is called 'Conscience and Wonder as Indications of Spiritual Vision in the Past and in the Future', see Virtues#1912-02-03-GA143

1924-04-27-GA236 is also about the attitude of wonder in everyday life, towards the things of everyday life, see Virtues#1924-04-27-GA236

General

1907-11-20-GA100

We do not mean to say by the above, that humanity no longer needs the Law, but that which we have described is an ideal, which should be striven for. Gradually men will come to where the harmony of the world will be brought about through their voluntary action, but for this goal to be reached the Power which in the Gospel is called Christ had to step in. In the occult schools it is said of one who, of his own inner power, is able to raise himself into this relationship to all his fellow-men, that “he bears Christ within him.” In order to understand what we are about to say, it will first of all be necessary to recapitulate once more the real constitution of man. Recall to mind the contents of the third lecture with the aid of the following sketch:

1908-05-26-GA103

All this is at present only in germ within the human being, but a time will come when it will live in him in its fulness. And by lifting his gaze to the Christ Personality, to the Christ Impulse, by energizing and strengthening himself through this Christ Impulse, he draws into himself the force that can accomplish this transformation.

1912-05-08-GA143

1/ The forces of external science cannot produce a body for Christ because they are concerned only with things that will have disappeared in the future, that will no longer exist. But there is something that precedes knowledge and is infinitely more valuable for the soul than knowledge itself. It is what the Greek philosophers regarded as the beginning of all philosophy: wonder or astonishment. Once we have the knowledge, the experience which is of value to the soul has really already passed. People in whom the great revelations and truths of the spiritual world can evoke wonder, nourish this feeling of wonder, and in the course of time this creates a force which has a power of attraction for the Christ Impulse, which attracts the Christ Spirit: the Christ Impulse unites with the individual human soul when the soul can feel wonder for the mysteries of the world. Christ draws his astral body in earthly evolution from all those feelings which have lived in single human souls as wonder.

2/ The second quality that must be developed by human souls to attract the Christ Impulse is a power of compassion. Whenever the soul is moved to share in the suffering or joy of others, this is a force which attracts the Christ Impulse; Christ unites Himself with the human soul through compassion and love. Compassion and love are the forces from which Christ forms his etheric body until the end of earthly evolution. With regard to compassion and love one could, to put it crudely, speak of a programme which Spiritual Science must carry out in the future. In this connection, materialism has evolved a pernicious science, such as has never previously existed on Earth.

The very worst offence committed today is to correlate love and sexuality. This is the worst possible expression of materialism, the most devilish symptom of our time. Sexuality and love have nothing whatever to do with each other. Sexuality is something quite different from and has no connection at all with pure, original love. Science has brought things to a shameful point by means of an extensive literature devoted to connecting these two things which are simply not connected.

3/ A third force which flows into the human soul as if from a higher world, to which Man submits, to which he attributes a higher significance than that of his own individual moral instincts, is conscience. With man's conscience Christ is most intimately united. From the impulses which spring from the conscience of individual human souls Christ draws his physical body.

The reality of an utterance in the Bible becomes very clear when we know that the etheric body of Christ is formed from men's feelings of compassion and love:

‘What ye have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’

— for to the end of the Earth's evolution Christ forms His etheric body out of men's compassion and love. As He forms His astral body out of wonder and astonishment, His physical body out of conscience, so does He form His etheric body out of men's feelings of compassion and love.

Why do we speak of these things at the present time?

Because one day a great problem will have to be solved for humanity: namely, how to present the figure of Christ in its relation to the various domains of life. This will be possible only if account is taken of many things that spiritual science has to say. When after long contemplation of the Christ-idea as conceived by spiritual science, an attempt is made to present the figure of Christ, the countenance will be found to contain something that can, and indeed will, baffle all the arts. The countenance will give expression to the victory of the forces that are contained only in the face over all other forces in the human form.

When men are able to fashion

  • eyes that radiate only compassion,
  • a mouth not adapted for eating but only for uttering those words of truth which are the words of conscience,
  • when a brow can be shaped whose beauty lies in the moulding of the arch spanning the position of what we call the lotus-flower between the eyes

... when it becomes possible to accomplish all this, it will be understood why the Prophet says: ‘He hath no form nor comeliness.’ (Isaiah, 53, 2.) What is meant is that it is not beauty that counts, but the power that will gain the victory over decay: the figure of Christ in which all is compassion, all love, all devotion to conscience.

see also: Schema FMC00.301C and 1932-10 on Representative of humanity

1917-08-28-GA176

How can one approach the Christ impulse, how does one come near the Being of Christ?

In one form or another this question is asked again and again, and rightly so.

People feel a need to ask this all-important question which must be approached from many aspects as we have done in our anthroposophical studies. Just as a photograph of a tree taken from one angle does not convey its full shape, so one aspect or indeed several do not exhaust the many-sidedness of a spiritual reality. All we can hope is that we shall come near it by approaching it from as many aspects as possible.

It is essential to realize that seeking Christ is deeply connected with the nature of the human ‘I’ and is therefore something inward and intimate. The special nature of the human ‘I’ comes to expression in the way we use the word ‘I.’ All other words are applicable to other things whereas the word ‘I’ can never refer to anything except to the one who speaks it. Because of the inner relationship between the Being of Christ and the human ‘I’ the Christ Being has for us the same intimate character as our own ‘I.’ All the impulses of feeling and will which stir within us when we contemplate the Mystery of Christ are actual means by which we draw near the Christ. It is through feeling- and will-filled contemplation of Christ that we have reason to hope we may find Him. At present it is of particular importance to pay attention to mankind's historical evolution especially in relation to the Event of Christ. Historically, the present is a significant moment in time. Few are aware of its full implication; it is therefore all the more important to be mindful of man's historical development in relation to every issue of significance.

...

It may be asked why in these circumstances such a great number of people still do not acknowledge the Christ?

All one can say about this is that so many and so far-reaching secrets are connected with this question that at present it is not yet possible to speak about them in a general way. But what I have just described is a fact of human evolution.

...

One comes to realize that one must bring to the Mystery of Golgotha all the depths of one's thoughts and feelings; for example when one attempts to relate the Mystery of Golgotha to the secrets of human death and man's subsequent awakening in the astral body and ‘I.’ It is through thoughts, through contemplation that one draws near to this Mystery. It is of no use to express through empty words a general wish to reach union with Christ; what is needed is a concrete understanding of what the actual appearance of Christ in earth evolution means for one's own life. It is not without meaning that the same time span elapsed between the death and the resurrection of Christ Jesus as the one that elapses between our leaving the physical body and our leaving the ether body in death. There is an intimate bond between Christ's life on earth and the man of today living after the Mystery of Golgotha. It is now possible to say with greatest conviction: Christ came in order that man should not be lost to the earth. Had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place man's body would have become larva-like, directed from above by his soul. Death would gradually have removed man from the earth altogether. Through the Mystery of Golgotha man's connection with the earth was restored. Through the Mystery of Golgotha the possibility of consciousness arising from death was created.

These things can be understood today, they are revealed to contemplation of the spiritual world; making them our own deepens our inner life. When we are faced with crucial events we are not helped by knowing in a general way that we are connected with something called “the Christ,” whereas our inner life is deepened and strengthened when we know quite concretely that we are intimately connected with that Being who actually experienced earthly life and went through the Mystery of Golgotha. In contemplating these things we feel our innermost being intimately connected with the historical events of Golgotha.

...

The first understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha came about through direct experience. At first people could speak of Christ because some had actually seen Him; later some had known others who had seen Him. There was still an echo of Christ's own words in those spoken by the first apostles. Thus mankind's first experience of Christ was on the physical plane. Through the centuries this knowledge faded and had vanished altogether by the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries. That the present situation should arise was therefore inevitable when there are people who, though they want to be Christians, do not actually seek Christ. We must realize that we live in a time of crisis as far as understanding Christ is concerned.

We can reach understanding appropriate to our age in no other way than through an ever-deeper understanding of spiritual science. Ahrimanic forces battle against this knowledge just because it is so essential in our time. However, this does not prevent those who recognize the task of spiritual science from seeing this task connected with the enormous world-historical events taking place in our time. The solution to today's great problems can only come from real knowledge of the present age. And it is not biased propaganda to say that only through spiritual science can a solution be found.

1920-02-06-GA196

...one of the most important and significant aphorisms that Christ spoke, which goes something like this:

"When two or three people are united in my name, then I stand among them."

In other words, when someone is alone, the Christ is not there. You cannot find the Christ without first feeling a connection to collective humanity. You must seek the Christ on a path that brings you together with all of humankind. In other words, being contented solely with one's own inner experiences leads one away from the Christ-impulse.

1921-09-30-GA343

When you have found the attitude of prayer, you can now go to the other side and find it in the reading of the Gospels as well. The meaning the Gospels have for religious development, we will of course still speak about. In any case, real Christians need to remain within inner childlike feelings today in order to understand the Gospels in a believable way, also without criticism. When as a theologian he applies criticism, he has to, because he comes from the Christian angle, be able to understand the Gospel without criticism. At least he must firstly become strong in his experiences of the Gospels, and then, armed with this strength, he only then applies criticism. That's actually the basic damage in Bible criticism and actually in the Gospel criticism of the 19th Century; people are not initially religiously strengthened before they apply criticism to the Gospels. As a result, they have arrived at a Gospel criticism which is nothing other than done in the modern scientific sense.

Nothing is more clearly felt regarding this modern scientific sense, my dear friends, than the Gospel words of St Matthew 13, for in Matthew 13, I could say, the pivotal point of the whole chapter are words which encloses a mystery, and that perhaps in the entire evolution of Christianity it could never have been felt more deeply by religious people than today, when they come up against the world.

It is in the words: He answered and said: for you it is possible, to understand the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven, but for those, whom I've just mentioned, the people around, it is not so.

To this an actually deep puzzle is connected: To him who has it, more will be given ... but he, who does not have it, nothing will be given: what would have been given to him, the little he has, will be taken from him.

These are extraordinarily deep words. Perhaps nowhere else in the evolution of Christianity can these words of giving and taking be so deeply felt — when one can really feel in a religious way towards the world and people — how just today, science has taken over nature and in the widest circles gained ever more authority; accepted to take away everything which could give the possibility of being able to spiritually hear with his ears or see with his eyes. This is not what Man is supposed to do, in the scientific sense. Spirit should be obliterated in the sense of science, in the mood of our modern times. When we speak in the same way as modern theology speaks to people who are raised in scientific terms, we take away that little which they could have in religious feeling. When we counter what is done in the faculty of philosophy with what is done in enlightened theology today, we remove the last bit of what is religious.

This needs to be felt, experienced in deep profundity, because the mood of the time is such has made it necessary for theologians to eradicate the religious. It is very necessary that we listen in a lively way to these words of the Matthew Gospel.

However, this leads us to the next question: How can we discover the truth content, the vital content of the Gospel in the right way?

We must find the correct way so that we can find the truthfulness also in the details of the Gospel and with this truthfulness directly illuminate the content of our lives. You see, in the way I'm saying this, I'm formulating my words in a particular way. I'm thinking of Paul's' words "Not I but Christ in me" and see how it should be spoken now in relation to the understanding of the Gospels, and when the word is within the heart of truth: "Not I, but Christ in me," the Christ said, in order to align the people in the right direction: "I am the way, the truth and the life." — We may express the words of Paul, "Not I but Christ in me," and then we will approach the Gospel in a way which leads to the right way to access the truthfulness and through this find the vital content in the Gospels. We have to climb up to a certain level in order to bring to life Paul's words: "Not I, but Christ in me." We must try to ever and again let it be spoken out, when we want to understand the Gospel. My dear friends, if Christ had spoken in the theologians of the 19th Century, then quite a different theology would have resulted, than it did, because a different Gospel view would have resulted.

Discussion

Related pages

References and further reading

  • Leo Tolstoj: 'The Kingdom of God Is Within You' (1893)

Various unqualified

  • Mara Friederich, Georg Goelzer: 'Falter und Blüte Christuswort und Christerkenntnis' (1994)
  • Peter Selg: Seeing Christ in sickness and healing (Anthroposophical medicine as a medicine founded in Christianity) (2001 in DE, 2005 in EN)
  • Wolfgang Garvelmann: 'Sie sehen Christus – Erlebnisberichte von der Passion und der Auferstehung Christi' (2008)
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