Tomberg and Anthroposophy

[AshvinP]

But even so, what stands out is that:


1. He's unequivocally against the being of Anthroposophy (or any other being) to find expression in earthly organizations - the ones that Steiner points to as one of his warmest wishes, for the evolution of humanity to take place in the right way.

This is simply unfamiliarity with VT speaking. The deeper consideration is that, in the sense of Knowledge of Higher Worlds, we can only gain an orientation to such individualities and their works if we approach them with a certain degree of humility and reverence, and also patience in condensing our unequivocal judgments. All too often, we forsake the process of attuning our inner activity to such a lofty being as Anthroposophy in the name of 'defending' her against her perceived enemies, thereby missing how this Being can adorn many expressive husks. We then selectively ignore some expressions, zoom into others, add our commentary, and so on, all in the name of rationally preserving the perceived opposition within supersensible dynamics. Because, as Cleric also illustrated before with the arcane asanas, VT's work is entirely meant to stimulate a higher, supersensible vantage point that brings the pinhole of inversion into clear focus. It is not about comparing and contrasting two seemingly 'competing' imploded manifestations of the Tradition, but retracing and renewing the unified Tradition through our entirely new creative efforts.

I surely admit unfamiliarity with VT works, but are you then in agreement with Rodriel that at times one must intend in his prose quite the opposite of what it says? It must be so, otherwise there's not much one can do with expressions such as: "For the tradition lives not thanks to organisations, but in spite of them. One should content oneself purely and simply with friendship in order to preserve the life of a tradition; it should not be entrusted to the care of the embalmers and mummifiers par excellence that organisations are." other than understanding them as I did.

Yes, at times, depending on the particular soul we are engaging and the circumstances, we may need to take a more arcanic symbolic approach. Sometimes, if we communicate with physical symbols or very familiar intellectual content (like 'spacetime curvature'), the receiving soul will need to strive to see through those symbols to experience the underlying spiritual gestures, and for some souls that is easier with religiously charged images. We have characterized this before as an 'inverted' stance and it could also be described as striving toward the opposite of the habitual gestures we make when encountering certain explicit content, the typical associations of meaning, so the deeper meaning of that content can shine through. That is essentially what was sought through various veiled analogical approaches, including in Rosicrucianism.

At the same time, I already offered Rodriel some cautions in this area and pointed out how the Gospels differentiate between how things are presented to the disciples or St. Paul (more directly) versus the masses (by parables). Now, with the new etheric Impulse, we should understand the etheric disciples of Christ have expanded to encompass many more souls who have developed the intellectual forces and are thus prepared to directly unveil the Spirit concealed within and animating their real-time thoughts. The content of those thoughts can more directly point to their spiritual gestures, if we craft them wisely and artistically. Of course, the soul still must receive that directly symbolic content reverently and livingly - there is no way around that, no matter how clear and precise our words become. I also cautioned, likewise, that we should be careful not to assume what worked for us in this direct way won't work for other souls, because the gap probably isn't as large as we imagine.

It should be said that VT's approach is much more in the style of the latter, or at least a fusion. His concepts and his reasoning are quite directly pointing to spiritual realities, yet he also infuses that reasoning with religiously charged images and sometimes more veiled indications and instructions. The arcana have become something quite different in his treatment of them, from my perspective, and are no longer purely 'concealing and revealing'. The reason is because this function of the arcana 'concealing and revealing' has itself become revealed, it has become the explicit content of meditation. In that sense, one can clearly detect the PoF influence here, the recursively self-conscious observation of inner activity, if one has become sensitive to that kind of activity. It brings the Hermetic tradition into a new phase which does indeed appear to hear and heed the 'trumpet blast' of Steiner in many important ways.

[Rodriel Gabrez]

Thanks for sharing the proposed letter to Levin. I will contemplate that some more and circle back on it.

As you know, I share many of the same concerns that Cleric is expressing with respect to this more purposefully veiled approach to the symbolic communications. But I do also see that a distinction can be made.

On the one hand, if we take the example of the one-life dogma that Cleric is referring to, we can observe that the Church will continue to teach that idea for the foreseeable future. In that case, you may say that we should still have something to offer those Church-affiliated souls who are interested in deeper questions and are working on refining the intellect, but also feel it is practically impossible to directly approach something like the higher knowledge of reincarnation. That is where the Dante approach comes in and provides a subtle, 'silent' way of stirring the germinal forces such that the soul becomes more and more receptive over time. I think it is practically undeniable that this will be the case, and that most of us agree that there's no need to banish these alternative ways of engaging with such souls in the name of "Steiner's wishes", "the Anthroposophical method", or anything similar. Not only we don't banish them, but we should be actively seeking them out and cultivating them, such as we do here.

On the other hand, the observation of what will continue to happen in this respect can be transformed into what should happen and what should be somehow reinforced through our efforts. In other words, we say that we would see the Church as completely regressive if it were to somehow adapt and transform its central dogmas, thus making its sphere of activity more conducive to a direct (spiritual scientific) metamorphosis of souls through the pinhole. We start to feel like we really need a 'separation of concerns' to maintain itself right up until the Event, which finally brings living unity to spirituality and science across the Earthly landscape. Then our idea of the Christ impulse is to do whatever we can to ensure such a state is maintained until something signifies to us otherwise. Such a stance is clearly problematic from my perspective, but I'm not sure if that's what you are pointing to, or rather, it is mostly the former.

I'm definitely interested to hear you take on Levin vis-a-vis this conversation.

And I very much appreciate your serious consideration of the case I've been making. As to your question intending to clarify my position, I don't think the situation is quite as divided into the clearly separated and competing options you describe. The central dogmas of the Church are an aspect of the Cross, part of the very mechanism of the transformation, perhaps not for all souls at the immediate level of the individual, but certainly at the broader morphological level of the social organism. As such, the dogmas themselves do not need to be transformed. Why would they need to be if the threshold (akin to what you describe in your Magic Eye metaphor) is being crossed -- hypothetically speaking, at least -- in the soul life of Peter's flock with the dogmas as they are? After gaining access to the Magic Eye image, perhaps with the aid of someone who has achieved it before and describes the image to us, does the veil then disappear? Do we desire to turn the veil into the image it contains? There is no need, for we now can see the image, albeit with some effort, both thanks to and in spite of the veil. Rudolf Steiner is that someone who has helped us with the Magic Eye puzzle by making the image itself public knowledge.

The final act of Lazarus's direct initiation by Christ was made public, for all to see. It was then recorded plainly and openly in the Gospel of that very initiate. He even points to the event as an absolutely necessary catalyst. But then, he himself, in his publicly known identity, disappears from the drama, continuing thereafter in a more mysterious aura. The drama then continues at toward its universal culmination at the Cross, out of which flows the inexorable intertwining of the beloved initiate's path with that of the keyholder to the kingdom (Peter). To this day, anyone and everyone can look back at the public event -- this rendering visible of the contents of initiation -- and refer to it in its original form. It is always a benefit to see it "out in the open," rendered in the mineral-intellectual element. But to stop short at this event, thinking it to be the conclusion, is to fail to allow Lazarus to fulfill his mission as John. And that mission, as you have very nicely encapsulated it in your response to Federica, deals largely with making the Lazarus-John pattern itself -- the mystery of revealing and concealing -- the explicit content of meditation (and to this I would add of activity).

I think I see the worry, though. How will the entire social fabric of humanity be raised to the level of the Consciousness Soul if the veil remains in place? How are Anthroposophical projects and programs to be carried out at scale if we are not at liberty to speak Steiner's language? This is where the important but difficult to fully comprehend synergy with the Catholic Church comes into play. Anthroposophical methods, in their outer procedure and effect, are in fact in complete lockstep with the Church's deepest concerns and principles, which all center around the importance of the human person. So long as a particular program doesn't violate the human person -- within the domain in which the person comes into his proper element (namely the mineral-intellectual) -- the Church basically has no problem with it. The human person is what is revealed by the Intellectual Soul and precisely what becomes the foundation for the Consciousness Soul. The Church as protector of this domain actually secures the field of operation, as it were, for Anthroposophical work done in the Johannine fashion. I will say something perhaps controversial here: it would be better to have devout Catholics teaching in Waldorf schools than half-baked Anthroposophists with the bare minimum spiritual scientific background. All this is to say, while it is a greater challenge to carry out Anthroposophical work without referring explicitly to Steiner's work, it can and should be done and will find a great friend in the Church, which is by the way open today more than ever in its history to collaborative effort with forces beyond its walls.

[AshvinP]

Here's a very rough gloss of the trajectory Levin would need to be taken through:

"Dear esteemed Dr. Levin,

You are poised at the precipice of a great turning point in the history of scientific mankind. Through your intrepid, trailblazing work, you are reopening the doors to the invisible world which sits at the foundation of the empirical world of sensory observation. Your experiments show clearly that this invisible world is teaming with universal (nonlocalized) agencies that direct and account for the particular activities of isolated empirical phenomena. In this sense you are returning the wisdom of pagan antiquity to public consciousness.

Are you unaware, however, that this pagan wisdom has died and been raised in the I AM made flesh ? The Platonic world of Ideas is not a realm of discarnate patterns but of spiritual beings, whose angelic knowledge-as-deed constitutes the spiritual foundation of the patterns you find in your thinking. It is only by passing through to a deeper understanding of the nature of spirit that you will come to know the true essence of the agency in the "agentic processes" you are discovering. In other words, you must come to understand the nature of personhood, which is the locus of the free spiritual activity you have glimpsed as mere "patterns."

As you can rise to this new height, you will regain a feeling for your own humanity. You must discover the radical freedom that undergirds your movement through the world and your very existence itself. You will find that this is precisely the humanity upon which the entire Western world is founded but which now teeters on the brink of total collapse, held up only by the flimsy apparatus of positivist legal systems. Having regained a comprehension of the dignity of the human person (the incarnated I AM), you will then do well to become a friend of the Universal Law of the human person, which is housed in the Catholic Church and which protects and upholds the dignity of humanity, serving as a North Star for all human activity. Not least among these human activities, of course, is your important research, which - if it should avert its gaze from that Star - will unleash forces into the world that will evacuate it of the I AM, turning it into a silicon graveyard.

Will you take up the call to boldly claim your work for the good of humanity?

Sincerely,
A group of friends who support you"

Understanding that this is simply a rough gloss, I suppose the follow-up question is, how much chance do you give such a communication to stimulate a soul like Levin to take the 'nature of personhood' seriously and begin investigating the spiritual foundation of the patterns found in his thinking?

I sense that mentioning the Catholic Church will, by itself, give him enough excuse to brush it off. But even without that reference, the gestures would feel way too abstract and philosophical for him to be of practical value in scientific exploration (which is only to say it is 'abstract' from his perspective). This is also why I chose the example of Levin to hone in on those souls that pursue the deeper realities through a characteristically scientific orientation and mindset in our time. I think that even within the midst of the Catholic Church, we will find many such souls. They may not immerse themselves in scientific details and method to the extent of someone like Levin, but the way of thinking is still quite scientific in its orientation, i.e., the soul wants to understand the concrete dynamics at play through empirical observation. It may nod along with many of the concepts surrounding 'personhood', 'I AM', and so on, but these will remain as abstract metaphysical principles for it. If the soul already values more concrete thinking, it will probably steer clear of anyone giving such indications. Generally, my feeling is that this approach is bound to reinforce the division between the souls 'doing religion/philosophy/theology' and the souls 'doing science'.

That being said, I do appreciate and understand the emphasis on the moral dimension in such a communication, which generally does seem lacking in more 'spiritual scientific' communications. Whatever way in which we invite souls to the phenomenological path, it should also speak to their deeper being in some way, highlighting what's at stake from either pursuing or failing to pursue the inner nature of personhood.

[Rodriel Gabrez]

Understanding that this is simply a rough gloss, I suppose the follow-up question is, how much chance do you give such a communication to stimulate a soul like Levin to take the 'nature of personhood' seriously and begin investigating the spiritual foundation of the patterns found in his thinking?

I sense that mentioning the Catholic Church will, by itself, give him enough excuse to brush it off. But even without that reference, the gestures would feel way too abstract and philosophical for him to be of practical value in scientific exploration (which is only to say it is 'abstract' from his perspective). This is also why I chose the example of Levin to hone in on those souls that pursue the deeper realities through a characteristically scientific orientation and mindset in our time. I think that even within the midst of the Catholic Church, we will find many such souls. They may not immerse themselves in scientific details and method to the extent of someone like Levin, but the way of thinking is still quite scientific in its orientation, i.e., the soul wants to understand the concrete dynamics at play through empirical observation. It may nod along with many of the concepts surrounding 'personhood', 'I AM', and so on, but these will remain as abstract metaphysical principles for it. If the soul already values more concrete thinking, it will probably steer clear of anyone giving such indications. Generally, my feeling is that this approach is bound to reinforce the division between the souls 'doing religion/philosophy/theology' and the souls 'doing science'.

That being said, I do appreciate and understand the emphasis on the moral dimension in such a communication, which generally does seem lacking in more 'spiritual scientific' communications. Whatever way in which we invite souls to the phenomenological path, it should also speak to their deeper being in some way, highlighting what's at stake from either pursuing or failing to pursue the inner nature of personhood.

I'm not really sure why I ended up choosing the open letter as my approach here. In reality I don't think such a letter would have much effect if any. It was basically more of an attempt at an outline of one possibility for the overall thought process he would need to go through in order arrive at a healthier standpoint for his work. In terms of the exact method of guiding someone like him to these insights, I'm really not sure. Your articles (and Cleric's writing style, which is similar) seem particularly aimed at souls of his kind. To a certain extent, though, I feel that your writing already assumes a certain level of having woken up the reality of personhood on the part of the reader. Levin might need something more basic and aimed fundamentally at jolting his sense of human nature back into awareness.

[AshvinP]

I'm definitely interested to hear you take on Levin vis-a-vis this conversation.

And I very much appreciate your serious consideration of the case I've been making. As to your question intending to clarify my position, I don't think the situation is quite as divided into the clearly separated and competing options you describe. The central dogmas of the Church are an aspect of the Cross, part of the very mechanism of the transformation, perhaps not for all souls at the immediate level of the individual, but certainly at the broader morphological level of the social organism. As such, the dogmas themselves do not need to be transformed. Why would they need to be if the threshold (akin to what you describe in your Magic Eye metaphor) is being crossed -- hypothetically speaking, at least -- in the soul life of Peter's flock with the dogmas as they are? After gaining access to the Magic Eye image, perhaps with the aid of someone who has achieved it before and describes the image to us, does the veil then disappear? Do we desire to turn the veil into the image it contains? There is no need, for we now can see the image, albeit with some effort, both thanks to and in spite of the veil. Rudolf Steiner is that someone who has helped us with the Magic Eye puzzle by making the image itself public knowledge.

The final act of Lazarus's direct initiation by Christ was made public, for all to see. It was then recorded plainly and openly in the Gospel of that very initiate. He even points to the event as an absolutely necessary catalyst. But then, he himself, in his publicly known identity, disappears from the drama, continuing thereafter in a more mysterious aura. The drama then continues at toward its universal culmination at the Cross, out of which flows the inexorable intertwining of the beloved initiate's path with that of the keyholder to the kingdom (Peter). To this day, anyone and everyone can look back at the public event -- this rendering visible of the contents of initiation -- and refer to it in its original form. It is always a benefit to see it "out in the open," rendered in the mineral-intellectual element. But to stop short at this event, thinking it to be the conclusion, is to fail to allow Lazarus to fulfill his mission as John. And that mission, as you have very nicely encapsulated it in your response to Federica, deals largely with making the Lazarus-John pattern itself -- the mystery of revealing and concealing -- the explicit content of meditation (and to this I would add of activity).

I think I see the worry, though. How will the entire social fabric of humanity be raised to the level of the Consciousness Soul if the veil remains in place? How are Anthroposophical projects and programs to be carried out at scale if we are not at liberty to speak Steiner's language? This is where the important but difficult to fully comprehend synergy with the Catholic Church comes into play. Anthroposophical methods, in their outer procedure and effect, are in fact in complete lockstep with the Church's deepest concerns and principles, which all center around the importance of the human person. So long as a particular program doesn't violate the human person -- within the domain in which the person comes into his proper element (namely the mineral-intellectual) -- the Church basically has no problem with it. The human person is what is revealed by the Intellectual Soul and precisely what becomes the foundation for the Consciousness Soul. The Church as protector of this domain actually secures the field of operation, as it were, for Anthroposophical work done in the Johannine fashion. I will say something perhaps controversial here: it would be better to have devout Catholics teaching in Waldorf schools than half-baked Anthroposophists with the bare minimum spiritual scientific background. All this is to say, while it is a greater challenge to carry out Anthroposophical work without referring explicitly to Steiner's work, it can and should be done and will find a great friend in the Church, which is by the way open today more than ever in its history to collaborative effort with forces beyond its walls.

I think it may be helpful if we also approach this from the 'other side', the side of Anthroposophical veils. I am guessing you agree that, for those who have not undergone the proper inner transformation, the image of 'Old Saturn' painted by spiritual science, with its self-sacrificial warmth establishing a 'foundational lattice' for the stages of creation, is a veil in a way not too dissimilar from central dogmas of the Church. It takes a Magic Eye shift in perspective on such conceptual descriptions before they begin to reveal rather than conceal the underlying spiritual reality. When some of us attain such a shift in perspective, this veiling function for others does not disappear. It is still a mental tableau of various spatialized pictures that may as well point to general metaphysical principles like Church dogma does, except with some other optional details included.

Given that, if a soul approaches us and is trying to orient to the deeper meaning of old Saturn, does this mean we cannot proceed to elaborate on the inner realities directly? That we should say "Sorry, but until you attain the Magic Eye shift in perspective, these things cannot be discussed so directly. We must keep the veiled descriptions in place for now and do the best we can with them."? There are many ways in which we could elaborate direct guidelines for how the otherwise enigmatic descriptions of Old Saturn can be oriented to more concretely. This is what I mean by 'adapt and transform' with respect to the central dogmas as well. It's not that we change anything of their essential nature, or reword them arbitrarily, but we are perfectly willing to elaborate on their deeper spiritual foundations in a direct way for those who are seeking such an orientation. Is this possible within your vision of the Church as securing the field of operation for the intuitive thinking work?

To be clear, I don't think the answer to this question hinges on whether we use Steiner's language at all. We may very well elaborate on the deeper spiritual foundations through a somewhat different symbolic language, which is nevertheless quite direct about what it is trying to symbolize.

[Cleric]

What I have referred to as an Event is of course actually a gradually unfolding process, whereby the higher spiritual knowledge you speak of becomes increasingly widespread within Peter's flock through their Johnification. The "sharpening of the pinhole" isn't some delayed arrival of a future sudden transition but is continuously accompanied by the shared, communicated knowledge entering in through the pinhole. That the communication sounds different coming from John than from Lazarus seems to be the main point of contention here. And this is understandable. Christ Jesus himself wept at the death of Lazarus.

The vision is of a Church consisting increasingly of Johns. Why would the Church of Peter-become-John persecute a flock of Johns? Additionally, what would be the point of teaching a mineralized (outwardly verifiable) version of reincarnation when it is collectively understood through the language of personal certainty?

Let’s try to form a more panoramic picture of the situation. First, something basic. Every kind of learning challenges the soul to go beyond its current limits. This may happen instinctively, as when the child instinctively pushes forward into acquiring language (which is initially completely beyond its limits, it is completely incomprehensible). But it can also happen, as in education, where the teacher raises the bar and the student has to make conscious efforts to reach the goal, even if initially it is likewise barely comprehensible.

Secret Christian communities have always existed in the last two millennia. These are the Johns in the background, who work quietly. Let’s imagine that the outer Church corresponds to high school. This high school, however, is special in that it presents itself before its pupils as the final educational degree – at least as far as the Earth is concerned. Johns, of course, know otherwise. They know that there’s deeper, occult knowledge that can be reached even while on Earth. Let that correspond to the university.

At the turn of the twentieth century, an important event took place. Streams of the John schools opened up into the outer world, and there was an outflux of higher knowledge, that touched upon all practical aspects of life (that is, it wasn’t passive knowledge, something that merely satisfies the thirst for knowing). Certain Johns saw that as a one-time event, which was to fizzle out like the transient Hippie wave, and was to be followed by the work that is essentially not principally different from what was happening in the last two millennia. In any case, the shockwave of higher knowledge had to be dampened, and quiet work was to continue.

Let’s try to form a vivid picture of how all this looks from the perspective of true Imaginative cognition. When our consciousness loosens from the bodily spectrum, we may say that we are like a hot air balloon that experiences levity. At this stage, if we try to focus on the nature of external religious life, we may say that we feel as if entangled in a trellis net.



This is very easy to understand. Higher knowledge, such as the one Hermeticism can lead to, goes beyond what the exoteric Church teaches. When we also include facts of inner certainty, such as reincarnation for example, it becomes obvious that the Church dogma is something of a constraint or a filter. Let me be clear immediately: this is not meant in a negative sense. The high school can be thought of as constrained university knowledge. In any case, the trellis does not fundamentally limit our flight, but if we are to conform to the rules of quiet knowledge, this trellis is our constant companion. Anything that we are to bring down to Earth has to pass through the trellis as if to be checked with a yardstick. Any excesses are clipped off. It's like university students who need to bring down everything to the level of high school students, such that it is not far too obvious that things come from a university (because, remember, the high school acts like it's the final degree).

Why would we limit ourselves in such a way? Because for the Christian Hermeticist, the trellis, the Church, is the body of Christ. From within the center of the trellis, he hears: “You are free to explore, but make sure you do not irritate my body, do not annoy it, do not make it your enemy. You can push the boundary slightly, but not so far that you get excommunicated. Otherwise, you went too far.” So we have the secret students in the university, who are careful not to confront the high school. The latter has to remain as it is, even if it continues to teach its pupils that it is the last degree. We trust the process because Christ himself operates the trellis.

However, there’s another possible experience. It can happen that we hear, “Saul, Saul, why are you dampening my impulse?” Depending on our background, this can be the most liberating experience, but it can also be terrifying. It can be terrifying, when, just like Paul, one realizes that an error has crept in. Paul was convinced that he was serving the Lord when he was prosecuting the early Christians, but then his eyes opened to the Truth. The Lord was no longer where the Hebrews thought he was. In the same way, we can realize that the voice from the trellis is no longer the true voice of Christ. What now speaks there is a kind of afterimage animated by other forces. Christ may have spoken in that way before, but no longer does. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has been expanding. Today, he can no longer fit in this or that Church, in this or that nation. He’s the Spirit of the Earth. He’s in every pebble, in every human soul.

So what has happened? Just like in optics, when a ray of light transitions between media with different densities, some of the light passes through, and some of it is reflected.



Something similar happens when a new spiritual impulse breaks through. The question is not whether there’s a reflection, but where it is, and will we recognize it when we see it.

The masters of the new impulse didn’t simply try to make noise. They raised the bar. This is what the Living Christ demands. This should be completely obvious from the nature in which the teachings have been given – they are not merely to satisfy our curiosity, but every revealed fact is at the same time a task. We have been given work for centuries to come! This is the ray that passed forward. The ray that got reflected held back the impulse. It dampened it. It’s not that it denied it (as if it recognized it as the opposite of the truth), but it simply considered that the Christ still operates within the center of the trellis and thus, the same quiet tactics need to be maintained until further notice.

This is what makes the whole story around Tomberg tricky. On the surface, it feels that he continues along the momentum of the impulse, except that he ‘softens’ it. He clips off the excesses as commanded by the trellis. As long as no one is excommunicated, we’re doing as the trellis says. Yet, what is more difficult to see is precisely this deeper aspect of the whole drama. It is easy to see when there’s agreement. It’s also easy to see when there are striking oppositions. However, the things that move quietly in the background are far more difficult to spot. We say, “So what’s the big deal? He simply wanted to reach the souls who are still within the Church.” Yes, but the whole nature of the operation is such that there’s no saying when or whether at all, the higher knowledge will be able to break free. Effectively, this holding back of the impulse, by believing that it needs to abide by the trellis, acts like a valve. Now it is not Christ, but other beings, who effectively control the flow of higher knowledge into the World. It is very clever. If that flow is to be dammed more, all it takes is to inspire in the Peters stronger hostility against the Johns. And we know that it doesn’t take much to turn human beings on one another! Then, the Johns say, “We need to tone it down. The trellis says so. We’re giving out too much, too fast.” So, it’s a perfect valve! I hope it's clear that none of this proceeds from some kind of deliberate wickedness. These Johns sincerely serve the Christ as they understand him!

Of course, those Johns will ask, “How do we know that it is not the other way around? What if the true Christ indeed speaks from the center of the trellis, and he inspires the Church in his Wisdom, while it was precisely these ‘masters of the new impulse’ who were listening to the voice of the tempter, who made them feel grand, free, and knowledgeable, and gave them their twenty minutes of fame?” So, basically, we can be accused of that by loosening from the trellis, we are chasing false freedom, we’re running away from our real duties and the orders of the Christ. This, however, completely reverses when we indeed hear the other voice, the same one who called Saul. Now our eyes are opened to the intense work that is being done at all scales. We realize in full reality that by reflecting the impulse and damping it down, we’re actually rejecting the evolutionary tasks that are given to us from Christ Himself! This immediately restores the educational process to its proper nature. Instead of finding excuses to water down and dilute higher knowledge, on the pretext that souls are to work on their own to guess it, higher knowledge and its practical implications become the high bar. Nothing is solved for us, it’s not some readymade answer robbing us from the joy of finding it on our own. These are all tasks that each one of us must undertake.

It is clear that the masters of the new impulse did not worry about excommunication. They were free from the trellises. This is simply because they drew from the Spring, and this Spring is no longer to be found in this or that Church. Peter’s temple is now the whole Earthly realm. This is the new Church – the Kingdom of Living Nature in all its fullness. I wish all of us to loosen our trellises and find in freedom the Living Christ, the inner Cosmic Sun, whom we need to serve in Spirit and Truth.

[Federica]

Thank you Cleric. May your wish be fullfilled!

[Rodriel Gabrez]

Let’s try to form a more panoramic picture of the situation. First, something basic. Every kind of learning challenges the soul to go beyond its current limits. This may happen instinctively, as when the child instinctively pushes forward into acquiring language (which is initially completely beyond its limits, it is completely incomprehensible). But it can also happen, as in education, where the teacher raises the bar and the student has to make conscious efforts to reach the goal, even if initially it is likewise barely comprehensible.

Secret Christian communities have always existed in the last two millennia. These are the Johns in the background, who work quietly. Let’s imagine that the outer Church corresponds to high school. This high school, however, is special in that it presents itself before its pupils as the final educational degree – at least as far as the Earth is concerned. Johns, of course, know otherwise. They know that there’s deeper, occult knowledge that can be reached even while on Earth. Let that correspond to the university.

At the turn of the twentieth century, an important event took place. Streams of the John schools opened up into the outer world, and there was an outflux of higher knowledge, that touched upon all practical aspects of life (that is, it wasn’t passive knowledge, something that merely satisfies the thirst for knowing). Certain Johns saw that as a one-time event, which was to fizzle out like the transient Hippie wave, and was to be followed by the work that is essentially not principally different from what was happening in the last two millennia. In any case, the shockwave of higher knowledge had to be dampened, and quiet work was to continue.

Let’s try to form a vivid picture of how all this looks from the perspective of true Imaginative cognition. When our consciousness loosens from the bodily spectrum, we may say that we are like a hot air balloon that experiences levity. At this stage, if we try to focus on the nature of external religious life, we may say that we feel as if entangled in a trellis net.



This is very easy to understand. Higher knowledge, such as the one Hermeticism can lead to, goes beyond what the exoteric Church teaches. When we also include facts of inner certainty, such as reincarnation for example, it becomes obvious that the Church dogma is something of a constraint or a filter. Let me be clear immediately: this is not meant in a negative sense. The high school can be thought of as constrained university knowledge. In any case, the trellis does not fundamentally limit our flight, but if we are to conform to the rules of quiet knowledge, this trellis is our constant companion. Anything that we are to bring down to Earth has to pass through the trellis as if to be checked with a yardstick. Any excesses are clipped off. It's like university students who need to bring down everything to the level of high school students, such that it is not far too obvious that things come from a university (because, remember, the high school acts like it's the final degree).

Why would we limit ourselves in such a way? Because for the Christian Hermeticist, the trellis, the Church, is the body of Christ. From within the center of the trellis, he hears: “You are free to explore, but make sure you do not irritate my body, do not annoy it, do not make it your enemy. You can push the boundary slightly, but not so far that you get excommunicated. Otherwise, you went too far.” So we have the secret students in the university, who are careful not to confront the high school. The latter has to remain as it is, even if it continues to teach its pupils that it is the last degree. We trust the process because Christ himself operates the trellis.

However, there’s another possible experience. It can happen that we hear, “Saul, Saul, why are you dampening my impulse?” Depending on our background, this can be the most liberating experience, but it can also be terrifying. It can be terrifying, when, just like Paul, one realizes that an error has crept in. Paul was convinced that he was serving the Lord when he was prosecuting the early Christians, but then his eyes opened to the Truth. The Lord was no longer where the Hebrews thought he was. In the same way, we can realize that the voice from the trellis is no longer the true voice of Christ. What now speaks there is a kind of afterimage animated by other forces. Christ may have spoken in that way before, but no longer does. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has been expanding. Today, he can no longer fit in this or that Church, in this or that nation. He’s the Spirit of the Earth. He’s in every pebble, in every human soul.

So what has happened? Just like in optics, when a ray of light transitions between media with different densities, some of the light passes through, and some of it is reflected.



Something similar happens when a new spiritual impulse breaks through. The question is not whether there’s a reflection, but where it is, and will we recognize it when we see it.

The masters of the new impulse didn’t simply try to make noise. They raised the bar. This is what the Living Christ demands. This should be completely obvious from the nature in which the teachings have been given – they are not merely to satisfy our curiosity, but every revealed fact is at the same time a task. We have been given work for centuries to come! This is the ray that passed forward. The ray that got reflected held back the impulse. It dampened it. It’s not that it denied it (as if it recognized it as the opposite of the truth), but it simply considered that the Christ still operates within the center of the trellis and thus, the same quiet tactics need to be maintained until further notice.

This is what makes the whole story around Tomberg tricky. On the surface, it feels that he continues along the momentum of the impulse, except that he ‘softens’ it. He clips off the excesses as commanded by the trellis. As long as no one is excommunicated, we’re doing as the trellis says. Yet, what is more difficult to see is precisely this deeper aspect of the whole drama. It is easy to see when there’s agreement. It’s also easy to see when there are striking oppositions. However, the things that move quietly in the background are far more difficult to spot. We say, “So what’s the big deal? He simply wanted to reach the souls who are still within the Church.” Yes, but the whole nature of the operation is such that there’s no saying when or whether at all, the higher knowledge will be able to break free. Effectively, this holding back of the impulse, by believing that it needs to abide by the trellis, acts like a valve. Now it is not Christ, but other beings, who effectively control the flow of higher knowledge into the World. It is very clever. If that flow is to be dammed more, all it takes is to inspire in the Peters stronger hostility against the Johns. And we know that it doesn’t take much to turn human beings on one another! Then, the Johns say, “We need to tone it down. The trellis says so. We’re giving out too much, too fast.” So, it’s a perfect valve! I hope it's clear that none of this proceeds from some kind of deliberate wickedness. These Johns sincerely serve the Christ as they understand him!

Of course, those Johns will ask, “How do we know that it is not the other way around? What if the true Christ indeed speaks from the center of the trellis, and he inspires the Church in his Wisdom, while it was precisely these ‘masters of the new impulse’ who were listening to the voice of the tempter, who made them feel grand, free, and knowledgeable, and gave them their twenty minutes of fame?” So, basically, we can be accused of that by loosening from the trellis, we are chasing false freedom, we’re running away from our real duties and the orders of the Christ. This, however, completely reverses when we indeed hear the other voice, the same one who called Saul. Now our eyes are opened to the intense work that is being done at all scales. We realize in full reality that by reflecting the impulse and damping it down, we’re actually rejecting the evolutionary tasks that are given to us from Christ Himself! This immediately restores the educational process to its proper nature. Instead of finding excuses to water down and dilute higher knowledge, on the pretext that souls are to work on their own to guess it, higher knowledge and its practical implications become the high bar. Nothing is solved for us, it’s not some readymade answer robbing us from the joy of finding it on our own. These are all tasks that each one of us must undertake.

It is clear that the masters of the new impulse did not worry about excommunication. They were free from the trellises. This is simply because they drew from the Spring, and this Spring is no longer to be found in this or that Church. Peter’s temple is now the whole Earthly realm. This is the new Church – the Kingdom of Living Nature in all its fullness. I wish all of us to loosen our trellises and find in freedom the Living Christ, the inner Cosmic Sun, whom we need to serve in Spirit and Truth.

Firstly, it seems we must at this point consider one of the currently knowable secrets of evil. When the epoch of the past passes over into its future state, the epoch of the past has associated with it certain backward beings who reluctantly sacrifice themselves, thus becoming the ossified support of the new epoch. The new epoch rests upon the Cross made of Ahrimanic beings who hold themselves back. These beings become allied with the spirit of death, which forms the barrier between the juxtaposed temporal worlds. Christ Jesus is crucified upon this barrier of death, filling it with the substantiality of Resurrection, so that what passes through it might enter the chastening fire of nonbeing and emerge into the higher world. The Cross is death, which has been conquered by the Sun of the Spiritual Cosmos. The Intellectual Soul, as I have said, is the Cross of thinking, upon which Peter's flock is crucified upside-down in humility to the Lord. The flock points their heads to the center of the earth, in which the forces of Ahriman are concentrated. We must not follow Lucifer or Ahriman, but the Representative of Man who stands in the middle, respecting both Ahriman and Lucifer in their proper domains. Let not the death of the Cross be taken away from the Church. For this darkness is the space that the Light now fills. The future rests on the disintegrated, discarded husks of former epochs and their sacrificed backward spirits.

Secondly, there is a crucial element of fractality that I believe is missing in the images you present. The Gospels are not simply depictions of events which will linearly transpire within one epoch and then make way for something else entirely. They are the words that do not pass away when heaven and earth pass away. The events in the Gospels contain the eternal blueprint for what happens fractally-morphologically across manifold planes of cosmic existence, for the entire collectivity of eternal spirits. Lazarus-John travels through the mineral plane into the etheric, where he is again initiated by Christ Jesus and raised. The crowds conspire to crucify Christ yet again, and the death of the Cross rips across the mineral-etheric divide. Again, Mary Madgalene mistakes him for the gardener. Again, John yields to Peter in the Tomb. And again the disciples find Jesus on the other shoreline. We have to be able to identify when these streams have reached their season. I have been pointing to the subtle perception that Lazarus has in the past hundred years died and been raised in the next morphological level his stream's trajectory.

[AshvinP]

I'm not really sure why I ended up choosing the open letter as my approach here. In reality I don't think such a letter would have much effect if any. It was basically more of an attempt at an outline of one possibility for the overall thought process he would need to go through in order arrive at a healthier standpoint for his work. In terms of the exact method of guiding someone like him to these insights, I'm really not sure. Your articles (and Cleric's writing style, which is similar) seem particularly aimed at souls of his kind. To a certain extent, though, I feel that your writing already assumes a certain level of having woken up the reality of personhood on the part of the reader. Levin might need something more basic and aimed fundamentally at jolting his sense of human nature back into awareness.

Ok, that makes more sense. You are simply trying to reflect a general inner process that such souls may need to traverse before deeper intuitions are sparked. I have also felt like what we do here is aimed at stimulating a similar inner process, which is more akin to what can be stimulated through PoF-MoT than what can be stimulated through modern spiritual scientific works (for example, Prokofieff's works). They strive for a balanced approach between core phenomenological exploration and deeper esoteric implications, while trying to address souls within a philosophical-scientific conceptual palette that we have all soaked in from the modern environment. I can see how emphasizing a religious dimension within such efforts could also become quite useful, as VT so artfully does.

I can also appreciate how you are trying to elaborate on some really subtle threads of our current evolutionary process, and how this can be easily brushed off when seeking a panoramic intuition of that process (and, don't get me wrong, this is always the first thing we should do). The RCC has been characterized as preserving the intellectual soul against the pervasive forces of degeneration, as a 'buffer zone' for souls unprepared for the Magic Eye shift, as the trellis net that filters our higher intuitions, and so on. The fact is that this is how the Church functions in our time for wide swaths of souls and will continue to function for the foreseeable future. There is no value in smearing over this fact or equating those who observe this fact and desire to seek ways of leveraging it for the pursuit of higher knowledge, with those who imagine this trellis situation must statically remain as the unconditional valve for all future spiritual pursuits. In fact, we can see in Christian Hermeticism, as VT illustrated and extended it, exactly an example of:

The masters of the new impulse didn’t simply try to make noise. They raised the bar. This is what the Living Christ demands. This should be completely obvious from the nature in which the teachings have been given – they are not merely to satisfy our curiosity, but every revealed fact is at the same time a task. We have been given work for centuries to come!

Anything we add onto that, which can be experienced by immersing ourselves reverently into his inner process, about unconditional and exclusive attachment to the Church trellis and valve, is simply our commentary, perhaps born out of unfamiliarity or generalization of that inner process. At the same time, obviously, there is a great deal of importance placed on the Church and its significance within the evolutionary process by VT. The Church is comprised of beings, including departed souls and hierarchical beings (including backward beings, as you pointed out). Have the departed saints who work across the threshold abandoned the Church body and its functions for deeper spiritual orientation, allowing it to unconditionally wither and die? Do the millions of faithful who pray to these saints for such an orientation pray in vain? Will their prayers be met by directions to leave the constrained valve of the Church and spend all their time meditating on Christ within? These are the kinds of questions that I think are too easily ignored or brushed by when seeking the panoramic picture of the situation. It is what you referred to as the fractal-morphological pattern of evolutionary developments, although I'm not sure if the pattern can be applied to the Steiner-VT dynamic exactly as you envision it.

It is true that many of our ideas of the Church functions can be afterimages of past functions that we are carrying forward into the present, but again there is no need to overgeneralize when we can explore those functions at a detailed resolution. There is certainly something of importance that needs to be contemplated here, even if it is quite difficult to feel how it fits within the bigger evolutionary picture at first. And these nuanced considerations were not lost on Steiner, either. In the more intimate setting of discussions with religious-minded souls and aspiring priests, he recognized that there is something unique about the Catholic Church which makes it "completely different" than the other church communities that are "doomed".  He recognized that "it is quite impossible to truly cultivate religious life without making the transition to worship, to speaking in the symbolum", which he identified as something present within Catholic preaching as "Catholicism strives for regeneration". And we likewise cannot help but feel his nuanced approach (and its overlap with VT) to such a topic when contemplating the following exchange:


A participant: Even if the practical side comes about easily, it may be that this or that practical matter is of the greatest importance to us now, especially since some of us are already in certain practical situations. Therefore, I would ask you to perhaps tell us something about the possibilities for connecting. Initially, there are two possibilities for connecting, either perhaps from the church or from the existing anthroposophical communities. Is it at all possible to connect from church work afterwards? This fear that it cannot be found still holds back many of us, although they could already enter into church service. What should happen then? The question of practical matters is perhaps already included, but the fundamental question of the possibility of making contact is already contained in it, because there is simply no clarity in our own movement about where we can make a practical connection right now. Would we be wasting an opportunity if we entered the church service now in the hope of being able to make a connection later? Should we not rather do something else, because we have to make a connection somewhere.

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is such that the answer to this must be a manifold one. It cannot be given in the same way because, despite the difficulties that the church presents today, there are still possibilities to work from within the church that should perhaps not be left untapped. If you take into account the particular circumstances here or there, you will be able to say that, given the nature of the community as a whole, you can found your community yourself, if you seek out the existing forms of the ministry, but then gradually lead the community out of the current church circumstances, while you would not be able to get the community members together if you placed yourself outside the church and simply tried to gather them. On the other hand, in certain fields it will no longer be possible to work outside the Church at all. In such cases it is of course absolutely necessary to try to found free communities. But I would recommend under all circumstances not to approach the matter with the aim of forming a union with the anthroposophical branches and so on, and not to aim at working out of anthroposophy itself, because in that case you would be pulled down before you got anywhere. Anthroposophy as such will simply be attacked in the most outrageous way from all possible sides in the near future; and in order to arrive at the formation of a quiet community within this battle, you see, the strength that you have today, even if you were ten times as numerous, is not yet sufficient. We do not yet live in social conditions that would make it possible to develop religious communities from anthroposophy itself. They have to form religious communities for themselves and then seek union with the anthroposophical movement. The anthroposophical movement – I can say this quite openly – will never fail to support this union, of course; but it would not be good to form ecclesiastical communities out of the anthroposophical 'communities', so to speak.

[Rodriel Gabrez]

Thank you for providing these very helpful quotations from Steiner showing the highly nuanced views he held in relation to the practical concerns of integrating religious and anthroposophical life. I'd like to examine one statement of yours in particular:

The fact is that this is how the Church functions in our time for wide swaths of souls and will continue to function for the foreseeable future. There is no value in smearing over this fact or equating those who observe this fact and desire to seek ways of leveraging it for the pursuit of higher knowledge, with those who imagine this trellis situation must statically remain as the unconditional valve for all future spiritual pursuits.

I would argue that it's crucially important to be able to discern the difference between the general texture of the unfolding morphology of the cosmos, which proceeds according to certain laws (divine intentions) that transcend all temporal contingencies, and the specific options available to the community of souls and spirits for creatively realizing that texture. That said, we must understand what the New Testament is in relation to the past and future. More specifically we need to fully grasp the significance of Christ's Incarnation into the physical-mineral realm at the exact nadir of Earth evolution and what the etheric return of the Christ means in relation to this.

Firstly, what is documented in the New Testament as recorded, witnessed physical history has been imprinted into the etheric body of the Earth, where it will now be rediscovered as the 5th Gospel in the imagination of the earthly assembly. The recorded, sensibly witnessed events have been so arranged (guided by the Holy Spirit, just as the Church claims) as to account for the unfolding of the prerequisite faculties and experiences needed to arrive at that imagination (the perception of the condensed etheric seed for the unfolding of the Earth's future). The etheric perception of the Mystery of Golgotha differs in certain ways from the intellectually derivable (dogmatic) account, but it is through this dogmatic version that the freedom of thought required to fully possess the etheric perception has been made possible. The physical events as intellectually apprehended are the necessary Cross upon which the events are sublimated into increasingly spiritual (eternal) spheres.

Now that the etheric seeds for the unfolding of the future were planted by Christ in the Earth organism, streams have gone out into the mineral domain of temporal becoming which are the transformed continuation of the those seeds. What does this mean? It means that human soul-spirits in cooperation with the hierarchies have begun to transform the spans of temporal duration between the present and the past into the formative curvatures contained in the etheric seeds. Those formative curvatures are the etherized realization of the physical events of the Gospels, apprehended in thought. When we see the contents of the 5th Gospel, we are seeing both the original events and their subsequent movement toward eternity through etherization. Therefore, the events of the Gospels actually are recapitulated again on the stage of human history, as the etheric formation of historical-morphological unfolding. Now connecting back to my first comment above, there is an inexorable texture to this unfolding, which corresponds exactly to the texture of the physical events. We need not interpret this to mean that certain possibilities for current and future action are foreclosed. Rather, we become morally creative in determining how the texture comes about. All the streams that flow out from Golgotha must realize the formative structure provided them by the Word through whom all things were made. This morphological structure grows toward equally pre-textured outcomes. But we creatively navigate our way through the re-eternalization of what was made free by descending into the mineral sphere of death at the midpoint of Earth evolution.

One of those pre-textured outcomes is the Peter-John relationship. Our imaginative apprehension of this aspect of the etheric seed -- precisely what you pointed out as the concealing and revealing becoming an explicit content of meditation -- is part and parcel of its impending realization on the stage of spiritual history.