Cleric wrote: ↑Fri Oct 31, 2025 5:45 pm
The other thing is that we should loosen the idea of the RCC becoming
the universal institution. When we delaminate the layers of our psyche sufficiently, we realize that such an idea can only be inspired in fifth-epoch consciousness. It can only be felt as necessary before a tipping point has been reached. Let me say it thus: as long as we feel like “I appreciate having your word on it, but a little contract signed with ink would be nice,” we’ll also feel that humanity is simply too slippery without a certain organization to oversee its form. All of this is bound to change with the inversion. Not globally, but starting from small societies enlivened by the High Ideal. And we can feel it even today if we go deep. Everything about contracts and formal memberships is fueled by fundamental
mistrust between human beings. It was certainly indispensable, it still is, and will be for more time, but we simply distort our vision of the future if we secretly project this state far ahead, and even all the way to the Omega point. Why should people in the future be members of the same one Church? What does it even mean to be a member of that Church? Does one need to have a baptism certificate, a piece of paper with ink? RS, BD, OMA, have all been very clear about it.
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With this in mind, we need the inner openness that communities will emerge ahead in time, which start directly with the application of the new impulses, afresh, unhindered, and thus wouldn’t need to first fight the inertia of the old. Of course, every member of that community is a source of such old inertia, but at least the ideal is immediately set high and without hindrances. Even today, it is encouraging to see how the spiritual scientific impulse is utilized in those who read BD, and vice versa. After a generation or two, souls become more sophisticated and can integrate these methods. My point is that there are great conditions to live this deepened life, with the needed sacred dimension. I prefer the word sacred, because religious and cultic are more loaded. As such, we should be prepared that such communities will unfold powerful individual and collective life, of which the Churches will need to
take example. I say this again as a counterweight to the idea that the impulse has been planted into the RCC, and anything of value can only be expected to grow in that context. But ultimately, all such communities, whether new or old, will need to draw their life from the spiritual world. This is the invariant.
A part of my comment was meant to preempt this idea that the connection to the Church needs to be spelled out in ink
It is, rather, exactly what you are speaking of, except the RCC comes also to be recognized as participating in this loose network of communities linked through purely spiritual bonds (which will sometimes take outer expression in certain ways, but not in the form of diplomas, certificates, databases, telegraphs, cable wires, and so on). Its center of gravity will, no doubt, be experienced as exerting a greater attractive strength than other communities on the periphery, but that doesn't negate the fact that the communion is all rooted in lucid conscience, in cognitively deepened
faith and trust, not on the coercive and mistrusting measures of the old days. It helps if we are clearer on what it means for John to serve Peter, or the higher to serve the lower. We need to complete this phrase with the other part that VT expresses - "
True obedience is the very opposite of tyranny and slavery, since its root is the love which issues from faith and confidence: that which is above serves that which is below, and that which is below obeys that which is above." (faith here is not blind belief in dogmatic content, but a condition of the soul that is reverently open to the flow of higher impulses).
We have expressed similarly, "spacetime tells matter how to move, matter tells spacetime how to curve." There is no simplistic and unconditional submission to the Church, and we only need to think of it this way if we feel that core spiritual aspects of the Church, which were once present,
are incapable of being renewed. In that case, it obviously doesn't warrant our faith and confidence. But if it can be, then we may seek to revolve around its center of gravity precisely because we see the untapped Divine potential in its structure that its members don't quite understand yet. That would be the higher self serving the lower, and the lower obeying the higher, in the spirit of Christ. The planetary spirits don't need certificates and diplomas to express their fealty to the spirits of the Sun - fealty rooted in a fully lucid trust that their intuitive movements filter the Divine potential for the Good - rather, it is expressed through their own harmonious movements around its center of gravity. It all depends on whether the Johns can see the Divine potential within the universal Church that most others fail to see, including much of the Church itself, just as Christ came to serve humanity in a way it did not initially understand.
This is not what I implied. The atomization is of the kind that BK leads to - a dissociative bubble that forms its private beliefs about MAL. I wanted to emphasize that true community starts within the spiritual world. If a school or a workshop are recepticles of the Divine Life, then even when they are relatively independent on the physical plane, as soon as they come in touch and need to do some work together, they'll already be in harmony, feel like brothers and sisters who, even though apart for the time being, are one family, one community, have common understanding, common ideals. This is the opposite of atomization. It is the continuous rupturing of the dissociative bubble and drawing upon the unified Life. And as said, this doesn't in the least imply that groups should remain isolated in physical space. What I say is that for man it will be far more real and important that in inner space he's together with the whole of humanity, than the fact that his local church has terrestrial communication channels with Rome.
That is, of course, the ideal, but as Steiner saw, it's not such a simple matter to spawn new communities that are receptacles for the Divine Life and can help shepherd souls into a morally purified cognitive life.
I also don't see any need for such explicit terrestrial communication channels for the Catholic project, as I understand it, to grow and bear fruit. But the atomization issue also speaks to something else, which hopefully is addressed below.
I think it is important to distinguish that two quite separate things get intermixed when we speak of cult and dogma. On one hand is the religious depth of life, where souls participate in a rhythmic life of Cosmic significance. And additionally, this is cultivated in sacred reverence and humility before the infinite Divine. This is completely necessary and must get stronger in time, because such collective works will have magical effects. They will be co-creative methods for guiding the unfoldment of Earthly happenings. Collective prayers attempt to do that even today, but in the future, these works will be imbued with a far clearer consciousness about the way we collectively impress in the Flow.
The other aspect is that of dogma in the sense of belief, an axiom for the intellectual soul. This must gradually change in character (in fact, it must change urgently, but for the Church's sake, it can only be gradual). Why is that? Let's step back and consider what religious life is in the fifth epoch. It is first and foremost a belief system. We, as aspiring esoterists, may claim that we have inner experiences that give us other sources of certainty, but for the sensory-intellectual life, religion is belief (even if deep and warmly experienced). What is it that is being believed? What is the origin of this belief? In the most general sense, the scriptures. When we ask the priest, "How do we know what to believe in?" he replies, "We know it from what has been handed down to us through the generations. We believe that what has reached us is the authentic Word of God, and that's the basis of our faith. Our faith is in God, but this faith is supported on the bedrock of the scriptures. Without them, we could never know what to believe."
This aspect of dogma no longer does great service to humanity. It's not even so much about the concrete points of belief (like one-life, the nature of the second coming, etc.), but the actual mode of consciousness. That's also why Steiner says, "build a bridge between such a cult, such a ritual, that can exist in the face of modern consciousness". Here's the place where we must very lucidly understand what the Michaelic impulse of spiritual science signifies. It means nothing less than the fact that we've entered an age where faith can be supported through another kind of thoughts. While in the last two millennia we've been looking down and touching with our thoughts the etheric tree rings of history, where the scriptures are embedded, and this gave us the confidence to send our faith upward, today we can touch with our thoughts also that which so far has been only an object of faith. This is the critical thing - modern man should be fully aware that support of his religious reverence can be found in a new kind of thinking that shoots in the opposite direction of the tree rings of the scriptures. In simple terms, this means that what could so far only be believed and at most asymptotically felt in a mystical mood can now become a cognitive experience; it can be touched with our thoughts and the higher forms of intuitive movements of our spirit.
This in itself should change the whole way the priest speaks. He must not simply rely on the passed-down knowledge, but he must speak as someone who brings something down from the spiritual depth. He must be a John. What flows out in the sermon should not be based only on what has been interpreted and synthesized from the past, but on what the spiritual world intends for the future.
Now, one may say that the simple soul would still have to take everything on belief, and as such, the good old dogma based entirely on scriptures is just as good. It is true that things will need to be taken with faith, but it is not true that the old dogma is just as good. It makes a great difference for the upbringing of the soul when it feels the source of what it is told. When that soul sees in the priest an authority that speaks from the spirit, this gives not only the points to be believed, but it develops a vision in the soul, that it can grow and become like the priest - one who is in living communion with Heaven. This the simple soul can understand very well, just like the small child can understand that it can grow like its parents. On the other hand, if we keep teaching dogma in fifth-epoch style, where the priests simply relay the contents of the scriptures (even if they provide their personal touch), this becomes impressed in the listening souls. They remain with the hidden mood that there's a chasm between the worlds, and our faith can only be supported by the tree rings of the past. For this reason, if we are to introduce the religious teachings back in society, it is critically important that they flow in such a way, that even the simple soul receives the impression that in our age, there's also a different way to know of the Divine mysteries, besides the scriptures passed down through the millennia.
As we seem to have agreed, everything you express above is in concordance with what VT-MoT seeks to establish for the religious soul and its orientation to dogma, ritual, and scripture, especially those souls in a position of teaching or preaching. It is all about transforming dogma as an intellectual axiom into dogma as an
instrument of Divine magic. From my perspective, this is the unmistakable shift that one experiences when meditating on its contents with inner effort and good faith. Certainly, my previous work with PoF, KHW, and spiritual science makes the shift much more pronounced, and neither Rodriel nor I have expressed that MoT alone is sufficient for lasting inner transformation (just as one should not rest satisfied with PoF or KHW). But then the question becomes, what can be
practically done to stimulate a change in the whole way the priest speaks, given that he is speaking and will continue to speak to millions? Should we just say, "They will mostly continue to speak with mechanical sermons and formulas, devoid of the magical element, so let's leave all of that aside and only focus on our local priests who speak out of true Spirit"?
We can think about it this way. In the post-WWII era, humanity has been dealing with multiple extinction-level crises of its own making. There were a few times when we were on the brink of nuclear holocaust, for example. The environmental catastrophes at scale are also quite new developments. I guess we can all agree that such possibilities are the result of extreme spiritual ignorance, yes, but also a complete lack of self-discipline and moral orientation in the face of quickly degenerating cultural life and corresponding tempting circumstances. The same kind of uncontrollable chain reaction is also happening more imperceptibly as the post-war World is completely overrun by techno-materialist impulses and ideas. In such a scenario, the initiates working within local, small-scale, brand new communities building bridges from the True Ecclesia to the ripening intellectual soul and nascent spiritual soul may end up building bridges to a spectrum of soul experience that
no longer exists. They will find the field they were hoping to eventually sow with seeds of higher Life, completely barren.
This is one huge reason why the atomization of religious life is so problematic and why we cannot naively hope that healthy, rhythmic, sacred existence will
exclusively flourish from the ground up within brand new communities that draw on the unmediated Source of moral intuitions and inspirations. The reality is that many such new communities quickly degenerate into atomic units that contemplate "spiritual reality" with little difference from typical Protestant religious life. It is why we need to seriously explore the possibility that the existing Churches, not as rigid physical structures and wired connections, but as wise soul structures 'made of'
pliable imaginative substance, have an important role to play,
if the John souls take up the task of artistically working upon that substance. There are not only obstacles to higher life in these existing institutions, but also subtle advantages that can be leveraged for the True inner work you describe, if we desire to look and listen for them with eyes to see and ears to hear.
This is not about pumping the brakes on higher spiritual development within our shared inner space and diverting inner resources to the Church, or at least it doesn't have to be conceived that way. If Steiner is any example, there is no such thing as a truly Sun-inspired soul becoming spread too thin, only able to focus on one task at a time. We can at least keep an open heart and flexible imagination, so as to try and sieze upon every occasion to be of service. We can also remain vigilant to avoid becoming hindrances to those working on slowing and reversing the chain reaction in a somewhat different way than we are familiar with. We can trust that, as long as we continue the direct communion with the spiritual Ecclesia, we will be able to discern the difference between rationalizing a way to pump the breaks, which is certainly common, and dealing with urgent realities in a morally creative manner.
Rodriel made an important point before in this respect:
I never said anything about the Intellectual Soul being "rolled back into inexistence." Of course once a particular level of morphology has been reached in human evolution it can't simply disappear. What I'm talking about is degradation, atrophy, erosion, etc. Once widespread degradation happens, it becomes more likely to spread and more difficult to reverse. Sure, if a small handful of people are still incarnated with the healthy member then all hope is not lost. But this would be a dire situation. The question of whether there are any true points of no return in human evolution is a profound one worthy of much discussion, but it is a fact that certain evolutionary trajectories lead to increasingly intractable scenarios. The eventual splitting of humanity into the good and evil races is an advanced manifestation of this.
So we see the Catholic project, by which I mean VT and Rodriel's orientation toward the Church and its future evolutionary role, is not about holding some intellectual vision of the preordained superiority and centrality of the Church, of how events must only unfold in one direction around its axis, and then crafting all our spiritual efforts around this unquestionable vision. That may be how such ideas function for many people who identify closely with nation, race, religion, or denomination and seek to establish idealistic programs on that basis, but for those who know their living spirit independent of these sheaths, it is fully acknowledged that things could go in a different direction depending on how consciously we grow into the spiritual worlds. Humanity in its current iteration may not even persist to inherit the new heaven and earth. These possibilities need to be wrestled with to some extent. It isn't a scare tactic to push through the Church agenda, but a carefully observed and reasoned set of spiritual scientific facts that informed souls such as VT. The Catholic project does not deny the necessity of autonomous community streams that draw directly from higher insight and even recognizes its
dependence on the efforts of these communities, while inviting the communities to also recognize their interdependence with the Church's domain of magical operations.
In any case, my only hope and goal in this topic is to stimulate a bit more appreciation for the perspective from which the 'further' is being communicated by VT and Rodriel, and to indicate that it can be spiritually explored as an open question and an invitation for potential future efforts. I also really hope that souls here can still pick up MoT and work through its profound value for cognitively deepened religious life without undue coloring from prior assumptions or prejudices.
"More and more of the 'management' decisions (curving the streams of destiny) for guiding Earthly affairs will be taken outside of the body, in the symphony of the True Ecclesia of beings at all scales."
