Lent

[Federica]

Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday is the day when our wish to begin to understand the Mystery of Good Friday - the death of Christ Jesus on the Cross - leads us to follow Him in the abyss. After the earthquake on Friday evening the Earth is now ready to receive Christ’s sacrifice. He is entombed, about to become the Spirit of the Earth, the Lord of the elements. His descent into the Hell of the Earth interior stands as the condition for the subsequent ascent of Resurrection. These Saturday events also mark a change of nature compared to Friday’s. Whereas the death on the Cross was perceptible for all, the facts of Easter Saturday could only be participated through clairvoyant vision. This subterranean environment - the nine layers of the descent - are enumerated in "Alchemy of Holy Week". They are also briefly described by Steiner (with abundant caveats) in GA 96 II - Inner Earth and Volcanic Eruptions, and in the work of Judith von Halle. I will not attempt to report these overviews here, as I am not in a position to offer genuine insights into the particular nature of the layers. I'll rather propose some more general thoughts about the significance of the descent for the salvation of human evolution.

The meditative symbol of the descent into Hell is purification. In giving the event our complete, reverent attention, we want to enact the purification prepared in the Crucible on Palm Sunday and throughout the entire Week. This is the day when we really need to roll up our sleeves and do the tough and dirty work. It is painful, and absolutely necessary. The path to redemption can only go through purification first:








The achievement of Good Friday was to open the possibility for man to awaken in perception, and in the fundamental interconnectedness with other beings. This is the development of the I-sense which dissolves the Luciferic blood-egoism and the Ahrimanic cult of matter. Now, on Saturday, Christ’s achievement is the Harrowing of Hell. He works through the congealed soul substance of each earthly layer, until Ahriman is put in chains in the Earth core, so that, in turn, we may begin to work through the layers of our congealed soul substance, in pursuit of the possibility of Good Friday. Since Holy Saturday in AD 33, this evolutionary task has been under our full and exclusive responsibility.

When turning attention to Christ's sacrificial descent into the earthly depths, it is important to keep in mind that the Earth is a being. As we are made of body, soul, and spirit, so is the Earth, and we don’t want to inadvertently imagine the earthly layers as the scene of a sort of geological enterprise, as if picturing a deep perforation in the earthly crust. Even more importantly, the Earth is quite literally us. This is literal, because the substances that make up the human body and the earthly body precipitated together, or in tight connection, and evolved together, as sort of communicating vessels. On the one hand, what we externalized out of our being through the eons became the kingdoms of the Earth. On the other hand, we continually take them in again, in the flow of life. The animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms are aspects of human nature that we formerly externalized, out of our own essence. While we exteriorized animals and plants during ancient planetary conditions, the mineral element (“earth”, everything that is solid and dense) was exteriorized at the beginning of the present planetary condition of the Earth. Therefore, it is only in its current incarnation that the Earth became dense, and so is the case for our human constitution as well. In the Saturn planetary condition of the Earth, we were created as fiery beings of warmth; then we grew through air (Old Sun), water (Old Moon) and now through earth, the solid element, on Earth. On this planet, we evolved from a very loose organization of the bodies, to the tight scaffolding of present-day man, which includes this rather inflexible material body. And this dense matter fallen out of union with the Spirit is the same in earthly materiality and in human materiality.

Today we are numb to the fundamental unity of the Creation and, by default, we feel to exist within a 'dissociative boundary'. However, once the drama of sensation begins to lose its grip and we begin to see more clearly how “substance is solidified sensation”, as Dennis puts it, then the communicating vessels relationship between our human corporeality, individual and collective, and the corporeality of the Earth appears in greater and greater obviousness. By the way, this is also the reason why remedies made out of the Earth kingdoms resonate so organically within our human organization and affect it with precise lawfulness. It’s because we - the Earth and us - incorporate the manifestation of the same forces, at different scales. The remedies then catalyze those forces which subtend both bodily organizations, ours and the Earth's.

So, when Christ sacrifices His divine condition to redeem the darkness of the Earth interior, this is about our soul’s dark sides, as humanity and as individuals. This compassionate endeavor - Christ dying into the Earth to experience and harrow the darkness of Luciferic and Ahrimanic entanglements - should not be read as a prodigious story to contemplate as passive spectators. Rather, it’s the turning point of evolution! What was an impossibility before has been made viable, for our salvation. The adversarial forces are strongly ingrained in the human organism, causing our incapacity to see the reality of the Spirit, and it is incumbent upon us to become conscious of how our soul life (to begin with) is continually subjugated by these forces. Hence the absolute necessity of the descent.

In this pursuit, the Christ being is at the same time our guiding star, and inexhaustible nourishment for our intention and persistence along the way. This guidance is necessary in the face of the suffering involved. At this juncture, an important truth to integrate is that any aspiration to attend to the amazing heights of the Spirit right away, leaving the question of the dark forces in the background, is a Luciferic deception that leverages an unrecognized egoism. Correspondingly, the intention to pursue the path of the new consciousness can never be motivated by merely individual considerations. To feel that our spiritual pursuits set us apart and make us rightly privileged is a mark of the old consciousness of egoism and interest. Inevitably, it leads to the fundamentalism of, “I am right and I deserve the best. They are wrong and they will pay for their mistakes”. By contrast, in the new consciousness the purpose of contributing to human evolution by caring for and with our fellow humans is at the center. It requires “to assimilate the corpses of my own wounds”, says Dennis.

And here’s the most scary and empowering character of the work that falls to us: Christ gives us direction and motivation, yet we cannot follow Him in exact footsteps, but have to create our unique path. Christ, the Lord of Karma, reinstated Karma for us, freeing our destiny from the necessity of egoism and delusion. Now our Karma is unique, and so is our potential. The task is then to form a path that is not already there. There’s no GPS, because there’s no map. And there’s no map because there’s no formed territory. It’s our task to work with thinking, feeling and will, and shape our curvature of becoming out of the potential encapsulated in the individualized seed of the Son of Man. The sign says “You are here”, and now we have to put our current quality of consciousness to work, with its given mix of clarity and dullness, and do our very best. With us, the certainty of the comforting guidance of the Sun being.

The great evolutionary value of this exercise in freedom - the forging of a path that is not already there - is that we can affect the future of humanity. Because the Earth interior is the crucible in which we begin to burn the darkness of our uncontrolled animal nature, individual and collective. This past of solidified patterns of experience is weighing there, emanating karmic constraints that dramatically pledge the future. However, this future is also infused with our freely created contributions. Here “our” is both plural and singular: as we begin to glimpse at these first-person individual possibilities, we also awaken to the mystery and paradox of the transpersonal nature of the work. One key to that is to realize that nobody is a mere spectator in the new consciousness game. To begin to know beyond the delusion of sense perception, is a doing at the same time - it's an activity. And we are not alone in this impulse. There exist possibilities to collectively imprint our moral imagination on the Earth's destiny, and to become conscious of that already is the activity that changes the future. It means joining in the unfolding.

In the language of the ordinary consciousness, these knowing movements translate as freedom, and clairvoyance, but the more we imitate the gestures of Christ and aspire to approach the sphere of the higher self as the restored Form of Christ, the more we zoom out of the ‘problem’ of freedom from maya, and the ‘problem’ of karma versus freedom, that the ordinary consciousness wrestles with. Then, the paradox between individual and collective action loses its tension and we begin to see the possibility that the more individualized we become, the more transpersonal our activity becomes, as well. Similarly, we begin to understand that the more we integrate the lawfulness of karma and destiny, the more we value the moral impulses that can ‘change the future’. Probably, an easier way to say it is that, just like certain effects of Resurrection occurred before it, in linear time, as helpful prefigurations, so we have to maintain a fluid understanding of time when approaching the mystery of Holy Week, and in general, keeping in mind that ‘predetermined’ is a concept of the sense-based mind. As Steiner often said, in the new consciousness, we have to be ready to evolve all our concepts. In his characteristic way, Dennis puts the question of affecting the world karma in these terms:

Because how you are experiencing in your flesh what is happening in the creation is changing the creation. This is the photon slit experiment in physics: how my consciousness interacts with the photons in the way in which the world is created. Or is the created world a done deal and I’m just flying around on a barren rock? Even though it’s a scientific question, it’s also a theological question.

Hopefully these considerations help work with the concrete meaning of purification. Once we feel more familiar with the meaning, the symbol can be returned to its process:







On Saturday morning, the proposed exercise with the Tree of Good and Evil is one that takes us at the core of the drama of sensation. This time, the question we want to form should connect two previously considered parts of the picture.

Dennis says: “The key to the Rosicrucian work and the alchemical work is to learn how to use your sensations as a video rather than a snapshot. I have to frame the snapshots in a sequence, in order to free them up from the corpus of my conditional belief that this is what this is. So the forming of an image and then connecting that to another image, and then connecting that to another image, in my own freedom is the work of rectifying errors based on past memories. We call it thinking. But because we’re trained the way we are, our thinking always ends up in a thought that becomes another corpse. So the method is to give yourself pictures that you sequence, form a question, and then if you really want to energize it, think the sequence of the pictures backwards. Then you’ll see what was there before you formed the question. Because before you formed the question about the sensation, there was already a predilection for the answer, and you have to find out what that is, because that goes back to when you were one year old.”

In other words, the exercise is to form linking questions, “video questions rather than snapshots. These questions are much deeper because we’re exploring the field of the whole thing, rather than individual units.”


PS: "Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

[Federica]

Easter Sunday

The symbol for this day is sublimation:





On Easter Sunday, the entire sequence of Easter events is sublimated in Resurrection. As Steiner says, Resurrection is arduous to grasp from the general perspective of our perishable physical body and brain. This body is our default means to gain consciousness of our entire soul life of thinking, feeling and will, reflected through the brain. However, because this body is by default unable to draw on the life-giving, balancing forces of the original Phantom, it makes our capacity to know sense-bound and stiff, mediated as it is by a cerebral lens trapped in a progressive death process, bound to perceive the mere material corpses of spiritual processes. If we do nothing, that’s the situation. Then, the understanding of Resurrection is either prevented by a materialistic outlook, or warped by blind belief, in an inward capitulation and alignment with a codified belief system - the “sign here” consciousness, as Dennis calls it.

In Steiner’s words, as a consequence of the Fall, “human understanding, the human intellect, has become so thin, so threadbare, that it cannot take in the great processes of cosmic evolution. It looks at them as miracles, or says it cannot comprehend them.”. That's the defective Phantom we have inherited from Adam. However, the real physical body, the Phantom as originally intended by its formgivers, was not meant to experience death - the slow, progressive bodily deterioration leading to complete overwhelm by the forces of destruction. Since the original Phantom is not a sense-perceptible body, in its proper functioning it shouldn’t fall into matter in this way.

Our life in the fallenness of matter - our common physical life and its earthly surroundings - can be understood as the result of an imbalanced interaction of forces. At this junction in particular, an alchemical approach can help develop a living understanding of the Cosmic proportions of the Resurrection event, and how it reframes Earth evolution, starting from our material existence and its faithful counterpart in the material existence of the Earth. Alchemically, the symbol of this imbalance of forces that opens the way to material existence is the forming of ash. Ash, as residue, is evidence of a process that has become a corpse. In a sense, our material body as a whole is such an evidence.

As previously mentioned, a sense-perceptible substance is the stagnation - the coming to rest - of a spiritual process or force. The alchemist used to name three main types of process/substance, corresponding to natural as well as psychic dynamics. Firstly, the salt process, which is a crystallization process. Precipitation of sea salt out of a solution is an example of that. In a larger sense, any piece of solid earth (one of the four elements) can be considered a salt, directly or indirectly resulting from crystallization. Secondly, there is dissolution, a fluid process in which salt is transformed in the direction of levity, with no residues. In the language of the alchemists, this is a mercurial process. For example, when we nourish our body by eating food (salt) we digest (fluidic activity) and completely dissolve the salt. This process in itself produces no ash: our body of fluids (etheric body) facilitates the solution, similar to water that dissolves salt in nature. Its results are taken into the etheric body, which lives in the fluids of the physical body, as growth forces, with no ash. Hence we take the earthly foodstuff into fluid state, one level up toward levity, so to say. From there, we use those forces to ‘make salt again’, in our etheric body. We grow, when young. As adults, tissue growth is minimal and we mostly use those forces to think. We crystallize them as thoughts (then we become aware of the related outputs in the physical brain). For the alchemist, these 'etheric crystals' are the inward realization of cosmic thoughts (archetypal ideas) just as natural crystals are the outward manifestation of cosmic thoughts. We humans, as well as the Earth, reflect those archetypes through our interconnected bodily organizations.

Thirdly, there is combustion - named sulfur process. In nature, this is the burning of any piece of earth element. In combustion, however, not everything is lifted back into levity form by the flames. The reciprocity of the salt process is not there. Instead an ash is formed. In the human microcosm, combustion is for example what we do in our body after the fluids have processed the intake of food. Breath - the air element - comes into the picture, and we begin to burn calories to produce effort and movement. This is the work of the astral body and the ego organization, and the result is bodily will. In our human experience, sensation is also ash. In a way, sense perception is another form of digestion, taking in the outer world. In the combustion of our sense life, meaning (the archetypal idea) is separated from sensation (the manifestation of that meaning). The former, imperceptible, returns to the spiritual world like flames, while the latter falls out as a separate ash, as a sensation in our consciousness. To the extent that we don't consciously recognize the unity of the process, we experience the “drama of perception”. Then our fallen sensations, as well as our material body that performs them, are the ash. The drama is that, when the ashes are not seen and treated, they accumulate. And the more they accumulate, the more anachronistic and dramatic our free-falling condition becomes.

This close parallel between phenomena of the human organization and earthly phenomena is at the core of a true monistic understanding of reality, be it through alchemy or otherwise. As Steiner says, the alchemist looks at salt formation in nature with reverence, deeply knowing that a crystal - be it a mineral crystal of the Earth or an etheric crystal in man - is an image of cosmic intelligence (unless it becomes separated and flattened in the brain). And this is what ‘thinking’ really means to the alchemist: to manifest cosmic intelligence. Similarly, in combustion, the alchemist sees the flames of purification and the fire of sacrifice, and this is the very concrete meaning of ‘will’ (unless the soul gives it away for the satisfaction of lower will impulses). And the mercurial, dissolving force is the mediator between Salt and Sulfur - crystallization and combustion. Mercury unites Salt and Sulphur, it keeps them flowing into one another, because in the ash falling out of combustion, a salt is hidden. This salt can in turn be dissolved and made imponderable again - supersensible, process-like. The alchemist sees in these dissolving forces of Mercury the real transformer, and an expression of love - be it divine Love or simply nutrition and growth potential within the defective physical body of man.

In terms of our fallen sensations, we need the dissolving love of Mercury to begin synthesizing and sublimating, from the ashes of combustion to progressive fluidic dissolving, to the dealbation of higher cognition (another parallel process that we can carry out in the laboratory and in our cognition alike). But nothing happens unless we initiate the process, unless we initiate ourselves. This return, this possibility of reversing the path of involution, is precisely what the deeds of Christ Jesus make possible. Christ's Resurrection Body is here now, as a gift and a template, to enable us to resurrect our fallen body in turn.

It came to pass that one man, who was the bearer of the Christ, had gone through such a death that after three days the specifically mortal part of the physical body had to disappear, and out of the grave there rose the body which is the force-bearer of the physical, material parts. The body that was really intended for man by the Rulers of Saturn, Sun, and Moon - the pure Phantom of the physical body with all the attributes of the physical body - this is what rose out of the grave.

From Jesus to Christ - GA 131 VII

Rudolf Steiner Archive

Everything had been prepared in order for the Phantom of Jesus not to be affected by the ash element, as it is the case in every human body of Adam, under Luciferic rule. The special origin of His first-incarnating I-being preserved Him from direct Luciferic influences in childhood. Then, at the Baptism, even the indirect effects of the ash element in the material body were dissolved. Steiner says:

The human Phantom, according to its intended development through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, should not have been attracted to the ashy constituents but only to the dissolving salt constituents, so that it would have taken the path of volatilisation insofar as the salt constituents dissolved. In an occult sense one can say that it would have dissolved and passed over, not into the earth but into the volatile constituents. The remarkable fact is that with the Baptism in Jordan and the entry of the Christ Individuality into the body of the Nathan Jesus, all connection of the Phantom with the ashy constituents was wiped out; only the connection with the salt constituents remained.

From Jesus to Christ - GA 131 VIII

Rudolf Steiner Archive

Now the expression ‘You are the salt of the earth’ acquires a new light. Through the restored perfection of the Phantom, we are enabled to experience a perfectly reciprocating salt process: everything charred and fallen in our experience can be worked out, crystallized again, dealbated, and lifted back into unity with its archetypal meaning. It means that all dead residues, all ashes can be progressively purified and sublimated. In Dennis’ words:

The salt of the Phantom comes out of the ash of the unredeemed, fallen physical body, and that is a seed at the center of the Earth. (...) The Phantom of the physical body in the Earth has no ash. It’s just pure salt, meaning it can go into solution without any corpse. That’s Resurrection. (...) It’s like putting a grain of salt in a supersaturated solution of salt and suddenly the whole thing crystallizes. And what it will crystallize into is the new Sun.

Another thing we can figure is why nothing is found in the grave after three days (39 hours, to be precise). The material body of Jesus, freed from the ashy element, dissolves fast. What resurrects is His real physical body, the perfect Phantom. This is different from the perceptible material form exposed on Good Friday, which is why Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Him. The body of flesh was necessary, though, for Christ to experience and redeem that which terrifies us to the highest degree: physical death. The same fear of losing oneself at death expressed in the Greek saying: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shades” still plagues us today. But the perfect Phantom, resurrected through the Earth from the ashes of the human material body, is here with us now, to show us that it is imperishable. The ancient Greeks didn't have this fortune!

Just like our Luciferic (fallen) physical body is genealogically linked to the perishable body of Adam, so our restored form-body in potential (the Phantom) is genealogically attached to the Resurrection Body of Christ. This is spiritual genealogy. Every cell is traceable to the ‘original cell’ from which it has originated by demultiplication, and in the same way our individualized Phantoms are in the lineage of the Resurrection Body of Christ, generated by it. As Steiner puts it, “the Phantom which rose from the grave communicates itself to those who make themselves fitted for it.” By endowing us with a new supersensible member, Christ restored the lost principles of human evolution: the possibility for man to give birth to the higher self, to evolve Love on Earth, and to bring forth its earthly gains into the next incarnation. This restoration means indeed that man is enabled to do what was impossible before: not only to know the unity of existence during incarnated life, but also to actively work in between incarnations, evolving through the sphere of the planets, to prepare the earthly life to come. The light of Christ's sacrificial love has put the adversaries in chains to liberate us from their forces, in incarnated as well as excarnated life - only if we create in ourselves the longing and the resolve that alone can transform these possibilities into a reality.

As Dennis means, organized religion says: “He did it, so you don’t have to. These are the books, just sign on the line, and you will be saved”. By contrast, the real, the crucial message of Resurrection is: “He did it, and we now have a template of the work we need to do”. The book of the New Mysteries is not written, because we are the authors. The book of the New Mysteries is about our life in becoming.



The sublimation symbol reversed:




PS: "Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

[Federica]

Raffaello, Resurrection, ca 1502


Raffaellino del Garbo, Resurrection, ca 1505