Untitled II

I find myself expecting the spirit to produce experiences that are so noticeable — those that involve miraculous visions, white lights, or etheric forms—but soon face the realization that the spirit is also in the subtle advancements, which, if one is not ready, will float by as if they never occurred. The spirit, one learns, is not like a man who can be manipulated, but must be experienced anew each time. One cannot recreate the steps or the path that first brought the soul to partake of that spiritual possession one longs for.

 

In hindsight, sure, there are moments when the graces from heaven have announced themselves quite loudly, but the real precious treasure is in the unfolding, in the educational variety of spiritual experience. It is a grace to grow older and to witness a renewal that can happen when one’s orientation to the spiritual is no longer a waiting game, but becomes a conscious intention to pursue its treasures. As I write this, I realize it cannot be one or the other that elevates me above the noise, but that my path forward must be blended so that the torment can be quieted —that emptiness that can exist for one who lives very idealistically, an individual who finds the priceless truth that what illumines the soul comes from a tangible sphere of spirit and yet may not quite know where to begin to bring this epiphany into one’s life in a pragmatic sense.

 

To truly grasp something as complex as the parousia is not possible in one life. There is something almost sinful in the supplying of labels that we use to better understand something such as Christ and His work, or even ourselves for that matter, when we limit them, in short, in some pedantic way. Christ is not a mere man from Nazareth, or simply a God, a Master, or whatever title, but He transcends all of these.

 

I still cringe when I see my younger self being so confident in how I assumed the God of the Bible or the spirit works in others. Oh, How much I didn’t know, didn’t feel, didn’t will into conscious awareness in order to redeem life’s many kinds of knowledge. But this awareness of that childish tongue now speaks to something else: it also speaks to how much one can change. For it isn’t the sin—the fire of the tongue—that can’t be forgiven; it is the refusal to open one’s heart toward the reality of continual revelation.

 

Christ told His innermost circle that there are things that you cannot bear at this point in your evolution. I don’t always know what I can or can’t handle, and if I had more than just a lamp unto my feet, I would surely become so ineffective, not being able to bear the truth of karma and how it would work itself out in my remaining years. For the mystery of karma is not only in what awaits me, but in what I have prepared – or rather, am preparing myself – to receive, putting oil in my lamp, — how one idea sits in one’s heart and causes the most convicting experience, awakening a divine zealousness, while another hears these same words and is left as they were before.

 

There are still mysteries to be uncovered within Christendom, if one can find Christendom as it is, perhaps not as they had imagined it. It is outgrowing its infancy.

 

How about within you?

“After the time of testing had set before me stern battles of the soul, I had to submerge myself in Christianity and in the world in which the spiritual speaks thereof. … What is achieved of the knowledge of spirit in Christianity as Mystical Fact is brought directly out of the spiritual world. … About the turn of the century the germ unfolded more and more. Before this turn of the century came this testing of the soul here described. The evolution of my soul rested upon the fact that I stood before the mystery of Golgotha in most inward, earnest joy of knowledge.”

“At 4.30 A.M. I saw something of which I had no idea at all previously. In the room where I was praying I saw a great light. I thought the place was on fire. I looked round, but could find nothing….

“Then the thought came to me that this might be an answer that God had sent me. Then as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had such an appearance of glory and love….

“If it had been some Hindu incarnation I would have prostrated myself before it. But it was the Lord Jesus Christ whom I had been insulting a few days before. I felt that a vision like this could not come out of my own imagination…

“I heard a voice saying in Hindustani, ‘How long will you persecute me? I have come to save you; you were praying to know the right way. Why do you not take it?’

“The thought then came to me, ‘Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.’

“So I fell at His feet and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get anywhere else. This is the joy I was wishing to get. This was heaven itself.

“When I got up, the vision had all disappeared; but although the vision disappeared the Peace and Joy have remained with me ever since.”

“Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe…

“It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.

“Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, ‘So this is the God of the preachers!’”

“Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines…

I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer.”

“It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me…

“In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God.”

“I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them.”

“Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.”

“I had never read any of the mystics, because I have never felt called to read them.”…God mercifully prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it would be evident to me that I had not fabricated this absolutely unexpected contact.”

—Simone Weil, describing her 1938 encounter with Christ – The poem is George Herbert’s “Love (III)” (1633)

“ I grew up in a non-anthroposophical family and I was told nothing about anthroposophy. I had a very active inner life. As long ago as I can remember I had a relationship to what we call the spiritual world. “Spiritual world” can mean anything, for one can understand almost anything by it. In my case it was not in a confessional religious way, but an experience a person can have with super-sensible worlds, and that’s something that I already experienced strongly as a child. Therefore, I asked myself very early about the world and about human beings in that context. I also wondered why so few people discussed the reality of the spiritual world. That was an important question for me as a child: Why is it a taboo?

And until I was 25 years old I found no one with whom I could exchange ideas about it. That’s why my encounter with Rudolf Steiner was so important for me and decisive for my path in life, because there I found assertions about things that I had experienced myself. It was like being reborn, and I was thankful to find out that there was a Society that concerned itself with these things. There is not only one who was bold enough to speak about them, but many people who come together to cultivate what played no external role during my childhood.

And the stigmata and the related experiences, that is something else. But the main thing, what I told you about this morning, namely the spiritual research, that has nothing to do with the stigmata. I have not become a different person because of the stigmata, but what has come about through this event are factual perceptions of events which have occurred historically, like in a chronicle. That was new, and had special meaning for me, because these perceptions of historical events during the beginning of the Christian era [Zeitenwende] provided the impulse to spiritual-scientifically investigate the connections behind these historical facts. You will be doing me a great favor if you remember that. Because people often see “only” the stigmata and the perceptions during the Christian era change, but not my spiritual scientific work and task. Do you understand what I mean?

But to be really wise on his own, like a god, an angel-hierarchy, that is to bring forth wisdom, that is something else, which human beings must still work on, just as the angels had to work on it. At present man participates passively in the wisdom of others, of higher beings, in sleep, and is wise through them. But he must become wise through a gradual awakening of consciousness in the spiritual world. He can orient himself on the angels for this development.”