Elementor #1818 – A Science of the Spirit

Evolūtiō Ecclesiae

The Inspiration for IA

To the eleven,

All of us here have not only heard of the movement that began in the 1930s, that of Alcoholics Anonymous, but we have all, in some form, fashioned this organization’s living impulses into life’s actualities. Some of you may know of its original name that was desired to title its foundational book, “The Way Out,” and most here, I suspect, can see quite clearly how it fits particularly well, for it gave a newfound freedom to those of you suffering from the hideous nature of alcoholism and similar conditions of body, soul, and spirit. You have found in it a spiritual solution to the vicious cycle of addiction and, in one way or another, have come to know not only a freedom from the drink or drug, but a freedom to live whole and purposeful lives.

The decade that saw this fellowship rise was a very special time, especially if one is acquainted with the works of Rudolf Steiner—the founder of a spiritual path that has given your brother a new way to know himself and the world he lives in. We have all learned that, at times, we must silence aspects of our egos and let a higher power, something that possesses more wisdom than we do, guide us. In likeness to that principle, I have entrusted myself to another who has gone before me, illuminating piece by piece things that perhaps I can’t quite reach on my own. I am asking each of you to take the spiritual principle that sits beneath those first three steps—that of an open and willing mind—and to consider what is written here as my feeble attempt to share with you some things that have made a deep impression on me through pursuing this path of knowledge known as Anthroposophy. I am, with all sincerity, hopeful that you might join me in what is, in my opinion, a true and righteous path toward bringing heaven to earth.

Steiner gave this decade a heightened significance for its overall importance to the coming point in which we now find ourselves, and have since the turn of the 20th century—a time in which there was breaking in upon the earth and within the souls of men the substance of what has been termed the return of Christ. Yes, it may seem strange to begin with what many of you already sense as a point of division, some New Age bend or some intellectual distinction in the core tenets of Christian thought. So again, I ask that we have an open mind to gain perhaps a wider perspective on how the ideas we carry so inherently influence our well-being and effectiveness. I think if we can join together in concretely attempting to win these richer perspectives of many of the sacred things which we know in part, then in time we can bring forth what may be hidden to ordinary observation. Remember, then, how the Lord told His inner circle that He had much more for them to process, but at the time they were not ready. For myself, what I have conceived in AA’s spiritual way of life, or in the understanding and experience of my Christian faith, has taken on a more developed form, and I have come to know that the limit to one’s knowledge and its fruits lies within—for the soul can’t bear something it has not been made sensitive to perceive.

Steiner described that in and around this time in history, men and women would begin to have experiences with Christ as Paul did on the road to Damascus. The event that not only supplied him with a new name, but was able to make Paul into a completely new creature, was to happen to more and more of Christ’s beloved in exactly the time in which we are all living. For what he experienced was premature for the time in which he lived as he says he was born out of due time. A precursor of sorts to what I truly believe each of us here can begin to witness more and more as our lives continue – the majestic content – the actual spiritual activity of the paroisia. And forgive me for what I am about to encourage if it indeed does come off as blasphemous—but one must realize that we each bear a responsibility for hastening this return– for bringing about it in one’s heart without it being a mere subjective or vague mystical endeavor. My hope is that we will be able to have this radical statement, in time, come to fulfillment as an actual occurrence within our hearts and minds—come to understand how Christ has ever been knocking at our own doors of soul, doors that are now thinning, just waiting for our striving to push them open.

I would like you to take another look, but with more inner attention, at Bill’s spiritual experience that occurred in 1934 at Towns Hospital. Try to bring before your mind’s eye an image of this Christ coming on the clouds of glory or whatever image comes to mind when you imagine the event that will be unmistakable when it happens like lightning from east to west that all eyes will see. This time however, try to soften its physical spatial form and remove its typical eshalogical coloring , and instead imagine what might happen within the soul of someone like Bill who had, even for a moment, connected more fully with this sphere of influence permeated by the living presence of Christ that protrudes into man’s inner life. Ask yourself again whom, Bill may have encountered and think again of where heaven exists, where Christ is seated in power. Is the chasm we thought that bars one from entering a higher spiritual sphere of activity while someone remains on this side of life in reality just a the veil that lies within due to organs of soul that are too weak to perceive the hidden workings of spirit?

In the A.A. conference-approved book Pass It On (p. 121), Bill Wilson recounts his spiritual experience at Towns Hospital in December 1934:

“Suddenly my room was filled with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. . . . Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, ‘You are a free man.’ . . . ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality, the God of the preachers.’”

I cannot help but see a resemblance to the experience of Paul with what occurred in Bill in the experience that propelled him, in his own words, into the “fourth dimension.” From the moment this encounter took place, he was no longer the same—not merely in relation to his alcoholism, but in the entire disposition of his inner life. Something had broken through that altered the direction of his thinking, feeling, and willing, and eventually released a creative activity that was directed toward the healing of others. Wilson seems to be one of these chosen vessels to experience this return that Steiner said would be received like a grace from above, a grace that allows one to gain access to the spheres of spiritual influence. He was one of many human beings who would begin to experience Christ in ways that could bring healing, – new faculties of soul would form to bring abilities to perceive something ordinarily veiled behind sense perception.

Scripture tells us that after the Damascus experience something “like scales” fell from Pauls eyes. We may pass over this as merely a poetic way of saying that Paul suddenly understood something he had previously failed to understand. But Steiner gives this image a deeper esoteric significance. He describes what occurs as the etheric or life body is loosened from the physical body, he speaks of the panorama of one’s earthly life becoming visible because the bearer of memory is no longer constrained in the ordinary way by the physical organism. Something is cast off from the soul, almost like a second corpse or husk, this is what is intended on a deeper level when the biblical expression of scales falling from the eyes is used.. Paul did not simply acquire a new opinion of the relation to himself and the Christ – how one might gain knowledge in today’s society through intellectual reflection. But, rather for a moment, the ordinary relationship between his soul and bodily organization was altered sufficiently for him to perceive what had previously remained concealed from him. Steiner goes even further saying that through the Damascus event Paul became clairvoyant and was thereby able to behold Christ in the spiritual aura of the earth. The man who arose from that experience was therefore not simply Saul with a corrected theology or new principles to live by but Something of the former Saul had, in a very real sense fallen away

Do we perhaps see this in Bill’s white light experience. I do not mean it as just a sudden profound psychic change . But something closer to what Steiner brings forth , the possibility that in certain exceptional spiritual experiences the ordinary sheath through which we experience ourselves and the world is temporarily loosened, allowing the forces and impulses from that aura of the earth inhabited by the Christ to flow into man’s etheric body the one that shapes man’s inner life of soul, all that he thinks feel and wills. One’s former life stands apart almost as something completed—a husk, a corpse, something that one can recognize as having belonged to oneself without any longer being entirely bound to it. This is also the experience of initiation – the process by which all genuine higher knowledge arose- by being brought to consciousness through the cultivation of similar conditions of this loosening of the soul whereby the initiate leaves the body and brings back revelations from what is concealed behind physical reality.

The alcoholic Bill who entered Towns Hospital did not simply emerge with a stronger resolution to stop drinking. What appeared was not merely abstinence, but a new orientation of soul. The experience demanded expression as it often does when one’s inner life of thought and feeling even deeper stimulations of will are heightened to live in a creative world that is the architect of life itself. And I must say this resemblance to Paul that I am bringing to light is not because I wish to place Bill on the same spiritual level as Paul, but because of the form taken by mostly by its fruits. Neither encounter ends with the individual. Saul becomes Paul, and the one who had persecuted the followers of Christ becomes one of the great bearers of the Christian impulse into the world. Bill, likewise, carries an impulse that could not remain his own. His metamorphosis becomes bound up with the healing of others..

Perhaps it is precisely the long-standing expectation of the Parousia as a literal, physical return that has made this more inward reality so difficult to recognize and has kept us from seeing the manner in which the return may already be taking place. This expectation has created difficulties from the earliest days of Christianity. For some coming to grasp this event from other angles than traditional interpretations and for it to find a fuller expression within one’s soul will require long preparation, but we must become ready to receive even what at first may seem small. The spiritual world is not a drug. It does not simply overwhelm us with an experience because we desire one. There must be endurance; one must learn to wait. I know that I am surely still lacking in this myself, particularly when certain defects of mine become so horribly apparent—premature judgment being one of them. Through it I can place a direct obstacle before another person, especially when I become imbued with a certain stubbornness in what I think I know. Perhaps, then, for some, the beginning is only a tasting—some novel inner dialogue, something that speaks within that was not heard before. Even this may be the beginning of something greater: the Christ gradually leading the awakening soul toward what lies beyond ordinary perception.

Bill Wilson,enjoyed firsthand experience of this return of Christ that anthroposophical spiritual science points to. I believe we find its fruits in the becoming of his words, as though they were gifts born from this personal spiritual experience, one that would show in very definite form through his writing . He possessed an ability to shape his words with the appropriate coloring and force that would impact so many because his inner life had been permeated by a wisdom from a higher world. He even admitted that it wasn’t he who wrote many of the words that you have come to know. He was keenly able to set forth a certain tone in his literature, unleashing a language that could penetrate to a common point in his readers, one that would ring true in the souls of those who suffered as he did.

I think you can imagine how it would be if you had never encountered his writings. You would certainly be at a loss to grasp anything near a concrete understanding of your condition. You would grope around in the dark, so to speak, if there were not his words to give shape to what you yourself had lived through. And in this spiritual experience of an educational variety, a kind of magic resulted: you were able to create a new life by learning to behold the past.

Just as it was with Bill, who gave us an inspiration from beyond the merely physical for salvation of a certain kind, I myself have again trusted another gifted individual to bring even greater clarity to what we all desire—that impulse of divinity that must become conscious within our day-to-day lives, or else we perish.

An inspiration has stirred in me to desire something that might allow those like yourselves, who have found a certain wholeness through Christian practice or through the 12-step program of action, to perhaps find life again in a fuller capacity through a path that Spiritual Science calls enlightenment leading to initiation. It is a path that can take further what is already contained in Steps 6, 7, and 11—those steps that pivot so much around one’s inner life and the art of cultivating one’s qualities of soul—and thereby bring one’s spiritual development to a still deeper place.

For we know that this work upon oneself can turn sour, become rigid, dormant of its former vigor. Practices that once opened something within us can become habitual; words that once carried life can be repeated without awakening the same inner movement. What may be needed, then, is a more conscious training of the inner life, one capable of developing that presence of mind through which we become increasingly aware of the higher processes involved in our transformation. We make ourselves more ready for that Power from on high to work upon what we have been unable to remove by our own strength—our baggage, our hang-ups, those defects of character that continue to interfere with a life attempting to mount the wings of spirit.

A program, I assure you, that would sprout from a source of proven wisdom. Just as AA did not come to be without the impulses of religious thought that preceded it, so too do all the spiritual forms we inherit have roots in earlier streams of development—for even what we traditionally call Christian did not appear at the incarnation or Pentecost, but has roots that take us much further into the past than one usually asserts. It is a path that does not wish to make a monopoly of what can be called the pursuit of the higher wisdom of man and the cosmos. It does not want to, nor can it, be summed up under a particular outward label, for this would surely hinder some from coming to this Spiritual Science, as it is sometimes called. Its labels are, however, still there in histories and recorded scholarship under various names, such as esoteric or occult science, a secret doctrine, Rosicrucian Theosophy, or Anthroposophy.

These movements, societies or bodies of wisdom all attempt to deepen science and the humanities, but this work must also rise above any particular body of knowledge or religious confession if it is to heal social fractures and come to expression in the actual doing of life. So what better way, in my opinion, than to take those impulses from AA’s society that have shown it capable of breeding an honest, open, and willing fellowship—one that becomes a sustaining force of adhesion—and bring this mode of living into the assimilation of a higher wisdom, giving it a social outlet for those committed to pursuing this particular training of soul.

This path, I believe, can transform Steps 6, 7, and 11 into a much fuller reality. For we have seen with our own eyes that these steps, especially 6 and 7, remain elusive to grasp in both an intellectual and pragmatic sense. We know, however, that they are not to be handled superficially, because their trials and subsequent fruits are what can turn boys into men. Yet one might work with these steps for years and still fail to find within them a concrete path by which further enlightenment and transformation of character can consciously be pursued. What one grasps can remain somewhat nebulous. How does one actually become ready? How does one cultivate the humility and teachability through which the soul becomes capable of being molded by something higher?

One would be at a loss to find anything worked out to this degree of specificity in the few sections the Big Book supplies for these steps. We must remember the more immediate scope of what Bill was attempting to address, and the urgency with which he was trying to meet common sufferers where they were—often at a point of incomprehensible moral and physical deterioration. Even when we open these steps further through the Twelve and Twelve, I feel there remains an absence of anything resembling a developed schooling of the soul that a person can consciously take up and gradually make his own. Much of the path forward still hinges upon developing a religious feeling toward something that cannot yet be fully known. This can certainly compel men further in their development, but for others it simply will not do to remain indefinitely within a faith that waits patiently for God to work upon the soul without also asking how the soul itself may become a more conscious participant in that work.

Bill leaves these steps largely in their ideal sense: something toward which we continually move—progress, not perfection. This should not be taken as a criticism of his treatment of them, for Steps 6 and 7 seem almost by their nature to resist being grasped and worked through as concretely as many of the others. Nor was it his primary purpose at the time to bring to light the whole field of inner schooling that belongs to what is truly a lifelong activity. But here we can see that there is room to take up what remains unfinished.

For there is always new revelation for new periods of time, new conditions of life continually demand a re-forming and deepening of human knowledge. Men and women today are, in some respects, capable of taking in knowledge of a spiritual kind differently than they were even a century ago. The loftier questions can no longer simply be surrendered to faith alone. There is a growing need for spiritual realities to become objects of knowledge, approached with something of the seriousness and discipline with which material science approaches the physical world. What once may have been sufficient as inherited faith will not satisfy every human being in an age whose consciousness is continually changing. Failure to meet this change creates dissatisfaction within the soul.

The history of recovery itself offers windows into this striving that I was moving towards earlier. Finding the effects of Christ’s power from his return being perceptible , specifically an impulse that seeks to break down the barriers between others. The social isolation that I see being such a sore spot in my life to such a great degree. One may have far reaching ideals that seek to serve others but the times in which we live makes stepping into this mode of selflessness not a simple task. I need others in this striving or it seems to be too much of just a pastime. It is difficult to attain an accurate self appraisal without others who are also growing along similar lines. For we have instilled in us that idea that we must give freely of what was given to us.The Washingtonian movement of the nineteenth century joined abstinence with fellowship, testimony, and the helping of one sufferer by another. Earlier still, the spiritual renewal surrounding Handsome Lake among the Haudenosaunee arose out of visionary experience and addressed alcohol as one of the forces devastating individual and communal life. These movements belong to different cultural streams, and I do not mean to suggest that they consciously knew anything of what Steiner would later describe. They do, however, show how long humanity had been reaching toward forms in which spiritual renewal, moral transformation, and communal healing could become lived realities. Steiner placed the end of Kali Yuga, the dark age, in 1899. In his account, the threshold between the physical and spiritual worlds would begin to grow thinner, opening the possibility of the etheric return of Christ we have been speaking of. Against this background, something further becomes interesting: the Oxford Group, from which AA would receive many of its practical spiritual impulses, placed its emphasis on changed lives rather than the preaching of theological dogma. Then AA stripped much of this still further of denominational requirements and placed spiritual experience within reach of people who might otherwise have rejected the religious vessel in which it had previously been carried. We see the Christ impulse continually breaking through cultural taboos, finding new forms where the old wineskins can no longer contain it.

It may at first seem difficult to entertain the thought that movements such as these could bear some relationship to what Anthroposophy describes as the return of Christ. From an Anthroposophical perspective, the return of Christ does not need to appear as the spectacular outward event that centuries of expectation have imagined. Its beginnings could therefore easily be overlooked, precisely because its effects are first to be experienced within human souls. These belong to the earthly effects of the Parousia itself—the return of Christ into a sphere in which human beings can increasingly encounter Him and come under His influence.

What I am asking, then, is whether Bill’s experience, and some of the spiritual movements arising with particular force around this period, can be understood as manifestations of this new reality: human souls responding, often without consciously knowing its source, to the increasingly perceptible presence of Christ and carrying its effects outward into social life. At first, this may sound like an abstract claim about a new “Christ consciousness.” Anthroposophy gives it more definite content through its descriptions of the evolution of human consciousness. It asks us to consider how our perception of ourselves and the cosmos has changed, and how even people living before these movements related differently to the spiritual world. What had once remained behind the appearance of physical reality might, in some cases, begin to enter human awareness more naturally.

This becomes especially interesting when we consider alcohol. I do not believe we should regard the temperance movements or even Prohibition simply as conscious manifestations of this spiritual event. Yet the enormous struggle with alcohol that came to public expression during those decades points toward something that deserves deeper consideration. Alcohol affects the very capacities through which self-consciousness, judgment, and freedom must increasingly develop. What society attempted to accomplish outwardly through Prohibition, however unsuccessfully, recovery would eventually have to accomplish inwardly through freely undertaken transformation. The law could remove the bottle from the hand; it could not remove the thirst from the soul. AA represents something far more significant than abstinence.

Anthroposophy also places alcohol within a longer history of human consciousness. In Steiner’s account, it once played a part in drawing humanity more fully into earthly life, even as it helped dim an older awareness of spiritual existence and of life beyond the body. To overcome alcohol now may therefore mean more than winning a private battle. It may be one part of learning to live consciously and freely in a renewed relationship to the spiritual world. This brings me back to Christ’s words to his disciples: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” Perhaps some knowledge had to wait until human beings had developed the capacity to receive it.

Other literature and spiritual paths have explored these same inner territories, developing exercises and practices that may help create the conditions for genuine transformation. There are many ways to approach a modern initiation, but only so much time, for the days are evil. A science of the spirit offers a way to understand how the faculties of the soul—thinking, feeling, and willing—might become more than they presently are.

So let’s return to what I mean by a schooling of the soul, where we can become, in ever-increasing measure, a son of man through the development of what may be called moral imagination. We gradually learn to see more through the eyes of spirit and to perceive the spiritual contours shaping both ourselves and the world we encounter. To become a son of man in this sense, patterned increasingly after the likeness of our Lord, is more than meeting an outward moral standard. It is to become capable of bringing what is spiritual into conscious human life.

Step Six takes on new depth when I bring the six basic exercises into it. They offer a way to take hold more consciously of thinking, feeling, and willing, and perhaps to understand what it means to be made meek in the truest sense.

Control of Thought — Thinking
Control of Will — Willing
Equanimity — Feeling
Positivity
Open-Mindedness — Unprejudiced Receptivity
Harmony — Bringing the Five Exercises Together

Step Seven, too, becomes something new when I try to bring the seven conditions into my inner life. Asking for grace begins to change as the soul grows quiet enough to hear the voice of God within. I do not mean an outward display of piety or morality in the conventional sense. I mean that the life of the soul must gradually become still, so that its ingrained passions, desires, joys, and sorrows no longer command all of its attention. There, as the soul is quieted and nailed to his cross, asking becomes part of a new relationship with God. The seven conditions are:

Pay attention to bodily and spiritual health
Feel yourself as a member of the whole of life
Recognize that thoughts and feelings have significance for the world
Recognize that the true being of the human being lies within, not in the exterior
Remain steadfast in carrying out a resolution
Develop gratitude for everything that comes to meet you
Bring all six conditions together into a unified way of life

Step Eleven I believe can then take on a deeper significance, especially for so many who still cannot quite find their way in meditation. Meditation can become more than an attempt to quiet the mind or wait upon God; it can become a conscious schooling through which the inner life is prepared to receive something higher. Through such practice, thinking, feeling, and willing gradually become more ordered, more sensitive to higher realities – creating the conditions through which the spirit can begin to express itself within us. Step Eleven then prepares, maintains and advances the ongoing inner work of Steps Six and Seven.

I envision a fellowship growing up around us, so that no one is left isolated on this path toward a modern initiation. It may not be written in the stars that we will be granted an encounter with the spiritual world like Bill or Paul. Still, we can cultivate an attitude of soul that allows us to attempt to live toward that possibility, however lofty it may seem. I will return to initiation later. Such a fellowship could help us discover and put into practice the esoteric impulses of the spirit through an anonymous movement similar to AA. In the company of others, we may be less likely to become caught up in the powerful impulses of a freed ego and the chaos that can follow.

But here I must add a disclaimer and point toward a snare that I can sense might become an issue: dependence upon others for things that one must ultimately come to on one’s own. There is an apparent tension here, for the fellowship is needed so that one does not have to walk this path in isolation, and yet the fellowship cannot walk the path for anyone. It can provide support and protection against some of the dangers that arise along the way, but the inner work itself must remain one’s own.

This path must also be a personal one, not because it is taken up for selfish reasons, but because the work must begin in one’s own conscious freedom and in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. No society or teacher can manufacture that freedom for another person. One must come to recognize truth freely and experience it for oneself. And if one hopes to work in love toward the world—even toward one’s enemies—one must also work upon oneself, or risk becoming a liability to those one means to serve. None of this is simple. It asks for a discipline that can seem almost beyond one’s reach. I do not speak as someone who has attained enlightenment or initiation. I have found dead ends along this path, and I have made many mistakes. A weariness has come over me, especially at the thought of continuing this work alone.

I now need to speak of another condition that also needs to be present in one’s life for this path to become edifying: the study of spiritual-scientific literature available to us. Through the study of this kind we can help quicken one’s ability to grasp these higher ideas in a logical way before experiencing the soul-spiritual realities themselves. This logical thinking—the mere grasping and working through of this theosophical content – can help make one’s later experiences trustworthy. For one is already, in a certain sense, entering into a spiritual world by working consciously with its content.

When we open the Bible and find an answer in a passage to the enigmas that we encounter, many, I think, would agree that these scriptures—at each turn of life—appear to contain entirely new meaning to meet us upon each reading, and at times peculiarly at the moment it can speak most directly to our soul. What is this phenomenon to be attributed to? Yes, it is the aging, the maturing of one’s soul, the reward, if you will, of much earlier seeds beginning to sprout, in which a man or woman has more internal currency, a strength of soul at their disposal, not occupied by the developing body, in order to look upon one’s life with more clarity and depth of scope. Of course, we must also give the salute to God—extend due honor to those higher powers, showing an appreciation for all that can be attributed to the unknown mystery of the working of a grace from above, often unperceived, that acts on content that reaches us from without, as well as transforming the organs of perception, of cognition itself. There seems to be inexhaustible content in the holy books that is brought to consciousness from the invisible spirit into what can be grasped through a person’s faculties of soul. But here is where the the working with ideas must become more. We must seek to understand the acquisition of knowledge beyond these dualistic forms, how one juxtaposes various ideas or concepts in ways that seem natural in the traditional sense, in the ways of academia, let’s say. Where a few of these concepts may be enough to master all that one assumes is necessary for them to then immediately apply in the world, how one idea links to another in ways one is most accustomed to. Ones that are so influenced by modern science and theologies methods. Take a moment to think of how one gathers knowledge of themselves and the events and things around them in today’s society. Many I think like to feel excited in a fleeting sense as the next video short streams into their awareness. They think they are being fed with a living knowledge and have acquired all that can be known on this or that topic. The human mind itself has been conditioned in some regards to crave these suitable skeletal summaries of all of life’s content. One truly believes they have understood a matter completely only after skimming a few of its major talking points. This is a tendency, a habit of thinking that needs to be put away if one wants to grasp the content of what is called ‘spiritual’ in life and see this ‘spirit’ as the foundation of existence. The holy writings themselves supply many layers of meaning and until one has come at an issue from more than a few sides, even those that seem to offer nothing but rubbish, then one just simply has not risen to a fuller approach to life’s content as it exists for modern consciousness. It is not a popular idea that one must be patient, to actually maintain a posture of endurance in order for spiritual insight to manifest in a way that orients oneself in a fuller appropriate way to the occulted or spiritual side of things. Instead of mere intellect in its ordinary way of assimilating knowledge, one learns through this path to engender a loving interest in how this knowledge has been inoculated into man’s cognition from spiritual worlds. One thus can experience a truer living relationship to the scriptures and apply them in all scopes of life, have them work in life’s actualities, where the feasting on the bread from heaven becomes a literal occurrence. Spiritual science wishes to bring about an ever-widening perspective of how we experience ourselves and relate to history in all its events and forms, not only in the accumulation of fuller concepts but ones that also work to develop the inner life. For one must also couple any study with the development of one’s soul and spirit. Thereby, anthroposophy is not a religion of doctrine or mere theories but a path of knowledge that remains flexible in its outer forms and does not rigidify into dogma because inwardly it allows man to become creative in his faculties of soul.

This helps us to, inch by inch—line upon line—let go of dogmas, these snares that keep one from outgrowing one’s worn-out notions of how the spiritual world influences life on the earth. Learning to expand one’s mental images, one’s imaginative faculty, when delving into these sacred texts, in this case the Holy Scriptures, asks for a commitment to the conditioning of the student’s inner life so that these fuller and richer concepts become something actual, a true impulse that eventually swallows up our more pedantic concepts, often linked to our own egoism—ideas that so easily seduce one to rest in knowledge already won. One learns the reality of an idea’s origin and can discover a realm of pure thinking where one can begin to grasp how the inner life of the soul is woven into the full living reality of universal phenomena. Through consistent effort along this path of inner work, our egoistic thoughts seem to disappear, and what used to occur so connected to physicality’s ebbs and flows instead adheres to rhythms and thoughts from another world that express themselves through an inner life that is now conscious of a world that had always been within and without but was veiled due to the condition of consciousness and the constitution of an individual’s soul. What we may have sensed beyond matter as hidden forces begins to reveal itself as the deeds of beings that were perhaps too abstract—a little out of reach when our knowledge of higher activity in other forms of consciousness was dimly presented to us through modern theology or modern physics.

When one has reached an age and perhaps has faced certain trials that allow one to shed much of life’s unnecessary pursuits, as I think all of us here have reached, we have all had that trail by fire fore life is a great master. Or they have embarked on a specific training of the will—as anthroposophy has at its core a schooling that contains exercises for the inner life, the soul—thst can quicken the process that brings an ability to separate oneself from one’s thinking. One, in reality, has created a distance from one’s identity, which previously was so influenced by the thoughts that were so bare in hindsight.”. One understands, as they climb higher in the ideals they cultivate, how even the elect have been deceived by the formation of dogmatic habits of thinking. Thinking is often considered by many circles as a process that goes on almost automatically—keeps on sustaining itself of its own accord, locked up within my skin—its actual impulses are not noticed in the passing moments of life and are not so readily thought of as possessing such power as they do nor do most imagine that they can be mastered, brought under control, so that only what the beholder wishes to perceive will enter his consciousness. This is quicker for some, and for others it takes much longer endurance of inner effort, but one begins to move past one’s erroneous conceptions—they fall away and dissolve, and in their place new paradigms appear. Life presents itself as a completely new experience when one absorbs the fact that thoughts themselves are living realities, parts of actual beings of higher and lower worlds. The strong delusion that the scriptures themselves point to, which God sends forth, reveals itself as an ongoing mystery to unravel: a delusion that consists of humanity’s lower thinking or memory, the thoughts that are habitual and pertain only to sense-bound knowledge, having obscured the cognition of our ancient past, when outer scriptures were not needed to provoke a memory of a spiritual reality. A delusion that blinds one to a higher sphere of activity which guides the lower—not only external happenings, the budding and dying of physical creation, but the rising and descending of the soul itself as it follows the spiritual rhythms that manifest in all that we see in this material life spread out before us. One then can look upon oneself in a more objective way and indeed, in a certain sense, experience oneself outside of the constraints of the body and can feel oneself as a secure spiritual being within the hierarchies that were mere skeletons in traditional religious expressions. One grows into a feeling for how reality is not a mere linking up of cause and effect that can be explained through physical material means only but one grasps that they must also include the soul – spiritual activity into the assessment of life. After the effects of this esoteric development emerge, the soul is able to bring forth an elevated thinking and feeling, a living moral imagination that isn’t subjective but grows into the thoughts of the beings that sustain the cosmos. One then carries a higher consciousness because one realizes that this grace from above, which did not hold much inner sustenance as a concept or mental image, now is received as an intimate experience of the soul itself, creating out of itself a higher vantage point and means of communication with the spiritual beings through whose love the human soul itself was created.

We let Rudolf Steiner illuminate more of what occurs occultly in the hidden astral substance or soul and spirit when one is or is not able to grasp more of reality through an assimilation of ideas that seek to penetrate these elusive worlds of the spirit with the same conviction one has in concepts suited to physical reality.

“Through his concepts, a person is continually creating structures in his astral body. These show themselves in the most various forms. The astral substance that lies unused between the individual structures is called ‘intermediary’ astral substance, to distinguish it from that which has been shaped into structures. This intermediary astral substance is continually supplementing itself out of the astral substance in our surroundings, is continually flowing in and out, is continually renewing itself. But the structures that man has cultivated by the way he feels and thinks and decides remain fixed. Let us then assume we have two people engaging in an ordinary conversation with each other. One of them has cultivated rigid, fixed concepts, which have correspondingly engendered very fixed structures in the astral substance. The other talks to him and tries to explain something to him. What must happen if one person is to make something clear to another? He must inject his own concept into the other person’s astral substance. This concept, this thought, thus flows into the other person’s astral substance. Once there, it must first of all be absorbed in the intermediary substance and [then] remake itself and become transformed [in a manner] corresponding to the forms already developed there. Now let us assume that the one is trying to explain to the other something to do with, say, reincarnation. The other has however already formed a fixed idea about reincarnation. Let us assume him to be a prejudiced person who has formed for himself the idea that reincarnation is something silly and absurd. This thought has hovered in his astral substance. The new thought of the first person now arrives and dissolves itself in the intermediary astral substance of the other, and would then have to be transformed by the thought forms already existing there. This will not work, however, because his [the second person’s] concepts are too rigid, too fixed. He cannot adapt the newly transmitted thought to his [own] thought forms and therefore does not understand it. The more a person keeps his concepts flexible, so that these can always be dissolved in the surrounding intermediary substance, the more he will understand the other people he encounters. This is why it is so difficult to convey theosophical life to academically trained people. The concepts acquired at university engender structures which are rigid, fixed and enclosed within themselves, which are not easily dissolvable. The academic usually comes to a theosophical lecture full of such structures and is then unable to comprehend theosophical life. “

Theosophy or Anthroposophy must lose its definitional character and become something that lives organically in the student of spiritual science. What is significant is that it requires no documents at all; instead, one seeks knowledge directly within oneself.

Anthroposophy desires to instill within a greater portion of humanity, which offers a path for the modern spiritual researcher who, in this case, desires to keep the Bible near as they embark upon the process we hinted at earlier of outgrowing our naïve or simple conceptions of man’s role in cosmic evolution. We wish to move away from our place as merely observers and toward becoming willing participants in the mystical fact of Christianity. Our aim is to engage in a richer pursuit of experiencing the actual essence of grace, redemption, and eternal life—those elusive spiritual impulses in which we have perhaps outgrown our initial ideas, but which in their core are more profound than one originally believes, as what lies behind them is actually the whole evolution of the human race.

We can begin to live more deeply into the Spirit within the Scriptures when we come to recognize that these sacred writings were not, in their earliest expression, historical documents in the modern sense in which we naturally approach the past. What remains within the text, even through the many translations, cultures, and centuries that separate us from its origin, often bears the imprint of far older realities. Behind many passages stand the purified initiation experiences of those great souls who were entrusted with carrying forward the impulses that eventually took form as what we now recognize as religion. These were not speculative ideas fashioned in the form of doctrine or modern science, nor were they formed as we today form concepts through intellectual reflection, but were the fruits of direct participation in higher worlds. The spiritual experiences of Paul that we have already mentioned – the scales falling from his eyes, or his ascent into the third heaven bear the marks of what must be clothed in poetic or seeming fantastical language. This ineffable experience of God’s chosen one – the initiate.

One must learn to imagine this wisdom itself differently. It is not merely a carefully arranged body of beliefs or rituals, nor simply a religious psychology. Rather, it consists of living impulses of soul and spirit received through actual intercourse with realities that transcend ordinary perception. This knowledge was not handed down through external instruction but through the higher worlds themselves by men and women whose consciousness had been prepared to perceive what remained hidden from the majority of humanity. They became instruments through whom divine revelation could gradually enter the stream of history.

Outer historical science itself has already uncovered evidence that nearly every great civilization possessed two streams of religious life. There was the public expression of religion, intended to guide and sustain the life of an entire people, and alongside it there existed a deeper current reserved for those who had undergone suitable preparation. hese individuals—whether they were called priests, sages, initiates, or by some other title—were entrusted with truths whose misuse would have hindered rather than advanced humanity’s development. It is best at this point not to linger on the idea, even though it may contain some truth, that such knowledge was withheld through pride or through malevolent impulses of domination or control, but rather to think of it as another grace from the spirit, in which a much higher wisdom embodies quite intrinsically a perfect reverence for the tremendous creative forces that accompany genuine spiritual insight.

These inspirations from the other side of existence were true mysteries—not secrets in the ordinary sense, but hidden realities concerning the manner in which higher worlds continually work into earthly evolution. They spoke of the living relationships extending from the celestial movements of stars and planets down into the formation and structure of human consciousness itself. Embedded within these sacred texts was an initiation wisdom through which the eternal patterns underlying existence became revealed. Entire civilizations were quietly guided by these impulses, and through them the soul itself learned the paths it must travel in its continual transformations.

This is why the Scriptures continue to speak with such inexhaustible power across every sphere of human life. Their deepest essence does not consist merely in their outward words, but in the invisible spiritual impulses that continually seek to unfold themselves within those words, and not only through their expression in writing or speech, but through a wisdom that unfolds itself within each encountered phenomenon and form. It is this hidden wisdom, woven into every genuine phenomenon of existence, that gives rise to the forms through which truth gradually manifests. It is the living force within becoming itself—the quiet activity that enables humanity to discover new knowledge and find genuine satisfaction within the soul.

Those responsible for preserving what would eventually become the Bible—these initiates, such as Moses, Daniel, and the apostles—were not simply authors recording events for posterity. They were guardians of living realities that had first been experienced before they were ever written. As humanity’s consciousness developed, these same divine revelations necessarily assumed new forms so that each age might receive according to its capacity. These are the works prepared beforehand into which we ourselves are now called to enter—not merely through outward deeds, but through the inward miles our own souls must travel. For initiation was never merely the acquisition of hidden information. The initiates themselves underwent profound transformations of their own being. The subtle members of man’s constitution had to be consciously cultivated and strengthened so that new capacities of perception and cognition could awaken. Humanity’s present powers of thinking did not simply appear fully formed. They emerged through immeasurable sacrifices made by countless generations who labored inwardly to expand the boundaries of consciousness. The freedom of thought enjoyed today stands upon foundations laid by those who willingly endured the difficult work of spiritual transformation long before such capacities became common to humanity.

If one were to journey backward in time—long before the first vestiges of recorded history, before the words of Homer echoed throughout ancient Greece—one would indeed discover what could properly be called an esoteric or occult science. This science, as we have stated, was entrusted to a comparatively small number of pupils, adepts, and initiates who had undergone the preparation necessary to experience these truths. But here again, it may be good to remember that the forms and functions have not remained static, nor has the source, the spiritual worlds, ever remained still, but is also following its own paths of transformation. So one must always retain a certain nimbleness in how one imagines the spiritual world as ever preparing a different relationship to man’s thinking and feeling, thus shifting the boundaries of what is exoteric or esoteric knowledge.

Perhaps a crude example can help paint a little clearer picture of what is meant here by esoteric knowledge or this initiation science, so we don’t think of it as some kind of nebulous magical or mystical form, but instead can have a clearer sense of how the limits of knowledge and cognition are ever transforming themselves as humanity gradually emerges from darkness into knowledge that was previously hidden from it. We teach children today that the earth moves around the sun, that the heavens obey lawful relationships, and that what appears to the senses is often only the outward appearance of a deeper reality. Yet there was a time when such knowledge itself would have belonged to the mysteries. At a certain point in humanities evolution,it would have found itself in almost a reversal of where it stands today, so instead of trying to find an assurance of salvation in higher worlds of spirit, humanity in much more ancient periods needed an assurance that the divine could be found in the sense-perceptible. What is commonplace in one age may once have required initiation in another. What is esoteric in one epoch gradually becomes exoteric in another as humanity itself grows into the capacities necessary to bear it.

Let’s return to the Scriptures, where Christ Himself points toward this great transition. In time, what was once esoteric knowledge would become available to all humanity,

Recorded were these words from the mind of a God who bequeathed a part of His own essence and lived within a consciousness fitted to the human race, in order that both humanity and the spiritual worlds, together with their inhabitants, might continue their evolution. What follows is my own rendering of the spiritual meaning I understand to be contained within Christ’s words to His disciples:

“I speak now to you in parables, but there will come a time when the hidden things shall be perceived through direct, experiential understanding, and the mysteries of the universe shall be won for all.”

One could almost regard the whole history of initiation as moving toward the fulfillment of these words. What had long been clothed in symbol, parable, and sacred rite was destined, through the evolution of human consciousness, to become capable of entering ordinary waking awareness. The mysteries were never intended to remain forever hidden. Their concealment belonged to a particular stage of mankind’s development. Their future belonged to humanity as a whole.

What once drew mankind toward the mystical—the living substance of the unseen worlds, the impulses and experiences that eventually clothed themselves in myth and later in religious feeling and doctrine—has gradually lost much of its original efficacy. This has not occurred because the spiritual world has withdrawn in actuality, nor because the ancient mysteries were false, as some still believe, but because they now approach modern consciousness in forms that are no longer living. The modern soul no longer inhabits the same inward constitution as the men and women who first received those revelations. Many fail to appreciate that the very faculties through which the soul perceives have themselves evolved. Thinking, feeling, and willing are not fixed realities but living capacities that have undergone continual transformation throughout human history. The evolution of consciousness is not a peripheral subject; it is one of the central realities through which both history and Scripture become intelligible. In this sense, what Genesis describes as the Fall reaches beyond a merely moral event. It also signifies the gradual descent of human consciousness into a mode of perception increasingly bound to the senses, a necessary stage through which freedom of the individuality could be won.

Here the Science of the Spirit seeks to offer its greatest service. It desires to illuminate this hidden development and provide a path of knowledge for those prepared to enter more consciously into reality itself. Its task is not to invent a new world but to awaken mankind to the world already surrounding him—a world extending beyond the limitations imposed by sense perception alone. In speaking once again of the mysteries in a language suited to modern consciousness, Spiritual Science seeks to make available to the many what was once entrusted only to the few, so that men and women may walk with greater light both in the body and beyond it.

And then one can be in a position to realize, in a deeper sense, what is really at the heart of the fear that accompanies the thought of embracing new knowledge in a living manner—of risking the possibility of ardent change. It is this clinging to the perception of the physical world and the love man has for what he has worked so hard to obtain. Man has developed an extraordinarily penetrating consciousness of the physical world and has learned to observe its phenomena in ever finer detail. But this very achievement has also created a dependence upon sense-bound perception, so that he carries its assumptions into what he believes the soul and spirit themselves must be. There now exists an unconscious fear of the spirit, of what man cannot grasp with the intellect through sense-bound experience, which reveals itself in his refusal to give serious thought to its mysteries. So, in the way that Christ asked His followers to count the cost, we must have a willingness to hold before our inner gaze this pursuit of knowledge that expects our whole being.

So in the coming months, we will begin working through some of Steiner’s major works, not with the intention of simply placing ourselves beneath another label, but in the hope of entering more deeply into the living knowledge to which anthroposophy points. We will work through these texts together, approaching the Scriptures with a better understanding of their higher content and bringing that content to greater elucidation. We will couple much of what has been brought to us through theology and various streams of Christian thought with a spiritual science that endeavors to approach not only religious evolution and psychology but the larger schemes of evolution concerning our own planet as well as the constitution of the human being. We must always have a clearer understanding of who we are and how the knowledge we have obtained makes its way into these bodies of concepts. For this we will enter into Theosophy and Occult Science, where the constitution of the human being and the greater course of cosmic and human evolution can begin to take on a fuller form. We will approach Christianity as Mystical Fact so that the development and spiritual significance of Christianity can be viewed in relation to the ancient mysteries from which it emerged. And because this knowledge cannot remain merely something taken into the intellect, we must also make the soul capable of moving into these places, these many mansions that have been prepared. Through Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, we will go as deeply as we can into that modern path of initiation—one that seeks to understand not only what was and what is, but what the human being itself may become.