The Sun Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection

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We must see the Mystery of Golgotha as more than just an inner, mystical event. It is also an outer event, although not in the sense of superficial, materialistic historical research. The significance of this outer event is that the forces of Ahriman have been incorporated into earthly evolution but have also been overcome.

A struggle between gods is played out in the Mystery of Golgotha. After the resurrection, the Christ imparted knowledge of this struggle to his initiated disciples through esoteric teachings. The Mystery of Golgotha is an event which affects every human being and has a decided effect on the entire cosmos within which we were created and are evolving. Here is a bit of what Christ taught his disciples:. He told them that the cross on Golgotha cannot be seen simply as a manifestation of earthly factors; in fact, it has significance for the entire cosmos.

How might a disciple of Christ speak about his master's task? Steiner gives us some insight in this imagined conversation between two disciples. These people knew about the gods, but only the gods who could not tell them anything about death. If these gods were the only ones we ever knew, we would never have experienced the essence of death. The gods first had to send a being down to Earth so that they could learn about death through one of their own.

Since his resurrection, the Christ seems to be teaching us about what the gods had to do to guide earthly evolution toward its appropriate conclusion. He is teaching us something that earlier human beings could not know.

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We are learning what the gods were doing behind the scenes in cosmic existence in order to further the Earth's evolution in the right way. For the benefit of humankind, they introduced Ahriman's forces into earthly evolution but prevented these forces from corrupting human beings. Steiner reveals to us how St. Paul understood the reality of Ahriman who introduced error into the world.

In a curious irony, as it occurs to me, Abraham as the great progenitor of the Jews, had his hand stayed by an Angel when he raised it to sacrifice his son, Isaac, an innocent victim. And yet, generations later, Abraham's descendants would raise their hands to sacrifice an innocent victim upon the Cross, Christ Jesus.

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Outside Damascus, Saul experienced the Christ himself and was convinced. But what did this experience mean to Saul? It meant that ancient wisdom no longer existed in its original form but had absorbed an Ahrimanic element. This is how Paul arrived at the insight that humankind's evolution had been appropriated by a foe who is the source of error on Earth. By introducing the intellect to human beings, this foe also introduces the possibility of error, and in the greatest manifestation of this error an innocent being was nailed to the cross.

The balancing of the divine and Ahrimanic worlds occurred behind the veil of sense perception but was played out in Christ Jesus' death on the cross. This next passage inspired me to write a poem which follows immediately thereafter. I did not understand the lifeless nature of the intellect consciously while I was studying physics in college and for some time afterward. But I do recall the difficulty I had with expressing what I was studying and learning to some non-scientific persons who seemed to form the question Why?

When we develop the intellect we are not actually living. We must learn to sense that when we think we pour our life out into dead, rational images. What about those people on Earth today who have never heard about Christ or choose not to believe in the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha? Those who ask such a question presuppose that the Mystery of Golgotha is a belief and they miss the essential point: It is not a matter of belief, but rather one of understanding.

Let me conclude with a few reassuring words: The Christ died for all, including those who cannot yet unite with him. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective, accomplished fact that is not affected by what people know or do not know about it. Nonetheless, knowing about it strengthens the inner forces of the human soul. We mentioned earlier about how healing can be understand best if one grasps the spiritual realities underlying the processes of the human being in sickness and in health. To Steiner's view, our modern medicine is one of blind experimentation because of its lack of comprehension of the spiritual realities underlying the medical conditions of their patients.

One need only listen to someone who spends a lot of time in a doctor's office to realize they often operate as pill-pushers doing experiments with human lives.

Anthroposophy can influence practical activities such as medicine 3. I can say only a few words today about anthroposophical medical science as it already exists, but unless we move toward spiritual perception of the cosmos, all medicine, all psychology, and all therapy remain nothing more than the result of blind experimentation.

We experience freedom as human beings only because we experience death. Without death we would have remained in thrall to the higher beings of the spiritual hierarchies, an angel of the tenth hierarchy as humans are sometimes called. But we are able to receive thoughts from the spiritual world, experiences which filled us before we incarnated upon Earth in this lifetime. Those thoughts are like soul corpses of our previous existence which we have received just as the Earth will one day receive this body we inhabit during this lifetime.

After death, the body ceases to follow the laws that the human soul imposed on it, beginning at birth.

The Sun Mystery and the Mystery of Death and Resurrection : Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity

Because it no longer incorporates any aspect of the human soul and spirit, it obeys the same natural laws that prevail among minerals. This is the physical fate of the human physical body after death. We must also acknowledge that a similar death occurs when the soul descends from existence in the world of spirit and soul to incarnate into a physical body at birth. This soul enters the physical human body in the same way that the physical human body enters the earthly element at death. As far as consciousness is concerned, our thoughts are the first thing we become aware of bringing with us from the spiritual world.

The mental energy of thinking is the corpse of soul and spirit. Before our earthly existence began, our thinking led a life of its own in the world of soul and spirit, but only the corpse of this spiritual force is incorporated into our earthly existence. The physical body carries our thoughts, which are the soul corpse of our former existence, just as the Earth receives the corpse of the physical body after death.

This is why modern perception is so unsatisfying. As long as we carry around this soul corpse, we grasp only the lifeless aspect of nature. It is an illusion to believe that we can discover anything other than lifeless nature through our modern experiments. Of course, we will encounter organized, living bodies as well as mere lifeless matter, but with the undeveloped thinking of personal consciousness, we will not be able to understand them. Even if we were able to create life in a laboratory, we would not understand it.

As a soul corpse of its former self, our thinking is spiritually dead. It understands only dead things. We must accept this truth with open minds, because it is important to know that human beings absorbed this dead, abstract thinking only at a specific stage in evolution. Because abstract thinking has no inherent life and imposes no constraints on the inner human being, it allows us to become free. This is why human freedom developed only once we began to experience death. The Gospels as we know are only possible because of the direct knowledge, the gnosis, of early Christian times.

This gnosis persisted with its ancient vitality far enough into the three centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha for the writers of the Gospels to interpret this great mystery properly. But for this gnosis, there would have been no Gospels today. If you have sought the mysterious Quelle or source of the Gospels, look no further. The source was not in a document, but in the ancient vitality or gnosis which was not a content in some document set, but rather a process , a living vitality of knowing in a set of individuals who lived in the centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha.

Rightly understood, the Gospels are the Quelle, the primordial source of written documents of this ancient process of knowing! Through Inspiration and Intuition, initiates develop an inner strength that leads not only to an awareness of life after death but also to objective Imaginations and truths about the outer world. Thus, initiates are not dependent on what the Gospels tell them. If the Gospels had not already been written, initiates could write them themselves.

In fact, initiates take the correct view of the Gospel writers, realizing that enough of thinkings' ancient vitality persisted in the first three or four centuries A. If initiates of the early Christian era had not interpreted the Mystery of Golgotha through the gnosis of the time which is similar but not identical to modern Anthroposophy , there would be no Gospels, because the Gospels were written out of the initiation science of old.

Does Steiner wish to kill religion and substitute some antiquated gnosis in its place? Only a shallow reading of Rudolf Steiner would allow one to reach such a conclusion. In this next passage he states clearly that his goal is to deepen religion, not deaden it, and he earnestly wishes to be a bearer of a love that will nurture the religious sense of all humanity. Spiritual scientific knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha allows us to transcend all the grave doubts we experience in modern religious life, which result primarily from our scientific education.

Although exoteric science has made us free and achieved great outer triumphs, it has also instilled very understandable doubts in our hearts with regard to religious feeling and knowledge of our own supersensible nature. Anthroposophy, which works out of the spirit of science, has taken up the task of eliminating these doubts and implanting truly religious life in the human soul. Far from contributing to the death of religion, Anthroposophy will foster a revival of religious feeling and a new understanding of Christianity, which can be correctly understood and accepted only by turning to the Mystery of Golgotha.

Because anthroposophically-derived spiritual knowledge will not only revive old religious feelings but also enkindle new ones, it is safe to say that Anthroposophy harbors no sectarian aspirations. This is as true of Anthroposophy as it is of any other science. Anthroposophy's purpose is not to found sects. Its intent is to serve preexisting religions and to revitalize Christianity in this sense. But Anthroposophy feels called upon to do more than simply preserve old religious feelings and allow traditional religious activity to continue.

Its aim is to contribute not only to reviving but also to resurrecting the religious life that has suffered so severely under modern civilization. Anthroposophy hopes to be a messenger of love that will not only revitalize old religious feelings but also foster an esoteric resurrection of humanity's inner religious sense.

If you change with the times during your life, liking a food you never liked before, a type of music you didn't like before, writers you never liked before, is it your fault you never liked them before or was it simply your destiny? It is their destiny as an engineer to think that way. It is not a fault. Steiner recognizes this and wants us to know that any scientific-minded aspects of his spiritual science is not to deemed a fault but rather its destiny. No wonder we need to give serious thought to how we relate to science! No wonder quite a few scientifically trained friends of Anthroposophy see it as their particular task to demonstrate that Anthroposophy can indeed be presented for all the world to see on scientifically justifiable grounds in any area of knowledge.

This is what the reality of our situation demands. When you hear scientific overtones today in contents that we formerly communicated in quite different terms, this is not the fault of the anthroposophical movement, it is its destiny. This is what the world demands. As a result, we see the world differently. Where ancient humanity experienced, "Not I but the divine spirit around me," we can experience, "Not I, but the Christ in me.

For Steiner, our most important task as human beings is to learn to overcome death by uniting with the Christ, who overcame death. Humanity's survival depends upon the "enchristing" of the world. It is the purpose of Anthroposophy to bring this reality into world evolution, to enable all religions and all human beings to experience the new reality.

Exoterisches und esoterisches Christentum GA Eight lectures were published in an earlier English translation as part of Festivals and their Meaning II: The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Looking for beautiful books?

Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more. Other books in this series. Education for Special Needs Rudolf Steiner.

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