Hopefully, the ‘Son of Man’ means more than it did before you came. We are talking about the future human. The one who betrays the future human will not be happy. “It would be better for him that he not be born.” This is about the betrayal of the son of man.

Gospel reading: “While they were eating, Jesus took bread and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it, this is my body.” Then He took a cup, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them and they all drank from it. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” He said to them.  “Truly I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it again in the kingdom of God.” 

This is part of the new mysteries. It is not just for the hierarchies. The new mysteries are for everyone. There is no longer a hierarchy that will prevent you from seeking mystery wisdom. What prevents you from seeking mystery wisdom is that you don’t study or practice. And you’re free not to do that.

Gospel reading: “When they had sung a hymn they went out to the Mount of Olives. “You will all fall away,” Jesus told them. For it is written,  “I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.  But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you. 

You will all be in a spot where you forget this – forget what we’re doing.  

Gospel reading: Peter declared, “Even if they all fall away, I will not.” Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, today, yes even tonight, before the rooster crows twice, you yourself will disown me three times. But Peter insisted emphatically, even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you. And all the others said the same.

Then they went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.”  

He took Peter, James and John along with Him, and He became deeply distressed and troubled. He was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

This is not sorrow for Himself, but for the condition that caused Him to have to come back to do this. It was sorrow for everybody. 

Gospel reading: “Stay and watch. Going a little further, He knelt on the ground and asked if this hour may be passed from Him. Everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. But not what I will but what you will.”

Dennis: This is one of the favorite lines of this gospel. He understood that He must experience death as an innocent because the stain of the original fall was not in him. It was not there because he had within him the phantom. 

Gospel reading: “When he returned to his disciples, He found them sleeping. Simon, He said, “Are you asleep? Could you not watch and pray for an hour so that you would not fall into temptation?” 

This is the great drama or dilemma of the fall. Rudolf Steiner gives a picture of the fall within the hierarchy of the Archai, the spirits of personality. They inherited from the other hierarchies the tendency to have a sense experience that was not simply a reflection. But there was something in the realm of the Archai, that caused them to have the experience that when  having a sense experience, it appeared to be something “out there.” 

Prior to that, if you read Occult Science, on old Saturn the experience of the hierarchies was to receive the fiat from the Father God and reflect it back as a sense experience. 

That is what Steiner called the seed germ of the senses. In order for there to be freedom, there had to be a sense body in the beings because fiat or creation was separate from the created. 

For hundreds of years, the theological  issue was that when God created, was He separate from the creation or included in the creation?

This is a deep theological issue. It led to the western and eastern rites in Christianity and raising the question of an image. This is what is happening today in the middle east with the fundamentalist Islamists trashing statues in museums. It is an iconoclastic controversy. 

The issue is the original experience that the Archai had that there is an experience out there. But the fundamentalists say that is not true because when the new caliphate comes it will bring about Armageddon. And they want to be part of that because they will be among the 144,000. 

We still have this issue of the falling of the sense experience into matter that gives the experience of being separate from the creation.

But being separate from the creation brings about a deep anxiety, an existential anxiety. This is a dilemma of what happens in sensation. In the original creation, there was to have been a body of sensation that reflected the deed of the Creator.

But when it was handed down there was a surcharge on the sensation until It got to the Archai. The Exusiai, the spirits of form, had the experience that when you have a sensation, it is a form. The Archai had the experience that the form is not them. 

The original form was the activity of the forming, the psychic activity of the forming.

For the Archai, there was a residue of the psychic activity of the forming. There was something left over out of their experience which allowed them to ask who is seeing that. That is the seed of the eventual I being separating from the creation as individual freedom. But it has a price. And the price is the anxiety of my freedom. 

That was then passed on to the archangels. Rudolf Steiner has a beautiful segue here that the Archangels received the fallen-ness of the Archai. But not all the Archai fell. The progressive ones are still the agents of the ability of the soul to recognize the I being.

That is what Rudolf Steiner calls the consciousness soul. The Archai are in control of that as the spirits of time. They make it possible during this time for large masses of people to experience their individuality. Just look at the newspapers. It’s everywhere. Spiritually, the Archai are active in this age in events like the Arab spring. Or in the great tradition of the Dalai Lama who said I’m not going to do that anymore. That would have been unheard of 200 years ago. But it is a symptom. As Steiner said, we don’t have to wait for the apocalypse. We’re in it. It’s already happened. We’re post-apocalyptic. 

So on good Friday there is a culmination of these problems of separation and connection. There are many legends around this, and I’d like to mention one of them to give you a flavor of how this has happened. There are all of these legends around the tree of the true cross, legends of what the cross was. One of them is that Adam had Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel. 

When that happened there was a third son born who was Seth. When Adam died, he had to be buried, and the people wanted to give him what is called in the Catholic Church extreme unction. But there wasn’t the appropriate anointing oil because the oil of Mercy was being held in heaven. 

This happened at a time when nature was red in tooth and claw, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. So Seth, the third son, had to go into Paradise and go to the tree guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. He  had to deal with that angel to get the oil of mercy from the fruit on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life were from one trunk that split. And the angel said OK you did the deed. You have access to the tree of life, but you do not have access to the tree of knowledge. so I am going to put a flaming sword here so that you cannot pass.  

So Seth had to go back to this cherub because Adam had died, and Seth said I just want to make an anointing oil for my father, Adam, who died. The cherub allowed him to pick a fruit from the tree of life and bring it back. And in the fruit was a seed. Seth made an anointing oil, the oil of mercy, and anointed Adam with it. And he took the seed from the tree of life and and buried it. So Adam’s skull had the tree of life.

When Solomon wanted to build his temple, David had an image of the temple but he couldn’t build it. Then came Hiram and the Masonic methods and all of that from the temple legend as Rudolf Steiner called it. When they built the doorway for the holy of holies, they found the tree and cut it down and made the timbers for the door of the holy of holies from the tree that grew out of the skull of Adam. That is the legend.

When the priest wanted to go into the holy of holies at a certain time, he had to pass through this tree that grew out of the skull of Adam, through the timbers of the door of the holy of holies. Then that was lost.

Time went on until it came time for the crucifixion. When they looked for pieces of wood for the cross, they found the timbers from the door and made the cross out of the tree. When they put the timbers of the cross into the hole on the hill of Golgotha where Adam was buried to begin with, they put the cross on the top of Adams skull. 

Because Golgotha means the place of the skull, when Christ died the blood of the covenant flowed across Adam’s skull and triggered a huge cosmic circuit. That completed the old mysteries with the new mysteries that were not based on blood because in the old days the power was inherited through bloodlines. Just read the Old Testament. It is about keeping the bloodline pure. But the covenant of the new blood is for everybody because Adam had been healed with the shedding of the blood of the new covenant. That is the language that they used. And then the blood that came down and was gathered by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Nicodemus had a couple of secret meetings with Jesus where he had a turning in his soul. So when Joseph of Arimathea gathered the blood of Christ and went out of the holy land, that started the grail stream of the feminine mysteries. 

The old mysteries of the ancient traditions were that you had to be born into the mysteries through the blood line. And the new mystery is the shedding of the new blood so that it is not based on blood anymore. It is based on the fact that you as a human are an individual and you have within you the seed of the son of man. You have the potential to go to another level in your inner life where you can purify your soul in the imitation of the Christ. 

What alchemically can we say about this? It is an interesting story. But does it ring true with anything?

In my research, I try to work with embryology to understand Rudolf Steiner. I’ve always had an interest in biology and what I’ve come to understand is that the tree of life is the circulatory system. Your blood, your vascular system is the tree of life. So what then is the tree of knowledge? That is your nervous system. That is another tree. But the trees are entwined with each other. One brings death. The other brings life. Every gland that you have in your body has a nervous function and an endocrine function and a vascular function. 

That’s how your life body and your soul interact in sensation. The glands form in your physiology a kind of focal point. Your physiology is a picture of these two trees in heaven. When I wake up, I have a sensation in my nervous system triggering whatever gland it is. It is an analog to the degree of sensation. Those are the neurotransmitters. Each neurotransmitter is balancing the quality of the sensation. You have in you a subtle body filled with images energized by the becoming of your sensation. It is a kind of ghost with particular patterns and cadences and forms. And those energies are neurotransmitters. 

They are codified behaviors. Wake up, freak out, procreate, vibrate. Hormonal secretions are images of the sense world. But when we have our senses, we experience that behind the sensations are the actions of the hierarchies. And because we’ve inherited the Archai predilection to interpret what is out there in the sense world as separate from me, we have a tendency to be insular in our thinking. My hormones are my hormones. My response to that particular color is my response. We build repertoires of stimulus responses that are called my personality. 

If it were just up to the Archai and the fall, we would be robots. Every image would be a stimulus and a response. We would have the consciousness of a planarian or a sea urchin. Oh, it’s the full moon. It’s procreation time. When that’s where the moon is, then that’s what happens. But we have transcended that consciousness in our humanity because when the archangels inherited the fall from the Archai, they were given a gift from the Seraphim. The Seraphim gave to the Archangels the ability to witness the arising of the inner picture in response to the sensation. And the quality that the seraphim gave to the archangels is the gift of love. 

According to Rudolf Steiner, they were at a stage where they did not have to because they had already transcended the need to go through all of this. They had already gone through the human drama and realized that this was eventually going to lead to a dire strait. So they gave the archangels the experience so that they could be awake when they experienced being separate. We call it forming a thought. And then the archangels passed it down to the angels. And the angels asked what do we do with this? 

Then the Angels passed that on to us. And by the time it got to us, things have become dire. We were given a pearl of great price. And the only ones that don’t know that are us. And we give that up for Ahriman and Lucifer. This is the the drama of sensation. We can interact with the inner pictures. That is experience. That is the pearl of great price. No other hierarchy has it. The Angels could interact with it, but they didn’t have the environment to give them such a pronounced experience of separateness. Because their sense of interacting with it was still in the spiritual realm. Hence it had not been taken over by Lucifer until the Old Moon. What I am describing to you is Saturn, Sun, Moon and finally we get to Earth. And Lucifer has made it so that my experience of that blackboard is completely separate from me. In my sensing, I kill the world, until I awaken to the fact that in my senses I can change the way I respond to sensing so that I can see the workings of the hierarchies in the world. When I do that, I am contributing to the Son of Man. And that is what Christ came back to teach us how to do, how to surrender to the resurrected corpse. 

If I have a resurrected corpse I have to learn that thinking is the forming of an organ of perception, a new organ of perception. That is the basis of the new mystery. That’s why the redemption of thinking was important to Steiner, changing it from abstract thanking to sensory thinking, to pictorial thinking. When I begin to have a perception of the becoming of something, I am no longer put to death by my sense experience. I awaken in it and with it. This is the resurrection of the world because when I perceive the world as a corpse, the hierarchies behind it are pushed out of the picture and what enters is dogma, or corpses of the memory, or organized repression.

Now we’re getting to the mystery of Christian Rosenkreuz. He was invited to the wedding of the bride groom and the bride, between Christ and the soul. When I marry my soul, I have to experience in my soul my I being. An action of my I being is to experience Metanoia, to change what I think about the sense world. This is the elemental perception and the medical work and all that Steiner labored to bring into existence with the transformation of the arts and of religion. He revivified the corpses of belief structures with an experience of the becoming of things in order to transform them. 

So the deed of Christ was to become human in order to experience the fear that humans have about giving everything away in death. The anxiety of suffering in death is due to the fall. But allowing the soul to say, even though my body passes away, I don’t pass away is Steiner’s teaching of reincarnation and all of that imaginative work to revivify the mystery wisdom. 

I always say that you have a parallel biography that depends on your ability to transcend your fear of memories of sense experiences. 

It’s not just random. It’s trying to awaken people to the fact that even though a person appears to be locked in, they’re just experimenting with what it would be like to be dead. 

In the movie ‘Awakening” by Oliver Sacks, people who are catatonic are getting L-dopamine and awakening to find out that they were still participating even though they were in a chair. They were moving along. They had a kind of disease that shut them out, but their soul was still active. When they took the L-dopa and started to come out of it, they rapidly progressed because there was a part of them that had been tracking.

So the Christ being comes back in a physical body and, as it says in the gospel, gives up the ghost. Giving up the ghost is a key.  The phantom is one of the deepest mysteries, and as I said for years, I talked to people trying to find out what that is.  It took about forty years and it was still only little pieces of a huge thing. The picture has to do with sensation.  

When you have a sensation and your glands light off, the electrolytes in your blood are following a sequence of metals. They are exchanging energies with each other and as they exchange energies, we call it a nerve impulse and your cells are interacting through those metals. 

This is the alchemy of metals. The pathways through which metals operate in the fluid in your bodies are part of the original creation. But how you respond to them is unique to your own situation. In autism, for instance, there is comorbidity. Comorbidity means that they cannot tell if you are autistic because the lesions you have that were created by the misfiring of those neurotransmitters don’t allow you to get access to particular parts of neurology. 

That is specific to your development. That is why autism is a spectrum disorder rather than a specific one. Many of the things that are arising today as dysfunctions such as Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS have to do with this issue of neurotransmitters and sensation. That is the great drama of the cosmos being played out in individual lives today. 

And it is all a recapitulation of the crucifixion of good Friday.  

And that is our inheritance, so to speak. Can I be awakened to that level in my own inner life of how sensing is creating and remembering patterns that I have access to that are specific to the pathologies that I am experiencing in my life.  

These then are the new mysteries. They involve thinking and bringing my thinking that has no thought into contact with sensation that has no object of sensation other than its own activity. We call it meditation. 

Freeing my sensation from object consciousness and turning my sense experience on my own cognition whose object is sense free. And I get exponential synergy from my being to understand my karma of why I have these particular issues in my life. In that moment of recapitulating Good Friday, Christ comes and says I can help you with this. 

In order to do that I have to train myself to focus on sense experiences where I bring my ability to control the inner picture myself, especially the processes that the hierarchies are using to create the world. And when I form images or symbols of them and meditate on them, I’m in effect asking the hierarchies to help me understand how this is working in my own life. I’ve got this thing I’m trying to work on, and I don’t get it. Can you help me? 

So you find a picture in the world that reminds you of the feelings you have about the issue you’re working on. It becomes a symbol for you, a metaphor of when you meditate, how you gain access back to the tree of life.

You give back the pictures that the heart is using to create the world and ask them, is it like this? And if you do that, Christ comes in and says here I’ll take it.  And then you have a dream. Or something that awakens you to potentials.

[An audience member asks, so this is about finding a symbol of something in your life. ]

Dennis replies, yes if it’s a kind of plant, picture how the plant grows. Don’t just picture the plant as a snapshot because if you picture the plant as a snapshot, it is just a corpse. And your consciousness will be corpse-like because it is just a snapshot of a thing. But if you picture it growing, your consciousness pulls your soul away from Lucifer and Ahriman. You can say to them, excuse me but I am involved in a dialogue with the beings that stand behind the becoming of this sense experience. So guess what? You’re not invited to the party. 

So that’s what I have been given from the dilemma of the archangels and the angels. The Christ had to come down to meet the Pistis. And what Mary tells him is the imagination she had that the angel Gabriel came and told her that she was going to be the mother of God. 

She is the only one who could do that. It is such an amazing image of what she did when she heard the news and she tells Him about that. Even He didn’t know that because she is a human. This is up to humans. The resurrection is up to humans. There is a seed in you, but now we have to search for the new Isis by using what was given to us as a capacity by the hierarchies that is latent in our own physiology. 

They are embedded in our physiology, but they have been overcome by the adversaries. We need to take it back from the adversaries by saying I’m going to work on this myself.  Neurotransmitters and all of that are just the corpus of the energy involved in the forming of memory. 

Memory is a big issue today. Ahriman wants it.  He wants memory because he understands that if humans get memory, he doesn’t have access to it. If humans claim their own memory, then it’s not on the menu, and there is no app to facilitate it. You are the app.

Holy Week is not something that happened in the past. It is happening all of the time, even now as we are here in the world. It is a continuing unfolding of the new mystery school that was inaugurated by Christ and then by all of the teachers who have come back and said you need to do this. It will become a dogma, but Rudolph Steiner cut right through that and pierced the veil so to speak by saying it’s about freedom.  

So, taking into sleep these two glyphs  of purification. If you keep distilling, it becomes so fine it gets to be what we call ether. Ether is alcohol. Highly rarefied.  Highly purified. Purification is repetition. 

The repetition of falling down and lifting up is a metaphor for the inner life. Christian Rosencreutz taught that the best way to do that is to bring the glyphs into sleep and then retrieve them in the morning. Taking a glyph like this into sleep begins to change how your REM state happens, and your REM state is where all of the neurotransmissions are happening. 

[An audience member asks what happens if you wake up at four in the morning? ]

That is good. The reason why you wake up at 4 AM is that the Earth is breathing out where you are, and your soul is breathing out with it. The angels know that a 4 AM call is the best. That is the way they do it. Spend a little time,10 or 15 minutes, trying to be silent. Then go back to sleep again. 

You will have excellent dreams. They’re not always about butterflies but what happens is that you’re awakening in a spot where you’re normally asleep and that’s where we’re going to go tomorrow. Have good dreams.

Glyph Exercise – Digestion