On the handout, go to figure 3 on the lower left. That’s an alchemical diagram of the relationship between what’s known as salt and sulfur.

This relates to the idea of form and then sublimation.

And so the Alchemist had a word for the way in which the invisible became visible. They would look at the phenomenon of a salt crystal coming out of the solution of salt. A solution is invisible and the crystal itself is visible. Invisible to the visible is called salt or sometimes called SAL, a Sal process. The process of coming from the invisible to the visible creates the substance Sal.  But the process Sal is going from the precipitate back into the invisible because of substances weaving and going back into its dynamic. Substances are only active in the body when they are being destroyed!  That’s life.  So if your potassium isn’t mobile then you have deposits.

What makes it mobile is your I Being, being active in the will to create fire, to keep the levity force in your blood so that the calcium stays up, the nitrogen in your blood needs to be activated by the Will Force that you have, or it forms crystals and falls down to your feet and then you have Gout.

The I Being represents a force of levity that lifts the substance up into a dynamic. And then when that dynamic weakens the substance falls back out as a manifestation, as a corpse.  That’s called Sal. In the diagram there, you see. When Sal has substance, the arrows are going out. That little dot in the center could be a cube of salt that you put in water and then it goes out and becomes invisible.

That’s the upper part of the diagram. The lower part of the diagram, the arrows are coming in, the Sal process is precipitation, but the substance goes back out again. The substance has a yearning to become imponderable, but the imponderable has a yearning to become ponderable. This is Sal.

So when you go to sleep, you are imponderable and you have a yearning to become ponderable. You call it waking up in the morning and losing your Sal consciousness, the day consciousness of Sal as a substance and your senses are a Sal substance, which we’ll figure out later. Cause as a tree out there, that’s Sal. But if you see the tree inwardly as becoming, you’re lifting the corpse of a memory into a process, and we call that imagination. 

The problem with imagination is it’s personal to you based on the memories that form the imagination to begin with. They have to be able to check your memory and check it and see, is this thing I’m remembering actually tallying up was something other than my spleen. Is this real?

Is it doing what I’m saying it’s doing?  And that process is that you have to learn that. The gravity levity pole in self has another component, and that’s the energetic component that allows the substance to go into solution. When the substance goes into solution that is more what they call sulf or sulfur, that’s more of a combustion process.

It’s going out of manifestation into a realm of potential.

In plants, that’s the forming of oils, especially essential oils that evaporate and go to the periphery if you leave the cap of the bottle off.

So sulfur also, if you look at the diagram there, sulfur goes out. But the arrows in the upper part where it says sulfur as a substance, the arrows are going out and in at the same time because sulfur is a rock that you can light on fire with a match. When the people saw that, I was like, whoa. Okay. And there are special properties from that.

You can find sulfur in the hot springs of California where the sulfur water comes out, that’s hot from the flume and it meets the cold water. It looks like egg yolk around the rock. That sulfur is a kind of a liquid rock that when it goes into a Sal condition of cold becomes congealed, and then I take that and light a match to that and it catches on fire. This was a great mystery to the old people. They call it sulfur. So sulfur as a substance has the periphery forces and the condensing forces united as a substance.  But when I light the match and the sulfur catches on fire, the warmth levity part of the sulfur goes totally away and what is left is ash. If I take the ash, I can’t reconstitute the sulfur again because the levity that was present as the sulfur has gone away. It’s called combustion. In the Sal, when I put the salt in the water, it goes away, but when I evaporate the water, it comes back just the same way it went away.

The difference is, in Sal, the form is retained, but in salt, the form is obliterated.  This is a big deal. So now we get to the Phantom. The Phantom is the “form template” that the Hierarchies use to form the original sense organs that would eventually result in the forming of a body. That’s the Phantom.

[Audience Question: Can you repeat that? ]

Yes. I will say it a couple times.  In the creation there was the idea of a being who would have the experience that they will be a rectifier for the creation. A rectifier is an apparatus in a circuit that keeps the vibrational rates within a certain parameter. So the purpose of creating a being that has sense experience is that it will allow all the different aspects of creation to go through its circuit but stay within a certain parameter. So we get fiat, God the creator creates, and then there’s a creation. And the creation was, there will be “being hood” in this creation. Let’s make it a rectifier to the creation and everything will be honky dory. So a rectifier in a circuit takes random wavelengths and synchronizes them.

That’s the human.

The human takes wide ranges of wavelengths and brings them into harmony. The function of the human was to have sense organs that brought harmony to the creation, that was a rectifier that would recognize it and then pass through that consciousness of those sense organs and then give back to the creation, the rectification, so there wasn’t random stuff going on in air noise.  That was the original form of the body of senses. For the original being, who would be the rectifier for the creation? The human is.  That’s the role of the human, from Steiner’s point of view, it is to rectify the creation. How? By sensing it. By being present in it and bringing consciousness to it.  That confirms this is what the creation looks like.

Cool. Let’s make the temple and celebrate it. That’s the original form and that form of the energies involved in that rectification was the original form of what eventually became Sensation.  Which means there’s a wave of energy, some type of organ, and it gets rectified and rayed back, and that form of the ability to receive and give back and rectify, that’s the human Phantom.

And that was the original form of the human. But as it evolved, it was understood that because of the separation of the Phantom from the creator, there was going to be a problem for the creator. Now there’s this creation running around, sensing. With a pattern of here’s what you’re going to sense, here’s the music singing in choir, and all the other beings are adding to that.

But it’s getting farther and farther away from the original wisdom that formed it. And now it’s into this realm down there. So Rudolf Steiner says, in the great wisdom of the Cosmos, a portion of the phantom was withheld while the large part of the phantom went and became all the other human beings.

And as the wisdom fell into earth creation, that phantom energy became available for Lucifer and Ahriman because it was the switch, it was the rectifier, it was the focal point that made creation harmonious. Grab energy from the rectifier of the whole cosmos. That’s called the fall. So in the fall, the energy of the phantom, the energy of sense experience that’s reflecting and harmonizing the creation was siphoned off and pulled into the realm of Lucifer who caused the phantom to fall into what Rudolf Steiner calls secretions. The form principle of the substances became manifest substances. They still retain their form principle as what today we call molecular attraction and repulsion, but they were substantial rather than energetic. They’re still energetic. But they are also substantial.

And because of the sense organs were made of these substances, they became filled with the ash of the fallenness, of the form of the secretion.

A secretion is a neurotransmitter, a neuro-modulator that forms an organ and the sensations that we have of light and sound and color and heat form the organs in the embryo.

Through form activity, it is intelligent because it’s highly organized, but it has fallen into secretion, and the secretions create the sense organs that give the human sense experience, which is your body experience that is separate from the creation.

So we wake up in our senses but it is not me. The earth is not me. You are not me. My pencil’s not me. Only me is me. And sometimes I’m not sure about that.

So the falling of the phantom into a secretion created the condition in a sense organ that allowed the human being to separate from the creation and be eventually in a condition where they would be unable to recognize the creator. It would simply see the creation as a resource. That’s the fall through sensation, and that happened a long time ago as humans began to take the resources of the earth, the living part of the earth, and make buildings and aqueducts and vehicles and fires, and God knows what. And then they started killing each other about  a wall of your city being over my territory, and that happened back somewhere in the very beginning, somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and it’s still happening. It’s just going to keep happening.  The falling into matter has created the physical body, a corpse, but the physical body is the invisible body of the forces that are attracting matter.

There are many names for that body. Paracelsus called it the Archus, the archetypal human, the iliaspur, the star body, the America body, the life body, the diamond body. So all these names for that body of the son of men.

And all the traditions speak about how we have to actually build organs in that body. We have to construct it through meditative practice in order that we can occupy it when it hits the fan at the end time. It’s not unique to anthroposophy by any means. So that speaking about the difference between the body of flesh and this body of light, but creation went so far that the sense body became so congealed that it just ended up in wars and turf wars and treasuries and laws, and by the time of Christ the Romans had spread all over the place. The Jews were fomenting and the hoards were coming out of wherever, and it just had really gotten to be a mess over the issue of the Earth as just a resource.

So there needed to be something to come back and say that’s where the old mysteries have led us. The mysteries of the seven Holy Rishis, the mysteries of Persia and Babylon, the mysteries of Egypt, the Greek mysteries, they’ve all led to this thought. And now the Romans have ripped off and codified and jammed into all the Greek mysteries as a kind of corpse of all these other ministries.

And there we are. This is when Christ appears on the stage and says, there are  new mysteries. But in order to do that, Christ had to be able to hold in a human physical body, the Phantom, which is a big deal in Steiner’s work. I don’t want to get into the Jesus children, but there is the possibility in the young Jesus to have a body whose organism operated with the laws of the physical body, but not with the impact of the fall, not having fallen.  There were secretions, but Rudolf Steiner says that the being, who did that was actually an angel, so the body of Jesus was actually an angel in heaven or in the spiritual world, that the Christ gave organs to so that the angel would be able to incarnate with the phantom as the operating principle of the life body.

So this was an angelic being in a human body, but the consciousness was kind of spacey. And then through all kinds of work that was done by Zarathustra, there was an exchange of a higher faculty of consciousness into that being. And then we get Jesus, growing until the baptism in the Jordan, when that ego of Zarathustra was taken away and because that physical body had been permeated for 30 years by the Phantom, it was possible to hold the energy of Christ.

That’s a tracing of a lot of ideas that Steiner gave. So the angelic part of that physical body that was holding the phantom could contain the energy of the I Being of the Christ.

And that then is the baptism in the Jordan. And then three years later, after wandering through the world looking for symptoms that the old mysteries contained the answer.  He finally had the experience of it not being there. So Steiner gives the picture that Christ Jesus went to his mother and said, I don’t get it.

And she said to him, well, you know, it’s really painful for me to tell you this, but it needs your sacrifice. And that’s when He got it. He got his mission, so to speak. It was all there, but He needed the feminine to quicken it. When we finally get to holy week, there’s this awakening in His Being of this great mission that “I have to die without having fallen.”

I have to do that for these people around me who could care less for this earth.   They’re in my father’s house selling doves. Can you imagine?

So that then is the death, a ritual death of an innocent being and the phantom is part of that death. And then in the gospels it says,” He gave up the ghost.”  When He gave up the ghost, he gave up that phantom, and it’s that phantom that he took into the earth to harrow hell.

And He placed the phantom into the earth.  The phantom of the physical body in the earth has no ash. It’s just pure salt, meaning it can go into solution without any quirks. That’s resurrection. It’s a very cool language.

So that’s why I thought the alchemy of Holy Week is a totally alchemical mystery of the salt of the phantom. It comes out of the ash of the unredeemed, fallen physical body, and that is a seed in the center of the earth that makes the earth have the potential to become all of that.

It’s like putting a grain of salt in a supersaturated solution of salt and suddenly the whole thing crystallizes. And what it will crystallize into is the new Sun.

And we humans will be the 10th hierarchy, who will be the spiritual beings who are the monitors and stewards of that Sun.  It will be the new Sun of a new cosmos, and we will be the ones who will be the managers of it. We will be the rectifiers of the next round of fallenness, because we will have learned from an angel through Christ how to do that.

It’s just such a beautiful picture of what Rudolf Steiner brings of this great mystery of Easter and what it means and what the potential is. But the difference between that and what we are given by organized religions is that organized religions say, “He’s done it so all you need to do is just sign on the line. And you’ll be saved.”

But, no, no, no. Rudolf Steiner tells us the  message is “I did it. You need to do it. I just did it as a kind of template of what you need to do.” So it’s not like the hotline to God.  That’s the difference. So the new mystery book is not written, because the book is about your life.

That’s the book of the new mysteries. That’s why the Pharisees were unhappy with Him because He was telling the people the kingdom is in you. It’s not in some book or an authority somewhere. It’s in the way you decide to look at the fallenness of your sense life, of how that works. And there’s no blame in this at all because this is a cosmic thing.

It’s just how much do you wish to suffer?  It’s like what St. Paul said in the letter to the Corinthians:  My strength is made perfect in my weakness.  He was preaching in the gulf of Coran, a mystery site near Delphi where the ancient priestesses would prophecy. Paul wrote to the Corinthians,  “That even if you speak with the tongues of angels, but you have not love…” In that letter he says that “because of the revelations I was receiving, I became exalted.” And the Lord sent a messenger of Satan to put a thorn in me, and I asked the Lord three times, “Could you take this from me? And the Lord said to me, I am giving you the power to do this if you call me to mind. And you should know that your strength is made perfect in your weakness.

This is the new mystery:  if you don’t do it, it’s not done.  And there’s no blame with that. It just means that you go back and sell some doves.

Go back to your business, go back to your field, that’s okay. But it’s not getting the work done. 

Exercise: The Gate of the Sun and Moon

So there’s a meditation that comes from an alchemical source.It’s in your handout in Figure 2.

This is a meditation to understand the issue of the phantom and the place of the phantom in the earth and in the future. And it’s called the gate of the sun and moon. And some of you know it, some of you don’t. I’ll explain how it works. In Figure 2, you can see a thing that looks like an orange; that’s the earth.

And the moon is rotating counterclockwise around the earth. Then there’s a little figure, and that is you. So you imagine the earth rising and looking down on the earth and then look out towards the rising sun of the East. Then you try to remember where the moon is. If the moon is full, that’s on the opposite side from the sun.

If the moon is dark, it’s on the same side of the sun, and that’s what you see there. You see the earth, the moon going around the earth. There’s a little man looking at the moon, going around the earth and to the right is the sun.  In alchemy there is a gate between the sun and the moon. You can learn to enter time consciously so that the elemental beings who move the planets, the spirits of the rotation of time, give to you a presentment of the qualities of time.

But in order to do that, you have to get away from Earth Time and understand that Earth Time is a huge convention. Get off the grid. So this is an exercise to lift your consciousness to the spot where you participate in the movement of time imaginatively in such a way that you can replicate this drama that I just described here of the phantom being brought from the sun, brought down to earth and placed there, and in the future.

This is called the Gate of the Sun and Moon. So you imagine looking at the earth and you try to imagine where in its orbit the moon is. That means you may have to learn a little astronomy, but it doesn’t hurt your brain at all. So you imagine where the moon is. You picture that. And if the moon is to the left, that is the full moon.

That gate is wide open. If the moon is to the right, it’s on the same side of the earth as the sun, but there’s still a space between that. So you imagine that you move away from the earth and go between the moon and the sun. Wherever the moon is, it’ll be on your left and the sun will be on your right – just organize space that way.

So as you do the  exercise, as you move through, imagine that you turn to your right and go behind the sun. That’s what you see in the diagram. So the little man moves from looking at the earth and the moon, moves between the moon and then goes around the sun. And on the right you see the little man down below the sun and the earth and the moon beyond you.

Imagine yourself behind the sun, looking at the relationship between the earth and the moon. In that position, then you look up and around and see the whole heavens with this drama of the earth and the sun and the moon in front of you. Now, I’ll go back to the first thing I read to you from Rudolf Steiner’s  “Christ and the Spiritual World”: The working together of thinking, feeling and willing has to be kept in order. Not, however, from all the planets, but only through the Sun, Moon, and Earth, so that through the interworking of Sun, Moon, and Earth, this is harmonious and is made fit for the harmonious cooperation of his three soul powers, this engenders the Virgin Sophia.

So we’re actually taking the Sun and the Moon in the Earth as teachers of this process in my imagination. But it’s not a random imagination because it’s based on the actual positions of the Sun and the Moon and the Earth. I have to do a little research to find out where that is. Go through the gate of the Sun and the Moon, I turn, I look at the Sun and then the Earth and the Moon, wherever that is, and then I look in my imagination, I see all the star realms behind it. I realize that the Sun, Moon and Earth are actually the source of my soul.

I look at the starry heaven of all Creation and in my soul, I imagine saying the great Rosicrucian mantra, Ex Deo Nascimur, out of God we are being born. I’m putting myself in the consciousness of the ordering of the creation from the whole realm of the zodiac into the realm of the earth and then the sun so I can understand what is the role of my soul in this? Ex Deo Nascimur, out of God we are continually being born, nascera: to be born.   That is step one. 

Then I imagine that there is a great being who emerges from the sun.  

Rudolph Steiner gives the picture that Christ was the Being of the Sun who was revered in the ancient times.  He was the great Sun Being, the Christ. But in order for the mystery of the redemption to happen, the Sun Being had to actually come to earth, live in a body of flesh, die in a body of flesh, and then become one with the spirit of the earth. So we imagine a Great Being coming from the sun and you see the Great Being and the small being are holding hands there. You follow the Sun Being down and you go behind the earth  so that the earth covers the sun. When you’re in that position, you’re in what is known as the Spiritual Sun.  The actual sun that we see with our senses has fallen.

So I see the earth blot out that sun, and I follow the Sun Being through Golgotha down into the earth, through the harrowing of hell and place a seed of a new sun in the center of the dark earth.

And then the inner mantra is, In Christo Morimur, in Christ we are dying, along with Christ, into the earth. When you give up the ghost, you take your vehicle and give it back to the earth. In Christo Morimur I watch Christ die into the earth as an imagination of what my soul has to experience, incarnating again and again. I’m watching myself die and each time I do, there’s a kind of a lesson learned there:   I thought it was the end of me, but now I see I’m going to  have to come back and deal with the person I disrespected and my other actions. So there we start to see karma. 

So, In Christo Morimur, I watch Christ as the Sun Being go into the earth and place in the inner core of earth, a seed of light of a Sun. So there I am in the darkness and that seed of light is the seed of the phantom, that is the seed of the human development of the senses to the point where they can release their senses from the bondage of matter.

This is just total alchemy. It’s my consciousness that changes the matter. It’s about consciousness. So that seed is the potential of humans to find in their sense experience the original form of the phantom, so that their consciousness frees itself up from ash and becomes more like the salt of a new world, the seed of a new world through sensation. I watch as the seed of light in the dark earth begins to make the dark earth transparent. Because matter is being sublimated by my imagination.  I watch as the earth becomes more transparent, the old sun starts to shine through the earth with a new blood filled with light. That new blood filled light, permeates the earth and it begins to become lighter and rosier. The rosy light of the new sun rising gives me a perception that even though I’m on the dark side, something that I am doing has something to do with what I’m looking at. Something that I am bringing to this is having something to do with the way the earth is changing.

This is climate change. Something you are doing has something to do with the way the earth is changing. It’s just the tip of the iceberg for that one. So as we become more aware of the fact that the earth is vulnerable to humans, to human activity, the earth will start to become treated more in a sacred manner because we’ll realize it’s not a resource.

It’s a being.

It’s a living being and its consciousness includes us, our consciousness, because we will be the stewards of the new sun.  But we need to understand that that action is through the Holy Spirit. So that is what is in the third part of the diagram. There you see the sun shining through the earth. The earth actually becomes the sun.

Humans will observe it, but then behind them in the spiritual sun, in the darkness, they have a perception that there is a being there of the Holy Spirit who is shining on their Sophianic effort to lift to wisdom. Rudolf Steiner says, Sophia will be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and released from Lucifer’s Prison of lies, through our activity.

We will lift human wisdom back into holy wisdom, late and slow, but it’s in the program.  When that happens, we will have the experience of redeeming Sophia and in a very unusual turn of events, Rudolph Steiner said, Lucifer becomes the Holy Spirit. Lucifer will be purged of his pride by our effort to redeem fallenness that he has put into our sensation.

Ahriman will receive the ash that we push out of the creation to make a little seed of evil, to allow the weakness to be perfected into strength in the new universe. It’s a beautiful thing. This is in Steiner’s work, but it’s in pieces in many other places.  Steiner was bringing it in through inspiration.  But now we have all the books and we just have to use thinking to pull it out. Otherwise, it just becomes sheet music, just singing in the choir even though you don’t get it.  It’s okay to not get it, but it’s better to try to get it, isn’t it? You feel a lot stupider when you try to get it, but your wisdom will be perfected in your ignorance.

This meditation comes out of my questioning for years:  What is Christ in the etheric? And what is the human phantom? For years, I tried to understand that. I looked at Goethe and I looked at Steiner. There’s a lot written about the etheric by other writers and science, but it actually is a theological question.

And then it has really to do with this problem of fundamentalism. I can’t say it often enough, that fundamentalism simply means I have my opinion and it’s more correct than yours. So I form a judgment of you, even though I have no idea what’s going on, and I put that judgment out on you, unconsciously, to scratch an itch that I have about how I don’t feel good about something I’m doing, something that I’m not sure about.

And it is exacerbated and amplified by the media. So the human soul has this great power in it of the phantom. The seed of the phantom to be able to change, to tell the mountain to get up and go jump in the lake. That’s our birthright given to us through the deed of Christ on Golgotha and through the resurrection.

The resurrection proved that the Phantom lives and that the Phantom is in us. Rudolf Steiner is very clear:  other people came back from the dead, but only one person came back from the dead through the action of the Phantom. The other people that came back from the dead were not mentioned in the Old Testament as people who were going to come back from the dead.

The Old Testament was always pointing at Osiris and Orpheus, and all the pictures of these beings that have to come down and go into a cave and get trashed and then come back again. They’re all Christ pictures of his deed.  The deed to come back and be in a body and die in a body. But the only place I’ve ever experienced the rationale for the Phantom is in the work of Rudolf Steiner.

And with that imagination, Holy Week makes so much more sense. This actually is the redemption. So that’s why I brought to you the Gnostic Gospels and this picture of Pistis Sophia, because they were all talking about this problem. But it’s true, the genius of Rudolf Steiner is that he named it and said: This is the work that Christ did to bring the phantom, to put the phantom into the seed in the center of the earth where the magicians are working so that humans can then redeem the earth as the spirit of Christ.

Glyph Exercise – Sublimation