Given to the Sacramento Anthroposophical Branch, this lecture explores the mystery of the “phantom” in anthroposophy, a spiritual seed of the future human being preserved from “the Fall” and placed in the Earth by Christ. Through the lens of Rudolf Steiner’s work, Dennis shares how humanity’s task today is to resurrect the fallen physical body using moral imagination and creative will.

From alchemical wisdom to the role of the elements and ethers, he shows how Christ became the “Lord of the Elements” and how the “electric double”, a shadow version of life through technology, challenges our inner development. Drawing on insights from Steiner, Wolfgang Pauli, and Carl Jung, this talk invites participants to reclaim their sense life through conscious image work, art, and daily aesthetic practice as a path toward spiritual freedom.

Transcription

Good evening, this subject is something I’ve been thinking about for an awful long while. I think it was close to 18 years ago, I was trying to recall, I was in a study group with René Querido over at Gail Davis’s house, and as a greenhorn anthroposophist, I asked Renee, “What’s the phantom?” And he gave me one of these answers, “Come back in about 15 years and we’ll talk”. One of those. And he was right because it’s been a lifelong question for me, what the phantom is, what Rudolf Steiner meant by the human phantom. And I’d like to bring that as an idea because that is really the center of an understanding of how Christ became the Lord of the Elements. That there’s something in the elemental world, there is a, we could say a cosmic seed or a transcendent seed point, [00:01:00] or we could even say an attractor for forces from the cosmos.

That has to do with the relationship between the divine and the human. It’s a kind of focal point, a lens, if you will, for energies into human beings. And the particular age that we live in has the task of preparing, or I could even say to continue the metaphor, of grinding that lens, of polishing it, of creating a condition in between the divine and the human, where there is a ready portal for flow between human beings and the divine.

It used to be that was the case, when people lived closer to the divine realm, but now because of the falling of consciousness and the struggle [00:02:00] with materialism, it’s very difficult for people to find that interface point. And that interface point is in the center of the earth and it was placed there by Christ on Holy Saturday.

It’s a seed. It’s a seed of a future human being and that seed of the New Adam of what we could call the spirit embryo, as the Rosicrucians called it, the building of the temple of the new Jerusalem. It’s all a kind of code language of the eventual apotheosis of the human being.

Apotheosis means the path back to the divine. And so in Anthroposophy, there is this task especially in this age, of [00:03:00] picking up the thread from the work of Christian Rosenkreutz. The work of Christian Rosenkreutz is to prepare souls through imaginative cognition to begin the work of mani.

If the Rosicrucian impulse in Anthroposophy doesn’t flower, then mani, the students of mani will not be able to love the evil good. And the horse and the cart should be in the right relationship. We could say we need to get our ducks in a row because the manichaeism is a very inspired high consciousness, but it needs to be grounded in a very clear perception of how the physical world has fallen into a corpse.

And that is the [00:04:00] task of Christian Rosenkreutz to teach people how to resurrect the corpse. And so I’d like to use that as a theme tonight to look at and give you some quotes from Rudolf Steiner and other sources about this issue of the resurrecting of the corpse that has fallen out of the divine realm.

So here on the board, I’ve made an outline that’s familiar to you if you’re an anthroposophist, the Father God, the Son God, the Holy Spirit, the Seraphim, Cherubim Thrones, Kyriotetes, Dynamis that comes from Dionysius the Areopagite through the work of John Scotus Eriugena, and then into the work of Rudolf Steiner as a picture of what we could call a step down transformation of the divine will down into human existence. This is the outline of what we could call Old Saturn.

But if you look at it, what I’ve done here next to [00:05:00] Dynamis, I’ve put the physical body because the physical body, the life body, the soul body, the I being the manasic body, the buddhistic stick body and the spirit man, Atman, those are the seven conditions of soul that a human falls into when they start to become a human and wish to walk on the path.

And if we took that as an outline, those seven bodies, and we put that in the context of the hierarchies, we could see that the Dynamis could represent, in one instance (there are a lot of ways to work this, of course) the physical body, the Kyriotetes, etheric, et cetera. Until we get the sun, the highest member of the sun, Christ, the Spirit man of sun is his highest member because that’s what he came back to teach us how to do that, and his lowest member is the [00:06:00] consciousness of the Dynamis. I could say that’s the equivalent of a physical body in a human. So in that condition, the Dynamis, their task is to bring life through motion.

So we could say the destiny of the Christ being was to incarnate and come down. And the lowest member of that being was to then be the being to bring life. To take the death force of the fall and to turn it back around by raying out into the cosmos, life.

So there’s a quote from Rudolf Steiner: the role of the Christ being is to stream forces of life, into the creation through the being’s lowest member, buddi or spiritualized ether body.

Okay, so buddi [00:07:00] comes down. This is the realm of the zodiac, the wandering zodiac as Christ. So Christ from the beginning had this destiny to bring to human life, life. But when we want to understand what life is, there was a kind of a problem with it.

So over here I’ve made a diagram of what are down below, fire, air, water, and earth, the elements and warmth, light, number, and life, the ether.

Now in Alchemy, the idea is, and this comes from Occult Science also, that during Old Saturn, the Archai were in their human condition and their bodies were composed completely of warmth. So their physical body was composed of warmth. And then [00:08:00] the Archai, Rudolf Steiner describes them as the spirits of darkness, in the hierarchies of the Archai, there was a splitting on Old Saturn due to them holding onto sense impressions and having the perception that instead of reflecting the sense impressions back to the beings of the cosmos, they held some of that experience of sensation to themselves and separated from the creation. They represent, and Rudolf Steiner calls that, the fall of the spirits of darkness and at that time there was a group of Archai who took a path down and they then became the hierarchy known as Azura. So there was a splitting in a very high level in the spiritual world of beings that were progressive and beings that kind of held [00:09:00] back on their progression in order to hold onto something.

And what that created in the ether of the warmth was the shadow of the warmth, or we could call the salt of the warmth, the corpse of the warmth, which we know as humans as fire. Fire is the shadow of warmth. It’s the manifestation of potential for warmth, and that’s an alchemical idea.

And then the next round on the Old Sun the Archangels were in their human condition and their bodies were composed of light, and that allowed the sun to begin to shine. And they inherited this dilemma of the falling and they had some help from the Seraphims in order to overcome it, but there was a rebellion and the seed was set of a downward stream as [00:10:00] well as an upward stream. So while the ethers were going from warmth to light to number, the elements are going from fire to air to water.

So fire is the shadow of warmth. Air is the shadow of light. That’s what an alchemist would say. It’s the manifestation of light. And if you look in physics today, you can start to see these things. This is the way physicists are beginning to talk about things. I’m gonna read you something from Wolfgang Pauli as part of the work here .

Because these kinds of ideas are not unknown to scientists today. It’s just that they don’t ascribe being-hood. Although this comment from Pauli, who’s the father of quantum theory, he talks about that issue of the problem in science, of not recognizing “being”.

[00:11:00] Pretty interesting.

So on the moon, the Angels were in their human condition and they had the experience of number, chemistry, tone, sound, as an ether. And that falls then into what on earth we call water. The great universal solvent, the great universal chemist that divides and unites and divides and unites and divides and unites in orders and ratios that eventually sets up things like the periodic table, the rotation of the elements, the number ether, the chemical ether, the tone ether, the sound ether, and then the water.

Now, we could say that warmth is rarefied fire, light is rarefied warmth, number or tone is [00:12:00] rarefied light, and life is rarefied all of these. So there as we go up in ether, we’re getting more and more rarefied, and as we go down in elements, we’re getting more and more manifest.

So rarefication in these hierarchies of the Archai, the Archangels and the Angels, there’s a guiding quality of that rarefication. Just get more rare. Just get more rare. Rudolf Steiner gives that quality a name…

[writes on board]Lucifer

… “just get more rare”.

So in the progression of the elements through the evolution, there’s this kind of Lucifer quality in the ether spheres until, [00:13:00] and you can find this in Occult Science, until we get to earth evolution. And there’s an interesting picture that Rudolf Steiner gives around earth evolution, that the sphere that began the earth evolution was not a sphere like it was for Saturn, a sphere of warmth. After the pralaya, there was another unfolding. And the way he puts it is that sphere that started earth evolution did not start with the warmth, it started with life because by the time we get up into life and we have the earth element appearing on earth, the creation has moved away from the realm of Lucifer and into the realm of the Prince of the Earth, the Lord of Matter: [00:14:00] Ahriman.

So at that time, it was a kind of bringing together of all these rarefied forms and the life ether is a composition of warmth and light and tone. So there’s a kind of reversing there that he talks about as things come closer to earth incarnation. The torch is passed from the Luciferic consciousness into a consciousness of condensation. And this then creates the condition of matter because what falls out of life is stuff and we get then the particular condition on earth.

So I’d like to read to you now some quotes. I’ve got some quotes from [00:15:00] the Leading Thoughts and other places to try to make a little picture of how Steiner saw this condition, and then what can we do about it?

So this is Leading Thought 112:

At the present time when Michael directs his spiritual eyes to the earth, he sees a fact that the human being during life on earth has a world around him, in which the working out of the divine spiritual no longer appears directly, but only something that has remained over as the result of its working.

We may say that the human sees only the accomplished work of the divine spiritual. To the human the divine is manifest in the forms and processes of nature, but is no longer in-dwelling as a living principle.

That’s just what I described.

Nature, everywhere around us is an image of divine [00:16:00] working. Due to the working of Michael, the human being lives as a being permeated by God in a world that is no longer permeated by God.

That’s a doozy right there. Okay?

So due to the work of Michael, the human being lives as a being permeated by God in a world that is no longer permeated by God. Humanity will evolve into a new world evolution. The divine being that will thus shine forth through humanity will no longer be the same divine being that was once the cosmos.

This is a big.

In its passage through humanity, the divine spiritual will come to a realization of being that it could not manifest before.

This is Leading Thought 165 to 167:

It is not permissible for the spiritual life of the West to suppress the ego in [00:17:00] order to know. It must bring the I, the ego I, the I-being to the perception of the spiritual. This cannot take place if we penetrate from the world of the senses to the world of rhythm, and so experience in the rhythm, only the processes in which the physical becomes spiritual. Rather, we must find the sphere of the spirit world that reveals itself in rhythm.

Two things are therefore possible. First, the experience of the physical and the rhythmical element as the physical becomes what we could call half spiritual. This is an older path, one not to be followed any longer at the present time.

This is like mantra, repetition of chanting and mantra and things like that. This is an older path.

Secondly, the experience of the spirit world that possesses as its sphere the cosmic rhythm within man and without him, just as man’s sphere is the earthly world with its physical beings and [00:18:00] processes. To the spiritual world belongs everything that takes place at the present cosmic moment through Michael.

A spirit such as Michael brings that which otherwise would lie in the Luciferic sphere, into the purely human evolution, which is not influenced by Lucifer by choosing the world of rhythm for his dwelling place.

That’s Michael lives in rhythm.

So these ideas point to a kind of falling. The ethers into the elements, but then the elements fall into the hands of Ahriman and humanity starts a downward path following into the elements with the sense experience being permeated by the illusion of a separate self. When [00:19:00] in reality everything in the world is permeated with the divine, but because our eyes and our ears and our smell has been filled with matter, our experience of the sense world is one of separation rather than unity.

We’re pretty sure that you’re looking at some guy here who is not you. That’s a very strong certitude and it can’t be shaken because it’s, we say “real”.

Spiritual reality is that, what we have in common in our soul can be explored with each other and as that happens, we grow in empathy for each other. That’s also real, but it is a higher kind of sense. It’s up there in the manas, buddi and atma body, and not down in our elemental body. [00:20:00]

Our elemental body is peopled by beings, Rudolf Steiner calls them elementals, who have a consciousness that is directed by our will. And the reason is they don’t have a consciousness other than a consciousness of serving a higher will. And the higher will they serve is the Ahrimanic world of matter until humans enter in and release them from that bondage.

However, if humans are not aware that they’re there, humans have no ability to release them from their bondage. You simply see “stuff”.

So Rudolf Steiner, if you actually read what he talks about as the elemental world, it’s scary. We’re speaking, we’re creating elementals, we’re digesting, we’re creating elementals. We’re breathing, we’re creating elementals. We are [00:21:00] seeing, we’re creating elementals.

It’s through our sense activity that the true world of the divine that is hidden in the world as it’s presented to us, is really still permeated by the divine. But we have created out of our sense experience, the abiding experience, that it is not divine, it is just stuff. And that has created a little hierarchy of beings that used to serve the higher beings, but now have been attached to humans through habit. Habits of seeing, habits of hearing, habits of touching, habits of tasting.

We tear elementals out of their archetypal situation and move them into a different kind of relationship. And there still absolutely are [00:22:00] elementals who are simply serving the higher hierarchies in the natural world, but there are whole groups of elementals that we capture in our bodies that get caught in a kind of little strange place that the hierarchies couldn’t imagine when they were going through their human evolution.

So in our human evolution as humans now our task is to deal with matter because matter and the life element are what is happening on earth.

So here we get to the issue of the phantom and what Rudolf Steiner calls the electric double.

So I’ll read a quote, it’s from Occult Science: an Outline:

Human phantoms are nothing but primal light images of the sense organs that were created on Old Saturn.[00:23:00]

The sense organs then are the fruit of the activity of the spirits of fire, the Archangels. Their task is to experience: that because of my environment, I exist. The spirits of fire, the Archangels, must interact with the spirits of love, the Seraphim, so that the events of Old Saturn can arise as the spirits of fire, as images.

In that drama, the Archangels inherited this kind of problem that when they had an inner image, like the fallen Archai said, “I’m separate from that thing”. The Archangels inherited that as a problematic thing in their existence, and they overcame it because the Seraphim gave them love.

So when the Seraphim gave them love, they could interact with the spirits of love so that the events of Old Saturn could rise in them as images, but they could interact [00:24:00] with them, instead of just having them and saying, “that’s not that’s not me”. They could begin to have the experience of the possibility of the interaction.

The Seraphim allowed this to happen by reflecting the events of Old Saturn selflessly for the Archangels.

That was outside the plan because the way Steiner puts it, the Seraphim actually had nothing to do with human evolution because they had evolved so high, they didn’t have any connection, but they were so taken with the deed that the Archangels were doing, that they decided to enter in.

It’s a beautiful picture.

And they brought to the Archangels the ability not to be trapped by the inner image, but to begin to interact with it a bit, to reflect it back out of love.

And then the Angels inherited again, what the Archai did, but they also inherited what the Seraphim had done for [00:25:00] the Archangels, and the Angels then regulate life processes within the human phantoms so that they come into harmony with outer cosmic processes. This is the analogy of the endocrine secretions or the glandular body, we could say the life body.

So the Angels deal with the life body by creating pictures in it that we interact with, that we can actually control, but we don’t have control over it because we lost that back at the beginning. But the Angels have created a possibility for that to happen. But we must do it. Unless we do it, unless we control the inner pictures the inner pictures control us. And that’s where we go from the Phantom, Rudolf Steiner said in the original creation, it was understood that this was going to happen [00:26:00] because the purpose of all this is that a hierarchy would develop, that would have freedom from the cosmos. That’s us. And the purpose of that is to have a greater cosmos.

Goethe said it best, I think, “What would a God be who only pushed things around from the outside?”

So the fact that there was a possibility of freedom of a hierarchy, not having to abide by cosmic law, that freedom created this separating and the illusion of a separate self. It was understood in the lodge of the Father God and the lodge of the higher Gods, as Steiner puts it, that was about to happen.

So a part of the original plan of the sense body that was to be part of all these beings, their sense [00:27:00] body, was taken away and held and didn’t go through the fall. And it was a sense body in which the complete order of the cosmos was perfectly reflected. It’s as if we could wake up and everything we saw or taste or smelt or heard was simply the singing of the divine, the harmony of the spheres. When we heard somebody speak, it would be angels singing. When we saw dew on the grass, it’d be the Angels coming and touching the grass and bringing the infinitely distant, you know, kind of what we were trying to get at in the 1960’s but we didn’t quite get there. Yeah, that kind of consciousness. That the world was made and there was nothing that was not made [00:28:00] by the maker.

That’s the consciousness of the phantom, the sense life of the phantom. And that quality of the sense life was a little bit held off, so it didn’t go into the fall. It didn’t go through this drama of coming down and being separate and having anxiety and on and on….

And it was held until humanity got to the spot where they came under the influence of the Ahrimanic deception and things had fallen so deeply that there needed to be a being from a very high place, come down through and go into a body of flesh, into matter, and change the body of flesh and transform it in such a way that the phantom could once again be part of the sense experience for humanity. [00:29:00] That’s the seed that Christ put in the Earth on Holy Saturday. It’s called the Phantom.

Took me 25 years to find that out, but it’s changed my life. So that seed is the goal of the Rosicrucian work because in order to get that seed and nurture it, I have to change my sense experiences, because they represent a total falling each time I use them.

I see in the world nothing but corpses and I have to resurrect that. I resurrect them by learning to love people and often it takes a long while to do that. I have to work at [00:30:00] awakening in my sense experience, something that allows me to listen into the soul of another person, to see in an older person how they looked when they were three or four years old. To see what Goethe called “their becoming”, they’re unfolding rather than what they have become. And in order to do that, I have to struggle against the a kind of shadow that Ahriman has created of that phantom. Because that phantom represents the freedom that I have to see the divine in the sense world as an image that I interact with in my inner life. That’s called Rosicrucian meditation.

And when I interact with images that I am creating and dissolving, then that’s the symbolic consciousness. [00:31:00] I create a liaison to beings on the other side of the threshold through consciously working to change my inner imagery. The power of this and the potential of the phantom to actually be the goal of future human evolution did not escape the recognizance of Ahriman, so Ahriman has created a capacity to take what used to be the life force in the cosmos and have it fall into what we call electricity.

Electricity then is a corpse of the life. That’s why people who study life and electricity think, oh yeah, there’s electricity in the human body. But if you really wanna have a picture of that read Ernst Lears Man or Matter, where he makes a distinction between [00:32:00] primary electricity, which is static electricity and secondary electricity, which is derived electricity. All of our apparatus work with derived electricity in which the life is taken from the sphere of the earth and pumped through devices or through the air.

That’s what’s called the electric double, and it’s used to create pictures, and then humans take the pictures in and have a difficult time determining what is real and what is only a picture.

It’s pretty big issue.

From Jesus to Christ, Lecture Six: [00:33:00] The observation of the physical human body in itself belongs to the most difficult clairvoyant problem. It’s the hardest of all problems is to actually see the human body as it really is. Suppose we allow the external world to perform on man the experiment, which is similar to the disintegration of water into hydrogen and oxygen. In death this experiment is performed by the great world upon the human. When we see how a man lays aside his physical body, but does he really lay aside his physical body? The question seems absurd for what could be clearer than the apparent fact that at death man lays aside his physical body.

What is it that he lays aside? It is something no longer imbued with the physical body’s most important possession during its life, it’s Form.

But this is form with a capital F, [00:34:00] and we can associate this form with the hierarchy of the Exusai, the spirits of form. This is form as a verb, form as an activity. Form, that’s the most important part of the physical body is it’s form. We could say, it’s “Forming”, the activity of the form, the form we see as an activity.

Steiner goes on to describe the difference here:

the most important possession of the human during life is the form of the physical body. Directly after death, the form begins to withdraw from the dead body, we are left with decaying substances, no longer characterized by the living form. The body laid aside is composed of substances and [00:35:00] elements which we can trace also in nature. In a natural order of things they would not produce a human form. Try as you will, you need to start with some stuff in order to get things to happen.

So that is also a part of the electric double, or what we could call the culture of the simulacrum, the simulated being.

Alchemist always insisted that the human body really consists of the same substance that constitutes the perfectly transparent, crystal- clear “philosopher’s stone”. The physical body is itself entirely transparent, and it is the Luciferic forces in men that have brought him to the non-transparent state and placed him before us so that he is opaque and tangible.

That’s this falling of [00:36:00] the ethers into elements.

And she will understand that man has become the being who takes up external substances and forces of the earth, which are given off again at death. Only because Lucifer tempted him and certain forces were poured into his astral body. It follows that because the ego entered into connection with the physical etheric and astral bodies under the influence of Lucifer, man became what he is on earth and otherwise would not have become the bearer of a visible earthly organism.

So the true physical body is transparent. It’s like a diamond. That’s the philosopher’s stone.

It’s made up of the forms, the action, we could say the unsounded sound that is there before we make it visible with [00:37:00] Eurythmy.

The idea of the movement that results in the form.

That’s the philosopher’s stone, and that is the structure of the phantom in its purest form. And that when we all evolve at the end of time and we all are in Atma consciousness, that’s what our physical body will be. It’ll be the diamond, it’ll be the great being on the other side of the beyond the beyond.

This is what the Diamond Sutra is all about in Buddhism. It’s about this future diamond body, the future philosopher stone, when the human physical body picks up the phantom. The seed phantom, the seed in the center of the earth can then expand.

[00:38:00] Now, during Steiner’s time, there was a huge explosion in science having to do with Newtonian materialism. So the science work at that time got to a spot in the 1800s where everything was matter and matter. But as the physicists started working and they started to have devices that became a little more sophisticated, they start to understand that there was a dimension to matter where things started to look a little different. Through things like integral calculus and other forms of high level equations, they were able to see that there were particles within particles and that the particles actually were sometimes forces, sometimes particles. They acted like waves and they acted like particles and they began to understand what today we call quantum.

Understand that there’s another [00:39:00] dimension when you start to get smaller. There’s a whole other world down there that kind of defies what we normally hold to be what we call the physical. And yet science being what it was, they had to do that kind of with formula for electromagnetic forces, Maxwell’s theorems and things like that. So they were exploring this world, but they were still in the shadow world.

There was a physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, who lived in Zurich and was a brilliant theoretician and founded many of the fundamental laws of quantum physics, but as he started to mature in his life as a young very brash, brilliant young man, but as he started to mature, he started to have emotional problems, deep depressions and things started to come flood in on him and eventually he came in contact with Carl Jung. [00:40:00] And it turned out that Carl Jung at this time had reached a kind of limit in his work because he was becoming disenchanted with psychology because he felt it didn’t have a good grounding in science.

Wolfgang Pauli was becoming disenchanted with physics because he felt it was driving him into a psychological cul-de-sac. This was an interesting meeting.

So these two over many years corresponded they lived not far from each other and they would have dinner often and correspond. Jung was delighted to find a physicist who could listen to his theories and try to interpret that in the context of contemporary cutting edge science. And Pauli was delighted in having Jung as a collaborator in taking him through these [00:41:00] deep problems.

Pauli kept having dreams. And he couldn’t understand the dreams. And in the dreams there were women coming and giving him like clocks with only three numbers on ’em and swinging pendulums and telling him about his theorems and writing theorems on the board.

They were all, he was actually his inner work, Pauli’s inner life was trying to correct the incredible rigidity of the harmonic science that he was working with. So Jung was able to help Pauli come in contact with the soul forces that were actually part of his work. And Pauli was able to help Jung come in contact with some of the ideas of going into the deeper levels of atomic structure.

Because it was a revolution that was happening away from what is the physicalthat used to be just stuff. Physical was starting to change into things.

One of the collaborators with Pauli was Werner [00:42:00] Heisenberg, who was the guy who developed uncertainty theory. He proved through mathematics that you can’t prove anything. This is one of the bases of modern science, modern physical science.

Anyway. So physical science is getting to the spot where it’s running out of paradigms, it gets smaller and smaller, and it’s running into consciousness. It’s running out of stuff.

So I’m gonna read you, I just finished a book about Jung and Pauli. And in there Pauli was very interested in an argument that was between flood the Alchemist and Kepler back in 1600-1700s. Kepler’s mathematics was based on his idea that a sphere was a picture of the Trinity, and the center was the [00:43:00] Father God, and the radius was the Son, and the circumference was the Holy Spirit.

Through Kepler’s entire life, that was a picture that he just kept returning to when he wanted to try to understand the sacred geometry of the world. The center was the Father, the radius was the Son, and the Holy Spirit was the circumference, but it was based on the Trinity.

Flood worked with the alchemical principle of the Quaternity, of the four. And all through time there were the advocates of the three is where it all is. And there were advocates of the four where it all is. And there was this mystical number 137, that both Jung and Pauli had in common. That is multiples of three and four taken to very bizarre relationships. It’s a universal constant in the cosmos, the number 1/137, but no one knows what it means [00:44:00] and everybody in these circles is trying to figure it out, but no one has able to figure out what one over 137 means.

So here’s a comment that Wolfgang Pauli wrote about the problem of three as a mathematical idea and four, and it points at what I would like to bring as a solution for the dilemma of the electric double.

The polemic between Flood and Kepler is still of significance to modern man.

This is not an anthroposophists here. This is a physicist.

An important pointer is to be found in Flood’s, criticism of Kepler, that “Mr. Kepler, you force me to defend the dignity of the Quaternity. For modern men, this is a symbol of a completeness of experience, which is not possible with the scientific method of observation as it stands.

Thesis /antithesis/ synthesis, phenomenon/ experiment/ result = [00:45:00] trinity.

The empirical method.

An attempt must be made to recognize the significance of the scientific stage of knowledge for the development of scientific ideas by supplementing the investigation of the scientific knowledge or insight towards the outside with an investigation directed inward.

That is insight towards the inside. This is a cutting edge physicist.

The former process is devoted to adapting our knowledge of external objects. The latter should bring to light the archetypal images used in the creation of our scientific concepts. Only by combining both these directions, will our research be a complete understanding. We have now natural sciences, but we no longer have a scientific picture of the world. This very circumstance, however, should make it easier to move towards a [00:46:00] unified concept of the entire cosmos, of which the natural sciences are only a part. Modern quantum physics comes closer to the Quaternity point of view, which was so violently opposed to the natural science that was germinating in the 17th century, to the extent that it takes into greater consideration the role of the observer in physics. That is the case in classical physics.

This is Goethe.

Alchemy furnishes instructive examples of the problem as to how the process of knowing is connected with the religious experience of transmutation undergone by him who acquires knowledge.

That is so beautiful.

Alchemy furnishes instructive examples of the problem as to how the process of knowing [epistemology] is connected with the religious experience of transmutation undergone by him who acquires the knowledge. It transcends natural [00:47:00] science and can be comprehended only through symbols which both express the emotional feeling aspect of the experience and stand in vital relationship to the sum total of contemporary knowledge and the actual process of cognition.

Precisely because in our times, the possibility of such symbolism has become an alien idea, it may be considered especially interesting to examine another age to which the concept of what is now called classic scientific mechanics were foreign.

Meaning the milieu that Steiner was trying to resurrect through most of the sciences that he was bringing.

But which permits us to prove the existence of symbols that had simultaneously a religious and a scientific function.

Pretty good. Yeah? So this leads us then to a great deal that is in anthroposophy of [00:48:00] the quality of being that stands behind is something in the world, or stands behind an idea like the cherubim or an angel, which if we’re not careful, becomes just a that. It becomes a placeholder. What’s an angel? And instead of having the experience of the Angel, we have a memory of the concept of an angel, and that then creates a conflict because I, when we speak about it we don’t speak out of experience, we speak out of remembered things. And the remembered things are the corpses of experience. They are the fallenness. And that’s where [00:49:00] the alchemist said, when I first begin to work with a picture from nature, it’s just what they would call a sign.

It’s just pointing to something saying there’s something here over here. And if I work with the sign and I begin to understand it in a knowledge way, I penetrate to the knowledge of it. I begin to experience that it has more dimensions than I can hold in my mind at one time.

The sign begins to take on a quality of being. I then can form images of that thing going through the changes that it makes in these different aspects of it, different dimensions of it. And what I’m doing is using my own consciousness to resurrect through imagery, the sign. [00:50:00] It then begins to have the quality of what an alchemist would call a symbol or an icon.

Now in our world, in the computer world, an icon is a doorway to information. But that’s a shadow. In the world of the 17th century and 16th century, an icon was a door to a being.

And today, in today’s world, many of the devices we have are really just shadows and corpses of what used to be esoteric faculties. So your cell phone is clairaudience, but you all you need is plastic to make it work and not 20 years of meditation. [00:51:00] Yeah?

And it’s my understanding that those are the gifts rudolf Steiner talked about that Ahriman would give to people in the future. They would have kind of instant clairaudience. Or instant clairvoyance.

And so that consciousness that a person takes a sign from the world and works with it and starts to move it inwardly creates in the will of a person flow through that sign until it becomes a symbol. That symbol is actually an attractor for a being who lives on the other side of the threshold that becomes interested in the movements of the mind of a member of the 10th hierarchy.

So the quality of the imagery that is presented is [00:52:00] very important. Whether or not I can grasp it and move with it in my soul is a whole question of creative will. If it’s an image that I can’t understand, like a gazillion images that we have in the media, my will gets thwarted in my ability to penetrate to the being.

I eventually get to a spot where I stop wanting to penetrate to the being and accept the image as a shadow of a being. It stands for a being rather than being a being. And it’s a very critical difference. It’s a critical difference of the nature of the [00:53:00] will in the forming and the dissolving of an image.

So when I take things from the natural world and I work them in the natural world, I create a kind of liaison, a rhythm between my waking and my sleeping and my waking and my sleeping, and that rhythm is then we just heard the substance of that work of Michael. I begin to approach a threshold where I feel a collaborative movement in my will, rather than a sleeping quality in my will.

The images that I take in do not just put me to sleep. I actually have to engage them and work with them and listen to them as they morph in my mind. If I did this all the time, I’d probably be a very strange [00:54:00] person, but if I don’t set aside a certain time of day where I can withdraw from the constant barrage of imagery and take an image consciously into myself and move it in a way that allows me to participate in its becoming, then I don’t build in myself an organ of perception for the quality of the movement of the being.

When I can feel like I’m in contact with a being and I’m working back and forth, that is what I understand to be Imagination (with a capital I). And that is the purpose of the Rosicrucian stream in Anthroposophy. The work of Christian Rosenkreutz is to develop an active imagination that is precise, yet fluid. Has to be fluid [00:55:00] as it can be, but precise.

Precise, not in each picture, but in the morphology of the pictures, in the movement of the pictures, in the rhythm of the pictures, in the sequencing of the pictures. And that’s just where the greatest attack is in sequencing of pictures, because all the media is sequencing of pictures.

So it’s not saying don’t do media. But if I do media and I don’t take a couple minutes a day to build a seed in myself, then all that’s running is the Luci/Ari [Lucifer and Ahriman] Double Team show and I always say they are the only double team beings you have to really watch out for on the court. And that’s us.

We’re being double teamed because we have great potential.

[00:56:00] So I talked to Dr. Paul Scharf, who some of you know. Dr. Scharf was a student of Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, a brilliant alchemist himself, a physician, entrepreneur, started the fellowship community in Spring Valley. And, his comment to me was what the goal of alchemy is for the future.

What is this Rosicrucian alchemical thing? What is the real goal of it? And he told me that the goal of the alchemist, especially out of the work of Christian Rosenkreutz is to develop a capacity to interact with the image of the mother and child.

Here’s a example I just brought her in. This is my present art form. Little Madonna mother and child. It’s called a Yakut figure. That’s where I’m gonna go. I’m [00:57:00] gonna read from The New Isis – Symbol of the Role of Christ as Lord of the Elementals.

This is from the New Isis by Rudolf Steiner:

Osiris is on the one hand, the representative of the sun powers after having passed through death. He is in various places simultaneously, the forest, which matures everything that grows out of the earth. The ancient Egyptian sage is quick to imagine how the powers that shine down to us from the sun enter the earth and become part of the earth, and how as sun powers buried in the earth, they hand over once more to man what matures out of the earth for the Egyptians Osiris was a kind of representative of the Christ that had not yet appeared among humans.

They looked upon Osiris as the sun being. But they imagine that this sun being had disappeared and must be found again. The Christ who has now [00:58:00] passed through the mystery of Golgatha came down from spiritual heights and connected himself with the Earth. He’s present. He exists. Jesus was not only born once at Bethlehem, but is born continually.

In other words, he remains with the life of the earth. The Christ and what he means for us cannot be lost. Christ is the spirit of the earth forever. My dear friends, it is not the Osiris, but the Isis legend that has to be fulfilled in our time. We cannot lose the Christ and what he gives because he is one with the earth.

But we can lose, and we have lost that which we see portrayed by the side of Osirus, Isis the mother of [00:59:00] the savior, the divine wisdom, the divine Sophia, the purified soul.

If we wish to renew the Isis legend, we cannot take it from the form in which it has been transmitted to us. No, my dear friends, we must somehow find the Isis legend again on the content of the Isis mystery, but we must form it out of imagination suited to our own times. An understanding will carry again for the eternal cosmic truths, when we learn to create in the world of imagination. We must find the true Isis legend out of imagination.

We must bear in mind that Lucifer is the power who wants to hold back the world picture at an earlier stage. Lucifer is the power that tries to bring into the modern world conception that which existed in earlier stages of evolution. He tries [01:00:00] to give permanence to that which existed in earlier periods. All that was moral in earlier periods also exists of course today. But Lucifer strives to sever the moral forces, the significance of which is that they are there in the present working as seeds for the future.

Lucifer strives to sever all moral forces from the present world picture.

Such chewy stuff.

He only allows the laws of nature the necessary and natural aspect to appear in this world picture. Thus, the impoverished human being of modern times possesses a wisdom of the world in which the stars move according to a purely mechanical necessity, devoid of morality, so that the moral meaning of the world’s order cannot be found in their movements.

The modern man, if he wishes to understand things must imagine that Lucifer appears to him [01:01:00] in the sunshine and in the light of the stars, in the movement of the planets and of the moon. The world conception of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler is a Luciferic conception, just because it is in keeping with our Ahrimanic forces of knowledge, its content…

Please note the distinction

…its content is a Luciferic one, but its method is Ahrimanic. Lucifer carried the Isis being, the divine wisdom who he had killed, out into the world’s spaces. He sunk her into the world’s ocean. When we look out into this ocean, we see the stars moving only according to mathematical lines. Then we see the grave of the world’s spiritual essence for the divine Sophia, the successor of Isis, is then dead. We must give new form to this legend for it sets forth the truth of our times. We must speak of the dead and lost Isis, [01:02:00] the divine Sophia, even as the ancient Egyptians spoke of the dead and lost Osiris.

We must shout out on search of the dead body of the new Isis, the dead body of the divine Sophia, with a force that although we cannot yet rightly understand it, nevertheless is in us, with the force of the Christ. We must approach Luciferic science and seek there the coffin of Isis.

Whew.

In other words, we must find in that which natural science gives us something that stimulates us inwardly towards Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

We have to take what science gives and change it with Imagination. This brings us the help of the Christ within, Christ who remains hidden in darkness if we do not illuminate him with the divine wisdom of the Sophia. Armed with this force of [01:03:00] Christ, we must set out in search of Isis, the new Isis.

So the alchemical wisdom is the work of taking from earth, motifs and taking them into the space of darkness, in sleep and in dream, and dialoguing with beings across the threshold. So that in our daily life we begin to have intimations that things are coming through the threshold from the work we have done in releasing them, the work that, of forming and dissolving inner pictures at night. The goal of that is then during the day to be aware of the aesthetic aspects of the surroundings that we live in. As then the role of the arts and the role of the arts is so that we have a kind of mirror, albeit a kind of dark mirror, of the [01:04:00] dialogue that we have across the threshold with the beings who stand behind the icon. Who stand behind the symbol. Who create the world and are still creating the world of the natural world, and then the world of archetypes that we take part of with our soul.

So the alchemical wisdom of taking this dialogue and taking a piece of native walnut and whacking on it until something appears out of it is not wasted energy. It’s not useless and superfluous energy. It’s energy that actually is designated to go to Sophia.

Thank you.

[01:05:00]

Q: So my question is this working of images and this practice with regard to doing art. So I don’t happen to be a sculptor. I do two-dimensional art. How do I then tie that to this practice?

There are many ways.

It’s the movements that you make to make the thing that’s where the actual consciousness of the imagination is. So that’s why the Eurythmists say eurythmy is, for the future. It’s because they become more conscious of their movements. But the more developed you get in painting or in sculpture or whatever, you become very conscious of this kind of movements that you make with your hands and your eyes and it’s the coordination between your eyes and your hands. There’s a whole neurological structure in the [01:06:00] emotional centers in the brain that are cultivated and organized by that.

By thinking an idea that I have to bring down into my hand and watch my hand make the idea in my head, my feelings come and enter into that and there’s a healing force in that process.

So the image itself is irrelevant?

The making of the image, or we could say the morphing of the image. Then we get to the question of making studies. So if I make a study of something and then the next day I do another study and it changes, that’s a morphology.

If I do another study the next day, that’s another morphology. If I just do studies, I end up with a work and I’m going down the road. However, if I take the sequence of the studies and at night I form a picture of “this is a study I did two days ago, this is the one I did yesterday, here’s the one I did today” and then I [01:07:00] think the studies backward, three frames of a movie, I’m doing a little art rückschau. And I take the movements of the morphing of that theme back into the archetype. So I could be cooking dinner if that’s my art form, and just go back and do that. And as long as I’m designated into it, it becomes artistic.

It doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you have the sense of autonomy and freedom in it. It’s so essential that I have this sense that when I’m doing something, there’s meaning in it. If I’m doing things and I don’t know what they mean, I am just a sponge for negativity. I spent a long time doing this, and to me it’s a really big issue, especially with the media and my kids are all in media, and we talk about [01:08:00] this, my, my middle son’s an art director at Pixar, for goodness sakes. He’s right there and we talk about the quality of imagery and what can be done to humanize these moving images. What can be done so that I don’t violate the feelings of the person looking at the picture. What can be done so I don’t violate the moral force myself: I see just a picture, but not the more moral imagination behind it. That’s what I think Rudolf Steiner’s talking about.

So when I start to entertain pictures in my mind and move them, I begin to move into a sphere of the creative forces of the cosmos. Feelings arise in me of what we could call feelings of the World’s soul.

And the greatest work in developing imagination is to be able to distinguish Self feelings from feelings [01:09:00] of the World’s soul. Feelings of the World’s soul are aesthetic perceptions and feelings of myself are usually anxious and I can play with them. Artists know that, so a lot of times they make pictures of their angst and then try to sell ’em in galleries so other people can put ’em on the wall. Bad idea, it’s just spreading the angst.

If you wanna do that great, then have a ceremony, or you get some gasoline and burn ’em all and hope that good ones come back in.

But we’re not clear that when we create an image, there are actually beings attracted to that. We’re just not clear in that because images are superfluous, they’re throwaway. But they’re not. They’re not. They can be very profound.

Rudolf Steiner has a quote that the conscious forming and dissolving an image is [01:10:00] the key to studying karma. I consciously form and dissolve pictures, and when I do I build an organ in my soul for the perception of karma. And when I perceive karma, my own action of something I’m about to do appears to me as a moral picture. That’s the double.

So it’s pictures. It’s a picture imaginative consciousness and I need to be sensitive to how pictures are impacting me and how the pictures I put out are impacting another.

This is just training in the arts in aesthetic perception and harmony and rhythm and colors at balance and things like that. The lower training of that is just to make pictures or cook dinner, but the higher training of that is that I’m actually training moral [01:11:00] faculties.

Q: You’re talking about such a pervasive problem in our culture. I’m just wondering how can the Christ impulse transform that?

If you have to get macaronis and glue them through a piece of matboard and spray them gold, do it. Art, whatever you do, try to see how the aesthetic is in it.

Whatever you do, if it’s sweeping the floor. My, my son used to complain. We had him sweep the floor all the time and I finally hit on that thing. I said, it’s called horizontal therapy, make it artistic. So we used to play little games and we’d make little patterns with the gunk on the floor, and stuff.

It’s a little game, but it could be a pain in the neck. So just ask kindergarten teachers, they’re full of that kind of stuff. Or [01:12:00] like children, they pick up a leaf and it’s can be a lot of things. In my class we’re working now where people are bringing in leaves and talking to them cause they look like faces. If you come in and you look at that, you go, Ooh, this is strange, but we built up to it. We have dialogue process going on over the threshold every night where we begin to understand how the wind blows through the threshold from sleep to waking. Once that happens, aesthetic experience rises in you like cream on the top of milk, but you have to prime the pump a little bit.

So just keep a journal of things that are significant in your day or something you can be grateful for. So just start there every day, right at the beginning of the day, something you’re grateful for, at the end of the day, something you’re grateful for. Over [01:13:00] time, you’ll start to expand on that and who knows, maybe you’re a writer.

It just expands, because it’s in the human to do this. It’s just sleeping now because of the onslaught. Yeah, it’s sleeping because we’re being inundated by images. We’re forced to consume images when we’re meant to create images. So we’re just consuming as fast food. And if we actually nourish ourselves inwardly by taking five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night of forming and dissolving an image that I’m working with, eventually that starts to spread into your day waking state, and you begin to perceive the world in a different way.

I’ve had people go through my course and suddenly go, oh my God, the world is like green.

I go, yeah, it’s green.

But now you don’t understand it’s like green.

Yeah, I [01:14:00] understand. It’s green. It’s green.

Yeah. But like this green and that green.

And that’s what Georg Kühlewind used to call subtle differences.

Suddenly they’ll be talking to someone and they see the light reflected off the grass hitting the bottom under their chin and this beautiful emerald color goes under their chin and they’re standing there and suddenly it’s a fauv painting where you’d see the portrait of the lady with a green stripes. There’s a big green stripe down her face and everybody goes, man, that guy must have been doing drugs. No, he had a higher perception of the reality. He just was aware when he was standing there, the model probably the grass was reflected in such a way that she had a green stripe down the center of her nose.

That’s a reality, but it’s such a subtle reality most people don’t see it. So as you start to journal or push colors [01:15:00] around on a piece of paper, something starts to live in your heart space of an of another realm, and then you’re off to races .