This morning in the first session, we will focus on Monday of Holy Week, where there is the cursing of the fig tree.

Gospel reading from Matthew 18: 

“Early in the morning as Jesus was on his way back to the city, He grew hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, He went up to it, but found nothing on it but leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again.” Immediately, the tree withered. When the disciples saw this, they were astonished. How did the fig tree wither so quickly? And Jesus replied, “I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do that to a fig tree. But also, you can say to a mountain, throw yourself into the sea and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

This is a big ticket item: the cursing of the fig tree. Everything in these vignettes is a symbol for the development of the Son of Man. This is Rosicrucian work, the work of self transformation, to transform one’s soul into a higher being, the Sophia. In ancient times, that work was given to the people by the priesthood. It was given out of a tradition of this is how it should be done. 

As Steiner spoke about it, the seven holy Rishis were so embedded in the spiritual world that they had a direct experience of the difference between the Adamic body, the body of flesh, and the spiritual body. They had a direct experience of that. So they said do not go into the Adamic body because it is just maya. But as humanity evolved, it became time for humans to plow the earth to let the light in. 

However, by the time of Golgotha, human consciousness had become so fixed that everything about the inner life was promulgated by the authorities and if you did not accept it, you were exiled.

This is Roman law, and today we are in its last gasp. It’s called democrats and republicans. No one can get along because there are so many laws that everything becomes lawless. Lawlessness rules because as soon as you walk out your door, you become a perpetrator. Get in your car and drive down the road? There is a speed limit for that. This is Roman rule, where everything is promulgated from the outside. But everyone who is in that rule of law is pushing the envelope and saying, I don’t think so.

This is the struggle about which Christ had to come back. 

So, why a fig tree? The fig tree in its reproductive cycle has a unique flowering process. It is called a caprifig. When the fig flowers, the caprifig comes out first, but it is infertile and falls off. People often freak out when their fig tree loses its early figs. It has this kind of first fake flowering. And then the reproductive flower comes out. In the fig, this second flowering is unusual because the anthers and stamens of the reproductive organs are inside the fruit. 

There is a little hole in the bottom of the fig, a small pore. Very often when you get a fig you will see a little drop of sugar. That is because that hole was opened.  

Little wasps go through that hole. They are called fig wasps. They are about the size of a pinhead. The females go into a boudoir inside the fig. Then they send out a pheromone, and the males come. If you watch, you can see the males hovering around that opening. They enter it and have a little bacchanalia in there that fertilizes the fig from the inside. The picture is that all of the real power is hidden on the inside. 

In the iconostasis of the eastern church, you are not allowed to see where the power is except when the priesthood determines that it is time, and then the priest opens the door and you’re allowed to see it, and then the door closes again.

A few years ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Czestochowa in Poland to see the Madonna there. There was a door on the Madonna. All of the faithful were down in the cathedral. The door opens and then it closes. That gesture – that it is hidden from you until it is allowed and then you can see it again – is a sign of the old clairvoyance, the old mysteries that Christ is struggling against.  

What you will see is determined by the tradition you are trained in. In order to be clairvoyant, you have to go to a school of the priesthood, where they will tell you that you are about to be in the consciousness of a being who will tell you something. And when you come back, the priests will ask, did the being tell you this or not? If it told you something else, then you failed the test. That is the way it is. That is the old clairvoyance. And the fig tree and the way in which its reproductive cycle is hidden is an example of the old clairvoyance. 

With that picture in mind, if you read the gospel story again, it says that Jesus found nothing but leaves.

Now look at your picture again. Look at the hands. One or two of them are finding nothing but leaves. Only one of them is getting the real deal.

Then He said to the fig tree, may you never bear fruit again. He is saying that the old clairvoyance, the old mysteries, the old way in which you were asked to participate in the mysteries, will never bear fruit again. 

The tree withered, and the disciples asked how He did that. 

He answered, if you have faith and do not doubt, you can do this and more. You can tell the mountain, i.e., the law, the organization, to go take a hike.

If you do not doubt, if you have faith, you can do this. Faith in what? In the system? No. In prayer. We have to learn how to pray.  If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He says that again and again and again. Because it is in the prayer life that we find the Son of Man.

In the parable of the cursing of the fig tree, He is speaking about how the new mysteries will be enacted. It will require a lot of work.

Then in Matthew 22, we have the parable of the wedding banquet. “And Jesus spoke to them again in parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a king preparing a wedding banquet for his son.”  This is about Christ as the bridegroom. This is not about the king preparing his own wedding banquet. It is about the King, the Father God, preparing a wedding for his Son. 

Christ is describing Himself and us. This is the alchemical wedding. That is the setting. So the King, the Father God, sends his servants to invite the people. In the past, those were the chosen elite, the priesthood, the ones who held the keys to the mysteries. 

So the servants, that is, the angels, were sent to the chosen elite to invite them to the wedding. But they refused to come. 

And He sent more servants to tell those who had been invited to come to the wedding banquet. Everything is prepared. But they paid no attention. One went to his field. And another to his business. 

So He is setting the stage here. He is saying that the ones He has chosen are just making a business out of this. They do not want to come to the banquet. 

Finally, they seized His servants and mistreated and killed them. 

Then the King was enraged and sent his army to burn their city. The King said, “Those whom I invited, do not deserve to come. They have betrayed the mysteries.”

I have read several books on the history of the mysteries, and the scholars agree that what destroyed the old mysteries was power and sorcery. Power wars and sorcery wars over occult power. Today that war is in the realm of devices.

So those who were invited did not come. Then the King said to his servants, go into the streets and invite to the banquet anyone you can find. These are the new mysteries. It is you and me. Good and bad. Go into the streets and gather all of the people, the bad as well as the good. And then the wedding hall was filled with guests.

But when the King came in to see the guests, he noticed a man who was not wearing wedding clothes. In the mysteries, this refers to the difference between what is known as the garment and the body. Only those with a spotless garment can enter. Your garment is who you will be at the end times. Your body is the Adamic body that you take on and off as a vehicle for doing the work. 

You cannot do this work unless you are in a body of flesh. That is also part of the new mysteries. You have to have a physical body in order to build a spiritual body because your experience in a body of flesh is what you contribute to the new Jerusalem. No one else can have that because you’re the only one in the body of flesh you are issued for that incarnation. That is the basis of the new mystery. 

How you experience your incarnation is the key, the vehicle for building the body of Manas, Buddhi and Atman to make the virgin Sofia. That is the new mystery. If a guest shows up in his Adamic body, he has to put on his wedding garment. Without it, he is not doing the work. He was invited to the wedding, and he thought he could come in street clothes and be taken care of. 

And he was asked how did you get in here without wedding clothes? The bride groom is about to come in. And the King told the attendants to tie him up and throw him out into the darkness because he has not done the work. And there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, because many are invited but few are chosen. 

In the new mysteries, everyone is invited. It is no longer for the priests to come and take you for training when you’re two years old. You already have an invitation. It is called your belly button. You are in the club. And that is your invitation to the wedding feast.

Who is the bride? It is your soul. And Christ is the bride groom. And when you are invited to the wedding, you have to take off your street clothes and dress with style.

When read that way, this is not about a wedding. It is about the future. The bible passages we’ll be reading are about the method of the new mysteries. The purpose of the New Testament is to replace the old mysteries where you were told what to do. Those days are done. 

That is why Christ had to come back and go through the Passion. It was to show the way it has to be done in the new mysteries. Do this in remembrance of me. Here is what will happen if you take this up. This is Holy Week. 

And there is a fundamental issue with this. Alchemically, you have to do something to go against what is known as fiat. 

Refer to the alchemical diagram by Robert Fludd, an alchemist. It is a picture of the drama of the fall with bodies that were made of matter and were sense perceptible. It depicts the original creation i.e. the creation of the Father God. There is a cloud with a hand coming out of it. Written in the cloud is the word fiat. Fiat means I create. The hand of God coming out of the fiat cloud is creating the creation, the original creation. The original creation creates the Adamic body. The Adamic body had an original form in the creation. But Fiat creates a problem for the Father. All you have to do is raise teenagers and you understand it. You create and they take your car to go to a beer party in Tijuana. You can’t control them. 

So the fiat creates a creation, which is no longer the creator. It is a creation. And the creation is one step removed from the creator. And it is on its way to becoming something other than the original intent of the creator. This is the problem of the fall. 

And the agent that carried that was the Holy Spirit. Here we see the Holy Spirit being sent by the Creator to go out in time and return to this circle. The diagram shows the wing beats of the holy spirit going out through time and coming back to create this circle. (See circle on handout.) The circle is the Christ coming from the original creation of the Father God, the Fiat that goes out and comes back again reformed with all of these epics of time in between, in which humans will be recalled late and slow. In the center is the realm of the Christ being that has to come from being one with the Father to being trashed by ignorant human beings.

So it is a theme, the difference between the Adamic physical body and the spiritual body. The son of man, as Christ keeps referring to it, is a new spiritual body made by the will of each individual. As we do that, it has to be done in freedom, or it would then just be a part of the original creation. 

The problem with the original creation is that it is like clockwork: this happens and then that happens. This one begat that one and that one begat this one. That is the old testament. Today that kind of consciousness leads to fundamentalism. It doesn’t matter what religion it is. It could be economics. Fundamentalism is a problem because it denies the freedom that Christ died for.

Whether you are a fundamentalist economist or you were raised in a  repressive religious atmosphere, you are still a fundamentalist. The gesture of fundamentalism is that I and my buddies are right and everyone else is wrong. Whether it’s Isis or the Jesuits or Hitler rising to power on the green party platform. It was one soil. The mother was German. The father was the Fuhrer. And when there was a marriage, they would have a superhuman. This is fundamentalism.

That fundamentalist gesture is restrictive of your belief, that gesture of my way or the highway is why Holy Week had to happen, so that there would no longer be a gesture of your way of believing is stupid. 

That is Holy Week. It has nothing to do with church. The Christ Being in Steiner’s work is a cosmic being. He is not Jesus. Jesus had another mission. It’s in the work that is about the two Jesus children. It explains in an alchemical language a lot about how it was possible to create a vehicle that could have what is known as the human phantom as part of its structure. 

I’m trying to build a case for the human phantom. The human phantom is what Christian Rosencreuz came back to teach about. We will get there as we go along. The human phantom was the unique part of the cosmic Christ being that Christ brought back into a body of flesh. And that changed a lot of possibilities. 

For years, I asked many people what the human phantom is. It doesn’t really make much sense until you get it. But when you get what it is, the deed of Christ makes a lot of sense. Until then, it’s just another belief. 

In order to understand that, we have to understand an alchemical practice. 

On your handout, look at figure 1. a, b, c, d, e. It describes something called a spagyric process. It means to take apart and put back together again. It comes from the work of Paracelsis, the great alchemist. 

It is understood that in alchemy the substances of the original creation, the Adamic body, the body of substance, includes the forces of attraction, molecular forces we would call them today, and the actual substance itself. The forces of attraction and repulsion are not the actual substance itself. You can take calcium and put it on a shelf and it will sit there until the end of time. 

It is always in the space between things where there are forces. Where the substance stops, the forces appear. That is a fundamental alchemical law. Where a process stops, a substance appears.

And when the substance comes in contact with another substance that it has an affinity for, in Chemistry it is called an elective affinity. When those two substances come in contact, there is a field that the two substances have entered.

The field is the spiritual dimension, the becoming of the substance. This is a new kind of chemistry. If you can talk to a chemist who is not a fundamentalist, he will be interested in this. I have talked to many chemists about this. Every time there is a discovery they have to change the rules again. 

Most of science is convention. Chemistry – convention. Biology – convention. Astronomy – convention. Convention helps us to not freak out because we don’t know anything. If we realized how little we know, it would be really bad. 

The alchemists understood that the original creation had feces or dead weight in it. The substances were not in a pure form. They had a kind of waste product. And that waste product clogged the dynamic. And in order to bring it back into a dynamic state, they would take it apart and purify each part separately. And then put the parts together again in accordance with planetary correspondences, in sync with planetary movements. 

Then the substances will marry again in an alchemical marriage at a higher order of dynamics because the feces have been taken out.

To do this, I am part of the 10th hierarchy. I can change what the Father God has presented to me through fiat. This is not natural unless you are scavenging after a volcano.

You are performing an alchemical process. Roast your coffee beans and pour water through them. It is all alchemy. Taking a substance apart and putting it back together is the great principle of alchemy.

And that is the essence of the work in Holy Week. Christ is taking apart the old mysteries and purifying each one.

By cursing the fig tree and casting the money changers out of the temple, He is going through the process.

The old mysteries led to the Pharisees where everything was the law. 

So the taking apart leads to the coming together. You don’t just tell the Father God to take a hike. You have to study the way in which the Father God put it together so that you can take it apart without violating the principle of life that brought it together in the first place.

It is part of the new mysteries: do this in memory of me. Here is what is going to happen. 

That is Holy Week. There is a fundamental issue with this. And that is that in order to do this alchemically, you have to go against what used to be known as fiat. 

There is a vessel with water and plants in it. Under the vessel there is a fire. If you set up that apparatus and start the fire going, steam comes through the plants.

So in the diagram in figure 1, we have a bunch of plants in a hermetic vessel. There is a fire underneath them. You set up that apparatus. You get the fire and the water going. The steam goes over the plants. The oil that was in the plant forms a little film as a distillate. The distillate means that a substance has been lifted to a higher form. In distillation a substance moves into a higher form. And the higher form is the corpus. That is a fundamental principle of alchemy. Taking a substance and liberating it from its fallen element. From the element that prevents it from healing. 

So I get the oil in part A. Then I take what’s left over. Put it in water. Add sugar. And make a wine from what the plant used to be. That’s part B. In Part C, I put the wine into a vessel. I light the fire under it.  And the alcohol comes out of the wine as the feces of the wine.

That alcohol is a much higher level of dynamic activity. Why? If you leave alcohol out on a plate, it goes back into spirit. They used to say going to the spirits store to get Jim Beam. They were distilled spirits. 

So alcohol is considered to be the universal spirit of all plants. So in part C, I take the alcohol, but then I’m left with what came out of fermenting. In D, I put it into a vessel and burn it to ash. But because I’ve boiled it and steamed it and fermented it, all the cells in the plant have opened. And when I dry it, there is a very fine salt released from the ash. The salt is the portion of the plant that retains water for growth to begin with. 

That is potassium carbonate. It was hidden in all of these processes because it was clogged by all of the substances. It went through a ritual death, dismembering it and leading it into a crucible in order to release the salt. So in the esoteric language, Rudolf Steiner calls it the phantom. Christ says ye are the salt of the earth. 

On Monday of holy week, the cursing of the fig tree was the opening of the door to the new clairvoyance through personal transformation of the parts of our soul that we are not particularly proud of. This is the shadow and the double. 

We choose the feces to be our garment. In Rudolf’s Steiner’s language, this is the spirit of darkness. The picture he gives there is that out of fiat comes the creation. But the creation has a separation.

There is a separation of the intent of the creator from the evolution of the creation. In the beginning with the Holy Rishi’s it was maya – don’t go there.

But it was understood that it would be necessary for an evolution going in that direction to eventually reach a spot where the creation would separate itself from the Creator. 

The creation would become so dense that it would no longer have any relationship to the divine. That was a problem.

If you read “The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness,” what Steiner calls old Saturn, was a very early evolutionary phase of consciousness that was purely spiritual.  

So there was fiat, and then the Holy Spirit was in the process of coming down and handing off the fiat to the next hierarchy and then to the next hierarchy-  a very ancient teaching. There were different levels of being that eventually come closer to a manifestation that is sensible.

The issue for this creation was the impulse for a fiat being that would have the potential to be separate from the creation. The reason why that is necessary is freedom.

There is a famous quote of Goethe that asks what would a god be that just moved things around from the outside. The answer is that it would be a fundamentalist god just pushing the creation around. This is the way it is. Just get in line. 

As that creation came down, it became a problem for the hierarchies to pass on the idea that eventually there would be a separation. 

For the Archai, the spirits of personality, the original plan was that there would be a recognition of the impulse of fiat: “Hosanna in excelsis deo.” Praise and glory for the creator. 

But the small print in the contract was that they would forget “in excelsis deo.” That shift would be the basis of personality. From gratitude for such a miracle to, “Hey this is mine.  I’m going to try and grab as much of it as I can because that is what the game is about. Because it is all about what is here right now. And who is right and who is wrong.” 

That process is what is called the fall. The gist of the fall is that my senses do not allow me to see the action of the divine unless I change them. When I change them, then that is clairvoyance. 

In order to do that, I have to take images from the world and transform them into metaphors. It’s a symbol or metaphor for self transformation. Basically, that is alchemy. 

Alchemy is taking what is in the world and turning it into a symbol of my apotheosis, the path back to the divine. 

Glyph Exercise – Precipitation

So here is a glyph. What we are going to do is reproduce the glyph inwardly. This is the glyph for precipitation. Precipitation is that if I have a solution of something, if I put salt into water, the salt disappears from my sense experience. It goes into a solution where it becomes invisible. 

If I evaporate the water, the salt reappears again. The forming of a salt out of a solution is precipitation. The dissolving of the salt is a kind of distillation. That is the tick tock.

We see precipitation as a horizontal line in an alchemical equation. 

For a couple of minutes now, I’m going to ask you to reproduce the form inwardly. You can redraw it over and over until you have a feeling that you are involved with it. Another way is to imagine it falling out while you are drawing it.

If you really want to engage with this, you draw the symbol and then you erase it in the opposite order of how you drew it. When you do that, your consciousness participates in the movement of the symbol by lifting it away from its corpus. You’re entering into its dynamic. We are going to play with this because it is a key element of the work. Do that for 5 minutes with the precipitation glyph however you want to do it. Then we’ll take a break.

[Back from break.]

Please take out your crucible (tree of knowledge image). Go down to the bottom lower left where it says “study.” That’s our focus for the crucible. Questions only. Study is number three, the dotted downward triangle.