On Thursday, they go to celebrate the Passover. They rent a room.

Reading from the John gospel…

“Jesus knew the hour had come for Him to leave this world and go to his Father…” When Judas decided to act, and Mary Magdalene anointed Jesus for his burial, that was the beginning of the Passion.

At this point, Jesus is representing the consciousness of the son of man. It is not, “You come from dust and to dust you shall return.” This is the Adamic body. But this is, “I come from the Father and I’m going back to the Father.” This is the son of man.

This is not unique to Christianity because the indigenous peoples have a tradition that we are star people and we are just visiting here to learn about being limited. We are transcendent beings, learning the answer to the question: what does it mean when you die? What does it mean that you are alive?

This all hinges on the idea of having a sense experience. We will go there in our next session. Meanwhile, the evening meal is in progress. The devil has already gotten to Judas. Jesus knew the Father had put all these things under His authority.

He stands up from the meal, takes off His outer clothing and wraps a towel around His waist. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet. At this time, everyone had been wearing sandals and walking around on dusty roads. So before you went to the table, there was a tradition of washing the feet before a meal, just as we have a tradition of washing our hands before a meal. 

He came to Simon Peter, who asked, “Lord, Are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus said, ” You do not realize now what I am doing. But later you will understand.”

Jesus knew that Peter was to be the foundation of the new church. He also knew that Peter was going to deny that he had any relationship to Christ.

Peter said you shall not wash my feet. Jesus replied, unless I wash you, you will have no part of me.

Christ is not speaking about his Adamic body. He is speaking about his son of man body. 

Washing of feet is essentially asking can I serve you? Can I understand how you feel when I say something to you? Can I awaken in you out of what I am bringing? This is washing the feet.

“That is why he said not everyone was clean .. When he had finished the washing of feet, He put on his clothes and returned to his place .. You also should wash one another’s feet ..”

These are the new mysteries. This is Abraham Lincoln. He is saying not only would I not be a slave. I would not be a master .. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.

This is the basis of the new mysteries. The healing of mercury is the willingness to be awake to the other. Rudolf Steiner calls it awakening in the other. And he goes on to say that you cannot awaken to the other with a concept. You can only awaken in another with a picture, a feeling picture. And it is a feeling picture of how the person is responding to what you are bringing to them. This is known as prescience. 

Prescience means I can feel the soul tone within me as a kind of picture of how this person is receiving what I am bringing to them with my gaze, my tone of voice and my intent, but not my content.

Roman law is about content. The new mysteries are about intent. This gesture of prescience means the ability to wash the feet of another; it means I understand what is going on in you when I am saying something to you. 

And prescience is also the Holy Spirit, Who is the healer that is bringing the male and female together by creating inner pictures in you of what is going on in me. That is why you cannot awaken someone else with a concept because it is too abstract.

You can only awaken another with a picture of what is going on with you as a feeling of what is going on with them. This is empathy. It is part of the Marion, feminine mystery. It is not sympathy or antipathy. 

[A member of the audience asks Dennis to repeat this.]

These are all code words. 

Rudolf Steiner said there are two forces in the soul: sympathy and antipathy. 

Sympathy is a code word for Lucifer. Lucifer is a code word for this is what is going on in me: “I’m going to tell you what I think you need to hear.” I have sympathy with myself. 

Ahriman is gravity. Sign up for this service, everything is there, you can download it, pay your monthly fee and you can get all the clairvoyance you want. 

Levity and gravity need to be brought together in mercury, the great healer that brings the male and female together.

The Christ principle is aware of the degrees of sympathy and antipathy that I am creating in the people around me. Am I creating sympathy? Antipathy? If I have an opinion about them, I am essentially putting them down.

So on Thursday, Christ goes to the last supper; He washes the feet; Judas leaves after the meal. Christ then goes to the mount of olives, where he talks to the disciples about staying awake and going to sleep. 

That is a microcosm of the new mysteries – can you stay awake with me while I’m going through my trials and tribulations? 

Then Jesus has a dialogue with Peter about whether he will deny Him. This is a picture of how my conditional belief is at odds with my unconditional belief. 

The way a belief works is to put one into a position of unconditional belief. We can call that meditation. My true self,  representative of the son of man, is completely silent. That is who I will be at the end times. I will be totally awake with a sense perception for the whole cosmos, without even the impulse to blog. No reflection. No reaction. Simply sensing the reality of the ‘I am’ of Christ. Christ is ‘I am.’ 

In the Trinity, the Father God is fiat; the Son God is ‘I am.’ In meditation, we are completely silent; we are “I am.” That is who we really are. However, we have a job description that says ‘you too will fall.’ This is because we inherited from Adam and Eve an Adamic body. The need for the Adamic body is a function of your sense experience, in which you believe that nothing in the world has anything to do with you except for what you desire. 

Look at the table. Do you desire the table? No, it is just a corpse among other corpses. But now if I ask you to put your credit card on the table, do you desire your credit card? Somebody does. But it’s just another thing. 

When it becomes an object of desire, it adds much more intent to your attention. That drama of attachment vs. non-attachment, intent vs. content comes from having an Adamic body that has been infiltrated by Lucifer and Ahriman. 

That changed the way that sense organs work. The sense organs now work in a way that you believe you are the one who originates your thoughts and that everyone in this room is separate from you. 

Rudolf Steiner said that is an illusion.  When you go to the other side, you become them. That illusion of the separate self. The original purpose of the senses was to take in sensations in silence and to give them back in joy. 

That intention was infiltrated and usurped by Lucifer who caused the senses to fall. In the gnostic language, the fall of Sofia led to Lucifer seeing her and imprisoning her in his belt of lies.

The appearance of the sense world as separate is Lucifer’s hocus pocus. Why does he want us to believe that? So that we won’t go into the sense world but will instead follow him. These are the Luciferic mysteries. The Ahrimanic mysteries are about the control of power.

These two have infiltrated the original form of the sense experience with the idea that every “thing” is separate. 

This blackboard came into being in a particular way, which was its line of emergence. Its line of emergence is its spiritual existence.  The powers of whatever formed it are still present if I change the way I think about my sense experience. If I do that, I start to have an inner experience of how it was made. That is the new clairvoyance. 

Thinking is the basis of the new clairvoyance, because you have to check whatever comes out of your mouth. If you don’t, then you are in Ahriman’s realm.

If you believe everything in the world is separate, then everything becomes stuff infiltrated by those two beings, and human beings are caught in the web of that belief of separateness and in the need for power to keep that.

To counter that I first have to control my own inner picture. I determine how the picture is built. That is my organ of perception. And then I take that picture that I determined and move it forwards and backwards and then listen with my heart, which is the doorway to silence.

When I learn how to create conditions of silence, and how to place the pictures that I created into the realm of silence, then the beings on the other side of the threshold allow the Christ being to move through them to reveal how the other person is experiencing what you just said. And they are clairvoyant to your intent, so that you’re not fooling anybody. Then you can agree on what you know and what you don’t know. 

The work with glyphs, pictures and symbols and dissolving them builds an inner capacity for longer states of silence. That in turn leads to a capacity to tolerate longer states of silence so that I can find out who I am.

Glyph Exercise – Oroborus