עברית I stream and weave with my gentle and merry hosts in the etheric light and life streams of the etheric world.
The Practical Spiritualization of Perception
From Chapter 2: The Spiritualization of Sense-Perception
The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Second Volume
The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
Part I
I stream and weave with my gentle and merry hosts in the etheric light and life streams of the etheric world. In total self-forgetfulness I surrender to the light of the world, and let it take me on its blissful wings into the experience of cosmic light and warmth.
From the outset, we emphasized that our goal in this book is not theoretical but to describe the real spiritual praxis that we developed through many years, and that everything we communicate is the result of firsthand experience. Until now, we have shown how the meditative exercises of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds are used, to create the cognitive faculties required to investigate the spiritualization of perception. We can now proceed to demonstrate, through some concrete examples, some aspects of the opening process of the gate of perception, how perception is spiritualized and what becomes perceptible in this way, in connection with the investigation of the modern Christ experience.
In the Michaelic yoga, we have trained our thinking and perception to spiritualize and regulate the inhalation of perception and exhalation of pure thinking, and developed pure etheric cognitive breathing, outside the dense physical body. This etheric inhalation and exhalation are the elementary experience in the praxis of Michaelic yoga. Now we concentrate all its forces to spiritualize sense-perception, as previously we applied it to thinking, and therefore we know from our experience that, ‘if you were living in an etheric sea as etheric being, you would have never come to that human consistency which you actually have in the world between birth and death’. In the etheric weaving in perceiving the etheric world outside the physical body, this consistency indeed disappears; it is no longer given to us in the physical instinctive way that only the physical body can provide. We must replace the consistency that the physical body gives us in the physical world, with the etheric consistency brought about by our spiritual activity.
The vitally important lessons of death, actualized in the course of the spiritualization of thinking and the separation of the soul forces, serve us also now, and we know exactly what we do to ‘reach this consistency... in that we suppress and kill this etheric life’. The suppression, or de-etherization, of our etheric life becomes as voluntary an act as the etherization of perception. Both the enlivening and killing of perception become conscious and voluntary activities. This is the Michaelic science, art and craft of the opening of the gate of sense-perception. ‘And with what do we suppress it? With what do we kill it? Through the counter-thrust of ideas!’. Ordinary perception becomes in this way a fully conscious act of killing our etheric perception and existence in the etheric world. It is a real death process of that part of the etheric body, in which the etheric counterparts of the sense organs are embedded, that live and weave in the etheric world all the time, without us being aware of it. Now we can regulate, actualize and de-actualize, spiritualize and de-spiritualize this killing and resurrection at will, in each moment in which we decide to do so. When we close our eyes for the briefest second to blink and weave ‘night into day’ as we showed above, we ‘have the etheric world around’ because- to rephrase Rudolf Steiner’s words- ‘we had not killed it and brought it down to physical form through the world of ideas’.
Let us describe this process as it happens in actual experience. I stand upright, grounded and secure in my physical body, fully awake in my daily consciousness; I am fully conscious of all the objects of the physical world around me, I perceive all things with great clarity; I am fully aware of my physical situation. I am clear and present in all the definitions and capacities of my earthly consciousness. And now in the midst of all this, I let the power of the meditation light up in me. I let the lightning power of the liberated being of the will strike through my whole being, light up and down through my soul and body; in the next blinking of my eyes, when the light of the external physical sun sets down and the inner night falls, it resurrects me out of my spatially grounded and solid body and identity. It lifts me out of my body and I experience how I take leave of my embodied physical situation. I become body-less and body-free; I hover in, outside and through, my enveloping skin and closed eyelids, flowing out with the freed etheric forces of the eyes, carried outward and thinly and lightly spread in the light filled etheric world, carried by the vivifying etherized forces of perception and vision; now I can also open my physical eyes, but from outside inward, as it were, not with the usual force of physical volition, but with the forces of spiritualized, disembodied, volition; and I remain poised outside, feeling at home inside the vast etheric outside cosmos, buoyantly carried by the liberated etheric forces of the eyes that extend far and wide into the surrounding light-filled world, and I feel secure enough to accept its kind invitation to join its wonderful light and colorful planetary and cosmic weavings. I stream and weave with my gentle and merry hosts in the etheric light and life streams of the etheric world. In total self-forgetfulness I surrender to the light of the world, and let it take me on its blissful wings into the experience of cosmic light and warmth, so precisely expressed in the verses of June in the Calendar of the Soul, ‘To lose myself in light, Commands my spirit vision... Lose yourself to find yourself’, and this trust is fully grounded in experience, because I know that ‘the human I can lose itself, And find itself within the cosmic I’, and therefore I can ‘trustingly seek myself, In cosmic light and cosmic warmth’.
When this experience is repeated and grounded in our etheric body until it becomes a fully embodied habit, becoming a true ‘way of life’, we experience perception, with all our senses, as an invitation to enter the etheric world. And in this world - as we shall see presently in greater detail - we also experience how ‘The Christ... stands directly before the human soul as the sustaining Cosmic Spirit’. This is a real experience we gain in the course of the spiritualization of perception; this is really what transpires as a result of such an open-eye meditation.
The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming