Düsseldorf, April 19, 1909
Notes from memory by Mathilde Scholl:
On entering the School, esoteric pupils have only one obligation to fulfill - namely, to apply their common sense and intellectual capacities completely to the teachings that come to them, so that in listening to them they ask themselves: Is it reasonable for me to tread this path. In this way, with understanding and common sense, they can recognize and grasp what is being offered them. This is absolutely necessary if esoteric exercises are to produce the right effect. Our esoteric work can bring forth the proper fruits only on this condition. On the other hand, the School has to fulfill its own obligation: that everything flowing through it must emanate only from the great Teachers we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations and Feelings.
What then is the aim they attach to this Esoteric School? It must train a small group of people, endowing them with a knowledge of world and human evolution, so they will carry away with them the true attitude toward the great spiritual truths that stand behind earthly occurrences. They will then allow these truths to flow into and benefit human evolution. How does it happen that such a spiritual movement should come into existence just now? Through important happenings in the spiritual world, because all that happens on Earth is merely a reflection of that realm. We have seen that it is the great spiritual hierarchies that carry out the commands of the Godhead, and guide human destiny. It was necessary, 800 years before our era, to send the hindering forces into earthly evolution to prepare, from a certain aspect, for the Mystery of Golgotha. The hosts of a leader, known in occult circles as Mammon, were unleashed for this purpose. They increasingly darkened human awareness of the divine. The ancient clairvoyance was lost to human beings, and western science and philosophy grew and blossomed. Ancient Eastern philosophy still arises out of the old clairvoyance, whereas that of Greece springs up entirely from what is material. The saying of Thales: "All things are created from water," was gradually interpreted more in a purely materialistic way. Human beings forgot what stood spiritually behind the water. But the great teachers were nevertheless at work even during this time of darkened consciousness to make human beings aware once more of their spiritual origin. Let us suppose that a person of that time had never had a chance to hear the teachings of a Buddha, a Zarathustra, and so on. What would have happened to such a person after death? You know that the time between two Earth lives is just as much subject to change as is the historical life in the physical world.
The darkening of human consciousness came about only gradually, as does everything that happens in evolution. These spirits of Mammon could make their influence felt only gradually. The children were always less clairvoyant than their parents, the grandparents even more clairvoyant and so on. If a person died, whose awareness of the spirit was quite darkened, then that person took this darkened consciousness into the spiritual world, and was obliged to work out of it little by little - that is, figuratively speaking, that person had to work upward through the line of that individual's ancestors, from one to another, until coming to the original ancestor who still fully possessed the ancient clairvoyance. In this way, the cloud obscuring that individual's vision was dispersed. Of course, this took a long while, and it could happen that someone in this position could not find that original ancestor because the latter had incarnated again in the meantime. Then this person was obliged to return to Earth prematurely. In Eastern wisdom this path was called "the way of the fathers," or "Pitri (fathers) - yana." One, however, who absorbed the teachings of a Zarathustra, or a Buddha, or followed some great teacher, was received in the other world by the hand of this teacher who shortened the Pitriyana for this individual, and dispersed the cloud that obscured the vision leading to that individual's divine origin. This path was called the "Devayana" ("the way of the Gods"), according to Eastern wisdom.
The light of the Mystery of Golgotha shone into the time of deepest darkness. It is know to esoteric pupils - or should be known - that it was at the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds, when Christ started His journey into the spiritual world, that He appeared in Devachan. That was the spiritual mirroring in the heavenly world of the physical events in the world below. What has been accomplished for humankind by the Mystery of Golgotha has already taken place, but the understanding of it can only gradually light up in human hearts, truly, in general, it is not even possible for it to do so today. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha that leadership over human destiny was taken out of the hand of Michael by Oriphiel, one of those served by the hosts of Mammon, the power whose task it is to create hindrances and difficulties for human evolution.
Michael took over his office from Gabriel, who returned to power in the sixteenth century after four other archangels had meanwhile succeeded Oriphiel. The regulating of human births came under the jurisdiction of Gabriel. That is why, for instance, he announced the birth of John and the Christ. He was the one who, in the sixteenth century, prepared the human brain through selected births so that an organ was formed therein (to be sure, not perceptible to investigation by natural science), which nevertheless makes the present-day brain appear different from that of a person, for example, of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.
The human brain has thus undergone a distinct change since the sixteenth century, perceptible to the seer, and has the purpose of enabling humankind eventually to understand Christianity in its full significance.
We have seen that from the fourth to fourteenth centuries, copies of Christ's etheric and astral bodies were made available to individuals who were thereby enlivened by the spirit of true Christianity. Saint Augustine, who received an imprint of Christ's etheric body, acquired after many blunders, an insight into the mystic knowledge that has so much similarity to our theosophical teachings. The division of the human being into seven parts was, for example, for him a known fact, even though he used a quite different nomenclature for it. All those endowed with this etheric or astral body were distinguished by a deep humility, because they were aware that the consciousness they bore within them, the great truths they had to impart, were inspired, were filled with a grace they could not comprehend through their I. The occurrence of a cosmic event, such as a person's endowment with the etheric or astral body of Christ, is usually accompanied by some natural phenomenon - which we are inclined to regard as mere coincidence - that is deeply connected, however, with the spiritual event. To cite just one example: when Thomas Aquinas received the astral body of Christ as a small child, lighting struck and killed his little sister, who was lying in a cradle in the same room, but the boy's astral body was thus made elastic so that it could receive the higher astral body into itself.
As a result of the preparation - accomplished by Gabriel in the sixteenth century - of a new organ in the frontal lobe of the human brain, it became possible during the last third of the nineteenth century, after Gabriel had again handed over his leadership to Michael, for what we call theosophy to be infused into people by the great Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations and Feelings, so that the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha could be brought home to humanity in all its implications. When a person now crosses the threshold at death it is possible for each human being to discover his or her own great Master, now available to anyone in a living physical body who seeks him.
Comentários