In the moist dark of the Earth***,

ancient sacred powers rest and then pour forth.

The Mother lives there in a circle with the wise,

and all that is of earthly dark or wrong

bows before Shes which cannot themselves be tamed.

She lives and rules there, the true Mistress of the

Uncreated, the Formless,

from which the Son of Light Itself was/is born,

out of Intercourse with the Father, who

then gave Himself  in seed to All,

so that each part has as its secret/sacred heart a piece

of Him and Her

This the very Stars sing in remembered Glory.

But still She seeks for unity,  throughout Eternity - to be

folded once more in the Arms of Her Lover/Our Father,

bringing Peace to all just by Her presence.

That is the Promise ... that all the seeds -

all the Children - would once more come to rest

in the Holy Womb of the Mother,

wrapped about with the Arms of Grace of the Father,

holding and surrounding All, forever and ever and ever.

Amen

*** For a beautiful and erudite  commentary on the nature of Evil as regards the Inner Spheres of the Earth, read Stephen Clarke here.
For a profound discussion of Steiner's so-called Mexican Mysteries, read Stephen here.

Read my response to Clarke5 here

introduction

           

     

The word “Mystery" here means Sacred Rite of Transformation.  The Mystery of Evil then is another name for the period of time (or Age) humanity now enters, where the individual ~!~ human Being must confront the true Beast from the Abyss of the Unknown/Unknowable, which is/will at first appear to mirror his/her own unredeemed and unmastered nature.  A raging private fairy tale, the truths of ourselves.  Masks unmasked at all masques. 

Having Choice, we determine - we become responsible for what is.  If we give into the darker urges that is what will manifest.  If we struggle for the light, that too will manifest.  This Rite of Choice in the Modern Age of Life on the Earth is the Mystery of Evil - a sacred encounter, in the World Temple that is the Earth, in which that which is Above and that which is Below, as these appear in and through the human Being, learn to understand each other.

Folk liking the idea of the multi-verse need to wake up, take a good look, since that's exactly what can be seen.  Learn to commune-with-in mutual surrender (the Way of the Mother's-may-i) WITH all our relations, rocks, stars, even fleas, bed bugs, and germs.  The Night Sky is the inside of all the parts and organisms, and their glorious order, turned outside/inside/out - nothing our senses reveal lacks conscious/experience, although rocks tell great stories of seasons of storms, with only the gnomes willing to live above ground, and out of caves, but then rocks sing in our own bones, should we be wise enough to listen to the songs of warm and cold, and light and air.

                                                              

Read on, read not.  Read widely, keep a diary.  Make friends with words, sing songs to the joy of being alive ....

This should be kept in mind.   There is no right Choice.  There are no rules that must be followed.  There are just the consequences of the choices we make, and for which we are responsible.  This booklet is meant to help the ~!~ -ing reader with coming to a deeper understanding of the underlying questions, both in their macrocosmic and microcosmic aspects, of which certainly the most peculiar is how we act as stewards of our own minds.  Wars for hearts and minds?  Advertising, Commerce, Politicians, Bosses, Priests, the faery world of think-like-we-want-you-too is a tough place, except we consider making of our own inner garden a temple, built by our own imagination & with no limits at all.  Sacramental Thinking anyone? 

Modern Culture/Civilizations, such as it is on a world-wide scale, lives amidst the fruits and labors of science, both religion&folly, being begat by human beings.  Crazy people with unimaginable horrors at the push of a button, or access to too much time mulling over private hurts&hungers - all of us being standing in the Face of our Own Mind's ~!~ tendency ~!~ to divide the world into the primary ignition point: Good&Evil.  Who made up that world?

                                                                                                                                                      

The roots of the world's monotheisms are eaters of the times of gods&goddesses - the natural pantheism everywhere present in Nature, which was Mother to us all - any other thought being shameless.  Each of us is begotten, our true history a mystery, as is our future.  I wrote recently: "I can raise a middle finger, but I can't make one".

This booklet-like cyberspace creature is also a companion for the book: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything. (my master's thesis in/on the school of life)  In this latter book a general view of our human situation is elaborated, in the form of a scientific theory.  The whys and wherefores are laid out in that work, and a few aspects of the present discussion >here< are there presented amidst a deeper context.  But the book - The Art of God - did not have space, or time, for the more intimate aspects of the question of the meaning of Evil, which then had to have its own presentation here. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                              

If Good&Evil are to be dethroned, that must necessarily be a part of the/a return of the Goddesses aspects, not just the males, but the females.  Something of the Highest imprinted itself on us, and left behind spices and wonder.  Cern keeps trying to force Her secrets from Her tinyest tribes.  When encountering, on the Earth, the always-been-there-alien-seeming consciousness of mom nature&friends, forms of politeness required ... didn't your mothers ever teach you anything, Mr Physics know it alls, ... you might want to behave at least a little bit, civilized ... otherwise, ... below, notice, how the other trees gather, around the Lady of the Waters, naked unashamed in age, limbs still outstretched for visiting birds to rest.  So much trouble in the world ...

               

                               The Grandmother Tree at River House                                                               

*         *         *

Language, particularly as regards the meaning of a word, has a certain flexibility - this the poet teaches, as well as the philosopher.  Their work is often creative of new meaning from the old words of a language - the new in language/meaning often comes to us from their songs, sometimes even new words.  After which the genius of meaning/language descends from its natural heaven in the higher regions of human thought, down to the more earthly realms where the passions of human beings takes possession of language and meaning and often sheds the higher meanings in order to express what only appears to be the coarse and the mundane.

Physics has contributed greatly to the possibilities, allowing one to refer, with glee, to the quantum/entanglements living in the black-hole of a banker's heart.

Words can have a dictionary or lexical meaning, but the speaker has the freedom to mean only what he or she intends to mean and is not bound to any convention - social or dictionary or otherwise.  Take for example the word “fuck”.  To utter this word in many public forums is to on occasion bring down the ire of censorship, although often the persons urging censorship will hypocritically use “fuck” frequently in their private language when among friends.  This goes for a lot of language  (meanings) as well, thus we have had to invent the term “politically correct” to give a label to the public social-censorship that erupts when language and meaning is used in a way that inspires critics of that use to blow their noses on someone else's speech.

                                                                                                                                                       

My grandson writes books of poetry&prose, while in and then coming out of adolescence, such as: "The Mundane And Often Profane"; "Mediocrity Monograph": "Reflections From The Void"; "The Mundane And Often Profane Visual Companion"; "The Morose And Often Gross". Just escaped Columbia with a Masters in Urban somethings, now earning bread&board working for a level of government lucky to have him.

His mom, my first daughter, has her own books'n stuff: "When You Can't Scream ... or 10 Reasons Why I Smoke".

Family "trees" be remarkable intersection nexi ...

Life - trees are unspeakably gentle.  Turtles go slow, yet trees are the Slow revealing its time-self.  Squirrels, on the other hand, or birds, they Dance and Cavort.  A tree a earth-home to each leaf/individualized moment of breath-sharing, all of life/living giving receiving eucharist, sunlit from above, making substanance - take and eat this is my body and my blood of the new covenant ... no Life, no us.

                                                                                                  

People make language.  Languages live and die, metamorphose & dance ~!~!~!~ code on a page, ...

Meanings often also have different functions in different contexts and as well vary according to the way the speaker will emphasize by tone of voice a word in speech.   Fuck is a perfect example of this kind of word, that has such a variety of purposes in human speech as to be almost capable of transcending its dictionary meaning altogether.  We can use that expression to mean anything from the act of sex to the abuse a boss weathers upon one of their workers.  When your boss fucks you, he is not usually engaged in sex, but rather seemingly trying to ruin your life.

                              

                                         The Grandmother Tree at Forest-Home

I’m going to fuck up your face says the thug to his victim.  He’s a fucking son-of-a-bitch says the father about his son-in-law.  This same word also has, in different regions of the earth, its own often varied peculiar gesture, using the arm, the hand, and sometimes certain fingers.  This word is often used when expressing surprise: “Well, fuck me!”.  The word has transcended its dictionary meaning as regards the act of sex, and become a word denoting strong emphasis concerning almost anything: “That’s a fucking good looking woman!”. 

It remains often socially incorrect - in the sense of speech in polite company, although among some groups it is used so frequently as to be the principle adjective and adverb by which emphasis is given to most nouns.  The comedian George Carlin sometimes used it hundreds of times in a single hour-long comedy set-piece.  Most people know when to use it, and when not, given the social context in which they are speaking.

Some people would say that to use such a word is to be or do evil.  Fuck does on occasion have an easy time being used in a context in which something more than a moral judgment is implied, while the word evil almost exclusively seems to involve a moral evaluation of some kind or another.  Evil entered the forecourt of political language with Reagan’s “the evil empire” and then George W. Bush’s “the axis of evil”.  Not being a verb, it doesn’t have the flexibility of fuck, however.  We don’t evil.  We maybe are evil, or do evil, but evil remains mostly a noun, and once in a while an adjective.

                                       

                                        We Are Groot                      ~!~!~!~!~@!

The Dark, unformed, uncreated, unexpected, constantly scarily surprising, often dangerous, wounding even unto death - torn away from Life and Living.

                                                                       ~!~!~!~!~!~

In a way evil, as a moral evaluation, seems to need to refer to something so base and degenerate that it is hard for many to not think in terms of evil and hell.  Those who do evil are condemned in many religions to whatever that religion considers the worst aspect of the afterlife: some kind of hell.  Creatures from hellish regions, often called demons, are axiomatically doers of evil.  The Horror Movie, as a genre, has explored all kinds of visual and dramatic and traditional forms of “evil”, as do those TV dramas involving the law enforcement profilers that chase serial killers.

  hieronymus bosch

Pornography and sexually explicit materials are to some considered evil, although the word obscene is more frequently used.  A famous Supreme Court Justice remarked that while he can’t define the obscene he knows it when he sees it.   There is something in this that we should recognize as we momentarily pass it by: politically incorrect speech, swear words, that which is evil, and that which is obscene are most often known (or at least judged) by the reaction of human beings to something.  Like the Justice, we feel (as in believe) we know it when we see it or hear it.  There is an important warning here, however.  We create a problem when we take our individual point of view and believe it should be universal - that is, It is to apply to all, not just to our personal judgments.

It is one of more wonderful pot-boilers in Media: public shamming of uncivilized males, who are already public figures.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Public language, having acquired the dreaded "values", whose results are as promised by the Casandra Harold Bloom,... modern public language upped the ante on race (White Privilege; Black Lives Matter;) and sexual/maze-flirting/morals (what is or is not appropriate in the dance of flirting and being actually powerful and dangerous).  Robert Bly in Iron John and the Sibling Society wonders whether too much mother&wife, and wearing of masks, makes communionwith/between any two three or four human beings possible.  Fact is that Porn won the Internet wars.  Replacing a healthy ceremonial relationship among the divisions, once owned by aboriginal folks.  Can sex be evil?  Sick?  Its not love making, when ... done in secret along - someone needs to touch me and get me off in the loneliness of Now ... more Ways then people to discover the Eros in the Own Soul.

Fate led me to a teacher, Candece, she of the highland scottish seers, and the native american shamans - talented ... all Woman, amazing scary life - hard so hard to live with - she suggested I need to examine the posibility that Western Culture has not the least clue about sex, not the least clue.  Goddess religions (Earth Religions), all that lower chakra stuff is holy, if we slow down enough to study it.  Told me, more or less, to go inside yourself, and drag the man you are, out from behind the covers of sin. 

At the same time paradoxes abound.  For many the violence and blood splatter in modern films and television is far more obscene than depictions of the act of sex.   For many seeing someone fuck is not as bad or evil as seeing someone’s head get chopped off, with copious amounts of blood conspicuously spurting from the neck.   On the other hand, in lots of places in the world there is a tradition of erotic art, and ages ago even the earthly aspects of physical love were celebrated in Temples as sacred.

                                                               

                                       The Teaching Tree, in A Monster Calls, voiced by Liam Neeson.

Every Culture in the World is Amazing.  Every damn one of them.  You be thinking yours is better, ... I'm a white privileged, Christian, son of Montana, American Shaman.  Its a tough job, but someone has to do it.  My current Amazon book page - all used.

All the various cultures were not until most recent times interconnected.  These cultures are basically alien to each other, and others unlike our tribal identity are often feared.   Each culture often is a mixture/layers of culture one on top the other, only visible if experienced, both the place and the related languages.  For a literary tour: Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.  Only philologists, such as Owen Barfield, know the treasures buried in the history of languages.

                                                                                                                                               

Modern people are also well aware of the various places in the world where female genitals are mutilated for seeming religious purposes.   The Victorian era of recent English history has entered our language such that certain public negative attitudes towards sex are called: Victorian.  Some assert that until that time, there was no pornography, only various coarser versions of erotic art.  Note also that, there are different rules regarding the way women dress that vary over the whole world.

In some regions of tribal Africa women do not hide their breasts.   Where certain forms of Islam predominate, the whole female form is covered except for the eyes.  Violating prohibitions against the exposing of skin can lead to death by stoning.   The rape of a daughter so disturbs family honor in some places that the victim is killed.  Nude (clothing optional) beaches exist in many places.  Emphasis on the female form in Western cultures has become so outrageous (or free, depending upon your point of view) that certain television shows and movies are built around the way they display “tits” and “ass”.

The length of skirts seems to rise and fall according to the dictates of the so-called fashion industry, as well as how much skin is exposed.  Most recently the female belly (and more and more the young female belly) has come to be “exposed”.   Cleavage exposure varies according to “taste”(?).   Women wear all manner of clothes in the West, frequently designed by men, that are uncomfortable and often harmful (the spike heel on shoes, for example).  A ballerina destroys her feet for her art, and the binding of the feet of little girls still can be found in parts of Asia.

                                      

                                                              Prophecy Rock, film at ll

Depending upon one’s taste or moral values, much is okay and much is not-okay.  Everyone has a point of view, and there is clearly no universal agreement.  Is something merely tasteless or obscene or ultimately evil, or godForbid!: "inappropriate"?

The pseudo-philosopher Sam Harris thinks that science can teach us true and objective moral values.   In the recent debate Harris had with the philosophy professor William Lane Craig, both, although on opposite sides as regards God’s interests and existence, seemed to agree that whether via science or the teachings of God, one could find absolute rules of what is or is not moral - or what is or is not good and what is or is not evil.   Right and wrong can be grasped as certainties - both seemed to assert.

Contrast that point of view with the spiritual teacher (the Magic Path) Franz Bardon, who said: there is nothing unclean in the whole creation; and that: evil is a human conception.  Catherine MacCoun, in her book On Becoming An Alchemist, writes that no one sets out to do evil, but rather everyone believes what they do is a good.   At the same time, the folk wisdom is: the road to hell is paved with good intentions; and, there is this saying of Christ in the Gospels: Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.

                                          

                                                                       Roots Go Deep

Is it possible to reconcile all these varied points of view?  To endeavor to answer that question is the purpose of this small book.  An important caveat: the author’s experience is that true research on Evil can only be done by facing these impulses in one’s own soul, for there they can be most intimately known.  To look to others, as if we can see Evil there, is to already make an unjustifiable presumption.  Here’s Christ from the Sermon on the Mount: 

Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged; you will be sentenced to the same sentence that you sentence others, and by whatever standard you measure you will be measured. Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye? And how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me get that splinter out of your eye,’ with that log there in your own eye? You fake, first get the log out of your own eye, and then you can see about getting the splinter out of your brother’s eye!

*         *         *

Victoria’s Real Secret

                                                               The Tree                                                                

"a music leads the mind through the starry night
and the brain must expand to contain the flight
like a tree growing branches at the speed of light"

The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance
 By Kim Stanley Robinson

A main problem with understanding Evil is our arrogant self-ignorance - no surprise there.  We easily see it in others (or so we believe), but seldom are willing to admit to it ourselves.   The most significant modern social process working deeply with that problem is Alcoholics Anonymous and its progeny, which has begun to socially replace the confessional of the Catholic Church, with a community and semi-public confessional.

No longer do we hide our so-called sin in a curtained box where only a priest is to know of it, but we admit our weakness in a very special public place - a place where anonymity is promised as a core social value.   Even the idea of God is different in AA, than in the Church, as it is intentionally  connected to our personal  freedom - we admit things to God as we understand Him in AA, not as a religious institution defines Him.

Not only that, but in AA we are not forgiven for a privately confessed sin, and given some prayers as penance.  Rather we are helped to go to those we have harmed and seek to repair what was done by finding a way to make amends.  Here we see a fault line, as it were, between the way the the Past - the Church - handled the molestation crisis, and the way those in AA (the Present and Future) deal with what appears to be their moral errors.

                                                                

As we know the Church was able for decades to keep hidden (and thus allow their continuance) these crimes, by hiding them in the confessional.  And even this hiding is now understood itself as a major contributor to the fundamental problem.  In AA we enter into a group awareness of our misdeeds, and get help from others who share our failings.  Who better to help us overcome them.  Only an already  semi-publicly confessed alcoholic can help us deal with our own similar failings.  When it is hidden, and then protected by a social institution, the failing is never resolved because we - the self-confessed doer of evil - have never faced it squarely.

What Christ spoke of, as the problem of hypocrisy in the Sermon on the Mount, is overcome when the flaw is made semi-public among a group who share our flaws, because no other group is also able to help us, given that they too have dealt already with that particular beam in their own eye, before seeking to help us with the related mote in ours.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

The institution (the Church) preserved Itself at the expense of many future victims.   AA is not any kind of institution, given that each meeting is an independent social process in itself, there being no priests or any hierarchy defining what is to be done or not done.  Only someone actually practiced at being in recovery (usually the sponsor), can help someone needing to enter recovery.  The Priest in the confessional often lacks the life experience to really appreciate the deeper psychological elements living in  the person with their flaw.  Religious and sentimental pieties don’t work as well as practical knowledge of the real struggles for genuine self-transformation.

Granted AA is criticized by many, but all that really shows is that this kind of work is not so easy as some would hope.  The Church (offered here mostly for contrast, not so much to pick on it) is weighed down by its past, and by the fact that in many ways it has never understood what Christ really taught in the first place.  In the authentic recovery disciplines of AA, Christ’s teaching lives as a practice in a way the Church only really had in its beginnings (or in the religious orders), before it was joined to the failing Roman Empire in the fourth Century ... recall the last phrases of the Sermon on the Mount:

                                                                  

So anyone who hears these words from me and does them will become like a sensible man who built his house on bedrock, and the rain came down and the floods came and the winds hurled themselves at the house, and it didn’t fall because it was grounded on the rock.   And anyone who hears these words from me and doesn’t do them, will become like a stupid man who built his house on sand, and the rain came down and the floods came and the winds beat at the house, and it fell, and its down fall was tremendous.

The institutional Church built its house on sand (no real practice), and when the discovery of the decades of hidden abuse (the rain, and floods and winds) came, this institutional Church fell (see my essay on the Third Fatima Prophecy for details: Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church).

*         *         *

the True Nature of the House of the Soul 

The Fundamentals of Anthroposophy

The very deep and wise philosopher-seer, Rudolf Steiner, in his lectures collected under the title: From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, briefly discussed the Mystery of Evil in this metaphorical way - here I have paraphrased his thoughts:

Imagine a train running on some tracks.  The train - its engines and cars - has a point or purpose as it were.  There is goodness inherent in its comings and goings.  Human perception, being human, notices mostly the wearing out of the rails, caused by the travels of the train, and thinks of this wearing out as evil or sin.

Consider for the moment that the “house” that can be built on rock or sand is our own inner organism - our own soul-spirit/being/essence-nature.  We need to keep in mind while we do this just how complicated human beings are, especially inwardly.  This is so regardless of modern brain sciences, which have basically assumed the mind (soul-spirit/being/essence-nature of the human being) is only a function of the material brain, and that there is no spirit at all.  Deconstructing the erroneous thinking of science in that regard was one of the purposes of my The Art of God.

                              

                                                                            the Songs of a True White Brother

There is an ancient idea from the Cultural East concerning seven energy centers that are thought to be some of the dynamic aspects of the house of the soul - the inner core of the human organism.  These tradition calls: Lotus Flowers or the Chakras: (the crown chakra; the eyebrow chakra; the throat chakra; the heart chakra; and solar plexus chakra; the reproductive chakra and the base - or the spine - chakra).   While conventional materialistic science doesn’t like these ideas, that prejudice doesn’t make them untrue - just not observed.

In Steiner’s metaphor above, these energy centers are the “trains” - the engines and the cars.  If, for example, we didn’t have the desire/drive for procreation, no new human beings would be born.  If we didn’t have hunger, we would starve and the physical body would die.  If we don’t care about each other - via the “heart”, we suffer as well.

What we observe is that the carnal body and as well our social communities (such as families) suffer when there is an excess of some kind related to these psychic (soulful) energy drivers in our existence.  The carnal body and our social communities are the “rails” - we see the harm from the excesses and this we have learned over time to culturally call: evil or sin.

                  

                                                                                                Dragon Riders: the human being in maturity

Another example, this time regarding the mind (something very complicated as well):  If we don’t discipline our “mind” we can become obsessed, and thus arises, for example, the social phenomena we call: the stalker.  If for various reasons we can’t control our thoughts (such as in certain so-called mental illnesses), we also loose our way. 

Since the Age of Science began, humanity has been trying to pin down the imagined causes of human defects, but our labors have been largely in vain because we mostly don’t consider human beings to be anything other than matter.  Since we are objectively far more than solely matter, the absence of that understanding disables our thinking when we try to solve social issues connected to human defects and flaws.  At the same time, this confusion over whether or not human beings are both spirit and matter is a quite complicated problem, such that the reader here will have to go to the above mentioned book: The Art of God: and actual theory of Everything, for the solution to those wider questions.

Here, in our seeking to better understand The Mystery of Evil, we face more practical problems, and it is toward those issues that we need to go next.  Immediately above I just wanted to point toward the house of our soul - our own inner organism - suggesting that what we tend to call evil is an indirect effect of other purposes, and that there is significant human  meaning to be yet discovered. 

                         Sacramental Thinking

This house of the soul is quite complicated, and major portions of it are not visible to the eye (such as the traditional energy centers).   At the same time, these “not visible to the eye” aspects of our nature are visible to our own introspection.  I can learn to see in myself something I don’t well see in others - the existence of my beam is apparent to my own inward perceptions.  What Christ promised in the Sermon on the Mount was that if (and only if) I learn to master my own “beam” will I discover how to help someone with their “mote”.

Now some might think that AA mentioned above is only valuable if one is an alcoholic or addict etc.  The fact is AA is the social model for a whole new “community” social process by which anyone can work on their self observed flaws.  After all, we first have to admit to ourselves we are flawed and need help, and this is often a dynamic social processes that is difficult to face, having acquired in AA the name: hitting bottom.   Most people don’t want to admit to flaws at all (witness the many politicians and celebrities whose flaws become public), and we call this refusal to admit to flaws: denial.  We continue to refuse to admit to flaws until life hits us upside the head over and over again, and our self destructive behaviors have gotten so flagrant that we no longer can pretend they do not exist. 

                                             

That these impulses flow over to the members of our own community and family is also something we deny.  The dry-drunk (not actively drinking) still behaves according to his addictive psychology - frequently angry and dominating, and never able to admit to his own responsibilities or flaws.

Help is always around, however, and many are the Ways we may travel.

If fact, in the Al-anon movement a whole necessary secondary social process has been discovered.  How do people live with personalities who will not admit (continue to deny) their self destructive flaws that also harm others?  If we have an addict in our family, we don’t have to remain the passive victims of their addictive behaviors, but we still need to find those who share our dilemmas if we wish to learn what to do.

There are practical arts here, such that our incapacity to live with or among others with such obvious flaws is itself a flaw.  We need help to learn the best ways to live with an alcoholic, and if we don’t we become enablers of their addictions.   Anti-social flaws require social solutions - everyone is involved.  The simple truth is we can’t fix the person with the flaw (with the mote).  Only they can fix themselves, and until we simultaneously learn to work on our own “beams”, we will not really understand how to help them “fix” themselves. 

                                                        A more personal story, of a crash and burn ....

If your head is starting to spin around a little bit here, good.  We are complicated, we human beings, and so are our social arrangements.  The teaching of Christ is simple to state: learn not to judge.  The doing of that in practice is not so simple.

We are only beginning to appreciate what is latent in the vocabulary of recovery, for many of our social ills are not even recognized as needing something like AA or Al-anon to help.  Consider the greed driving the current financial problems of the world.  Is that not an addiction?  What about the will-to-power of the many political leaders?  Is that too not an “addiction”?  What does a people do when their leaders in finance and politics live in denial of their addictions to wealth and power?  How do we enable them with our own weaknesses, or the false belief that we have no choice but to end up as helpless victims of the excesses of others?

The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount reach quite far.    Quite far In Deed.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Who or What am I, that I too am Flawed

We are all human beings.  That said, just what is a human being?  The main scientific paradigm is that the human being is an accidental consequence of random events in a vast uncaring cosmos.  This is what the Theory of Evolution and the Theory of the Big Bang teach.  Science - at least at this stage of its development, in this sense, has it very wrong.

To lay out the details of the underlying philosophical and scientific problems, I had to write a whole book, mentioned above: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.  

In that book, I suggested that the truth will turn out to be that a human being is an immortal spirit, experiencing multiple lives over eons of time in order to learn.  Existence is a divinely authored school, of a remarkable and detailed intricacy and intimacy.  What I had little time to deal with in that book, was the more intimate aspects of the nature of the double, or the doppleganger or the shadow.  I could hint, but not do justice to the main  facts regarding the nature of Evil and how the individual human being contributes to that aspect of our shared existence.
                                        

Here in this booklet I am trying to provide more detail.

In a couple of other books of mine [the Way of the Fool, and American Anthroposophy], I put this symbolic diagram:

Christ Jesus

Guardian Angel

~i~AM~

[sense world < soul (A/d) < I-am > (L/d) soul > spiritual world]

human double 

(asuras)

the Divine Mother

... out of which I separate for emphasis, this sub-diagram:

~i~AM~

(A/d) < I-am > (L/d)

[human (d)]

This is not an accurate picture, so much as it is a thematic schematic of some structural relationships.  It is therefore a very poorly drawn abstract of a whole set of maps, none of which describe the actual territory.  The reason for "i-AM" is to emphasis that this word refers to our nature which is more clearly understood as a verb, not a noun.  "i"ness is necessary, but secondary to what acts.  what/which/who/why/whatever: Acts is ~!~ Primeval ~!~ Fire ~!~ .  Look in a mirror.

Here, in this word/picture masque, I am going to tell you how to study the territory, based upon several decades of personal experience of such study.  Or Not. 

                                                                      

Lets start with the terms: soul and spirit.  We could also use the terms: consciousness and self-consciousness and be speaking of the same things.  There is that-which-experiences (self-consciousness, or spirit ~!~!~!~!~) and the content of those experiences (the field of consciousness, or soul ~!@#$%^&*()_+).

For example, you are presently reading some text upon a page.  “You”, in this example, are a self-consciousness experiencer, and the content of your experience includes (but is not limited to) the booklet/tablet/whatever you hold in your hand.  Other aspects of your field of consciousness includes what it feels like to sit in the chair in which your are sitting, any incidental sounds in the background (music, kids yelling) as well as incidental experiences in your visual field besides this booklet.

As you “read” you may be sub-vocalizing the words, and as well using your mind to seek the meaning of the text.  The text itself is a code - lines of dark on white, while the meaning of the text is only created by your mind - a skill it acquired when you learned to read.  Most of us don’t pay any attention at all to the concepts created by our self-consciousness when we read, ... we just read and arrive at some understanding of the text.  We then think (as in believe) we “know” what we believe the text to mean.

                                                                                                                                 

To a certain degree, part of what is happening as you read is that the <“attention”> of your mind (of your self-consciousness as it is married to your field of consciousness) is directed to a purpose (reading), from which purpose other experiences can enter your consciousness created by some kind of a “distraction” (a dog barks).  Notice I joined together (married) self-consciousness and the field of consciousness, for that is what we experience - their natural unity.

          the Madonna of Raphel too chaste for reality,
                                                                      THE MOTHER Abides Surrendering ....

We experience what we call mind as this union of self-consciousness and the field of consciousness.  “I” know I am reading, as reading is my intention, and it is my “I” (self-consciousness) that is directing my attention to its objects.

Suppose my spouse calls from another room and wants my “attention” - wants to change the attention of my self-consciousness to include within my consciousness his/her needs and wants.  I may for a moment not want to be disturbed in my reading, but an instant of reflection may lead me to recognizing that it is better (from my present in the moment point of view) if I give to my spouse the attention he/she wants.

That just described above is a brief version of the territory for which the diagrams above are maps.  My self-consciousness I am naming the I-am, and the conscience-like moment of reflection (choosing to let my reading be disturbed to pay attention to my spouse) I am labeling the ~i~AM~.  These two appear (as a map) thus:

The Best Six Doctors Anywhere, and no one can deny it, are:
               
crown chakra antenna      

           hair ~!~!~!~!~!~!~                                                                                                        sunshine
                            eyebrow chakra

               O eye wounds O                     water                     

                     ?nose?touches?

                                             Throat Chakra   &   &         rest&
                           heart/breathing                         AIR      

                             i-AM
                                                             I-am
                                                                                          solar plexus chakra
                                                                                    dancing with the Fey              exercise
                                                  & diet
                                ~!~!~
             reproductive chakra
                   Rites of Cosmic Generation
             groot, or base chakra
         the seat of life
?

To borrow from other systems of thought, let us call these (together) the lower and the higher ego.  I am relating the higher ego (~i~AM~) obviously to what we experience as conscience, and the lower ego (I-am) to what we general think of us our self-consciousness.  Always keep in mind that the map is not the territory.  And, That an alchemical wedding is sought, not mutually assured annihilation.

This is the dancing/fiery pagan core of our spirit, these two - this lower and higher ego courting among ????????????????

  ........... its many mini-me selves, Whitman's multitudes ... hard to love others if you don't love yourself ...

and which are to be educated over the many incarnations of our human existence.  During this education/learning process, the possibility exists for the lower ego and the higher ego to marry (unite), the details of which we will go into later.

Let us next look at this symbol set (map):

[sense world < soul (A/d) < I-am > (L/d) soul > spiritual world]

and this sub-set within the above:

soul (A/d) < I-am > (L/d) soul

The core of our human nature (our spirit or self-consciousness) sits within the soul (or field of consciousness). 

We actually look out at two different worlds from this seat of the self-consciousness within the field of consciousness:

[sense world <         ,,~~~~!experiencing!~~~~..              > spiritual world]

This sense world we are mostly familiar with, as it governs our daily existence from the moment of waking to the moment of going back to sleep once more.  In our culture we don’t recognize that our interior world is the entrance to the spiritual world, given the assumptions regarding the mind common to the dominate paradigm of materialistic science (all is matter, there is no spirit).  For an alternative vision see: Cowboy Bebop - and the physics of thought as moral art.

   Is the mind the brain?  What?  Do not be silly.  Look, see, choose, think ~!~!~!~!~~!~!~!!!!~!!!!` always dancing

[ For those familiar with the last Harry Potter movie, there is a scene (which appears to take place in the world of the dead), where Harry has a conversation with his now deceased mentor Dumbledore.  Harry wonders aloud whether he should believe what he seems to be experiencing, saying something like: this can’t be real as it is only happening in my mind.  To which Dumbledore replies, essentially: What makes you think what happens in your mind is not real?]

The interior world (as against the exterior sense world) - the narrow gate (the entrance to the spiritual world) - is that world where we experience thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will.  Others cannot see this aspect of our existence - it only appears inwardly to us, and we often swim in it the same way a fish swims in water - we are mostly unaware of it.

What a lie detector machine tries to capture by measuring certain very limited phenomena is only a vain ghost of the real nature of our interior experience.  What someone who was once called a psychic, or now an intuitive, experiences is some of the surface (yet hidden) elements of this interior world.  All of us have intuitive (spiritual) experiences.  We just don’t live in a culture that knows what to do with these experiences, given the dominance of the paradigm that all is matter and there is no spirit.

                                                                                                                           

                        Naturata naturans and natura natura roughy translate, respectively, as “nature naturing” and “nature natured.”

                                                  yet, what do we/I/you/me/thou/thee contribute?

Yet the fact remains that it is from this interior (spiritual) life of the human being that there arises that which appears to be good and evil and then entered into our shared social world when patriarchal dominion over required the application of Sinfulness from the Pulpit, which is why it is so crucial to acquire real knowledge of the facts of this world of our interior life.  Fear of ourselves has many undesirable consequences, as revealed in the News Daily.

We need to face this Shadow* or Double in a fully objective fashion.  Steiner/Bornfield describes the reason for this in Lucifer and Ahriman, at page 21: “...the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence. [emphasis added]

[*While I recognize the use of the term the Shadow by those connected to the works of Jung, I am not using this term with the same meanings to which they adhere.  I actually mean (in a metaphorical sense) something more akin to an actual shadow cast by a human being when with their density and solidity they stand between something and ”the light”.  We (our “I") stands in between the ”divine light” and the world of earthly existence, and casts a shadow into that world by our density or stubbornness - the solidity or “fallen nature" of the baser moral qualities of our “I-am”]

Still, ~!~!~!~!~!!!!! dancing, singing, playing, getting intoxicated is divine ... we need not remain conquered by the staid, the boring, the scared to move, ... Anarchy is Coming.

                                                                                          

It all gets more complicated, as the above maps included these symbols:

(A/d)               (L/d)

[human (d)]

we are not alone inside, in the quiet, ...
some folks are troubled there, mostly because
western medicine does not realize
the Mother is VERY REAL
& well, there are Imps
of the perverse,
a boundary
condition
unnaturally across without training
shaman becoming
dangerous
thank all the old gods&goddesses & the new:
music rules

even more, in the dark ...

The letter (d) is meant to refer to the double, and the structure above means to suggest that this double is in fact threefold in its nature.  This structure/creation is not unknown to humanity, although for a time it had to be forgotten.   Here are some references:

Here is how the double (shadow) is described in a Native American work: “Waynaboozoo’s Spirit Father advised him: ‘You have a twin brother whom you have wondered about and whom you would seek.  This I tell you: he is your other side in all things and in all ways.  He is with you...do not seek him.  Do not wish to know him, but understand him.  You will walk in the path of peace...he would not.  You are kind...he is not.  You are humble...he is not.  You are generous...he is not.  You seek the good in things...he does not.  You shall respect others...he will not.  You will seek the goodness in others...he will not.  You are the light...he is the darkness.  Know that he is with you, understand him.'”  From the Mishomis Book The voice of the Ojibway by Edw. BentonBanai, 1979.]

And the story of the two wolves (my version): A young man was speaking with his grandfather, and was troubled by impulses he had inside him to be mean, in imitation of some of his friends.  His grandfather taught him as follows:  Inside you are two wolves.  One hungers to do the good, to be kind and to be wise.   The other hungers to do evil, to be selfish and make trouble for others.  This you must understand.  The young man then said: But, grandfather, what do I do, how do I become the good wolf instead of the bad one?  To which his grandfather replied: It all depends on which wolf you feed.

                                                               

Let me also quote from the Quoran: “Qul a’udhu birabbin nas. Malikin nas. Ilahin nas. Min sharril waswasil khannas. Alladhi yuwaswisu fi sudurinnas. Minal jinnati wannas”, or in English: “Say, I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind, from the mischief of the sneaking whisperer, who whispers in the hearts of mankind from among the jinn and mankind.”

Or from the Lord’s Prayer, traditional version: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  And from The Unvarnished Gospels, translated by Andy Gaus, this same verse:  Matthew 6:13 And do not put us to the test, but snatch us from the Evil One’s clutches, ...

                                                                          

                                   

So, the core of each of us:

~i~AM~

I-am

... is then surrounded by this threefold double-complex, resulting in this symbol set:

~i~AM~

(A/d) < I-am > (L/d)

[human (d)]

Notice that the higher ego is free of the impediments attached to the lower ego.  Further, via the conscience (the higher ego) the total organism of the self-consciousness and field of consciousness is connected via the Guardian Angel to the higher spiritual powers, thus:

Christ Jesus

Guardian Angel

~i~AM~

< I-am >

Because the human being is unlearned, and learning, it needs this threefold double-complex in order to pass through the experiences of life - that is we need both earthly help (the threefold-double complex) and heavenly help (the Guardian Angel as an intermediary to the higher power).

                                        there is courtship involved in the lower ego and the higher ego achieving the Alchemical Wedding

Next, let us consider the threefold double-complex by itself, as connected to the lower ego:

(A/d) < I-am > (L/d)

[human (d)]

helpers, actually ... guide us to karma,

make sure we have the right brick-weights in our invisible packs of troubles

a mistake is often a blessing, and illness most assuredly is ...

In Search of the Lost Chord

Tradition gives certain names for these “creatures”, who lie nearest at hand to the I-am in the soul.  Here we will use that which was worked out by Rudolf Steiner, then later further developed by  Valentin Tomberg.  Let me repeat - as a practitioner for decades of introspective science I have direct experience of these beings.  They help with the falling down, the increase in gravitas, ??? what part of that is just us, forgetting how to dance and sing???

Steiner gave us these names: Ahriman for A, and Lucifer for L.  Now these classes of non-material invisible to the physical senses spiritual beings are hierarchical - that is they have a pyramid like order, such that the actual Being Ahriman and the actual Being Lucifer* sit like corporate or king-like bosses at the top of the pyramid, which then via a structure like gloves within glove within gloves, or >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> brings down into the individual soul a tiny “creature” that can be called the individual ahrimaic or luciferic double, ... depending upon what role it plays within the soul or field of consciousness.

[*Lucifer, according to some traditions, redeemed himself following Christ’s Crucifixion, and became then a member of the Paraclete - the community of spiritual beings whose totality we call: the Holy Spirit.  Lucifer’s hierarchies remain at their previous tasks, however.]

                                                              

a central aspect of the mystery of evil is the primal paradox ... from the point of view of the "others", now is already perfection, and the only ones learning on the job are those beings we call: human, whose nature it is to be displeased, with the whole gift of life, existence, feeling, thinking, dreaming, ... magical thinking is needed, and actually works when&if rightly applied.

Now everything in the Creation is in the nature of Beings of Spirit, such that the shadow our I-am casts, because of its own unredeemed nature, results in the presence of a spiritual being.  Its not a mere effect like the physical shadow we see when light does not pass through us, but as all is being, every aspect of reality that is not “I” is other beings - including the double.  There actually are no “things” in the way we ordinarily think.

How many children are called names, like bad, or good, or worse and worse and worse.  Wounds of soul ... become splinters in the growing eye of character .... Born to Run ...

Clog up your mental arteries with enough dead-wooden thoughts - the garden there in most of us could always use some attention - although in soul-dynamics it is often the soil that needs enlivening.  What seems by culture to be base, may well have a misunderstood reality when observed empirically.  Men and women masturbate, or engage in Onanism-whatevers.  Seeds are many.  Nature's choice for insuring wide distributions of treasured substances.  Powerful forces live there, yes, but please leave the meaning of the sacred to that which is clearly meant to be the creator of their own meaning, given that they are endowed with existence in this World of Woes.  The Divine Mystery Made US for a reason, which I suspect is not at all as lame as we treat each other.

                                       

So much seas of troubles, and sometimes you just want to let go, turn over the soil of that life, and take a rest ... Or, SIGH, maybe not, maybe dream up a little hope now and then, food for the heart.  There be Fairies lurking about, don't you know.  Magical/pagan thinking is oddly wise.  Anyone&Everyone in the world is a natural shaman/ness (if you wish).  Life makes us all wise, or we are soon dead/recycled for the next dance.  Children - a category of Being that tells a remarkable tale.  We are taking too much childhood from the world, and the children are not pleased.  That fierceness of adolescent and post adolescent fire breathing politics, getting more and more out in the open these days.

I'm betting on the Children, ... mostly since it is clear that Gods&Goddesses have been betting on Children for Millennia ...

The ahrimanic double generally mediates between the lower ego and the sense world, while the luciferic double generally mediates between the lower ego and the spiritual world.  Tomberg in his Meditations on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism

                                                                                                                                                             

called aspects of the ahrimanic double the prosecutor, and aspects of the luciferic double the tempter.  These are psychological (soul-lawful) functions.   These are not the only functions of these beings within the soul.

Because we are in need of help in understanding the sense world, the ahrimanic double causes us to believe in absolute* facts (the sense world is not actually absolute, but its paradoxes require a subtlety of mind most of us do not yet possess), and the luciferic double causes us to believe in absolute* truth, which gives us all those obsessive and fundamentalist errors of thought.

*[For this language I am indebted to Catherine MacCoun’s remarkable: On Becoming an Alchemist.]

Think of it this way.  We are incomplete (fallen), although this should not be understood as what some call “original sin”).  This incompleteness is kind of like a virginity - in our first lives (of many) we were both innocent and culpable.  We made mistakes (being innocent - lacking knowledge and experience), and these had consequences which is symbolized in the Christian and Hebrew Bible by the end of the time in the Garden.

We fell, out of a time in which we lived originally among spiritual beings as ourselves a spiritual being, into materiality, where for many God is now dead (the new atheism).  It is only in materiality that the “I” or spirit can transform itself by having something (the material in all its meanings) which resists our “I”.  Only in the density of modern existence can the newly born self-consciousness (see the discussion of the Evolution of Consciousness in The Art of God), feel so existentially involved that the “I” makes out of itself something it can only become through its own forces.  Our “I” becomes clay-like and capable of being remodeled through our own wills.  Our transformation is fully within our selves to accomplish, according to our own understanding of who we freely choose to become.

                                                                                                                                                         

                                            The Rising of the Sun in the Mind

At the same time, as fallen and incomplete, we yet lack certain capacities, and the positive side of the three-fold double-complex is that the ahrimanic and luciferic doubles provide a kind of intelligence (one directed at the sense world, the other directed at the world of spirit) that we lean on until we ourselves can carry out those tasks.  We need these most intimate companions in the soul.

For higher worlds (the upper vertical), we have the guardian angel.  For the more earthly tasks (the lower vertical) we have the doubles.

Now to the human double, or [human/d].   This is the most earthly of creatures  in the soul, and Tomberg in Meditations called these beings by their more ancient name: egregores.  I have found that term in-artistic, and prefer the words: self-inflicted wounds of soul.   These beings are not part of a hierarchical creation, out of higher spiritual beings (not gloves within gloves within gloves: >>>>>>), but rather they are created by human activity.

They are most frequently created by repeated rite-like activity such as that which leads to alcoholism or addiction.  Such a rite as the ritual of shooting up used by a heroin addict is what creates, via repetition, a kind of psychic parasite in the soul, which the heroin addict has learned to call “the monkey on my back” and the alcoholic “demon rum”.

Let us now return to the original symbol set:

Christ Jesus

Guardian Angel

~i~AM~

[sense world < soul (A/d) < I-am > (L/d) soul > spiritual world]

human double 

(asuras)

the Divine Mother

... and notice its cross-like nature.

                                                                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                                           

The Cross, as an spiritual symbol in itself, has both a vertical aspect and a horizontal aspect.  The horizontal aspect is mostly related to our social realities - our relationships with each other, while the vertical aspect is mostly related to our spiritual realities - our relationships with the Divine Mystery.

This Cross has both an upper* vertical gesture and a lower* vertical gesture.

*[For this language as well I am indebted to Catherine Maccoun’s remarkable: On Becoming an Alchemist., as well as her wonderful meditation on sex and anthroposophists, in 1914 or so ... Germans/Austrians seeking spirit in concert; 'Work on What has been Spoiled"]

It is on those paths connected to the lower vertical gesture of spiritual development that we find this symbol set:

human double 

(asuras)

the Divine Mother

Just as nature has the means by which the decaying world of matter can be taken apart and recycled (various insects, micro organisms etc.), so the decaying (recycling) world of spirit has those Beings that can take apart spirit, in the literature called: the Asuras.   We only come close to seeing the activity of the Asuras when we find a human being so lost and consumed by their darker tendencies that we see that aspect of them we would normally call “the human spirit” disappearing.  This activity is, by the way, holy art.  The Asuras are not unclean,  yet with life there are constantly processes of decay, leading to rebirth, and decay is always done impeccably.

                                                                                                               

                                                  Christ Blesses the Grays, by themikehoffman

The most common of these are such as the heavy-use crack addicts.  In addition, actors who have nearly given up their humanity in an effort to portray evil in  the human can begin to find themselves deeply troubled, such as what we know as connected to the death of the actor Heath Ledger after his work in the movie The Dark Knight, or the soul-decay of Marlon Brando following his portrayal of Colonel Kurtz in the movie Apocalypse Now.

When such as Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold, the actors in the Columbine tragedy, stared unprepared by their culture into the abyss of their own souls, they found that what lived in that  abyss stared back at them, after which they were undone.

If we get too close to fire we will burn.  Tomberg’s Meditations says that to identify with true evil is to commune with it, and this destroys our vital elan - our creative will.

Now these are some of the most terrible and profound powers of the Creation - these grave and often ancient (see the imaginative writing of H. P. Lovecraft) earthly powers, which is why they are ruled by the Divine Mother forces.  Most of what we have learned to call Evil is in fact an aspect of the Creation meant to exist, and which is ruled (set within limits) by the Divine Mother and her companions. 

                    Arrival 

It is only the creations of the free human being, and its/his/hers unruly appetites (the Beast from the Abyss of the Unknown and Unexpected) - or the human double, which lies outside the rule of the Divine Mother, and ultimately belongs to us, and thereby connected to our own fates.  In granting the human being real freedom, the very Creation, with great love and vulnerability,  has surrendered Itself to our Choices.

Do not let the News create despair.  Chicken Little and Henny Penny rule that puffed-up self-promoting the Sky may fall, news at 11.  Yet/yes many people can lead lives of quiet desperation, but the human spirit ... and we all know this, .... has got more stubborn than ten mules.

                                                                                                        

All the seeming horrors of modern existence we will never understand until we take up a science of the spirit that includes and acknowledges our dark sides.  Once we do that, we will discover that the “I” (the lower and higher ego), can be and is protected by the forces of the Divine Mother, and as well as by the nature of the afterlife. 

In my book The Art of God I go into the details of the afterlife, the kamaloka experience, and the meaning of karma and reincarnation, because it is there, where Divine Justice operates, that the human being most fully experiences the consequences of his deeds in the life just passed.

I write this immediate above to suggest that the total structure of our relationship to Evil is full of saving graces, which however eventually require that we awake to them and participate in them in order to find our way in the world intentionally created by the Divine Mystery  to have such characteristics.   As we go further into these studies, more facts of this kind will become apparent.

                                "Fox Network Presents : Let's Fool The Nation"
                                                       - by Robert Nuckels

                                                             titled: Theurgia
("Theurgy describes
the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature,
 performed with the intention of invoking the action or evoking the presence of one or more gods,
especially with the goal of achieving henosis and perfecting oneself" Wikipedia)

Prayer&meditation works just as well ... and so does the practice of creating art ...

fires we are ~!~!~!~ dancing with fate, .... do we see the art of the gods yet???, ... pause and take in a great breath, ... modern humanity loves to feel its oats, but we are nowhere near to actually creating a planet or another living being out of nothing ... so proudly we fall in the flames of our own hungers and desires ...

going up, for The Americas, means going down ... unnatural science believes there is no "consciousness and life" in rocks&waters flowing, but if we live in the Americas, ... the secrets of what happened to Christ, between His Death on the Cross, and The Resurrection ...

  "Christ Blesses the Greys", by themikehoffman

Are we really ready for choosing to create a new relationship with what the goddess religions would have called the Fey, or the Land of Fairie, or the Underworld, ... 

Before this however, let us consider what is called: The Day of Judgment.  Religious tradition in the cultural West recognizes a time when the consequences and price of all our flaws will become due.  The best writing on this I have read is by Valentin Tomberg in his Meditations on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism, in the Arcanum: Justice.  There he points out that the human community will individually judge itself after going through a Rite where it remembers all that it has done through the eons of Time. 

As to the question many preachers assert, that we will then be condemned to hell for eternity, Tomberg asks who can justly claim to define and limit God’s love and God’s forgiveness, suggesting that while any who chose to be impenitent (unrepentant) could spend eternity in hell, who during the Rite of the Day of Judgment, will, upon viewing their errors, still then not seek and accept the offer of love and forgiveness.

One last word on the double - the dark side, as it were ...

                                                                               

In my other writings such as the Way of the Fool and American Anthroposophy I write in detail about certain aspects of dealing practically with the three-fold double complex.   The point so far has been to let the reader realize what depth and mystery our soul life contains.  These matters we may learn to empirically and scientifically understand and deal with, but only in ourselves, not in others.  Our inwardness is rich and complicated, and the path to discovering that will be individual - not one of us walks exactly the same path.

Not only that, we are to be helped - we are not alone.  The double is held within laws by the Mother and the Son, which includes the fact that we have, in the soul-region of the heart, independence from all aspects of the dark.  This most remarkable matter, which bears repeating, is that the battle ground with evil is within ourselves, not out there in the world.  As we conquer and discipline ourselves, we win the battle with the dark.  The Mystery of Evil then includes the fact that we are full participants in a World-wide Temple Ritual occurring on a large scale over considerable periods of time.

With then these ideas, models and symbol sets in mind, let us next proceed to various kinds of common sins, error or kinds of possible evil, as a means to find some of the inherent wisdom of the whole.  Often what we want to call evil, as is suggested by the Sermon on the Mount, is a projected perception - a beam in our own eye.  Below we will try to find our way past these beams to the mote.

The Moral Lesson of Daytime Dramas

                                                                                                                                                               

- a movie -

Lots of people enjoy watching what we call Soap Operas.  Many people look down on those folks who enjoy watching these daytime dramas.  If we stand back from these dramatic forms, view them collectively, and sense their artistic integrity, we will come to realize that these are basically Morality Plays.

They have a certain excitement, given all the basic impulses displayed: love, affection, hate, murder, theft, and so forth.  They also drag out various developments - a nighttime TV drama makes something happen in a couple of hours, which in a Soap might take months to unfold.

There is also a Mystery, given the attachment of many folk to spending their time watching TV, at any time of Day.  I've found over the years that if it exists, it may well harbor secrets that will hide from us of we approach the experience with disdain.  If you look down upon this activity - the making of&watching of Soap Operas, then perhaps you have overlooked something very basic about what it means to be a human being.  Judgments previously made, but not well self-observed, pile up in the mind/soul like a lot of dead wood thoughts, --- there be lots of beams, of all kinds, types, shapes, and not all of them are there to be burned to ash.  We need the Beams, as a foundational/elemental of the structure of our own thought-edifice.

                    

                                   http://www.elmwoodreclaimedtimber.com/our-products-price  Made this as an advertisement.

The soul is a house - a home - and it is ours.  We decorate it in favorite thoughts, feelings and hungers/wants/ woven together by sighs and words .... uttered, or not; And all the gods&goddesses see us as wonders ... to the Divine, we are the central mystery.  To the invisible folk we are moving stars, trailed by invisible chains, binding us to the earth for a while.  To many of the truly-different-others, a human being is a living divine spirit ~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~@!~in a temple self-made.

                                                                 my girl (Linda) friend and her two daughters Katherine&Alicia,
                                                                                                                               visiting mom at Forest Home, where Linda and I live.

We make a mistake if we believe these “dramas” have nothing to teach, for they all share a common lesson, repeated endlessly everywhere over and over again: the first misstep is to lie.  As characters confront their life dilemmas, some of which they confront repeatedly, they have choice after choice between the truth and a lie, and as soon as the lie is uttered, all kinds of consequences flow from that deed.

One lie leads to another.  People hearing the lie are mislead and then themselves make mistakes of judgment because they lack the truth.  If we step outside these Morality Plays, to a different literature we might find this term: The Father of Lies, sometimes referring to a spiritual Being we might call Satan, or the Devil.  In Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual paradigm these are two different Beings: Lucifer and Ahriman.  In other venues concerned with these subjects, it is often pointed out that while modern humanity likes to believe in God, we often don’t bother to believe in the Devil (for some thinkers, this is a very big mistake to believe only in God and then not believe in the Devil too).

One of the more curious matters is that while many do not believe in either the God or the Devil, the Devil clearly believes in God (see the story of Job in the Bible, or so I have been led to believe.  Mostly i'nI just practice the Gospels, and leave the rest to historical confusions).

This not believing in the Devil (or Satan) lets him get away with a lot of stuff he otherwise would not get away with.  The reality of the Dark Side (which we are here exploring) is not at all like those spiritually immature views that humanity has had for many thousands of years - views which needed the words sin and evil to mean something unclean. 

                                                                                                                               .... the Way of the Fool ...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

There is a saying, several actually: fools rush in; only fools fall in love; a fool and his money are soon parted; What Spirit ~!~ dancing in each human being ~!~ willing steps off of a cliff, and into the unknown, gazing at clouds in the sky  In the Tarot, some interpretations also call the Fool Card, AMOR, or LOVE ... certainly a mystery that

Consider for a moment, modern politics. 

                                                           , A rather poor student of Loki, Raven, and Coyote - an apprentice in the arts-trickster - being given all the rope from which he needs to hang - hopefully without too much collateral damage.

This political reality (as against the daytime morality plays) has real world consequences that flow from all the lies that live in this realm of thoughts and actions.  It is not without serious consequences for us all that our governments lie to us, and that those running for President of the United States of America have so much trouble with the truth.  Or, worse perhaps is that we like to live in the fantasy of their lies because that fantasy world is more comfortable than the reality we would otherwise have to face.

Our lives are places where life imitates art on a very huge scale.  The Daytime Drama is an escape in a way, because we can turn it off, or ignore it, or otherwise pretend there is some control over what goes on there; while our actual lives are buried under the rule of The Father of Lies - a real spiritual Being determining much that happens to us.  Wars, financial woes, crimes inside and outside government and corporate boardrooms, ... the list is endless of real world consequences of the fact that each individual is a place/gateway where through us evil and or good enters the world, Or not.

Good&Evil, ... is that a reality?  Light&Dark?  Clean&Unclean?  Wicked?  Sinful?  Or does the "just what is" have more to it?  What would be the point of human suffering, a prime mystery for the Buddha,

                                                                "this and that"    - some thoughts on the Four Noble Truths -        

if there was something fundamental we did not yet know, or otherwise have forgotten?

Why bother to create an ~i~AM~, and then just weigh it down with difficulties and trials?  Look again at the schematic, and its geometry.  A human being, as most every mother&father knows, is something basically a miracle.  Does not the clearly free upper set of 4 symbols rest upon a base obviously solid, as well as aesthecially pleasing - an arrangement artistic ...

~i~AM~

(A/d) < I-am > (L/d)

[human (d)]

We look out onto the world and act on this world from out of these interior realities, although we are simultaneously surrounded by even higher powers, thus:

Christ Jesus

Guardian Angel

~i~AM~

[sense world < soul (A/d) < I-am > (L/d) soul > spiritual world]

human double 

(asuras)

the Divine Mother

We choose what comes out of us into the world.  The higher Divine Powers make for the world-order that enables us to individually be morally (both in a positive negative sense) creative - to be actors in our own Dramas (“...all the world’s a Stage...”).   Part of the Mystery of Evil is that its main battleground is not out there in the world, but rather it is staged precisely where we can most directly effect it - in our own inner life of soul and spirit.

                                                          

Here again is how Rudolf Steiner put it in a lecture in Lucifer and Ahriman, at page 21: “...the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence”. [emphasis added]

For details on how this works on a world-wide social scale, refer once more to The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.  Here we are working not with the macro results of this structure, but with the personal and individual elements as appear within our own interior.  The map is not the territory, and to best understand The Father of Lies we have to be self honest about our own lies.  You could say that all the “secrets” of evil are within us, and that is where we will gain all our needed knowledge.

                                                

Then it is these personal lies that we know best.  The oddest reality here returns us again to The Sermon on the Mount and “judge not lest ye be judged”.   Christ advises us to learn first about the Beam, in this case our own lies and lying.  Only after facing our own lies and lying can we begin to help another with their Mote.

Once more there is a kind of fool’s skill to be learned: to forgive ourselves.  It is hard to face our own lies and lying if we judge ourselves.  In the self-reflective soul the problem of the Mote and the Beam exists as well.  The Beam of our unjust inner judgment of our own self disables us from really being willing to acknowledge our own lies and lying.  Instead, fearing our own “conscience’s” (our higher I’s) judgment, we hide from ourselves our own truth.  This is why the Fifth Step of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous reads: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. [emphasis added, ed.]

From Soap Operas were are taught the webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive.  From politicians, we see the consequences for the webbed-world of operatic folly, in the name of What?
                                                                                 

A lot of self-lies take the shape of either ego-inflation, or ego-deflation.  We make inner pictures of ourselves as bigger and better or lesser and worse.  It is the luciferic double that encourages ego-inflation (bigger and better) and the ahrimanic double that encourages ego-deflation (lesser or worse).  The former tends to excesses of the euphoric and the latter to excesses of the depressive.  When the physical body is defective in some way, then the interface (the organ of the brain) between the spirit/soul and the body is lamed somewhat, and we get the phenomena: bi-polar or manic depressive.

These are not illnesses, as much as unusual relationships, of the ~i~AM~ &&& the I-am, with the threshold between the world of matter and the world of spirit.  Not everyone is the same Inside, and the Narrow Gate to the world of spirit is Inside Us - through and on the other side of the dark.  Joan of Arcadia, last episode, first season: "learn to see in the dark" "trust the world behind your eyes", and "go toward the light"   Joan was produced by Barbara Hall, whose works are well worth enjoying.

                                                           

All the same, we are not our brains, nor is/are the maps provided by consciousness scientists even close to the actual territory - the experience of the school of hard knocks, and its remarkable companion, learning how to share the pain.

       When You Can’t Scream… Or 10 Reasons Why I Smoke          

It is not something wrong with us that we do go through such changes of mood.  It is merely very human.  At the same time there is a huge problem with aspects of our modern culture, which we might call the fields of psychology and/or psychiatry.  These forms of knowledge carry within themselves the lie that we as creatures of spirit and soul can be diseased.  It is not a conscious lie, although many practitioners of these arts might inwardly have qualms about what they do.

Much that happens to us in our souls and spirits is seen today as diseased, in part because the basic paradigm, natural science, is infused with what has to be called: the anti-Christ spirit.  This spirit - this attitude of mind -denies the Father and the Son by believing there is only matter and there is no spirit.  To the extent that the above two so-called healing professions believe a human being is only matter, and never spirit, we cannot be truly helped as we are not actually seen.

Bicycles: a Children's Christmas Story for Adults

Let me take a couple of cases in point, out of my own experience as someone who spent almost two decades fighting in the trenches of the field of mental health.  By trenches I mean I was never a professional such as a nurse or doctor, but rather someone who might be called a psychiatric aide or a mental health worker. 

At that level I actually saw the patient more often and more directly than did the professionals.  If they needed their bodies cleaned when they were incontinent, I did it.  If they needed someone to sit with them in the middle of the night while they fought the voices inside their heads, I did it.  If someone was to be struck, it was me.  If someone had to be wrestled to the ground it was by me.

Of course there are hundreds of thousands of us, fighting in these trenches, for low pay and little recognition.  For us, such experiences grace us with direct knowledge of what Christ taught with “the washing of the feet”.

Case One: hearing voices.  We make the assumption that when an individual reports “hearing voices” that this is some kind of inner illusionary state - there are no voices to be heard, according to our cultural paradigms.  We discount their experience, often treating this experience has having no possible meaning and as something to be gotten rid of.   A lot of what we today call mental disease is actually very normal human inner experience arising in a time in which the “system” believes our inner life is not valid, and the only way we are to be judged is by our outer behavior

     https://www.amazon.com/William-Bento/e/B001K810FK

https://www.amazon.com/Dennis-Klocek/e/B001KIXLWA/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Spiritual tradition recognizes something called: the threshold.  This is the boundary between ordinary consciousness and the spirit world.  Certain material dysfunctions in the matter of the brain cause the “I” to have un-wanted experiences across this “threshold” - experiences of the spirit, for which the so-called “insane” person is not prepared because our culture does not recognize these experiences as valid and real.  These “involuntary” spiritual experiences then represent an unusual kind of karma and suffering we have yet to fully appreciate.

Whenever we invalidate someones reported experiences, we place our judgment as superior to theirs.  It is a hubris of the first order, as with only a little thought we would have to confess that we cannot see their inner world and have no idea of its real nature.  Even to guess is flawed, although common.  The fact is we hardly at all know our own inner life, so what makes us believe we are in a position to judge what is going on inside someone else?

Case Two: intermittent explosive disorder (an example of the flaws of the DSM system of diagnosis).  The Diagnostic Statistical Manual (going into its 5th edition as I write this) asserts that psychiatry can mimic physics - that is it can be scientific using number relations.  So diagnosis is based upon lists of symptoms as definitions of disease - a kind of check-off list. This is an amazingly stupid idea, given that observation of human beings is far more of an art than it will even be a physical science.  The drive to mimic science kills the art.  At present one can find numerous discussions of how bad an idea the latest DSM is on multiple levels.  But the insurance and pharmaceutical industries have something to gain from this DSM, and they also have sufficient social/political power to continue to push this false paradigm on the rest of us.  Keep in mind that under Communism, the Soviet Union routinely imprisoned people of different political persuasions for fancied psychiatric illnesses.

It used to be, when I was growing up, that some people had what we called bad tempers.  They were socially expected to get control of this tendency to excess, and if they refused there were social consequences, usually criminal.  Now that this is a DSM diagnosis (having a bad temper is now called: intermittent explosive disorder) we have taken a path which treats the person with this imaginary “disease” as no longer responsible for their behavior.  This is a hugely dangerous tendency in modern society - to apply deterministic causal thinking to matters of inner life about which we really  know nothing.  Our ignorance here is colossal, and the social consequences of this ignorance unimaginable.

*

Everywhere lies.  Self lies, institutional lies.  Lies to gain power.  Lies to gain wealth.  Lies to hide from our own truths about ourselves.   If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.  John 8: 31-32.

For a different approach to the Divine Presence, "Strange Fire: a wizard's compendium of IDEAS in the light of EROS
a self-illustrated book, with commentary, ... on occasion, beginning with A~Treatise~on~Physics
 

*         *         *

Even such a field of study as Anthroposophy confronts within itself the possibility of the lie.  “One must be able to confront an idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage.”  Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

*         *         *

Marriage and Community

Certified Copy is a filmed tale of deep understanding:  A man and a woman meet, converse, and spend an afternoon together in Italy.  He appears to be an English writer, she appears to be a possible fan.  The movie starts where he is giving  a lecture about his latest book: Certified Copy.  He is a philosopher of art, it seems, and has written about whether or not a copy of some art is as artistically valid as the original piece.

The movie, following his apt introduction to his philosophical questions, seems to ask us if people are art and whether relationships are art.   The film, being good art, works on multiple levels and heightens its effect by suggesting at midway a delightful mystery.  Are these two, this man and this woman, actually husband and wife, and are their initial encounters where they seem to never have met, actually unfolding a special  stage of development of their 15 year relationship, which includes a son?

The relationships of men to women, and women to men, have an import that, because of the scale, places all reproduction of new human avatar organisms, in the hands of irregular passions, very strange twists of fate, and discourses on male and female natures that have been going on for a long time, perhaps entering their twilight years - maybe the millennials will find a way through those age old mazes.

                                       

The movie also demonstrates, less through concepts and more through actions, a discourse on the differences between male and female.  He, ever the philosopher, is most himself when he masters the life of concepts and becomes able to define his own life on those concrete terms.  She lives out of feelings, which as we know tend to the mercurial.

His concept of the healthy human being is as a kind of adult child, free, spontaneous, living in the now.  She lives in the responsibilities of her relationships - for example, as to her child she must be the adult.  While this can be cognitive, for her this responsibility is something she mostly deeply knows through her feelings - her heart - not just her head. 

Clearly to her, the man is often just another child for whom she must be the responsible person.  He chafes under her efforts to guide and cajole, resisting the loss of freedom in the face of another person who feels she must tell him what to think and how to live. 

Both desire to love and be loved, and yet have not understood in practice that one must learn to love the flaws of the other as much as the more decent parts.  This ideal is given a spoken line in the tale, but little action or dramatic demonstration. 

Late in the tale they erupt into a fight in a public place - a restaurant.  What she sees as his childishness frustrates her efforts to fix; and, her intrusions into his life - a kind of excess of mothering - frustrate his efforts to be true to himself.

The film is very modern in its artistic appreciation of the drama in marriage of the collision between two individuals - in this case one male and one female.  If I were a marriage counselor, I’d show the movie to a small group of married couples, and then over food, and perhaps drink, let them discuss it for several hours.

                                                       

If I wanted to encourage wise discussion of community, among a group interested in living in close community, I’d show them the movie The Village, by M. Night Shyamalan. 

Part of the reason for this discourse on marriage and community, in cyber-intersection, is to point out the role art can play concerning deep questions, whose reality goes far beyond what is possible to consider even in this kind of text.  It is the role of art to raise good questions, not necessarily to answer them.

These movies also reveals how often we “judge”, and how those consequences play out in marriages and communities.

*         *         *

“an Animalization through Dismembering of the Astral Body”

Rudolf Steiner suggested one of the dangers coming toward humanity was this: "an animalization through dismembering of the astral body".  What the heck does that mean?

Such a concept is a kind of technical term of Steiner’s Spiritual Science.  It is one of four consequences of future evolutionary developments, that might be characterized as: the continuation of the Fall.  There are some interesting (and challenging) philosophical-theological questions here, but it is not my purpose to explore them.  I only want to point out a particular contemporary phenomena which is, in my experience, an aspect of these wider questions.

For some time a certain kind of literature has become more popular, even reaching beyond books, and now into film and television.  These are stories about vampires and werewolves, in which their lives occur as parts of extensive forms of fantasy culture and also as containing admirable character traits. 

While a deeper analysis could be made, here we just need to notice how it is that this attractive set of fantasy pictures, in film and books, has enveloped the imagination of many young people.  We need to know why.

                                                                                            

People find today a certain emptiness in their lives.  Working at a fast food restaurant, or in an office under an abusive boss - all these instances the ~i~AM~/I-am naturally finds undesirable.  Since those who lead our civilization don’t have a spiritual conception of the human being, they don’t know what to do to bring about social health.  Mostly what they do encourages social dysfunction.

At the same time, the imagination is becoming more powerful, but again our culture does not understand how to teach about the imagination, so that people can be pulled in certain directions mostly out of instinct, rather than due to conscious choices.  While some can see this as a terrible consequence, the reality is far more complicated.  Karma plays a deep role in these changes, as does individual choices by the ~i~AM~/I-am during its sojourn in between death and a new life. 

                                  

Some of our young walk toward their futures and find the coming times filled with possibilities from which they recoil in horror.  They want passionate engagement with life.   They want to feel themselves as more powerful.  These aspects of the desire-body (the astral body) for greater sensuality and power are not unwarranted.  They dream dreams of power and sexuality and passion and community. 

There is a source to these dreams, and their powers.  Thousands of years ago, the religions of the world were run from Mystery Centers, where seers/initiations and prophets, lived with spirits, and taught what needed to be taught according to that more ancient time.  Gods&Goddesses were everywhere recognized.  The older Goddess religions were also more practical, in a sense.  The arts&crafts worked visibly in the world of the senses - people saw what was entirely believable.  There was a time when magic was formidable, and not just fabulous trickery.  The monotheisms got rid of pagan magiks, and fairy-worlds&workers.  The Earth Mother went into a kind of eclipse so that a culture would arise that was free of belief in invisible folks.

The life of the mind (our inner life) begins to become more attractive than the outer world of the senses.  It would be a perceptual mistake for thinking to conceive that there are only certain ways in which one learns to come awake inwardly.  Such retreats into fantasy are not without their quite valid consequences.

                      https://www.amazon.com/Vampires-Zombies-Werewolves-Ghosts-Supernatural/dp/0451531949

The fantasies about werewolves and vampires, who have an animal nature and magical powers, draw the imagination into the interior of our lives.  We will do well not to assume this will turn out to be all bad.  Large portions of the world today, hold to ideas of sorcery, spells, and curses.  Even politicians hold to vodoo trickledown economic ideas, and that the invisible hand of the market rules events capitalistic.  The strangest folks fancy they are capable of leading a nation, and/or a people.  Physics believes that stuff is made of parts, and in spite of having spent years of calculations and other re-renderings of the world into/via very large instrumentations, Cern has not proven any of the deeper micro cosmic particles to exist.  Theories are not working out.  The god-particle did not show up.  

             in Cern, magnetic tech makes for interesting mandalas

                                                              

Again, we (if we want to understand) need to keep in mind our Beam and their Mote. 

*         *         *

Multi-Player Internet Role-Playing Games

a team sport seeking recognition as an aspect of the Olympics ...

Here again is a social phenomena that can be pre-judged and mis-understood were we to only think about it in a superficial fashion.  As a result, when we read in the Press about some doctor or scientist talking about Internet addictions, or addictions to games or to porn, we can have the idea that someone who retreats from the so-called “real” world is ill and needs to be fixed.  That idea is our Beam.

The truth is that in many case not only is inner activity of the soul heightened in much game play, but real world skills are being produced.  Take for example multi-player role playing games of the “shooter” type.

What happens in “real life”?  Several people from a wide variety of physical locations come together in an imagined world.   While some can complain that the visual imagination is too detailed (or bloody), the fact is that the “meaning” of the experience is the more intense part.  An emotional bonding arises among the game players, one that may not be possible in their “real” lives, because in those lives they don’t find anyone who shares their interests.

Cooperation is required in order for the players to succeed - they can’t win on their own.  Quick thinking is trained, and visual acuity in making important observations of the game environment is rewarded.

                         

If one wants, its is possible to go on the Internet and find deep studies and thoughtful books about the real world consequences of so-called “game play”.  Keep in mind that “play” is one of more profound ways we learn, while flipping burgers for low pay, under an abusive dominating boss, is not play - its “work”, which we do in order to later be able to “play”.

For a wonderful literary journey into the intersections between game “play” and the “real” world, read Neil Stephenson’s latest novel: Reamde.  The world has and is changing rapidly as the Third Millennium dawns, and what seems foolish to older people is quite likely wisdom for younger people.  God does work in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

the Age of the Dark God:

Ahriman

I’m trying to keep this booklet short, but at the same time somewhat complete - that is, not leave out matters that need to addressed ... in the above I tried to give a few examples of how to try to see past the Beam - past our tendencies to quickly judge matters we actually do not understand.

Now we need some history in order to grasp deeper aspects of the present.

The Persians recognized two divine powers, a God of Light - Ahura Mazda, and a God of Darkness -  Angra Mainyu (also know as  Ahriman).  Rudolf Steiner used the name Ahriman in his works on Spiritual Science, to refer to a macrocosmic Being, who also appeared in the microcosmic (human nature) world is a tendency in human beings.  We called part of this above, the ahrimanic double, or the prosecutor.  Yet, the main Way in which human beings model themselves after Ahriman, is with their intellect.  Ahriman is cold, exact, and callous (uncaring).  The human intellect, if not warmed by impulses of sympathy or empathy, will make a cold, distant, calculation to pull the trigger ignoring consequences obvious.

Steiner also referred to what he called: the Ahrimanic Deception.  Ahriman, being the Father of Lies, through the human double was able to introduce, over time, into the cultural stream of Western Civilization a massive coordinated structure of lies or untruth following the Incarnation of Christ.

                                  

Why is Ahriman the Father of Lies?  Is it because he takes some kind of human-like perverse pleasure in lying?  No.

Its because he can’t see the truth.  What is true or not is a mystery to him.  Like many of us the only thing he observes in reality is the mirrored picture of his own nature.  He sees the rest of the Creation, but only recognizes there what is like him.   He is, in his own one-sided view, such an absolute perfection and power that when he goes “mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest maid of all” he sees only his own nature. 

Lucifer is different.  What he saw was human imperfection, found that wanting, and in his pride believed we could not become what was possible for us without bowing to him.  Recently got his own television show.

                                                                                
 

Having no love, no compassion and no humility, Ahriman can’t see truth, and therefore can’t communicate truth because he is perceiving only the warped mirrored perfection of his own being and nature.  This is his attitude and it lives quite strongly in present day natural science and in all religious fundamentalism.  This “materialism” then is everywhere in this Age of Ahriman, which itself is now marked by his incarnation.  He has become human for one lifetime, and lives now, at the time that I write this, as a human being.

The writer of the John Letters (I and II) in the New Testament spoke of what he called “the anti-Christ spirit”, or an attitude which denied the Father and the Son.  Natural Science lives fully in this “spirit” or attitude of soul when it decrees that the world is only matter and that there is no spirit.  Religion too lives in this spirit when it takes its points of view (its theologies) and declares there is only one valid system of belief, and it is theirs (that particular religion’s).  Not only that but the “system” becomes a set of “fixed” ideas - ideas without any Life in them.   Life grows and develops and changes, and systems of ideas that don’t have life in them become fixed and only breed death into the souls of those who believe in them.

Physics proposes only: matter and energy, but however - and with great serious silly - insists that all be measurable and countable.  Since most of human experience is qualitative, not quantitative, physics, chemistry, and biology tend not to find it, even though it stares out of the mirror at them every morning.

  Alice and friends ....

The higher powers of the Mother and the Son, loving us, let us live in this arid cultural desert in order to experience its existential emptiness (God is dead, some declared).  Ahriman serves us by creating his “enchantment” of the mind (the attitude of the anti-Christ spirit), which isolates us from each other and drives us into ourselves in order to pull out of ourselves the counter-spirit - the spirit of Life.  The Ahrimanic Enchantment is meant to put us to sleep in our souls until such time as we ourselves - within ourselves and among ourselves - become the Prince that gives the Kiss that awakens - what Steiner called the Christ Impulse.

This is not meant to be easy or without deep pain of soul and spirit.  Modern Life, within the individual biography, must be excruciatingly real.  Our i-AM has to pull something out of itself - it has to forge new meaning out of its own creativity in life.

In the appendix I have added some material available elsewhere, but which in this text ought to be included without those who read this having to go to another book.  From my book American Anthroposophy is a long essay on Ahriman’s 20th Century incarnation and its meaning: Outrageous Genius.  As a companion to that we have the Return of Christ in the Ethereal (not in a physical body - but in the spiritual plane where authentic thinking takes place) and the story which leads us to our personal understanding of the Second Eucharist in the Ethereal which accompanies this Return: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul.

                                        

What this shows us is that at the Dawn of the Third Millennium since the Incarnation, a great battle has taken shape.  The Dark God Ahriman has incarnated in a body, inside the Life of Rights in the United States of America.  This incarnation involved a birth on December 25th, 1950 in a kind of mockery of Christ’s own birth.  It was preceded by another mockery, a Star in the form of a horrible bomb experimented on at Trinity site near Alamogordo New Mexico, and then dropped on Japan near the end of the Second Great War of the 20th Century.

In this same Century it became possible for human beings to experience Christ’s Return in the Ethereal - the ancient Persian polar-opponents even more intimately involved in human affairs.   Yet the battlefield is not earth existence itself, but rather the inwardness of the human being.  We let in (or not) the Force, the moral power of the human being, by the choices of our own I, as the American story teller George Lucas intuited years ago in the original Star Wars.  We take the hero’s journey, or fall into the dark side.

At the same time we have our Yoda’s and our Obi Wan Kenobi’s - our Rudolf Steiner’s and our Valentin Tomberg’s.
 

In Outrageous Genius I name Ahriman’s earthly incarnation, but do not do that here, because unless we fully understand the context, and as well realize that the social-political world is in fact the leading edge of the Creation, we will not appreciate what is at stake, or why Ahriman is not only not unclean, but is in point of fact a kind of spiritual teacher.

                                                               

Recall once more our symbol set:

Christ Jesus

Guardian Angel

i-AM

[sense world < soul (A/d) < I-am > (L/d) soul > spiritual world]

human double 

(asuras)

the Divine Mother

In the center is the fallen human being - the <I-am>.  Surrounding that is the coordinated might of great spiritual powers, whose full existence means via Love to make possible the <I-am>'s eventual freely chosen goal to either rise up, via the some kind of path on the upper vertical, or to descend into the deeps of earth existence on the lower vertical, where we learn to integrate the double into our selves and into our world view.  Neither path is better, and the biography itself can contain elements of both.

           falling back to earth      wounded, maybe dying

Another marker of this Dawn of the Third Millennium is the metamorphosis (dying and becoming) of Western Civilization.  As I explain in detail in my book The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything, there is profound order in the social-political existence of humanity.  In fact, the Creator God - named Christ in our time (in more ancient times the Creator had more ancient names), is Embodied in this Organism of the Social-Political World.  We live, literally, inside the Divine, surrounded and buoyed up by this Love.

There is no detail of our existence which is outside this Love, although a whole book was required to even hint at the nature of this order/organism in which we unfold our biographies.  An especially important theme in that book is that: even conflict has meaning.  The present day social chaos is necessary so that our individual “i-AMs” are confronted with fully real and existential crises from which we may not escape.

The outcome (of the choices) in those moments of crisis is not ordained, for our freedom is essential.  At the same time, each biography has its own needs, and as regards moral dilemmas there are no moral absolutes that all must follow, for that would take away our freedom to choose.  Thus, the Third Millennium begins with an immense social dysfunction that is required in order for each individual to face their particular moments of inner pain and doubt.  Only in this way is the “i-AM” challenged to pull out of its own nature that which can arise in no other fashion.

There are no accidents.                 

Simultaneously, ... each world view is necessary for each individual.  That one human being is born a Muslim and lives in Pakistan, and fights in a war against the West, is the intellectual and mental context in which their particular biography is to unfold.  That another human being lives in North Dakota, and has become a confirmed new atheist, is for them the needed paradigm through which they see the world of their individual biography.

While there are universal truths, there is no need for any biography to find them, for they will have precisely what they need for their personal biography, and the arguments of many - setting religion at odds with science, is just part of various individual contexts.  Love cares not about whether we have the right point of view, but rather whether we have the experiences we most need in this particular life.

                         however seeming frivolous&pointless ... silly used to mean
                                     possessed by the sacred ....

In this sense then, Ahriman’s incarnation, and Christ’s Return in the Ethereal, are mere details.  Even my books are tiny ripples, mostly isolated in the vast oceanic streams that are the totality of Earth Existence.  What Steiner called the Age of the Consciousness Soul is to run from about 1400 to 3500 AD.   The dominate reality for that Age is the Rite of the Mystery of Evil, an event taking place in the World Temple that is Earth Existence, and for each participant the meaning of all of this belongs to them to determine.  What I think is irrelevant for most.

Love fully individualizes this Rite - it has only structural universal significance - i.e. we can name it and describe it, but no participant needs to know either that name or that description.

At the same time, this is also the Age of Science, which is marked by a search for universal truths.  As a consequence, certain thinkers add to human spiritual knowledge during the course of such events, in the same way that those doing research on biology add bit by bit what they can derive from their own investigations.  A street child in Bombay has no need for this knowledge, for Love will see to it that all that s/he needs s/he will receive.

The Rolling Stones had it right: “you don’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you’ll get what you need”. 

Or, as Christ said: “Ask and you will receive; look and you will find; knock and you will be admitted”.

*         *         *

presently being revised, watch out for ganja based pot holes in the below

appendix one

from the book American Anthroposophy

the spirit of the four directions

[A brief introduction to the neophyte: For some it will come as a strange surprise (perhaps quite off putting) to find this book begin with the following discussion concerning the present day incarnation of a spiritual Being of whom they have perhaps never heard anything. Ahriman is apparently first known to outward history as a figure in Persian religious myths. Rudolf Steiner discussed this Being in great detail, and represented both human nature and the general structure of the social world as being threefold in its most universal all-human characteristics. As represented artistically in Steiner’s sculpture: the Representative of Humanity, we find above was Lucifer, who stood between the human being and his experience of the divine spiritual worlds. Below was Ahriman, who stood between the human being and his experience of the world of the senses. In the Middle, as the balancing gesture, stood Christ as the Representative of Humanity (what our true higher nature is to become, as St. Paul had noted: Not I, but Christ in me).

                                                                                                                                                     

This arrangement should be viewed as something not easy to understand and as something that needs to be approached carefully and without succumbing to any temptations to sensationalize or exaggerate the real nature of Mystery of Evil, the main social-structural Mystery surrounding humanity in the present.

This much should be recognized. The social world consists of two parts, the first of which is an outer structural aspect - a Stage Setting, the maya of nature ~!~ <dancingwith> ~!~ history and social-political facts&processes. Here in this outside structure Ahriman is a main feature (recall above diagrams: sense-world A/d].   As we know, in tooth and claw, Nature is dangerous, untamed, wild.  Yet, all aboriginal wisdoms knew that Nature taught, and it taught harsh lessons to those who did not pay attention.  The Ahrimanic is Some Of the Laws of the dark/wild/dangerous side of nature, which the Creator made lawful from the beginning.

The Laws, which include/lean-toward Death ...  Humanity wrestles with Nature, and Nature always wins, so maybe its time to stop arguing, and ask with please and thank yous, for a better understanding of Her, ... Her message about Ahriman is simple: he's always welcome home for tea&sympathy, remains the brightest of Her children, a Star ~!~ in his own right Pure/Innocent/Geometry the Love of numbers by Number itself.  Just keep in mind that counting is interesting/fascinating (as Spock well knew), yet coloring outside the lines is erotic, a wild power to Vulcans.

                    

The Theoretic Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans            
by Thomas Taylor. 

More essential is the inwardness, what is not visible to the senses. All our outer actions (and inner actions) have a consequence for our soul and spirit. This inwardness is not maya, but truth. But to arrive at truth requires a rite of passage. The governor of this rite of passage is Lucifer. As we progress in inner development, we come to learn that the real essential aspect is Christ. He is the predominant feature of the truth of the inner world (Lucifer commands an inner world of temptation and illusion, while

                                

Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life - what receives our approach (the Way), in the middle becomes the means (the Truth) leading us through this rite of passage to its culmination (the Life).).

                                                           ~!~ ~!~ ~!~ ~!~!!~ ~!~ ~!~

As the essay below progresses, certain facts about this structural Mystery will be illuminated, and other related facts will come forward as the reader gets deeper into the rest of this work. The neophyte, who wants to go further into this Mystery - particularly what is called: the opponents, may want eventually to read Steiner’s works on the subject of Lucifer and Ahriman very carefully.]  The follow material is basically a rather long footnote, in two parts, usable for scholars or folks with aggressive curiosity ...

                                                                                                                                                                  appendix one

Outrageous Genius - Discovering the in-the-Present Incarnation
 of Ahriman in America
 through
the Signs of the Times

first, some necessary preliminary considerations

Honoring the Teacher and the Teaching

                                                                                                                             

“And, just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh, and as there was an incarnation of Christ in the flesh, so will there be, before even a part of the third post-Christian millennium will have passed, an actual incarnation of Ahriman in the West: Ahriman in the flesh.” [emphasis added] R.S. lecture, 1 November, 1919

“The thing that will matter, though, will be for people in the age of Ahriman to know that John William Smith* is only what appears before them outwardly, and that inwardly Ahriman is there; they must know what is happening and not succumb to any deception in the drowsiness of their illusions.” [emphasis added] R. S. 28 December 1919 [*a name Steiner made up]

                                      

                                                                  context is everything,
                                                                                                 i.e.
                                                                      The Times need to be well understood

The first and essential thing to realize is that in thinking about the Incarnation of the near-god Ahriman, as a human being on the cusp of the change from the 2nd Millennium to the 3rd, we must not conceive of this as an incarnation of Evil.

All of us are incarnations, and all of us are equal on the plane of incarnate existence.  Equal, ... so Ahriman incarnate is wrapped up in the same dramas of want&folly as the rest of us, and like all the skills potential in human beings, this person is gifted at birth, like any artist.  Sure for some, we will choose not-to-like him, or blame him, or otherwise use him as an excuse for our own peculiarities.

He had stuff to solve, and Life itself weighed and measured him in Ways only he apprecicates.  He made mistakes, got things wrong, and still set in motion something we will have to live with - a system for controlling the dissemination of truth..  Not just the absence of truth - rather the anti-truth, which annialates both when they are in contact with each other.  Trump is his child, but still Ahriman's story must be grasped, because we have within us the same gift: intellect.  Except in him, there is not the ability to moderate this penetrating intellect with the hear; and, his intellect is of the highest order.

What Rudolf Steiner has called the “opponents” play a necessary and ordained role in the Creation. They are the density and weight we are to meet and learn to carry (in both the inward heavenly realm as well as the outward earthly realm), otherwise our own incarnations would be too easy, and we would never really learn anything.

Macro Evil (the opponents) are different from the Beast from the Abyss, or collective and conscious micro (human) evil. The tempters and confusers tempt and confuse, they sow seeds of fear and doubt and judgment and cynicism, but they do not bring true evil into the social world. We do that when we give into their urgings, instead of the wise (though challenging and often difficult) promptings of our own hearts. The more consciously we choose the dark, the more the Beast from the Abyss has free play in human social existence. The more we consciously seek and choose the Good, the more evolution moves forward in a balanced and harmonious direction.

Or not.  Is the essence of the Mystery of Evil that it - evil - does not exist?   No.  the Mystery is what we do - how we participate in existence, knowing full well that the wild is good as well as the car3fully groomed and ordered.

How is it that we can do that?   How is it that human beings can apparently kill the life sphere of a whole planet?  That we humans can eradicate species, and even ourselves, ... for what purpose does that possibility even exist?

“...the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect ~!~ through him in earthly existence.” [emphasis added] R.S. Lucifer and Ahriman, lecture II, 2 November 1919.

Some anthroposophists create pictures within their inwardness, in which they view the opponents as more or less extremely powerful, and thereby capable of overwhelming humanity (especially in connection with the hardly spoken of Soradt - the Sun Demon - and the Asuras). Simple logic refutes such an assumption, for if these Beings had the power some anthroposophists believe they have, progressive evolution would already be over. The fact is they are constrained, principally through the office of the Divine Mother, whose golden realm is found on the other side of the Eight Inner Spheres of the Earth (the Spheres of the Fallen Hierarchies). As we more and more become able to do research into the Feminine Mysteries (something Steiner could only hint at in order not to get caught up in the web of the Mary Cult of European Catholicism), we will discover that there is not only a male trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), but also a feminine trinity (Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul). Steiner could only point out to us a few facts about this golden realm, and also the significance of the return of the Imagination (the Holy Sophia) and as well the significance of Anthroposophia. Some of the best present-day research on the Divine Mother can be found in Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot, in the 11th Arcanum: Force. It is through Hell to the realm of the Holy Mother (the Eight Inner Spheres of the Earth) that Christ descended on the Saturday following His crucifixion, whereby he obtained the forces necessary for resurrection. [See Proverbs viii, 22-30 for some hints.]

More detail will be developed on this problem in my essay below: The Mystery of Macro and Micro Evil: the relationship of the Shadow (the three-fold double-complex) to the American Soul, wherein knowledge of the Shadow obtained after 35 years of introspection will be described. This much can be said presently: Ahriman and Lucifer enter directly into human affairs through us - through our giving into the Shadow, the three-fold double-complex. We are the gate by which the effects of the opponents enter the world social order. In a like fashion, it is also only through us that Christ (and the Divine Mother - but that is, as noted above, a whole other theme) can directly enter into the social order.* The Fifth Cultural Epoch (the Age of the Consciousness Soul) is the era in which greater and greater aspects for the responsibility for earthly social affairs falls to human beings.

*[Obviously, both Christ and the Divine Mother appear sometimes to make a physical contact with individuals in various forms. This is one of the means through which they influence a particular time, but still this is always done with great respect for human freedom, and still keeps to the same rule: the influence enters the social world through us. The recipient of such effects is not made into a passive tool in any sense of that word.]

Ahriman in reality is a gift to humanity, a two-edged gift to be sure, but a real treasure. His very onesidedness teaches us, and this is teaching we need to face squarely, for it not only teaches us about ourselves, but also about an essential aspect of the real nature of the Creation. We all contain within our souls the ahrimanic potential, the possibility to be calculatingly cold and heartless, and if we are as brutally self honest as our conscience would encourage, we have all made and will make judgments that have such a quality - that are, from a human perspective, callous and indifferent.

Do we not walk through the world turning a blind eye away from all manner of suffering and pain, fully aware that we do this in order to preserve our self interest, our comfort and our far easier lives?

To fill out this picture, think on Nature. In tooth and claw, in flood and earthquake, in all that seems as powers of death and radical sudden change, we see in the processes of Nature what appears as an absence of either compassion or love. The Natural World (as against the Social World*) is a world of profound and complicated laws, which seem in their results to have not at all the same consciousness that one human being might bear, out of compassion and love, toward another. In this indifferent power of Nature and nature’s lawfulness, lives Ahriman as he manifests as an aspect of the sense world.

*[From another point of view this distinction, separating the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms from the human kingdom, does not work. But we have different purposes here, if the reader will accept that reality (as Steiner himself pointed out) is frequently paradoxical. Our bodies are of this Nature, but our Spirit, in its freedom, stands outside those rules. See Owen Barfield’s remarkable book Worlds Apart to explore some of the logical problems here in a deeper way.]

Yes, Nature (as meant here) contains beauty - it is a divine work of art, but in its processes and laws it is basically finished, fixed and complete. It is essentially done. That human beings may in the future have the possibility of lifting Nature up out of this fixed and finished condition is a whole other story. That Anthroposophy can yet teach humanity mysteries of Nature unimagined by today’s mankind is a necessary step in laying the groundwork for this lifting up. Humanity must learn to truly see, and it is a mission of Anthroposophy to enable this seeing. All the same, Nature is Created (past tense), in which the last act was the arising of thought. “Thought is the last member of a series of processes by which Nature is formed” [emphasis added] R.S. A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception. This is why the path of Anthroposophy is a path of cognition. To see the real secrets of Nature requires the metamorphosis of thinking, a task not as well advanced as it should be in anthroposophical culture (more later). What we haven’t truly understood in practice, we cannot teach.

Our social-political world has almost completely emancipated itself from Nature. As we more and more developed, we more and more separated away from Nature, so that today the Social World is a world essentially all of its own, in which callous indifference and compassion and love operate along side each other. The Social World has out of instinct come to sit astride the Natural World, using it for our egoistic benefit. We can now choose whether to continue that course, whether to continue to embody dominion over or to transform and metamorphose that into communion with (see my book the Way of the Fool). We can go to sleep and let raw animality (callous indifference and appetite) rule us (instead of us ruling it), or we can wake up.

Ahriman in entering into our world confronts other powers than those which would be normal to his realm - his usual place in the Creation. As a human being he now enters this world of choice, not of essentially fixed processes and laws.

Part of what bothers us, and will bother us about this Cosmic Being, now to be seen as a human individual, is not how much he has done that we see as wrong, but how much he is just like a certain part of us. For example, many people have and will in the future like and admire this individual. Even so, as a human being, to the extent that he does evil, he does it as a human being. Elements of his cosmic powers are restrained by being incarnated, just as are ours.

In addition, recall that Rudolf Steiner explained how our antipathy to another really acquires its strength and passion from the fact that we semi-consciously know just how much we ourselves are like that which we observe in others as failings. Ahriman incarnate is a mirror to a common human failing, a failing to which everyone living today in the world is prone. If we want to avoid this, we must strive to know the true nature of our heart, and at the higher levels of inner development, think our way to an experience of the Ethereal Christ. This requires us to work properly and consciously at soul metamorphosis, and not just whine and complain about how awful the world is, and about how much everyone but us is wrong, evil and dumb.

It is also important to realize that Ahriman incarnates in a specific place and time in order to accomplish something as a more or less ordinary human being (with extraordinary intelligence - one-sided spirit-thinking) he can only achieve at this specific place and time. Outside the social world of incarnate human beings, the cosmic power Ahriman can only do certain limited things, and these mostly indirectly through our Shadow (the three-fold double-complex). Inside the Social World, when with us as a human being, he can do directly things he was unable to do before.

All the same, to act directly on the world, as a member of the social order, he must still surrender some of his capacities - some of his genius, that is operate as a extremely gifted human being, not as a nearly divine power incarnate (what in ancient times might have been called an avatar).

In this, Ahriman’s teaching is harsh - it is not for wimps, and his influence on our social existence is necessarily profound, regardless of how dark we may be tempted to seek to portray it. A cosmic power is on the earth living as a human being, and this is a power that can only be called Outrageous Genius.

Ahriman also belongs to America (the true West), in the same way Lucifer belonged to the East and Christ to the Center. American anthroposophists need to recognize that he is ours. Our materialistic society, mostly of our own making through our choices in terms of comfort and appetites, is ahrimanic because we opened the door to his influence and have benefited from it. For example, we have computers and all that goes with this electronic world, because of him. The genius of cold heartless calculation provides many gifts, and we have had to become awash in it - buried up to our necks in it - so that we will soon be forced to decide whether or not we really want it to rule us, or us to rule it.

Our task then in coming to knowledge of this power is to recognize a part of ourselves in its nature, and to also understand how fine and exact is the shape this power seeks to give to our social life. This shape, crafted by outrageous genius, can tell us a great deal. In so doing it reveals to us, we who would foster the good - that is we who would be balanced instead of so extremely one-sided - just what we need to do and how we need to act in the social world to bring into that world just the healing that is needed. Ahriman would overbalance the world in a certain direction, and it will be up to that portion of humanity, willing to be awake to him consciously, or instinctively, to strive to restore this balance.

In a peculiar sense, he also points directly at the true Second Coming, as began in its initial ethereal world dynamics in the years 1933 to 1945, by pointing so strongly away from it. He (Ahriman) comes to distract us, to move us away from our true heart, and this is his temptation - to cause us to loose ourselves in the world of the senses, and never look within at the own soul and discover what lies there, for as Christ told us in Luke: “the kingdom of heaven is within you”. Ahriman would have us be so absorbed in the Stage Setting, that we never notice that the real battlefield is within - that is: It is within this inner battlefield of soul that we as individuals act most powerfully as creative authors in the Play.

Yet, by this very distraction and its strength, he points the other way. He speaks into our lives and says to us: go here, for you will like it, for all your lower impulses will find there their satisfaction. He wants to pull us down into too much self-gratifying gravitas. Even the excess of seriousness in anthroposophical circles tends to have this ahrimanic character. We have to engender the counter-levity out of our selves. We have to overcome the cold-hearted and calculating materializing lower senses tendency in our soul that otherwise remains sub-conscious, and replace that with the ethereal forces of consciously moralized thought. Only our wills can do this, and we have incarnated just in this time precisely to learn this lesson and to accomplish this task, which Rudolf Steiner has called: the unfolding of the Consciousness Soul.

Moreover, if we learn to perceive the real dynamics of social existence correctly, we will see that already, in spite of Ahriman’s incarnate activities, we have been instinctively engaged in much that is already transforming the worst that he would accomplish were we not to learn to understand his teaching. We are learning even now from this teaching how to make its countering healing gesture. Everywhere there is a waking up, and now it is time for Anthroposophy to step forward and find a way to serve the world’s hunger to wake up all the way. However, first we need to rouse ourselves by facing the mirrored shadow of our worst qualities as these manifest not just in American and World Culture, but more importantly, as an absolutely necessary crucial first step, in American (and world-wide) Anthroposophical Culture.

Were we simply to look at the outer culture, without first looking inwardly and squarely at ourselves, we will fail utterly. We must meet the Shadow in ourselves or we will be nothing but the hypocrites to which Christ referred when he said in Matthew 23: 25-28:

“Woe to you canon-lawyers and Pharisees, you fakes, for cleaning off the rim of your cup and saucer while on the inside you’re bursting with greed and wild appetites. Blind Pharisee, wash out the inside of the cup and saucer first, if you want the outside to end up clean! Woe to you canon-lawyers and Pharisees, you fakes, for being like dusty monuments that look pretty on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of corpses and all kinds of rot. You likewise from the outside appear to the world to be decent, but inside you’re full of hypocrisy and ways around the law”.

It is the thesis of this essay then that Ahriman incarnated in the West in the latter part of the 20th Century, and that his activity as an incarnated human being can be found in various phenomena of social existence. He leaves/left a trail, as it were, in events that mark his passage, and this paper means to discover that trail, and mark that passage, so that we know who he is/was and what he did, and can then begin to counter-balance this influence. Not erase it, or eliminate it, but consciously counter-balance it. Moreover, we must start to look also at its examples that are nearest at hand in our Society and Movement (a great deal in the collection of essays that follows does this). We look outwardly to understand it, and then inwardly to correct it; for we have nothing to teach anyone about this if we have not first understood it, and mastered it within ourselves and within our own circles.

Anthroposophists are faced in this trial - of coming awake to Ahriman’s Incarnation - by the problem of the mote and the beam on a very large scale (See Matthew: Chapters 5-7).

Those wanting to consider more details, as regards the indications of Rudolf Steiner, are encouraged to read and ponder the essay in the appendix to the book: The Future is Now: Anthroposophy at the New Millennium, which appendix was called: When did Rudolf Steiner Expect the Incarnation of Ahriman? by Hans-Peter van Manen. This is, of course, in addition to the obvious books Steiner wrote specifically on Lucifer and Ahriman.

In order to fully appreciate this incarnation of a near-god, we have to have a proper inner picture of modern existence - to learn to perceive that Earth Events also have Cosmic Meaning. What can seem to some, to be merely historical confusion and social evil, has to be perceived by the anthroposophical living picture thinking as Divine Drama, in which certain unusual Actors enter Stage Left, cross the Stage, and leaving behind their Effects exit Stage Right. I use the term Actors, because Ahriman does not incarnate alone - many others are drawn to this place and time precisely because of the unique characteristics Ahriman has stamped upon it.

We also need to ask good questions about where to look. Do we look in the Cultural Sphere that is: Religion, Art or Science, or in the Economic Sphere (Production, Distribution and Consumption), or in the Life of Rights (State, Media, People)? Where would Ahriman work?

I am going to suggest the Life of Rights, because if we read Steiner’s The Inner Aspect of the Social Question, we will come upon the understanding that while the Cultural Sphere and the Economic Sphere have spiritual world counterparts, the Life of Rights is completely Earthly. It is our Earthly existence to which Ahriman wishes to bind us (while Lucifer would take us to a world of unearthly and illusory spirit). Nonetheless, nothing here should be taken to confine the reader to coming to a different understanding.

Why the Life of Rights?

Humanity now possesses considerable freedom with respect to the happenings in the human social life of the Earth, as well as with regard to our relationship to the natural world. We can build bombs that we believe make a small sun of death inside a city. We can alter biological life in ways we can’t predict out of an almost cultivated arrogant ignorance (callous indifference). We can consciously spread horrible diseases, perhaps killing all human life, all animal life, all plant life.

We can also control the economy by the hidden secret levers behind the issuance and management of currencies, and then using the power that this concentrated wealth can buy, the holders of these hidden levers subvert politicians and media outlets so as to hold great temporal power in a few hands, which hands cannot be challenged or often even named. A secret cabal tries to rule mankind, and seems to direct through money (stones into bread) most of the scientific research of our great industries. All this inside a world view dominated by ideas and concepts that make little or no room for the reality of Spirit. All to what end?

At this climatic point in world history, one Nation State is behaving as if it is the main center of political, economic and technological power - the United States of America. The entire social and natural spheres of earth existence are spread out before this power like live prey waiting to be devoured (Americans literally consume far far more than a fair share of the world’s wealth). Since the United States Government is a nexus of these powers, those who seek to rule from out of the economic and financial circles still must work through the Life of Rights.

If then someone were to be inside this nexus of power conduits, they would be able to sit astride all those flowing streams of power running from the economic, and the cultural (as in that which is controlled by corporations - television and movies etc. and also the dangerous oversight of the State in education) in and through the Life of Rights - the middle Sphere of the emerging Threefold Social Organism.

Recognize also that of the threefold nature of the Life of Rights (State, Media, People - see my essay Waking the Sleeping Giant: the Mission of Anthroposophy in America http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/wkslg.html), these streams of power are currently dominated by the State alone.

We could place then Ahriman’s human incarnation right inside the current Bush II Administration and not be far off the mark in our efforts to see if some kind of heartless calculating force is/was radiating from there outwards into the political life of the United States, tilting it and the world in certain directions. We should also expect that Ahriman will not incarnate alone, but will bring with him (or along side him) those who have some karma to work out with respect to such Genius. His cold calculating genius does not need to be perceived as just localized in him, but needs to be seen as distributed - as spread out among many many individualities around or near him (and also throughout the world).

We also need to recognize that there will be those intimately within these circles (although more will be outside), who oppose him and these tendencies. Christ is the Lord of Karma, and through His Art as the arranger of the relationships of all human biographies, He has allowed in the circles around Ahriman not merely his closest allies, but also those who have the remarkable strength needed to thwart much that he would otherwise like to achieve. Michaelic warriors will be right next to those who have chosen to be the Dragon’s earthly spawn.

Moreover, Ahriman has no need to hold directly any reins of temporal power, for the use of such power is not his genius. His genius is to see how number relationships can be gripped and thus give an excessive strength of fixed-like order to the normal living and fluid nature of social existence. He knows better than anyone, human or divine, what power lives in number, and earthly temporal power has no attraction to him at all.

second, a presentation of the relevant context in the form of a contemplation on the social organism

The Wise Earth* as Counter-force to Ahriman’s Incarnation

*c.f. Paul Hawken’s http://wiseearth.org/

We need now to revisit the above themes, but from an even higher and more picture-like level. It is important for the reader to realize that our conventional conceptual frame of reference as regards political-social themes, in particular the Life of Rights, does not adequately take account of the related spiritual reality. To speak or think of the political-social using the same terminology as conventional media is to “materialize” our mental pictures, concepts and ideas. In this next section I will endeavor to help the reader overcome these habits of mind.

First, we should step back a little, and see if we can see earthly events in the more mythic or imaginative form. Events in the social organism are also a story, or perhaps better said a Cosmic Tale as it were. Just like nature speaks in its appearances, so does the logos nature of Christ speak into social events, which He artistically arranges through His role as Lord of Karma (see my essays below: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul; and, The Methodology Necessary for a New Social Science).

Picture the surface of the Earth sphere, that narrow spherical physical band in which unfolds all the visible phenomena of human lives and cultures. Literally, dear reader, consciously form this picture of a huge spherical band, perhaps only twenty miles in height, that at its upper limits is airless space (beyond which we cannot breath), and at its lower limit solid near impenetrable rock. Six billion plus people spread over the surface of the Earth, all held dear by the Divine Mystery. Waves of change move through this sphere of social existence, which in the 20th Century became truly global economically, at the same time it became more self-aware globally (via the Internet). In fact, if we think away the mental pictures we have of this world that are derived from the senses, and begin to substitute more imaginative, more fluid and dynamic pictures of the social world as the interplay of downward and upward flowing will forces of Cosmic Beings, in which the human being moves through fields* of thinking, feeling and willing born in the hierarchies, we will come closer to the truth. The apparently material earth sphere, in which the social world seems to have emancipated itself from Nature, is in fact a nexus of dynamic and inter penetrating cosmic spiritual activity. Rudolf Steiner gave us a very necessary picture of this activity, when he said that “man was the religion of the Gods”.

There is a reason so much activity is directed from the Cosmic Spiritual Heights and from the Earthly Spiritual Depths, at this in between center - at this narrow material-like spherical band where human beings unfold their biographies. The Hierarchies conceive of us as their religion, because inside us, in the i-AM, that is the human spirit, exists something that can’t be found anywhere else. Rudolf Steiner wrote of this in his youth, in A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception:

“Man is not behaving in accordance with the purposes of the Guiding Power of the world when he investigates one or another of His commandments, but when he behaves in accordance with his own insight. For in him the Guiding Power of the world manifests Himself. He does not live as Will somewhere outside of man; He has renounced his own will in order that all might depend upon the will of man.” [emphasis added]

*[See the lessons of the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science.]

We are the father and mother of all human action.

Within the consciousness of these many billions of human beings, whose true mystery we are hardly ready to acknowledge, exists struggles, which we call in general the Evolution of Consciousness. In the current phase of this evolution, which we call the time of the Consciousness Soul, the I seeks to awake in the encounter with other I’s. Within the soul, moral challenges appear out of these encounters, as each biography confronts its necessary karma and destiny. First, as if radiating outward in waves from the Western Democracies (where individualism is most fully developing), while at the same time appearing homeopathically in smaller communities world-wide, the Consciousness Soul begins its unfolding. From out of the totality of the invisible inner world of humanity the I faces both outer and inner challenges (for the most part lost from the insight of our thinking in an inner darkness of coagulated concepts, such as rigid and arid religious beliefs, or a spiritless materialistic natural science, or even to the Anthroposophical Society and Movement via the intellectualization during the 20th Century of the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence).

Meanwhile, unknown to most, the Christ works in between. He is able to work in between because having arranged our karma - our integrated and finely interrelated biographies - to the extent that our social relationships are informed with moral qualities (even the most tentative impulses of the heart), these moral acts in the Epoch of the Consciousness Soul also amount to an encounter with the Eternal. In that we seek the Good, and draw even a weak tea intuition of it into our social relationships, Christ can be present precisely because of that qualitative vertical inner gesture we make in our souls in order to seek knowledge of the Good in the dramas of the moral challenges in modern life. (For every one step in spiritual development, we must take three steps in character - moral - development)

In the outer stage setting, which we believe we know through our materialized conceptions of present world history, itself a kind of polar opposite to the inner world of spiritual awakening and moral challenge, gestures of change seek to warp the slowly unfolding threefold social organism to their own uses and needs. A Dark Prince of the World seeks to dominate the Stage, while the Lord (Artist) of Karma weaves the biographies into a musical-like harmony of inner conscious spirit evolution. The I, under the influence of Christ, tends to become We. While we, under the influence of Ahriman, are pushed to remain only I. [The Rastafarians - a mostly now Jamaica based religious impulse - speaks interesting enough of the idea of I ‘n I - we - as something different from the idea of I and you. The idea of I and you comes from the devil, according to their instinctive wisdom, while the truth is that we are both I’s - that is we are the same, “I ‘n I”.]

Ahriman divides communities into smaller and smaller groups, ultimately to become isolated I’s. Christ unifies I’s into communities through His in between support of the healing resolution of our karmic moral challenges.

Let us look for a moment closer at the threefolding of the social organism of the world social order.

Many in anthroposophical circles will tend to believe threefolding is something we have to create and is not the present condition of the social world. This is partially true, but at the same time we need to recognize that the dynamics of social life have been active in the history of civilizations for thousands of years, and the slow evolution of the social organism has been set on a progressive course for a long time. For example, in the third cultural age the Cultural Sphere (the ancient Mysteries) ruled the social order. In the fourth cultural age, a Rights Sphere impulse was added at the foundations of Greek and Roman civilization in the idea of the State on the one hand and of the Citizen on the other. As the fifth cultural age emerged from the fourth, the rights life itself threefolded (State, Media, People - or citizen), just as the cultural life had already threefolded into Science, Art, and Religion. At the same time that the on-looker consciousness appears (as did the deepest aspects of the Ahrimanic Deception, namely materialism in all its aspects), so began the birth time of the economic life, which now struggles to differentiate into an inner threefolding of producers, distributors and consumers.

Clearly we live in a time when the concept of the threefold social organism had barely begun to be present and was at the same time never more needed. Threefolding manifests itself instinctively, but if we are to properly birth it in a healthy social way, we have to know the Idea of it consciously. as well as choose to embrace it consciously. Here again is a teaching task which anthroposophists may fail entirely to bring into our shared social life.

With Ahriman’s incarnation, powerful dividing forces entered into the nature of the Stage Setting - the stream of historical events and its structurally embryonic threefold relationships. America (as a political power ruled by an essentially unelected elite) under this influence isolated itself on the world Stage, taking the attitude that it could stand alone (Ahriman’s attitude). Within America, groups were set against groups, communities against communities. Hate and mistrust was fostered, for to some at least this was seen as an advantage. This we know from the News, but other impulses were simultaneously at work.

At the same time that this isolating gesture pushed against the instincts of the human spirit for community, the instinctively developing consciousness soul produced its counter-gesture. People did not really want separation, and felt in their hearts the social poverty of this tendency. As this situation ripened, it brought with it a certain developments in technology, which also contained both potentials - one for isolation and one for community building. This was woven into the the whole world’s social fabric - a means of connecting across previously disconnecting boundaries. Someone in China could now meet and work with someone in Sweden, instantly in the moment.

Out of the earth, human intelligence, guided in part by Ahriman’s genius, raised up from the world of metallic substances a network, perhaps a spider web of inter-connectivity. A great power oozed out of its previous sub-natural condition and took on form in metal and plastic, spreading its arms all over the world.

Yet, Ahriman was not the only inspiring genius, and other impulses from human beings took hold of this transformation of substance and sub-nature and gave it higher potential uses. It was after all capable of being only a tool, and the real meaning of this tool was in the hands and hearts of those who created how to set it to work.

One kind of work was the turning of human beings into number. Everything that could be counted was being counted and every fact that could be converted to data was being converted. Human beings became capable of being known as mere cyphers. As a result, when Ahriman incarnated, he could take hold of this number meaning of human beings and use that tool to create a top down driven political power machine, filled with the callousness of cold calculation exactly in the center of the social organism: the Life of Rights.

A kind of social heart attack was created in the instinctive relationship of Americans for the Consciousness Soul (English speakers are instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of Rights - R.S. The Challenge of the Times). Just when the most egregious terrorist attack of modern times shattered the world’s divisions and united them in a shared sense of loss and tragedy (remember the Towers were centers of international financial activity), the political power elite of America turned away from this warm-hearted world-wide joining, and used this situation in the most callous and calculated fashion. Centered in the most powerful Nation State in the history of humanity, this heartless thinking flowed outward as a political foreign policy out over the world, encouraging division and in the lie of all lies, everywhere (domestically and internationally) suppressing freedom in the name of freedom.

But, again as we have already seen, Ahriman had not incarnated with only his minions as companions. Michaelic warriors, some very aware but most only instinctive, entered into incarnation as well. At their insistence and from their genius, the tool of metal, plastic and sub-natural forces was put to other uses. Reacting, the Consciousness Soul took on a world-wide social form in thousands upon thousands of new kinds of communities of association, something it had been slowly preparing to do for a long time. Civil Society was born, and the tool - the Internet - was placed in the service of heart-warmed thoughts. In so doing we need to emphasize that this Sphere of heart-centered activity (the Wise Earth) tended to arise on the Internet as individual expressions of community service. The I’s sought out other I’s and many kinds of We’s were born.

The same tool Ahriman used to create a social machine for the manipulation of political power in America, was used by others to create a living organism of communities world-wide in scope, while at the same time concentrated in America and active on all political fronts. Above, in the top of a now decadent elite political hierarchy, Ahriman worked, while below, spread out across the social commons, the Consciousness Soul - the Wise Earth - spoke back.

In the Wise Earth impulse all manner of spiritual voices are heard. The excesses of the Ahrimanically driven assault via the Life of Rights on social order and individual freedom has become so plain and obvious, that communities of opposition are everywhere being formed. As a prime incarnate opponent, Ahriman does his duty, driving individuals toward the necessary moral dilemmas and challenges. You could say that one of the aspects of the Ahrimanic Incarnation is a kind of heating up of social chaos - an inflaming of disorder. This engenders in morally awake human hearts the will to do battle. The dragon forces circle social life everywhere, and the knights of Michael, themselves no doubt students of the spiritual world Michael School before incarnation, take up their earthly social tasks. (see the book Blessed Unrest, at: http://www.blessedunrest.com/)

Ahriman’s teaching is harsh, and the I must stand up within itself and in relationship with others, or succumb to soul failures it would otherwise be unwilling to tolerate in what we call: good conscience. Inwardly, in the deepest aspects of the soul, invisible to outer sense experience, the presence of Christ in the Ethereal (the realm of human thought) is met with a hunger to know the Good on the part of the I. This moral need for knowledge of the Good (in order to know what is right to do in the face of challenges forced upon humanity by Ahriman’s intensification of the heat and pace of social crisis) - this moral need instinctively hungers for the Eternal, the experience of the Consciousness Soul.

There, inside the soul, this hunger for knowledge of the Good, coming in the time of the Second Coming, leads to a Second Eucharist - a communion of the I with the Being of the Good (for details see the next essay: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul).

What an amazing teacher and teaching is this Outrageous Genius, we know as Ahriman, forcing us to awake to the Good by driving into the Center Stage of social existence, in the principle nation state in the world, obviously powerful impulses of callous and calculated indifference to human suffering and need.

third, an entry more into the material, in the sense

of ordinary political and social language

Brother What Ails Thee ?

In the following discussion it is very important to keep in mind that we are now mostly using a quite materialized way of speaking and writing about something whose true essence remains entirely spiritual in its most significant meaning.

Such a personality as Ahriman incarnate, in my view, can be found just here then in the American Life of Rights (working from there upon the whole world), for after all these preliminaries we must begin to name him. The question for us, however, is: Will we recognize this “human” being as a brother?

Karl Christian Rove (birth name), was born December 25th 1950. Karl’s biological father abandoned him early on, his adoptive father left home when Karl was 18, and it later became known that this second father was a homosexual. His mother committed suicide when he was 30. Karl described himself in high school this way: “I was the complete nerd. I had the briefcase. I had the pocket protector. I wore Hush Puppies when they were not cool. I was the thin, scrawny little guy. I was definitely uncool” [facts and quote from Wikipedia].

[There will be a few quotes below about Rove-Ahriman (hundreds could easily be provided). The reader should realize that Rove has had such a strong influence (which Outrageous Genius certainly would) that while Google only shows 630,000 entries for him and about 8 million for George W. Bush (and 1.5 million for Dick Cheney), all that is said about Rove recognizes that his influence from behind the scenes is the real dominant feature of the Bush II Administration. He is the riddle and puzzle that many have commented on seeking to penetrate his real nature and activity in order to understand the policies of the Bush II White House. His hand prints are everywhere, and no historical political figure has ever inspired such interest, both positive and negative.

We could also keep in mind this idea from Rudolf Steiner. In the lectures published under the title The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, he presents the following for our understanding. Just like what happened after the mid-point of the various ages of Atlantis, we in this the Post-Atlantean Epoch are past the mid-point as well. Spiritual capacities and impulses that are up-building and progressive in the first half of an Epoch become in the second half forces of degeneration. Decay sets in and the course the Evolution of Consciousness takes must be unfolded in the context of this decay. In addition, with the Battle in Heaven between Michael and the Dragon, which Michael had won by 1879, the Spirits of Darkness were pushed down into the realm of the Earth.

These spirits have to be recognized as being everywhere, in particular working with the dead and with the various occult brotherhoods. So when we recognize in social phenomena the prevalence of human evil, we have to see that the tendency for this immorality to dominate social existence cannot be avoided. In fact, our ability to properly work with the times, requires we not be asleep and have fantastic visions of unrestrained potentials for utopias. Our thinking has to root itself in reality, and social reality cannot in our Age be forced into an illusion of some kind of universal domain of freedom and happiness. These facts then all the more call to us, who receive Spiritual Science, to develop our own soul life so that we will be able to find the down to earth healing social ideas that can actually be brought into incarnation.]

Now we must tell a more detailed story of certain changes in social life that have come at the same time as this incarnation entered deeper and deeper into a core aspect of the Life of Rights in America. Let us begin by considering certain changes in law and other governmental emphasis that have accompanied the 7 plus years so far of the Bush II administration (at the time of writing these paragraphs). While doing this we need to keep in mind how crucial is this moment in the Evolution of Consciousness. A great deal is being decided by individual human beings just now, and we cannot blind ourselves by assuming that the struggles for the future of America, and as a consequence the whole World, are simply passing and insignificant moments in history. These events are profound in the deepest sense of that concept.

Not only that, we, living today, are in the middle of them. It is no accident we too have incarnated in the Time that Ahriman is to be discovered as our most significant outer-world teacher. What Ahriman could not do, while excarnate through the Shadow - the three-fold double-complex, he could now do as a human being having incarnated just in this time into the heart-center of human social life: the Life of Rights, and giving birth there not to heart-warmed thoughts, but rather the most cold and calculated conceptions possible.

Over the course of activity of this Administration, several structural changes have occurred, which changes by the way are not just confined to the time of the Administration, but were authored further in the past, and then matured and polished off in the time since the 2000 election, the election, remember, at the cusp of the New Millennium. Let us list a few of those.

The Executive Branch, mostly through the exercise of raw power has been able to achieve a certain freedom from restraint by the other two Branches (the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch). This breaking down of the threefold balance of the U.S. Constitution gives to the will force, of those addicted to power, extraordinary latitude in its conduct (this is how we must see Cheney and Bush, as addicts to the most addictive temptation of all - earthly power). This executive power has become so freed of any restraint that it neither must feel (the significance of the Legislative Branch - the People’s House) nor be wise (the import of the Supreme Court). The American Government, during Rove’s strongest period of influence, had no wise head, nor any open heart. Nor would it do to see this as a reflection of just the Republican Party. The Ahrimanic confusion and the influence of the Spirits of Darkness is everywhere, and we have now mostly raw will forces owning the Executive Branch of the dominant Nation State on the Earth, which from there radiates out into the whole world social organism heartless cold and calculating thought and will.

The Bush II administration’s definition of the meaning of the War on Terror has taken hold of the political consciousness of both major American political parties. No major candidate currently running for President wants to appear weak in the War on Terror (a complete illusion by the way, once critically examined as is being done out of the social commons by the Wise Earth appearance of Civil Society).

Thus also has torture become officially permitted in the conduct of self-interest by the U.S. government (using the identical language of the Third Reich in its justifications for torture). Included in this are the powers to remove any claim of citizenship of a natural or naturalized Citizen. Anyone anywhere in the world (including Americans in America) can be kidnapped and taken anywhere anytime to places of prison and torture (extraordinary rendition). To call these Imperial Powers, akin to that of Rome at its most decadent, is to severely understate the case, for the United States has far greater powers than ever Rome could dream of.

There is a quote, falsely attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. While it turns out the great French thinker never wrote this, the fact that it is constantly quoted in public life suggests that it nevertheless has deep meaning for Americans.

Civil liberties, once taken for granted in the United States have been neatly and nearly castrated. Since there is nothing to require the government to admit to even possessing the body of a single human being (habeas corpus exists as a rule, but is consciously ignored and obstructed by the Bush II administration at every turn), we have no idea how many have disappeared into the hidden bowels of this out of control will. This is all the more problematic if we recognize that to a certain extent America is very much a cradle for future spiritual development, so that the unopposed emasculation of major components of the Life of Rights in America is a significant victory for Ahriman.

The power radiating out from the imbalance in the State (the out of control Executive Branch), has been joined by an ahrimanic corporate control of the Media (the heart of the heart of the social organism). Thus it has come about that the threefold social organism’s inner core (the Life of Rights), itself is out of balance such that (or so it appears) that the polar opposite to the State - the People - is completely dominated through so much fear and hopelessness, that many of the People have come to believe themselves to be completely powerless.

“He [Rove] could carve up constituencies with the best of them, and divide the country as easily as columns on a spreadsheet -- and with no more thought” diarist “Hunter” DailyKos Aug.2007.

Yet, here is where the counter-pole begins to appear, for recall that Rudolf Steiner spoke in a lecture collected in The Challenge of the Times: English speakers are instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of Rights. Ahriman’s incarnation arouses the Consciousness Soul to action. Rove, by pushing forward the callous and indifferent to consequences unconscious will forces of Cheney and Bush II (and others), stimulates in those who strive to follow their political conscience the opposite reaction.

This administration has made of the lie an art never dreamed of even in the time of National Socialism (see Steiner’s The Karma of Untruthfulness). They have lied so successfully that large portions of the People of America have bought elements of it for years, and still buy into it (polls still show that large numbers believe Iraq was connected to 9/11). Granted the culture of the lie is everywhere, from daily advertising to individual human biographies, nevertheless the callous, calculated and repeated nature of these lies offered by a United States government is staggering. The only matter more staggering is how much they have managed to simultaneously hide from view.

 

The art of secrecy is equally adept in this government. No one knows what it is doing, and so clever has been the manner of this hiding, that it is carefully layered such that even if you think you have caught them out, they have a backup plan - lies within lies, as it were. As time has gone on, and various members of the administration became more publicly vulnerable, they have easily blocked every effort to have them removed from office (Rumsfeld and then Gonzales, for example), until it was time to cut them loose and then install an even better buffer in between public interest and the truth. For example, nearly every military general officer who would not spin and lie about Iraq has been systematically removed until all that is mostly left in positions of power are career military general officers who are themselves essentially politicians and sycophants.

The pure outrageous nature of the nerve of this administration is extraordinary. They lie, and then they act, and then even when caught out, continue to lie and lie. Holding powers stolen from the other Branches (and to which these Branches acquiesce) there is no motive to come clean in any fashion, for almost no human heart forces are really present in this home in which Ahriman created for himself and his priests to incarnate.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,'’ he continued. ‘’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” Senior white house official, assumed by everyone to have been Karl Rove, summer 2002. [An earthly social-political act comparable to materialism - a kind of political-social Ahrimanic Deception.]

“The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as if they were realities” Machiavelli

At the locus of this center of power of Earthly streaming forces, he has come to rest, with his aides, in order to imprint with his nature, the most earthly aspect of the potential and unfolding threefold social organism: the Life of Rights.

One of Ahriman’s qualities is hardening. He desires that things become fixed, immobile.

This means that one Party in the United States strives to achieve continuous dominance. Not only was a world dominating power to radiate from the United States as a center, but it was to have within itself a loss of what had been an otherwise self-correcting fluidity - that more than one Party would hold power, which would mean that no longer could any Ahrimanic excess of the Right be balanced out through the pendulum swing by any Luciferic excess of the Left . So it was desired that this swing of the balance be stopped for a while, especially at a particular Moment in Time; AND, if this unbalancing gesture was to take into itself an also rigid and arid religious impulse, then the knowledge of the social effects of Christ’s True Second Coming could be hidden, if not completely blocked for centuries, in that the otherwise good effects on the social world of humanity, this Second Golgotha offered, were obscured and interfered with.

Consider: Already, the Anthroposophical Movement and Society had been eviscerated from within, and led in its centers into great confusion (any honest rendering of our history in the 20th Century shows this - for details see the essays below), so that basically unopposed and unknown Ahriman could now undertake the task to boldly assert temporal powers as an obstacle to spiritual inspiration [for example, the New Freedom Act which enables the government to test all for mental illness and require medicine to be given to those who fail this examination]. In addition, granting political power to an arid and rigid religious cult, calling itself Christian, could do much to convince the world that Christ and Christianity had nothing to offer. So drawing this already decadent religious impulse deeper into politics does a great deal which is far more than just to secure votes at a crucial moment, for whatever the outer world press sees of the effects of this genius that radiates out of the White House, you can bet this outer world press is completely clueless to what is truly at stake.

The ahrimanic Christianity of the Religious Right hates all that it judges (all beam and no mote), and speaks into world culture in such a way that more and more the world is pushed to hate such Christianity back. What better way to turn minds away from the true Second Coming, than to raise up a such a false and foolish alternative, that seemingly* rational people cannot but think of the idea of Christ and the Second Coming as some kind of insanity. How do we bring into such a world, a true appreciation of Christ’s Second Coming, and the related Second Eucharist, when ahrimanic Christianity has gained such temporal power in the Bush II administration to the dismay of so many intelligent people. Ahriman is clever beyond our imaginations.

*[See Sam Harris’s The End of Faith; Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great: how religion poisons everything; and, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, where what are called the New Atheists have taken (hopefully briefly) center stage in the public dialog on religion and Christianity.]

Craig Unger*, In an interview with Amy Goodman, mid-November 2007: Well, LeHay** is one of the founders of the Council for National Policy. Now, this is a not-very-well-known group, but it’s an umbrella group that oversees dozens of Christian Right groups, like Focus on the Family, which is James Dobson’s group. The Moral Majority was part of it, and so on. And within it was a much smaller group called the Arlington Group, of about fifty religious leaders. Now, they were in regular contact with Karl Rove. And what you have in the Christian Right is as many as 80 million adult evangelicals. You have about 200,000 pastors, and they operate almost as precinct captains did in the labor unions for the Democratic Party. So this is a vast populist movement that operates as part of the Christian Republican Party, and they have regular contact with the White House. [emphasis added]

[*author of: The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future. **one of the authors of the Left Behind series of novels on Armageddon.]

Christianity is not alone in being so publicly compromised by the materialization of religion.

“The grim truth is that when George W. Bush declared “a global war on terror”, he was really announcing a jihad of his own - a struggle to convert the whole world to American-style capitalist democracy....Here lies the peril for the future. For how can “the Axis of Evil” and “the Great Satan” negotiate a businesslike compromise on the basis of live-and-let-live?” from the article: Bush the Jihadist: How the world was plunged into an apocalyptic war, by Correlli Barnett, Daily Mail, Sept. 2007.

“...these ahrimanic powers are present wherever disharmony comes about between groups of people...” R.S. lecture, 2 November 1919

Another matter to recognize is that after 9/11, the ahrimanic forces radiating out of the temporal power center that is Washington, were able to bring about a Crucifixion of the Imagination of America as a Beacon of Hope for the poor and disenfranchised the world over. Previously America (which is at root itself a Mystery) stood in the imaginations of the world’s downtrodden as the place of dreams, where one could go and find freedom (spiritual-religious, as well as political and economic). So Rove-Ahriman not only created and encouraged a debased Christian Meaning in the World, but also cast down the single most important aspect of the American Mystery in the present - its meaning as a Beacon of Hope.

Let us now take a necessary but small side trip here, and fit in two of Ahriman-Rove’s chief allies: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Both are addicted to power, but in two entirely different ways. At the same time, let us keep in mind the title to this section: Brother what ails thee?. These are flawed (as we are all flawed) human beings, placed by the Lord (Artist) of Karma, in their biographies into very special places in relationship to all of us. Like Ahriman-Rove, they participate in the creation of the heating and speeding up of social chaos - conditions necessary for the development of the Consciousness Soul through the I’s necessary encounters with real existential moral crises.

Bush appears to be what is called a dry drunk. That is, while he is not actively drinking or drugging (we assume) he still displays all the behaviors of a serious alcoholic or addict: bouts of extreme anger (kept mostly secret from the public, but well known to West Wings staffers), coupled with a psychological need to never admit he is wrong - the problem always lies with someone else. In taking up the outward (fake) posture of recovery, he adopted the attitude of someone who has been saved by Christ. No doubt encouraged by Rove (all the way back in Texas), Bush courted the Religious Right, and here found fuel for his own (hopefully sub-conscious) megalomania - a religious conviction which included him as being an active and dominant world player in the End Times fantasy. So rigid is his faith, as he constantly demonstrates by his unchanging behaviors, that only this mega-illusion has meaning - the truth has been banished from his consciousness.

“Mr. Greenspan described his own emotional journey in dealing with Mr. Bush, from an initial elation about the return of his old friends from the Ford White House - including Mr. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense - to astonishment and then disappointment at how much they had changed.” New York Times book review describing Alan Greenspan’s (former chairman of the Federal Reserve) book: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World “...much to my disappointment, economic policy making in the Bush administration remained firmly in the hands of the White House staff.” He was clearly referring to the political team led by Karl Rove at the White House. Mr. Rove was a neighbor of Mr. Greenspan in a leafy enclave near the Potomac River, but the two men almost never had a conversation.” [emphasis added]

“Rove’s method is to plot out elaborate strategies well in advance of the campaign, and stick to them vigilantly. John Deardourff, Rove’s media consultant for races in Texas and Alabama, says, ‘This rap Bush has of never changing his mind and never admitting a mistake-that’s Karl! That’s where it comes from.’ It is a tribute to Rove’s strategic skill that he is so often right.” Joshua Green Atlantic Monthly 2007.

Already long before his incarnation, Ahriman-Rove had cultivated the illusory religious impulse that has at least captured the sub-conscious of Bush, probably through the help of Lucifer’s legions, for in its rigid End Times world picture and rigid and fixed morality, it has hardened all that was once Life in these aspects of Christianity, and turned that Life into a fixed and vain system of beliefs in the soul.

The fixed nature comes from Ahriman, and the vanity (pride of belief in ones moral righteousness) comes from Lucifer. Both these, however, arise indirectly in the soul through the three-fold double-complex (see the essay on the Shadow below).

Then comes Cheney. Already a hard line cold-warrior, well connected and supported by the elites of industry and banking throughout his political career (Cheney won his spurs here, while Bush was born into these circles), Cheney (again no doubt encouraged by Rove) became Vice President, and having an intellect of far more depth than Bush’s, discovered that the child of privilege had little interest in actually understanding and wielding the reins of governmental power (Bush loves to playact as president). These then fell by default to Cheney, and gave to his addiction more temporal power than any human being has had in history, and of such a nature that as a behind the throne power he could do much that was unseen and thus experience as all the more delightful its private pleasures (the addictive payoff). Think on it! No one could really oppose his actions always taken in secret. He could tell any lie he wanted and change them at will for everyone else was asleep. Every urge and impulse to dominate his political enemies and reward his rich friends could be immediately indulged. Nothing stood in the way of this will to excess, while at his side, and in his aid was the most clever of minds ever, able with just a word or two to encourage Cheney’s every desire, and at the same time to likewise with silver tongue encourage the child of privilege to believe he was god’s chosen to stand in the world just in this time. [Recall Tolkien’s character Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings!]

So then we have around Rove, two personalities, the one lost in a luciferic dream of egoistical historical place, and the other, given the opportunity to wield enormous earthly temporal powers, becomes instead the creature of those very powers - possessed by them. Recall from above Greenspan’s dismay to discover the changes in his old friends. Rove’s truest and more profound contributions, however, are of a whole other kind, even though he played a significant role in the transformation of a child of privilege, from out of the culture of Texas oil and wealth, into a public persona that doesn’t actually bear any relationship to the underlying human personality*. See: “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove made George W. Bush Presidential” by Wayne H. Slater and James C. Moore.

*[To appreciate this even more, just consider how frequently it is now observed that Bush seems so often inappropriately happy as his term of office nears its end (or culmination?). A President, who honestly bore the necessary wounds of leading American into such a state as it is today, should be gray headed, careworn and full of melancholy.]

At the same time, we have to remember the title to this section: Brother what ails thee? It is essential (as will be discussed in later essays) to recognize in such personalities that we are observing wounds of soul. Certainly there can be venality, and even conscious choosing of evil, but if we were to be able to live through the details of the biography of such men as these, and see how their inner life developed over this long period of a lifetime, we would discover how the soul has been wounded by life experience.

We all bear such wounds. It would go too far here to go into details, but the question Brother what ails thee? is directed exactly at discovering the mystery of the wounds that lie behind choices and actions, so as to be able to perhaps help heal our brothers and sisters in life. With this thought in the background, let us continue our examination of what has flowed out of the center of the American government, and into our shared public life.

In order for a single Party to dominate, certain possibilities inherent in our Time in relationship to technology have become applied to the political process. Computers are turned into ballot boxes. The striving for power, which had taken possession of the Republican Party, found a crucial inspiration in all that Ahriman had prepared before his incarnation, and in all that he was about to accomplish during his incarnation. Win at any cost is the goal, and the corruption of the ballot box by electronic means provides an easy tool in a war in which number is to play such an essential role.

Data is accumulated, not just State by State, or city by city or neighborhood by neighborhood (voting precinct by voting precinct), and when possible individual by individual. Profiles are created showing, through the accumulation and use of well tracked commercial purchases, just what attitudes each individual who is potentially a voter is likely to possess. The out-of-strict oversight computer powers, of the United States intelligence community (and willing corporate allies), is through secret process turned on its own citizens, and further data accumulated, such that there now is in place and in the hands of a single party, exactly which voters to encourage, and which to discourage in order to place in power and keep in power a single political party as the dominant political force in America, itself (at a crucial time) the dominant Nation State in the World.

Nor is this done with any sense of the individual itself, as an I. It is only their general characteristics as a set of numbers on a spreadsheet that matter. One young woman, who had worked with Rove, the human incarnation of Ahriman, described in a televised interview how remarkable it was to watch him pick up a newly generated spread sheet from a computer, glance at it and then immediately begin to issue instructions, down the well oiled machinery intended to coerce an election effect, from the inside of the White House out into a neighborhood and then surrounding an individual home.

In addition was perfected what became called: the Republican talking points. Spreading out from the political center of the West Wing of the White House, a well controlled and perfected set of lies and spin was distributed throughout Party officials (elected and otherwise) and among the cooperative media, such as Fox News and the widely listened to conservative radio talk shows. If one listened across this spectrum, as well as to the President himself and his chief spokesman the White House Press Secretary, the same reality was presented. Remember that Rove’s idea of the power of deception is remarkable. Set the agenda, set the tone of what is to be claimed to be true. Create our own reality (an earthly political ahrimanic deception), and never ever give an inch.

Radiating from the imbalanced and unhealthy will force of the Executive Branch had been created a huge manipulative mechanism for coercing the vote, precinct by precinct, drawing certain voters in, keeping certain voters out, and all the while ignoring places, neighborhoods and communities that could be seen by this cold calculating genius as having no meaning or worth at all. Coupled with this was an enormous publicity machine, never seen before, creating in that Nation State that believed itself most virtuous to have unlimited free speech, a propaganda mechanism quite beyond that known even in the time of National Socialism or Communist Russia.

 

This lie machine is all the more devious (and clever) for it was accomplished in what thought of itself as a non-totalitarian state. In the center of the Life of Rights, this calculated number driven process came into existence, in which data streams about voters were turned into numbers on a spreadsheet. and false ideas about social reality merely items on a sheet of talking points. What genius created such a work!

“President Bush’s powerful adviser is one part spreadsheet-carrying, vote-counting political wonk, and one part no-holds-barred, brass-knuckled political operative” Dan Froomkin.

“I’m looking at 68 polls a week. You may be looking at four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes nationally, but that do not impact the outcome -” Karl Rove in a radio interview late October 2006. “You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math. I’m entitled to the math.” same interview. [emphasis added]

In all this, the Legislative Branch was compliant. Even so far as to pass legislation requiring all States to issue common-in-nature drivers licenses, that individual States could then require be presented in order to vote. This process of making voting more and more difficult was another part of the grand scheme, which then makes it possible to eliminate those most inclined to vote for the Party that is not to dominate - namely the Party whose fundamental traditions connected it to the poor and disenfranchised. Remember, Ahriman incarnated with a community of like-minded, already disposed through all his preparations to their own weakness and self-interested heartless cold calculating judgments. All he had to do was enter into the center of these streams of downward radiating powers, take hold of the number relations, and polish off the machinery that was to permit a solidified rule from the top down, during one of the most significant moments of emergence of the Consciousness Soul (the Dawn of the Third Millennium), with its natural impulse to bring in social reform out of the social commons - out of the social below.

Now in this work, he was not unopposed. As a human being, his will was bound by many earthly laws. He could not force those around him serve his will. He could only, with extreme cleverness, encourage their weaknesses and inclinations, thus the personality changes that can be observed in those he influenced while in (and on his way to) this center of temporal power (from which he himself recently resigned, which is, of course, just an appearance - another kind of clever lie, his influence is undiminished).

At that same time as all this ahrimanic success, we need to come to understand that his very genius in its one-sided nature was also a blindness. This blindness came to the fore in the 2006 general election in America. Rove fully expected to win, his spreadsheets told him so. However, human beings are in fact not numbers, and not really predictable at that level. Rove’s numbers told him only of general characteristics, which were all based on specific assumptions. When many of these people walked into the polling booth, something happened (and will continue to happen) which can’t be reduced to number. People, when they vote, are faced with what to them is essentially a moral choice (English speakers are instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of Rights).

This righteous impulse, invisible to number driven perception, expressed itself strongly in the 2006 election, reacting in large part to all that was being experienced as the callous indifference radiating from the White House, and as political impotence, corruption and incompetence in the Legislative Branch. The Democrats won the House with far more seats than expected by any pollster (whose immature science suffers the same perceptual limits as Ahriman), and further won the Senate as well, something not expected by either Party. Since this victory gave the chairmanship of the various House and Senate committees to the Democrats, a very large shift in power occurred in the Life of Rights in the United States of America (in the People’s House especially, with it role as regards “feeling”). While such a shift of power is not able to manifest in a rapid fashion (in spite of the hopes of the Left), this expectable time-delay has enabled the White House to continue to act out its disdain for the People, treating them as number-cyphers instead of as real human beings.

“Rovism is not simply a function of Rove the political conniver sitting in the counsels of power and making decisions, though he does. No recent presidency has put policy in the service of politics as has Bush’s. Because tactics can change institutions, Rovism is much more. It is a philosophy and practice of governing that pervades the administration and even extends to the Republican-controlled Congress. As Robert Berdahl, chancellor of UC Berkeley, has said of Bush’s foreign policy, a subset of Rovism, it constitutes a fundamental change in ‘the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this country.'"Neal Gabler The Los Angeles Times Sunday 24 October 2004.

“The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.” Rove campaign memo from the early years in Texas.

“Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation. He not only is a breathtakingly smart strategist but also a clever tactician. He knows history, understands the moods of the public, and is a visionary on matters of public policy. But he is not a magician.” Fred Barnes, conservative commentator, editor The Weekly Standard.

“Dubbed the “architect” and “Bush’s brain”, Rove plotted the rise of George W Bush and departed the White House after the disastrous 2006 mid-term elections. Successful punditry is a combination of real political experience, intellectual nimbleness, a provocative turn of phrase and a coherent point of view. Rove, a Fox News commentator and contributor to Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, has all these qualities.

“Democrats may protest that they would rather see him in jail than on their television screens but they can’t help noting what he says. Whether outlining what the Democrats should do or outlining John McCain’s rocky path to victory (and McCain has followed his advice almost to the letter), Rove’s take is important and often surprising. Expect the name Rove to come up frequently on the campaign trail - and in coverage of it.” Comments in the British newspaper The Telegraph, who ranked Rove (since leaving the White House) as the number one (of the top 50) pundits in U.S. Politics, Friday, May 2nd, 2008.

Ahriman-Rove’s genius is seen by many, and his incarnate influence is far from over. He has left the realm of the State now, and is taking up his mature biographical position in the real heart of the Life of Rights: Media. From here he can continue his influence, for his very success is attractive. Because of the influence of the ahrimanic shadow on people, many will succumb, for that same callous and calculated indifference toward which they are inwardly tempted, will now reside in those aspects of Media open to making such views widely known and justified.

It is not an accident that Rove now works for two major Rupert Murdoch Media companies, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Many will read him, and his clever genius will guide and teach, all who will listen, into a life without any moral center at all - only the cold calculus of intellect, and its anti-human world views and impulses of will.

Ahriman-Rove has now risen to the celebrity heights of the social world as a Media personality, respected and trusted by many, for he reflects back to them all the justifications they need for their own ahrimanic tendencies. A quite neat fit, if you think about it. The Shadow of Ahriman within, and the Stage setting influenced by Ahriman without.

Even so, the individual I in the Age of the Consciousness Soul would chart its own course. His very presence arouses something in the I that needs just that presence as a goad to its own awaking.

finally, a look at the challenges to the role of the Society and Movement as a consequence of recognizing Ahriman’s present day incarnation

Waking the American Anthroposophical Society and Movement

for their true tasks in the 21st Century

The above then is what happened on the macro scale of modern human history. What then on a micro scale has happen in the internal makeup of the Anthroposophical Society and Movement? Were we somehow free of this influence? Did Ahriman incarnate and just ignore us in the process? I think not, and in the next essays it will be unfolded just what needs to happen within our circles in order for us to be able to speak first honestly among ourselves, before we can earn the moral authority to truly bring Anthroposophy further into world incarnation. The greatest potential for leading the instinctive Consciousness Soul into full awakening lies in Anthroposophy, and by implication in the Society and Movement. But these problems are not simple and many of the essays below are required of anyone wanting to really learn what is needed to be learned in order to meet the Challenge of Ahriman’s Incarnation on the Cusp of the New Millennium.

We have one last task,however, which is most essential. Having discovered Ahriman’s incarnation, how are we to treat the living man, now and into the future? Ahriman-Rove has a family - a wife and a son: should they think of him as evil? Of course not, he is a genius, he is a cosmic power incarnate, who will at the final judgment weep at the feet of the Mother and beg forgiveness for all that he had, out of his given nature, the responsibility to author.

Those seduced by Ahriman-Rove are to be pitied. Our problem then is not to assume evil and seek to rub it out, but to see clearly the social processes so that we, who would do the good, can discover how our work can be applied in the right places. Many already are working in such ways, albeit instinctively, and others will want to hate Rove, Cheney, Bush and their friends. Should we follow such an example, or create another? How do we redeem what Ahriman-Rove has done and properly honor it?

We are also frustrated by the scope of the debacle - Ahriman-Rove has spread chaos in the world in a huge way, and this is not yet finished, for much worse may yet be done by those who have succumbed to his influence. This Ahrimanic Impulse, living throughout the social world of humanity, has pushed that world toward its breaking and fracture points in a quite precise fashion through the influence of Ahriman-Rove within the excesses of the Bush II administration. The whole social order of Western Humanity is breaking down. Wherever we look, whether at global warming, the crisis in the food supply, the corporate theft of the water supply, the spreading of technological means of biological destruction, the machinations of those in the banking and finance industries and the interference with the genetic code itself, - all stands on the brink of even further decay, while the political life by its everywhere pursuit of dominance, engages all structure in war, at a time when in order to survive humanity needs instead of war to develop the greatest skills at cooperation.

One of the worst effects, as previously noted, is the crucifixion of American Dream. All over the world, that which had once been a Beacon of Hope to many people living amidst poverty and despair, has now been tarnished, perhaps beyond repair. Is this not then the next goal for America, to discover how to restore what has been defiled? Who will lead here? Who will understand this need for the imagination of the downtrodden the world over to have once more a Beacon of Hope? Can there be a resurrection of what was crucified? What kind of moral forces could bring this about?

We are also right to be concerned whether the political machine that has been created will live on into the future inside the core of the America Government. Already, many wonder whether the Democrats will roll back some of what has been done, should they win the White House in 2008. A lot of people believe many of the worst of the changes introduced by Rove and friends will be permanent.

All kinds of debris live as the after-effects of Ahriman-Rove’s incarnation. The situation and consequences will not go away, but reverberate on into the future, and we have to not just come awake, but must learn how to stay awake.

Into the world the power, the tone, the sound of number, and the searing light of geometry incarnated, with its naturally given mission to draw downward the heart of the developing social organism into rigid form and lifeless brilliance - what Rove called “the math”. Here too was “mission accomplished”, because while the Anthroposophical Movement and Society lost themselves in a massive forgetting of the true significance of Steiner’s scientific introspection (The Philosophy of Freedom, and A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception), and in ignoring the beauty and potential for community life given by Steiner in Awakening to Community as the Reverse Cultus, we also took the living Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence given to us by Steiner through Anthroposophy and converted it to dead intellectualized content, without any life at all: the Steinerism displayed constantly in the excesses of Steiner-said.

There are no redeeming powers in Steinerism, such that without The Philosophy of Freedom (Spiritual Activity) and the Reverse Cultus, with which to meet the deeper spiritual after-effects of Ahriman’s incarnation, the Movement and Society are impotent. At the same time, American Anthroposophy (which this book seeks to illuminate) offers just those needed antidotes and inspiration for all of Anthroposophy world-wide. The American Soul must awake now, and the best leaders for this will be those American Anthroposophists who have the will and the courage to find the truth of who they are, as a separate but equal soul force in the threefold world.

For example, Ahriman accomplished a great deal during the weaknesses of the 20th Century into which the Society and Movement fell, such that all kinds of wisdom was lost and buried in Ahriman’s “preserving jars”, locked up either in books stashed in libraries, and in books allowed to go out of print. Hundreds of significant works, by early students of Steiner, have been allowed to go out of print, while the anthroposophical publishing houses reprinted again and again Steiner’s lectures, erroneously leaving aside all the work done by others during the 20th Century.

Let me take up just one other theme left in the dust heap of the 20th Century, along side The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and the Reverse Cultus: namely Projective Geometry. Nothing else has quite the ability to give to the Life of the Mind the forces necessary with which to meet Ahriman’s one-sided: “...power, the tone, the sound of number, and the searing light of geometry incarnated...”.

 

Let us begin with an obscure out of print essay by George Adams Kaufman: Space and the Light of Creation: a new essay in cosmic theory. Just in the Chapter headings of this essay we can feel/see the redemptive force of the new thinking as it penetrates the very realm of Ahriman and lifts it free through the art of thought of the tendency to an excess of gravitas: Chapter I: Radiation of Space; Chapter II: Music of Number; and, Chapter III: Burden of Earth and Sacrifice of Warmth.

One of the tasks of American Anthroposophy will be to rediscover and ingest the art of others besides Steiner, which has been given to us by European anthroposophical endeavors during the 20th Century. This is something far beyond what Steiner had provided, but which he certainly inspired. In the essay far below: a letter to a young anthroposophist, you will find details.

Olive Whicher’s book: Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space and Time, should never be out of print, and ought to be on the same shelf with every anthroposophist’s copy of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Awakening to Community. By the way, little or no abstract thought is called for in this way of study - as all that is essential is taught through drawing.

The significance of Projective Geometry can be found here, quoted by Olive Whicher in her introduction to Adam’s remarkable Physical and Ethereal Spaces: “Confirmed by Rudolf Steiner in the knowledge that the quality of thought prevailing in the new geometry is in reality indispensable both to the scientist in his quest of world-reality and to the individual on a path of spiritual development...” [emphasis added].

The living (heart) thinking, to which many anthroposophists today aspire (but believe comes far easier than it actually does), needs to remain scientific and picture-like in all its qualities. Nothing aids this need better than the study through drawing of Projective Geometry, which teaches the I how to move and weave living pictorial thought, through and from one metamorphosis to the next, all the while never losing the exact and precise quality of scientific thinking.

To truly meet and contain Ahriman-Rove, we also need a living spiritual social science, whose scientific qualities can only be found through pictorial thought trained in the disciplines of Projective Geometry and Goetheanism (A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception). We meet his powers, with those of our own. Then out of this soul training, the I can hear the World Song in which is contained the logos speaking of the Christ into the social world of humanity (as the Lord - the Artist - of Karma). Just as Goethe learned to listen to the speech of Nature, we must now learn to listen to the speech of the social world, and then out of our own forces of art and story telling, render this logos speaking into pictures we share with each other.

Let me end by bringing forward one last matter, which in its details can be found below in the discussion of the true soul roots of the Mystery of America. This will be there developed much more fully - here I only want to hint at its dimensions.

The roots of the American Soul, by the way, are not found in Europe, but in America’s Aboriginal Peoples. The soul is determined by two main influences of which the most earthly is the local geography, while the most heavenly is the incarnating spirit. Spirit and place interact, and the soul is born.

Among the various Nations of Indians, there is one who has a very special relationship to the whole: the Hopi. All the Elders of the other Nations recognize this. It is from a Hopi that we received the idea in the 1990‘s: we are the people we have been waiting for.

The Hopi Prophecy anticipates the arrival from the East (from the rising Sun), of the True White Brother. This influence is to come at a time when the Nations of Indians will be in dire need, for world conditions will have brought about their near destruction. Only one or two individuals may still be alive that are true to their deepest teachings. In the most crucial words of the Prophecy we find this statement: “This third event will depend upon the Red Symbol, which will take command, setting the four forces of nature (Meha) in motion for the benefit of the Sun.”

You can find details below, but let me just render my best interpretation of this phrase in the language with which anthroposophists are familiar (it will be well worth repeating in greater depth later).

 

At the time of great crisis, the World will be three times rocked into War. It is the last, the third event, which is the most crucial. The outcome of this third event (Ahriman’s Incarnation) will depend upon the Red Symbol, or the People of the Rose-Cross. These People of the Rose-Cross, the True White Brother (true in the sense of also being awake to the living Being of the Earth Mother and the Father in the Sky, as once were all Aboriginal Peoples), will then take command, setting the four forces of nature in motion. These are the forces of the Four Directions (honored in the Pipe Ceremony of the Lakota Sioux), or the Cosmic Ethereal Forces (and their elemental servant beings in Nature), which even Steiner recognized when he laid the Foundation Stone for the original Goetheanum in the Earth, and then later the Foundation Stone Meditation in the hearts of those who attended the Christmas Conference.

All this for the benefit of the Sun. To understand this all we need to remember is that the Hopi Prophecy originated in a People who remembered Atlantis (see below). At the time of Atlantis, where was Christ? He was in the Cosmic Sun Sphere! What then does all this come to mean, especially given that the Prophecy also recognizes that this needed work of the True White Brother can fail to manifest?

The outcome of the Third Event - the third time the World is rocked into War (Ahriman’s Incarnation) depends upon the People of the Rose-Cross bringing forward a scientifically based knowledge of the Ethereal Cosmic Forces, not just in the living aspects of the sense world, but in the life of thought itself. Moreover, all this in service to the Christ, by announcing His True Second Coming in the Ethereal, with all its majesty (a Second Crucifixion, a Second Resurrection, and a Second Eucharist).

Are anthroposophists up to such a task? Apparently that remains to be seen.

appendix two

from the book the Way of the Fool



[For the neophyte: Ahriman's incarnation as Karl Rove in the social-political world, really only effected the Stage Setting, which serves as a background to our individual biographies. Granted this Stage Setting is far more realistic than the cardboard and paint of a theater, nevertheless the relationship, between our individual lives and the historical backdrop in which those lives unfold, is captured quite neatly by the Bard's metaphor of Stage Setting and Actors in a Role. Ahriman is a significant ruler of the characteristics of the Stage Setting, but as regards the soul and spiritual element of the human being (our inner world and life), Ahriman, through his influence via our Shadow (the double-complex), is but a small though significant part, while we ourselves can be the Star.

Ahriman is also not the Author of the Play, Christ is - Christ as Lord (Artist) of Karma, and we as free choice-makers. Just as the East sometimes talks of there being something that might be called (in the human being) a Buddha Nature, so we in the West can speak of a similar characteristic of being human - the Christ Impulse. Out of the Buddha Nature of the human being comes Compassion, and out of the Christ Impulse of the human being comes Love. So the two combine: Christ Himself as Lord (Artist) of Karma, who works with our freedom, so that we can out of that freedom ourselves author human love in the form of the Christ Impulse.

In this realm (the inwardness) Christ can have far more influence if we know how to choose to make that possible. The inwardness belongs to our will (we know this instinctively), but for the individual I to become the proper steward of all the potential capacities hidden in this inwardness does require that we wake up there and begin to be active. In this next essay I lay out just how Christ has made himself available to us directly when we strive to be moral - that is when we seek to know and do the Good (or as Rudolf Steiner would say: become knowing doers).

As such the essential lesson from the story of Ahriman's incarnation can be seen in that his activities push many people in the direction of such soul pain that they are confronted by a choice as to whether to remain asleep or actually wake up to the conditions of inflamed social chaos and insane speed of life. Modern existence, for all its seeming unnecessary difficulties is actually a blessing. Just as physical illness is a transformative blessing, so are today's illnesses in the social existence of humanity.

Of crucial importance is to keep in mind what was mentioned above, in that religious fundamentalism (Christianity forced into arid and dead doctrines and dogmas, by the influence of the ahrimanic double) acted in the world in recent years in such a way that made a mockery of the True Second Coming. Nothing Ahriman has accomplished is a potent as this misdirection, which has made people shy of the promise Christ made to come again. This essentially fake Christianity is simply a modern version of what a similar impulse among the Hebrew people accomplished at the time of the Incarnation - that is: People in that time were lead away from the truth by those who sought to maintain their own power and stature as religious leaders, rather than understand that Love begins with Service to the Thou (washing the feet), and then leads ultimately through trials to Love as a total Sacrifice of self for other.

We live in a time in which a similar gesture permeates the Christian world. Religious leaders tend to prefer themselves over others, and being  more in love with their own thoughts of what is the truth, they keep their flocks (and those who hunger for spiritual enlightenment) from knowledge of the True Second Coming. In the essay below (and those that immediately follow) I offer to the reader precise instructions as to how to experience the True Second Coming, first as a Sacrament in the Soul - a Second Eucharist in the Ethereal - in the world of thought, that arises when we authentically seek to know the Good, or what I also call: discovering the experience of Love Engendered Free Moral Grace as that arises out of the spiritual activity of the own I.]

The Meaning of Earth Existence

in the Age of the Consciousness Soul

*[John 16: 12-15 “I have much more to say to you, but you can’t bear it just yet. But when the other comes, the breath of truth, he will guide you in the ways of all truth, because he will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears and announce to you what’s coming. He will glorify me, because he will take of what is mine and announce it to you. Everything the Father has is mine: that’s why I said he will take of what is mine and announce it to you.”]

*

There yet remains a small effort to make a synthesis this work - to make a whole out of seemingly disparate parts. I will try to be brief.

A principle aspect of the great Mystery of our Time is the Mystery of Evil, both outwardly in the structural backdrop to the shared social world of humanity, and inwardly in the depths of our own souls. I have tried above to point out how it is that the essential matter is not the outer social world, but the inner soul world, and the trials and education of the i-AM, in the biography. The context, which we need to call the maya of history and current events, and which is receptively held everywhere from below by the Dark Mystery of the Divine Mother, all passes away, and only what is Eternal, that is what becomes an aspect of the developing i-AM, continues; and, this inner realm (the whole Inwardness of the Creation, which includes human souls and spirits) only exists because of the Heavenly Mystery of the penetrating thoughts of the Father, while the whole (the outer social maya and the eternal inner mind) is created, loved, overseen and mediated (wherever two are more are gathered...), in all its Grace filled and Artistic interrelationships, by the Earthly [new Sun] Mystery of the sacrifices of the Son.

We (humanity) now begin to move out of our spiritual childhood, and in making our way through the Rite of Passage that is Life as it leads us toward our spiritual maturity we need to take hold of the complex of the doubles and the karma of wounds, as these thrive within our souls, and which encourage human evil through temptation and inner prosecution. Even so, this task of meeting the Mystery of Evil within the soul is not as heavy as we think, for through the Shepherd’s Tale [Charles Sheldon], the King’s Tale [Rudolf Steiner], the Healers’ Tale [the community-created Twelve-Steps] and the Sermon on the Mount, we have all the practical instructions that we need.

In seeking to understand in ourselves these three: moral grace, freedom and love [each of these is elaborated in great detail in the book], we set before ourselves what is required to be learned in this Age and it is with these three naturally unfolding capacities that we are Graced and strengthened so as to be able to meet with courage the Mystery of Evil. If we do dare this path, and seek for the deepest instruction in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, then will come to us a change in the nature of our biography, such that it more and more takes on the pattern, described in the John Gospel, as the Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ (the washing of the feet; the scourging; the crowning with thorns; the carrying of the cross; the crucifixion; the entombment and the resurrection) (for a careful exposition of these Seven Stages, see Valentin Tomberg’s [anthroposophical] book: Inner Development).

Whereas Christ lived this in an apparently mostly physical way, those, who truly follow In His Steps [the name of Sheldon’s book, as well as a critical phrase** in Ben-Aharon’s The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century - a profound Imagination of the True Second Coming], will in the main feel these trials in their souls, as aspects of the joy and suffering in the human biography.

**[“Now when they identified themselves with the situation of earthly humanity, the souls who remained true to [Archangel] Michael prefigured, in their planetary Earthly-Sun life, the great Sacrifice of Christ. They walked again in His steps [emphasis added] as they did in former earthly lives, only now the order of following was reversed. They went before Him, showing Him the way, acting out of free and self-conscious human decision, and He followed in their steps [emphasis added] only after they fully united themselves with the divided karma of Earth and humanity. Only then could He offer His sacrifice as the answer to the new, future question of human existence: the question concerning the mission and fate of evil.” Jessiah Ben-Aharon, The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century.]

These trials may seem difficult, but the truth is they are merely human. It was Christ becoming human that went to the Cross, for how could He place an example before us we could not do out of our own humanity (just as Sheldon wrote in In His Steps). [something written by a Shepherd (a pastor) in America, at the same time Steiner (a King) was writing his The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom)] It is the human in Christ that asks in the Garden of Gethsemane that the cup be taken from him, but if not, He accepts the Father’s will. While later it is the even deeper human in Christ that says on the Cross: “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?”. Who among us, in the trials and sufferings of life, has not uttered these same thoughts? [That Steiner teaches an esoteric meaning for the end of life statements of Christ, in no way contradicts their exoteric meanings, which are also true.]

It is here that Christ’s teachings strongly diverge from the Wisdom of the Buddha, for the Buddha would have had us overcome suffering by learning not to know it (one version of the third Noble Truth of the Buddha reads as follows: “ ...concerning the Cessation of Suffering; verily,it is passionless, cessation without remainder of this very craving; the laying aside of, the giving up, the being free from, the harboring no longer of, this craving.”, whereas Christ asks us to embrace our human pain so that we can pass through the Narrow Gate of suffering to then know our deepest self, the true i-AM, and then through this burning trial of knowledge of the true-self, ultimately come to Him. If we would follow In His Steps then we too must take on ourselves the errors (sins)*** of the world, and the tasks of forgiveness and love, for every love engendered free act of moral grace takes up a small part of Christ’s suffering, so that we too participate in the deepest creative acts of the Seventh Day of Creation - the transformation of evil into love. [This is for anthroposophists the teaching attributed to Mani, but the reason such a personality even knows this is because the transformation of evil into love is modeled for us in the deepest felt actions of the Divine Mother and the Son. When we know intimately these actions of the Divine Mystery, we know the true spiritual meaning of the Mystery of Evil, and that this Mystery is Itself the real source of the earthly doctrine connected to it that is sometimes called Manichaeism.]

***[The word sin does not appear in the original Greek, from which the Gospels were translated into the other languages. The Greek word hamartia, misused to indicate sin, actually means “missing the mark” (it is a term from archery). See in this regard the Unvarnished Gospels by Andy Gaus.]

Is this foolish? Of course, but we need not fear this Way of the Fool, for our Faith in Christ’s Promises will always be fulfilled, as we ourselves can learn to become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Yes, this Way is full of trials, but whoever has lived life, and reflected upon their experience, knows that in the meeting of our biography’s trials with courage we discover what it truly means to be human: to struggle, to fall, to get up and to learn - and, through this process, gently and humbly, begin to take up along side and with Him, Christ’s kind and light, Yoke of Love.

Having said all this, it becomes necessary to make one last picture for the reader, for clearly, in that we read the news and hear of the horrors of man’s continuing inhumanity to man, we ourselves face a terrible trial. How are we to understand a world seemingly so filled with Evil?

Picture, for a moment, the surface of the Earth. Below dense matter and fiery substance, while above, airless space. Humanity lives out its Earth Existence only in this narrow spherical band of Life, whose diameter is just under 8,000 miles (and whose height is just three to four miles, because above 15,000 feet above sea level, the atmosphere starts to not contain enough oxygen to support our breathing). The total surface area of the Earth is 196 million square miles, and the habitable land area 43 million square miles Six billion plus human beings must find all that they physically need, which when we consider actual available arable land (land that could be cultivated for food, and other necessary resources), means that each individual only has a square 161 feet on a side from which to grow what they need. This then is the physical spacial aspect of the social organism of the whole world.

Yet, we know that this spherical space is itself often unwisely distributed, for human social arrangements, whether rooted in dominance and selfishness (dominion over) or generosity and sharing (communion with), these social arrangements seem to determine this social order. This stream of moral gestures (choices), of good and/or of evil, moves out of and through human beings, organizing the physical one.

As to this moral aspect of the social organism of the whole world, it has reached in this Time a kind of climax of development, and it will be important to appreciate the true nature of the logos order in which Christ has set modern human existence, through His creative powers as the Artist (Lord) of Karma (the precise and love based placement of individual biographies in relationship to each other). Here is something Natural Science cannot do, for the meaning of existence is beyond the weaknesses of their yet fanciful and spirit-empty images. This will also help us to understand why so many (falsely, but with some degree of reason) believe we live in the End Times.

In the Twentieth Century the world was woven together into a single social organism, not just via the globalization of economic matters, or the personal interconnections offered by the Internet, but most centrally by the Media. At the beginning of the 20th Century, few knew what went on elsewhere the world, in any detail or with any immediacy. At the end of the 20th Century, at the same time that the returned Kings’ were unfolding the New Revelations of Christ [the story of the 20th Century involves a return of the meaning-essence of the Three Kings of the Gospels - that is a return of the knowledge of Gnosis, hungering to be woven again into a single whole with true Faith - an event which clearly had to accompany the True Second Coming], the world itself was woven into a whole in the sense that no macro social event was not to be almost immediately known everywhere the same day (if not the same hour) that it happened.

We live in a time when has arisen a Culture of Media - a kind of knowledge commons, in which vast resources are used to create for us pictures of the meaning of the world and of events. The more developed the country, the greater our daily experience can be saturated with the messages coming from this Culture of Media.

Moreover, great effort and expense is gone into by those who would force us to believe what they want us to believe. Between advertising, political propaganda, outright lies, weak or lame reporting, and other similar failures to reach the truth, this saturation of the soul by the Culture of Media would seem to fail to offer us any service at all. What is not appreciated is that the Christ is far wiser than even the deepest believers imagine. Every evil is eventually turned to good, and next we will explore the prime example for our time.

Recall what has been pointed out many times now, that the individual biography is the central reality of life on the Earth. What happens inside us as we experience life is much more important and enduring than the outer events which surround us. That Stage Setting (all the world’s a stage....) is but epiphenomena to the reality of the life of the soul. To help us appreciate this then, let us explore these matters from the point of view of the individual biography.

In this time, there are over six billion plus of these biographies woven into the tapestry of the social organism of the whole world. Six billion lives held delicately and exactly within the Love and Divine Justice of the Mystery. Within these biographies, all the individual i-AMs experience that precise and personal instruction that hopes to lead them to the realization of their own divinity and immortality of spirit. [The epoch (rite of passage) of the Consciousness Soul is 2100 years long, going from the time of the beginning of the on-looker separation (and the creation of Natural Philosophy - Science) in the 1400‘s, until the years around 3500 AD.]

To understand this we need to think it from the inside out, and not from the outside in. The Culture of Media only provides context, never essence. True, life is hard, even harsh, even terrible. The naive consciousness wants to turn away from this suffering, and cannot understand how God (the Divine Mystery) could allow such things as torture, child abuse and the genocidal acts which are dumbed down by the terms: ethnic cleansing.

The reality is that what the Divine Mystery does is to allow for freedom. This most precious gift is essential to the immortal spirit during its Rites of Passage we are calling: Earth Existence. Moreover, the Mystery also makes certain there is a true Justice through the post-death passages of kamaloka and lower and higher devachan, in a manner no human social structure can provide. Christ has told us this in the Sermon on the Mount: “to what sentence you sentence others, you will be sentenced”. All this should be kept in mind as we proceed.

As a single ego, I wake in the morning. From the night I bring the remainder of yesterday, perhaps worked over. Surrounding me, as I live the day, are the lives of those with whom I have a karma of wounds - with whom I have a debt of meaning to creatively work over. This we carry together, each bearing a part, each bearing their own wounds. These are wounds from the past, from the present and from the future.

To observe the world of today, as we walk the walk of our lives, is to observe trials of fire and suffering - rites of wounding and being wounded. But not just this, for also there is healing. Where we let love thrive, wounds become healed.

Thus flow all our days, often too fast to even notice the beauty and wonder of the sea of personal relationships and shared trials. Yes, there is misfortune, and evil deeds. But do we really imagine Christ and the Divine Mother lets this evil happen without recourse or justice? We may not know this directly through Gnosis, but we also can have Faith. Gnosis without Faith is empty of Life; and, Faith without Gnosis is empty of the Truth. Only when we join them together, do we get: the Way (the Mystery of living the Good), the Truth (the Mystery of knowing the Good) and the Life (the Mystery of union with the Good).

This then is the wonder of the outer and inner biography, for often the wounds are not visible. Yes, sometimes the wounds are visible to our eye or ear for we see people too fat, too thin, too lamed in body, too poor, too physically or mentally deficient. Often, however, so many of us suffer in silence that we really do not know the nature and personal meaning of their wounds - only our own are visible to the eye of our heart, unless we first learn to exercise and unfold certain powers of soul and spirit.

Amidst all this visible and silent suffering, we find ourselves woven into the Culture of Media. Images and sounds flow around us, pictures of a world on the verge of chaos and madness. Yes, we have the intimacy of our personal biography, but through the Culture of Media we are drawn into the painted backdrop of the whole world - a backdrop we all share. War in Iraq. Global warming. Governments out of control. Pandemics waiting in the wings. Local economic recession, and even world-wide depression.

What lives in this painted backdrop - in this Stage Setting - in the wise relationship of the Culture of Media to the unfolding of our personal biographies?

The answer is this: the mirror of our own inner darkness and light...

Inside us the double-complex - our feelings of judgment, our temptations, our addictions and our sense of failure. Inside us the darkness that belongs personally to us, and outside us, carried to us by the Culture of Media, the mirror of that darkness. But also inside us the Good that we would author.

Think on it. Do we not experience the images and sounds brought to us by the Culture of Media as something that is filled with what we like and we dislike? We live our biographies and the Culture of Media confounds our souls with pictures of dark and light to which we all respond individually. The great masses of humanity do not make the News. The great masses of humanity experience the News.

What is News? News is exactly what the reporters and television personalities call it: stories. The Culture of Media provides us stories (tales) of the world, which are often presented as if these stories are true, something most of us have come to know they are not. News stories reflect all kinds of bias, and in some cases the bias is deliberate. Moreover, news stories reflect conditions of commerce living in the agency reporting them.

For example, it is well understood that in the last third of the 20th Century in American television the news divisions of the major networks disappeared, and the entertainment divisions took over the responsibility for the news. The opportunity to inform and educate the receivers of news stories became secondary to the need to keep them interested so as to be able to sell commercial time and make a profit. In addition, the stories are mostly about dire and tragic events, and little is investigated or reported that is about the positive and the creative.

We are right then to wonder sometimes about the News, about its harsh nature and artless excessive attention to the dark deeds of many. Humanity in general bears within it the beam that is not seen, while the mote is exaggerated. But the world itself is not this beam, is not this darkness. The greater part of darkness is inside us - in our own souls, and from there projected onto the world. The Culture of Media exaggerates this darkness further, at the same time it gives us much that also arouses our own unredeemed antipathies and sympathies.

Once more for emphasis...

The world in its reality is not this Media generated excess of darkness (so out of balance with the light that is also everywhere present), which we all project from within the soul - the beam. Yet, in the Culture of Media this whole processes of dark projection is exaggerated so that the mirroring nature of the social world itself begins to bother us. This logos order of the social world is complex and rich, and worth a deep study.

Pictures of a distorted and untrue meaning of the world abound, and while we share these pictures, we make personal and individual our reactions. Just as the intimate events of our biographies have a personal meaning, so does the shared stage setting have a personal meaning. In a more general sense, for example, many Christians today are confronted, via the Culture of Media, with pictures of individuals whose actions as self-proclaimed Christians either inspire us to imitation or cause us to turn away in shame. The same is true in Islam. The terrorist who frightens us in the West, also causes many ordinary Muslims to turn away in horror. Everywhere fundamentalism rises, to continue the example, the great mass of humanity, that are not so tied to such arid rigidity, shrink away in antipathy. Do we not assert quietly, inwardly to ourselves: this is not me, I am not that - I will not be that!

In our biographies then, we are confronted in the intimacy of our personal relationships with what are sympathetic and antipathetic reactions to that which we would choose to admire and imitate, and that which we would shun and refuse to be like. Via the Culture of Media, we are met with that which approaches us in the same way, yet on a larger scale. Just as we as individuals have a Shadow (a double-complex), so nations, religions and peoples have a Shadow, and the Culture of Media puts in our faces these pictures and meanings with which we can identify or from which we can turn away, often in shame.

Christ has arranged, in this particular moment in time (the cusp of the 20th to 21st Centuries, which is also the Dawn of the Third Millennium) to place in the dying away hierarchical social forms of humanity, those biographies which do two main forming gestures within that history. This is all connected to a process in which social chaos arises in order to cause these old hierarchical [third cultural age] social structures to let go their no longer valid hold, and in many instances be eventually replaced with new social form arising out of the social commons [fifth cultural age].

In the first instance, these biographies living in the decadent social hierarchies (such as government, corporate and church organizations) portray strong images, via the Culture of Media, to which we react equally strongly out of our likes and dislikes. For example, one of America’s wise women, Doris (Granny D) Haddoch, has said that we should be grateful for such as George W. Bush, because he causes us to awake from our sleep as citizens. As a consequence, in our individual biographies we react to the extremes of these dominant religious, business, cultural and political personalities, and this brings about in us as individuals certain inner judgments and calls to action.

The second effect of those biographies unfolding in the now decadent institutional social hierarchies is to drive the social order further into a needed condition of chaos, something all 6 billion plus biographies require in order to birth the moral dilemmas necessary for the Age of the Consciousness Soul. This social chaos sweeps traditional moral authority aside, and forces us as individuals into situations where we must rely on the own I in order to properly face the moral crisis. In that human beings are incarnating in massive karmic communities in order to have these sometimes shattering moral experiences, this causes the present world social organism to have the strong tendency to completely dissolve into a condition of near total social conflagration [thus my website: Shapes in the Fire].

The moral aspect of the logos ordered social organism of the world requires crisis in order for the individual biographies to live, not just intellectually, but fully and dynamically and existentially into dilemmas of moral choice. Only true moral choice can awaken in us what is offered in this Age to the development of the Consciousness Soul.

Nothing in the world is not touched by the Art of Christ, who as Lord of Karma - Lord of the Satisfaction of Moral Debt and healer of karmic wounds, arranges in majestic harmony all the biographies so that even from the smallest detail to the grandest historical event, meaning is put to the service of our development - the leaving behind of our spiritual childhood followed by our birth into spiritual adulthood.

The world historical crises of this time are a complex and rich Stage Setting, against which 6 billion plus souls live out the dramas of their individual biographies.

Thus, in this birth from spiritual childhood to spiritual adulthood, the Time - the Age of the Consciousness Soul - is a Rite of Mystery, a Baptismal Mass for all of humanity, just as was told to us by John the Baptist. [in Matthew 3:11] “Now I bathe you in the water to change hearts, but the one coming after me is stronger than me: I’m not big enough to carry his shoes. He will bathe you in holy breath and fire.” (emphasis added)

Consider now more closely what happens inside us as we experience the intimacy of our biographies, and the shared pictures that come via the Culture of Media.

Choice confronts us. Do I be like that, or like this? From what place inside do I choose? In a time so filled with chaos that rules no longer apply, I discover that I can rely only on myself. Out of myself I must author the Good in response to the world of meaning that surrounds and confronts me. So powerful, in its personal immediacy, are these experiences, images and meanings, that we cannot turn away from them. It is as if the World itself is on Fire, wanting to burn and burn and burn until we run from it in terror, or stand up to it and give the fullest of our participation to its moderation and its healing.

Yet by Grace, I contain the means to know the Good that my biography and membership in the shared fate of humanity draws out of me. What I source becomes a part of the world, and I know that this is so. I know my freedom to enact the moral grace that my heart comprehends in its deepest places. Deep inside my soul my very own heart hungers to sing: Love will I give. Love will I create. Love will I author.

So now we think away the physical - the maya of the sense world, and let our picture thinking gaze only upon this inner, invisible to the physical eye, moral act. An act more and more emerging everywhere, for while in America, and the Cultural West, the Consciousness Soul is first widely appearing, it will and must appear everywhere that human beings let the world touch their wounds, while they seek to share with others the trials by fire of their biographies.

Invited by the Love and Art of Divine Circumstance to look within and to reach into the depths of our own being in order to source and author that Good which we know to be right, we touch something spiritual and are Touched by something Spiritual. In this time of the True Second Coming, in the inwardness of our souls and invisible to all outer seeing, a Second Eucharist is being enacted - the Good offers Itself - Its own Being - to us (Moral Grace). For the Good we know is not just known in the soul as what we tend to think of as a mere thought, but if we attend most carefully, it is true Spirit, just as the John Gospel writer told us that Christ spoke: [John 3:6-8] “What’s born of the flesh is flesh, and what’s born of the breath is breath. Don’t be amazed because I told you you have to be born again. The wind blows where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes; its the same with everyone born of the breath.”

[The existence of a Second Eucharist, to accompany the Second Coming, in no way means to diminish or change the Original Eucharist. On the contrary, we will find that via the Second Eucharist our understanding of the meaning of the Original Eucharist (the transubstantiation of matter) will deepen. See in this regard, the small pamphlet: Radiant matter: Decay and Consecration, by Georg Blattmann. From the transubstantiation of matter we are being led onward to learning how to participate also in a transubstantiation of thought.]

Thus we are being truly and continuously born again today (each act of moral grace is another Second Ethereal Eucharist and birth), from out of our spiritual childhood and into our spiritual adulthood, baptized outwardly by the fires of the times in our biographies, and by holy breath within - a Second Eucharist where Christ gives of His own Substance that biblical knowing of the Good - His own Being. For us to truly know the Good, requires we join our own soul to the Good. Our yearning to author the Good out of ourselves is how we participate in the Baptism of being truly born again, and how we participate in the sacrament of the Second Eucharist. Christ also participates by giving to us, out of Himself, this very Good - this Moral Grace. When having received within ourselves this sacrament of the Second Eucharist, an act that only arises because we seek it and form its actual application, we remain free - we create moral law - we author the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Given to us within by Christ as a capacity, we then author its incarnate nature and pass it on to the world of our biographies, - from out of us thence into the outer world (or into the inner world), do we then ourselves author this Good: love engendered free moral grace.

But how does Christ do this? Is this Good offered to us in this Second Sacrament as if it was a thing, passed by hand from one to another?

No. Christ as holy breath breathes upon the slumbering burning embers of our own good nature, just as we breath upon a tiny fire in order to increase its power. He sacrifices His Being into this breath, which gives Life to the tiny ember-like fire of our moral heart. The holy breath becomes within the soul of each human being who asks, seeks and knocks a gift of Living Warmth that enlivens our own free fire of moral will.

The Narrow Gate opens both ways, making possible thereby the intimate dialog and conversation of moral deeds and thoughts that is woven between the i-AM, the Thou and the Christ (wherever two or more are gathered...), which intimate conversation leads ultimately to the consecration - the character development - of the soul.

In this way our thinking can now behold the Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul: A macro-cosmic Rite, a Second Ethereal Eucharist, in which we give birth out of ourselves in the most intimate way possible, knowledge of the Good, not as mere thought, but as Life filled moral will, breathed into greater power by the sacrifice of the true ethereal substance of Christ’s Being in the form of holy breath.

The outer world is but a seeming, and what is brought by the Culture of Media mere pictures of the Stage Setting for the World Temple that is home to our biographies. When we think away this outer seeming - this logos formed and maya based sense world, and concentrate only on the Idea of the moral grace (Life filled holy breath) we receive and then enact out of the wind warmed fire of individual moral will - as individual law givers, as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets - we create this Meaning of Earth Existence. Every act of moral grace, given greater Life within in the deepest intimacy of our life of soul, is an ethereal communion with Christ, even though we may only experience it as what to us is a mere thought of what is the Good at some moment of need in the biography.

Christ gives us this Gift, by Grace, freely out of Love, and with no need that we see Him as its Author. We hunger inwardly to know what the right thing to do is, and when this hungering is authentic, we receive Christ’s Holy Breath. This does not come so much as a thought-picture of the Good in response to our questing spirit, but rather as the contentless breathing substance of Christ’s Being. We are touched (inspired) by Love, and at this touch we shape that Breath into the thought that we then know. The nature of its application and form in which we incarnate this thought is entirely our own. We shape the thought completely out of our own freedom - our own moral fire of will, for only we can apply it accurately in the individual circumstances of our lives.

As the Age of the Consciousness Soul unfolds accompanied by this Second Eucharist, the Social World of human relationships begins to light and warm from within. For each free act of moral grace rests upon this Gift of Christ’s Being to us - an ethereal substance received in the communion within the Temple of the own Soul, freely given in Love whenever we genuinely: ask, seek and knock during our search for the Good. Our participation in this Rite, this trial by Fire leavened by Holy Breath, leads us to the co-creation of new light and new warmth - the delicate budding and growing point of co-participated moral deeds out of which the New Jerusalem is slowly being born.

This co-creation is entirely inward, a slowly dawning Sun within the macro Invisible World of Spirit. Moreover, we do it collectively (as humanity). While each of us contributes our part, it is our collective conscious celebration of the Second Ethereal Eucharist (creating the Good) that begins the transubstantiation of the collective (presently materialized and fallen) thought-world of humanity into the New Jerusalem.

Thought is real, and it is as equally real as is matter. The Original Eucharist transforms the already divinely given now-dying substance of earthly matter into Life-filled Spirit through our ritual invitation of the active Grace of the Divine Mystery; and, our participation in the Second Ethereal Eucharist transforms dead thought into living ethereal Substance, through the mystery of our individual spirit’s active and embryonic grace, that becomes united into the collective co-creation of humanity.

In the Invisible World of Spirit, we co-participate, out of the own moral fire of will, in the Dawn of the New Sun that is to become the New Jerusalem.

Let us now slow down here for a moment, and take a deep breath, for these last thoughts above may seem almost too big - too idealistic - to be easily contemplated. To ease our understanding and gently ground it, let us consider this situation once again in it most ordinary aspects.

The world of our biographies places each individual into the fires of experience. These are remarkable gifts that lead us toward moral questions - often deep and troubling. We yearn to know what to do, and in this circumstance we may ask, seek and knock. What has been called earlier in this book Moral Grace is available to us, yet the mystery of this practice of inner activity is where we ourselves create moral law - where we become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.

In the King’s Tale, we saw that Rudolf Steiner’s book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity showed how to come to this knowledge through the practices of Gnosis - to knowledge - in the form of moral imagination, moral intuition and moral technique. In the Healers’ Tale, we saw how the 12 Steps helped us to master the soul through the elevation of the spirit, and in this way come to know God’s Will as we understand it. Finally, in the Shepherd’s Tale we came to understand that by asking What Would Jesus Do out of Faith, we could also come to the needed individual moral beliefs.

Three different paths (among perhaps many more) all leading to those individual invisible depths that each of us must uniquely experience, which we have now seen must be properly called: the Second Eucharist of Holy Breath. So we come now to perceive the Time - this Age of the Consciousness Soul - where, if we seek it, we have made ourselves available to be baptized with Fire and Holy Breath, just as John the Baptist us told Christ would do, 2000 years ago.

Even so, we still have to truly want to know the Good - to authentically ask, seek and knock.