a brief description of meeting the Lesser and Greater Guardians in the new way,
and as well a description of the meaning of, and new manner of,
the Second Pentecost in the Ethereal.

For a discussion of the Second Eucharist in the Ethereal, to go with the Return of Christ in the Ethereal, read my Living Thinking in Action, or the Way of the Fool, or American Anthroposophy, or The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.

Nothing stays the same, not even Spiritual Science and Anthroposophy.  Time passes, the spiritual itself evolves as do human beings.  Certain matters of significance will have to be updated, and students of Rudolf Steiner will find that they have to reconfigure their paradigm if they are not to lose the connection with these natural changes.

For Americans these are very special facts of which to take account.  Our souls are not like the souls of either the Center or the East, and it is well past time for us to continue to assume that we need to imitate those selling either enlightenment or initiation.  The following material is meant to be a guide for those with an American Soul, and as well a Teaching for those who do not have an American Soul.  In the American is the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness, and the most earthly and natural expression of Anthroposophy. 

Part of the difficulty is that while I was learning about Steiner’s version of Anthroposophy, I assumed, like all those I was meeting in the Society, that this knowledge was nailed down and fixed.  I took in then imagines of what was to be expected and as I progressed naturally, in the American Way, nothing happened as I had been led to expect.  I was saved in a kind of way, by Christ, who on occasion touched me, and from those touches I eventually learned that matters were to have a quite different flavor than what Steiner had to teach to those without an American Soul, and also mostly still living in the Intellectual Soul.

It was not that Steiner was wrong, it was just that Reality is highly differentiated, and the American Way had to take a different course, with which his own comments on America agree.

Let me now lay out some examples:

 The Double: Based on Steiners descriptions of the double-complex in both the early Class Lessons, and the first lectures collected under the title: The Challenge of the Times, I anticipated that my experience of the double-complex, and its effects, would be visionary - i.e. supersensible images consistent with what Steiner had described - we were, after all, practicing science, which seems to seek a universal knowledge.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my inner voice, which I used when discursively thinking, could be captured by aspects of the double-complex if I was not using that voice myself, consciously.  The double-complex lived right next to my I, and from there was able to do its work, which is by the way both positive and negative.  For details the reader of this is referred to my work: The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount.  At the same time it is important to understand that the voice of conscience (the higher ego) and the guardian angel also sound in us in a like fashion.  Distinguishing them is part of scientific self-observation.  Each (double complex, higher ego - conscience, and guardian angel) has a characteristic quality that can be inwardly noticed.

 The Lesser Guardian of the Threshold:  As my experience of the luciferic/ahrimanic aspects of the double-complex grew in its details, and as well in my ability to somewhat master these creatures, part of the relevant lessons came during a mood of soul which we call: depression.  In the state of encouraged by the double depression (not always, sometimes it is caused by brain defects, again see The Mystery of Evil) our inner voice becomes captured by these beings, which regale us with details and images of how bad we are, how stupid, etc., such that it is very significant that Tomberg’s characterization of the ahrimanic aspect of these beings is as a prosecutor.  What to do to recover from this state is also discussed in The Mystery of Evil.

 The co-working of these beings creeps up on us, it is not overt, and we often don’t notice the effects until they get acute.  Besides the negative (prosecutorial) thoughts, there is also a related paralysis of the will.  It was then in the Fall of 2009 that I found myself experiencing a very profound apparent depression that had slowly advanced upon on me over the course of a week.

On one particular evening came the most intense activity in this regard I had ever experienced, and I began to pace around my room becoming more and more convinced of how useless and ignorant and weak I was.  I began to intensely loath myself.  I was not suicidal, by the way.  I just did not doubt for a moment that I had failed at everything, and had not completed any spiritual task in the right way, regardless of how hard I believed I had tried.

The situation became intolerable (I paced for almost two hours), and I finally woke up to the “depressive state of being”, its song of my flaws and its related paralysis of my own will.  Exhausted I collapsed on my bed, and started to recite out loud the Lord’s Prayer.  The depression and negativity then fled and I fell into an emotionally drained sleep.

In the morning the night work had embraced me and as I awoke I realized that a profound Being/s had revealed itself to me, and that it was of a hierarchy in which human failure and weakness was intolerable.  I was not really feeling myself as much as feeling how this Being felt about human beings, and our human weakness.  In itself it believed it had none, which is why it so intensely loathed me.  [Even today, my reflections on this experience grow, for we do not always fully know the meaning of such experiences immediately.]

Moreover that is precisely why such related communties of Beings were ordained to be part  of the double-complex, although generally quite restrained by certain rules.  In this case, my experience of this Being was an Intuition - it drew me into itself and revealed itself to me in all its remarkable power.  It had given me by grace insights into the workings of our lives that can be obtained in no other way.

Once free of the burdens of its gift, and back to my ordinary self-consciousness and thinking (in the following days), I began to truly see how to forgive myself for all my weakness, something this Being was incapable of doing.  It was as if there was a marriage being commenced, between my lower and my higher ego, at which this Being/s played an offertory.  From learning to forgive myself even of this profound loathing by another, I then became able to forgive others in a much more real fashion than ever before.

 The Greater Guardian of the Threshold:  This was a very strange event as it unfolded.  It wasn’t until later, when I was able to put it together with a number of other experiences that I came to the conclusions I now hold.  Again, I was not prepared for this experience by my readings of Steiner’s works.  How could he prepare me?  Great aspects of the Americas and Americans were invisible to him.  It is only our self-serving vain belief that he knows everything that leads us to confusion.  When we start to recognize that he was also a human being, then we can move forward free of the ideas we have built up from our too often unconscious reading.

This event happened about two months after the meeting with the Lessor Guardian.

On a certain afternoon I became feverish.  It was not a high fever, but I went to bed early, and the fever continued for about a total of 24 hours.  The next afternoon I started feeling better.  After a day free of fever, I became feverish once more.  This was a bit more intense, but when I took my temperature I was barely over 100 degrees.  During the night, every time I woke up and turned over, my scalp hurt everywhere.  When I got up the next morning and looked in the mirror my neck and head were everywhere red, like a sun-burn.  My scalp hurt, the fever was still there a little, and I was red from the neck up.

I called an old friend in California, who is also an anthroposophical doctor, and she had never heard of or seen a fever produce a sun-like burn on the face and neck.  I went to the ER, and the doctor there ran some tests, which gave no evidence of any kind of “bug”, but nevertheless gave me some antibiotics and had me pick up some anti-itch cream at the local pharmacy, with which to treat the skin.  He too had never seen a fever give an effect like this.

The anthroposophical doctor had said that it was a good sign the effect of the fever was on the outer edges of my organism (the skin), because fevers causing effects deeper in the interior organs often led later to worse conditions.

By the end of the third day the fever was gone and all that remained was the “burn”.  I treated it a little with the anti-itch cream, but during the next few days a very thin layer of skin flaked off in quite tiny pieces, and the surface of the skin all over my head and neck, after a period of being pink and new-like, healed and the itch disappeared. 

I had been consciously practicing intuitive thinking, after the sense of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for over a decade.  The only thought that was making sense of the event was that a/the Sun Being had touched me, so strongly that not only did I have a fever, I also had, in early winter and indoors, a “sun” burn, even though I had never left the room for several days.  This thought was coordinated with the recollection of something Steiner had written in the 12th Lecture of the John Gospel cycle, where he described that when a student of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has achieved a catharsis (purification) of the astral body, a higher being then takes the seed organs of clairvoyance born into the astral body that have arisen from this purification, and then impresses them on the ethereal body to lay a basis for clairvoyance.

Experience has taught me to cultivate a bit of doubt in the face of such intuitions.  I don’t necessarily throw them out, I just lay them off to the side and try to learn more.  I am particularly leery of thoughts that could so easily be self-serving.

After a time I began to notice that on going to sleep, the closer I got to the “threshold” of sleep, the more my spontaneous inner picturing (not directed at the sense world, but rather at the inner world), had become alive with all kinds of activity.  I would see faces, and sometimes the faces were looking back at me.  I did not work with this experience, although again my intuition was that this was the world of the dead.

My main path of knowledge previously had clearly been with regard to thinking and thoughts, not to inner visioning.  So the practical question to me was whether there was any change to the consequences my thinking activity.  This took a while to manifest, but in 2010 and following, as mentioned previously, I created over 270 spontaneously given oral versions of my written works for YouTube (this has so far resulted in over 200,000 visits to individual videos, including over 1,000 subscribers - visits quite international in scope) and wrote a book I had not even previously imagined I was going to write: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.  As we say in America (at least): the proof is in the pudding.

 The Second Pentecost in the Ethereal: Again, I was not expecting anything to happen. Yet, on Pentecost 2011 I was sitting in my reading chair, had folded my open book on my chest, closed my eyes and began to drift into nap-like rest.  Mostly when I do this I don’t sleep, but I do very often think in the form we call reverie.  I am also aware that in this state I have a more conscious awareness of both my ethereal body and my astral body, although I do not study these - I just let myself wander among their fields as it were.

Something unusual was present once I had shifted my attention from the sense world to my inner world.  This will be difficult to describe, so bear with me please.

Take you right hand and place it centered over your right eye, covering your face from the mid-forehead down to about half way down your cheek.  Make, in your imagination, the upper pole of this hand-form wider, and the lower a bit narrower.  Also give it a kind of slight waist, in the middle - a narrowing.  The outer edges are basically rounded - they are not straight lines.  The upper aspect of the form leans in a kind of way toward the left.  It is not in anyway precisely symmetrical.

Now in reality there is no outer edge, for the form is built up of many dozens of smaller forms, which are basically identical in general, but also conform themselves inside the general overall shape.

Each of these smaller forms is like a two ended flame.  The end toward the outside is tipped to the left, and the end toward the inside is tipped to the right.  There is a slightly wider middle, which is of a somewhat darker color like the nucleus of a cell, and the outer flames (in both directions) are lighter.  The colors did not seem very important, as if the shape was everything, but blue and white seemed dominant.

All of these two-ended flames were nested next to each other, kind of like when people sleeping together “spoon”.  They nested in such a way as if from the center of the form ran a line-like ordering impulse, such that these “spooning” flames made a form and structure that circled around what was essentially the larger oblong form with a kind of waist, with the upper pole wider and the lower pole relatively narrower than the upper pole.  Each flame then was of a slightly different length and width so that their nested spooning filled out the whole form, without any gaps, except at the outer “edges”.  The total organism pulsed in a kind of way - that is, it was not static but in movement.

Most of the day, whenever I shut my eyes and let my attention wander in the right way, the two-ended multi-flame form was there, spacially occupying most of the right side of my “face” as that is recognized inwardly as a felt aspect of my head region when our eyes are shut.

Some conclusions arrived at over time:

My head region was being reconfigured, such that the interface between my individual spirit and my physical nervous system (in the region of the head) was altered.  The interface is the crucial aspect, and whether one wants to speak of the physical body, the ethereal body or the astral body (or all three), the change was being done by an outside source.  I wasn’t doing it, nor was I resisting it.  On the contrary, I surrendered to it.

Subsequently in speaking to others (I was giving some courses in my home that Spring and early Summer), I noticed a change in the sense that all that I had to do, after first asking a few questions to orient myself to my listeners, was begin to speak.  I did not need a goal, and my first utterance was mine to choose.  The difference was that I could, with full confidence, let myself go into the stream of thought being unfolded and trust that it would lead me in the right way to exactly what my listeners could best benefit from hearing from me. 

I seldom paused, or lost the train of thought.  I spoke with ease, often creating new imagines I’d never thought of before.  Nor was I unconscious in any way, or channeling.  I was actually more awake and more artistically free.  This same effect began to appear in my writing as well.

I have since studied this phenomena in other ways.  In certain sense I became more aware that America was a kind of micro-Babylon, such that even though we all used the same language (English), our individual and group understandings of the world were often radically different.  I found that if I needed to talk to someone concerning spiritual matters, with a few leading questions I could understand their paradigm’s language, and speak to it. 

Further, there was no point of view I need “sell”.  My task was to be more socratic, although in a very modern way.  I was to bring out of their already existing point of view what could in that moment be born.  I was to wash the feet of their way of seeing/thinking/beholding the world, not to induce them to believe in my paradigm.