‘I Think Speech’ Podcast for Good Friday
The 5th stage of Christian Initiation is revealed as The Mystic Death.
In the grip of the greatest of all suffering the disciple recognizes that the world of the senses is illusion. We become aware of death and of descending into the world of shades, but then the darkness breaks, and a new light — the astral light shines out. The veil of the temple is ‘rent in twain.’ This light has nothing in common with the physical light of the Sun. It rays forth from the inner being. The impression it makes is unlike anything made by an outer light.
We can imagine that we are leaving a turbulent city behind us, entering a peaceful, dense forest. The noise gradually stops and the silence becomes complete. We finally begin to be aware of what lies beyond the silence - “to pass the zero point” - where all external sound has terminated.
And then sound arises again for the inner ear from the other side of existence.
This is the experience of the soul of those able to enter the astral world.
In this stage, the initiate consciously crosses the threshold to shine forth from out of the Intellectual Soul and orient life there. They are then “in contact with the inverse quality of everything, just as in arithmetic, beneath the zero point, we enter into the growing series of negative numbers.”
We need to lose all, in order to gain all. This applies to our own existence. In the moment of losing all, we appear to die to ourselves, and it is in the world around us that we begin to live again. We pour our life out into our surroundings and it flows back to us again, ever enriched.
When the initiate absorbs the power of Christ into the Intellectual Soul they develop “virtues which go from like to like” which shine out into the world. What lives in the soul passes “from “I” to “I” - we really see the other. “Subject and predicate are equal,” as in the 5th Beatitude: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”. Steiner fills it out with “Blessed or God-filled are they who develop love; for as they radiate forth love, it will return to them again.”
What goes forth returns again, what dies will be reborn. The Mystic Death is the antidote to the 5th layer of the inner earth, called the Fruit Earth. This earth of expansive growth has a soul-like quality, struggling to gain shape and form. Its substance consists of burgeoning, teeming, out of control energies. In this layer we find life in its most original state, which was found “on the earth’s surface when nothing lifeless had yet developed.” Steiner tells us that it must be contained, for if it got out into the atmosphere it would be like a virus. Without the transformation of the Mystic Death there would be no mercy.
The fifth stage on the Rosicrucian path is the Correspondence of Microcosm and Macrocosm. When we survey the path of human evolution, we see that what lives within humanity today has gradually entered from without — for instance, the glands were an external growth on the Sun, like our modern fungi. The human body is pieced together from what was spread outside it, each separate member of your physical body, etheric body and astral body was somewhere outside in the universe. This is the macrocosm in the microcosm. Your very soul was outside in the Godhead. Whatever is within us corresponds to something which is outside, and we must learn to know the true correspondences in ourselves.
When we concentrate our thinking, for instance, on the Third Eye, it will express what was formerly outside. If you penetrate this organ in meditation, sink yourself into it, you learn to know the part of the outer world which corresponds to it. The larynx, too, you get to know and the forces which build it. This is how we can learn about the macrocosm - thru sinking yourself into your own body.
This is not a mere blind brooding – a self-concerned navel gazing. To reach this by the path of modern Rosicrucianism is less comfortable and demands real work.
The universe is full of beautiful and marvelous things, we must be attentive to these, seeking the Godhead in all its manifold expressions. Then we can find the Divine within - knowing God is One.
The world is like a great book. We find its letters in created things, we must read the book microcosm and the book macrocosm from beginning to end.
This is no longer just a head-thinking, it lives over into our feeling life, it fuses the human being with the whole universe so that we feel all things to be the expression of the divine Spirit of the Earth. When we have reached this point, we can voluntarily perform all our deeds in accordance with the will of the whole cosmos and this is what is known as Divine Bliss…
~hag
29 March 2024 - “Speaking with the Stars”: Jupiter and Mercury stay almost on station with each other in the western twilight, but Mercury (occult Venus) is fading and will soon be gone from sight.