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things i have learned from rudolf steiner

• christianity
• esotericism

A living document I guess, because this system of theology is practically its own thing distinct from any theology I’ve read and I’d rather just consider it Esoteric Christianity for now.

• Lazarus wrote the Gospel of John.
• After chapter eleven, when he came back from the dead he was the beloved disciple.
• The state of being dead and coming back was one of spiritual initiation and one we are all to follow?
  • Initiates can go visit the spiritual worlds (as Lazarus did); however in order to do so, one must be ‘homeless’, that is, without any attachment or sympathies in the spiritual world (or else it would bring a bad dowry)
  • Our astral bodies must become the Virgin Sophia (the mother of Jesus Christ) to purify themselves, to initiate, to encounter the cosmic I and receive pure illumination
• Demanding the origin and direct material meaning of scriptural text has made this very difficult to understand, and so all liberal Christianity, being fundamentally materialist, will not actually comprehend scripture.¹
• Paul had a secret other school of spiritual science that he made with Dionysius where they taught about the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the I or the ego.
  • The latter two leave when we are sleeping and replaced by their divine equivalents.
  • The ‘son of man’ is the I and the astral body.
• Our bodies were gradually woven into these four through the constant recreations of the Earth from Old Saturn, the Old Moon, and the Old Sun, until we reached Earth now.
• So our states of consciousness, too, also were not quite what they were now; in the Lemurian period (which I don’t know either) it was more like we were conscious an hour or two a day.
  • In this consciousness, we only saw things dimly – we would not quite see the physical forms so clearly, just movements of colour and soul.
  • At the same time we were more aware of the divine-spiritual consciousness, where we felt we were part of the divine I.
• Even sleep was something that had to be introduced by the grace of God, as a subtle process that incorporated two of these bodies.
• The declaration of the Gospel of John is the recreation of the divine archetype through joining with Christ at the end of the post-Atlantean epoch. That is, I guess, this current age, because the Atlantean epoch is the one mentioned in Plato’s Timaeus.
• The mission of the Earth is to evolve love, in the same way that the mission of the Moon was to cultivate wisdom.
  • In the future planetary mission on Jupiter they will see love in everything the way we see wisdom in everything.
  • While the point of being an Earth-dweller is to constantly take in love (develop it, evolve it, return it to divinity), the point of being a Sun-dweller is to kindle love in all things.
• The essential trait of love is independence; love must be a free gift to another. Therefore, in order for human beings to love, they had to develop their own I (ego).
  • This is in contrast to older humans, which had an undeveloped “I” but rather operated in a group-soul.
  • “I am the voice of one calling in solitude” represents this emphasis on the individual self, as does the remark that “he who does not deny wife and child […] cannot be my disciple”; the Old Testament in contrast is of a “group soul” character
• There were seven spirits on the Old Moon that had progressed far enough to develop love; six made their home on the Sun where they stream forth love onto the Earth (the six Elohim?), one remained on the Moon to pour wisdom ripened down onto the Earth, and His name is Yahweh or Jehovah.
• Human beings didn’t used to have eyes or ears, but meditation and concentration amongst early humans brought light to the astral body’s eyes and ears, which evolved onto it, and then over time stamped itself onto the etheric body. The etheric body can’t bring this forward to the physical without being drawn out of it, in order to have the astral body stamp its changes onto it.
  • This is no longer necessary after Christ; if He is present, then the astral body can stamp onto the etheric without it needing to be drawn out.
• Christ came to spiritualize love out of the blood relationship (group-soul or being a “common folk”) toward a love that is above the material world, freely given from one individual to another. He appealed to those who operated outside the love-by-blood relationship, preaching in Galilee outside Judea, where people of all races mixed together.
• Alcohol was necessary for human evolution, appearing in the post-Atlantean period, because it cuts off all connection with the divine and the spiritual world. In doing so, it draws one into the material world, makes one egotistical, able to claim the group-soul’s “I” for oneself.
  • “Dionysus was the dismembered god who was drawn into individual souls–separate parts no longer knowing anything about one another.”
• Baptism with water in ancient times was done out of remembrance, because we were previously fluid beings, united with the Godhead, and those who were ancient enough to recall used it as a remainder of how one had fallen. Christ baptised with the spirit, in order to point to the future, not to the past.
• Christ is the spirit of the Earth. “Just as human flesh belongs to the body of the human soul, so does bread belong to the body of the Earth–that is, to the body of Christ.”
  • In the Last Supper the flowing of the blood from the wounds of the Saviour gave the Earth the force to carry forward its evolution.
  • Evolution occurs by the I gradually working through the other three bodies, purifying and strengthening them. When the astral body is purified, it becomes the spirit self. When the etheric body is purified, it becomes the life spirit. When the physical body is purified, it becomes the atman (spirit human).
    • Because the catharsis of this astral body has not yet been accomplished, selfishness is possible; because the etheric body is not strengthened, lying and error; because the physical body has not been fortified by the I, sickness and death.
  • The healing of the blind man shows the full force of the Christ; but the Earth must first be fully permeated by the Christ spirit (the Logos). Remember how Jesus heals the man with His body (the earth).
  • Religion signifies union of the physical world with the spiritual; it is a creation of the post-Atlantean period, because the Atlantean period was an earlier stage of human evolution where we had no waking consciousness that severed our spiritual consciousness. The spiritual world is what we call ‘heaven’ now. They did not need belief because they directly experienced spiritual beings.
    • The earlier clairvoyant consciousness is what allows one to see the higher bodies of animals (including the group-soul of the animal species)