Easter Sunday 2018
What we celebrate today can probably only seem like a joke to modern “enlightened” people: that a being from the infinite spiritual worlds – that Being of which the fabric of existence itself is woven – incarnated in a human being, died and thus, by entering into the heart of that which brings about decay, sickness and death, made of the being of death the fountain of new eternal life, thereby planting a seed for future unimaginable forms of existence, as the (real, living) Ideal of the future cosmic-divine human being. In this picture, resurrection comes to meet us not only from the past (what we commemorate today as the resurrection of Christ), but as a stream of evolution from the future, from Omega, gradually growing into and transforming consciousness (and eventually also the body) of our present being; a stream of resurrecting life not only coming to meet us after corporeal death, but inside the death which earthly life is. The Word became flesh so that the flesh could become Word. Friends, not servants are what we humans are called to become.
But, once such a life-changing discovery is made, and everything gains a new light, what becomes most pressing is the question of how this stream lives on today – or if it does at all? Where to find people who live consciously inside this living stream of becoming, people who as modern witnesses carry this in their consciousness and being? And to discover that one searches, and reads and reads, and reads. Until one stumbles across this:
“As the imaginative appearance of Christ is the awakening of man to conscious spirit-reality, and his inspirative outpouring of soul-transforming words is the crystallization of super-sensible self-identity, so his bodily penetration is the awakening back to physical reality, but awakening in the body as in a conscious spirit reality. This means the cancelling of all differences between spirit and matter by making of “spirit” an “Earth” and from “matter” a new “Heaven”. A crystal-clear transparency is demonstrated when man is passed through and spiritually penetrated at the most opaque and lowest point of his being. A special state of consciousness is realized in this process, which can only be expressed in the following words: “ultimate creative freedom experienced in heavenly transparency, in the heart of absolute, coarse density”. As in the first stage darkness was transformed into light, and in the second a new being was shaped out of evil, so here beingness as such, the ground of all cosmic heaviness, streams lightly through its infinite zero point of transubstantiation in man himself. “Beingness, the Father ground of the worlds, finds its return and reversal of homecoming in and through man”. One can also express that which resounds in the omnipotent silence of this stage as follows: “In your bread of life that I broke in twain while passing and in the fiery spirit of your life I have seeded the fiery seed of My life. This you can assimilate into your being, and in it the world is resurrected from the dead. I thereby transfer to your creative hands and feet the responsibility to nurture and mother the Earth and all its kingdoms of life. I give to you that which until now was protected under My care alone: the future world-seed, containing infinite evolutionary riches and possibilities”. So reverberates the ever-remaining echo behind the disappearing One on awakening back to physical reality after the final stage of the meeting with the etheric Christ.”
The book from where this passage is taken, The New Experience of the Supersensible by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, has been for me a continuous remembrance of the essence of Easter Sun-day, for many years – a collection of written words from which emanates living words of experience that one can assimilate and nurture as a growing being, thus feeling a stream of supersensible life begin awakening also within oneself.
I will never forget the feeling from struggling with this book, which was much more than a “book”: as if a stream of budding life was flowing beneath the words whenever I was able to “hold” them in my mind, let them dissolve into a soul-metabolism, from which then a kind of feeling reverberation would come – with time becoming more and more a substantial quasi-bodily reality in which thinking and experience was one expanding reality. Then one could go out on the streets filled with this wonderful feeling of discovering the world anew, carrying this treasure: the spirit is real, as real as any physical encounter. This book shows that there is someone who knows the details of the path across the river of forgetfulness also today and who has studied this for the sake of continuing Rudolf Steiner´s Anthroposophical revelation of the Christian mysteries.
The wondrous music of becoming 