The Advent of Christ in the Ethereal World

GA 118 — 13 April 1910, Rome

VI. The Christ Impulse and Its Great Proclaimers

Notes from the lecture

The last two lectures introduced us to the nature of the individual human being. Today we will gain a small insight into certain developmental epochs of humanity as a whole and their spiritual life. Looking back from the standpoint of our present evolutionary epoch, we can see into the distant past and draw conclusions about the future. If we use our clairvoyant eye to help us, our examination will be even easier and our prophetic view of the coming times even more certain.

Human abilities have changed throughout the millennia, and the ancient generations were gifted quite differently than ours. What used to be clairvoyant consciousness is not what can be attained today through Rosicrucian training. It was a duller, yet clairvoyant consciousness that was inherent in all people. We ourselves, who are gathered here, were embodied in those people, but our abilities were different and will continue to change in future incarnations. In our epoch, those abilities should be developed that enable the exact observation of the physical world, such as the outer mind, which makes use of the brain and the physical sense organs. In the past, the soul was not limited to the latter as it is today; it had clairvoyant organs that have gradually become dulled. The soul's ability to perceive has been completely transferred from the inner world to the outer world, but in the future it will be changed and elevated again. Sensory-physical vision will be supplemented by spiritual clairvoyance, which will become the normal gift of all people. We have descended into matter and our vision has become obscured; but the time is near when it will become light around us again and we will look up through matter to the spirit. For this it was necessary that ever new influences should come from the spiritual worlds. Man received gift upon gift, in order to develop his nature in all directions and to become mature, in order to receive the highest of these from Christ when He descended to earth and incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth.

Christ is such a mighty Entity that He remains incomprehensible even to the highest clairvoyant consciousness. However high the initiate may rise, he comprehends only a small part of Him. We, who live 2000 years after Him, are only at the beginning of comprehending Christ. A higher realization of its nature is reserved for the humanity of the future, when more intimate impulses of will will have been awakened in it. Our entire preceding evolution was only a preparation for the reception of the Christ principle, and less exalted forerunners had the task of guiding this maturing of the human souls. Likewise, successors will imprint ever higher ideas and feelings on the human souls, making them ever more suitable for the divine power to rule within them. Those high guides and teachers who sacrifice their spiritual power in the service of humanity and open up our souls are called Bodhisattvas in the Orient. They are beings filled with wisdom, and their mission is to radiate wisdom. Among them, the one who lived 500 to 600 years before Jesus should be emphasized: Gautama Buddha, the great Buddha.

To get a true picture of him, we must think of his previous incarnations, in which he was active on earth as a bodhisattva, just as many others have intervened in the life of humanity over the millennia, forming something of a choir, each member with a specific mission, depending on the state of maturity of humanity.

It was only during his incarnation as Siddhartha, an Indian prince, that he rose to the level of a Buddha. His mission was to prepare the teaching of compassion and love. One might object that Christ did this – but no. Christ not only taught it; he instilled love and compassion into the hearts of humanity.

There is a difference between Buddha's teaching and Christ's power, just as there is between an art connoisseur in front of a painting by Raphael and Raphael himself. This is precisely where many people make the great mistake of seeing in Buddha the highest of all spirits in human form. They do not know that the one who incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth 600 years after him was the incarnation of the Logos Himself. Buddha had to prepare the impulse of compassion and love. He prepared the souls for what Christ was to bring. In the grand scheme of things, his preparatory work is the most significant that has ever been done. To understand his personality better, we need to understand the difference between a Bodhisattva and a Buddha. If we use our clairvoyant eye, we see that a Bodhisattva is a human being who is constantly connected to the spiritual world and does not live entirely in the physical world. His being is, as it were, too great to find room in a human body; only a part of it extends down into the earthly shell, while the greater part remains in the higher worlds. Consequently, the Bodhisattva is always in a state of inspiration.

Gautama Buddha was born as one of these beings. Only in his twenty-ninth year did his personality become strong enough to receive the higher part within himself. According to legend, he settled under a fig tree during his wanderings and received the enlightenment that made him a Buddha. He rose to a higher dignity, according to the hierarchy that prevails in the spiritual world. Another one advanced at the same time and took the place he had left. His successor in the office of Bodhisattva is now carrying out his duties until he himself has attained the Buddha maturity. Another 3,000 years will pass, and then he will incarnate as Maitreya Buddha among people. His task will be discussed later.

What does it mean for humanity that the Bodhisattva has become a Buddha? It has made it possible for them to acquire new abilities. There is a widespread belief that these abilities have always existed to a greater or lesser extent. However, that is not the case at all. In the course of evolution, new abilities have been added, and every time humanity matured to be endowed with a new gift, the new ability had to be incarnated first in a great man. In him it manifested itself first, and he then laid the seeds in the souls that were ready for it. Therefore all feeling and thinking was different before the appearance of Gautama Buddha. Even the reception of the teachings was different from what it was for later people. Half unconsciously, like a suggestion, they received what the Bodhisattvas received as inspiration and allowed to flow over into their disciples as strength. It was only through Gautama Buddha that human beings received the impulse of compassion and love for their fellow beings, and were thus prepared to receive the Christ Impulse. It is not enough, however, to feel this ability; it must become the guiding force in life and be lived accordingly.

But whence do all these Bodhisattvas receive their strength and their teaching? High up in the spiritual worlds, in the midst of their lofty choir, there dwells the teacher of all and at the same time the inexhaustible source of all light and strength and wisdom, which flows over to them: Christ. From Him they drew and descended among men as His forerunners. Then he himself came down to earth and embodied himself in Jesus of Nazareth. And after him they will come again to fulfill his plan.

At the end of his high career, a bodhisattva becomes a Buddha and no longer needs to take on a physical body. The Buddha stage concludes the cycle of his incarnations, and he enters into a new, higher evolution. His lowest vehicle is then no longer a physical body, but an etheric body, and henceforth he is perceptible only to the clairvoyant eye. The seer alone can follow how Gautama Buddha continued to work for the good of humanity after his death and helped develop all the forces on earth so that the Christ Himself could embody Himself in the flesh, in an earthly tool that became His personality: in Jesus of Nazareth. Much had to happen for this to happen, and a series of great events were connected with it, as we can see from the Gospel of Luke. It says that the shepherds in the field were granted the grace of seeing what otherwise no earthly eye could see. They became clairvoyant and saw angels floating above the place where the child Jesus was born. What were these heavenly spirits? It was the gift that Buddha gave by sacrificing himself. They saw him, in his powers, interwoven in the aura that surrounded the place. But it was not only he who had to contribute to this greatest of events; each of the previous Bodhisattvas had his part to give. Buddha's part, the greatest, was visible as an angelic aura.

This interpretation may seem to many to be at variance with what they know of Buddha and Buddhism. They forget that their knowledge comes from ancient scriptures and that Buddha has not remained what he was at his death. They forget that he too has progressed in evolution. The Buddha of that time prepared the way for Christianity; the present Buddha is within Christianity.

If we now look back to his predecessors, we see from their teachings that man has been aware of the Christ-being even in the most distant past. The great leaders of all nations and all times have spoken of him. Thus, for example, we find in ancient India in the Vedas, even if only a small part of the mighty teachings of the holy Rishis. They called the incomprehensible being, which they sensed beyond their sphere, Vishva-Karman. Later, in ancient Persia, Zarathustra proclaimed what his spiritual eye beheld. It was, as discussed in the first lecture, that which one attained through initiation: the seeing of the sun at midnight. Looking through physical matter, he saw the spirit of the sun.

Let us recall, for a better understanding, that the physical body of a celestial body, like that of a human being, is only part of the entire being in question, and that both have more subtle principles, which are visible to the clairvoyant as an aura. Just as the human being has the aura, formed by the astral and etheric bodies, the small aura, so in the macrocosm we distinguish the great aura, “Ahura Mazdao”, as Zarathustra called it. This name was later changed to Ormuzd, which means the Spirit of Light. At that time, Christ was still far from us, so Zarathustra said to his disciples: “As long as your gaze is fixed on earth, you will not see Him. But when you rise with clairvoyant power into the high heavens towards the sun, you will find the great solar spirit.

Likewise, the ancient Hebrew secret doctrine speaks of the great spirit that floats through space and that the seer in the high spheres has to seek. However, the prophecy follows that he will descend and unite with the earth aura. One of those who perceived him in our earthly sphere was Paul. As Saul, he knew that the Messiah would come and that the Earth would be united with the spirit of the Sun, but he believed that this was still far in the future. On the road to Damascus, he suddenly gained clairvoyance and realized that the great event had already taken place and that Jesus of Nazareth was the long-awaited one. This experience converted him to Paul, and henceforth he proclaimed the event as an enthusiastic apostle.

The Christ Impulse is not to be understood as the illumination of only a few individuals. The seer may say that through him the whole earth has become something new. When the blood of Christ flowed at Golgotha, there occurred an intimate union of our earth with the highest Being, Who descended from inaccessible regions of heaven for the salvation of mankind. He has already been recognized by many as the one for whose coming the Bodhisattvas have been preparing down here for thousands of years, but there are few in whom Christianity has come to true life. The Christ impulse is still in its infancy, and humanity will need a long time and the help of many leaders before it comes into its own in all expressions of social life.

However, we can see a tremendous advance in the outlook on life in the short span of time that separates Buddha from Christ. One fact shows it as vividly as possible. When the young king's son Siddhartha, the future Buddha, once stepped out of his palace, where he had never seen anything but lust and splendor, youth and beauty, he saw a cripple whose sight horrified him and he said to himself: Life brings illness, and illness is suffering. Another time, he encountered an old man, and sadly concluded: Life brings old age, and old age is suffering. Soon after, he saw the most horrifying thing, a decomposing corpse, and in horror he repeated: “Life brings death, and death is suffering.” Wherever he looked, he found physical ailments and mental anguish and separation from all that is dear and precious in life. All life is suffering,” he said to himself, and based on this principle, he built the doctrine of renouncing life. Man, he taught, should, in order to escape suffering, strive to rise as quickly as possible out of the cycle of incarnations, to withdraw forever from the painful alternation of life and death.

If we now advance a few centuries, we see countless people who were not Buddhas, but simple souls, who nevertheless sensed the power of the Christ within themselves, looking at a corpse, but not with horror. They are not filled with the sole thought: death is suffering - because in the death of Christ they experienced the exemplary death that means: death is victory of the spirit over everything physical. Death is the victory of the eternal over the temporal.

Never before has there been such an impulse as this one that came from the mystery of Golgotha, and never again will a greater one be bestowed on man on earth. That is what those naive souls felt when they looked up at the cross, the most powerful of symbols. There they felt that there is something higher and stronger than the decaying body, which is subject to disease, old age and death.

Let us now consider the other tenets of the Buddha's teaching with our Christian spiritual perspective: disease and old age cannot discourage us and drive us to flee because we have recognized their cause. Yesterday we saw how the newly acquired abilities of our astral body make the inflexible physical body increasingly uncomfortable and how the growing disharmony between soul and body gradually destroys the latter and it is finally discarded. We are not afraid of old age, because we know that when life here reaches its peak and the body begins to wither, within it the newfound strength contracts into a young germ that will one day flourish into a richer life on earth. This development of the spirit, as taught by Christianity, contains infinite comfort and makes the separation from those we love less painful, for we know that the separation is only due to physical barriers and that we can find our way to our loved ones in spirit.

If we think and feel this way, then our whole life down here takes on a new, spiritualized aspect and becomes more and more valuable to us. Our spiritual eye sees through physical ailments and helps us to bear them with equanimity. We know that our field of work is down here and that the seed for new life must be sown here. What we can recognize today from spiritual teaching will become a certainty for us in the future stages of development. The Christ-power, which is only just beginning to emerge, will soon bring about an increase in our perception. We are at the end of the transitional epoch, which means the lowest point of submergence and spiritual blindness in matter, and in the not too distant future, physical sensory perception will be joined by the beginning of clairvoyance. This ascent will be recognizable by two phenomena. In individual people - and their number will constantly grow - the ability will awaken to see the ethereal forms that surround the physical. They will see the fine covering of the life body shimmering around the human body.

In addition to this enrichment of vision, some people will see something like a dream image when committing an act. At first, these images will hardly be noticed and, above all, not understood. At first they will be shadowy and will only gradually become clearer, especially in those who are materialistic. For the more powerfully materialism holds a person in its thrall, the more difficult it will be for him to become aware of the spiritual and to perceive the superphysical. Naturally, the future clairvoyants will be ridiculed as fools and perhaps locked up as insane. But that will not be able to prevent what is to be. Supernatural vision will become clearer and more frequent, and people will understand what is revealed to their sight. The ethereal forms will teach them that there is life everywhere, and they will soon recognize karmic images of compensation in the emerging visions. They will give what they have created through an act and understand how they will have to compensate for it if it was evil.

But still other abilities will be linked to the ones just mentioned: a smaller number of people will relive through their own experience what transformed Saul of Tarsus into Paul. Just as he did, they will suddenly see that Christ united with the earth through his crucifixion at Golgotha. This powerful inner experience, which some will have in the not too distant future, is what has been promised as the “reappearance of the Christ”. For only once did Christ appear in the flesh and could be seen with physical senses, when humanity was not clairvoyant. But he remained with people, as he himself promised: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Christ did not remain in a fleshly shell and will not reappear in the flesh either. Those who believe in the enhancement of human abilities will understand this.

Through the power of Christ, people shall ascend again, beyond the barriers of the physical world, and their perception shall not remain bound only to the beings embodied in matter. The spiritual kingdom with its essence shall be opened up to them again, and they shall behold Him who redeemed them from darkness and sin.

This will be repeated to people over and over again. Many will accept it in the form in which today's spiritual science presents it. Others, however, will hold on to the erroneous opinion that Christ will come again in the flesh, and will allow themselves to be deceived by false messiahs and go astray. Those who do not want the spiritual, who do not want to see it, will seek it here in matter among men, and hostile powers will send out their representatives and use the stubbornness and blindness for their purposes. In the course of the centuries there has often been talk of such Messiahs, and external history shows many of them in the flesh. It is they who will be the test for those who call themselves theosophists. For many speak as Theosophists and readily profess themselves as such, yet they carry Theosophy on their tongues and not in their hearts. He, however, who will trust his physical eye no more than the unfolding spiritual eye, he will experience the event of Damascus.

At first there will be few and then more and more, and with the number of those who see it, their influence on all mankind will grow and change it. In the course of the next two millennia, new moral abilities will also be added to spiritual perception. For what man creates now, he needs intellectual ability and intelligence, and the morality of the inventor does not matter. This will be different later. At present, for example, the work of the chemist is limited to the composition of substances. However, a time will come when he will be able to infuse life into the structures he puts together. But to get that far, man must first have developed the very finest and noblest impulses within himself, and only then will he be able to let the power contained in them flow into his work. Today man is still too undeveloped and immoral, and he would cause the greatest havoc if such powers were at his disposal. Therefore he will not succeed until he is able to pour not only intellect but also morality, feeling and love into everything he does. The irreverent experimentation with selfishness must have become impossible, love must be the mainspring of all creation and the laboratory table must become an altar.

A new era is dawning with the appearance of the power of Christ, and John the Baptist points this out in the words: “Change your soul's disposition, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” He had seen the descent of the Sun-God, Ahura Mazdao, and recognized in Jesus of Nazareth his representative. We must prepare ourselves for this new era and rise above materialism. We must realize that our horizon will widen and that new organs will be added to the present physical ones for a more perfect perception. Let us not doubt this truth and let us not consider it a fantasy and a dangerous teaching that can harm the Christ impulse. The understanding and the feeling for it will become ever clearer and deeper and the number of those in whom the Christ germ will begin to grow will become ever greater. However, in order for it to come to full development in all of humanity, a great individuality must still embody itself among us.

The Bodhisattva who took Gautama's place when he became Buddha will descend in the form of Maitreya Buddha to bring people to the full recognition of the Christ. He will be the greatest of the proclaimers of the Christ impulse and make possible for many the experience of Damascus. A long time will pass and spiritual science will make the Christ Being understandable to people from ever higher points of view, until the last of the Bodhisattvas will have completed his mission on earth and humanity will have grasped the Christ in all its meaning and their entire life will have been absorbed without reservation in His impulse.

Such a mighty perspective shows us how man must look up to supersensible history in order to understand the meaning of earthly history. Everything leads up to making man understand what the fulfillment of the words is: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age!”