Lecture XI

At the moment when Peter, whose deeper nature had been able to understand that the Christ Impulse signified the down-flow of spiritual power through the Son of the living God—at that moment Christ knows that He can speak to those around Him of the beginning of something new arising on the Earth. Whereas it had been declared to Abraham that the image of cosmic conditions was to be formed by blood-kinship, this image was now to be replaced by one formed by relationships of an ethical, moral and spiritual character, giving expression to what man can attain through his Ego. When men understand, as the deeper nature in Peter understood, what the Christ truly is, they will not establish communities and institutions based entirely on the blood-tie but communities where the bond of love is woven from soul to soul. Just as in the blood of the Hebrew people and in the threads running through the generations, that which was ordained to be bound together in the human race was bound together and that which was ordained to be loosed was loosed according to the pattern of the Macrocosm, so there was now to arise through the conscious Ego, in the form of ethical, moral and spiritual relationships, the force that either looses the ties between human beings or binds them together in love. Human institutions were now to be created or harmonized by the conscious Ego. This is the meaning of the words spoken by Christ Jesus in continuation of the answer He had given to Peter: ‘Whatever you bind on Earth—whatever the deeper nature in you binds—that shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever the same deeper nature in you looses on the Earth below, shall also be loosed in Heaven’ (see Matt. XVI, 19).