Human Thinking and Divine Will: A
Reversal
-by Richard
Distasi
In the opening pages of Dennis
Klocek's Seeking Spirit Vision, he addresses the
polarity of human selfhood and Divine Will as follows:
In prehistoric times, the human capacity for thought was embedded
in the universal currents of will. Human will and Divine Will
flowed
in the same stream of consciousness in a state of what could
be
called intuitive thinking. Human consciousness was at one
with the
Divine consciousness. ...In order for
individual selfhood to arise, it
became
necessary for human currents of will to flow counter to the
original will currents of the Creator and to focus upon
itself. ...The
present human consciousness is now like a swirling vortex of
selfhood
in a great stream. The vortex sustains itself through the
resistance to
the prevailing motion of the whole, and the flow of Divine
Will is reversed
in it. ...The vortex of selfhood arises
through antipathy which is the
foundation of thinking in the intellect (page
3).
The "vortex of selfhood" that Dennis Klocek speaks of
here can also be thought of as the fallen human form of the physical, etheric
and astral bodies, which through resistance to the Divine Will, allows the EGO
to gain its individual consciousness. It was the descent of Cosmic Intelligence
and loss of Sophian revelation, (intuitive thinking), that brought about the
death forces of sense-bound thinking. Over great eons of time, the human form
and its sphere of activity, the earth, gradually came to reflect the hardening
forces of the human brain and head. Rudolf Steiner remarks in the lecture
cycle, The Temple Legend, that our thoughts, when
they have condensed into the physical, manifest as electricity, and that
the atom is 'frozen electricity,' that is, a kind of materialization of
sense-bound thinking. Jesaiah Ben-Aharon in his book The New
Experience of the Supersensible writes:
Objects are Maya, illusion, when compared with their
appearance
to
the higher, enlivened, ensouled and spiritual perception. They are
our
(unconsciously, livingly killed) dead creations. An object must,
therefore,
be readily redeemable and dissolvable. In the moment we
cease
its unconscious consolidation, it etherizes, becomes transparent
and
rent in twain, revealing the real living and ensouled world-man
behind
it (page 84) ...An object is, in the purely sense world, an
etheric-elemental
flowing reality, fixated, cemented and sedimented,
made
dense and heavy through - and only through - our bodily, willed
touch,
from which we abstract, conceptually, all our metaphysical
notions.(page
85) ...At this point we may begin the living deconstruction
process
of the opaque, external object.(page 85)
This "living deconstruction process of the opaque, external
object," the redemption and resurrection of our brain-bound intellect and
perception and all of its consequences, is also intimated these scenes of the
Gospels: the agony in the garden, the crucifixion, and the Risen Christ as a
gardener.
In the scene of the agony in the garden there is the passage,
" Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours
be done." (Luke 22:42) This passage has often been poorly interpreted as a plea
from Christ to the Father to circumvent His impending passion and death. Steiner
interprets it as the anguish that Christ felt due to the realization that none
of the apostles is able to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha in full
consciousness. Steiner, however, has also postulated that 'truth' can be
understood from many sides with multiple aspects. The same is true for
archetypal scenes and images in the Gospels. Thus the cup of agony may also be
interpreted as the human form; that is, "the vortex" of the astral, etheric and
physical bodies. This human form which is referred to in Genesis as pain (astral
body), toil (etheric body) and death (physical body), is the form that flows
counter to the Divine Will of the heavenly hierarchies (the Father). Christ's
plea is thus a proclamation that He is now ready to reverse the counter
individual will and again unite it to the Divine Will, thereby
transfiguring the human form of the vortex, the cup of agony, the cup of
the human-earthly experience, and make it possible that in the distant future
this cup can be converted to higher spiritual forms: Manas (Divine Wisdom),
Buddhi (Divine Love) and Atma (Divine Will).
In the scene of the crucifixion we are given the word
Golgotha which translated means "the place of the Skull." (Mark 15:22) This
leads us to consider the human head and its forces in relation to the archetypal
scene of the crucifixion on Golgotha. The crucifixion is a scene that depicts a
dark, solid sense-bound image. Its image of death is an image of the nadir of
brain-bound thinking with its crucifying, hardening forces. It is a picture that
projects the reality of solid, dark mineral matter created by "fixated, cemented
and sedimented" thoughts. We see in this image the death of living Imagination
and Intuitive thinking; the sense-bound thinking that now must be spiritualized
and resurrected.
The Gospel of John progresses from the scene of Golgotha to
the image of Christ as a gardener on Easter morning. From an image of the dark,
solid mineral we move to an ethereal image of Christ as the human representative
who dissolves the mineral into the love imbued etheric-astral ring which
now envelopes the earth. This ring is formed through a consciously willed
spiritualization of thinking. The Risen Christ as a gardener is a
living imagination of an Etheric Christ experience which can be won by
sense-free thinking. It is Mary Magdalene who is the first human to have this
experience. She may be pictured as bearing the archetypal, redeemed human
astral-soul body which has attained the achievement of new Sophian impulses,
thus giving her the capacity to recognize the Risen Christ. The image of Christ
as a gardener tilling the earth reflects back to us that through the experience
of Imagination and Intuitive Thinking we can participate in the transfiguration
of the earth, eventually bringing it to a future astral condition of
form.
In closing the above mentioned
work of Jesaiah Ben-Aharon is again cited::
...the modern Christ experience, achieved
through the knowledge
drama of the Second Coming, is this: that man can begin today
consciously to create the new vital and
sentient sheaths of the
Earth through his actively awakened
sensible-supersensible cognition.
...the spiritualized process of sense perception... is the beginning of
the
conscious macrocosmic construction process of the planetary
Heaven of the earthly-human Sun, in a form that will become part
of the universal, spiritual and social
life of awakened humanity
