Notes and excerpts from:
Etheric vision
In the lecture series "The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric", Steiner talks about the importance of recognizing the difference between destiny and mechanical laws.
He says this is the key to understanding the death and resurrection of Christ— the Mystery of Golgotha —and His role in guiding our lives in the proper direction. Whereas today historians focus on evidence for the physical, external existence of Jesus, this is pretty irrelevant to the spiritual tasks confronting humanity.
There is thus an inner relationship between the Mystery of Golgotha and the necessary ascent of humanity, starting from our time, to spirituality. Truly, from this time on, human beings must rise to a certain spirituality.
They must grasp in this coming time that the Mystery of Golgotha can be comprehended further only by spiritual activity, that Christianity must have an essentially spiritual continuation, not just an outer continuation through historical traditions or more historical research.
The Christ impulse also links us with the dead, who play a strong role in directing our destiny. By focusing on external, mechanical laws only, we lose our ability to perceive the subtle, inner prompting these souls give us. This is strongly linked with the new etheric vision that will arise for humanity in the upcoming age, if we allow it.
In addition to the already evolved self-consciousness, certain clairvoyant faculties will again evolve quite naturally. Human beings will have the strange and remarkable experience of not knowing what is really happening to them!
They will begin to receive premonitions that will become reality, and they will be able to foresee events that will actually take place...Things will come to a point at which many people who have such experiences will ask themselves, “Am I really mad?"
The Holy Grail illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1917
Destiny's call
The workings of destiny are often hidden from our conscious awareness. It is most apparent under extreme circumstances, like evading death by mere seconds.
Unlike our conscious thought, what governs our feelings, and especially our will, remains dim and mysterious. We often have no idea why we feel compelled to act in a certain way, because destiny is worked out through our feelings and our will. Only can alert conscious thinking grasp the realm of nature.
Once you begin to grasp this fact, once you realize that there is a realm of destiny just as there is a realm of nature, you will find that this realm of destiny is no poorer in content than the realm of nature.
Into this realm of destiny, however, which reveals itself, I should like to say, with particular clarity when some extreme incident occurs such as I have just related—becoming obvious to the human intellect—into this realm of destiny works what I was describing earlier this evening. Into the feelings and into the will impulses through which destiny moves are working the impulses of the dead.
Steiner warns us that in modern times, we will fall into the trap of believing exclusively in the mechanical realm of Nature, which is important in its own right, but separate from the realm of destiny.
The consciousness of modern and particularly of future humanity will become a merely natural consciousness, a consciousness of entirely natural facts, but that in addition to this another consciousness must be added.
A narrow escape from danger can wake us up to the realm of destiny. However, in the wider scope of things, we have to consider all possible courses of events playing out, regardless if they seem significant to us or not.
This view of things will come and must come when man learns, just as he now beholds the world of the senses through his sense perceptions, to observe just as consciously the course of his destiny in the world, in great events and small. What do I mean by this?
Today man pays little attention to the course of his destiny. Consider some extreme cases, however. I will relate just one to you, which will show you what I mean, and it is only one case out of thousands. One could relate thousands of such cases, countless thousands.
A man leaves his house to go for a walk along a path he knows quite well. It takes him up a mountain slope to a rocky place from which there is a beautiful view. He has often gone to enjoy this view; it is his usual walk. On this day, while he is walking, a thought suddenly strikes him as if out of the blue, “Watch out! Look out!”
He hears an inner voice, not as a hallucination but in the spirit, saying, “Why are you going this way? Can you not miss this pleasure just once?” He hears this in the spirit. It makes him hesitate, and he steps off the path to think for a moment. At once a tremendous mass of rock plunges down over the very spot where he would have been had he not stepped aside; it would obviously have killed him.
Ascent of the Blessed
When we go beyond reacting with our external senses, and keenly observe how our lives play out — either what has or has not happened — we can see the subtle working of Destiny.
Christ Himself is present in the power of Memory.
This helps us develop a finer sense of estimation for the future, what could or could not happen, a type of spiritual foresight that we will lead our lives by — the new etheric vision. "They will begin to receive premonitions that will become reality, and they will be able to foresee events that will actually take place.:
Quite another realm is thus continually reaching into our lives, the realm of destiny, a realm to which as yet modern man pays no attention, because he casts his gaze only at what has happened and has no interest in what is constantly being prevented from happening in his life.
None of you sitting here this evening can possibly know whether three hours ago you may have undertaken something that was then prevented from happening, something that would have kept you from sitting here tonight, perhaps even from still being alive tonight.
One soul, multiple paths
The inner voice
Today, many people may even realize the mechanical understanding of events is insufficient, and abstract the concept of destiny as merely an "inner voice" or "intuition", but the true spiritual nature of reality lies in our place within the hierarchy of Beings, and Christ as the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, above all spiritual hierarchies, who constantly guide and direct our lives.
All our lives, and our destinies are intertwined in infinite ways, and Divine intelligence coordinates this complex web of connections. The ancients were much more aware of this, but over the course of human evolution, we lost touch with the spiritual world, and the hierarchies.
Now I ask you to consider for a moment what role destiny was playing there. Certainly something was active. The man is still alive. The lives of many human beings on this earth are connected with his life. All of them would have been changed if the rock had killed him. Something was accomplished there. If you try to explain it by natural laws, you will never arrive naturally at the act of destiny that took place there.
Certainly you can explain by natural laws how the mass of rock came to be loosened, how the man could have been killed when the rock suddenly fell across his path, and so on. In all that can be said about the matter, however, from the standpoint of natural laws, the laws of destiny are nowhere to be found; it has nothing to do with them.
When someone has heard such a voice, it is this or that dead person who has spoken at the behest of one or another hierarchy; furthermore, from morning till evening, and especially from evening till morning, during our sleep, the impulses of the dead are constantly working into us, together with the impulses of the spiritual hierarchies who work in our destiny.
Inner voice, or something more?
“The Great Chain of Being”, from Diego Valadés Rhetorica Christiana, 1579
I have related to you an extreme case, but our lives are composed of just such things, in so far as our lives are a matter of destiny. It is just that man does not notice it; he pays no attention to these things.He does not notice these things as he notices what is conveyed to him through his senses as natural facts. From day to day, from hour to hour, from moment to moment, things happen of which only one example has been given, the extreme case I have just described. Think how often, for instance, you are about to leave your house and are delayed half an hour (one must study even the small things).Such things and similar ones happen thousands of times during our lives. You only see what happens when you have been delayed that half hour; you do not consider what would have happened completely differently if you had gone out as scheduled half an hour earlier! You see only the thing for which spiritual impulses were already gathered in manifold ways, through which the thing did occur.
The Christ impulse
Before the Mystery of Golgotha, certain beings directed human souls, the dead and those on Earth. Steiner mentions the daimon of Socrates as an example. These beings lost their power at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and the Christ impulse took their place, working through the dead and the hierarchy of Beings.
The phenomenon was already considered mysterious in antiquity, led to the creation of legends and gave rise to various explanations. Platonists regarded the sign giver as a high-ranking daimon, a divine spirit being that acted as the philosopher's personal guardian spirit. Christian authors saw the advisor partly as a guardian angel and partly as a malevolent demon.
"Socrates and his Daimon" by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)
Now you have the Christ impulse bound to human destiny in the way described by spiritual science. The forces, the impulses of the dead work as I have described into the sphere of our will and feeling. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, the Christ impulse is living within it. Christ is the directing power in this realm that I have described.
Not I, but through Christ in me.