Free will in light of the Fall of Man

The story of the Fall of Man from Paradise is relevant to humanity's complicated existence today. Over the course of millions of years of human evolution, from the time of ancient Lemuria, man became independent of the divine spiritual powers that once guided him, symbolized by Lucifer's temptation of Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

See: Fall and redemption - original sin and grace

We see that human consciousness posits a fall of man at the beginning of the historical development of mankind on earth. He would have been incapable of falling into sin if he had remained in his old state, in a state of instinctive guidance by divine spiritual powers. 

...Whereas he would then have remained sinless, incapable of sinning, like a mere creature of nature, he now became capable of sinning through this independence from the divine spiritual powers.  

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

This was a necessary part of the Divine Plan. If we had always remained perfectly wise and moral, we would have never become free. We would always know how to act, and there would never be a deliberation of choice between two options. 

If we did not have this possibility of choosing, we would still be unconscious in Paradise, among "little angels with pink gowns playing lyres, what a boredom!"...Thus, Evil was a necessity!

As Mephistopheles answers to Faust, when asked who he was: "I am a part of that force who always craves for evil but always ends up doing good".  

Building with the atom: the new masonry. The frontier of spiritual knowledge in the modern age. Collected quotes by Steiner.

What is the atom? 

The atom of physics is nothing else but frozen electricity...It stands in the same relationship to electricity as ice does to water out of which it has been frozen. The physical atom is condensed electricity.

The developments in electricity in recent centuries heralds a new era in which human knowledge of the atom will be used for spiritual purposes. 

New electrical theory...is something of enormous importance...[it] hints at the critical turning point in the development of man's thinking...Before the end of the fifth epoch of culture, science will have reached the stage where man will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. 

It is true that only now...human thinking has turned to tracing natural forces as far as the atom, and indeed, he who would understand this precisely must follow the latest phase of the various developments in electricity.  

Thinking...must be carried right into the atom. When man has learned to think right into the mineral atom, when he has an understanding of how to make use of what lives in the atom and place it in the service of the whole. 

Clairvoyance: a vision of our destiny

In continuation of my other posts: Memory and etheric vision and Destiny and the Christ.

In the Daoist parable of the horse, one fortune leads to misfortune which leads to another fortune. Because of life's infinite complexity, we cannot identify the chain of effects that originate from a course of action from rational thought alone. From there, we can begin to understand the nature of etheric vision.  

The butterfly effect. One action can have many unintended consequences

We must have a way of estimating future conditions by a form of thinking that is not sense-bound nor linear. This highly developed form of foresight will be our faculty of etheric vision. Also known as clairvoyance, which stands for "clear vision". 

Etheric vision is distinct from atavistic (old) clairvoyance or mediumship, which does not arise from intellectual or moral development on the part of one's volition. 

Memory and etheric vision

Memory is usually thought of as information stored in the physical brain. Consider this: when we are remembering something, it means that it is not immediately present. The moment has already passed, but it stays with us in our soul. 

The physical senses are not responding to anything in front of it, but subtler senses coming from the etheric body are making us aware of something that has passed. From that aspect, the etheric body acts as a bridge between the physical and non-physical realm, the body and the soul. It is part of what is known as the human aura. 

The Christianity of spiritual science

Notes and minor additions on The Nature of the Virgin Sophia and of the Holy Spirit

At the present time the idea is all too prevalent that everything religious is identical with all that is primitive and simple. People say: We acknowledge that Science possesses many and complicated ideas, but we do not grant the same to Faith and Religion. Faith and Religion—so say many “Christians”—must be simple and naive! They demand this. 

And many rely upon a conception which is little quoted perhaps, but which in the present is haunting the minds of men and which Voltaire, one of the great teachers of materialism, has expressed in the words: “Whoever wishes to be a prophet must find believers, for what he asserts must be believed, and only what is simple, what is always repeated in its simplicity, that alone finds believers.”

The Christ

The Great Cosmic Being, second Person of the Godhead. Descended to earth from the Sun, the sphere of the Elohim. Descended from even greater Cosmic Heights, the central Spiritual Sun and the Sirius Star.

See: Alice Bailey: Esoteric Astrology, the Creative Hierarchies

Referred to as Yahve when He worked from the Lunar sphere in Old Testament times. Known to Zarathustra as Ahura Mazdao. 

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirt

Hibernia: the mysterious and forgotten birthplace of Christianity. Understanding the cosmic influence upon earth.

The Cosmic Christ and the etheric plane

In esoteric science, Christ is a cosmic spiritual Being standing above the Hierarchies, who descended from Cosmic Heights to the sphere of the Sun, then united with the earth in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The great and sublime Sun Being descended from cosmic heights, descended to Earth—that is the event that came to pass in the Mystery of Golgotha. And when He had descended from spiritual worlds and passed through death, and His body had been laid in the Earth, then this same Christ—after His death, after His resurrection—had initiate pupils. 

And it is important that many should know today what Christ taught at that time to His initiate pupils; it is important that many should know of this teaching of the risen Christ, in order that they may be able to participate in the forces that are now at work for the further evolution of mankind. 

Some notes on The Mysteries Of Hibernia I

The Irish, or Hibernian Mysteries stand at the starting point of modern spiritual life, though they contain elements from more ancient Mysteries. Extremely powerful forces repel the clairvoyant attempt at accessing these Mysteries in the Akashic Record. The opposition is very intense. 

In preparation for initiation, the pupil was made to experience a feeling of anguish that arose from all kinds of doubts or missteps on the path of attaining knowledge, through the regular power of cognition. The pupil would feel that he was open to deception at multiple points, and would also struggle to express in words the essential nature of the truths he acquired without falling into errors and pitfalls. 

From all this, the pupil was made aware of the difficulties in the process of genuinely attaining knowledge. In a second preparatory stage, the pupil approached a contradiction. That knowledge in the ordinary sense did not really contribute to happiness, yet happiness was essential to the human being. 

Considering the uncertainties of attaining knowledge “how can I know that this is really true?”, after this preparatory stage, the pupil was made ready to discard “knowledge” altogether. Though this defies our sense of what’s normal, the pupil felt he had no other option than this resolution, because of the immense challenges he experienced in attaining knowledge. On the opposite hand, it’s easy to say that one should forgo happiness for knowledge, but that is not a viable approach.

Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centers GA 232 7. The Mysteries Of Hibernia I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA232/English/RSP1972/19231207p01.html