The following is the text of a talk I gave as part of the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex’s celebration of the St John Festival, held at Emerson College on Sunday 21st June 2026.
We are now at the Summer Solstice, that time of the year when in the Northern Hemisphere we have our longest day and shortest night, and when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky. This is also the time when people around the world celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist. The festival of John the Baptist is held approximately six months before Christmas, since John, the Herald of Christ, was born about six months before Jesus.
In this talk, we will be looking together at the Mystery of John, a wisdom impulse which has been with us since before recorded history and which has continued to evolve right up into our present momentous times. Throughout it all, the John presence has accompanied us and is still with us today. Later on, I’d like to look at how that may be manifesting in our world right now.
The festival we are celebrating today is dedicated to one particular aspect of John, the life of John the Baptist. And I’m particularly struck by contrasts and similarities between the birth circumstances of John the Baptist and those of Jesus of Nazareth, as for example they were described in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
John’s parents were both aged, certainly older than is usual for first-time parents. John’s mother was Elizabeth, who had been unable to have children; and his father was Zechariah, an elderly priest. Luke tells us that “they were both upright people in the sight of God, not failing to keep all the commandments and regulations of the Lord; but they had no children because Elizabeth was barren and they were both advanced in age.”
One day while Zechariah was performing his priestly duties within the temple, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and said: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your request has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall give him the name John. You will have joy and great happiness and many will rejoice at his birth, as he will be great in the sight of the Lord.”
Zechariah was amazed by this, saying to the angel: “How can this be, as I myself am an old man and my wife is advanced in age?” But this was not well received by the angel, who said: “I am Gabriel who stand in the presence of God. I was sent out to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But see – now you will be silenced and not have the power to speak until this happens, because you did not believe my words – which will be fulfilled in their season.”
And that is what happened. Elizabeth did indeed become pregnant and Zechariah remained unable to speak until the birth of their child. Then in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, the angel Gabriel went to the town of Nazareth in Galilee and spoke with a young woman, Mary, who was promised in marriage to a man whose name was Joseph. He said: “Do not be afraid, Mary, because you have found favour with God – and see, you will conceive and bear a son to whom you should give the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.” Unsurprisingly, Mary was perturbed by this and said to the angel: “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” She meant by this, of course, that she was still a virgin.
Unlike in the case of poor Zechariah, who had been punished for disbelieving the angel’s word, Gabriel reassured Mary by saying: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Highest will overshadow you. Therefore, the child who will be born will be called holy Son of God. And see, your cousin Elizabeth has also conceived a son in her old age and this is her sixth month, although she was considered barren; because nothing which he says will be impossible for God.”
A little while later, Mary, who was by now newly pregnant, visited her cousin Elizabeth in Judea, who had been pregnant for six months. When Mary greeted her, the unborn baby made tremendous movements in Elizabeth’s womb and Elizabeth said: “When the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy.” It was as though John in Elizabeth’s womb was overjoyed by proximity to the Jesus embryo within Mary.
Mary then stayed with Elizabeth and Zechariah for three months before returning home. Whether this was before or after the birth of John is not clear, but one would like to think that Mary was present at the birth in order to help her cousin. But Luke does make it clear that all the neighbours and family members expected the baby boy, in accordance with tradition, to be named Zechariah after his father. Elizabeth, however, said: “No – he must be called John.” And so they then asked the mute Zechariah about the name of his son. Zechariah called for a writing tablet and to everyone’s astonishment, wrote: “His name is John.” And Luke says: “Instantly, Zechariah’s mouth was opened and when his tongue was set free, he spoke in praise of God.”
From Luke’s account, one can begin to see the deep connections between John and Jesus and the divine forces already at work in them. But inevitably, questions arise. For example, was the birth of John also miraculous, arising in this case from divinely ordained ‘immaculate conception’ rather than normal sexual procreation? And what should we understand by the terms ‘immaculate conception’ and ‘virgin birth’ anyway? Rudolf Steiner spoke about the virgin birth, which he interpreted not as a physical, biological event, but as a profound spiritual, esoteric reality. He taught that it represents the purification of the human soul and the preparation of a specialized physical vessel for the incarnation of the Christ Being. The focus in anthroposophy is less on the apparent biological impossibility of virgin birth and more on the descent of the Divine Word, the Logos, into the purified vessel, representing a new type of birth into the human sphere.
More questions arise: did Joseph and Mary make love and conceive a child before Mary set off to visit her cousin; or did Zechariah and Elizabeth, aged though they both were, still maintain a sexual relationship, which led through divine grace to the conception of John? I don’t think so. Like much else in the Mystery of John, these are matters which are not easy to explain with our everyday understanding. They require us to open ourselves to new concepts of what might be possible. When discussing this with a dear friend in the Christian Community, she said that we are all born of the spirit and each of us has a star. For most of us, that star is an individuality, moving from life to life. For a few people, especially those who have a special destiny within a particular nation, such as Nelson Mandela in South Africa or Winston Churchill in this country, this star might also be the folk spirit of that nation. For Jesus of Nazareth, the star was the Holy Spirit, because his destiny was for the whole of mankind. And as the angel Gabriel told Mary, with God nothing shall be impossible.
Not only were Mary and Elizabeth cousins but Rudolf Steiner has set out the extraordinary spiritual relationship between Jesus and John. John was an old soul who carried the power and spirit of the prophet Elijah of the Old Testament, he who preached the Law of Moses. Steiner points out that: “We know from the Gospel itself that John the Baptist is to be regarded as the reborn Elijah.” This is confirmed in the Gospel of Luke (1.17) and is also found in the Gospel of Matthew (11.11-14) where Jesus says: “Certainly I say to you there has not risen up among those born of women anyone greater than John the Baptist (…) because all the prophets and the Law prophesied the coming of John – and if you are willing to receive him, he is Elijah who is about to come.”
With this spirit and power of Elijah as part of his soul lineage, John was well-equipped not only to preach about the old Law of Moses but also to renew old teachings so as to prepare a new path of human evolution. And Steiner indicates that John even carried the message of the Buddha, which had originally streamed forth through Elijah. In Lecture 6 of Rudolf Steiner’s lecture cycle (GA 114) on The Gospel of St Luke, he says: “From the mouth of John the Baptist we hear what the Buddha had to say six hundred years after he had lived in a physical body.”
And Steiner goes on to say: “There we have a real indication of the unity of religions! We must look for each religion at the right point in the evolution of humanity and seek for what is truly alive in it, not what is dead—for everything continues to develop.”
So we can begin to see that the St John festival commemorates not only the Baptist but also a powerful Being with a long history through all ages of influencing human evolution and of restating spiritual truths to meet the changing needs of humanity.
John baptised with water, the water which purifies and cleanses the psyche, the soul, with its accumulation of karma. He said that he was the forerunner of Christ, who would baptise with fire, the fire of divine love and with the Holy Spirit. And it was of course John the Baptist who facilitated the descent of the Christ into Jesus through his baptism at the river Jordan. Baptism at that time was not a gentle sprinkling of water on the baby’s head but was instead a full immersion under water for a period long enough to provoke a near-death experience in some of those undergoing it. For the person who was baptised, being submerged and held under water by John could result in a separation of the etheric from the physical body. Rudolf Steiner described it:
“The disciple was submerged in water, resulting in a certain separation of the etheric from the physical body; (…) Even in everyday existence it may happen that when a man is in danger of drowning, or sustains a violent shock, a tableau of his life hitherto appears before him. This is because something that otherwise takes place only after death, occurs momentarily: the etheric body is lifted out of the physical body and is freed from its power. This happened to most of those who were baptized by John, and in a very special way to (…) Jesus. His etheric body was drawn out—and during that moment the sublime Being we call the Christ descended into his body.” (GA 114, lecture 7)
Here Steiner makes a clear distinction between the Christ Being, a cosmic divinity from the spiritual Sun, and Jesus of Nazareth, a human being. The Christ Being had always existed in the highest spiritual spheres and had not previously been physically connected with the Earth’s evolution, though Steiner has said in various lectures there had been what he calls ‘ensoulment’ of the Christ in earlier stages of the Earth. But in this one stupendous event of two thousand years ago, the Christ Being descended to Earth and, at the baptism in the river Jordan, united with the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. This incorporation lasted for three years, culminating in Christ’s death on the cross, which anthroposophy calls the “turning point of time”. Steiner’s spiritual research had led him into the conviction that this was the most significant and important event that has ever happened in the whole history of humanity.
Why had it been necessary for this to happen? In the times before the incorporation of Christ into the being of Jesus of Nazareth, human consciousness had been falling too deeply into material, physical reality, losing its connection to the spirit. Is that not similar to the situation in our own times? And as an aside, do you not sense that an equally significant change is on its way to meet our own overwhelming need? Back then, Christ brought the impulse of unconditional, all-pervasive cosmic love down to Earth, together with the force that allowed humanity to develop individual “I” or ego-consciousness, giving human beings the power of free will. Ever since the crucifixion on the hill of Golgotha, this Christ force of love has united with the Earth and is today present in the spiritual environment of every human being, regardless of religion or non-belief.
But contrary to the expectations of many Christians, Jesus Christ will not be returning in a physical body – because He is already here. Rudolf Steiner tells us that the incorporation of Christ into the human body of Jesus was a once and forever event and will not happen again. Instead, the Christ, since the 1930s, has been present in the etheric realm of the Earth, and people will increasingly be able to experience the living presence of Christ through a new kind of spiritual clairvoyance. In a gathering like this one, I think it possible, even likely, that there are several people who have already had a meeting with Christ in the etheric. I would love to hear at some stage from anyone who has had such an experience. Steiner compared this phenomenon to the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus. He stated that more people will naturally develop the inner faculties required to perceive Christ etherically without needing physical proof. This was possible from 1930 onwards and will remain so for the next three millennia, until about the year 5,000 A.D. by which time a sufficient number of people will no longer need the Gospels, because they will have met the Christ in their own souls. So for those of us, like me, who have not yet had this experience, we only have up to 3000 years and several lifetimes to wait!
When we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist at the Summer solstice, one of the things we are doing is recognising the beginning of the descent of Christ from the Sun to the Earth. After the Summer solstice, the Sun’s light begins to decrease and the days slowly become shorter, until we reach the shortest day at the Winter solstice. As a reflection of this process, John the Baptist says in the Gospel of John (3.30), speaking about Jesus Christ: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” As the Christ entered the 30-year old physical form of Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism in the Jordan, there were just three years to go before his crucifixion on Golgotha – but John the Baptist was not present to witness that event, because in the meantime (probably in the years 28-29 AD) he had been arrested and sentenced to death by beheading. John’s head was then served on a silver platter to Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee under the Roman Empire.
And this is where the Mystery of John becomes deeper. There is a constant evolution in the Mystery of John in the direction of universal love. This was pointed out by Rudolf Steiner, in that extraordinarily moving final lecture that he was able to give on 28th September 1924 before being overwhelmed by the illness that was to lead to his death the following year.
Steiner’s illness prevented him from completing what he had intended to say in that lecture. As Marie Steiner put it, “He did not get as far as he had originally intended with the lecture. He gave us the first part of the Mystery of Lazarus; at the time he not only told me but later wrote on the cover of the first postscript: ‘Do not pass this on until I have given the second part.’ It was then wrested from him anyway, like so many things. Now he will no longer give us this second part. It will be left to our powers of understanding to distinguish the right thing between the secrets of incarnation and incorporation, the crossings of the lines of individuality.”
What Marie Steiner was referring to here were the evolutionary links, what one might call the lineage of John, which was traced by Rudolf Steiner from Elijah right back to Adam Kadmon (the primordial thought of God in terms of the human being) and then forward to John the Baptist; and after the death of John the Baptist it passed to Lazarus who, after he is raised from the dead by Christ, became John, ‘the disciple whom Christ loved,’ and subsequently John the Evangelist who wrote the Gospel of John, the three epistles and the Book of Revelation. Steiner then brings the story further forward, linking the John being to incarnations of the artist Raphael and the poet Novalis. These are difficult ideas to get our heads around, and to help with this, we should try to remember the words of Marie Steiner, just quoted: “It will be left to our powers of understanding to distinguish the right thing between the secrets of incarnation and incorporation, the crossings of the lines of individuality.”
This is part of the Mystery of John, which as we have seen, requires us to expand our understanding. But there is a universality about this mystery, recognised through many spiritual streams. We know, for example, that John the Baptist is revered within Islam, where he is known as Prophet Yahya ibn Zakariya, who heralded the coming of Isa (Jesus). John is also recognised as a prophet within the Baha’i faith and the Druze faith, as well as within Mandaeism, which is a baptismal faith practised in southern Iran and Iraq; for Mandaeans, he is considered the final and most vital prophet. Within more recent spiritual streams, such as White Eagle Lodge, John is a towering figure whose emblem is the white eagle; and in the Findhorn Foundation, their joint leader David Spangler wrote a book called Conversations with John, a being whom he also knew as Limitless Love and Truth.
We have seen that John is a powerful Being with a long history of influencing human evolution. How do we see the Mystery of John manifesting in our present time? I would like here to quote from a talk I gave at last year’s MysTech online conference, which was on the theme of ‘Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman’. It seems to me that in our time there are three processes going on simultaneously, which in my mind I associate with the evolving John and Michael impulses.
The first process is that we are coming to the end of the old path of development which, in the West at least, brought widespread prosperity and progress; but which also increasingly led us to materialism, selfishness, greed and disconnection from the environment and the spiritual world, and hence to the multiple crises facing us. It is the breaking-down of this first process which we tend to see reflected in our news media. This old developmental stage made us become who we are today: independent personalities with an I and self-consciousness. But now that humanity has accomplished this developmental stage, the old path is breaking up and is slowly coming to an end amidst chaos and confusion, which increases the fear and uncertainty felt by so many people.
The second process is that a new way of being human is seeking to be born, as the old is breaking down all around us. This is occurring as people ask themselves questions on their life paths, search for answers, go through processes of change and, as a result, perceive, think, and do things differently. This new kind of consciousness, arising as it does from inner transformation, is happening everywhere and can be recognised worldwide. It is leading to the emergence of a new culture in which people connect to their feelings, think about what they believe, make conscious choices, know what values they stand for, and consciously interact and cooperate with other people and with nature.
The third process is about building these new ways of being human. Instead of an attitude of competition and rivalry, opposing and fighting each other, people are increasingly seeking connection and cooperation. Instead of blindly obeying an authority outside our self, we would rather trust our own authority, our own inner knowing. This is accompanied by a shift of perception from separateness to wholeness – the recognition that we are connected to the greater whole in all aspects of life and reality, our humanity, the earth, the cosmos, everything that lives. There is an increasing realisation that we are one – and that everyone and everything is dependent on everyone and everything else.
One could regard these three processes as symptomatic of a much bigger change in human evolution, a change which seems to me to be a result of the working together of the John and Michael impulses.
One might also say that nations, governments and individuals, who are still stuck on the old path of development, are now beginning to reap their karma, which after years of cruelty, injustice, selfishness and greed leads inevitably to their destruction. As Rudolf Steiner told us in a lecture given in Dornach on 19th November 1917, “it is humanity’s task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world”. And we have certainly had all-too-frequent opportunities in this present age to observe the operation of evil in our world: the last 150 years have been in many ways the worst period for human beings in the whole of history; and my own sense is that this will come to a culmination between the years 2030 to 2033.
But we can also see that, underneath all the chaos and confusion, the evolutionary John process is in operation. During our time it is not taking place through the actions and teachings of singular inspired leaders but instead it shows itself through countless acts of inspired collaboration, kindness and community building, involving millions of people. This reminds me of what the Bible calls, in one of the parables of Jesus, the separation of the sheep and the goats. This takes place through a mysterious process of grace, in which the souls of those who are attuned to what is seeking to be born are overshadowed and filled by angelic forces, whose mission it is to bring together the human souls who are united with Christ; while the more goatlike among us are oblivious to this and carry on with bombing, wars and torture, abuse, greed, selfishness, corruption and power games.
The effect of this renewed John impulse is seen in the myriad initiatives of many inspirational people who are manifesting newer and kinder ways of being for how we live on Earth together. We are fortunate to see several examples of this in our own locality, such as here on the Emerson campus with the creation of the Ashdown Garden School for children with learning disabilities; or again, the emphasis on biodynamics and care for the soil, plants and animals both here and in our neighbouring farms; or again, the Christ-filled loving care given to vulnerable people at Nutley Hall; or slightly further afield, the healthcare given to a severely deprived community in East Brighton by the Wellsbourne Healthcare initiative. As it happens, these are all inspired by anthroposophy but I don’t single them out because of that, but because they are part of that much wider phenomenon I’ve just described.
What lies behind this phenomenon is surely the same impulse that Rudolf Steiner referred to in his final lecture as the Michael Thought bearing the Christ-word to human beings. If you look carefully and closely, particularly beyond our normal news media, you will find many, many inspiring shoots of new growth. There are what one might call Michaelic and John-inspired initiatives and projects emerging all over the world, most of them not arising out of anthroposophy. Our new world is being born, quietly and without fanfare, but it is on its way. It will be messy and confusing for quite a while yet as those unable or unwilling to leave the old path will rage, fight and storm against what is coming – but the final outcome is assured.
I’d like to finish with a prayer:
May all those souls being forced out of incarnation by man’s inhumanity to man find true peace and healing in the spiritual world; may their persecutors find access within their hearts to the compassionate love of Christ; and may we all find the strength and courage to take up the renewed John and Michael impulses which are flooding in; so that, as a world community, we can love one another and all life on Earth as fully as possible.
And so be it; and so be it; and so be it.
Thank you for listening.
Tag Archives: christianity
The Mystery of John
Filed under Cosmic Christ, John of Patmos, Apostle John, John the Baptist,
Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman “with an attitude worthy of humanity”
The MysTech online conference on the theme of ‘Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman’ was held from 7th to 10th August 2025. Organised by Andrew Linnell and his colleagues, it offered an impressive range of talks by some excellent speakers. I was not able to listen to all sixteen speakers, but I did manage to hear presentations from: Inessa Burdich, Harrie Salman, Bastiaan Baan, Benjamin Cherry, Adriana Koulias, Doug Smith, Florian Sydow, Robert McKay, Are Thoresen and Andrew Linnell. The text of my own talk is given below.
In a lecture given in Dornach on 18th November 1917, Rudolf Steiner said: “What people in our epoch must learn is the need to wage a fully conscious fight against the evil that is making its way into human evolution.”
The epoch to which Steiner was referring is our present stage of human development which he called the Age of the Consciousness Soul, or the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. This has been with us since the early 15th century and it will last for around 2,200 years, ending approximately in the year 3600 of our present era. Steiner tells us that, since the beginning of this Age, the propensity for evil lies in the subconscious of every person, and that there is no crime, however dreadful, that each one of us, as people of this epoch, does not have the potential to commit. Paradoxically, confronting this reality is the only way that we can solve the riddle of evil, which is the most important task of our age.
The existence of evil is also, of course, a powerful reason why many people say they do not believe in God, for how can a god of love who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent allow evil phenomena to exist? Yet initiates tell us that God has two aspects, which when understood and viewed correctly, enable us to see the purpose of evil. Evil can be seen as the unevolved and undeveloped aspect of life, the force which tests us and absorbs and removes that which is unwanted.
So this is the scale of the challenge each of us is facing in this very difficult period in human physical existence. Anthroposophists characterise our present time as one in which we shall see the actual incarnation of the great dark archangel, Ahriman. Ahriman could be defined as the power which prevents man in his physical-sense world existence from perceiving the spiritual-soul beings lying behind the surface of our physical world – but Ahriman is also an actual being, whose incarnation in physical form is imminent. This will be the last of three unique incarnations of which Steiner spoke – the first was the incarnation of Lucifer in about 3000 BCE (believed by many to have been as the Yellow Emperor in China, he of the terracotta army); the second was the incarnation of Christ in Palestine two thousand years ago; and the third will be the incarnation of Ahriman, which to quote Steiner will take place “before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed”, probably in the USA. Each of these incarnations is prepared for many years, indeed centuries, in advance, and we can see quite clearly already the kind of evil influences that the future Ahrimanic incarnation is bringing to bear upon our human societies.
In my view, the past one hundred and fifty years has been the most terrible period in the whole of human history and the evil is worsening and intensifying as we approach the actual incarnation. Some of the notable characteristics of what is happening across the world right now include:
A huge increase in personal stress levels
A loss of faith or confidence in governments and public institutions of all kinds, both nationally and internationally
Rancour and divisions between families, friends and colleagues, with irreconcilable positions taken on issues of the day
A collapse of the systems on which we all rely, including the international rules-based order
The gradual disappearance of many of the old certainties on which society is based.
For anthroposophists, these social phenomena indicate that what is happening is Ahrimanic, clear signs of the impending incarnation of the being that Christ called the ‘ruler of this world’. Wherever we look, we see many examples which are indicative of this and perhaps even of the actual incarnation itself. The signs are all around us, and you don’t need me to list them. We are all aware of the ever-increasing range of threats which confront humanity and the entire web of life.
For me, the Covid pandemic has been one of the most significant of the Ahrimanic phenomena. Covid is a viral disease, which means that it is mineral in nature and does not have its own life processes and therefore needs a host organism so it can reproduce itself. But it also has astonishing intelligence, for example in the resistance it can develop to medicines, or in the way it can mutate, partly in response to vaccinations. But I can’t help asking, where does this astonishing intelligence live? In what being does this intelligence reside?
Second, the Covid pandemic produced fear, much of it stoked by deliberate government policy, as well as anxiety and division between people, even within families. It also led governments to dismantle existing civil liberties with an ease that they had not expected to find in Western democracies. It became impossible to have a fruitful exchange of views between those taking different standpoints and we saw instead heightened emotions, rejection and hatred of other people’s opinions. This process was driven even further by our news outlets and social media, who censored the views of anyone, even distinguished professors of medicine, whose expert opinion did not fit the official line. Again, one must ask: whose interests are being served by this fracturing of social cohesion?
Such attitudes have also radiated out into wider society, causing dissension between ordinary people. We see it internationally and we see it also in our national lives, with both the USA and the UK having more divided societies than ever before. And during Covid we also began to see discord and division growing in our localities. Here are just two examples of these polarised attitudes from the time of Covid, from my own local community: the first one was told to me by a woman who has a mother in a care home. This woman did not want to have the jabs and was told that as a result not only would she not be able to visit her mother but that unless she had both jabs her mother would no longer be able to stay in the care home! The second comes from someone who runs a kindergarten, who at the height of the pandemic was told by some parents that if she herself had the jabs, then they would remove their children from the kindergarten. Tyranny runs in both directions… Such unkindness and the breaking-down of relationships are characteristic of the impending incarnation.
When contemplating a theme as weighty as the incarnation of Ahriman, it is helpful to have in our minds a picture of ourselves as human beings and our current evolutionary progress. For we are undoubtedly at a significant point of change and our evolution can go either in the way intended by the spiritual hierarchies or else in the direction wished for and worked towards by Ahriman and his helpers. The issue is still in the balance and the outcome depends on each one of us.
Anthroposophy teaches us that we human beings are engaged on a path of development that leads us to ever higher levels of consciousness and existence. And it’s clear today that we are at a critical point along that path. What we are now being called upon to do is to connect and work with our higher spiritual self, which everyone of us has and which Steiner calls the ‘I ‘or higher ego: the image of God, our true nature, which is within each of us.
It is particularly confusing for us at this time that there are three processes going on simultaneously, some of which are cause for despair and others which are as, Ita Wegman said in another context, “full of future”.
The first process is that we are coming to the end of the old path of development, which brought widespread prosperity and progress; but which also increasingly led us to materialism, selfishness, greed and disconnection from the environment and the spiritual world, and hence to the multiple crises facing us. It is the breaking-down of this first process which we tend to see reflected in our news media. That is also the aspect which Ahriman and his helpers want us to focus on because it induces great fear in us. This old developmental stage made us become who we are today: independent personalities with an ‘I‘ and self-consciousness. But now that humanity has accomplished this developmental stage, the old path is breaking up and is slowly coming to an end amidst chaos and confusion, which increases the fear and uncertainty felt by so many people.
The second process is that a new way of being is seeking to be born, as the old is breaking down all around us. This is occurring as people ask themselves questions on their life paths, search for answers, go through processes of change and, as a result, perceive, think, and do things differently. This new kind of consciousness, arising as it does from inner transformation, is happening everywhere and can be recognised worldwide. It is leading to the emergence of a new culture in which people connect to their feelings, think about what they believe, make conscious choices, know what values they stand for, and consciously interact and cooperate with other people and with nature. It is those who can ride the wave of this change who are creating the new culture.
The third process is about building new ways of being. Instead of an attitude of competition and rivalry, opposing and fighting each other, people are increasingly seeking connection and cooperation. Instead of blindly obeying an authority outside our self, we would rather trust our own authority, our own inner knowing. This is accompanied by a shift of perception from separateness to wholeness – the recognition that we are connected to the greater whole in all aspects of life and reality, our humanity, the earth, the cosmos, everything that lives. There is an increasing realisation that everything is dependent on everything else.
One way of looking at this might be to say that humanity has lived in a state of adolescence for two thousand years. Now it is time for us to grow up, become true adults and work for unity and understanding throughout the world. We have progressed in our intelligence and our mastery of scientific discoveries but our capacities for wisdom and love have not progressed to the same extent. We have uncovered the workings of the laws that govern Nature without being sufficiently attuned to the Cosmic Law as it is reflected in Nature; and have thus brought ourselves ever closer to destruction.
In this MysTech conference we are considering the role of Ahriman but we should also consider other adversary forces. Steiner spoke about another spiritual entity, an opposing principle to the Lamb of Christ, that he calls the ‘Sun Demon’ or ‘Sorat’. It is this being, the adversary of the Lamb, who is literally the anti-Christ. It is an open question for me as to how much Sorat, and his demonic helpers, the Asuras, have been behind the work of Ahriman during the last century and a half. Whereas Ahriman’s aim is to lead us into an ever-intensifying form of brain-bound, earth-bound materialistic thinking, and Lucifer’s is to tempt us into disembodied fantasy and to believing that we are gods, the aim of Sorat the Antichrist, the Sun Demon, is to destroy the human ‘I’ (the Self, the bearer of the Christ principle or the indwelling divinity in the human being), to drag us towards the so-called Eighth Sphere and to destroy the Earth itself, which our ‘I’ needs for the future development of the human soul. Yes, we and the Earth need each other for our evolutionary paths. Climate change, war, the sixth great extinction, genocide, materialism, racism, and transhumanism – these are all facets of attacks from the same enemy. This is the true scale of the battle with which we are now engaged.
A quick explanation about the expression just used, the Eighth Sphere. Anthroposophy teaches us that humankind in its total evolution from the very beginning to the end of time must pass through seven planetary spheres, which correspond to our seven bodies, which are members or aspects of our being. We are currently in the Fourth Sphere, which is our dear planet Earth and which corresponds to our ‘I’ or higher ego, the individuality which we take with us from incarnation to incarnation. Over aeons we have already lived through the first three spheres which are: Saturn, which corresponds to the physical body; the Sun, which corresponds to the etheric body; and the Moon which corresponds with the astral body. There are three further bodies which we have within ourselves as potential for future development, that is to say Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. (You can read more about these seven bodies or members of the human constitution in Steiner’s book Outline of Esoteric Science.) The adversarial forces are working together to try to divert us from our natural evolutionary progress through the seven planetary spheres, and to take us instead into the Eighth Sphere. If they are successful in this, it means that we would be unable to progress with evolution, nor have the possibility of the encounter with Christ, but instead we would be thrown back to a lower level. Both Ahriman and the Asuras work from the Eighth Sphere. This is the realm which the religions call Hell.
Steiner says that in their will to evil and in their fullness of power, the Asuras surpass both the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings:
“The Asuras – the evil ones – are beings who are again one degree higher in their will to evil than the ahrimanic beings and two degrees higher than the luciferic ones.“
“These are the beings who strive towards the Eighth Sphere. They want to compress matter more and more, so that it cannot be spiritualised again, i.e. returned to its original state. They want to drag human beings down into the Eighth Sphere and thus snatch us away from progressive development and its goal – the Christ.“
And alongside this, we are also facing the challenges brought to us by transhumanism. Many scientists, technologists and engineers are working on the development of these concepts, which in a nutshell are designed to transcend human limitations through technological interventions within the human body. Targeted genetic, neurotechnological, prosthetic and pharmacological interventions are meant to optimize our bodies, feelings and brain and broaden them so that biologically programmed human limitations, such as sickness, ageing and death can be overcome and ultimately left behind. Andrew Linnell, our conference organiser, and several other of our speakers, specialise in these matters and I am hoping they will have more to say about them during this weekend. (They did!)
A prominent figure in all of this is Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former futurologist, who is a leading computer scientist and inventor. His prediction, made in his book The Singularity is Near, is that we human beings will become more godlike as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technologists, people who are experts in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. Their work will produce new tools that will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons.
it is clear that Kurzweil, who is a highly intelligent man, is nevertheless one of the Useful Idiots preparing the way for Ahriman. As part-evidence for my statement that Kurzweil is an idiot, it should be noted that he has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his death, Kurzweil plans for his corpse to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him. If only he had studied Steiner, he’d know that his consciousness is already immortal and he could have saved himself $200,000!
But it does seem quite possible that those of us alive today are likely to be the last generation of pure human beings that the world will know. Within a single generation the transhumanists intend that we will become a hybrid species of biological and synthetic bodies. Ray Kurzweil says: “Some people find this frightening. But [The Singularity] is going to be beautiful and will expand our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine, like a person who is deaf hearing the most exquisite symphony for the first time.” But it’s surely also possible that these developments will limit our ability to think, to love, to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way. Behind all this is Ahriman, who wants us to lose our capacity for emotion, empathy, intimacy and forgiveness – the very qualities that we value and cherish in our humanness.
The historian of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, also points to a near future in which “people will no longer regard themselves as autonomous beings who follow their own wishes according to their life, but rather as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that are constantly monitored and directed by a network of electronic algorithms”. He says that “Humans, giraffes, viruses are all algorithms. They differ from computers in so far as they are biochemical algorithms which have evolved at the caprice of natural selection over millennia.” “The individual authentic self is no more real than the immortal Christian soul, Santa Claus or the Easter bunny.” As a not entirely humorous aside, my wife has a fear that in the future those of us who refuse to be microchipped or to accept technological improvements to our bodies will be forced by the rest of society to live in nature reserves where we can be visited and observed as quaint throwbacks by the medically enhanced ‘normal’ people, as a kind of millennium seedbank of the human genome.
Do all these phenomena mean that Ahriman has already incarnated? Rudolf Steiner predicted that Ahriman would incarnate in the flesh in the first part of the third millennium in which we are now living. The details of how, when and in whom this incarnation would happen have of course been the subject of much speculation since Steiner spoke about this over one hundred years ago. Steiner also said at a meeting with young people in Breslau that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance the moment of his incarnation as much as he can. Steiner then mentions the year 1998, which for anyone interested in numerology is 666 multiplied by 3.
My own view is that, rather in the way that the incarnation of Jesus Christ was preceded for around 500 years by all kinds of what might be called precursor indications, the various phenomena we are seeing now are also indications of what is heading our way. At present, I don’t see any convincing candidates for the role of Ahriman, despite strong competition among current world leaders, so even if Ahriman is now here in a physical body, he has not yet assumed the prominence we might expect.
For how long will these evil times last? Here is a quotation from the great Bulgarian master, Beinsa Douno, also known as Peter Deunov (1864 – 1944), who was a contemporary of Steiner – they had a high regard for one another. This excerpt comes from a talk with his followers during the 1920s, and it still seems highly relevant to our situation now:
“The ‘end of the world’ manifests itself through the cleansing of the old humanity, so that a new humanity can come in that place. This cleansing (…) has been carried out for a period of 45 years. This period began in 1900 and will end in 1945. You are all eyewitnesses to what happened during this period.”
“From 1945 will begin another period, which will also last 45 years until 1990. Such times come and such power comes, that whoever opposes it will lay his bones on the ground. A great dictatorship ensues (…) “
“After this period there will be a short break until 1999 (…). And then a new period will come, with an even more terrible dictatorship (…). It will also last 45 years.”
That takes us to the year 2044. So, if Peter Deunov is correct, we can expect around another twenty years where these Ahrimanic phenomena will intensify and worsen, years which will perhaps include the actual incarnation.
Steiner did not specify what exactly Ahriman would do on earth, and what sort of person he might be in the flesh. But in a lecture given in Bern on 4th November 1919, he said that during his incarnation, Ahriman would seek “to utterly mislead and corrupt humanity on earth.” He also said in 1922: “And what is it that these Ahrimanic beings are seeking to bring about? They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve their purpose.”
But Steiner also says repeatedly in the lectures that this incarnation could not and should not be averted. It has to happen and, in the right conditions, might even benefit human evolution. The really important thing is that people should be sufficiently awake to recognise Ahriman for what he is. Only if Ahriman were to go unrecognised would this event be wholly calamitous for the evolution of the earth and humanity.
There’s no doubt that Ahriman has an easier task than one could wish. He finds it easy to persuade humans to give up their future to him, because Ahriman can work through the seat of human desires – our pride, greed, laziness, lust or wish for power – but Christ can only reach us through our ‘I’ or higher self and this means that the struggle is not an equal one. Our ‘I’ has so to develop that it can in time learn to recognise and resist the many temptations offered by Lucifer and Ahriman. These two adversarial forces work as allies at the present time, even though they appeal to different instincts in us. The way to deal with these two poles of Evil is to seek the point of balance between them, which is represented by Christ.
One has to recognise, however, that the behaviour over centuries of some Christians, some churches and some supposedly Christian nations has combined to make the name ‘Jesus Christ’ distasteful to many people today. This is another area where Ahriman has been working effectively.
To quote from the very useful AnthroWiki website, “Jesus Christ is the name for the unique and singular earthly embodiment of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Steiner’s research, this incarnation began with the baptism in the Jordan River, which occurred around the 30th year of Jesus’ life, and was completed with his death on Golgotha”.
“Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Power, which originally worked from the Sun, united with the Earth. This is a spiritual fact that stands above all denominational religious confessions and is also not bound to the name ‘Christ’ that is in common use among us”. As Steiner emphasised: ‘Never will he who recognises the Christ-being insist that the name of the Christ remain.’ ” In other words, we shouldn’t get upset if other people use a different term for the universal fact of Christ. And Steiner has made the stupendous statement that “the ‘I’ in human beings is microcosmically the same as Christ is macrocosmically for the world.”
Just lately I have been reading Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation by the anthroposophical writer and seer, Are Thoresen, in which he offers an intriguing update on Steiner’s descriptions of Ahriman’s incarnation. Thoresen is in supersensible contact with the Nordic angelic being Vidar, whom he describes as continuing the work of Michael as an Archangel, and who is the outer and shining aura of Christ himself. Thoresen asked Vidar about the future incarnation of Ahriman. To quote from the book:
“Vidar’s answer was clear and simple, and as I slowly pondered this it made more and more sense. He said that Ahriman was already in the process of incarnating, at this very time, but he is incarnating in all of us, with the help – or by being given cover by – the asuric beings. It is extremely important to understand this.” Are Thoresen is one of the speakers who will be taking part in this conference so I’m hoping that he will be saying more about all of this during this weekend. (No, he spoke instead about ways of entering the spiritual worlds.)
And whether you agree with Steiner or Thoresen or even with neither of them, one real challenge of these times is how to get through them without succumbing to despair. For me, the pain consists in seeing what is happening and realising that the vast majority of our fellow human beings, although they know that we are living in a very troubled world, are oblivious to what is really going on. And what is really going on, to borrow the title of a book by Bernard Lievegoed, is The Battle for the Soul. According to Lievegoed, because the human spirit is unassailable, the opposing powers therefore direct their efforts against the soul. The human soul is the real battlefield of the war between the powers of good and evil. What the Ahrimanic powers are attempting is to obscure the human soul or even to destroy it, so that the human ‘I’ is unable to gain the experience it needs on Earth for its healthy evolution.
Ahriman is also working very hard to ensure that we humans are unaware of the second coming of Christ, which according to Rudolf Steiner will not be a physical incarnation this time around. That was done once and for all 2000 years ago and will not be repeated. Steiner says that since about 1933, the Christ has been available to human beings in the etheric field and that more and more of us will be able to have the experience of an encounter with Christ. We know how Ahriman dealt with this threat in 1933, by assisting the rise of Hitler to power in Germany, thus creating more assaults on the human soul that diverted us from awareness of what was happening in the etheric realm. By keeping the eyes of most of humanity fixed firmly on the material world, and completely unaware of any other reality, Ahriman has kept knowledge of the second coming from our souls.
Why is it that we have come to this particular crisis in our time? After all, humans have been killing one another and behaving with utter selfishness and greed for centuries. What has made the difference now? Why has there been this intensification, a kind of industrialisation, of the scale of evil on this Earth? And how can we wake up to what is really going on and begin to counteract “the evil that is making its way into human evolution”?
This relates to what Steiner called “the war in heaven” that took place over the period 1840 to 1879 between the Archangel Michael and the dark angels. Since that time, when Michael cast out these dark forces from heaven and into the earth, these adversarial powers have been working within the blood and nervous systems of human beings in an attempt to reverse both human and angelic evolution. It is no coincidence that since the fall to earth of these dark angels, humanity is being forced to endure what I have already called the most terrible one hundred and fifty years in the whole of human history.
But we should also bear in mind that at this time, in this 21st century, all signs point towards the emergence of a new world amidst the old, dying world. That new world originates not from outside our selves but from the inner life of us humans. It is derived from the divine core that lives and works inside every individual human soul. This means that the development of every individual on earth is of the utmost importance.
And what looks right now as though the triumph of Ahriman is a foregone conclusion, may not be quite as strong and solid as it appears, because as we know from the past, despite many victories in battle along the way, in the end Ahriman always loses the war. I suspect he will lose this time as well because there is a resilience in human life and the natural world which, when allied with the love of Christ and our innate capacities for empathy, compassion and kindness, give certainty that truth and real human values will outlast and survive the worst that can be done to us, or that we can do to ourselves.
But in the meantime, how can we counter Ahriman and find the strength and resilience to live through these terrible times? We can hope that increasing numbers of people will discover what it truly is to be a human being; that is to say, we humans are beings with one foot in the material world and another in the spiritual world; that spiritual world to which we return between earthly lives and which is our real home. Here on Earth, we have something which is not available to us in the spiritual world – and that is the privilege and the challenge of free will, something which allows us to experience both the good and the bad sides of our natures over many lives and through this process to grow and evolve in freedom through our own decisions.
In a way, we should be grateful to the Ahrimanic beings who, in this spiritual evolutionary process play an essential part. Not only are they instrumental in the forming of the human being’s constitution in all its beauty and darkness, but they also play an important role in bringing us face-to-face with the consequences of our actions and decisions and hence also the forming of our destiny and karma.
It is all too easy to feel that the struggle is hopeless. Whenever I am feeling overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the challenges facing all of life on Earth, the following words from Judith von Halle can give me new courage:
“The consistent psychical-spiritual work of an individual, or of a few individuals, can have an enormous influence on the physical and spiritual conditions of the world! When someone asks: What can I as one person do to influence world events? – the answer is: everything! If people could only see with physical eyes the effect on the macrocosmic context that the decision and its implementation to consistently practise only one meditation by a single person, then probably no one would hesitate to undertake such an exercise themselves. For the possibilities are enormous! Allow me to give you this as the greatest consolation, as the strongest ray of hope in the present situation. The individual person holds the world’s fate in his hands. This is the gift of the Christ, who sees the individual I as a deity, who treats it as a deity. (…) Spiritual life must become a reality in our hearts and therefore in our higher consciousness. We must develop a feeling in our souls for the true, the beautiful and the good that resides in this spiritual life.”
And I also feel it important to concentrate on those areas of life where one can make a difference, rather than wasting time and emotion on problems which are way beyond one’s capacity to influence. Each of us is now being called upon to do all that we can to help in the evolution and progress of human life. In the face of the current massive onslaught which is seeking to re-define what it means to be a human being, any project which concentrates on true human needs and values is a worthwhile antidote to the poison of our times. People are trying to help in their own myriad ways: artists through their creative work, teachers and parents through educating and bringing up children, activists through changing policies and laws, and any of us through our encounters in daily life. If we can be people of initiative, rather than passive sponges soaking up whatever is done to us, humanity will survive the incarnation of Ahriman.
We should remember a saying of St Francis that: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” A few people working with and for the light can counteract the negative workings of thousands of others. If you can get together regularly with one or two other people to pray for humanity and all life on the Earth, then the effect of this will be much greater than you can possibly imagine.
In a lecture given at Dornach on 1st November 1919, Rudolf Steiner said the following: “To the extent to which people can be roused into conducting their affairs not for material ends alone but also so as to incorporate a free and independent spiritual life alongside economic life, as an integral part of the social organism — to that same extent Ahriman’s incarnation will be awaited with an attitude worthy of humanity.”
I’m going to finish with a prayer by Paul King, who is a translator for Temple Lodge Publishing and also a member of the meditation group which meets in our house:
Light of the world,
Great Sun-Spirit of the Earth!
May Your light enlighten our heads,
May Your love warm our hearts,
May Your peace pacify our strife!
Thank you for listening and I look forward very much to the rest of this conference!
Filed under Ahriman, Anthroposophy, Archangel Michael, Cryonics, Evil, Judith von Halle, Lucifer, Ray Kurzweil, Sorat
Trump: the triumph of Ahriman?
Like many people, I was rendered angry and depressed by the results of the US presidential election on 5thNovember 2024.
Angry, because Donald Trump has once again, as he has throughout his life, escaped just retribution for his crimes and abhorrent behaviour. It seems that Trump was quite right when he boasted in 2016 at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa that: “”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Depressed, because the return of Trump as President indicates that a majority of Americans voted for him despite knowing everything about his character. This not only says something disturbing about American society and the polarised consciousness of its voters; but this second Trump presidency is also likely to lead to detrimental consequences in many ways, especially for the climate and all life on Earth. It fits into a pattern of worldwide phenomena showing that we are now well into the process of the Ahrimanic incarnation foretold by Rudolf Steiner. (If you are unfamiliar with this idea, I have written more about it here.)
Do I think that Trump is the incarnation of Ahriman? No, I don’t – I wrote about this back in 2016 and that analysis still seems to me accurate. But I do think it likely that the election result will hasten the decline of the US as a superpower, with knock-on effects for Europe and accelerating decline for the West and liberal values, which for good or ill have shaped the world during my lifetime. There is a persuasive argument to this effect in an article by the historian Alfred McCoy in the online Southern Cross Review. The worldwide rise in populism and nationalism, wars of aggression and the cult of the strong leader who can overcome the deficiencies of democracy, are not going to lead to positive outcomes for any of us or the Earth. I was struck by a reported comment last week in Paris from Richard Moore, who heads the UK foreign intelligence service MI6, that during his “37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state.”
One of the things I have noticed in all the commentary there has been about the reasons for the election of Donald Trump is how inadequate this analysis has been in explaining what has happened, however distinguished the intellectual capacity of the commentator and however penetrating their psychological grasp of Trump’s narcissism and American popular opinion. The common factor underlying this inadequacy is the absence of any sense of the spiritual reality behind what is happening. If you are an atheistic member of the commentariat and think that the spiritual world is a delusion, that the material world is all there is, and that human beings have but the one life, then you have no access to an essential understanding of the root cause of what is unfolding right now. This spiritual short-sightedness lies behind the failure to apprehend the grimmer facets of our present situation.
So how should we understand the impending incarnation of Ahriman? Rudolf Steiner predicted that Ahriman would incarnate in the flesh in the first part of the third millennium, which is the beginning of the millennium in which we are now living. The details of how, when and in whom this incarnation would happen have of course been the subject of much speculation since Steiner spoke about this over 100 years ago.
Just lately I have been reading Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation* by the anthroposophical writer and seer, Are Thoresen, in which he offers an intriguing update on Steiner’s descriptions. Thoresen is in supersensible contact with the Nordic being Vidar, whom he describes as continuing the work of Michael as an Archangel, since Michael’s elevation to the rank of an Archai. Vidar is described in Nordic mythology as the one god to survive the great battle of Ragnarök (Twilight of the Gods) and is the outer and shining aura of Christ himself. Thoresen asked Vidar about the future incarnation of Ahriman:
“Vidar’s answer was clear and simple, and as I slowly pondered this it made more and more sense. He said that Ahriman was already in the process of incarnating, at this very time, but he is incarnating in all of us, with the help – or by being given cover by – the asuric beings. It is extremely important to understand this.”
Who are these asuric beings and why does knowing something about them help us to make sense of what is currently happening in the world?
In a lecture on 1st November 1906, Steiner described them as “satanic gods of hindrances who began their work in the Atlantean epoch but who are now starting to work in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch (ie our present age). They’re the worst of the three forces hindering humankind and they mainly work into sexual life in the physical body. The many sexual aberrations today are to be ascribed to this strong influx.” And in another lecture from 29th January 1907, Steiner said that: “Asuras are spirits of the very greatest egoism who remained behind during Saturn evolution. They want to condense matter and compress it ever more so that it can’t be spiritualized and brought back to its original condition. They’re the dregs of the planetary evolution that goes from Saturn to Vulcan. The asuras inhabit the moon and from there they work on the humans whom they want to drag down into the eighth sphere and thereby tear away from progressive evolution and its goal — the Christ.”
Now I’m aware that, to many people, this will all sound abstruse and fanciful. But if I describe some practical effects of the activities of these entities on human beings in the world today, let us see if any of it accords with your own perceptions. Are Thoresen suggests that since the year 2019 and the Covid pandemic, the asuras have gained much more access to human beings through the opening of what he calls the first elemental realm. (This refers to what Steiner has described as the crossing of the threshold between the physical and elemental worlds, which he says will happen unconsciously and inevitably for every human being towards the end of the 20th century and thereafter. Much of Steiner’s work was to help us prepare to cross the threshold consciously, by building a bridge between the spiritual and the earthly, thus allowing the unfolding of our soul capacities and awakening the consciousness with which to engage and transform our outer lives. Making this journey consciously is much safer than crossing the threshold unconsciously, which Steiner likened to putting your head into an ant’s nest.)
I am indebted here to the Australian writer and spiritual teacher, Lisa Romero, and her book The Inner Work Path,** for the following descriptions of what may happen to people who cross the threshold to the elemental world unprepared. She describes how there are seven realms or spheres of the true spiritual world and the capacities and preparedness that each of us brings determines which of these spheres we may encounter. For most of us, it is the first three elemental spheres that we are most likely to experience. Beyond the three elemental spheres lies the outer etheric realm, where the Christ has been visible since around 1933 to those who are able to reach him. As we evolve, more and more of us will be able to meet Christ during the next 2000 years.
“For those unprepared, the first crossing to the moon sphere could leave them feeling that life is just an illusion, that they have been caught in maya, living a lie. They can end up feeling despondent and unable to continue as a useful member of society. For those who cross unprepared into the second sphere, it can leave them with the feeling that they are puppets, that nothing they do really matters, and that there is no free will. This can leave the soul incapacitated in relation to earthly life, or even destructive toward others. If seekers cross the threshold unprepared and enter the third sphere, they may feel that they just want to leave this world, escape the wheel of life and death. They may see that if they clear up their personal karma, they can escape the karmic cycle of dying and returning to earth. This may then lead to a life of working simply to liberate the individual self.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Do you know anyone, particularly young people, who may resonate with these descriptions?
Thoresen says that: “…I have also observed that these (asuric) beings were able to give the ‘carrier’ of the entity some degree of clairvoyance, but that this clairvoyance was always false. Usually, the adversarial entities give information that was ninety per cent true and ten per cent false. This makes the carrier believe in themselves, and thus to connect with the adversarial beings and forces for eternity.”
(…) “I had not understood why these asuric beings could provide such clairvoyance, but now, after pondering Vidar’s answer, I understood perfectly. Ahriman is in the process of incarnating NOW. Ahriman is incarnating in ALL people – also myself – and especially spiritual people, with the help of the asuric elementals. In this way, he incarnates, hides himself and also initiates a ‘school’ of magic, leading to clairvoyance – a clairvoyance that is personal and that nobody can agree on.”
It is these adversarial forces that create the things that attack humankind in unseen warfare aimed at all levels of our being. Nearly all of us are totally unaware that this is our situation. The effects of this assault can be seen in many of the disturbing phenomena affecting human society in our time. But by a strange paradox, the elemental beings in the three elemental spheres are the foundation of the material universe. Without them, the material world would not exist. Material creation is thus the outer face or expression of the elemental beings, who although partly adversarial are also necessary for our human development towards freedom.
Our sole protection is the Christ and we need to develop the techniques that will counterbalance these phenomena. Are Thoresen says that: “To be able to work into and with the elemental world in all its three realms, to introduce morality and the Christ-force in the material/elemental world, we have to be able to observe the elemental world. That is why it is so important today to be able to cross the threshold (to the spiritual world), and also to be able to activate one or more of our spiritual sense organs.”
Finding the Christ-point of balance between the adversarial forces is key to our survival as humankind. Thoresen describes how in all the adversarial forces, in all technological devices and even in all human abilities, there can be found a Middle point, the Christ force. By finding this, we can redeem the luciferic, ahrimanic and possibly even the asuric elements in all these, and consequently material reality itself. I don’t want to go into more detail here of how this may be done, so I would refer you to Thoresen’s books for further information.
In Downhill All the Way, the fourth volume of Leonard Woolf’s five-volume autobiography, he writes about how horrible it was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler, “the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers which, like the daffodils, ‘come before the swallow dares and takes the winds of March with beauty’. Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech’. I shouted back: ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’ Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple tree in the orchard.”
So, after the election result was in and taking my cue from Leonard Woolf, I went out into the garden to plant bulbs under an apple tree, which was all I could think to do in human solidarity with the values of truth, justice and kindness. May they flower for many years, long after Trump and all those leaders under the influence of Ahriman have gone to reap their karma. May human beings find the Christ force living in our hearts. May the Earth be protected from all those seeking to destroy it!
* Published 2021 by Temple Lodge Press, ISBN 978-1-912230-83-9
** Published 2014 by SteinerBooks, ISBN 978-1-62148-059-4
Filed under Ahriman, Donald Trump
anthropopper 