Christ's return in the etheric? - making sense of Rudolf Steiner's false prophecy

Rudolf Steiner gave many lectures in which he announced and elaborated upon a prophecy that Christ would return to earth in about 1933, but not as an incarnate but instead in the etheric realm; where he would be perceptible only to those of spiritual discernment.

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/ReapChrist/ReaChr_index.html

To me, this prophecy was wrong in so many levels that my inclination is to reject it outright. For example, I do not believe for a moment that God unfolds his plans according to pre-specified dates, and it seems crystal clear from the gospels that the second coming cannot be foretold.

But given my basic respect for Steiner, my preference is to try and make sense of this prophecy in terms of him having sensed something true, but misinterpreted its meaning because of his personal quirks relating to numerology and his fixed conviction that Man's destiny was pre-specified in terms of sequential eras of fixed length and function, extending over millennia...

What I infer happened, was that - by his sensitive spiritual discernment, and his profound understanding of the history of Man's consciousness - Steiner realised that it was God's hope, and the time was ripe, for modern Western Man to move to a new kind of intuitive spirituality of thinking, of which Goethe's life gave a foretaste.

It was therefore Man's destiny to move forward from the dominant materialism, and spiritual blindness, of the modern era; and if this happened then there would be new and expanded possibilities of direct, intuitive knowing.

One vital and crucial aspect of this was that If Man developed this new spirituality, Then he would come to experience Christ as a living and active personal presence in the world - not by seeing, hearing or touching Christ in a body (this would have to be an imagined Christ, an hallucinated Christ); but instead by a direct, intuitive knowing of Christ in thinking.

 What this means, in practice, is that for modern Man it is more important to become spiritual than to become 'a Christian' because to become a non-spiritual Christian is not enough; while to become truly spiritual (in the intuitive, thinking-based way described by Steiner) will also, inevitably, sooner-or-later, lead to becoming a Christian by direct personal experience.

To be clear: this is not what Steiner actually said, but my interpretation of what underlay it, but could this be true?

Could it really be that - here and now, in this modern world - well-motivated sincere spirituality of the true self will lead to true Christianity for any serious, seeking individual, without any other input being necessary?

Yes, I think so.

This sounds outrageous at first; but it is clear that merely 'being a Christian' in the usual sense is not enough now (if it ever was).

Modern Christians are often terribly lacking in discernment, and wide-open to demonic deceptions, corruptions and inversions.

The traditions of the churches are wrecked, Biblical interpretation deeply distorted, philosophy riddled with false assumptions; the general culture is one of lies, ugliness and sin-enforced as virtue; many or most church leaders, priests and pastors are primarily secular Left materialists working strategically to harness Christianity to politics; Good to evil...

There are so few safe and reliable sources of Christianity that it seems we must have direct knowledge of the truth - or else what we learn may be worse than nothing.

If that is what we absolutely need, then that is what God will surely have provided. We need direct knowledge of spiritual truths, and that is now available to us; and the method by which this is made possible should therefore be our first priority.

The Problem of Susan

I think CS Lewis was very wise in deciding that Susan was not going to make it to heaven when he had her preferring nylons and lipstick to Narnia thereby rejecting the spiritual world for the material one. We don't know what eventually happened to her but it may be that her choice was decisive or then again it may not since she would perhaps have had time to regret her decision.

For those who haven't read The Last Battle, the final story in the Narnia series, let me just explain what I am referring to here. The Pevensey children, who once came to Narnia from this world and ruled for a full life span as kings and queens, are involved in a train crash in England and they all die except Susan who was not on the train. They return to Narnia but not the Narnia they knew before. This is the higher, more archetypal Narnia which remains after the created, or more worldly, version is destroyed at the end of time. It is now a heavenly realm, or the approach to such, and the children have earned the right to be here because they have stayed faithful to Narnia and the principles of which Narnia is an embodiment. Susan, however, the eldest sister, has not. She has renounced imagination for reality or what she thinks of as reality. Basically the here and now, what's in front of your eyes and can be touched, tasted and so on sort of reality. The reality that everyone agrees is reality and what really matters. Susan has grown up but in growing up she has lost her soul.

Lewis was wise because there are many people like that, people who, when young, are still sensitive to spiritual things but as they grow up and the world closes in around them forget. Why do they forget? They forget for various reasons but two of the most common ones are that their inner perception was not that strong to begin with while their propensity to be attracted to worldly things was strong because of a spiritual deficiency within them. There was a materialism in their soul which is brought out by the temptations and distractions of the world so they lose contact with deeper reality.

These are hard words but nothing is gained by soft-soaping the truth. Susan was spiritually weak but Peter, Edmund and Lucy were spiritually strong, especially Lucy who was always the closest to Aslan/Christ, exonerating Lewis of any silly charges of sexism. We should note that Edmund had started off badly in the first story, siding with the witch through greed and ambition, but came good in the end so Lewis allows for both eventualities, the sinner who repents and the believer who loses her belief because of the pull of the world.

Susan could be any one of us. If we fall away from truth then an initial awakening is not going to help us. Yes, we must awaken to the spiritual world and see it as the true world but then we must keep faithful to that however hard it gets and however separated from it in our consciousness we seem to become. Susan had had the immense good fortune to have what amounts to a spiritual experience when young but she lost contact with that. She lost contact because she now regarded it as make believe as she had become distracted by worldly things, but we can also lose contact if we, while still believing with our outer mind, don't live up to it. We can believe in God but if we live as though this world is the proper or prime reality, as many outwardly religious people do, then it is as if we did not believe. For what use is belief if it doesn't transform us or, at least, totally reorient us? So many people profess religious belief but act and behave little differently from those who don't. Their heart is still in this world. Their belief is shallow. They may seem good people in a conventional sense but they do not have any real love of God in them and that, when all is said and done, is the only true spiritual virtue.

Susan not only lacked this love (unlike Lucy who had it in abundance) but she had lost belief altogether because her priorities were elsewhere, in her case possibly sensual satisfaction and the pleasure of being admired. She can serve as a warning to us all, that the spiritual path is a life long journey which must be constantly worked at and deepened or it will just lead back to the world even if externally all seems well. If we would really build the truths of the spiritual world into our consciousness then that must always take absolute precedence over everything else.

Susan admired and was admired by the world but she had lost the one thing that really matters.

The Rebellion of the Left

Here's a question. As ideas pertaining to the left are fundamentally anti-God (which they are since they replace the centrality of God with the centrality of Man who is regarded as sufficient unto himself, effectively his own creator with responsibility to no one but himself and free to make his own decisions based on his own desires and will), are people on the left bad people? As they have turned their faces from the true good to a false good does that make them bad?


We live in a world where everyone has the right to be what they want as long as they are not (apparently) harming anyone else, and so it is very hard to say that someone is a bad person who isn't obviously so because of cruelty or extreme selfishness. Live and let live we say, and that's a good thing up to a point. But I think that anyone attracted to left wing ideology, especially as it is now when it is no longer the economic thing it largely was in the past but goes right to the roots of what a human being is supposed to be and to think, does have a spiritual defect which, when analysed, can often be seen as rebellion against the Creator. And this I'm afraid does have the potential to make them a bad person inasmuch as anyone can be described as that. At the very least they are spiritually deficient and seemingly celebrating that rather than seeking to redress it.


Now I don't say this applies to anyone just mildly left wing in their approach because we live in an ignorant age when people are largely cut off from the truth and fed lies, and most follow the status quo. But it does apply to many activists of the modern left. These people are basically rebels against God and you can clearly see this since their prime motivation, when you strip away the fine words on the surface, is often a mixture of hatred, resentment and anger. Their urge is to destroy even when they are being creative (see much 20th century art and philosophy), and what they seek to destroy is the natural order of the universe.


Before I go any further I should acknowledge that we are all sinners. We all have the stain of egotism. That's a fact of being born into this world. But some of us attempt to put that right by following spiritual teachings designed to help us out of this situation. We recognise that we are not right with our Maker and try to put ourselves right. But others, and this very much applies to those on the left in my experience, do not acknowledge this and actually regard their sinful separation from God as a virtue. They are the wise and noble and truthful and good ones. I fear that in this deluded posturing they follow the first leftist who sought to justify his rebellion against God as something heroic.


How does what I am saying here differ from someone who demonises his opponents in the attempt to justify destroying them? We know where that leads. Am I not doing that or else what the left does when it paints its ideological enemies as either mentally ill or wicked? I don't believe I am. I am not trying to slander or silence the left but to point to the roots of their failings and to say that these are spiritual. As I have said, we are all sinners but there is a difference between acknowledging your sinful state and representing it as virtue. And then there is the matter of truth. Not all points of view are equal. If one person argues from truth and another from falsehood they are not doing the same thing and cannot be given the same consideration. You might say that motive matters and so, of course, it does but I would submit that anyone who takes a stand against truth is by that very fact ill motivated. The truth is in us and it is proclaimed loud and clear in religion. We have no excuse to reject it. Naturally earthly religions are far from perfect but most have enough of the truth in them to guide us to some kind of understanding. To reject that is to reject truth and a person of sound mind and good heart cannot reject truth. He can misconstrue it or misinterpret it due to personal limitations but, if his heart is true, he cannot totally distort it.


Who's to say what is truth, you might counter, to which I would respond that truth proclaims itself. It is of our nature. It is not an ideology or a relativistic point of view but the very fabric of our being. If we are true, we know the truth, to an extent at least. Jesus said that those who were his would recognise him, and he was the truth. But if we, or something in us, are false, well that's another matter. And that is my reproach to the left.


Besides leftism cannot be true due to its origin.For it is basically a reaction to something, inspired by hatred of that thing, whereas the spiritual understanding that opposes it comes from love of something, something higher than ourselves. The left recognises nothing higher than ourselves.


So when I point to what I regard as the moral failings of the left I am not speaking from hatred of the left but from love of God  or as much of that as I am capable of responding to. So I am saying that those who follow the ideological precepts of the left are spiritually deficient and usually that is because of a perversion of the will since it is the will rather than the mind that is at the heart of everything we do. That's why God seeks people of good will before those of high intellect. After all no one is smarter than Satan in a strictly intellectual sense. The ideological left does not have good will, though that is hidden behind its outwardly fine sounding humanitarian agendas. But how can you be a humanitarian when you are denying that which fulfils our true humanity which is God? To be a real human being always requires going beyond the merely human since the real human being is a multi-dimensional creature, one not restricted to material levels and appetites, aims and goals. The real human being has his home and his destiny elsewhere than here.


Therefore I do condemn those on the left because they have departed from the path of truth and, worse, seek to drag others with them. But there is a way back for them. The same way back that there is for all of us. It is repentance. However to repent you have to accept that you are in the wrong, and how many on the left ever do that? They are too enamoured of their sin, too identified with the false virtues of their rebellion, to acknowledge its rotten roots. So there is hope, there's always hope, but to avail themselves of it they will have to become humble, like little children, and return to their Father with a chastened spirit. They will have to acknowledge their perverted will. Then (who knows?) they may be amongst the best of God's servants.

The Game of life requires forgetting and letting go - a perspective from William Arkle

ME: "My cup runneth over" and I am concerned to catch the valuable life experience and not allow it to go to waste doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. There are so many possibilities to choose from in my creative play.

GOD: You simply cannot do everything all of the time. 

Experiment and waste go together and lead to discovery, so don't become anxious about results.

Try to enjoy the process itself which allows for lateral thinking and lateral diversions. The new things are not found where you expect them to be.

We can't live "new beginnings" without letting go of the "old beginnings" and allowing them to slip away. All that is really valuable will come back to you when it is needed.

This is part of The Game of life which requires forgetting and letting go with good grace and a sense of non-importance of ones valuable Self.

So do not fear to waste your time and energy, you will never run out of them and the "Crisis" in the World is only solved by those who follow the best instincts of their Spiritual Nature.


From a short piece by William Arkle written just before he died.

How do we know that awakening is needed?

...Because we live, in all mainstream public discourse, in an insane world of lies.

The insanity can be seen in the kind of things we talk about and what is avoided/ excluded from conversation.

The lies can be seen in that all our insane conversations are built on lies - in deliberate lies: that is, on strategically dishonest, selective, distorted, misrepresentation ad misleading (as can be seen if ever we can compare public discourse with reality as experienced directly).

We categorically live in a world where what is treated as of primary importance is either trivial or false; or when genuinely important is permeated with very obvious distortions and taboos.

Now, all this is perfectly obvious to everyone who is genuine in their spiritual Christianity; but in fact very few people indeed are genuine in their spiritual Christianity - very, very few. (Not because they try and fail; but because they are not even trying.)

And those who are not actively seeking to live in a spiritual way in the context of Christianity, are - here-and-now - in great peril; because for the first time in history the mainstream public discourse is positively leading to chosen self-damnation.

I mean, normal modern people disbelieve in anything other than the material world and see no need to seek for anything other; and/ or when they are spiritual - eg. New Age, Perennial Philosophy/ Eastern Religious people, they disbelieve in the reality of purposive evil in this world and the possibility that they themselves are on course deliberately to blight their own eternal life beyond mortal death by choosing to side-against God. 

The fact is that we modern people in The West live in an insane world of lies; therefore if we adopt a passive attitude to human existence we will develop and endorse and end-up deliberately choosing an insane and lying eternity - which we can do, because we are free agents.

We simply must notice our pervasive environment of insane lies, must awake to the reality of our situation, and must acknowledge the fact of our own personal agency - our freedom...

We simply must become spiritually active, striving; must take our personal life and the nature of existence seriously and truthfully, and then (but only then) can we do something constructive about our situation. 

Prophecy versus numerology - And living well, here and now

I do not believe that divine destiny is organised in terms of numbers, therefore it cannot be predicted from numerical patterns. I don't believe that God follows a timetable for human salvation and theosis; nor do I believe that theological history is following an abstract geometrical master plan expressive of specific proportions.

I regard time as serial and sequential; as implied by the fact that Christianity is an historical religion and the fact of free agency (hence non-predictability).

And therefore, I am sure that all prophecies of divinely-ordained events which are tied to specific dates are intrinsically wrong - because derived from false premises.

However, the validity of prophecy as such is not ruled-out - indeed it would be difficult and inconsistent for a Christian to rule-out the validity of prophecy, considering its emphasis in the Gospels (as well as elsewhere in the Bible).

All that is uncertain concerning the validity of prophecy as a general phenomenon (not each specific prophecy, of course) is the mechanisms by which prophecy is made to be fulfilled - and here there are presumably many ways and means by which a prophesied event can be made to come to fulfilment - ranging from predictions based upon extrapolation from a very complete basis of knowledge, to direct divine interventions (whether explicit and miraculous, or behind-the-scenes imperceptible).

For me, the most impressive and overall-convincing prophecy I have encountered was by Rudolf Steiner in 1918; something I have extensively written about previously.

I believe that this was a true prophecy - and a vital one, which has primary implications for what we (individually - you and me) should be doing in our lives; as a major priority. However I would also emphasise that Steiner made many more prophecies which were not validated, or were indeed either nonsensical or incomprehensible - including many that were based upon exactly that kind of 'numerology' which I rejected in the first paragraph above.

Which goes to show that although Steiner was a real prophet, he was (like most other prophets) fallible and flawed: being a real prophet does not imply getting-it-right all-the-time (nor even, quantitatively, most of the time).

As usual - as, indeed, the world has been designed - we need to work-out such things, each for himself. Life isn't a matter of following a program; because each person is different - ultimately, not superficially different; and is meant to be different; and each has a different path of divine destiny that must be (and this is a vital part of it) discovered by personal effort.

(At the basis of creation is that we are all hoped/ intended/ given-the-choice to become divine sons and daughters of God; and like mortal sons and daughters, each divine son or daughter is (and is designed to be, supposed to be) unique in his or her divinity; this resulting from the over-time experience of God-within-us that we all share identically, interacting with our eternal/ unique/ divine selves.) 

My understanding of Steiner's 1918 prophecy is that he described what we ought to do - what God wanted us to do, and still does - and what would happen if we chose not to do it. (This was both a warning, at the time it was given - and is now a means of validating the prophecy.)

Steiner knew what God wanted us to do because he was (in this instance) unusually able to discern this from God-within-him; and he predicted, largely correctly, what would happen if we did not do it from his general understanding of Life and the powers at work in it.

(Steiner's other prophecies were wrong from the usual kind of human failings; especially a characterological reluctance to acknowledge past errors and the possibility of present error. Also from his Pythagorean/ Platonic tendencies towards strict numerology and God as a blueprint-planner. Steiner displayed a fairly common form of pride, especially in men - a fixed baseline assumption of de facto infallibility. One is hard-pressed to find a place when Steiner explicitly admitted to a significant mistake; at least not without also making so many explanations and excuses for his error that the admission is in effect undercut and reversed.)

The value of this and other real prophecies is to clarify causes and consequences; and therefore to clarify our priorities - the nature and direction of our efforts.

In the case of Steiner's 1918 prophecy, this clarifies that the Christianity of the future must be different from the Christianity of the past (which, with time as sequential and history as real, would necessarily be the case); and that we must be focused on re-establishing our individual and personal connection with the imperceptible, immaterial, spiritual world; but in a new and unprecedented way.

(Steiner made the specific recommendation that this be done by the general method of Anthroposophy - and in a general sense of the aim of the spiritual activity I regard this as correct; although Steiner's specific recommended techniques and meditative 'exercises', framed in terms of a stepwise process of 'initiation', are unconvincing, arbitrary and apparently ineffective - or even counter-productive in practice.) 

In my life this means that I keep-on trying to change my world view from the prevalent modern spirit-denying metaphysics of materialism/ reductionism/ positivism/ scientism - but not in the direction of trying to revive that early historical and childhood spirituality of immersion-in, and sensory-perception-of, the spiritual world. My aim is to develop the habit of experiencing the reality of the spiritual, immaterial and divine world in the domain and activity of thinking.

I seek a direct knowledge of reality - a knowledge located in my thinking, not my perceiving - of the divine and spiritual realities; such that I can live properly from my own resources even when all (or nearly all) significant social institutions are corrupted and inverted. 

In sum, we should not strive to see or hear (or touch, smell or taste) spirits and divinities and unseen realities; instead we should strive to know them in our thinking.

This, at any rate, is what I am doing.

What is the significance of the upcoming US total eclipse?

On 21 August a total eclipse of the sun will sweep across the entirety of the USA. Does this event have any significance - aside from the astronomical angle?

Eclipses seem to have had a bad reputation in ancient times, being regarded as portents of disaster. Assuming that the world has long been in the grip of a spiritual war between god and evil, angelic and demonic powers - why might this be?

My interpretation is that evil powers are the ones who most like to plan and strategise, and use symbolism. This (I guess) is because they tend to ignore free agency - they try to overwhelm people's ability to perceive clearly, understand real significance, make good decisions. An eclipse is just the kind of thing they would look-forward to.

The sun is good, and a symbol of good (indeed of Christ) - so solar influence being blocked (even temporarily) is symbolically 'a bad thing'. There is also a tradition of evil, or at least ambivalent, symbolism of the moon - which is doing the blocking... however, I interpret this as a deceptive distortion of reality, and that the moon is also good, but in a different and complementary way from the sun.

In sum, I would not be surprised if the forces of evil had something planned for the eclipse. Yet, if the forces of evil are planning, then the forces of good will know that something is being planned; and perhaps will know what it is. The angelic strategy is, however, different - because the angels hope that Men will perceive and think clearly about reality, and exercise their agency to choose well - whatever happens.

And the eclipse is also a hazard for evil, because it is potentially a great big primary experience that may induce people to think about ultimates and realities... always something that favours Good.

So, the demons and their servants will - I guess - be very keen that people experience the eclipse only at second hand - via the mass media; and that the experience will be undermined by socialising (e.g. an 'eclipse party'), social media ('nuff said), and technology (if someone is trying to get a good photograph of the eclipse, they will not be having a spiritual experience).

So, maybe what we ought to do is to experience the solar eclipse (whether the totality or more likely some degree of partial eclipse) in as simple, direct, quiet, thoughtful and solitary fashion as may be contrived...