21st  Century Initiation Science

This book has sought to bring home the weight that resides occultly in certain streams anthroposophists have tended to overlook because of the politicization of their striving, and because of the politicization of the striving of those representing the streams in question.  Smith’s and Moon’s legacies are institutions with agendas perceived as overtly “right-wing”; Hubbard’s is one that is not politically so readily identifiable, because, though he, like Smith’s successors and Moon’s, lived with a consciousness of procreative matters that led him to condemn abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, unlike them his movement has never treated women as if they were in any way different than men.  Rudolf Steiner never spoke to political concerns outside of his responsibility to characterize what was at work occultly in various political manifestations, or to point up sheer human stupidity; political concerns are irrelevant to spiritual science, and beneath the sensibility of anyone who has grasped it in its essence as an impulse for freedom in the spiritual-cultural life.  Abortion, contraception, and homosexuality* had no public presence of any note when Steiner was alive, but he would surely have seen them as reflections of a moral decline, one spiritual science can only observe without judgement.  (That it is possible to speak of a moral decline as an objective phenomenon the perception of which is accompanied by no moral condemnation is an essential attribute of spiritual science correctly understood.)

This objectively present decline in the consciousness of the sacredness of procreative activity undermines the potential souls incarnating into it have to develop their spiritual capacities.  At the same time, it is the product of impulses flowing from the presence now of Christ in the etheric, because the forces emanating from Him and the beings who surround Him there are ones that, indeed, produce the sense in human beings--when it is authentic--that there is no guilt or shame in sexual matters.  The procreative impulse has its origin in the etheric, and the cleansing of the etheric sphere of impulses that, in the past, have served to degrade sexual activity has been proceeding for more than seventy years.  But a sense of innocence in sexual affairs is rapidly turned to the service of the very opposition to that innocence when, under the influence of a materialistic worldview, what was formerly tabu becomes “no problem.”  The attitude towards sexual matters that takes hold when there is no moral halt arising from a sense of shame and when the conception of such matters has become completely materalistic--that they are all a matter of “biochemistry”--is one of disregard for the high spiritual origin of such impulses.  This leads, in turn, to the degradation of sexual behavior by its trivialization.  In this way, the progress that has flowed from the impulses radiated by Christ in the etheric is rapidly being turned against Him.

Without the presence in mainstream culture of a concept of the etheric, there is no way for souls incarnating outside of anthroposophical circles to gain an awareness of these developments, and to protect themselves from them.

Gabriel, who has been addressed in this book in terms of his influence upon man’s moral development, is understood by Muslims to have been the inspirer of their Prophet Mohammed’s mission.  A people filled with moral passion will always, in the long run, defeat one motivated by baser concerns.

The mission of an initiation science for the 21st  century, heralded by 9/11, must include most centrally the task to disseminate a conception of the etheric that will permit moral intuitions to arise, especially in youth, regarding the holiness of procreative impulses.  Michael’s moral “stance” is not inherently different than Gabriel’s or that of any divine being:  what is different is his approach to inspiring moral consciousness.  He waits upon man’s pursuit of the kind of consciousness development that can become the basis of further moral development man then undertakes freely; and, for every three steps of this moral development, a further one towards initiate consciousness becomes possible.

Whether the coming hundred years will be characterized by the kind of victory of Michael over his opponents that was predicted by Steiner as the widespread acceptance of anthroposophical conceptions in the world, or by a further delay in this victory and the consequent undermining of world karma as foreseen by the higher beings whose role it is to administer this, depends, as it always has, upon the will that can be mustered by servants of the Christ impulse in Michaelic form to cultivate the moral attributes of control of thinking, control of the will, equanimity, positivity, and openness, so that the hard truths that have to be faced in a world governed, now, in an occult sense in great measure by the work of millions of souls who have attached themselves to what L. Ron Hubbard and Sun Myung Moon have brought as contributions to humanity, and by what is being radiated out from the centers of Islam in the world, can be faced in a way that can, in turn, lead to truly Michaelic activity on behalf of that cosmopolitan civilization that, alone, can embrace them all and much more beyond.

May what is true in what you have read fire your soul for further truth; and may what may be in error pass through your spirit without harming it...

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*The author is himself a representative of the GLBT community, whose bisexuality has been known to those closest to him since he was sixteen years old.  What is stated here about homosexuality as the reflection of a moral decline is not a statement about homosexuality per se, but about the form of thinking and willing that, under the influence of powerful feelings, has permitted it to take its place in modern culture as a “competitor” with authentically procreative activity, rather than as a treasured companion to such.

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