Second Coming, Page 7

We can now return to the concept of moving water, which pervades the Old Testament (e.g., Gen 2,10-14; Ps 1,3), also John’s Gospel. Christ tells the woman at the still well that he will give her “living water . . . which will become a spring in [her] welling up to eternal life” (Jn 4,10,14). Then in Jn 5,7 we see that the lame man at the pool cannot be healed until the water is made to move (how like what must happen with the “lotus flowers”). Later, Jesus appears to his disciples walking on the water (Jn 6,19, as well as all of the synoptics). And when his side was punctured, “blood and water” flowed out (Jn 19,34), both representative of the etheric body; also, the Ego first made its entrance into the human being’s body through the blood. Consider as well that Moses came to Israel on the water (Ex 2,3-10), and while he was on the water the etheric body he had received from Zarathustra was illuminated (see “Spiritual Economy”). So also Zarathustra, in his many preparatory incarnations, came “on the water” (see The Book With Fourteen Seals [BFS]; also NHL, “The Apocalypse of Adam”). Other passages involving water come often to mind. Surely the part that water plays in bringing spiritual revelation in scripture can be seen to be full of deeper meaning considering that it is the esoteric symbol for the etheric body, which alone can begin to reveal the spiritual world to the human being. In a later volume, under “Storm/Water Launching,” we will see how all the Biblical episodes of launching out upon water seem to relate directly to the stages the human soul traverses in the soul and spirit worlds between lives (see I-33).

In WW, Lect. 8, Steiner says, “What really do the blood circulation and the heart mean to us? They are the ether-world condensed, they are the densified forces of the etheric world!. . . The important and mysterious feature of Earth evolution is not only that this densification took place,. . . but that as regards each of our systems of organs in Earth evolution an impulse entered [i.e., via the Christ] whereby what was once etheric and had become physical, is once more dissolved, is changed back again into the ether.” (Can we here but marvel that the etheric, or life, body is represented by the “Blood,” which Moses also saw as being the “life” of all flesh? See Gen 9,4; Lev 17,11,14.)

Consider this passage from RCE, Lect. 9:

When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the clairvoyant eye, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart toward the head. If we wish to sketch this schematically, we must draw the region of the heart here and show the continuous streamings from there to the brain, flowing in the head around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland. (Click here to see image)

These rays of light stream from the heart to the head and flow around the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is continually dissolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance that streams upward toward the head and flows glimmeringly around the pineal gland. This process, the etherization of the blood, can be shown in the human being throughout his waking life. It is different now, however, in the sleeping human being. When a human being sleeps, the occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart. These streams, however, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical and etheric bodies . . . reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals.

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular coloring of the streams that flow into human beings during sleep. . . . At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake, the intellectual element streams upward from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downward from above. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality and an outstreaming intellectuality, a peaceful expansion of glimmering light appears in the region of the pineal gland. This gland is almost surrounded by a small sea of light in the moment between waking and sleeping. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man’s moral character is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the region of the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—one from the macrocosm, the other from the microcosm.