Light, Page One

Contents

Introduction

Those who were blessed to witness, on the mountain, the Ascension of Christ heard "two men" in "white robes" say that Jesus would "come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1,10-11). These are the same "two men" who appeared "in dazzling apparel" to the women at the tomb (Lk 24,4; Jn 20,12). In The Burning Bush we saw that these "two men" were the etheric and astral bodies of Jesus (pp. 414, 447 and 449). Through these bodies, remaining in the etheric and astral domains of the Earth, these followers were enabled to "see" and "hear" a spiritual event of great moment.¹ A window into spiritual reality was briefly opened to them, as witnesses, for the day when this could be more fully understood. That day, only now beginning to dawn, can evolve into full understanding only when "cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without men, and the land is utterly desolate" (Is 6,9-12).² The Earth is already dying as the Prodigal Son begins the long return journey home. The Gospel accounts of the Resurrection appearances, the forty days, and the Ascension can be reconciled and understood only in the light of Koenig's divine perception set out in The Burning Bush (p. 506). We saw there in the "Second Coming" and "Lord of Karma" essays how the Christ, who had "gone to the Father" (Jn 14,28; 16,10,28 and 20,17) in those early days, was returning to reveal himself again through those "bodies," that is, "in the same way as you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1,11). The "fish" that were partaken after the Resurrection were of the same character as those in the divine "feedings," symbols (signs; see Jn 6,14) of the Age of the Fish (i.e., two fish, Jn 6,9, the sign of Pisces), our present Cultural Era that began with the Renaissance, when the human spiritual soul would begin to "see" the Christ returned in the etheric world.³

In the last essay, we saw what it meant that Christ "came to cast fire upon the earth" (Lk 12,49). We cannot begin to understand the meaning of light until we grasp firmly the organizational structure of creation, the four ethers and their earthly counterparts, the four elements, expressed not only in classical Greek but also in the Old Testament, condescendingly disregarded in the scientific revolution of the last few centuries.

From a human standpoint, no more arrogant statement has ever been uttered than the one from Christ's lips in John's Gospel, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me" (Jn 14,6). Until it can be considered in the light of this organizational structure of creation, schematized in the chart reproduced in the Creation essay from I-22, it cannot be understood as the one and only return path of the Prodigal Son in its reascent to the Father. The same creative scheme is set out in the life, word and light expressed in the prologue of John's Gospel (see its discussion in The Burning Bush, pp. 438, 448 and 533). Every human soul, and indeed all creation (Eph 1,9-10; Rom 8,19-23), must traverse it to escape the eventual abyss.

Ironically, that period in human spiritual evolution in the eighteenth century that is known as "the Enlightenment" coincided with the rise of the documentary hypothesis of the Old Testament (1 Interp 134; 1 NIB 107) and the increasing certainty that the first three chapters of Genesis present not a single, sequential story of creation, but two different accounts, the second one (Gen 2,4b-3) being the earlier (the so-called Yahwist, or "J," account) and the first (Gen 1,1-2,4a, the so-called Elohist, or "E," account) being the later. By recent decades this understanding became almost universally accepted among Christian scholars, though major cracks in the dike are certainly now appearing.⁴ The Creation essay above shows how the documentary hypothesis fails to comprehend the nature of the creative process through the etheric conditions into the material.

And nowhere is the lack of understanding more significant than in the case of Gen 1,3-5:

³ And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

Recall what was said in the Creation essay about the first six days of creation. Nothing that we would today recognize as matter came into existence during those six days. The fission between light and darkness in the first day was in the contemplation of the Elohim, the Spirits of Form. The fire and light ethers were separated, thus creating the physical form of air (gas). But recall the difference between the spiritual physical principle and its condition when in the mineral-physical state. The physical principles of form exist even before they are filled with matter (see fn 1). So the eye, had it existed during the "first day" of creation could not have beheld anything, not even the dome of heaven, illumined by light, for atmosphere is matter. Matter enters the creative process of Earth evolution commencing with Gen 2,4b.

As every scientist knows, light itself is not visible to our physical eye until it falls upon matter in either solid, liquid or atmospheric (gaseous) form. And even then the light itself is not visible, but only the matter it illuminates.

To then comprehend the transition from the purely etheric, form-creating conditions of Gen 1 to the materializing conditions of Gen 2, we must go back to what was said in the "Fire" essay (in its section called "Heat and the Other Ethers"). In the tabulations there, heat is shown between the higher realm of "materializing, dematerializing; dark, light" and the lower gaseous realm of "rarefying, densifying." And it was said, against the mechanical theory, that "heat is indeed motion, but in the sense that there is a tendency to create material existence and then let it disappear again. . . . It is a vortex continually manifesting in such a way that what appears physically is annihilated by what appears as the spiritual—a continuous interplay—a sucking up of what is in space by the entity that is not."

Later in the same section of that essay we were led by our observations to see that before the separations ("fissions") taking place in the etheric world in the "creations" of Genesis 1, the realms of the gaseous, fluid and solid, now existing only in matter, were then in union with their related etheric condition. While still in this etheric union, as we saw in the Creation essay, Gen 1,3-5 tells of the creation of the sentient soul (the portion of the human soul that would later relate to the sense body in perceiving physical light; see I-9). When the actual separation of the light ether from its related gaseous condition took place, air was breathed into the living sentient soul as described in Gen 2,7.⁵

And today science has come to the point of recognizing that, just as heat is a continual interplay between what is in space and what is not, something of the same character is to be found in what we know as light. Lawrence W. Fagg, in his recent Electromagnetism and the Sacred (EMS), tells us that the "virtual photon," a phenomenon shown by quantum theory to exist though it cannot be observed, is the workhorse of all electromagnetism that pervades all material existence. Related to the virtual photon is what he calls a "virtual particle," an electron-positron pair that emerges as mass and then disappears from observation. In language similar to what Steiner used to describe the nature of heat, Fagg says (p. 53), "It is as if the particle pairs 'borrow' energy in the form of mass [from Einstein's famous formula] from the vacuum but must pass it back quickly, and the more the mass-energy that is 'borrowed,' the more quickly it must be paid back." We shall look more fully at this later, noting for now only that science has recently come to conclusions in relation to light that articulate quite precisely what Steiner said early in the century, namely, that light is the realm characterized by "materializing, dematerializing."

If we stand in awe of the nature of light, we are in good company. In 1951, a mere four years before his death at seventy-six years of age, Einstein said, "All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself."⁶