Module 2 of 2023
Participants on this module
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The second Module of 2023 was held on the weekend of 12 to 14 May 2023. The theme for the year is:
Cultivating a Relationship with the Etheric Christ
The theme of the weekend was:
The Christ-Impulse in Us
Africa Seminary Module 2 of 2023 - The Christ-Impulse in Us
The Christ-Impulse in Us by Rev. Michaël Merle
reported by John-Peter Gernaat
The second module of the Africa Seminary on the theme of Cultivating a relationship to the Etheric Christ was held from Friday 12 to Sunday 14 May and had the specific theme of The Christ-Impulse in Us. The opening talk given by Rev. Michaël Merle on the theme of the module is reported here.
This module, together with the next two modules, will deepen the theme introduced by Rev. Jonah Evans, co-director of North American Seminary based in Toronto, Canada. He introduced three main themes: the Christ-Impulse in us, the theme of this module; the encounter with Christ in life, which will be theme of the module in August; the way of communion in and with Christ, which will be the theme of the module in November.
The prospectus for this year says that this module will “explore the inner aspect and development of the consciousness soul”. The term: ‘the consciousness soul’ as used in Anthroposophy will be explored in the course of this module at hand of the seven activities of the ‘I’, which was something that Jonah introduced in February. The seven activities of the ‘I’ in us are the seven archetypal activities of the Christ Jesus.
In this first talk the aim is to establish a foundation towards understanding of the consciousness soul. This talk will introduce the ‘mystery of the ‘I’’. How does the ‘I’ work?
We start by establishing a picture of the human being. We understand ourselves as having come to this earth, possibly with a mission or purpose, from the spiritual world and have incarnated onto the earth. At birth it was clear that we had a physical body (see image below). Everything that we were going to experience, whether these were inner experiences or experiences of the outer world, were going to be at hand of this physical body. This body is central to our earth experience. We come to experience ourselves as having an inner life; we sense there is a life in us. We have our thoughts and feelings, something that stirs in us. Something that stirs in me may not stir in another person even when both people are in the same location, experiencing the same outer sensations. We wish to describe this inner reality. It is not the body. We have a sense that it could and would exist outside the body, or not confined only to the body. This inner life is rich. It has thoughts and feelings, expressions and ideas. We can call this the life of soul. It has something to do with the inner experience of life. This brings us to the idea that there is life here. This body is not dead, it is alive. We therefore come to understand that the experience of body has something to do with a physical body and it has something to do with life. The soul has something to do with life, but it is a life that finds expression; a life that has the ability to connect and to find itself in relationship to itself, to others, to the world, to ideas, and to an experience of the divine. The soul is connected to the experience of life and also to the experience of relationships. Then, we have a sense – because we have come from another reality, the reality of the spirit into this earthly life – that we carry with us something that is essentially ‘us’. It is not our body; it is not the inner experiences of thoughts and feelings; it is essentially ‘me’. I come to understand ‘me’ and I come to relate to ’me’ through the life body and through the relational experience, but the ‘me’ remains. Except that in English we refer to ourselves, when the subject of a sentence, as ‘I’. This is not an abstract idea of ‘I’, but rather a sense of an organisation of myself that we refer to as ‘I’. We will call it ‘I-organisation’. The relational experience and the I-organisation relate to something beyond the soul; something we can consider eternal; something that was, is and will be. We will call it spirit. We can also refer to it as essence, because it is the essence of ‘me’. This essence of ‘me’ will undergo transformations. It is going to come into a body, and it is going to leave a body, but it is going to be. The body, we know, will cease to exist at some point, it will disintegrate. Biology teaches us that our body has been disintegrating from birth. It disintegrates and it builds up. At some point the disintegration becomes greater than the building up. In the first seven years of life the building up is huge and will never be as intense again. We may be attached to our body, but we know that when the body disintegrates it does not negate the spirit essence.
The second module of the Africa Seminary on the theme of Cultivating a relationship to the Etheric Christ was held from Friday 12 to Sunday 14 May and had the specific theme of The Christ-Impulse in Us. The opening talk given by Rev. Michaël Merle on the theme of the module is reported here.
This module, together with the next two modules, will deepen the theme introduced by Rev. Jonah Evans, co-director of North American Seminary based in Toronto, Canada. He introduced three main themes: the Christ-Impulse in us, the theme of this module; the encounter with Christ in life, which will be theme of the module in August; the way of communion in and with Christ, which will be the theme of the module in November.
The prospectus for this year says that this module will “explore the inner aspect and development of the consciousness soul”. The term: ‘the consciousness soul’ as used in Anthroposophy will be explored in the course of this module at hand of the seven activities of the ‘I’, which was something that Jonah introduced in February. The seven activities of the ‘I’ in us are the seven archetypal activities of the Christ Jesus.
In this first talk the aim is to establish a foundation towards understanding of the consciousness soul. This talk will introduce the ‘mystery of the ‘I’’. How does the ‘I’ work?
We start by establishing a picture of the human being. We understand ourselves as having come to this earth, possibly with a mission or purpose, from the spiritual world and have incarnated onto the earth. At birth it was clear that we had a physical body (see image below). Everything that we were going to experience, whether these were inner experiences or experiences of the outer world, were going to be at hand of this physical body. This body is central to our earth experience. We come to experience ourselves as having an inner life; we sense there is a life in us. We have our thoughts and feelings, something that stirs in us. Something that stirs in me may not stir in another person even when both people are in the same location, experiencing the same outer sensations. We wish to describe this inner reality. It is not the body. We have a sense that it could and would exist outside the body, or not confined only to the body. This inner life is rich. It has thoughts and feelings, expressions and ideas. We can call this the life of soul. It has something to do with the inner experience of life. This brings us to the idea that there is life here. This body is not dead, it is alive. We therefore come to understand that the experience of body has something to do with a physical body and it has something to do with life. The soul has something to do with life, but it is a life that finds expression; a life that has the ability to connect and to find itself in relationship to itself, to others, to the world, to ideas, and to an experience of the divine. The soul is connected to the experience of life and also to the experience of relationships. Then, we have a sense – because we have come from another reality, the reality of the spirit into this earthly life – that we carry with us something that is essentially ‘us’. It is not our body; it is not the inner experiences of thoughts and feelings; it is essentially ‘me’. I come to understand ‘me’ and I come to relate to ’me’ through the life body and through the relational experience, but the ‘me’ remains. Except that in English we refer to ourselves, when the subject of a sentence, as ‘I’. This is not an abstract idea of ‘I’, but rather a sense of an organisation of myself that we refer to as ‘I’. We will call it ‘I-organisation’. The relational experience and the I-organisation relate to something beyond the soul; something we can consider eternal; something that was, is and will be. We will call it spirit. We can also refer to it as essence, because it is the essence of ‘me’. This essence of ‘me’ will undergo transformations. It is going to come into a body, and it is going to leave a body, but it is going to be. The body, we know, will cease to exist at some point, it will disintegrate. Biology teaches us that our body has been disintegrating from birth. It disintegrates and it builds up. At some point the disintegration becomes greater than the building up. In the first seven years of life the building up is huge and will never be as intense again. We may be attached to our body, but we know that when the body disintegrates it does not negate the spirit essence.
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In Anthroposophy the image above depicts what is referred to as the three-fold human being (on the left) and the four-fold human being (on the right). In Anthroposophical terminology life is referred to as the etheric. Here we came into a relationship with the theme of this year’s modules: “a relationship to the Etheric Christ”. One could say: “a relationship to the living formative force of Christ in the reality of earth existence”. This would not be a bad translation of the ‘Etheric Christ’. The relational experience is a reference to our astral experience. The I-organisation is still sometimes, although less so as time goes on, referred to as the Ego.
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This is the human being. It was necessary to establish this because what comes next will relate to this picture.
Our focus now turns to the ‘I’-organisation. The ‘I’-organisation, the Ego, that we have and work with, that allows us to say “I am” is essential to our experience of life here on the earth. Through the experience of self-identification, we become connected to a name. This name may be the name given at birth, or it may be a name we chose ourselves, or even a name of convenience because of a language barrier. We are also able to self-identify with characteristics peculiar to our lives, for example, being a father or a mother, a son or a daughter. None of these identifiers are entirely unique to us; whereas the act of identifying as ’I am’ is unique, in that no one can say it of another.
The ‘I’-organisation is a complex organisation. There is a sense of me that realises that my ‘I’-organisation is not all of my essential being. It is only a part of my essential being. In many different paths, philosophies, religions people refer to an ideal version of themselves. This is something that may, for them, shine in the future and guides them. We often refer to this as the ‘higher self’ or ‘higher I’: my best self that we are not able to realise on a daily basis. We constantly fall short of the ideal, but we find ourselves striving towards it. We live in a relationship to this ‘higher I’.
Looking at the diagram below: we speak about the earthly ‘I’ that is incarnated (in the body). The reality is this was not always the case. The earthly ‘I’ was present, but it was experienced as accompanying us, but not as being in us. This was the experience from early biblical times to the incarnation on earth of Christ in Jesus. The earthly ‘I’ was experienced as being a companion to our experience of live, not as being integrated in the experience of life. This is very difficult for us, today, to conceive. We have an inkling of the experience when we are children and youth. The ‘I’ is incarnated but we have not yet come to full terms with this reality. As children we may find ourselves musing as to who it really was who had climbed the tree, for example. The ‘I’ is incarnated but, as children, we have not yet fully realised it. This is why, as a child and a young person, we need outer instruction. There was a time in history when we needed laws, spiritual laws. These laws acted as guidance to what the human being should and should not do. As with most laws and instructions, there were many more ‘you should not’ than there were ‘you should’. We needed the instruction because we did not have the inner authority. We had a capacity to follow, but not yet an inner authority. When the inner authority is incarnated, we become the author of our life. (These words have the same root.) Through this authority we are trying to relate our earthly ‘I’ to an aspect of our essential self that has not incarnated, our higher ‘I’; the picture of the best part of ourselves, the true ‘I’ which is who we are. Rudolf Steiner says that our guardian angel holds our higher ‘I’ in his being like a mother holding a child in her womb. Our higher ‘I’ is cared for, and it is for this reason that we have a relationship with our guardian angel. Our higher ‘I’s, each one of our ‘I’s, are in a relationship with what we call the True ‘I’, the picture of the ‘I’: the ‘I’ as a created, conceived ideal. The True ‘I’ is sometimes referred to as the Christ ‘I’. This is not the Christ; it is the Christ ‘I’. It is that ideal ‘I’ that is the picture of God, the image and likeness of God, so much so that it looks like God, and it reflects God. It is the True ‘I’ of the creative conception at the very beginning of the human journey. And the creative principle in the Divine, that which creates, that which is always in the process of creating, is the Christ. Therefore, one can say that the True ‘I’ must create a relationship with the Christ.
This is not yet the mystery of the ‘I’. How does the earthly ‘I’ manage to create a relationship with the higher ‘I’ so that the higher ‘I’ can develop a relationship with the True ‘I’ and the True ‘I’ to the Christ? Because the relationship that needs to be developed between the higher ‘I’ and the True ‘I’ and the True ‘I’ and the Christ occurs in the spiritual world, we can maybe trust that it knows how to happen. But how does the earthly ‘I’ incarnated on the earthly plane manage all of this? Because eventually we want the earthly ‘I’ to be a perfect reflection and manifestation of the higher ‘I’. Because then the higher ‘I’ can be a perfect reflection of the True ‘I’ and True ‘I’ of the Christ. This is an integration that will occur in times to come. How does this happen, especially as the experience of the incarnated ‘I’ is such a recent experience? By recent we mean approximately 2000 years, since the event of Pentecost. When our ‘I’ became incarnated on the earth it was gifted with a seed that is ever more growing into a reality; evermore a reality in the past 500 years and even more so in the last 100 years. It is the gift of the Christ-in-us. The very thing that we are trying to aspire to connect to gifts us with the seed for that connection. It is the living Christ in us that awakens something. It is the Christ impulse that waits for us, as it will not act unless we work with it. It will not take over because if it were to take over the entire picture below would collapse. Then the ‘I’ would be obliterated, and Christ would be in control.
Our focus now turns to the ‘I’-organisation. The ‘I’-organisation, the Ego, that we have and work with, that allows us to say “I am” is essential to our experience of life here on the earth. Through the experience of self-identification, we become connected to a name. This name may be the name given at birth, or it may be a name we chose ourselves, or even a name of convenience because of a language barrier. We are also able to self-identify with characteristics peculiar to our lives, for example, being a father or a mother, a son or a daughter. None of these identifiers are entirely unique to us; whereas the act of identifying as ’I am’ is unique, in that no one can say it of another.
The ‘I’-organisation is a complex organisation. There is a sense of me that realises that my ‘I’-organisation is not all of my essential being. It is only a part of my essential being. In many different paths, philosophies, religions people refer to an ideal version of themselves. This is something that may, for them, shine in the future and guides them. We often refer to this as the ‘higher self’ or ‘higher I’: my best self that we are not able to realise on a daily basis. We constantly fall short of the ideal, but we find ourselves striving towards it. We live in a relationship to this ‘higher I’.
Looking at the diagram below: we speak about the earthly ‘I’ that is incarnated (in the body). The reality is this was not always the case. The earthly ‘I’ was present, but it was experienced as accompanying us, but not as being in us. This was the experience from early biblical times to the incarnation on earth of Christ in Jesus. The earthly ‘I’ was experienced as being a companion to our experience of live, not as being integrated in the experience of life. This is very difficult for us, today, to conceive. We have an inkling of the experience when we are children and youth. The ‘I’ is incarnated but we have not yet come to full terms with this reality. As children we may find ourselves musing as to who it really was who had climbed the tree, for example. The ‘I’ is incarnated but, as children, we have not yet fully realised it. This is why, as a child and a young person, we need outer instruction. There was a time in history when we needed laws, spiritual laws. These laws acted as guidance to what the human being should and should not do. As with most laws and instructions, there were many more ‘you should not’ than there were ‘you should’. We needed the instruction because we did not have the inner authority. We had a capacity to follow, but not yet an inner authority. When the inner authority is incarnated, we become the author of our life. (These words have the same root.) Through this authority we are trying to relate our earthly ‘I’ to an aspect of our essential self that has not incarnated, our higher ‘I’; the picture of the best part of ourselves, the true ‘I’ which is who we are. Rudolf Steiner says that our guardian angel holds our higher ‘I’ in his being like a mother holding a child in her womb. Our higher ‘I’ is cared for, and it is for this reason that we have a relationship with our guardian angel. Our higher ‘I’s, each one of our ‘I’s, are in a relationship with what we call the True ‘I’, the picture of the ‘I’: the ‘I’ as a created, conceived ideal. The True ‘I’ is sometimes referred to as the Christ ‘I’. This is not the Christ; it is the Christ ‘I’. It is that ideal ‘I’ that is the picture of God, the image and likeness of God, so much so that it looks like God, and it reflects God. It is the True ‘I’ of the creative conception at the very beginning of the human journey. And the creative principle in the Divine, that which creates, that which is always in the process of creating, is the Christ. Therefore, one can say that the True ‘I’ must create a relationship with the Christ.
This is not yet the mystery of the ‘I’. How does the earthly ‘I’ manage to create a relationship with the higher ‘I’ so that the higher ‘I’ can develop a relationship with the True ‘I’ and the True ‘I’ to the Christ? Because the relationship that needs to be developed between the higher ‘I’ and the True ‘I’ and the True ‘I’ and the Christ occurs in the spiritual world, we can maybe trust that it knows how to happen. But how does the earthly ‘I’ incarnated on the earthly plane manage all of this? Because eventually we want the earthly ‘I’ to be a perfect reflection and manifestation of the higher ‘I’. Because then the higher ‘I’ can be a perfect reflection of the True ‘I’ and True ‘I’ of the Christ. This is an integration that will occur in times to come. How does this happen, especially as the experience of the incarnated ‘I’ is such a recent experience? By recent we mean approximately 2000 years, since the event of Pentecost. When our ‘I’ became incarnated on the earth it was gifted with a seed that is ever more growing into a reality; evermore a reality in the past 500 years and even more so in the last 100 years. It is the gift of the Christ-in-us. The very thing that we are trying to aspire to connect to gifts us with the seed for that connection. It is the living Christ in us that awakens something. It is the Christ impulse that waits for us, as it will not act unless we work with it. It will not take over because if it were to take over the entire picture below would collapse. Then the ‘I’ would be obliterated, and Christ would be in control.
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The Christ impulse in us makes it possible for us to begin this process, that is the mystery of the ‘I’. We can now possibly understand the statement of St Paul when he says: “not I, but Christ in me” as being: “Not the higher ‘I’, not the higher True ‘I’, but the living Christ in my earthly ‘I’, in me”. So, it is not my higher ‘I’ that takes charge, the source of the work is not my higher ‘I’, but Christ in my earthly ‘I’. “Not I, but Christ in me.” Therefore, it is not me aspiring to be the best higher self that I can be, but Christ in my earthly ‘I’ making it possible for me to find my connection to the higher ‘I’. The higher ‘I’ does not try to take over, my earthly ‘I’ must aspire to that connection. So that it can put me in the right alignment, I have to be receptive to what it can instruct because the higher ‘I’ at this point in our evolution is our companion, held by the guardian angel and it instructs the earthly ‘I’ how to be. How does the earthly ‘I’ even know how to hear the higher ‘I’, how to cooperate with it how to work with it? It is the Christ impulse, the Christ-in-me that makes this possible. All activities of the ‘I’ are activities of the Christ. In the final picture of the human being the ‘I’ is no longer there, it is now everywhere because it has taken hold of the physical, the etheric, and the astral and transformed them and, like Christ, it will have self-sacrificed.
With this picture, that, hopefully, is helpful in understanding the mysteries of the ‘I’, we will now look at the mysteries of the ‘I’ in the soul, because that is the inner life. The world of the soul comprises thinking, feeling and willing. Rudolf Steiner gave a picture of how the will shows itself in the human being. In the body the will manifests as instinct, see the table below. In the etheric life body will manifests as drive. We see this manifested for example in long distance athletes who drive themselves to complete an event. In the astral body the will appears as desire. Desires are the things that fascinate us, the things we want but don't really need. One can motivate the will in the etheric body by using the ‘stick’, or one can choose to motivate the will in the astral body by creating desire, the ‘carrot’. The ‘I’-organisation shows in the will as motivation. Only the individual can move themselves. If we want to understand something about our relationship (‘I’ relationship) with the Etheric Christ it must have something to do with motivation.
We move on and look at feeling. In the body feeling appears as reaction. In the etheric life body feeling appears as emotive response. On the astral level feelings, in the positive, would be refined feelings or in the negative they would be rough feelings. When the feeling life appears in the ‘I’-organisation it appears as a judgement or, a better word would be, discernment. Rev. Evelyn Capel described this discernment in the soul as harvesting. One takes in the harvest and decides what one discards and what one retains. We discern through our feeling and not through our thinking. A passage that very clearly defines discernment was written shortly after the birth of the consciousness soul. It appears in William Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice and is the passage that is known as ‘the quality of mercy’.
We will now consider thinking. In our body we have an enormous capacity to avoid harm; thinking in the body presents as reflex. The body does not need the capacities of brain thinking it has the ability to think for itself. The thinking that sits in the etheric life body is habitual thinking. It is the thinking that is related to my habits, the things I do without really thinking although they're not merely reflex actions. Consider for example the activity of making tea or preparing cereal for breakfast, we can do these activities on ‘autopilot’ without having to actively think about the activity. Thinking in the astral body occurs when we create, through thinking. We can conceive creatively or conceive destructively. Thinking in the ‘I’-organisation is consciousness. Without consciousness we cannot work with the Etheric Christ in the Age of the Consciousness Soul.
With this picture, that, hopefully, is helpful in understanding the mysteries of the ‘I’, we will now look at the mysteries of the ‘I’ in the soul, because that is the inner life. The world of the soul comprises thinking, feeling and willing. Rudolf Steiner gave a picture of how the will shows itself in the human being. In the body the will manifests as instinct, see the table below. In the etheric life body will manifests as drive. We see this manifested for example in long distance athletes who drive themselves to complete an event. In the astral body the will appears as desire. Desires are the things that fascinate us, the things we want but don't really need. One can motivate the will in the etheric body by using the ‘stick’, or one can choose to motivate the will in the astral body by creating desire, the ‘carrot’. The ‘I’-organisation shows in the will as motivation. Only the individual can move themselves. If we want to understand something about our relationship (‘I’ relationship) with the Etheric Christ it must have something to do with motivation.
We move on and look at feeling. In the body feeling appears as reaction. In the etheric life body feeling appears as emotive response. On the astral level feelings, in the positive, would be refined feelings or in the negative they would be rough feelings. When the feeling life appears in the ‘I’-organisation it appears as a judgement or, a better word would be, discernment. Rev. Evelyn Capel described this discernment in the soul as harvesting. One takes in the harvest and decides what one discards and what one retains. We discern through our feeling and not through our thinking. A passage that very clearly defines discernment was written shortly after the birth of the consciousness soul. It appears in William Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice and is the passage that is known as ‘the quality of mercy’.
We will now consider thinking. In our body we have an enormous capacity to avoid harm; thinking in the body presents as reflex. The body does not need the capacities of brain thinking it has the ability to think for itself. The thinking that sits in the etheric life body is habitual thinking. It is the thinking that is related to my habits, the things I do without really thinking although they're not merely reflex actions. Consider for example the activity of making tea or preparing cereal for breakfast, we can do these activities on ‘autopilot’ without having to actively think about the activity. Thinking in the astral body occurs when we create, through thinking. We can conceive creatively or conceive destructively. Thinking in the ‘I’-organisation is consciousness. Without consciousness we cannot work with the Etheric Christ in the Age of the Consciousness Soul.
It is out of our motivation and discernment and consciousness that we can develop a relationship with the Etheric Christ; to the living Christ as an impulse in us. An impulse that allows us to become, like Christ, a wounded healer, the witness, a disciple, an overflowing cup.
The mystery of the ‘I’ is that it comes to know itself. Rudolf Steiner speaks about the sixteen-year-old, that they don't just want to know how it works, they want to know how you know, and how they can know how it works. It is about knowing and trusting that the knowledge on how it works is true. This is entering into a consciousness question. We're looking for a level of confirmation within ourselves and this is the beginning of developing consciousness, and what it means to be in the consciousness soul.
The mystery of the ‘I’ is that it comes to know itself. Rudolf Steiner speaks about the sixteen-year-old, that they don't just want to know how it works, they want to know how you know, and how they can know how it works. It is about knowing and trusting that the knowledge on how it works is true. This is entering into a consciousness question. We're looking for a level of confirmation within ourselves and this is the beginning of developing consciousness, and what it means to be in the consciousness soul.
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