Save as PDFIn order to place what has been written here into a geometric form let me share the following:
From this diagram it can be seen that the petition is not one that necessarily takes one into the future. The diagram suggests the here and now in the life of the striving human being. Let us try to accept that this prayer asks that we can in our present circumstance strive to bring the future of the Lord’s Prayer into the here and now. It is within the flow of our day, of the present, that we seek to strive. To bring the future to the present, uniting the past with the present, this is initiation. This is not only an act in a cult, but in daily life – in many acts.
The bringing of the heavens to earth took place. This we can learn from a spiritual science. It is the Christ who performed this deed in his activities at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha when the blood flowed into the earth. However, that actual lifting of the earth and man into the lower astral world, the lower kingdom of heaven, this I would say was a Resurrection deed. This is the way I would try to put it. In resurrective process, there is not only a raising of the soul out of the body, a lifting of the ether out of the head, but there is a raising of the remainder of the human organism. At the same time, the earth accompanies this process. The reversal here is not only a lifting of the soul into the spiritual, a loosening of the ether, but an actual transformation of the physical into a higher state. The physical is the physical of the earth and man, both. It is not atomic explosions that are asked for, but a working with the earth and substances so that a new substance, a new earth substance can come forth. The same can be said for the human organism.
The changes in substance we can think of as a spiritualization and etherization of substance. We can think on the practicing of Biodynamic agriculture with Preparations, the use of potentized remedies or even coming to a meal, where there is not just the usual revelation of our lowest life. This change in substance we can consider to be the creation of new substance as can occur within man since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the earth, the deed of the Christ has brought about the spiritualization of matter, physical matter, in radioactive decay. This Rudolf Steiner indicated to Johannes Walter Stein by word of mouth. With man, the Christ leaves it up to man to first come to the loosening of the etheric of the head, so that in truth man can come to the spirit in freedom, and then he, man, can work for the spiritualization of the earth and mankind.
A lecture in the Karma of Vocation spells out the kind of life, religious life, that can be undertaken today without an outer formal cult and ritual. My impression is that this cycle gives indications for man to work for the freeing of the human soul-spirit and the spiritualization of our earth evolution. What is indicated might be stated as an ensouling of our deeds. It takes the karma of vocation to do this, however. In the lecture cycle on vocation, Rudolf Steiner indicates that our deeds, our vocational deeds, lay the foundation for future evolutions, of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. This means that something of the future is brought to the here and now. The future is brought to the present. It is these evolutions in the here and now, that makes for a seed process in the present.
As the future is seeded, the past has to be redeemed. There has been a Fall. This means that the original intentions of the spiritual world were taken too far into the material world, and this has to be corrected. Man has to reunite with the original intentions and deeds of the spiritual world. This redemption and union with the spiritual beings who brought evolution into our present circumstances, can be called religion, this means to re-unite. For this to happen certain types of activity and certain deeds need to take place. These deeds and activities are pointed to in this cycle of lectures, Karma of‘ Vocation. Because of the Fall, religious practices have to lead to redemption, have to include the redemption of those spiritual beings who went through the Fall before man. These are the fallen elemental beings who have come to be invested with the forces of electricity, magnetism and gravity, and perhaps information. These fallen spiritual beings have to be released, be redeemed, so that these elementals which invest man, can be liberated. Just as these elemental beings invest the states of matter, they also give matter its purely subearthly quality in our existence as a physical human being. In religious life of the present, it is necessary to work for this liberation so that the true form of man can be maintained. Here we are dealing with fallen etheric beings and substances, which need release from this fall though our deeds. The redemption of these beings means that it is not only man whose future we are working for, but the earth with which the Christ has united Himself and the elemental beings on earth and in man.