Christianity As Mystical Fact 5/12: Rudolf Steiner - The Mystery Wisdom of Egypt

Jeff and I continue on our voyage of discovery into Rudolf Steiner's transformational book "Christianity As Mystical Fact: And the Mysteries of Antiquity". We look the myth of Osiris as well as aspects of Buddha's and Christ's experiences in relation to the initiation process.
GA 8. rsarchive.org/Books/GA008/Eng...
During the fall and winter of 1901-02, Steiner gave a series of lectures called “Christianity as Mystical Fact” to members of the Theosophical Society. The lectures were rewritten and issued as a book later that year. They mark a watershed in the development of Western esotericism. Steiner wrote of the idea behind his book:
“The title Christianity as Mystical Fact was one I gave to this work eight years ago, when I gathered together the content of lectures given in 1902. It was meant to indicate the special approach adopted in the book. Its theme is not just the mystical side of Christianity in a historical presentation. It was meant to show, from the standpoint of a mystical awareness, how Christianity came into being.
“Behind this was the idea that spiritual happenings were factors in the emergence of Christianity, which could only be observed from such a point of view. It is for the book itself to demonstrate that, by ‘mystical,’ I do not in any way imply a vague intuition rather than strict scientific argument. In many circles, mysticism is understood as just that, and therefore it is distinguished from the concerns of all ‘genuine’ science.
“In this book, however, I use the term to mean a ‘presentation of spiritual reality’―a reality accessible only to a knowledge drawn from the sources of spiritual life itself. Anyone who denies the possibility of such knowledge in principle will find its contents hard to comprehend; any reader who accepts the idea that mysticism may coexist with the clarity of the natural sciences, may acknowledge that the mystical aspect of Christianity must be described mystically.”
#osiris #initiation #plato #mysticism #christianmysticism #rudolfsteiner

[@theseventh7865]

21:50 thinking about the idea of experience after death (between a new birth), I was reading Man as Symphony and in it Steiner described the experience of the journey in the spiritual world. There is a devouring, all the "heavy heartedness" or impurity/sin is stripped away by the lower hierarchies, before we can travel into the higher hierarchies. And so I assume that if you had the light heart of the initiate or saint this experience would be less painful, you would not need to be devoured. But you would have had to experience disembodiment/ devouring in your life, death inside life, for that to be possible.
I'm guessing that once the understanding of I-ness came about, through the bodisatvas, the understanding of reincarnation could be developed. Steiner described in these lectures how when we descend back through the lower hierarchies, they fashion our new bodies out of what they stripped from us.

[@jeffbarney3584]

Yes dear Kate. This is what I was drawing on when speaking of the minor initiates using death rituals to access and hold the dead in attachment with the earth. That includes in my mind those whose thinking that has gone beyond material bounds but whose identity has not (Postmodernists). A sort of walking dead who have no epistemic creative traction as a self in an ontological field they either mistake as a version of the sense perceptible or as an abyss. That is the quiet desperation of a simulacrum or the violent fear-based desperation of identitatarian ideologies. The post modern narrative is an unwitting report back from across the threshold. If one wants to manipulate people one doesn't need the literal spectres and their attachments. Consciousness for many has already crossed the threshold without realization of self and an individualizing of the soul to orient to the necessary intimacies in the realm you speak of. Yet go forward we must as there is no turning back. What is called for is a global mystery school that recognizes that the hygiene you speak of is available now to both unburden the dead from their enslaveature to the earthly and the manipulations of the greedy AND to unburden the spiritual beings that would prefer we advance to their rank. The new Mysteries ushered in at the turning point in time are for all not just a few. Obviously there is multidimensional resistance to this communal awareness and so we see the symptomatic inversion in tribal group think as people cling to superficial identities. Which of course makes them as manipulatable as the dead who are unable to let go. This is why we have the zombie phenomena in pop culture among other such supra conscious expressions.