The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. The Sermon on the Mount: The Land of Shamballa

[ 1 ] The day before yesterday, a reference was made here to how humanity will face serious events at the present time. We will understand what this is all about when we look back and place our own time within the broader context of human evolution as a whole. Then we will be able to recall many things, both familiar and unfamiliar. You know that one of the most significant sayings uttered before the advent of Christ was the one that stated: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” These words are of profound significance because they indicate that something significant had taken place in the development of the soul at that time. A little more than 3,000 years had passed since that time we call the Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age. What, then, is the significance of this age? It is that epoch during which human beings, under normal circumstances, were dependent solely on what presented itself to the external senses and was accessible to the intellect—which is, after all, bound to the instrument of the brain. All of this could be experienced, known, and understood during the Dark Age of Kali Yuga. This Dark Age was preceded by another era in which human beings were not solely dependent on the external senses and the external intellect, but still retained, to a greater or lesser extent, memories of the ancient, dreamlike states that enabled them to connect with the spiritual world. Let us try to form a picture of this prehistoric period of humanity.

[ 2 ] Human beings could not only perceive the realms of minerals, plants, and animals—as well as themselves—within the physical human realm, but they could also perceive a divine world in a state between waking and sleeping. They then perceived themselves as the lowest link in that chain, as the lowest realm in the hierarchical sequence, with the angels, archangels, and so on above them. They knew this through their own experience, so that it would have been nonsense for them to deny this spiritual world, just as it would be equally nonsensical today to deny the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. However, it was not the case that human beings possessed only the knowledge that flowed to them from this realm; they also had the ability to allow themselves to be permeated by the forces of this realm of the spiritual world: they were then in ecstasy; their sense of self was suppressed, but the spiritual world literally flowed into them. Human beings therefore possessed not only knowledge and experience; when, for example, they were ill, they could attain refreshment and healing through ecstasy. Oriental wisdom referred to those ages in which human beings still had a direct connection to the spiritual worlds as: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, and Dvapara Yuga. In the latter, a direct insight into the spiritual worlds was no longer possible—only a memory, like that of an old man recalling his youth. Then the gates to the spiritual world were, as it were, closed. In normal states of consciousness, human beings could no longer communicate with the spiritual world. And the time came when human beings could turn toward the spiritual world only through long, rigorous preparation in the secret schools. During the Kali Yuga, something from the spiritual world would sometimes enter the physical world. But this usually did not come from the good powers; rather, it was typically of a demonic nature. In all the individuals described in the Gospels as afflicted with peculiar illnesses—which were called possession—these ailments can be attributed to demonic influences. In them we can recognize the influence of evil spiritual beings. The Lesser Kali Yuga began around 3000 B.C. and is characterized by the fact that, little by little, the gates to the spiritual world closed completely to normal consciousness, so that all knowledge had to be drawn from the sensory environment. If this had continued, humanity would have completely lost its connection to the spiritual world. Until then, humanity had still preserved some memories through tradition; but now it increasingly lost that connection as well. For even the teacher, though a custodian of tradition, could no longer speak directly to them about the spiritual world. The receptivity for this was no longer present. Humanity’s understanding extended more and more solely to the material realm.

[ 3 ] As this development progressed, human beings would not have been able to rediscover their connection to the spiritual world—even if they had sought to reestablish it—had something not happened from another source. And this happened because the divine being we refer to as Christ incarnated on the physical plane.

[ 4 ] In the past, human beings were able to elevate themselves to the level of spiritual beings. Now, however, these beings had to come very close to him, descending completely into his sphere, so that he could recognize them with his “I”-being. This moment was prophetically announced in ancient times. It was said that human beings would then be able to find their relationship to their God through and within their own “I.” But when this moment arrived, people had to be vigorously reminded that the promised time had truly come. The one who did this in the most powerful way was John the Baptist. Pointing out that the times had now changed, he said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” This was then pointed out in a similar way by Christ Jesus. The most significant indication, however, had taken place earlier through the baptisms in the Jordan, which John performed on many people, and through the teaching itself. But this alone would not have made the transformation possible. Rather, a number of people had to experience something in the spiritual world that would bring to life within them the conviction that something Divine was about to reveal itself. And this occurred through immersion in water. When a person is drowning, the connection between their etheric body and their physical body is loosened—in some cases even severed—and the person then experiences what is a sign of a new phase in the evolution of the worlds. And from this arises the powerful exhortation: Change the state of your souls, for the kingdoms of heaven are near! The state of soul through which you will enter into a relationship with the descended Christ is coming upon you. The times are fulfilled.

[ 5 ] Christ Jesus himself gave the most powerful teaching on the fulfillment of the ages in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. It was by no means a sermon to the people, for it is written: “When Christ saw the people, he went away and revealed himself to his disciples.” There Christ revealed to them, in broad terms, the following: In ancient times, a person could become filled with God through ecstasy; apart from his ego, he was blissful; he had a direct experience with the spiritual world, from which he could draw down spiritual powers and absorb healing forces. But now, said Christ Jesus to his disciples, the person who can become filled with God is the one who permeates himself with the impulse of God and Christ and who can rise up within this impulse as the “I.” In the past, only the one who was filled with the currents of the spiritual world could ascend to it; only such a one could be blessed as a person rich in spirit. That was the clairvoyant in the old sense, and such individuals were among the rarest of personalities. Most had become beggars in the spirit. Now, however, those who sought the kingdom of heaven within their “I” could find it. What happens in such a significant epoch of humanity always happens for the whole human being. Even if only a single member of their being is touched, all the others resonate as well. All the aspects of the human being—the physical body, the etheric body, the feeling soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, the consciousness soul, the “I,” and then the higher aspects of the soul—come to life through the proximity of the heavenly realms. These teachings are in harmony with the great teachings of primordial wisdom.

[ 6 ] In the past, when entering the spiritual world, the etheric body had to separate easily from the physical body; the physical body therefore had to be of a very special nature. Christ Jesus therefore said, referring to the physical body: “Blessed are the beggars”—that is, those who are poor in spirit—for if they properly develop this outer body, which is governed by the “I,” they will find the Kingdom of Heaven. He then said of the etheric body: In the past, people could be healed of physical and psychological suffering by ascending into the spiritual world through ecstasy. Now, when they become filled with God and divine, those who suffer can be healed and comforted and can find within themselves the source of that comfort. He went on to say of the astral body: In the past, those who harbored wild, stormy passions and impulses in their astral bodies had to be soothed by the inflow of equanimity, serenity, and purification from the spiritual-divine beings. —But now, through the power of their own “I” and under the influence of Christ, people are to find the strength to purify their astral bodies. The place where the astral body can be purified has now become the Earth. Therefore, this influence on the astral body had to be presented in such a way that it was said: Only those who acquire balance and moderation can be blessed and filled with God in their astral body, and to them will fall, as their lot and reward, all comfort and all that is good on Earth. - The fourth Beatitude refers to the sensitive soul. Whoever wishes to truly purify their sensitive soul and undergo a higher development will receive an influence of Christ within their I; they will feel a thirst in their heart for righteousness, become godly, and their I will be satisfied within itself. - The next link is the intellectual or emotional soul. The “I” slumbers dully within the sensory soul and only awakens in the intellectual or emotional soul. When we slumber with our “I” in the sensory soul, we cannot find in all people what makes them truly human: the “I.” Before a person has developed the “I” within themselves, they must allow their sensory soul to grow upward into higher worlds in order to perceive anything there. But when they develop within the intellectual or emotional soul, they can perceive the person next to them. With regard to all the members mentioned so far, we must remember what existed in earlier kingdoms. Only in the intellectual or emotional soul can the soul be filled with what flows from person to person. Something special must occur in the sentence structure of the fifth Beatitude; the subject and predicate must be the same, because the reference is to what the “I” develops within itself. This fifth sentence says: “Whoever develops compassion and mercy will find mercy.” This is a cross-check we are performing here on an occult document. Christ has promised everything with regard to the individual aspects of human nature; everything is true.

[ 7 ] The next sentence of the Beatitudes refers to the soul of consciousness. Through it, the “I” as pure “I” develops to such an extent that it can receive God within itself. Thus, when a person is able to ascend to this level, he can perceive the drop of the Divine—his “I”—within himself. Through his purified soul of consciousness, he can behold God. This sixth saying of the Beatitudes must therefore refer to the beholding of God. The outer physical expression of the “I” and the soul of consciousness is physical blood, and where this finds its most particular expression is in the human heart as the expression of the purified “I.” Christ therefore said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” This indicates, right down to this very intimacy, that our heart is the expression of the “I,” of the divine within the human being.

[ 8 ] Now let us ascend to that which is higher than the soul of consciousness: to Manas, Buddhi, and Atman. Modern humanity can certainly develop these three soul elements, but only in the distant future will it be able to develop the higher elements: the Spirit-Self, the Life-Spirit, and the Spirit-Man. These cannot yet live within the human being on their own; to do so, he must look up to higher beings. His Spirit-Self is not yet within him; it will only pour out over him later. He is not yet sufficiently developed to fully receive the Spirit-Self within himself; in this regard, he is only at the beginning of his development, serving, as it were, merely as a vessel to gradually receive it. The seventh beatitude also alludes to this. At first, the Spirit-Self can only warm and permeate him. Only the deed of Christ brings it down to earth as the power of love and harmony. Therefore, Christ says: “Blessed are those who draw down the Spirit-Self to themselves as the first spiritual link, for they will become children of God.” - This points people upward toward the higher worlds. Furthermore, reference is made to that which is to be brought about for the future, but which is increasingly challenged by the present and persecuted with all forces and powers. This is hinted at in the eighth beatitude: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for they will be filled within themselves with the kingdoms of heaven, with the Life-Spirit, with Buddhi. - Following this, we find further references to the special mission of Christ himself, including the idea that Christ’s inner disciples may be blessed if they must suffer persecution for his sake: a subtle allusion to the Atma, which will be bestowed upon us only in the distant future, is connected with this.

[ 9 ] Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount, the great teaching is proclaimed about the Kingdom of Heaven, which has drawn near. In the course of these events, the mystery of human evolution was fulfilled in Palestine: humanity had matured to such an extent in all its constituent elements that it could directly receive the Christ impulse within itself through its purified physical powers. Thus the union of the God-man Christ with the human being Jesus of Nazareth took place and permeated the Earth with its stream of power for three years. This had to happen so that humankind would not completely lose its connection to the spiritual world during the Kali Yuga. Yet the Kali Yuga, the dark age, continued for some time longer, until the year 1899. This is a particularly important year in human development, because it marks the end of the five-thousand-year period of the Kali Yuga. This marks the beginning of a new stage in human development. In addition to the old abilities of the Kali Yuga, human beings will develop new spiritual abilities. We are thus moving toward a period in which new natural abilities and opportunities to glimpse into the divine-spiritual worlds will awaken. Even before the middle of the 20th century has passed, some people, while fully conscious of their “I,” will experience the intrusion of a divine-spiritual world into our physical-sensory world in the same way that Saul experienced it near Damascus during his transformation into Paul. This will then become the normal state for a number of people.

[ 10 ] Christ will not be reincarnated in a physical body, as He was in Jesus back then, because that would serve no purpose now. At that time, it was necessary due to the profound laws governing cosmic-earthly evolution, because otherwise people would not have been able to recognize Him. But now human beings have evolved further: they have now become capable of penetrating through to etheric vision by means of their soul powers. Therefore, Christ will become visible to human beings in an etheric body and not in a physical one. All of this will, in any case, occur more and more frequently over the next 2,500 years, beginning in the middle of the 20th century. By then, a sufficient number of people will have experienced the Damascus event themselves, so that it will ultimately be recognized from all sides as a well-known event on Earth. We pursue Spiritual Science so that these abilities, which are only just beginning to emerge, do not pass people by unnoticed and without a trace; so that gifted individuals are not regarded as dreamers and fools, but are understood and supported by a small group of people who, through their collective efforts, prevent human ignorance from brutally trampling these tender seeds and predispositions to death. Spiritual Science is intended, rather, to prepare the way for these abilities to develop. In the previous lecture, these abilities were referred to as providing insight into the land of Shamballa, so that humanity might recognize the significance and essence of the Christ, whose reappearance is nothing other than humanity’s ascent in its knowledge.

[ 11 ] In general, the ages repeat themselves, but always in a slightly different way. In Spiritual Science, the Kali Yuga epoch is viewed in such a way that its beginning is described as the closing of the gates to the spiritual worlds. At the end of the first thousand years, the first change occurred when, through the individuality of Abraham—following his initiation by Melchizedek—it became possible for a human being to recognize God in this external world by discerning and correctly evaluating the tapestry of the environment spread out before the senses. Abraham revealed the first dawn of the realization of what an “I-God” is—a God who is akin to the human “I.” It became clear to Abraham that behind the phenomena of the sensory world there is something that leads one to conceive of the human “I” as a drop of the immense, incomprehensible World-I.

[ 12 ] A second stage of divine revelation was experienced in the time of Moses, for then God drew near to humankind through the elements. In the burning bush, in the lightning and thunder on Mount Sinai, He revealed Himself to their senses and spoke to their deepest being. In the third millennium of this gradually emerging knowledge of God, the Solomonic epoch took place, during which God revealed Himself through the symbols of the Temple that Solomon had built in Jerusalem. Divine revelation thus occurred in stages: with Abraham as the “I” God or Yahweh; with Moses in the fire of the burning bush, in lightning and thunder; with Solomon in the symbolism of the Temple. What applies to a certain age is repeated later in reverse order. The turning point is the appearance of Christ Jesus in Palestine. What was most effective before this time is the first to rise again afterward. Therefore, the first millennium A.D. is once again a Solomonic one, and the spirit of Solomon works in this time within the finest of human beings to penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha. The one who could interpret these signs most fully and most deeply was the one who, in the first centuries A.D., was able to feel the event at Golgotha most profoundly.

[ 13 ] In the second millennium A.D., we can recognize a repetition of the Age of Moses. What was an external experience in that era now appears in the mysticism of Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and others. The very same thing that Moses had experienced externally in the burning bush, in lightning and thunder, the mystics now experienced within themselves. When they turned inward, they spoke of the “I-God” revealing Himself to them. When they grasped the spark of their “I” within their souls, the “I”-God—the God of Unity, Yahweh—revealed Himself to them. This was the case with Tauler, who was a great preacher and could proclaim powerful truths. To him came the layman, the friend of God from the Oberland, of whom it was first thought he intended to become Tauler’s disciple, but who soon became his teacher, so that Tauler was subsequently able to proclaim God from within with such inner power that this can still be recognized in the accounts, according to which a number of disciples and listeners fell down as if dead upon hearing his words—a scene reminiscent of the events surrounding the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai.

[ 14 ] The centuries leading up to our time were imbued with this spirit. But now we are moving toward a remembrance and revival of the Abrahamic age—in the sense, however, that people are being led upward from the world accessible to our physical senses. The spirit of Abraham will influence our understanding in such a way that people will turn away from their exclusive focus on the sensory world. And in the opposite way to how it was with Abraham—since the Spirit, since God, could only be found in the sensory world—people will now grow beyond the sensory world and into the spiritual world. One might well say: It did not hinder human development that people knew nothing of all this until now, but in the era now dawning, people are to be enabled to take their destiny into their own hands with self-awareness. They must know how Christ will later become perceptible. It is rightly told that after the event at Golgotha, Christ descended to the dead, into the spiritual world, to bring them the word of salvation. The Christ event continues to work in the same way even now. Therefore, it makes no difference whether a person is still living here in the physical world or has already died: they can still experience the Christ event in the spiritual world, provided they have developed an understanding of it here on earth. Then it will become clear that the person did not live on this Earth of ours without reason. But if the person has not acquired an understanding of the Christ event here, its effects will pass him by without a trace during the time between death and a new birth, and he must wait until his next return to Earth—until a new birth—so that he may then be given the opportunity to prepare himself. One must not believe that Christ will reappear in the flesh, as some heresies proclaim, for otherwise one could not believe in the continued development of human abilities but would have to say: events repeat themselves in the same way. But that is not the case; they do repeat themselves, but always on higher levels.

[ 15 ] In the coming centuries, it will be proclaimed even more frequently that Christ will return and reveal Himself. False messiahs or false Christs will appear. But those who, in accordance with what has been presented, have attained the correct understanding of the true coming of Christ will reject such appearances. For the informed person who is familiar with the history of the past centuries in this regard, the emergence of such messiahs will come as no surprise or cause for concern. This happened, among other times, before the Crusades; furthermore, in the 17th century, when a false messiah—Sabbatai Zevi—appeared in Smyrna, to whom even pilgrims from France and Spain flocked.

[ 16 ] Back then, such a misleading belief did not cause much harm. But now that, with the advanced abilities of humankind, one should recognize the reappearance of Christ in the flesh as an error, and his appearance in the etheric body as correct and true, it is now essential to distinguish between the two in a certain way; a confusion will have bitter consequences. A Christ who is supposedly incarnated in the flesh is not to be believed, but only the one appearing in the etheric body. This appearance will be like a natural initiation, just as the initiate now experiences this event as a special experience. We are thus moving toward an age in which human beings, in addition to the physical-sensory realm, will have a spiritual realm around them in accordance with their knowledge. The guide in this new realm of spirits, however, will be the ethereal Christ. And people—whatever religious community or denomination they may belong to—will, when they experience these facts within themselves, acknowledge this Christ event. Christians may find themselves in a more difficult position than adherents of some other religions when they actually experience the etheric Christ; but they must try to accept this Christ event with the same neutrality. This will be the very task: that, particularly from within Christianity, an understanding may develop of the possibility of entering the spiritual world without being dependent on any specific religious creed, but solely through the power of good will.

[ 17 ] Anthroposophy is meant to help us with this above all else. It will lead us into the spiritual realm that the ancient Tibetan writings describe as a far-off fairy-tale land—meaning the spiritual world—the land of Shamballa. But it is not in a trance-like state, but in a fully conscious state, that human beings are to enter there under the guidance of Christ. The initiate must and can already go to Shamballa frequently to draw ever-renewed strength from there. Later, other people, too, will enter the land of Shambhala; they will see it radiant, just as Paul saw the flood of Christ’s light shining upon him. It will flow toward them as well; the gate to the world of light will open for them, too, through which they will enter the sacred land of Shambhala.