The New Age – the Second Coming

The True Nature of the Second Coming

 – According to Steiner

We are in the time of the Second Coming, the meeting of Christ in the Etheric, and not on the brink of the Abyss, what is happening now is two thousand years old karma and the powers of darkness is worn out, they are only a lesser disturbance for the Christ powers now forming in the outer world. Through the next 2500 years humankind will work to meet Christ in the etheric. This is the Golden Age Krishna said would start at this time. This text is from The Old Souls in the History of Earth ~KimGM

The following text are from The Second Coming of Christ in the Etheric World, Lecture II, by Rudolf Steiner:

Kali Yuga

The last three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity belong to an epoch in the history of human evolution called the Dark Age, the lesser Dark Age — Kali Yuga. Kali Yuga began in the year 3101 B.C.

With it is connected everything we recognise nowadays as the great achievements of humanity, as the fundamental characteristics of present-day culture.

Before this Dark Age, before Kali Yuga, all human thinking, all the powers of the human soul, were in a certain respect differently organised.

The year 3101 B.C. is an approximate date, for in the process of development qualities of one kind passed over gradually into others; but before that time the last vestiges of ancient clairvoyance were still present. In the course of evolution the sequence of the ages is: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Kali Yuga. It is the last that is of particular interest to us to-day. …

The Descending Abraham Epoch

… we call the first millennium of Kali Yuga the Abraham-epoch; it was the epoch when man did, it is true, lose the direct vision of the spiritual worlds, but when there unfolded in him something like a consciousness of the Divine which gradually made its way more and more deeply into his ego, with the result that he came to conceive of the Deity as related to human ego-consciousness.

In the first millennium of Kali Yuga — which at its conclusion we can call the Abraham-epoch — the Deity is revealed as the World-Ego.

The Descending Moses Epoch

This Abraham-epoch was followed by the Moses-epoch, when the God Jahve, the World-Ego, was no longer revealed in the form of a mysterious guidance of human destinies, as a God of a single people; in the Moses-epoch this Deity was revealed, as we know, in the burning bush, as the God of the Elements.

And it was a great advance when, through the teachings of Moses, the World-Ego as the Deity was experienced in such a way that men realised: the Elements of manifested existence, all that is seen with physical eyes — lightning, thunder, and so on — are emanations, deeds of the World-Ego, ultimately of the one World-Ego.
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You know that when we rise into the spiritual worlds we find there the Hierarchies of spiritual Beings. They, naturally, are under a unified guidance, but this was beyond the grasp of consciousness in those ancient times. Men beheld the individual members of the Hierarchies, a multiplicity of Divine Beings. To grasp them as a unity was possible only for the Initiates.

But now the World-Ego, grasped for the first time by man himself with the physical instrument of the brain — a faculty that had developed in a specially marked way in Abraham — confronted him, and he conceived the World-Ego as manifesting in the different kingdoms of Nature, in the Elements.

The Descending Solomon Epoch

A further advance was made in the last millennium before the founding of Christianity, in the Solomon-epoch.
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… we are led through this last epoch to that point in evolution where the same Divine Being whom the Abraham-epoch and the Moses-epoch, too, beheld in Jahve, where the same Divine Being takes on human form.
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A repetition of these three pre-Christian ages takes place in the Christian era, but now in reverse order.

The Ascending Solomon Epoch

The essential and fundamental trend of the Solomon-epoch is repeated in the first thousand years after Christ, in that the spirit of Solomon lives and is active as an impulse in the most outstanding minds of the first Christian millennium.

And fundamentally speaking it was the wisdom of Solomon through which men endeavoured to grasp the nature and essence of the Christ Event.

The Ascending Moses Epoch

Then, following the Solomon-epoch, came the era that can be called the revival of the Moses-epoch … and in the second millennium after Christ the best minds of this era are permeated by the spirit of Moses.

The spirit of Moses does indeed come to life again in a new form. In the pre-Christian age the spirit of Moses had been directed towards the outer world of physical Nature in order to find the Divine World-Ego as Jahve, the World-Ego manifesting in lightning and thunder, in the great revelation from the Elements of laws for men.

Whereas the World-Ego streams into Moses from outside, is revealed from outside, in the second millennium after Christ the same Divine Being announces Himself within the soul.

The experience which came to Moses as an outer happening when he withdrew from his people in order to receive the Decalogue this significant happening is repeated in the second Christian millennium in the form of a mighty revelation from within man. …

The Ascending Abraham Epoch

But the course of the evolution of humanity is such that from our time onwards a renaissance of the Abraham-epoch will take place as we pass slowly into the third millennium.

… We are moving towards the Abraham-epoch, and this will inevitably bring momentous consequences in its train.

… But on the other hand, in the new Abraham-epoch exactly the opposite path is taken — the path Which leads humanity away from vision confined to the physical and material, away from intellectual inferences based upon material data.

We are moving along the path leading into the regions where men once dwelt in times before the Abraham-epoch. It is the path that will make states of natural clairvoyance possible for man, states in which natural clairvoyant forces will be in active operation. …

The New Age – Dvapara Yuga

We are passing into the Abraham-epoch and are being led out into the spiritual world. This means that it will be possible for a certain number of human beings, and more and more in the next two thousand five hundred years, to experience a repetition of the event of Damascus.

The Return of Christ – Meeting in the Etheric

The great and momentous feature of the coming era will be that many human beings will experience this event. The Christ, now to be found in the spiritual sphere of the earth, will be perceptible to those faculties which, as we have said, will make their appearance.

When men become able to see the etheric body, they will learn to see the etheric body of Christ Jesus, as did Paul. This is what is beginning as the characteristic trait of a new age, and between the years 1930-40-45 it will already become evident in the first forerunners of human beings possessed of these faculties.

If men are alert they will experience this event of Damascus through direct spiritual vision and therewith clarity and truth concerning the Christ Event. A remarkable parallelism of happenings will come about.

… the Event of Golgotha was an event that affected not only the physical world; its influences reached into all the spiritual worlds.

Christ’s descent into the underworld was an actual fact and the effects of the Christ Event that is to take place in our century will also work — though not in the same form as on earth — into the world in which man lives between death and rebirth.

We are on Earth Purposefully

But there is one essential. The faculties by means of which men will be able, between death and rebirth, to behold the Christ Event, cannot be acquired in that world; they must be acquired on the physical plane and carried from there into the life between death and a new birth.

There are faculties which must be acquired on the earth, for we have not been placed on the physical earth for nothing.

It is an error to believe that there is no purpose in living on the earth. Faculties have to be acquired there that can be acquired in no other world — they are the faculties for understanding the Christ Event and the events that will follow it.

Those human beings who now develop these faculties on the earth through the teachings of Spiritual Science will carry them through the gate of death.

It is not through Initiation only, but through a clear-minded acceptance of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that the faculties are acquired which make it possible also to be aware of the Christ Event in the spiritual world between death and a new birth.

The reappearance of Moses, Abraham, et.al.

From The Event of Christ’s Appearance in the Etheric World, Lecture I

It will be of the utmost importance to recognise and understand this event of Christ’s Appearance, for it will be followed by other events.

Just as other happenings preceded the Christ Event in Palestine, so will those who prophetically foretold His coming follow Him after the time referred to, after He Himself has become visible to mankind again in the etheric body.

The preparers of His coming will be recognisable in a new form to men who have experienced the new Christ Event. Those who lived on earth as Moses, Abraham and the Prophets will be recognisable once again.

And it will be known that just as Abraham preceded Christ as a preparer, he also takes over the mission, after Christ’s coming, of being a helper in His work. Thus a man who does not sleep through the event of supreme importance in the immediate future gladly finds his way into fellowship with all those who, as the Patriarchs, preceded the Christ Event; he allies himself with them.

The whole choir of those to whose level we shall thus be able to rise is again revealed. The one who led mankind downwards to the physical plane appears again after Christ and leads men upwards again, unites them again with the spiritual worlds.

The Platonic Stream and the Michael Age

The new Michael Age started in 1879 with Michael raising to Archai, a spirit of time and personality, where he from being the face of God became the face of Christ. It simply means that his I AM became the soul of Christ.

In 1899 Kali Yuga ended and in the start of the twentieth century the return of Christ began and he descended slowly into the earth sphere through the century to enter the hearts of humanity and end materialism.

Rudolf Steiner tried to speed this up by bringing a number of people through the initiation in an attempt to hinder the darkness that came the following years, but he failed in this, and predicted that it would then take hundred years before it was possible again, which is now.

Rudolf Steiner, from Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies – Volume VI:

Since the last third of the nineteenth century we have been living in the initial stage of the new reign of Michael; throughout this time, and above all in our own day, preparation has to be made for what must come to pass in the twentieth century.

For before the end of this present century a considerable number of human beings who have unfolded real understanding of Anthroposophy will have passed through a briefer period between death and rebirth than is usual and will again be united on the Earth under the leadership of those who were the Masters of Chartres [the Platonic stream] and with those who have remained in direct connection with the sovereignty of Michael [the Aristotelian Stream].

This will take place in order that under the spiritual guidance of these two groups of beings the final, hallowed impulse may be given for the development of the spiritual life on Earth [a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian stream].