Clearly the cure for both the planet and our individual souls is one and
the same: initiation to clairvoyance, eventually for one and all. In the
ancient mysteries the job was easier for the hierophant, who could sep-
arate the upper part of the candidate's etheric body. He could take it
traveling, along with his astral body, for three and half days into the
spiritual world, leaving the candidate's ego in its physical body in a
deathlike state devoid of physical consciousness, a state different from
ordinary sleep. Steiner, reading from the Akashic Record, describes this
process in Atlantean times when a looser connection between etheric
and physical bodies allowed the initiator more easily to withdraw the
candidate's etheric body.This gave the candidate access, through the ini-
tiator's own ego, to the hierophant's wisdom and clairvoyant vision, re-
vealing to the candidate the world of spirit. It was a vision, imprinted
by the candidate's astral body onto his etheric body, that became avail-
able to the candidate's awakened ego along with the realization that he
was not a body but a spirit actually inhabiting the spiritual world, at
one with the Spirit that underlies all creation.
Over the centuries, as the etheric body became more closely
molded to the physical, a near-death experience was required to sepa-
rate the two; hence John the Baptist's initiation by prolonged submer-
sion in water. Nowadays, says Steiner, by means of a Rosicrucian or
Christian initiation, it is possible to become clairvoyant without with-
drawing the etheric body. Instead, the candidate retains full conscious-
ness as he or she obtains access to the higher spiritual worlds, a
condtion hopefully to become available to all humankind, giving ac-
cess to the entire hierarchy of spiritual beings.
Were one to subscribe to Steiner's notion that the workings of these
beings are actually what scientists call "the laws of nature," it might be
joyce
(Joyce)
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