|
by Brad Steiger
May-01-2008
from
Rense Website
A quantum leap in humankind' s
intellectual development occurred
in Sumer 6000 years ago when
cuneiform writing was invented in order to record a dramatic
starburst.
Every pulsating thrust of the technology with which
humankind surrounds itself today was initiated when a star died in a
dramatic, brilliant explosion.
The psychological and cultural impact of the supernova on the
inhabitants of Sumer was overwhelming.
Literally "overnight" in
evolutionary terms, the Sumerians gave the world a law code, the
first love song, the first school system, the first parliament, and
the first directory of pharmaceutical remedies. The origins of
contemporary Western culture were nursed in Sumer, the cradle of
civilization.
The roots of the Judeo-Christian religious beliefs
grew from the "tree of knowledge," the Garden of Eden, which
tradition places in that same area.
Today astronomers recognize the nearest and brightest supernova ever
witnessed by humankind as Vela X, now a faintly flashing pulsar
about 1300 light-years from our solar system.
George Michanowsky, a
specialist in Mesopotamian astronomy, saw how the very first and
most fundamental symbol of Sumerian script was one which represented
"star."
He went on to show how the first word ever written by a
human soon became linked with the symbol for "deity," thus
communicating "star god."
Michanowsky saw the death-blaze of Vela X
to have been such a profound sky show that it became a "cultural
organizing principle" that forced human knowledge to take a dramatic
leap forward.
But was there something more that took place at that time?
The
priest-historian Berossus chronicled the account of Oannes,
half-man, half-fish, who surfaced from the Persian Gulf to instruct
the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia in the arts of civilization.
Oannes was said to be one who was possessed of an insight into
letters, sciences, and every kind of art.
Oannes was but an
ancient Greek form of Ea (En-Ki), the star god of the Sumerians.
-
Were the Sumerians so overwhelmingly inspired by the starburst that
they were stimulated into creating writing, law, education, and many
of the essential concepts of science?
-
Or had they received some overt physical assistance and instruction
from survivors who might have been escaping the supernova, the death
of their sun?
Reference to a god who was said to be half-man, half-fish suggests,
once again, an amphibious intelligence.
Later, we may recall a great
teacher of righteousness, a "fisher of men," who taught the Way and
whose followers identified themselves to one another by making the
sign of a fish.
Australian Sir John Eccles (1903-1997), winner of the Nobel Prize
for medicine in 1963, was the complete scientist, philosopher,
metaphysician.
As the neurophysiologist who demonstrated the
transmission of electrical impulses in the brain, he declared that
his research led him to conclude that evolution alone cannot explain
man's awareness of himself. Sir John became increasingly convinced
that there must have been the intervention of some transcendental
agency in the infusion into humankind of Soul.
Simply stated, he
maintained that the brain and the mind are separate entities which
interact, but it is only the brain that is the product of genetic
evolution.
Sir John explained that he was an evolutionist, of course, but he
did not believe that evolution was the final story.
As he stated once
in an interview in the Washington Post [April, 1981],
"The genetic
code and natural selection explain quite a lot, but evolution
doesn't explain how I came to exist.
It doesn't explain even the
origin of consciousness .... If you look at the most modern texts on
evolution, you find nothing about mind and consciousness. They
assume that it just comes automatically with the development of the
brain.
But that's not an answer.
If my uniqueness of self is tied to
the genetic uniqueness of self that built my brain, the odds against
myself existing are 10 to the 10-thousandth against.
"It is just too improbable to wait around to get the right
constructed brain for you. The brain is a computer, you see. Each of
us has a computer, and we are the programmers of this computer. [We
were] born ... with what this wonderful structure of evolution and
genetic coding have wrought.... But the soul is this unique creation
that is ours for life. It is us.
We are experiencing, remembering,
creating, suffering, imagining. All of this is processed here with
the soul central to it."
The great metaphysician Rudolf Steiner theorized that the people of
our prehistory had been largely guided and directed by a higher
order of beings who interacted and communicated with certain
humans--the smartest, the strongest, the most intellectually
flexible.
Eventually these select humans produced what might be
called demigods, divine human beings, who, in turn, could relay
instructions from higher intelligences.
In effect, Steiner may have given us another definition of the semi-divine progeny that the ancient Hebrews named
Nephilim," which does,
in fact, mean demigod, men of "great renown."
Steiner went on to speculate that within the larger evolving human
race were the descendents of those divine-human hybrid beings, men
and women who are animated by higher ideals, who regard themselves
as children of a divine, universal power. It need not be
overemphasized that the larger body of humankind is devoted to the
service of egotism, materialism, and selfish, personal interests.
Steiner believed that within what he termed the emerging "Sixth
Post-Atlantean Race" would be children of the divine universal power
who would be able to initiate those men and women who have developed
their faculty of thought so that they might better unite themselves
with the divine.
The children of the divine universal power, those
who have the "seed" within them, will be able to initiate the more
advanced members of humankind. People so initiated will be able to
receive revelations and perform what others will consider miracles.
The initiates will go on to become the
mediators between humankind
and the higher intelligences.
The whole point of the efforts of these higher intelligences is to
enable humankind to become more independent, more able to stand on
its own feet without having to rely on the higher order of beings
that directed us in ancient times.
Rudolf Steiner was born at Krajevic, Austria-Hungary (now
Yugoslavia) on February 27, 1861.
Although he had experienced
encounters with the mystical and the unknown as a young child and
was guided by an adept he would only refer to as the "Master,"
Steiner's early academic accomplishments were in the scientific
fields.
His father had wished him to become a railway engineer, so
that had led Rudolf into a study of mathematics, which seemed only
to whet his appetite for the material sciences, leading him to
pursue studies in medicine, chemistry, physics, as well as
agriculture, architecture, art, drama, literature, and philosophy.
Fascinated by the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Steiner began
the extensive task of editing Goethe's scientific papers, and from
1889 to 1896 worked on this project. It was also during this period
that Steiner wrote his own highly acclaimed The Philosophy of
Freedom.
When he was in his late thirties (c. 1897), Steiner received a
revelation of what he believed was the turning point in human
spiritual history, the incarnation of the Divine Being known as the
Christ.
In the twentieth century, Steiner said, humankind began to
enter the "fullness of time" when the Christ principle, cosmic
consciousness, might once again become manifest.
Steiner defined "Christ consciousness" as a transformative energy
that greatly transcended orthodox Christianity. In Steiner's view,
Jesus became "christed" and thereby was able to present
humankind with a dramatic example of what it means to achieve a
complete activation of the spiritual seed within all human souls and
to rise above all material considerations.
In Steiner's Tenth Lecture on the Gospel of St. Luke, he reflects
that just as a plant cannot unfold its blossom immediately after the
seed has been sown, so has humankind had to progress from stage to
stage until the right knowledge could be brought to maturity at the
right time.
To Steiner, the Christ energy is the catalyst that germinates the
seed that great Spirit Beings implanted within their human
offspring.
There were, of course, the physical seeds of male and
female, which intermingled to produce the whole human being. But
there was also something in each human that did not arise from the
blending of the two physical seeds.
There was, so to speak, a
"virgin birth," a something ineffable, Steiner says, which somehow
flowed into the process of germination from quite a different
source.
In 1913, Steiner set about forming his own group, the Anthroposophical Society, which he declared would be about the
utilization of "human wisdom" (anthro=man; sophy=wisdom) to achieve
contact with the spiritual world.
The human intellect, Steiner
insisted, could be trained to rise above material concerns and to
perceive a greater spiritual reality. The human consciousness had
the ability to activate the seed that the great Spirit Beings had
implanted within their human offspring.
Steiner emphasized that the path to such contact might best be
attained by a proper application of meditation.
When human
consciousness had been raised to the spiritual level where it can
experience the eternal element that is limited by neither birth nor
death, then it can comprehend its own eternality and its ability to
be born again in subsequent life existences.
Such spiritual prophets as Steiner have foretold that humankind is
now entering the "fullness" of time when the Christ principle,
cosmic consciousness, can once again become manifest.
Sensitive
observers of the contemporary scene have taken careful note of the
fact that thousands of men and women throughout the world are being
activated by a heightened state of awareness that comes to them in
dreams, visions, and strange memories. These individuals are feeling
the seed bringing forth new life within them and they are concerned
about the spiritual needs of the human souls around them.
Spiritual history is replete with many sincere and insightful
prophets and teachers who lived before Jesus, but,
Steiner said, they could speak to their fellows only by using the
faculties transmitted through their earthly natures. They used the
energy and the wisdom of Earth.
According to Steiner, Jesus tapped into an awareness of that higher
energy which comes from the realm of the Divine. He knew that a
speck of this energy no larger than a mustard seed could exalt the
human psyche.
He knew that even the slightest infusion of this
energy into the physical seed of male and female would transform the
individual into a citizen of a higher dimension of reality, the
"Kingdom of God."
And, at the same time, he taught that the doorway
to enter such a wondrous kingdom lay within the heart of each
sincere pilgrim who sought to join him there.
"The importance of Jesus was not that he was a human like us,"
John
W. White remarks, in the April 2, 1982 issue of New Attitudes, "but
that we are gods like him - or at least we have the evolutionary
potential to be."
White observes that while Jesus, the man, was a historical person,
the "Christ" is an eternal, transpersonal condition of being.
When
we distinguish between the eternality of the "Christ consciousness"
and the man Jesus, we can more completely understand the promise
given in John 14:12:
"Truly, truly, I say to you. he who believes in
me will also do the work that I do; and greater works than these
will he do .... "
In White's view, Jesus was an evolutionary forerunner of the higher
race that will inherit the earth, a,
" ... race of people that will
embody the Christ consciousness on a species-wide basis, rather than
the sporadic individual basis seen earlier in history when an
occasional avatar, such as Buddha or Jesus, appeared."
White gives the name of Homo Noeticus (pertaining to higher
consciousness) to the evolving form of humanity:
"Because of their deepened awareness and self-understanding, the
traditionally imposed forms, controls, and institutions of society
are barriers to their full development.
Their changed psychology is
based on expression, not suppression, of feeling. Their motivation
is cooperative and loving, not competitive and aggressive. Their
sense of logic is multilevel, integrated, simultaneous; it is not
linear, sequential, either-or. Their identity is sharing-collective,
not isolated-individual.
Their psychic abilities are used for
benevolent and ethical purposes, not harmful and immoral ones. The
conventional ways of society do not satisfy them. The search for new
ways of living concerns them."
"We are not simply human beings," White tells us, "we are also human
becomings, standing between two worlds, two ages. Each of us has the
latent ability to take conscious control of our evolution and
thereby become members of the New Humanity... Jesus did not say
that the highest state of consciousness was his alone for all time.
Rather, he called us to follow him, from his example."
Numerous mystics and seers, quite apart from the Christian
tradition, have noted that there appears to have been some
dispensation of cosmic energy that occurred at the time when Jesus was seeking to raise awareness.
Some believe that when
he preached about a new way that had come from his Father's Kingdom
and which had blended with the feminine principle of the Holy Ghost,
he was talking about a literal transmission of energy being
broadcast to Earth from some higher realm.
Pentecost, those
metaphysicians will say, was a powerful demonstration of that
energy.
The apostles were so glowing with the cosmic energy that
they appeared to be on fire to those who witnessed the absorption of
the Christ principle into their physical bodies.
Perhaps something truly was added to the energy of the Earth Mother
at that time - call it the Holy Spirit for lack of a better term - and hundreds
of thousands of men and women are being activated by that same
cosmic energy today as it is received in their dreams, visions, and
memories.
All over the planet, contemporary citizens of Earth are
having their individual Pentecosts, as the seed within them, their
spiritual legacy from beyond the stars is being brought to fruition.
Futurist Theodore J. Gordon has commented:
"In considering the
future of religion, it is appropriate to ask what the unknown might
yield in the next few decades that would have relevance to man' s
view of his relationship to the cosmos.
A major event... would be
the discovery of extraterrestrial life wherein we would become
members of a community of life, participants in a drama bigger than
we could have dreamed."
|
