Living-way — Holistic Biography Work

…bringing spirit to life…

Biography Work and the Etheric Christ
A Path of Individual and Social Schooling

What is biography work? Dr Michaela Glöckler’s answer, given to the 1993 Biography Conference, is that biography work is Anthroposophy itself — and that its schooling has two sides. The individual side purifies the ‘I am’ along the paths of thinking, feeling and willing; the social side she draws from Rudolf Steiner’s Letters to the Members as nine conditions for working together. Both sides prepare the same meeting: with the Christ in the etheric, in the realm of life itself.

Dear Friends,

This afternoon, when we had put all our questions on the blackboard about our work in small groups, I thought to myself, “Which group deals with my theme?” Then I found out that it was the one which had been wiped out! And this question was, “What is biography work?” So please take this as a contribution to this group. I hope very much that it will become apparent that we have to deal with two aspects: one on a very personal or individual basis and one on a more social basis.

Historical Remarks

When looking at this question, “What is really biography counselling or biography work?”, I had an idea, that I’m sure most of you have had during your work, that biography work -the idea of having a biography, an individual biography – is a very new phenomenon. We have the fact that biography counselling, which is worked with on a world-wide basis in our times, started after the Second World War. It is therefore a totally new impulse. If we look back, it was prepared by the French Revolution, culminating in the middle European Idealism of Goethe, Fichte, Schiller and Novalis; through them, the idea of individual development came into the culture of mankind. This period of creating epic life stories, like Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister” or the first French development novels is something that came out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having been prepared in the seventeenth. And this time was, in itself, prepared by the dawning of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries, a time when the historical Doctor Faust started to speak as an individual, going on his own path, independent from the church and official initiation training. This is the beginning of the Consciousness Soul and had never been the case before. Paracelsus was the one who brought this impulse in the medical field – working out of one’s own forces as an individual, towards the furthering of individual development, and Shakespeare, at the same time approximately, introduced the question, “To be or not to be, that IS the question.” Prior to this, there were very few cases where the quality of being an individual appeared.

If we focus on the idea of how individual development lived at the beginning of philosophy, we can discover that we need philosophy, we need thinking about ourselves, we need self-reflection, as a basis for individual development, for self-education. But this way of thinking about ourselves as individuals is very new. It started a few hundred years before Christ was born and it was prepared by the Greek tragedies. If we look at these tremendous pictures of heroes which were presented to the people, we can see that they were not given as individual biographies but as a way to educate the soul. They were not meant to be a path of inner development, but were forms of thought that were presented artistically to nourish the life of people. It was an artistic presentation in the form of thoughts, that gave a certain education to the life of people and education was the outcome and not self-education and development. It was education through pictures given by great teachers and not an education of one’s self and by one’s self. Here is a tremendous difference! This fact poses the question – when was the possibility born in mankind’s development that self-education through working on one’s own biography could take place?

The preparation for this was to be able to think independently and the second step was to feel free from social obligations. Plato, who had a beautiful individual understanding, was an example of this first step. He had a certain understanding of the development of the soul but only on the level of thoughts. In social life, it was totally acceptable and did not worry him that there were slaves. In his dialogues, this was never articulated as a problem.

So first this idea of being able to become an individual was a fact of self-recognition on the level of the thoughts. Then later, with the Consciousness Soul period, came this tremendous revolution towards a realisation of Individualism as a question of the will. A social revolution had to take place so that the human being felt free enough in social life to realise, “In a way, I am really standing in my self in my own biography.” We know that it is our century that brought the emancipation of women. Before that, women’s biographies were not independent from the social aspect – there were very few possibilities available to allow a free process to create biography. So we can understand that on the one hand it must be prepared by this philosophical development, but then on the other hand it must be prepared in another way, which is the social part of the whole development.

We can see that Lucifer brought freedom on the level of thinking and this was followed by Ahriman, who brought emancipation, freedom in the will sphere, in the social sphere. At first Lucifer’s impulse was not at all Christianised. In our century we have an Ahrimanic, free power of the will and we suffer for this. So we can see that the realm of thoughts came to the human ego before this – it was prepared a few centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. With the Mystery of Golgotha we have this revelation of the ego. And we have this sentence in the Gospel of St John that we shall receive the knowledge of the truth in order to become free.

In this short sentence we have the whole transformation of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses of freedom.

The whole past was ruled by Lucifer and, as we know, the whole future will be guided by Ahriman and we have to battle, to fight and to overcome him. The balance point or this middle point between these two qualities of freedom, between thinking and willing, is the Mystery of Golgotha.

Biography Work and Its Relationship to the School of Spiritual Science (Goetheanum)

In our previous three Biography Conferences at the Goetheanum, we asked ourselves, “Is this the matter of one of the sections?” It quickly became clear that this topic of biography work is a question of the General Section as it is something that comes out of the innermost source of Anthroposophy. We can say that biography work is Anthroposophy, in a certain sense. It gets its colour and its specific intention, of course, through the professionalism of the pedagogical, social, curative, artistic and other fields. We have to struggle if we feel responsible for Anthroposophy and its image in the world so that we really see our professional borders. We need to be aware of how we can colour our biography work intentions. What I’m trying to give now as a contribution is only this general aspect, which is independent from all the professional sections. Biography work gets its differentiation from your professionalism. This point is inherent in the basic theme that Anita asked me to speak about and which is the most central and the most general aspect of the whole business.

But on the other hand it is not possible to separate this biography work impulse from the anthroposophical impulse. There is no true biography work without Anthroposophy. There are indeed Luciferic and Ahrimanic projections and intentions in this field, but to discover biography work as an aspect of Christianity, is only possible through Anthroposophy. The detailed knowledge of all this lives in Anthroposophy.

Schooling for Biography Work as a Path to Find Christ

Out of this idea, to discover biography work as an aspect of Christianity, I would like to make a few aphoristic remarks regarding the two sides of our anthroposophical work and the responsibility in regard to this biography work. One of the questions we had in our meeting at the Goetheanum and that I also experience as living here is, of course, “What is the specific path of schooling for such a biography co-worker or worker?” So, with this idea as a background, I will try to make an outline of this path.

I have found that we have to discriminate between the individual schooling and the social schooling for this work and that it is very, very important to train both and to realise the difference between these paths so that we can bring them together very consciously because also in biography work we have always the problem that the client needs help for his inner path of schooling and, on the other hand, he needs help to deal with social life. These are not always the same and we must be very sensitive to which one is appropriate to take. For example, in one case we may encourage to focus firstly on his individual path, independent from all his social problems, to help him establish a healthy centre first. Or with another case we may say, “Look beyond yourself! You are not at all interesting! Just deal with your social problems! This is the path.” As a biography worker, we must learn to play on these two pianos; sometimes it is one and the same piano and sometimes it’s really a different piano with another specific path and to understand the focus of this path, we must realise that the Mystery of Golgotha was the initiation moment for understanding human biography.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, there was no knowledge in the spiritual world about birth and death. Minerals, plants, animals have their spiritual being, their group ego, in the spiritual world. They cannot die on earth, they are always present in the spiritual world and they are only a little differently active if they are incarnated on earth and when they are excarnated from the spiritual world. It makes little difference. But when human beings incarnate, in a certain sense, we disappear from and come back again to the spiritual world after physical death. What happens in between, what we call biography or life, is something that is very curious for the hierarchies. When we die, and appear with all our errors and failures, they can say, “This is right and this is wrong”, and they can prepare the starting point with us for a new incarnation. But they cannot really understand why and how we came to these errors. And they cannot really understand what it means to die; to live with the fact of death and birth in biography, in life.

This is the esoteric sense of the Mystery of Golgotha: that the Trinity and the hierarchies wanted to know what happened to the spiritual beings who incarnate as spirits on earth, who leave the spiritual world during their biographies on earth. Our biography is really a time when we are dead in a certain sense to the spiritual world. They want and need to understand this mystery of death – from their aspect, but also from our aspect -“what is this?”

In the whole plan of earth’s evolution, Lucifer had his task and later Ahriman was called to take part in it. Ahriman brought the possibility to make conscious what death is for us as human beings. Rudolf Steiner describes that human beings before the Mystery of Golgotha, also had no knowledge of what death is. The old mysteries contained the whole wisdom about nature, social life and other things, but did not have a real idea of death. Therefore the human beings did not know. They knew the fact but they did not know the how or the why or what it was as a conscious experience.

So Ahriman, who had the mission to bring the possibility of the free will, needed to prepare this mission that human beings received the possibility to understand death through the dying of living thoughts. The whole development of philosophy shows us how thoughts were not seeing the spirit anymore but they only explained the visible world. This is the dying process which is the huge work of Ahriman – to create our materialistic, intellectual consciousness. This is his work.

Now we, as human beings, understand death as an experience because of this deed of Ahriman. If Christ had not come to give us another image of death than this ahrimanic one, then the whole mission of mankind would have taken another direction. Without this, we really would have come to death in the intellectual, materialistic sphere with our consciousness. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha needed to have taken place before this complete death in the thinking sphere. On the other hand, a real understanding of death could only take place after this death of the thoughts. This is a very modern phenomenon which came to an end in our century. In the nineteenth century, the scientific world still had some heritage from the past of these inspiring qualities of thoughts and a relationship to the spiritual world.

Thus we have two conditions. During the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ went through this experience of birth and death, therefore, for the first time, from the spiritual aspect there was a recognition of biography being possible for mankind as a spiritual recognition.

To begin with, our wisdom was given by grace through the old mysteries and then, human beings had to find wisdom by themselves. This is the same process as what we have with this wisdom of birth and death. Firstly, we have the revelation of this wisdom by a god, and then we can come to our own understanding of this mystery. So the Mystery of Golgotha is the mystery of the birth of biography – the mystery of understanding what is between birth and death as a specific development and what are the thresholds of birth and death in the understanding of the human being.

It is from this point of view quite obvious, that we are looking towards a path of schooling for biography work which must be a path, a specific path, to find Christ because He is the initiator of the spiritual aspect of the understanding of the truth of biography in all its details. Through this Mystery of Golgotha He became, as we know, the Master of Karma, the Master of Biography. It is very interesting to read in “Theosophy”, the trinity of sentences:

“The physical body is determined by the laws of heritage. The spirit is determined by the spiritual law of reincarnation and karma.” This law was made by the gods, and you can’t change it – and the development of your spirit is determined by this law.

For the soul is written – “The soul is determined by the laws of the destiny that the soul creates for itself” – “Die Seele unterliegt ihrem selbstgeschaffenen Schicksal.” And this is exciting -it shows that the impulse of freedom can only be discovered in biography work. In other words, the soul is determined by the laws which are created by the soul itself in working on its own destiny. The soul is a small Master of Karma; just as Christ is the great Master of Karma.

The ego lives in the soul as we learn in “Theosophy” -“das Ich lebt in der Seele. Die Seele unterliegt ihrem selbstgeschaffenen Schicksal. The ego lives in the soul; and the soul is determined by the destiny which it creates for itself.”

The self is the ego aspect of the soul – the living centre of the soul.

From the esoteric aspect, biography work is the realm of self development through biography; in the real sphere and climate of freedom, between the laws of nature and of spirit. It is implicit that, if we look for a path of schooling, we have to find both this Master of Karma in general and in ourselves. Therefore it has these two aspects – this large social aspect of destiny and this personal aspect.

We have this sentence: “Ich bin Ich” – “I am I”. This is destiny, the biography (see diagram). This is what we meet as destiny, and this is what we meet in our consciousness – the I am. “I am I” is something which has the abyss in between – the abyss of freedom. It is I who creates the condition of what I really am. What am I? That is my business. We need to help our clients towards total identification with their destiny conditions in order to connect with the higher part of the lower self as revealed through Karma.

The social part of biography work is to help towards the identification with the higher self met through karma. The individual aspect is to purify this “I am”, the lower self, from egotism by the individual path of schooling. This social aspect, which we have to deal with when working with our clients, is to help them towards a total identification with their own destiny, with their own karma for in karma everybody has his revelation, in picture form and in fact form, of his higher being. We can give more of an individual advice by focussing on how to purify this lower self, this spontaneous “I am” with all its pride, sadness and resignation. This lower “I am” quality can be purified by helping it to find an inner path of schooling, so that a selfless self-consciousness can arise. This can prepare us to meet this Paulinic word, “Not I, but ….” This is a tremendous pathway of purification of this “I am”, that we can say “I’m not, but …” To bring egotism outwards guides us towards these words “I am not”. Then the two aspects can come together and the lower self and the higher self are united. This is biography work. I am really standing in my biography when the “I am” is the writer of destiny, of my biography.

So, of course, we have to train ourselves in the same way as we try to guide our clients. We can’t help them if we have not the insights and the whole experience of this work. I will try to characterise this briefly.

Individual Schooling through the Paths of Thinking, Feeling and Willing

The individual aspect of this path of schooling, this “I am” path, is the journey of how to find Christ. For us, as counsellors, we need to ask this question, “How do we find Christ with threshold consciousness?” This is because we know that Christ can only be found if we take the mystery of death into account; this is the mystery of the threshold. We need to separate our thinking, our feeling and our will and really try to find Christ through these different soul qualities. We have the pathway to Christ through thinking – which is that we train ourselves thoroughly to understand every expression of the life of thoughts in other people as if Christ had to listen to all these thoughts and was living in these thoughts. “What the lowest of my brothers is thinking, I am the one who thinks in him.” Christ reveals himself as living in the etheric world of thoughts. The revelation of Christ in the etheric for everybody can only be in the realm of thoughts because we think with our etheric forces. We have this tremendous impulse of understanding and we prepare ourselves to be good understanders and we feel that we have to overcome every pride regarding our ability to think. All this will happen if we try to meet Christ even behind thoughts that appear to us as untrue or problematic etc.

Next we have the description of this will path to Christ to come to a new idealism which is born out of freedom – to really feel this tremendous force of resurrection – to be able to find a new starting point out of our own free will in every situation and not to feel pressurised to act as a reaction. This is the pathway to act out of love. If we really act out of ourselves, then we act out of love. This is the path of work, of acting out of freedom and, of course, love. Firstly this means that we train ourselves to act out of freedom and then we meet Christ, and this is love. So when we meet and train our understanding then we finally also start to love the one whom we understand. In the moment when we really understand, we love the one whom we understand.

Both these pathways end with love, both in the field of knowledge and in the field of will. This love has different qualities of course, but it bears the same substance.

The big question is, “What is the path of the middle? What is the path of feeling to Christ?” Well, I think this is the path to love biography, to love destiny. It must begin with compassion. If we enter into a biography story without empathy and compassion, we will understand nothing – at least nothing that is relevant from a Christian aspect. We must train our feelings of compassion and this is very difficult- to transform feelings in such a way that they get the quality of a sense organ. We need to find this very objective, although very individually felt, compassion. If we train this compassion, then the love which comes out is the love of the middle and this is the love for the karma. Rudolf Steiner says that when we learn to love our karma (this is the feeling aspect of love), this is the esoteric aspect of meeting Christ, the esoteric path to Christ. This is the sphere in which we meet him face to face.

The pathways through thinking and willing have more an exoteric aspect. We deal with these in outer life and we meet them in social life and so on. But this very intimate dealing with loving karma is something which is very, very hidden.

I think these three aspects are basic guidelines for this personal, individual path of schooling when we really try to firstly, consciously separate thinking, feeling and willing in a threshold situation and, as a second step, bring these together again and by this, discover that the quality that brings these three strivings together is love. As we know, we can cross the threshold with this love. But the preparation towards a real compassion to understand and to overcome all the negative feelings that militate against developing a real compassion and to release our will from all its unfree aspects, we need to learn to act out of freedom, even if we are wrong in our decision, and to strive towards and finally meet this “love for the deed.” At the same time, this is also a preparation to cross the threshold consciously. We then meet this force who carries us over the threshold – the true image of the human being – the ego which has to develop this substance of love through understanding in the thinking, through compassion in the feelings, and through this striving towards freedom in the will sphere.

Aspects for a Social Path of Schooling

Now we will look at this other path of schooling which is the social one. I hope you will not be too astonished that, as I mentioned before, this Christian biography work – this true understanding of biography work, is not possible without Anthroposophy. We can discover this in the first part of schooling. We really see that without this tremendous threshold knowledge provided in Anthroposophy, we cannot find this individual schooling pathway. But for social schooling we do not only need Anthroposophy in the way we do for the individual path. For the individual path we need only Anthroposophy: but for the social path we need the Anthroposophical Society and the School – but specifically the Society because the Anthroposophical Society is the social path of schooling for mankind today and there is no other one. As this is so, and because the social path of schooling is the most necessary in our times to prepare for the next epoch, to meet all the forces of hindrance that are trying to destroy the Society. The forces of hindrance are not so abundant and active against Anthroposophy – here and there they come and go but the whole attack of these counter-forces goes against the Society; to make it poor, to make it destructive, to make it uninteresting, to make it dogmatic, sectarian and this and that. It goes so far that sometimes people are nearly ashamed to say “Well, I’m a Member,” and then they smile and say, “But I’m also a free person, of course.” We even know all these destructive qualities in ourselves! We know quite well these beings that try to destroy our Society from the tendencies that live in ourselves.

These demons are the most potent attackers against an understanding of karma and biography. Ahriman hates karma. Steiner says to the young doctors, “Ahriman wants to kill karma.” – “Ahriman möchte das Karma totschlagen”. (Die einzige Stelle, die ich kenne, wo Rudolf Steiner von totschlagen spricht. The only place, that I know of, where Rudolf Steiner speaks about killing.) Ahriman wants to kill karma and this is the counter impulse against the Christ impulse: to take karma away from people, to take karma away from the earth. We know from the evolution of mankind that when Lucifer came, the good gods brought illness and death as possibilities. But when Ahriman started to work in the Atlantean period, when he came more and more into the reality of the earth forces, then the good gods gave karma. This brought on the Ahrimanic impulse. Ahriman knows that this is the force through which human beings will overcome him one day, and bring about his salvation.

We will overcome Lucifer through self-knowledge, which is the best prevention of illness, and we will overcome Ahriman by biography work, by the understanding of karma. Therefore we need a path of schooling which meets Christ in social life. We need people who do not run away even if the most difficult processes in social life come up and we have only one Society in the world in which all these problems can appear – this is the Anthroposophical Society.

There are no difficulties between young and old, between men and women, between races, religions and so on, like those in our nice little Society. This is really the social sphere to experience representative problems of our time. Before Fundamentalism came, in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, we had this in our Society decades before. We know of this tremendous battle of who has the right knowledge of what Anthroposophy really is and what is the right method of studying it? We have all these characteristics and also the experience of the battle and powerlessness. (I must not give more details – I’m sure you can all elaborate on this with your own experiences.)

If you read the Letters to Members from the aspect of what is the social path of schooling, you can discover there, that to deal with it, you need a society. We need to discover the Society as the social activity to overcome Ahriman; to create a community in which Michael can reveal himself, rather than Ahriman who splits people into groups and into individuals. Ahriman is the spirit of splitting, and Michael is the spirit of uniting the most different streams and splitting paths of mankind. Rudolf Steiner says that Michael can only really start his work powerfully in our days if there is an instrument in which the different streams are working together. He indicates that this is to happen around the turn of the century; at least by then this must be created! We have seven years left to develop it and we will.

To add to this perspective, in his final address to Members, Rudolf Steiner says, “At least 4 x 12 people must form such an organism so that Michael can live and this festival of the experience of his revelation can take place.” It is not a question of number but of qualities. Four times twelve different problems, qualities and streams must come together. This is a huge number of different streams that we really have to unite in the Society.

I went through these Letters to the Members with the question, “Which are the most important impulses for the social schooling of biography workers?” On the whole, you will find in these letters, twenty-one impulses for self-education, for those who want to work actively for Anthroposophy. From these twenty-one points, I found nine of them very essential for this social path of schooling of the biography worker.

The first one is that a member who wants to be active for the Society has the duty to identify with the whole Society. This is the first condition that he mentions. We see immediately that this means the higher self of the Society – the destiny, the whole; this part about which we are tempted to say,” Not with these people! I love the idea of the Society, but not with those people!”

We have there the same threshold of identifying, as our clients have with their own biographies – “Part of my destiny-yes, but not the whole.” To identify with the whole is a tremendous schooling.

We all hope that biography workers will be a positive infection for mankind and multiply into thousands one day. If all biography workers take these nine points, of which I have only mentioned the first, as their very active schooling, as a social training, to be good counsellors, then the whole society will be transformed. Through this, an awakening process can take place of the higher being of the Society, which is Michael. He is the guide of the Society, the spirit who wants to reveal himself in the Society and its work. But this means a tremendous social activity which we can only reach by this strong will towards selflessness. This selflessness is the same quality which we need to accept karma. In this case, it is the acceptance of the karma of our Society and through identifying with it, we can meet the mystery to discover what we can learn and win out of this specific karma for mankind’s future.

The second condition is to have good knowledge of all the enemies of Anthroposophy, of all the forces of hindrance. This is easier than the first condition, but nevertheless, it is also quite a business. For now I will only mention the three enemies that Rudolf Steiner cited in the Statutes of the Christmas Foundation meeting which are the centre of the newly formed Society. He mentioned here that we have to fight against dogmatism, sectarianism and politics. We can, at least, start to discover these enemies in these three following fields. We see it in the field of knowledge where we have the corruption( dogmatism ), in the field of feelings, we have sectarianism which is a corruption, a problem of feelings (you feel for the people with whom you are and against those people who are not in your group – this tremendous criticism can only arise out of feelings.) Lastly, in politics, we have corruption of the will. It is a Luciferic corruption of the will if we try to make it nice for everybody. This is a very Luciferic aspect because we start to become untrue, and here is the essence of politics. The Ahrimanic aspect of politics is what we all understand as politics – that is the manipulation of people by an obvious or a hidden power. Being continually nice or using hidden or overt power – this is the corruption of doing things with love.

Also in these Letters to Members, Steiner describes the therapy and with this we can discover the enemies. The therapy for dogmatism is interest in other people, to try to understand them. We know that behind this is the path of thinking. The path of therapy for sectarianism is recognition of all the positive qualities another person has. (Criticism is recognising the negative aspects, recognition is discovering the positive aspects.) This is the only force to overcome sectarianism. In the last sphere we have this beautiful word – trust. If we are always fearful that the other is not being truthful or is being political with us, we will never overcome politics. We must start by not being politicians, and this we can only do on the basis of trust -self-trust and trust in other people. This we can start now so that a world can start to develop which is not full of politics in that way. This is one aspect, but there are other huge enemies of course.

This is the second condition – to come to truth, to overcome error through recognising evil. We can understand that the first condition, to identify with the whole, is only possible if you also include the second condition. Without this second condition, we will not be able to discriminate evil from good which is necessary in order to identify with the whole Society.

The third condition is a very difficult one – it is to be honest when we sit together and speak about our own work and the work of the others. Rudolf Steiner, in his time, already discovered that if people sit together, everybody is nicely political and says, “What you are doing is great,” and then after the session, one by one or in small groups, the truth comes out. The third condition is to bring the truth out in public and to find a way to do so.

The fourth condition – and you know what this is from biography work when you try to strengthen your client so that he can come to the threshold where he has the courage to say the truth to himself and to others. If we do not experience how difficult this is, if we think it is enough to school this quality in our personal destinies and in our professional lives, then we are under an illusion. The most difficult thing is to come to this inner decision to say the truth about someone when we are sitting together with people with whom we join our karma and with whom we do not have a personal relationship. This is the case in this wide, objective field of such a Society as ours.

So then the fourth point is to find, not only the good will for cooperation, but also the point where it can become fruitful. Rudolf Steiner says, “Das Richtige in der gutwilligen Zusammenarbeit mit den Anderen finden”. We have to strive to find the right thing when we have good will in cooperation with another person. It must be possible in any relationship based on goodwill to find the right thing which makes this relationship fruitful.

Then the fifth point is referring to interest in others again. It’s a specific condition but with the aim of engendering so strong an interest that the members, for example in the branch, can feel it. The right atmosphere in a branch can only be created if the people feel themselves understood by the interest of one for the other.

And the sixth condition is to learn to find the right questions to put in front of life – to learn to question, to find the right questions out of life and for life situations. If we can then come to questions that are really relevant and if we try to work towards finding an answer, then we have to find the right tone for this answer. Rudolf Steiner says, the content of the answer is not the most important fact, but it is how we put the answer in the quality of our language. With this condition, speech training as an instrument of counselling, the working of how to humanly express what we want to say, is also an integral part of this path of schooling.

A very relevant problem that we have in the whole movement of counselling and biography work and we can also discover this in group sessions, is that many people are in the danger of becoming quite egoistic. In this seventh condition Rudolf Steiner indicates a certain development. He says that every human being has a striving for world knowledge. However achieving this is very difficult so people resign themselves to feeling unable to reach this world knowledge. They don’t understand what’s going on today and thus they don’t feel good about it and start to hate it. Then they retract their questioning and searching to understand the world because they are too hurt, so they pull back from striving towards world understanding. Instead of this they start with self-understanding. Quite often this creates a tremendous imbalance – that people are extremely interested in themselves, in psychology, in self-understanding in all its details, and not interested enough in world understanding or in understanding other people. We also have this problem in the branches and therefore those who want to strive actively as Members of the Society have to know this fact. This is just a fact. Self-knowledge is always in danger of degenerating into self-love. He says, “Selbst Erkenntnis kann ausarten in Selbstliebe”. Self-love is the beginning of a serious illness- small self-love leads to small illness and great self-love to great illness. As counsellors or as members of the Society, we have to heal this self-love. This is one of the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society – to overcome self-love, because this appears when we have not the right balance between self-knowledge and world-knowledge. Then we have to work to overcome self-love by striving towards loving mankind and the human being in general. This is the therapy for self-love and this quality of love is THE Christian quality which brings mankind together.

Then the eighth point is to be a real representative of Anthroposophy so that people can meet Anthroposophy through you. This is a very Mercurial activity – that you school yourself in such a way that in counselling the client always feels that what speaks through you is not only you as a person, but also the very objective pathway of mankind, which is higher than you as a person. He must have the impression that behind you stands something higher and he has to look for this, to find the right question to understand this. This will be very unconscious for the client at first of course, however it must be felt by him that something stands behind you – the being of Anthroposophy.

The ninth condition, and the last that I found and felt to be very specific for a biography schooling path, is a certain summary of all these points; to feel oneself as a mediator between the knowledge of the initiate and the questioning human soul of the client. I think this is the most lovely description of biography work: to feel oneself as a mediator between the knowledge of the initiate and the questioning soul living in our time.

In this way I would say the path of schooling of a biography worker deals on the one hand with pure Anthroposophy, and on the other hand with the mission of the Anthroposophical Society. Without this social experience and the inner experience of the schooling path, we will not have this tremendous flexibility and the whole spectrum of all occurrences in human life. We need individual counselling. It is always difficult if we set standards, such as how we ask questions, or how to follow through. These are necessary, of course, but they must be always created anew out of the huge panorama of possibilities and finding moral intuition for the specific situation.

Concluding Remarks

Now I must come to an end, and you may think that I did not speak about the Etheric Christ, so now I will try to make this clearer with some concluding remarks. Rudolf Steiner prepared the revelation of the theme of Anthroposophy in his “Philosophy of Freedom”.

The impulse of this “Philosophy of Freedom” was to wake up ego activity in the field of knowledge, to overcome the pride of wisdom, which is Lucifer, and the mighty egotism which is potentially integrated in freedom, which is Ahriman; and thus to overcome these two enemies in the realm of thinking so that the ideal and the reality of freedom can become Christianised.

Through this deed, the preparation was done to purify the realm of thoughts in the human being so that Christ can reveal himself in the etheric, in the realm of thoughts. Steiner was somehow like John the Baptist for this etheric Christ-revelation. He had to prepare the path so that the ego really could awake in this realm to find and meet Christ in overcoming the enemies – the forces of hindrance.

Then Anthroposophy had to come and this was the second step in the preparation for the revelation of Christ in the etheric, that this being of Anthroposophy which was born in the field of knowledge, could reveal itself also in the field of art (with all its different manifestations) through the soul-forces, and at last, in the will-forces in the sacramentalisation of all the professions. It was a tremendous second step to prepare for this revelation because people meet the etheric Christ in their daily life when they struggle with their feelings, when they struggle in their social life or in their professional life and when they struggle with knowledge processes. He can suddenly appear when people are struggling and help us to find the right thought which will bring salvation to the situation and immediately change the whole mood of our soul. One idea comes and suddenly the whole inner sphere is totally changed by this one thought provided it is the right one, the fitting one and if the question or the situation is strong enough.

Therefore it is necessary that, beginning with the thinking life, the whole soul life is so prepared that humanity, which is Christ, can come to a revelation. Anthroposophy must be there as a whole so that the essence of humanity can be revealed.

As we know, Rudolf Steiner mentioned that the general accessibility of this revelation of Christ in the etheric will come in 1933. This was when the counter-human forces in Germany had this revelation. We can see that there is a tremendous battle to hinder human beings from really meeting Christ, from really asking for him.

Now we have only five years before 1998, when the second tremendous attack of the Sorath-being, the beast with two horns, will come. This beast force will work against humanity and we have already in preparation a certain counterforce to this which is the tremendous impulse of biography work which began after the Second World War and is preparing mankind for the end of the century.

I was so glad to hear some of you were saying that we must bring these ideas on a much wider basis to the whole of the population. This is really what we have to do because what is preparing now for the revelation of the beast in ’98 can be felt most powerfully during the last few years, and specifically last year, when we read all the horror stories of violence and brutality from all over the world.

What is the result, the fact, of this most terrible expression of brutality and inhumanness? The effect is that people start to doubt that mankind is guided by a good spirit and that people start to hate life on earth. The fears of violence and all these things are so strong that many people take drugs or try to kill themselves because these fears are more terrible than the idea of destroying themselves or dying – so strong is this insecurity, loneliness, doubting and desperation about what’s going on and this is what the beast wants! It wants us to have such a negative impression of humanity on earth that we refuse to go further. This is not only the most effective thing the beast wants for mankind, but also it is the most effective thing to hide the redemption of Christ in the etheric world.

Therefore we have to understand this fact and to work for a new trust which means to struggle with evil and to meet evil in our own karma and to overcome it out of free will. Then people will meet Christ. I think the fact that biography work goes hand in hand with the revelation of the Etheric Christ in our century is significant. We have to deal with that peacefully, in silence and to realise it because this Anthroposophical Society is devoted to Christ, through the Foundation Meditation, to prepare for this event. I think we have to deal with this tremendous task – to find enough human beings who really decide to become co-workers in the Anthroposophical Society which Rudolf Steiner wanted to found at the Christmas Foundation meeting. Against these beast forces it is absolutely necessary to have, at the end of the century, human community building in which Michael can reveal and show us this pathway to meet Christ in the etheric.

I would like to conclude with a sentence (out of a lecture of 26 March, 1922, in the book GA211) in which Rudolf Steiner works out the revolution which came into the spiritual world through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the totally new knowledge of death and of human biography for the gods! I will summarise this now for you.

The gods need, as research and as totally new content for their own development, that the people on earth meet Christ and understand their lives anew through Christ and bring to them this mission of how Christ lives in the human biography -in all the details of daily life which are to be looked for in the light of the reality of Christ. These details of human life are of the greatest interest to the hierarchies.