Dear Friends,
The fifth step in our meditations on the First Beatitude comes from Robert Powell’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer Course, available on the Sophia Foundation’s website as pdf. (For the first of these meditations, and their background motivation, see here; for the second meditation see here; for the third see here; for the fourth see here).
The first Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The preparation for the baptism in the Jordan: the conversation with Mary in The Fifth Gospel (see lectures by Rudolf Steiner). The way to the Jordan as the bringing to realization of the highest prerequisite for the highest Intuition in world history.
Jesus, when he went to the Baptism in the Jordan, had offered up everything: his family, and even his own body—as he had to live in another body. Then he experienced on his wanderings that the Mystery forms that he had created in his previous incarnation—and in a still earlier incarnation (as Zarathustra)—were now fully degenerate, and that the cultic ritual centers were possessed by demons. Secondly, he experienced the silence of the Bath-Kol, the voice which had been heard by the priesthood down through the ages. Thirdly, he experienced how the Holy Order of Essenes—because they wanted to live a pure and holy existence—drove out Lucifer and Ahriman to other people, i.e. false purity and poverty. Then Jesus went to the Jordan to be baptised. He had offered up everything, was completely empty and poor, and now he offered up his last, his “I”, in the hope for a miracle. He knew that everything of the spiritual life of that time was at an end, and that only a miracle could bring new, spiritual life again. And then the greatest miracle occurred: Christ entered down into the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth, which were completely opened up to Him.