Lodge of the Masters

Now from where do the higher beings obtain this plan? We find an answer to this if we consider that there are still higher stages of evolution where the plans are devised. That is where world evolution is worked out. These higher stages are indicated to us by the Ancients, for instance by Dionysius, the pupil of the Apostle Paul, and also by Nicholas Cusanus. His perception was:

Higher than all knowledge and perception is the lack of perception. But this Unknowing is a higher knowing, and this lack of perception is a higher perceiving.

When we stop looking at what we hold in our thinking and concepts of the world, and turn ourselves to what wells up, to our inner powers, then we find something still higher. The Masters can weave the [third] Logos because they have ascended still higher than the nature of thinking. When the higher powers are developed, then, in such beings, thought appears as something different. It then corresponds to our spoken word within us. The thought which constitutes the innermost being for the Masters can itself be the expression of a higher being, just as the word is the expression of thought [with us].

If we ourselves consider thought as the word of a still higher being, then we come near to the concept of a the Logos. Knowledge taken out from thought stands on a still higher level.

When we behold the world we find the atom at the one extreme. It is an image of the plan that proceeded out of the depths of the spirit of the Masters, which is the Logos. If we now look for the transformation of man himself during the great world epoch, then we are led back again into the world.

If we now look for the transformation of man himself during the great world epoch, then we are led back again into the world.

Just as man has descended, has plunged down to the physical plane, so is it also with the world as a whole. What contributes to the development of man’s self lies around him in the world.

But then we are led down to the lower planes, which however, themselves contain the higher planes….the Lodge of the Masters.

Rudolf Steiner, Atoms and the Logos

Renunciation of Higher Knowledge

My dear friends, we have reached an event in human history that is of the greatest imaginable importance. Human beings are making the resolve: We will renounce knowledge! It was in one of those simple gatherings of Rosicrucians that, on the occasion of a ritual arranged for the purpose – during the latter half of the fifteenth century – people’s knowledge of the stars was, in deeply solemn manner, offered up.

People stood before a kind of altar and said: “We resolve to feel ourselves at this moment responsible not for ourselves alone, nor for our community or our nation alone, not even for the people of our time alone; we resolve to feel ourselves responsible for all people who have ever lived on Earth, we resolve to feel ourselves belonging to the whole of humankind.

And we feel that what has really happened with human beings is that they have deserted the rank of the fourth hierarchy and have descended too deeply into matter. [ for the ‘Fall’ was understood in this sense.] And so that humanity may be able to return to the ran of the fourth hierarchy, may be able to find for itself of its own free will what in earlier times gods have tried to find for it and with it, let now the higher knowledge be offered up for a season.

And certain beings of the spiritual world, who are not of humankind, who do not come to Earth in human incarnation, accepted the sacrifice in order to fulfill therewith certain purposes of the spiritual world. Thereby was the impulse for freedom made possible for human beings.

Everything that takes place in the external life of the physical senses has its spiritual counterpart; we merely have to look for it in the right place. For it can happen that such a ritual, enacted – I will not say, in this instance, with full knowledge, but enacted by persons who stand in connection with the spiritual world, can have very deep meaning; from it can radiate impulses for a whole culture, for a whole stream of civilisation.

It is a fact that if we want to come to a clear knowledge of the fundamental colouring and tone of a particular epoch of history, we must look for the source in the spiritual; the spiritual spring whose forces stream through that epoch of time. Whatever, in the years that followed, showed itself to be of a truly spiritual nature was a kind of echo sounding on of this creative working out of unknown spiritual worlds. Side by side with external materialism that developed in the succeeding centuries, we can always find here and there individuals who are living under the influence of that renunciation of higher knowledge.

The Secret Stream, Rudolf Steiner