Where there is loneliness and loss, Christ can reveal himself in the four types of ether.
Whatever is eternally present remains hidden. The air we breathe and the warmth surrounding us are so ubiquitous that we are unaware of them. So is it with the perceptibility of Christ. The question “Where and how does Christ work?” is also the question “How do I recognize Christ in his all-pervading presence?” or “Who is the human being whose goal and archetype is Christ?” or “Who are you—as the other whose essence I share?” or “Who am I—in relation to the world and to Christ?” A few months ago, I encountered a way of looking at Christ as a human-divine biography. These are biographical stages that are not identical with a human biography and yet contain the seven stages of our life script.
Biography of the Christ
From the Gospels, we know the account of the birth of the baby Jesus or, in Rudolf Steiner’s presentation, the birth of the two Jesus boys. Just as we human beings prepare our biography in harmony with the hierarchies in the spiritual world, so Christ prepared his earthly existence by bringing together the hereditary stream of Zarathustra and the hereditary stream of an individuality that had never before incarnated in an earthly body. Just as in human biography, where father and mother are brought together across incarnations, so the Christ incarnation was prepared by uniting the bearer of the wisdom stream of humanity with an innocent individuality unmarked by earthly incarnations. The birth and childhood of Jesus, as we know them from the Gospels, are thus the prenatal preparation for the incarnation of the Christ. Preparation is followed by “conception.”
This occurred at the baptism in the Jordan, at age thirty. Here, the Christ was conceived in his human body. The conception was followed by the three years of the historical work of Christ. We can understand this time as the “embryonic period” of the Christ. We have the preparation, the conception, and now the shaping of Christ’s life during these three years. Then the Mystery of Golgotha occurred: the death of Christ in his prepared earthly body. Just as the placenta must die, so this human body had to die in order to make possible the “birth” of the Christ. The death on the Cross was the birth of the life of Christ. We learn of the Resurrection, as Mary Magdalene was the first to experience it on Easter morning. She found the tomb empty. In her desperate search, she encountered the gardener. A gardener is always there, caring for the grass and the flowers and the order of things—and in him she was able to recognize Christ, in his effective body upon the Earth, in his etheric form—the form of the Risen One. This is how the other disciples also recognize him. They all first have an encounter with a stranger who then accompanies them, who understands their concerns, and who, in the evening, with bread and wine, is eventually recognized as the one who is always there, who will now always be there, as the Christ in his etheric form.
All these encounters with the Risen One have something of the everyday about them. Something common to all human beings occurs, and therein the Christ becomes visible in his resurrected reality. This period of intimate encounters lasts forty days. The disciples experienced Christ on Earth in etheric form, in his Resurrection Body. This is the true “life of the Christ” on the Earth. And, like every earthly biography, the life of Christ also ends. This is the Ascension, the “death of the Christ” from the perspective of the Earth. Rudolf Steiner describes the disciples’ experience of the Ascension as a “time of mourning.” Christ ascends to the heights with the promise, “I will be with you until the end of days.”
Within the Community, Christ Appears
Ten days after Ascension, a new conception occurred: again, the symbol of the dove appears, the holy, healing, and liberating spirit, which now fertilizes a human community. In human community, the encounter with Christ becomes possible as a process of recognition. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the middle of them” [Matt. 18:20]. Community building, witnessed by the presence of the ‘I’ of humanity. In this community, ‘I’-consciousness develops and ripens. A mature ‘I’ takes responsibility for itself and its own biography. This “I-Am-Becoming” is the central motif of the consciousness soul, but if it remains the sole motif, it leads to isolation and loneliness. “I am” also means taking responsibility for those people who are entrusted to us. This requires further experience of the ‘I’ from the perspective of the periphery, the community.
Many people today will say, “I have no ‘I’. I don’t even know what that is.” They rightly notice that our feelings are constantly changing, our bodies wear out, and that the convictions upon which I base my life may be entirely shattered by tomorrow. The ‘I’-Being is fragile. The identification of the ‘I’ with this or that is illusion, as the Buddha has already taught. An ‘I’ that negates itself in this way experiences profound isolation and loneliness. This emptiness resonates when a person says, “I don’t know who I am. I have lost my ‘I’. I lost myself.” And then perhaps there’s a therapist who says, “Try to remember when you were a bundle of humanity—thrown into the world—and there were hands that caught you, how there was warmth and nourishment, peace, security. And hands that carried you, overcoming your heaviness. Experience yourself from the periphery, from the love that made your life here on Earth possible. Experience what you yourself cannot know; experience it from the warmth, from the love of the people who surround you, even if it is only one.”
“Find yourself in the light,” wrote Rudolf Steiner in a mantra he gave to Ita Wegman in November 1924. Ita Wegman recited it every morning for many years to the nurses in her clinic. It was an encouragement to find oneself in the endless unfolding in the etheric world of light and tone.
Find yourself in the light
With the soul’s own tone
And tone granulated
Becomes color image in the light
Light-Divine-Being
Tone dispersed
Tone, resurrected in light-being,
Speaks from light-being
You are
A unique tone in the world light
Tone enlightening
Light intoning.
The everlasting reality of the ChristFinde dich im Lichte
Mit der Seele Eigenton
Und Ton zerstäubt
Wird Farbgebild im Lichte
Licht-Götter-Wesen
VerschwundenerTon
In ihm wiedererstandener Ton
Spricht aus ihm
Du bist
Eigenton im Weltenlicht
Töne leuchtend
Leuchte tönend.
Die immerwährende Wirklichkeit des Christus
It’s good to be completely absorbed in nursing and palliative care. When you then look back at the end of the day, you may hear the encouragement: “You are!” It is the experience of inner connection and connectedness with the world of life, with the world of goodness, with warmth, water, air, and the heaviness of the Earth. Just as we can discover the quality of light in our thinking, we can experience what is spiritually airy all around us. We find the quality of fluidity where things are in rhythm—the water that can differentiate and dissolve, bring together, and form. Rudolf Steiner calls this the chemical ether. Added to this is the life ether. In scarcity, abundance can appear. The despair of loneliness, which creates its own periphery, is love.
This is the everlasting reality of Christ. He lives in the etheric sphere. Rudolf Steiner first described the etheric Christ in 1909. He mentions the reappearance of Christ in etheric form on Earth so that it will be possible for every human being to achieve this individual encounter with Christ. He speaks in moving words about how these encounters can take place. It can occur quite incidentally when we are in inner need and don’t know what to do at all. We can always do something for ourselves. We have hidden resources. But the greatest despair is to see another person whom we cannot help. That is when the real need of the soul begins! There Christ can be present. There are situations where you help someone who may have had a night plagued by pain. You leave the room, and the doctor asks after her rounds, “What did you do with this patient?” Perhaps it was just a glance into this nothingness, into powerlessness and need, or a hot water bottle.
Christ can appear where something is lost. He gives the forces of life that unite everything. Every little thing we do, every movement, every medicine we find, every little stone we pick up, generates an etheric periphery in the act of doing. It streams out. When a movement comes to an end in a human deed, at that moment when it becomes past, it generates this periphery.
In a mantra that he gave to doctors and priests, and which is cherished in the hearts of both professions, Rudolf Steiner depicted a meditative path for experiencing Christ:
I will walk the path
That looses the elements into deed
And downward leads to the Father,
Who gifts illness to balance karma
And upwards leads to the Spirit
Who guides the soul to attain freedom
Christ leads downwards and upwards
Harmoniously generating Spirit Man in earthly man.Ich werde gehen den Weg
Der die Elemente in Geschehen löst
Und nach unten führt zum Vater,
Der die Krankheit schickt zum Ausgleich des Karma
Und nach oben führt zum Geiste
Der die Seele zum Erwerb der Freiheit leitet
Christus führt nach unten und nach oben
Harmonisch Geistesmensch in Erdenmenschen zeugend.
This path can be transformed into the inner experience of the caregiver, into my personal, meditative experience, and formulated as follows:
I will walk the path
That reconnects the abandoned with the periphery
And downwards leads me to the Father,
Who wills humanity from the beginning,
And upwards leads me to the Spirit,
Who awakens the soul to feel the other’s suffering.
Christ leads into the heights, depths, and widths;
Uniting human souls with the world soul.Ich werde gehen den Weg,
der das Verlassene mit dem Umkreis wiederverbindet
und mich nach unten führt zum Vater,
der die Menschheit vom Anfang her will
und mich nach oben führt zum Geiste,
der die Seele zum Erfühlen fremden Leides erweckt.
Christus führt in Höhen, Tiefen, Weiten;
Menschenseelen der Weltenseele einend.
We also live in the reality of the etheric world. Encountering Christ in his etheric form remains unattainable. Settling into the etheric world may prepare a space of knowledge and life for such an encounter. Anthroposophic medicine, in particular, can contribute to this in a special way through its remedies, its handling of the elements, nursing, and the arts.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images Impressions from workshops at the international annual conference of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum 2025; Photo: Xue Li.
