United in our I Am At Pentecost

Understanding Pentecost is an important part of unlocking the Bible.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Acts 2:1-4

Why didn’t the disciples experience the Holy Spirit when they were with Christ? Why did they have to wait until fifty days after his death? Perhaps this explains why they were a bit slow at times, why they didn’t seem to see what Christ was accomplishing? Peter addressed all those present saying, “he has poured out this [Holy Spirit] that you both see and hear.” So even though the disciples could see him and hear him in the flesh, they didn’t have the inner perception that came at Pentecost.

At Pentecost, when the tongues of fire rested on their heads, they experience the presence of Christ within them for the first time. Pentecost is the celebration of the entry of the Cosmic Christ into our being. It means that we can experience our individual I Am and at the same time feel at one with the Cosmos and the Cosmic Christ. We can be separate and part of the whole at the same time. The experience of separateness is as important as the experience of connectedness; to think that we will be part of an homogenous Cosmic consciousness is from the past.

The I Am changed everything

Up until Golgotha, our I Am had been held for us in the heavens by Jehovah. The Christ deed gave our I Am into our hands. Until then we had been part of the group consciousness, now we have to go it alone. No more tribes and families, we are now individuals fully responsible for ourselves. This doesn’t mean that we dispense with our family or community; it means that we must individually bear the responsibility for what we think, feel, and do.

This is the modern dilemma isn’t it? We always want to ask someone else for advice when we have to make a decision. How often do we ask others, “How do you feel about that?” We are forever bouncing ideas around to see what others think. If we are honest, we must admit that we miss group consciousness; we miss the guidance of the tribal elder, the king, or the priest. As long as we seek the opinions of others, we have not been filled with the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel of St John, Jesus reassures us by saying: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another counselor, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, …” John 14:16-17 The counselor, the comforter, the parakletos, is the Holy Spirit. This can be the only source of confidence for our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Pentecost is an excellent time to contemplate our I Am. Pentecost is about universal understanding beyond creed and culture. There is no right or wrong side of the track. It is through our I Am that we are united as a human race; it is our astral and lower soul that divides us. It is through our thinking that we are united, our feelings divide us. When we think, regardless of the language we speak, our thoughts are the same. A tree is a tree is a tree anywhere in the world.

We are separated from one another by the spoken word. Even within the same city we are separated by the spoken word. An uneducated person would not be able to understand the university lecturer and probably vice versa. Even among the educated much effort is put into describing what we really mean when we use particular words. Because of Golgotha there is a way to use words so that everyone understands what we are saying. This is the gift, and the challenge of Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit

It is our task to connect with our I Am so that we can speak to each other in that spirit of truth and love which is called the new Holy Spirit. What exactly is this Holy Spirit? One way to understand it is this: as Christ is the offspring of the Father, so this new Holy Spirit is the offspring of Christ. At Pentecost this offspring of Christ was born; it is the spirit of universal love and it quickens us. The quickening is a feeling inside us like a fire burning bravely and warmly. This fire is an activity which we must contain. The more we love the better the container. Rudolf Steiner talks about this in his Fifth Gospel.

It is only through our human love that we can comprehend Christ’s deed of love. Through thinking it hardly makes sense. At Pentecost the disciples united in a common feeling of love for Christ which enabled them to contain this new Holy Spirit poured into them by Christ.

So at Pentecost we can use the power of our spiritual Imagination to feel how much love it took for a God to enter a human body and hang on a cross. Free will and love united in a deed that stands before us as a goal we also must strive for. The more we can have a real experience of this, the more we contain the Holy Spirit.

Each year we can add a bit more paint to the canvas, creating our Imagination of Pentecost. We create a living image etched on our souls and hopefully at the end of our life we have created a masterpiece to carry into the spiritual worlds when we die. In the glow of this masterpiece we will be able to contribute to the mighty Cosmic image that motivates souls to incarnate as co-workers of Archangel Michael and the Cosmic Christ.

So each year we are reminded that it isn’t until Pentecost that we can experience within us what was displayed at Golgotha 50 days before; Pentecost is the fruit of Golgotha. Pentecost and Golgotha are two halves of the whole. Christ’s deed at his crucifixion transformed our physical and our etheric bodies, now, through our own effort, we must receive the Holy Spirit so that we can experience Christ in our astral and ‘I’. This is the living Eucharist; our body is purified by the crucifixion and our blood is purified by the Holy Spirit.

Rudolf Steiner speaks about this living Communion in Lecture 9 of the lecture series “From Jesus to Christ”. Holy Communion is a ceremonial act through which spirit can unite with matter. Divine power actually flows into the bread and the wine. In the past people felt that taking Holy Communion was for them an esoteric path. Through Holy Communion they could find a real union with Christ. They took the bread and wine into themselves – from the outside they took something consecrated into them.

Now that the etheric presence of Christ permeates everything, from now on we must increasingly experience Holy Communion within us. This too is the gift of Pentecost. Through our contemplation of spiritual truth, our thoughts, and meditations on the Christ deed, our bodies become the consecrated bread and our blood becomes the consecrated wine. Certain thoughts and feelings will permeate and spiritualize our inner being – thoughts and feelings as fully consecrated as the bread and wine have been on the altars of churches over the last two thousand years. All external thoughts and external forms are transitory; the Christ-thought will live in ever-new forms in the hearts and souls of humanity. Then we will be united as co-creators with the living Christ – this is the Pentecost thought.

Published in:  The Secrets of the Christian Festivals https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08D6CPL8D/