Today, in our culture, the name of Christ occupies too little space, and very few people know as yet the truth about who Christ is and why He is called the Saviour of mankind. True knowledge of Christ leads in a natural way each person to reverence and divine adoration. The truth about Christ and why He is truly the Saviour of mankind is now widely accessible to everybody, but it can be reliably found only in the spiritual science of Anthroposophy and in the teaching of Master Peter Dunov. I am speaking about the literature, which can be easily found in Bulgaria.

Today, the name of Christ is mentioned and praised only during the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter as a beautiful tradition, surviving the crises of time and history. But we should know so many other things, things which are essential, about Christ and about mankind’s connection with Him.

For example, if we are to understand correctly reincarnation and destiny, we need to have also a true understanding of Christ. The more understanding we imbue about Christ in the course of our earthly life, the more He will become our guide through the complicated cosmic relationships after death – when we leave the earth and set out on the long journey to the Zodiac and back, returning to a new incarnation on the earth. When we get to know Christ and His significance for the evolution of earthly mankind, while we are still on the earth, our life acquires a completely new meaning. We then start living with quite another understanding and accepting the ordeals on our way of life, which also gives us its fruits after death. The more correct understanding man acquires of Christ, while still living on the earth, the more he will dress himself in IMPERISHABILITY and rise to an ever clearer I-consciousness. This is actually the mission of Christ.

It is time, and as a matter of fact, now is the correct time, while we are living on the earth, to learn as much as possible about Christ, so that our soul could attain to the right mood. This means that our soul should start already feeling that it cannot possibly achieve its rightful development, as envisaged in the evolution, by itself, without the FORCES given to it by Christ. These forces, connecting us ever more strongly to the Christ impulse cannot emerge in us without our conscious search and commitment to the Christ forces.

Those people, who feel nothing and don’t care learning about Christ, those, who go through their earthly life without connecting themselves in some way to Christ – the earthly way of their destiny will become ever more difficult, full of suffering, which they will be unable to explain. Such people will feel an increasingly stronger disharmony in themselves, a subconscious dissatisfaction, depressions, will experience a feeling of disorganization. The reasons for this will be their inability to relate correctly to their karma and destiny. In other words, they will not be in the right accord and harmony with the Cosmos.

If man is to understand correctly this last sentence I formulated above, he must definitely acquire knowledge about Christ and His role in the human evolution. This is not something, which can be learned in 5 or 50 words, but in the first place one should have willingness to learn and consequently allocate time for study, reflection and understanding.

According to the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy, from the point of view of cosmic evolution, the physical body of man is his oldest structure, which has been worked upon by Spiritual Beings of various ranks in the Hierarchy during the period of the so-called Old Saturn. The next period of the Earth’s incarnation is called the Old Sun, during which the physical body of man, once again through the assistance of sublime Spiritual Beings in the Hierarchy was reorganized so that it could receive the etheric body. In the next period, called the Old Moon, again through the spiritual intervention of the Hierarchy, man received the astral body, and during the Earth period, the human body was formed again and placed in the upright position already, so that it could become the bearer of the Ego, of the I. The mission of the Earth is to make possible the free development of the I, which should express love in such a way that at the end of Earth’s evolution everything should be penetrated with love. In what lies still ahead, man should take up his role in the creative world process with responsibility and love.

In order to achieve this goal, the Ego – the I needs the physical body, which is the mirror of the I-consciousness.

Nevertheless, when we speak about the physical, etheric and astral bodies created during the above mentioned periods, we should not imagine anything like our present physical body. The aim of the formative Beings, who created man, was not endowing him with a visible physical body like it is today. The body, created by them at that time, was a transparent net-like form of matter, which represented the spiritual form of the physical body. This is described pictorially as the Fall in the Bible.

During the Lemurian epoch, the germ of the I had already been given to the most advanced human beings in the development, but they were still far away from the time, when they would become I-conscious. After Lucifer’s temptation, working in the human astral body, a series of complex reactions started operating, “falls”, which mixed up the spiritual essence of the human physical body. This spiritual essence of the physical body is called by Rudolf Steiner “the phantom of the human body”. The phantom has always been invisible and is still now invisible for our eyes.

After the interferences of the Luciferic beings, material substances were gradually implanted in this fine spiritual net-like form of the physical body, until it became dense and visible, as we have it today. That, however, which was immortal in the human body until that time accepted mortality and became perishable, accepted death.

Later, the Ahrimanic forces (the satanic forces) got also involved and together with the Luciferic (devil’s) influences contributed for the disorganization of the primary spiritual form of man, made it confused and too strongly attached to the mineral elements. As a result, the energies of death became so powerful that life on the Earth was going to cease if that continued longer. The most important thing was that the spiritual essence of the physical body, the phantom, which has always been, and still is, invisible, became so dense and dark that it could not accompany any more the soul and the spirit after death. In this manner, the feeling for the I became duller and duller and there arose a clear danger of losing the I-consciousness. If man’s phantom could not be restored, it was possible that the mission of the Earth could not be fulfilled. This restoration of the phantom or the spiritual form, or the original of the physical body, through which the I had to be saved, could not be performed by man or by another Higher Hierarchy, but by a Divine Being only. It had to be such Being, who could be free from any influences of Lucifer and Ahriman. This Being was Christ.

The appearance of Christ on the Earth, of the God, Who descended to the Earth and sacrificed Himself in order to save the I of man is an event of such magnitude that there is nothing to compare it to! For this reason, there are many mistaken views today about Him. The time of today, 21st century, demands from man new understanding by creating new concepts and ideas, which are already related to the supersensible world and to the Spiritual Hierarchies. Very few people think of the supersensible world from this point of view as yet. The man of our time has a superficial idea about the worlds he does not see, but it is more or less an idea about certain extraterrestrials, in which he does not believe either, or about which has such a distorted idea that we can only laugh. It is high time for man to change his thinking, i.e. to stop accepting and explaining things and phenomena only within the framework of what he actually sees, but to uplift his thinking to understand and create concepts about the Spiritual Worlds, about the Spiritual Hierarchies and Beings. They are as yet invisible for us, but it is time we know that they are much more closely related to man that we can surmise and that they are taking care for the correct development of mankind all the time. If we manage to uplift our thinking above the limitations of our materialistic science and surroundings, we would achieve wonders.

I am aware of the fact that a lot people in our times, who are strong believers and make efforts to be good Christians, accept only the Bible as their guide and don’t want to hear the deeper truths offered today by Anthroposophy. It is true that the Bible is by far the greatest book of the truth, but for the time being man understands too little of it. In order to understand it, he should gradually raise his thinking up to the Spirit, since the Gospel writers themselves, who left us their four Gospels, were people with “initiation”. Besides, each of them had a different kind and level of initiation, which resulted in certain differences in the Gospels.

The concept “initiation” cannot possibly give us today reliable ideas of what it really means. It is a different thing if someone has studied purposefully one of the esoteric sciences. The “initiations” in ancient times were not only given to people really deserving access to cosmic secrets, but were also a very complicated and dangerous process, performed by skilful wise men and high priests. During that process of initiation, the neophyte had to be extracted out of his own physical body. Even the Adepts and the initiates of the East were out of their body during the initiation, because it was clear for all initiates from the pre-Christian age that even if they reached the most outer limits of the physical body, they did not touch the forces of the physical body. Why was that? Until the Mystery of Golgotha and the wonder performed on the Earth through Christ’s death (the Resurrection), men, when dying, spent a certain length of time between their death and their next incarnation in the higher worlds, but coming to their new incarnation, they brought down from the Spiritual World an imperfect, predestined for destruction phantom (the spiritual invisible part of the physical body). This means that after their death on the Earth, people could not bring to life a complete phantom of the physical body. While mankind can actually draw near the purpose of its evolution only through this phantom, through its genuine forces, such as they were given to it with the Creation, but lost after “The Fall”. This is the reason for the great sacrifice given by Christ to mankind. Dying on the cross and pouring His blood into the Earth, He connected Himself with the Earth and became part of it and part of mankind. Thus, He made it possible for us through the Death on Golgotha to save the human I and to give possibility for the resurrection of the physical body.