The Second Coming as Inner Event

Part three of a series on the Apocalypse archetype and the esoteric meaning of our time, via Rudolf Steiner and Gigi Young

This is the third part of an essay inspired by Gigi Young’s video, “War, Israel, Earth Magic, Trump, Anti-Christ & the Third Temple”. You can read part one and part two first, if you want, or just start here. Please let me know what you think in the comments.

We are at a point where the long-hoped-for phase-shift toward a higher octave of consciousness— expressed in the best of art, philosophy, and political activism of the last centuries to today, and in the best expressions of modern esotericism or mysticism found in visionary influencers from Terence McKenna to Ram Dass to bell hooks—seems to have, at least temporarily, failed. Instead of anticipating progress or evolution, many of us increasingly hold the foreboding intuition that our civilization—our world system—has stalled, stagnated and is rapidly regressing. I have different ideas as to why this has happened, which I will try to share. The question is whether this is a permanent condition, or whether the whole situation could shift again, unpredictably.

Philosopher Ken Wiber explored his model of spiral dynamics as it related to the rise of Trump in Trump and a Post-Truth World (2016). For Wilber, the postmodern movement since the 1960s (while he calls the green meme) put forward the idea that there is no universal truth, which he calls “the partial truth of postmodernism: all knowledge is context dependent. “This led to cultural relativism, deconstruction, and the “death of the author,” as well as identity politics, and, ultimately, a profound “legitimation crisis” for contemporary society as a whole.

The cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to anybody else (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing inequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, and life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis: a culture that is consistently lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long.

Wilber thought the postmodern model was shattered by Trump’s ascendancy. With far more intensity since his reelection last year, Trump and his allies have weaponized postmodern relativism to insist on a world without objective evidence or fact—where truth is defined by the powers-that-be or the autocrat. Trump seems to believe he can simply declare that climate change is a hoax or grocery prices are cheaper, and people will accept this as reality.

We are seeing very dark foreshadowings of a mechanically imposed post-truth society in Elon Musk’s manipulations of Grok, which has praised Hitler and supported Holocaust deniers. As The Washington Post reported:

Musk’s social network on Thursday was flooded with examples of Grok replying to users’ questions by lavishing praise on the billionaire entrepreneur. Asked about his intellect, appearance and accomplishments, Grok consistently hailed Musk as “strikingly handsome,” extolled his “lean, athletic physique,” raved about his “genius-level intellect” and ranked him as the No. 1 human, ahead of Leonardo da Vinci.

Musk, like Trump, is a thin-skinned want-to-be-autocrat who would like to rule over a totally controlled domain, much like the country of North Korea —but on the scale of a whole continent or planet — where he is continuously praised and worshipped. AI makes this relatively easy to accomplish for whoever controls the system on the back-end. As Robert Wright notes in his Non-Zero Newsletter: “The persuasive powers of LLMs have been demonstrated in multiple studies, and those powers will grow—especially when the LLM you find so “empowering” has recorded everything you’ve ever said to it and in some ways knows you better than you know yourself.”

Wilber proposes, optimistically, that Trumpism’s shattering of the postmodern meme was, in some sense, necessary as the only way to drive us to the next evolutionary stage, which he calls integral. We need “a developmental-based discriminating wisdom, in order for evolution to again start moving forward in a truly self-organizing and self-transcending way… Little by little, in other words, an Integral awareness is helping to embody an evolutionary self-correction in its very actions.” This integral stage, for Wilber, will transcend and include earlier stages of consciousness development, including “green” postmodern relativism. By doing this, it will heal our current divisions and dichotomies, and allow for positive evolution as a continuity.

Of course, I hope that this is the case, but I am also not sure how much of Wilber’s thinking (and, to be honest, my own) has been tainted by the Judeo-Christian bias toward a future state of post-messianic wholeness. Hegel’s idea of history as a dialectical process leading to the Absolute was a transposition of Christian eschatology, which Marx then absorbed into his vision of class warfare eventually leading to a post-political utopia. Similarly, the enterprise of tranhumanism and the quest for a technological Singularity posit a utopian future where death has been transcended and some form of total liberation from all material constraints has been attained. But these may actually be nightmare visions because they annihilate human agency and political participation as a vital activity of meaning-making.

In Hannah Arendt, I found a different perspective that seems more true to me. She believed that human beings have an innate political ability which modern society —Capitalist modernity—seeks to suppress. She noted that the word ‘politics’ derives from the word ‘polis’, the city-state in Ancient Greece. In a polis free citizens gathered to deliberate, debate and make decisions together. Arendt believes that democracy —human freedom—needs a public place where it can be practised, as we find in sudden revolutionary moments like the Paris Commune of 1870.

‘Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance,’ Arendt wrote.

To be sure it may still dwell in men’s hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called a demonstrable fact. Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter.

The future prospect of a purified, nonpolitical utopia—whether a dictatorship of the proletariat or a technological republic governed by AI—is an unhappy mistake, because political agency and authentic freedom are intimately related.

In fact, the entire future-orientation of Western civilization, embedded deeply in our way of thinking and rhetoric, may be part of the problem. In Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin wrote: “Every second is the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.” For Benjamin, the coming of the Messiah is not a single terminal event occurring at the end of a linear timeline. Instead, every instant—every present moment—is charged with the possibility of messianic irruption. The messianic revelation changes the way time is experienced and seized, now. It is not a date on the eschatological calendar: it isn’t about futurity at all. As Christ put it: “The hour is coming, and now is.”

Benjamin also wrote, in one unpublished note discovered after his death, that he saw Capitalism as a religious movement: “Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed… Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement.” The goal of Capitalism as a religious cult is to continue the destruction and make the guilt over it into a universal condition:

to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.

I think this is partly what we see with Trumpism, Putinism, Muskism, Netanyahu-ism, and so on, albeit unconsciously. The shameless blasphemy of Trump posting the AI-produced Gaza Trump video—where he is memorialized as a vast golden statue, and the site of the genocide of hundreds of thousands of children becomes a beach-front resort for the global elite—is meant to break our sense of moral structure or ethical context on the one hand, and on the other hand, it poses a question to the absent god, the Deus Abscondus. The despair overtaking the universe conceals the secret hope of redemption or a return of the Sacred, in some new unknown form.

In the history of the West leading up to today, outside of the limited domain of empirical science, we failed to accomplish the critical task of separating evidence-based reason and logic from thinking which is corrupted by ideology and distorted by lower forms of desire. The West needed to develop a model of open debate and dialectic, as found, for instance, among Tibetan Buddhist monks when debating fine points of Buddhist philosophy, which is a logically constructed system of thought. The murder of Socrates for inciting his followers to question and reflect was the founding act of Western civilization, a moment repeated again and again in different ages and costumes.

This type of questioning is what, for instance, the Renaissanc prodigy Pico della Mirandola sought to do with his 900 Theses and his attempt to create an open debate at the Vatican, back in the 15th Century. Because of this, he was exiled as a heretic and probably eventually poisoned, dying at the age of 31. The Church’s insistence on faith over logic was integrated into the narrow-minded belief in scientific materialism and secular atheism, when that became the governing ideology of the modern world. Materialism also turned into a kind of church, a rigid religious faith, eventually. If you went against this faith as an intellectual in the Twentieth Century, you got exiled and mocked, dismissed as an apostate. This happened to me when I insisted on the paranormal, supernatural, and psychic as valid aspects of reality, based on my own direct experiences. As an intellectual, you might allude to these kinds of nonordinary experiences, but you could not profess knowledge of them without being marginalized and attacked.

In the modern West under the materialist paradigm which saw reality as random and unintegrated, knowledge splintered into hyper-specialized domains. There is no collective belief that we need public forums where people can hone their thinking faculties, just as they develop themselves physically in the gym or yoga studio. America has always been an anti-intellectual society. 200 years ago, Emerson wrote: “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” In our culture, we don’t possess the idea that generalist thinking is a valuable activity: We don’t hold the idea that at least some people need to strive to become comprehensive generalists, encompassing the meaning and trajectory of the collective social organism through ongoing multidisciplinary study and reflection. Instead of a truly philosophical or intellectual culture, we now have “podcast bros,” Right Wing influencers like Joe Rogan, who fill up enormous volumes of wasted time with lazy, false ideas and worthless opinions, attacking the minds of the young.

Along with the problem of endemic anti-intellectualism, summary dismissal of the esoteric and transcendent dimensions of reality, and reductive materialism, we also have the problems posed by our Western language, which traps us in simple dualisms with little tolerance for paradox and ambiguity. As education becomes more shallow and vocational, people lose access to the deeper dimensions provided by cultural literacy—what they gain from immersion in the classics or in modern writers like Virginia Woolf, Proust, Kafka. They become increasingly intolerant of paradox, ambiguity, and complexity. We saw this, for instance, with the hysteria over the Covid vaccines. These were considered either an evil plot or a benevolent intervention, instead of the result of a complex history of medical interventions, with always mixed consequences.

Mass media like Fox News rewards the masses for their ignorance by intensifying their dopamine addiction. Social media is algorithmically designed to reinforce people’s sense of self-righteous outrage, fear, and grievance. People are not given any sense that pursuing their own original thoughts—continuing to learn how to reason from first principles as adults—is valuable or productive for them. Instead, adults are generally left to vegetate, psychically. They are indoctrinated to accept mainstream cliches and prejudices. That is the situation we are in now—a cul de sac. It is not easy to envision a way out of it.

I agree with Gigi Young who notes that the second coming of Christ or the Appearance of the Messiah is not about some literal person who waves a sword or leads a killer-drone army. It is an inner experience, an encounter, that can only happen within us. “Christ is already within every single human being. He returns—his return basically is his appearance to you in your own heart. It doesn’t matter if there’s a temple built or not. … These material things don’t matter. It’s not going to bring about his arrival.”

The true meaning of Christ’s incarnation has nothing to do with becoming “saved” because you maintain illogical faith in Christ’s divinity or literal scripture. The point is to have direct, inner experience—to walk a similar path of love, mercy, non-judgment, humility, generosity, and sacrifice that Christ walked, which is the path of the higher self. This isn’t an ironic, sardonic, or glamorous path. It doesn’t mesh easily with our postmodern culture of pastiche and cynicism and immediate gratification. It is the polar opposite of everything we see around us. Yet it also remains so intimately close to us.

For Rudolf Steiner, the incarnation of Christ was the central turning point of earthly and human evolution: the Sun-Being or macrocosmic “World-I” united Himself with the Earth so that the human “I” or subjective ego could find its true centre as well as its future form. Since the crucifixion and resurrection (“The Mystery of Golgotha”), according to Steiner and Young, Christ lives within the spiritual aura of the Earth and can be met inwardly in the depths of the soul as the real center of the self.

I don’t know any way to validate this in any empirical fashion, but I find it resonates for me as an esoteric reality — I am curious what you, reading this, think of this idea? Steiner believed that “The I in man is the same as Christ in the world:” What we intuit as our inmost self is the microcosmic reflection of the Christ-being. Our task is to let that higher “I” permeate our thinking, feeling, and willing.

For Steiner, this experience is not limited to a particular faith or ideology. The divine reality is universal. It may be felt under many names and cultural traditions, as an ethical-spiritual impetus that balances Luciferic escapism and Ahrimanic hardening (or whatever names you want to give those forces). As we integrate the messianic revelation—patiently over time, despite many missteps and humblings—we become the conscious bearers of that divine force.

I confess I have my own secret sense of the messianic or Christ being, as I feel it within me, when I attune to it. Probably most of you, reading this, have a similar intimation. Alfred Kazin, a Jewish writer of the 1930s, described his inner experience of Christ in his wonderful memoir, A Walker in the City:

I had known him instantly. Surely I had been waiting for him all my life—our own Yeshua, misunderstood by his own, like me, but the very embodiment of everything I had waited so long to hear from a Jew—a great contempt for the minute daily business of the world; a deep and joyful turning back into our own spirit. It was he, I thought, who would resolve for me at last the ambiguity and the long ache of being a Jew—Yeshua, our own long-lost Jesus, speaking straight to the mind and heart at once. For that voice, that exultantly fiery and tender voice, there were no gaps between images and things, for constantly walking before the Lord, he remained all energy and mind, thrust his soul into every corner of the world, and passing gaily under every yoke, remained free to seek our God in His expected place.

Following anthroposophical teaching, Young rejects the evangelical idea of a future appearance of Christ as a particular individual. As a cosmic-world-process, the Second Coming is already underway: Christ reaches out to us through the “etheric” or spiritual world. “The second coming actually refers to Christ’s appearance to humanity in the spiritual world or the etheric plane. Which means that … more and more people are going to have experiences with the Christ from the inside.” This manifests as inner visions and experiences of Christ or the messianic impulse, similar to Paul’s “Road to Damascus” moment. The “Second Coming” happens when we meet the Christ or the Messianic consciousness as an inner experience of revelation. It has nothing to do with building physical structures, murdering heifers, building beachfront hotels in Gaza, or fomenting wars of religious fanaticism.

From this perspective, the future “Israel” in the Bible is another symbol or archetype of inner experience. It has nothing to do with war-mongering, genocidal nation-state afflicted by delusional collective narcissism. Israel is the community of those who live with Christ, or the Messiah, as both inner experience and outer activity. Christian and Jewish extremists got lost in a materialistic misconception of spirituality and prophecy. Prophecy, Young proposes, is something for the higher forces guiding humanity to fulfill in their own way, according to their own time. It is not something we as humans should force through geopolitical manipulation. The true, ongoing battle takes place within the human heart; the true “return” is the awakening of Christ, the messianic consciousness, within individuals now.

If there is any “weak messianic power,” to borrow Benjamin’s phrase, available to us today, it will not come from electing an authoritarian strongman or forcing a destructive sequence of events on the Temple Mount to bring about Armageddon. It will come from much quieter, more difficult work: the effort to discern, to think clearly, in this time of delusion, propaganda, and mass psychosis; to resist the seductions of outrage and othering; and to allow the hidden center of our being, the Christ-being or messianic impulse, to come to fruition and shine forth.

In any case, that’s my two cents for today!