Michaelmas 1901 saw cosmic beings celebrating the inauguration of a new age – the age of spiritual science. The new age was prepared by the beginning of the new age of Michael in the fall of 1879 and the end of Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, in 1899. Also, earlier that year Steiner completed and published his philosophical studies under the title World and Life Conceptions of the Nineteenth Century . These studies enabled him to see how to speak about his spiritual research. He also found a group of people who wanted to listen to him speak about these experiences.
The cosmic events in that Michaelmas celebration included meetings of every planet with one or more planet elements and other planets. These meetings were associated with a great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation of Gemini near the descending node of Pluto and aphelion of Earth with Venus nearby. Pluto, Uranus, Mars, and Mercury were on or near the apsides line of Mercury and the nodal line of Venus in the constellations of Taurus and Scorpio. Finally, Neptune was near the perihelion of Saturn in the constellation of Gemini. The great conjunction was a descendant of that of 6 BC which Sucher associates with the spiritual nativity of Jesus.
These cosmic and earth events around Michaelmas 1901 mark the dawn of humanity’s breakthrough to the spiritual world. It marks a significant step in the renewal of the mysteries, the restoration of the bridge that once spanned the abyss of materialism. The new bridge being built by the new mysteries is the development of the highest capacities of cognition human beings can attain in the present age. Steiner termed these capacities imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Sucher associates them with the newly discovered planets of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, respectively. The constellations in which the cosmic celebration took place are deeply connected with these potentialities and the opposition that arises when a human being attempts to meet these challenges.
As Steiner and Sucher repeatedly remind us, these potentialities can be realized with the help of Michael and Christ. We have only to make this possible by achieving spiritual freedom through developing our thinking. Steiner describes the contemporary status of thinking in lecture one of Human and Cosmic Thought. He describes the thinking required to access spiritual realities in lecture four. The activated thinking to which he refers does not use the physical brain as does nearly all contemporary ‘thinking’. The thinking that accesses the spiritual world uses the etheric brain. Activated thinking can be developed. Steiner has described how this can be done in various books and lectures. In recent times others have described new developments in human consciousness that appear to lead to this kind of thinking.