LECTURE II
Berlin. 13th September, 1919.
In
the last lecture the endeavour was made to show how necessary
it is for men of the present day to turn the eye of the soul
towards spiritual science, to those spheres of existence, of
reality, in which the rule of the spirit within human
evolution is clearly perceptible to anyone who has the faculty
of sight in such regions.
As
I said, the middle of the fifteenth century brought with it a
complete change in the relation of civilized man's soul to the
three Hierarchies next above man, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and
Archai. Hitherto it has been out of their own interests and
impulses that they worked in human evolution. In our times,
this connection has come to an end. They have for the moment no
interest in continuing to work as before on the evolution
of man. They will only enter into a new relationship to us when
human beings begin to develop an interest in the spiritual
worlds, out of free will and of their own accord. If we would
not lose all connection with the spiritual worlds, we
must occupy ourselves with them in the near future, for the
spiritual beings who have been connected with us so far
have of themselves no reason to be further interested in us. We
can only arouse their interest anew if out of our own souls we
again concern ourselves with the spiritual world, fostering
thoughts, sentiments, and impulses of will, into which
spiritual forces can flow. The question may and must be asked,
how can human beings manage so to concern themselves
with the spiritual worlds as to maintain their connection with
the higher Hierarchies as the Earth evolution proceeds. The
answer may deal with things which apparently have little to do
with the question; but we shall see that they do provide the
foundation on which we can rebuild onwards into the future our,
connection with the spiritual world.
The
first thing which we must examine is the effect of the various
confessions, the creeds, existing among civilized people.
Hitherto they were necessary, to guide the heart and, mind to
spiritual realms, but in future they will help to detach man
from the spiritual world, unless they admit something entirely
new into their efforts. Fundamentally speaking, the
creeds of the present day are based on the egoism of man, as we
shall realize if we put before our souls one question of such
great importance that it forms, and always must form, a
touchstone for their views, the question of the immortality of
the human soul. We can see, from the way in which this question
is generally handled by the creeds, that they appeal largely to
man's egoistic instincts. Of course there are deeper
foundations for their speech, but these we are not discussing
to-day: as a rule the creeds speak of the “continued
existence of the soul after death” — that is, the
continuation of the life of the human soul.
To
deal with the subject of immortality from this point of view is
comparatively easy, for human egotism asserts itself there
emphatically. Man simply cannot bear — apart from
all truth about the question — the thought of utter
extinction at death, so that a certain response is always to be
found in man's soul when “life after death” is
mentioned. The treatment generally given to-day to the idea
springs from an egoistic interest in people. They would prefer
not to die as souls at physical death. Naturally, the soul's
continued existence after death will be assumed in all
our future discussions on immortality, but the way in which
anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of the continued
existence of the soul after death is very far from being
accepted by the creeds.
But
this also is important: that people of our day must hear a very
different language about immortality from that to which they
are accustomed. One who discusses the question of immortality
should not only speak of life after death, but also of that
life which is lived here in the physical world between birth
and death. For as you know, this life is also a
“continuation”; it is a continuation of the life
passed between our last death and that birth through which we
are now in the physical world. That is the view which men must
learn to hold — that the life here is a continuation of
the spiritual life before birth. In the growth of a child from
day to day, from week to week, from year to year, we must
notice forces from the spiritual world arising from its inner
being, forces which have come with birth and work so as
gradually to form the being of man as time goes by. In a sense
we lift the veil of the God in man when we enter into the life
of the child to develop it. Social relations must take on
something of a religious impulse permeating the whole of life
between man and man. For this the important, the
essential thing is an attitude which never forgets that
physical life is a continuation of a pre-natal life, of spirit
and soul.
Many things will follow on this. For one thing we shall
recognize that our real humanity lies in the depths of our
being, gradually emerging. I have referred to ancient times of
human evolution, known from an anthroposophical
standpoint as the first and second post-Atlantean epochs.
People in those days were as capable of development right into
their old age as only the young are nowadays. A child goes
through a physical evolution about its seventh year with the
change of teeth; through another metamorphosis when puberty
occurs; but after that what goes on in his evolution is
outwardly less noticeable. In olden times this was not so; what
man went through in soul and spirit expressed itself into much
later stages of life. Nowadays old age sets in at seventeen or
eighteen, and we are amazed at its evidences. Here is an
example: a short time ago, in Stuttgart, at a meeting of the
Cultural Committee where present-day education was discussed
from the most varied points of view, a young man got up (let us
call him “a young man” though he might equally well
be called an “old boy”!) who told us we needed
instructing about the true ideals of education! He began by
uttering some very high-sounding words, then read out the
programme of a modern Educational Society. After much stumbling
he finally broke down, and, having no more to say, gathered up
the threads with “I must therefore claim to have
proved that old age no longer understands its own youth,”
and went out. I replied that I quite saw we had not understood
him, for the simple reason that his speech and behaviour had
been those of an old man; he had in fact enunciated as
principles, like an ancient grey-beard, the last word in
abstractions. Old age, nowadays, means the limit up to which a
man can develop. Up to a particular age a person can absorb all
sorts of things, and is not ashamed to develop himself. But at
about twenty years of age he feels shame at the idea of
developing farther. Seldom nowadays do we find people with grey
hair and wrinkles welcoming with joy the dawn of each year
because each year brings new possibilities of development to
the organism and new knowledge, unattainable before, is
within reach. At the inconsiderable age of thirty men are
ashamed to make themselves capable of development, or to learn
anything more. The point is that we should actually retain the
possibility, all through life, of rejoicing in the coming year,
because each year charms forth the divine-spiritual content of
our own inner being in
ever new forms.
I
want to emphasize this point. We should really and truly learn
to experience our life as capable of development not only in
youth, but through its whole span between birth and death. For
this a new education will be necessary. We elders find that to
look back at our own schooldays evokes few pleasant thoughts.
We must manage to shape schooldays for the children of
to-day so that to remember them will provide an ever new and
invigorating source of life. Now this will bring, as you can
see, the possibility of opening for mankind real perception of
the soul-spiritual within themselves, of experiencing something
extending beyond the everyday life which is stirred and
stimulated from without.
Other knowledge will be recognized as necessary. There is a
secret, intimately connected with the present stage of
human evolution, which is not known to-day. In earlier times,
before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not
necessary to take much notice of it, but to-day it must be
reckoned with. This mystery of life is that man, constituted as
he is to-day in body, soul and spirit, every night looks, to a
certain extent, at the events of the coming day, but without
always carrying that vision over into full day-consciousness.
It is his “Angel” who has that clear consciousness.
But what is experienced at night in community with that being
whom we call the Angel is a pre-vision of the coming day. This
is no subject for human curiosity, but a matter for practical
life. Only when the feeling of this fact fills our inner being
can we make right decisions and bring right thoughts into the
course of daily life. Let us assume that a man has something
definite to do, say at noon. This that he has to do has already
been arranged by his Angel and himself during the preceding
night, though the fact is not necessarily kept in
consciousness and human curiosity has no part in it.
People should be filled with the conviction that during the day
they should realize in a fruitful way what they have arranged
at night in co-operation with this Angel being.
Much that has happened of late might draw men's attention with
almost shattering force to what I have just said. The last four
or five years of agony should have taught men that the
consciousness of their association with higher beings through
the experiences of the night did not, alas! exist. If the
feeling had permeated men that their doings in the day were in
harmony with the decisions made with their Angels in the
preceding night, how different events would have been! These
things must be spoken of now, to point out how man must learn
to regard this life between birth and death as a
continuation of the life of spirit and soul which was
his before birth. It must be made known that man in future
should be able to experience throughout his whole life the
revelation of the Divine in his own being, and that through all
his life in the day this vivid consciousness should persist as:
“What I do from morning till evening I have discussed
with my Angel, while I slept.” Men must turn to feelings
which are more concrete with regard to the spiritual world than
the modern abstractions of various creeds, which at the same
time claim that they appeal to unselfish, not to egoistic human
instincts. From such feelings will arise that which will
provide the necessary relation to the beings belonging to the
Hierarchy of the Angels, who will once more be able to interest
themselves on our behalf. Men's attitude to the spiritual_
world must move in this appointed direction.
Yet
again we must observe something. The creeds speak much about
“God” and “The Divine.” What do they
really mean? Surely something of which a vague
consciousness, at least, exists in the soul of man. After
all, it is not, what name is given to a thing that matters, but
what it means to a man's soul. Men talk of “God”
and of “Christ,” but all the time they only mean
the “Angel” — the Angel to which they turn
because they meet a response in their souls. Whatever the
creeds may speak of to-day, whether of God or Christ or other
divine being, the substance of the thought only relates to the
Angel Beings who are connected with man, the Angeloi. Higher it
cannot rise, since people are disinclined to seek any wider
relation to the spiritual world than an egoistic one. The
relation to the Archangeloi, the Hierarchy of the Archangels,
must indeed be sought in another way. Men's interests to-day
must be considerably widened. I will show you how that
extension must take place, so that from making response only to
the Angeloi, they may rise in their feelings to the
Archangeloi.
They must realize that they have passed through terrible
experiences all over the civilized world during the last few
years. Many have asked about the “causes” of, these
events, with mutual imputations of “guilt” and
“innocence”: yet we need only look below the mere
surface of things and we shall have little interest in all this
talk about “causes” and “war-guilt” or
“innocence,” simply because we can see that what
has come up to the surface in these last four or five years is,
like waves of the sea, always there, but brought up from the
depths to the surface by the forces below. An upheaval of human
forces had been going on; one people after another shared in
the enormous folly of those years; one could but say:
“Some turmoil of elemental forces is surging upwards into
view. The sea of human life has become unquiet — What is
it?”
We
shall never get things clear if we do not connect this fact of
humanity's unrest with the whole period we call
“history.” We must convince ourselves that the
armed struggle of the last few years is only the beginning of
events which will take place in quite other spheres, but which
have never before existed among us in this particular form. We
are not at the end of a stage of evolution — only
superficial observation could lead to that conclusion —
we stand at the beginning of the greatest conflicts, the
greatest spiritual conflicts of the civilized world, and
we must put forth our best efforts to be equal to them.
Increasing opposition is threatened in the soul-attitude of
East and West in the near future, for East and West have
developed in two quite different directions. If we would see
into these things, we must set before ourselves certain
phenomena in their deepest, most fundamental form as riddles to
be solved.
For
decades we have heard repeated in socialist circles holding the
Marxian theory, that everything man experiences as art,
religion, custom, law or science is just “Ideology”
(I have discussed this at greater length in the first chapter
of The Threefold Commonwealth). This means that a view
which had been developing amongst the middle classes for the
last three or four hundred years, but which they were too timid
to admit, has been frankly acknowledged by the socialists of
the last half-century. They assert that the genuine reality of
social life consists in actual happenings; therefore the
real lies only in the economic forces. All
conceptions of art, religion, custom, science, law, morality,
merely form a kind of vapour rising from true reality, and are
mere ideology, with nothing but a semblance of reality. The
socialists conclude that it is only necessary to change
economic life and all other changes will ensue, since
everything else — morality, law, religion and so forth
— is only an unreal vapour arising from the events in the
economic sphere, which is the “only reality.”
If,
however, the world be considered in no restricted sense but as
a great whole, we shall defend this word “ideology”
which, but for their timid dislike of facts, the middle classes
might have been using for three or four hundred years. They did
feel that the economic life was the “only reality”
and what displayed itself as science, art or religion was like
a vapour; all life was based on this, and it was reserved for
their pupils to carry their reasoning to its logical
conclusion. Socialists are, after all, only extreme pupils of
the middle-class world. This is the view which, forming in the
West, reached its climax in the second half of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
Other impulses have formed the Eastern view of the world, and
an Oriental would say: “I look at what is going on in the
external world: I see what my senses convey to me, what I use
as an instrument for transforming the world around, what shines
down on me from the stars, and what I myself am as to my bodily
nature — what is it all? It is Maya! What then is
reality, and not illusion? Only what is experienced in the
human soul — that is reality!” One who does not
translate in terms of a dictionary, but according to the inner
meaning, knows that the words “Maya” in the East
and “Ideology” in the West mean one and the same
thing. For thousands of years the Oriental has regarded the
outer world which affects the senses — including
economics — as Maya. The Westerner, on the other hand,
sees his reality in what for the Oriental is
“Maya,” and what arises in his soul is for him
“Ideology.” Both views of the world have developed
to a certain point. Talk with the leading men in the socialist
parties especially in those places where the first Revolution
(known here as the “November” Revolution) has
not yet taken place, and it is evident that this revolution
altered their ideas somewhat, but not their feelings. You hear
the same views as obtained right up to the war, that it is not
necessary to contribute anything from the will
towards transforming, revolutionizing the world, but that
all that will happen of itself. Something fatalistic has
appeared in the West. People are convinced that they need only
wait until the means of production are sufficiently developed,
and then by a natural metamorphosis all that is
concentrated in private capital will pass over into other
forms. Thinking of this sort is as sensible as saying:
“This room is full of bad air. I cannot breathe. The
window could be opened, but I am not going to open it; I am
waiting until the air improves of itself.”
Fatalism of the West, Fatalism of the East — we know them
well. In the East, though not at the very beginning, men fell
into complete fatalism, as the philosophy of Maya
developed. Every world-philosophy has, in its inner law,
the impulse towards fatalism at some time, but we stand to-day
at a point where we must get rid of fatalism. We must pass from
mere observation and contemplation to the exertion of will and
intention. We must rouse our wills by developing impulses from
the truths I have described regarding birth as a continuation
of pre-natal life, remaining young notwithstanding white hair
and wrinkles, the playing in of the nightly work of the Angel
into daily life. Man needs to acquire impulses for his life of
will by widening his sphere of interest, by seeing not only
what touches his own personal life but what affects the
civilized world in manifold forms. Looking at the West,
to which we ourselves belong, we see the inner world as
ideology, the outer world as reality: in the East, ideology,
Maya, in the outer world, reality in the inner world alone. In
the interaction of human beings at the present time, we have
the task of finding the way of escape from that aspect of these
philosophies which has already turned to fatalism. We must look
for this way, and we shall only find it if we are in earnest
about something which annoys people terribly to-day.
There was a remarkable example of this once, when my hearers
were greatly vexed by something I said in a lecture in a South
German town, though it was a truth necessary for the present
time. The context of my lecture necessitated the remark that
the leading classes of the present day have a decadent
physical brain. Such statements are unpleasant both to
utter and to listen to, but it is necessary that people should
realize this fact. The very people to whom the present
configuration of our times is due have, in achieving it,
acquired a decadent physical brain. It is so, and we are in one
sense in the same case as were the people of Europe during the,
great migrations and the spreading of Christianity. The
Christian impulse came over from the East, by way of Greece and
Rome. Naturally the Greek and Roman world was far more highly
developed than the. German. The Germans were barbarians. But
the brains of the Greeks and Romans were decadent,
therefore the surge of Christianity was not absorbed by
them in the same way as it was when it reached the Germans.
That is a migration of peoples which went horizontally. To-day
it is “vertical.” To-day a wave of spiritual life
is coming from the spiritual world. Just as Christianity was at
first reflected from the Greeks and Romans, so the spiritual
world is reflected from the bourgeoisie to-day, and that is
decadent. The proletariat are not so yet; they are still able
to understand what is meant by the spiritual world. But the
others will need preparation through anthroposophy, through
that part of the brain which is not yet physical that is the
etheric brain. We are at present confronted with the fact that
the leading classes are not only menaced with a decadent brain,
but with entire decadence, if they do not realize that they
must grasp the spiritual view of the world by supersensible
means.
The
tragedy of the bourgeois system is that it would grasp
everything “physically,” whereas our task to-day is
to grasp things with the etheric brain, to take
spiritual truths into our being. Modern humanity must
steer in this direction, and the West must take the lead. Here
we must take into account something very important.
Observe the development of language, passing from East to West.
Take the German language, to-day dreadfully misused. If we look
back at the language of Goethe, of Lessing, we can see that not
so long ago in the very words, through their peculiar quality,
it was possible to express what of spiritual life lay within
them. To-day we have dreadfully neglected our language,
degraded it into phrases only; but that it can no longer
express spirituality is not due to the language alone. The
farther West we go as regards language, the more we find in
speech, with its tunes and sounds, even with its grammar, a
complete rejection of what is really spiritual. From this
rejection of the quality of soul and spirit from the
Anglo-American idiom follows the mission of the Anglo-American
peoples. Their world mission consists in this: in
learning, maybe instinctively, yet still learning (as they
listen to other men, in course of acquiring world dominion),
not only to comprehend the sound, but to interpret the gesture
of the language, to hear more than the mere physical sound, to
hear something which passes from man to man in speech, going
beyond the spoken word. That works from etheric body to etheric
body. Here lies the secret of the Western languages, that in
them the physical tone loses its significance, while the
spiritual gains it. It is part of their task to let the spirit
filter into speech, not merely to hear physically, but to hear
intuitively more than passes over into the sound. In the West,
the spiritual must be sought behind language itself.
If
we look at the East, we shall notice an ever-increasing urge
among the peoples who, as we have seen, sink themselves into
their own inner being, not to be bound by the old forms of
conception as to “Karma,”
“Reincarnation,” and so forth, but to look out into
the world, and in that outer world to perceive something
spiritual, even to establish a sort of Philosophy of
Nature.
These are only trivial instances through which we can widen our
interests from our own personality and our nationality to take
in the whole of humanity, saying to ourselves “Here in
the West is Ideology, though quite another Ideology from the
Eastern one,” and seeing how elemental forces are stirred
up within earthly humanity as a result, of these antitheses. We
learn to take our stand within the whole civilized world, and
when we develop such knowledge of our position within it at the
same time we build in our souls the means of acquiring feelings
which lead higher than the sphere of the Angeloi. Our interests
will be so much extended that we shall incline to ideas which
ascend to the sphere of the Archangeloi, for all that I have
been saying about the opposition of Ideology-Maya, etc., works
in its primal force in the sphere beyond that of the Angeloi.
We can see from this what is really needful for modern
humanity. What will the so-called clever people call anyone who
speaks of these things — Maya, Ideology and so forth
— as having primal forces which function in the sphere of
the Archangeloi? Just a fool, quite naturally, since men
are so hide-bound by their acquired spiritual outfit that they
feel no concern in the wider interests of mankind. That can
only be achieved from a spiritual standpoint, by penetrating
into everything which works for the great interests of
humanity.
I
have given you an idea of how to work up into the sphere of the
Archangeloi. It is possible to rise stilt higher, and
present-day humanity must learn that also. Our educated classes
have, always been taught to look back to Ancient Greece. Young
men (and in recent times young women also) have had to go
through a certain schooling to absorb Greek culture, and have
thus acquired an impulse which was enough to lead them to feel
more and more deeply into the Greek world. This has a great
significance for our civilization, that in our most important
years of development we have learnt what Greece accomplished
for the world. The Greeks did otherwise; it never entered their
heads to teach their children the Egyptian tongue: they
occupied themselves with immediate reality, for which they
possessed a clear, sense. We occupy our young people, not with
instruction concerning their environment and the impulses of
reality, but with those of an olden time. We have no idea what
we are really doing. It is not only that we teach our young
children (I suppose I should say our “young ladies”
and “young gentlemen”) the Greek language: for in a
language, in the configuration of its sounds and its grammar,
lies also the character of a whole people. In absorbing
the Greek language, as is done to-day, man acquires the same
soul-attitude in the world as was held in Greece. There all
cultural life was such that only a small top-stratum shared in
the culture; the rest were slaves. In Greece no
occupation was worthy of a free man but science, politics
and — even then in a supervisory capacity agriculture:
everything else was a matter for slaves. This is hidden in the
language, and when we take Greek culture and language into our
own spiritual education, we unite aristocracy with it at the
same time. For the Greek it was quite natural to construct his
whole social organism in accordance with his intellectual
tendency, for in his case that was connected with his blood.
There were the ordinary masses: then those people of a higher
type, who possessed the higher life of the mind through their
blood. This finds expression even in Greek sculpture. Compare
the position of nose and ears in the Hermes-type with that of
the Zeus- or Athene-type. The Greeks knew perfectly well what
they wanted to express when they set the Hermes-type over
against the Aryan Zeus-type.
We
are permeated with all this more than we think. When we form
our views of the world, we really construct ideas still suited
to what in the Greeks came through the blood. Our intellectual,
our cultural life is saturated with what we absorb from the
Greeks. Hellenism intrudes into our times luciferically.
Hellenism, in the period which immediately followed it, was
metamorphosed into Romanism. Compared with the Greeks the
Romans were dull, prosaic people, but they did develop other
aspects of life. They lived out in an abstract fashion what
came to the Greeks from the blood. Unlike the Greeks they made
even man into an abstraction, a “citizen of the
State.” A man, in the Roman sense, is not really
“man”; he is a citizen of the State: an
incomprehensible thing to the Greeks. To be born a human being
did not make him a man, but being registered in some kind of
State archives. This sometimes appears to-day in grotesque
fashion. I once had an old friend, sixty-four years of age; one
day he said to me that he had saved such and such a sum —
he had always been very poor — and that he wanted to
marry the love of his youth. He had become engaged at eighteen,
but had no money to marry, and the couple had vowed to wait
until they could. He returned to his birthplace, now that the
way was open, but found that the marriage could not, take place
because his community doubted his existence. Years before, the
parsonage, with all the parish registers, had been burned down
and there was no one alive who could give evidence as to his
identity. My friend assumed that his existence was proved by
his presence, but he had no “legal evidence.” It is
true the marriage did eventually take place, but the
difficulties had shown him the much greater importance of a
“birth-certificate” than of his own
personality.
Men
then are “citizens.” They are what they are in an
abstract connection. This view is essentially Roman, as is
everything of this sort which we come across in ordinary life.
Our education has been taken in hand by the State, which is
already abstract, but will become more so under socialist
influence. People are not educated to-day to take their place
in the world as free human beings, but to have a professional
calling and take their place in that. The State takes young
people in hand, not at once, for then they are too
“shapeless,” so it leaves them for a time to their
parents, then, stretching out its talons, it trains them to be
useful to it, taking good care that they are so. It gives them
an economic life, gives them everything prescribed, and then
pensions them off. It means a great deal when a man can assure
himself of a pension as well as an income — something
substantial, which binds him to the abstract State and affects
the rest of his mental attitude. The Roman attitude has passed
into men of other times. Say to a man to-day: “to partake
of immortality needs an activity of soul, that thou thyself
mayst carry thy soul wide awake through the gates of
death”; he will not understand. He has been made wholly
unaccustomed to direct his understanding to such a
question. Instead of this he is told: “You need only
believe in Christ and in what the State does.” First he
will be looked after by the State, with a pension when he has
worked long enough then the Church goes one bit farther; it
offers a pension for his soul after death, so that neither in
his lifetime need he do anything for his own soul nor when he
carries it through the gate of death: A man is
“registered” nowadays, and the political essence of
Rome, already taken into our own being, will increase.
All
sorts of dreadful experiences are possible because of this.
Helping with the institution of the Waldorf School at
Stuttgart, I have had to look at the various School
Regulations. Looking back, I must admit that in the 'seventies
and 'eighties of last century, the regulations were very small:
they included what had to be studied in each class, the aim and
the subject matter being given, but in everything else the
teacher was left quite free. Nowadays we get an enormous
syllabus with “Official,” “Ordinance,”
written on the first page, and specific instructions as to the
manner of teaching. So that what should only work on one living
personality from out of another, is set down in rules and
orders; it has become “official,” it is
“decreed”! That is the death of mind and spirit,
directly traceable from Central Europe to Ancient Rome. This is
the second thing we have absorbed — with Romanism, the
politico-legal element.
In
addition to this, however, there is something which could
not be transplanted from the old life into the new — the
economic life, which can only be modern. It is possible to chew
the cud of Greek knowledge, to allow the Roman political ideas
to influence us, but we cannot “eat” what the
Greeks and Romans have eaten. Economic life must be modern. We
have gradually woven into our economic life the Greek life of
intellect and the Roman life of rights, and our task is to
disentangle them again. To understand that these three strata
brought out of different epochs have, as it were, been joined
together and must be separated means to extend one's interest
in time (as, in the East and West in space) down
to the present; that means to make ourselves capable of
feelings which can raise us to the Archai! How few develop an
interest for these things, an impartial interest in how the
Zeitgeist (Time-Spirit) acts by thrusting one period into
another. I spoke at Stuttgart on the artificial nature of our
classical education. It may have been mere coincidence that a
few days after there appeared in the papers great announcements
signed by all kinds of Zöpfen — professors —
(I beg their pardon!) to the effect that a classical education
should not be undervalued, seeing that it had contributed to
the greatness of the German people, so gloriously displayed in
the latter days. This, literally, was to be read as the alleged
opinion of educationists in April, 1919 — after what
happened in October, 1918! And to think that this and other
things should be possible in our times!
Unless we reach a stage at which we can see things so as to
absorb the impulses which work into our physical world out of
the spiritual — unless we realize that man, just as he is
connected through his bodily organization with the animal,
plant, and mineral kingdoms, is also connected in his spiritual
organization with the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai (Angeloi
as the guardians of personal development, Nation Spirits
as guardians of development of peoples in space, Spirits of
Time as guardians of development throughout the ages)
— unless we can understand these things from their
spiritual foundations, we can advance no farther. Everything
depends on man having courage and force to-day to look into the
spiritual world. We are at the beginning of a hard struggle, in
which will be stirred up all the instincts springing from
the one half-truth that economic reality is the only reality,
that everything belonging to soul and spirit is Ideology; and
from the other half-truth that the only reality is the psychic
spiritual, all outside it is Ideology, Maya. These
contradictions will let loose in human nature such instincts
that the spiritual conflict will blaze for long periods in
forms of which people at present have no idea. We must grasp
this; and, further, learn how we are to raise ourselves, in
harmony with our time, to a view of the spiritual world as we
conceive it. It is this which the times themselves ordain and
demand; to this we must turn our attention.
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