Lecture 10
Problems on Spiritual Path —
National Characteristics in Europe Moulded by Folk Spirits
Berlin, March 16,1915
Dear friends, once again let us first
of all remember those who are out there at the front, in
the great arena of present-day events:
Spirits of your souls, guardian
guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.
And for those who because of those
events have already gone through the gate of death:
Spirits of your souls, guardian
guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.
May the
spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual
knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of
Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and
progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have
to perform.
Dear friends, the points we shall
consider today will once again be aphoristic. They may
serve to round off one or another of the things I have
spoken of before. The first point I want to refer to is
the way we find the facts, the real nature, of the
spiritual worlds when we ascend to those spiritual worlds
and have taken the first steps Within them. Let me start
by considering the problems we meet in our efforts to
attain to the spiritual worlds. They are indeed
considerable, and although it is certain that the path we
take when we meditate, With all the work we do in the
inner soul, must lead to the spiritual world —
certain as this may be — it is also very easy to
fail to recognize the particular kind of soul experience
that takes the soul up into the spiritual worlds.
First of
all there is the problem that we are in the habit of
judging everything our soul comes upon on the basis of
experiences we have gained in the world accessible to the
outer senses. We could say that we really know nothing
but what we have made our own out of the
sense-perceptible world. Now we enter the spiritual world
and find that everything is entirely different from the
sense-perceptible world. Everything being different, the
main problem is to extend the range of our attention to
the things we are supposed to be seeing. The situation is
that the whole of the spiritual world might lie spread
out before us but we would see nothing. The reason is
that whilst we are awake and in our earth bodies we are
not in a position to withdraw our spiritual organs from
this earth body, to draw them away from their union with
the earth body.
Let me use
a comparison I have used on a number of occasions to
present an image of the soul element separating from the
body. I have often said that it is just as impossible to
recognize the immortal part of man from what he is here
in ordinary life as it is to recognize the properties of
hydrogen and oxygen by looking at water. Hydrogen is
present in water, forming a compound with oxygen, the way
our immortal part is present in the body. It will reveal
nothing of its qualities until it is separated out of the
water. It hides all those qualities. In the same way the
soul hides its qualities when it is united with the
body.
Our
ordinary life between birth and death trains us to relate
to the sense-perceptible world in such a way that whilst
we are awake the organs of the mind and spirit are always
tied up with the body in the same way as hydrogen is tied
up with oxygen in water. The soul is therefore unable to
depart from the body during the time between birth and
death, except for the time between going to sleep and
waking up again when it is in the spiritual worlds.
During the time between going to sleep and waking up the
soul really enters the spiritual worlds. It is there in
those worlds. It gains new strength for the daily round
out of the spiritual worlds. It retains the habit,
however, of perceiving lily with the physical organs, and
the moment it reaches the point where it has gained the
strength that would enable it to achieve perception
within the spiritual sphere it wakes up. The soul is
joined to the body through the powers within it; because
of it ability to feel desire the soul is connected with
the body. The moment its powers have been recharged and
it is again able to be active it desires to return to the
body as long as the body is still capable of life. In the
first place it will therefore be necessary for us
gradually to get our bearings after death.
In one of
my public lectures I referred to the ability to remember
as the ultimate soul activity
[ Note 53 ]
Let us compare this with
what happens when man learns to look into the spiritual
world. It is something which to some extent does make us
free of the bodily element. Modern science, as it
continues to develop, will actually show that looking
back to an earlier experience is a process occurring in
mind and spirit. This process is however given enormous
assistance, assistance provided by the body.
It happens
like this. When our soul dwells in the body, anything we
entrust to our power of memory has the nature of an image
to begin with; it is very similar to what we call
imaginative perception. In ordinary life, however, we
proceed to imprint everything that is to be memory into
the bodily element. When we have an experience we first
of all encounter the experience with our senses; we form
an image of it. This image first of all imprints itself
in the body; an imprint is left in the body, an imprint
we could compare with the imprint left by a seal. It is
important to understand that such an imprint is left.
Conventional science takes rather a naive view of this.
According to some authors, one idea is recorded in one
part of the brain, another idea in another, and so on.
That is not how it happens. The imprint a memory leaves
in our physical body is really very dissimilar to what
may later come up as a memory. To the clairvoyant eye it
is a kind of image taking the form of the human head and
a bit more, continuing on into the rest of the human
being. Irrespective of the nature of the experience, the
imprint will be of that kind; such an imprint is made
into the ether body. If we were able to take this imprint
out we would indeed have a thin, shadowy spectre of the
head and its continuation. Another memory would also take
the form of a shadow image of a head and its
continuation. These images are certainly quite different
from what we experience as a memory. There is such a
shadowy spectre within us for every single memory we
have. They all merge into each other, they
interpenetrate. What remains would from the outside
appear as such a shadow picture and all one could say
would be that one of them looks like this, another like
that.
If memory
is to arise the soul of man must first of all focus on
the imprint left in the body and decipher it the way we
decipher the peculiar symbols on a page when we are
reading — symbols entirely different from what the
soul experiences after reading them. The soul has to
apply a subconscious reading process in order to convert
those imprints into the actual memory we experience. Let
us assume you are today recalling an event you
experienced in your eighth year. The actual process
consists in something making you focus your soul on this
little head with its continuation that was imprinted at
the time; your soul will now decipher it. As to the
experience, as little remains of it in the body as the
book you have read retains of what you experienced in the
reading. When you read the book again you need to
recreate the whole thing in your soul. All this happens
without our noticing it. But someone who has not learned
to read will be unable to tell from the symbols what they
represent. The same applies to the memory process; it is
an inner reading process. There is much that goes on
below the threshold of consciousness in the human soul
and is never considered by man. When we give ourselves up
to memory, an infinitely complex process takes place in
the human being. All the time, etheric seal imprints rise
up from the dim twilight where all else in life is
darkness and the inner process man experiences as memory
consists in these imprints arising and being
deciphered.
I am not
telling you something I have thought up but a genuine
fact discovered through occult investigation.
When we
begin to strengthen the inner powers of the soul through
meditation and concentration the process I have already
mentioned will come about. The process which develops is
not the one we have to call memory. We develop inner
powers but an imprint also forms and is left upon the
ether that is alive and present everywhere in the world
outside us, it is objectively imprinted into the world.
As we meditate, as we concentrate, we leave an imprint in
the objective cosmic process. Basically the same thing
happens when we devote our studies to what spiritual
science has to give, for spiritual science has to do with
supersensible, nonphysical, things. When we really take
hold of the thougts coming to us from spiritual science
we are already coming away from ourselves to such an
extent that our mental effort has us working with the
cosmic ether: when we think ordinary thoughts we merely
imprint them within ourselves.
You
realize, of course, that it is important for anyone
wishing to make progress in soul development to put
enormous emphasis on what we must call repetition of the
same thought process. If we concentrate just once on some
thought or other, it will merely leave a fleeting
impression within the world ether. If however we nurture
the same thought in our soul day after day, over and over
again, the impression will also be made over and over
again.
Here we
must ask ourselves the following question. If we
repeatedly make an impression in the world ether,
repeating a meditation over and over again, what actually
happens? Where is the impression made?
To answer
this question, something else has to be considered first.
If someone is genuinely looking for the way to the
spiritual world and begins to be clairvoyant, he will
find that his clairvoyant experiences take a very strange
form. He will be very much aware that what he finds there
is something which is experienced but, fundamentally
speaking, there is something lacking in those
experiences. I am presupposing that the person has
reached the point where he has clairvoyant experiences.
Afterwards, when we are no longer in those clairvoyant
experiences but remember those clairvoyant experiences,
we say to ourselves: It may be that I have nothing
whatsoever to do with all those things. The impression is
that the things experienced in clairvoyance are quite
separate from us. Above all, it is impossible to find out
how far we ourselves have anything to do with those
experiences. That is the important point. Because of this
it is easy to consider such experiences mere dreams. We
only realize that we have something to do with it when we
come to see that our own self has been confronting us
there in another form. We come to realize that what we
have experienced there is really very similar to our
personal experiences and we could not have experienced
what we did in clairvoyance if we did not exist.
To make it
even clearer let me put it like this. Let us assume you
have a dream which brings back something you experienced
when very young. When you wake from the dream you only
realize that those were dream experiences because among
the mass of images you encountered there was also that
childhood experience. Then you knew that the dream must
have something to do with you. That is how it is with our
first clairvoyant experiences. You gradually come to
realize that really it is someone else who is dreaming
there and yet at the same time it is also you yourself.
We come to recognize ourselves within the mass of
clairvoyant experiences.
It is
indeed an experience of some significance to learn that
we have been within a great body of experiences yet it
was we ourselves who were within it. One must first of
all discover oneself within those clairvoyant
experiences. We then come to realize that we are not only
inside our bodies but also in the world outside. It is an
experience of tremendous significance which shows us that
we have something which the spirits of the higher
hierarchies hold and support, nurture and cherish. Here I
am, we say to ourselves, in my body. I inhabit the
enveloping form of the body and I am at the same time
also in the spiritual world, held and supported by the
spirits of the higher hierarchies. We must not allow
ourselves to be distracted by the law which says that a
particular entity cannot be in two places at one and the
same time, for laws of this kind no longer apply in the
spiritual world. I am inside me and at the same time I am
also someone Who lets experiences arise within him in the
spiritual world. We find ourselves held secure within the
higher hierarchies. We know we have this kind of dual
nature and we gradually come to realize that what we are
in essence in the spirit does not really lie within the
sense-perceptible world at all. It lies in the spiritual
world and what exists in the sense-perceptible world is a
shadow cast from the spiritual world. We slip into a
spiritual ‘body’ existence and with this are
outside ourselves, looking at ourselves from outside.
Anyone not prepared to make himself familiar with such
apparent contradictions will never arrive at concepts
that can make the spiritual world explicable to him. The
important thing is that in as far as we are part of the
world of the senses we discover that we are beyond
ourselves.
We have now
reached the point where we can consider the question as
to where our meditations are inscribed. Our ordinary
memories are imprinted in ourselves. A seal imprint is
always made which represents the upper part of the human
being, the head and a few appendages. When we meditate or
consider in our mind the ideas presented in spiritual
science, we also produce imprints but these go to the
other one I have just described, the one who is another
self. These ideas go to the other one. We may experience
something in Berlin or in Nuremberg; the imprint of this
will be made in the same body. Everything we experience
in the spirit, however, goes to the one who is another
self. Everything is imprinted there. If our attitude is
truly in accord with what is thought or felt or
experienced in spiritual science, we are working on the
supersensible human being whom we also are, just as we
work on the physical human being we are when facing
everyday experiences.
You will
now understand that it needs great inner strength to work
on the supersensible human being. It clearly is easier to
recall things that had an external effect on us through
their colour, sound and so on, because we are in that
case supported by the body. When a colour makes an
impression on us this triggers a physical process within
us. When it is our aim to enter into a purely spiritual
idea we have to do without all those physcial props;
inner effort has to be made in the soul and the soul must
gain greater and greater powers, growing so strong in
itself that it really can make an impression on the
cosmic ether outside.
If we look
for union in this way with the human being we really are,
the human being who is always there, we establish a
relationship with our individual human identity, with
what we really are as human beings. And what we really
are as human beings, this lives among the forms of being
that are the higher hierarchies the way our body lives
among sense-perceptible processes in nature. We are part
of earthly existence and in the same way we also partake
of existence in the spirit, within all that takes place
in the world of the higher hierarchies.
There is
something else I want to mention. Being thus related to
the spiritual world, we are related to many different
spirits in the higher hierarchies. Among them are the
spirits we only relate to as human individuals —
they are not destined to have any kind of cosmic
function. On the other hand we also belong to spirits
that do have a cosmic function. We all belong to a folk
spirit for instance. In the processes that belong
entirely to the world of the senses we are connected with
sense-perceptible nature. Reaching upwards we are
connected with all those spirits which in a supersensible
way reach down into the world of the physical senses.
Here, we relate to things outside us and have thoughts
and ideas about them. In the same way the different
spirits in the higher hierarchies develop thoughts and
ideas on the basis of the fact the we are objects to
them. We are objects to the spirits in the higher
hierarchies, we are the realm they have thoughts about.
These thoughts are more will-like by nature.
The
spiritual entities are different in kind because of the
way the hierarchies relate to us. An important
distinction will clearly emerge if we note how the
evolution of such spirits in the higher hierarchies
progresses, for instance in the case of the folk spirits.
We also progress between birth and death here on earth,
for our ego grows more and more mature, gaining
experiences about the world. A young Person cannot have
learned as much as someone who is older. The same applies
to the spirits of the higher hierarchies, except that
their evolution proceeds somewhat differently from our
own.
We are
referring to a spirit belonging to the higher hierarchies
when we speak of the Italian folk spirit. This Italian
folk spirit goes through its evolution and we are
actually able to pinpoint a particular time when this
folk spirit passed a major stage in evolution. We know
the relationship between the Italian folk spirit and
individual Italians to be such that the Italian folk
spirit acts through the sentient soul of individual
Italians. The way this happens is that to begin with the
folk spirit is, as it were, only acting on the soul
element. It is only later, in the course of its further
development, that the folk spirit, using its will,
intervenes more and more in the way the soul comes to
expres- sion through the element of the physical body. If
you consider Italian history you come to a very important
year, around 1530. That is the year when the Italian folk
spirit grew so powerful that it was then able to begin to
work also on the physical body. From that time it started
to develop very specific national characteristics. In
occult terms this means that the folk spirit developed a
much more powerful will; it began to engrave itself also
into the physical element, developing national
characteristics even at the physical level. Whilst our
ego is becoming more and more independent of the body the
folk spirit is evolving in the opposite direction. Having
influenced the soul element for a time it is now
beginning to influence the physical.
We find the
same thing happened with the French folk spirit around
the year 1600, and about 1650 for the English folk
spirit. Before, the folk spirit had more or less only
taken hold of the soul element but from then on it also
intervened in the physical. Its will grew more powerful
and the soul was less able to put up resistance against
being given a configuration that had national
characteristics. It was therefore at this time that
national characteristics began to emerge more clearly.
This happened because the folk spirit descended. It is
higher up when it acts more on the soul sphere; it
descends to act more on the physical aspect. The folk
spirit of the Italian peninsula therefore descended
around the year 1530. In France this happened at the
beginning of the 17th century and in England in the
middle of the 17th century. Shakespeare wrote his works
before the folk spirit had passed this stage. This is
what is so significant. It is the reason for the strange
rupture which occurred in the way the English regard
Shakespeare, with the result that Shakespeare is actually
more appreciated in Germany than in England. We are
speaking of the way the folk spirit descends more and
more into individual human beings.
If we now
come to consider the evolution of the German folk spirit
we can see something similar happening during the period
between about 1750 and 1850. Yet oddly enough we have to
say that in this case the folk spirit descended but then
ascended again. This is what is so significant. We are
able to observe a process in which the folk spirits of
Western European peoples descended and took hold of those
peoples. In the case of the German people we can also
observe the folk spirit descending around the middle of
the 18th century, but we then find it ascending again
around the middle of the 19th century. The situation is
therefore quite a different one. A beginning was made to
develop the German character into an eminently national
one, but it was only done for a while. When some of this
had been done the folk spirit ascended again, once again
to act only on the soul element.
German
cultural life had its flowering period at the time when
the folk spirit had descended to the lowest level. The
folk spirit will of course always remain with these
people, but it is now again in spiritual heights. That is
the peculiar thing about the German folk spiny It did
descend at an earlier time but it then stopped before the
people became too strongly national. The Western European
peoples have become very much crystallized in their
national characteristics, but in the case of the German
people this cannot happen because of the peculiar nature
of the German folk spirit. The result is that German
attitudes will always have to remain more universal than
those of other peoples. These things relate to profound
realities in the spiritual world. If we had been looking
for the German folk spirit in Goethe's time we would have
found it at about the same level as the English, French
or Italian folk spirit. If we want to look for it today
we have to go higher up. There will be times when it
descends again and others when it ascends again. It is
this to-and-fro movement which is so characteristic of
the German folk spirit.
The Russian
folk spirit does not descend at all to achieve full
crystallization of the people. It always remains
something like a cloud hovering above the national
character. We shall always have to 10°k for it up
above, and the Russian people will only enter into
spiritual development when they make the effort to
combine the fruits of the work done in the West of Europe
with their own essential nature. They must develop their
culture in conjunction with the West for they will never
develop a culture out of their own resources.
All this
has to be understood in this way. The flexibility in
German attitudes is due to the fact that the German has
not united with his folk spirit the way this has happened
in the West of Europe. This is also why it is so
tremendously difficult to understand the Germans. They
can only be understood if we are able to admit that it is
possible to have a people whose folk spirit only comes in
sporadically to intervene in their evolution. This is one
of the most difficult chapters in historical development
and you should not despair if it seems to be full of
contradictions. We are, however, living in an age when we
must try and really understand the origins of the enmity
which shows itself so clearly now during these fateful
days within Europe. With anything we experience, if you
look more closely you'll always find that there is
something coming in which might indeed be called
incomprehensible and only becomes clear when we look more
closely. Yes, of course, the Germans will be aware that
fundamentally there is a tremendous hatred felt towards
them. Looking at it more closely we shall find that this
hatred is directed towards what in fact are the best
qualities of the Germans. No particular hatred is
directed towards their less desirable qualities.
Anyone
wishing to penetrate these mysteries will have to
consider these things more in their context. You might
say that it is a case of German chauvinism if someone
says such things now in Germany. Why should a German
speak with appreciation and in praise of the German
character? Yet if that were the case, these lectures
would not be given and I would not speak in this way
about the German people. It really does not need German
chauvinism to characterize the nature of the German
people in such a way that it is evident that it differs
from the nature of other European peoples, and not to its
disadvantage. To demonstrate this let me read to you a
characterization of the nature of the German people given
in a letter Ernest Renan wrote to David Friedrich
Strauss.
It was around 1843. when I was at
the St Sulpice Seminary, that I started to learn
something about Germany through the works of Goethe and
Herder. I felt I was entering a temple, and from that
moment onwards everything I had formerly considered
magnificent and worthy of the deity appeared merely as
tired and faded paper flowers… Germany has the
most perfect legal title, because of a historical role
of the utmost significance, a soul, I would say, a
literature, men of genius, a unique view of things
divine and human. Germany produced the most important
revolution in recent times, the Reformation; what is
more, over the last century one of the most marvellous
developments of intellectual and spiritual life known
in history has occurred in Germany, a development which
— if I dare put it like this — has taken
the human mind and spirit one step further in depth and
breadth. People who have not been touched by this new
development are to those who have gone through it as
someone who only knows elementary arithmetic is in
relation to someone well versed in differential
calculus.
[ Note 54 ]
So that is
what Ernest Renan wrote to David Friedrich Strauss in
1870. I am not going to go into the details of their
correspondence, but let me just mention that Renan also
wrote that there were only two alternatives. The first
would be to take away French territory-The outcome would
be revenge unto death against all that is German and
alliance with all kinds of confederates. The other
alternative would be to leave France untouched, and then
the Peace Party would gain the upper hand and say: 'We
have been extremely foolish, we want to make good where
we have gone wrong, and the good of mankind will be
preserved.’
I mention
this in order to show you that when Renan wrote the
letter, part of which I have just read to you, his mood
was not exactly a conciliatory one with regard to the
German character which had evolved in the course of human
evolution. On the other hand he was prepared to represent
the qualities mankind had gained through the German
character in relation to everything else as being like
higher mathematics in comparison to elementary
arithmetic. There is no question, then, of being a
chauvinist; one merely has to repeat what Renan wrote in
1870.
In thus
speaking of man's relationship to the higher worlds we
must realize that in concrete terms, in reality, man is
able to have these relations because he bears this other
one within him, because this other one is alive in him
who has the same relationship to the higher world of the
spirit as we have to the sense-perceptible world here in
our body•
The
supersensible, intangible part of us gives us a certain
relationship to all that is supersensible. And it is a
truly living development we undergo — nothing
theoretical — when our heart and mind enters into
the experience I have described as the process of
meditation. The soul is really inscribing something into
the spiritual worlds. It inscribes it into what
fundamentally speaking is we ourselves. If we really
think about this, the idea of 'being within the living
stream of spiritual science" links up with the idea of
‘human responsibilty’. This idea of 'human
responsibility' really must arise in the soul of anyone
pursuing spiritual science. We know that mankind is going
through things in the course of historical development,
that it undergoes change. Clairvoyance has been gradually
disappearing and today we know that it will be necessary
to regain the connection with the spiritual world that
existed in the past. and that spiritual science is the
path by which it can be regained. In the past, man's
natural relationship to his body was such that part of
him was always within the spiritual worlds. Today he is
so much more closely bound up with his body that he must
see to it that he gains understanding of the spiritual
world independent of his body. We may say that man had a
hereditary trait that gradually grew weaker and weaker
and disappeared altogether in the present age. It is in
our time, therefore, that work has to start that will
take the soul up into the spiritual world.
Can you
envisage the way the German folk spirit is again and
again coming down to the German peoples and then going up
again into the higher world? Why does it do this with
just one particular people? It is because it is intended
to evoke in this particular culture the powers that will
lead to spiritual science in the truest sense of the
word. When the folk spirit descends it firmly establishes
the folk characteristics. When it recedes again, leaving
the national characteristics in a state of fluidity, the
people will have to go through that upsurge and
regression of the folk spirit again and again in their
own bodies, and they will learn how all 'beingness' is a
state of flux between the sense-perceptible and the
supersensible world.
You will
recall my saying a week ago that the whole history of
literature for recent decades will have to be rewritten.
This is because certain individuals with spiritual
insight have been forgotten, though they are of much
greater significance than literary figures known to us
today. That relates to the period when the folk spirit
was once again ascending. It will now be necessary for us
to unite ourselves in the greatest possible degree with
spiritual science so that we may find the folk spirit in
its ascent. In other words, Germans must come to
understand their essential nature not just in the
physical world but also in the supersensible world. It is
to be found in both these worlds. This is another reason
why I have said — even in public lectures —
that there is a certain inner relationship between the
culture of the German spirit and the striving for
spiritual science. Fichte
[ Note 55 ]
could only develop his
views at a time when the folk spirit had descended.
Because of this his philosophy can only be imperfectly
understood and must indeed be misunderstood. All that
busy activity in concepts and ideas where egoic nature
had entered the way it had in Fichte's philosophy was
possible only at a time when the folk spirit had
descended to a lower level. Today we have to look for it
at a higher level and we can only find it with the aid of
spiritual science. This is due to the relationship of the
folk spirit to the German people. It is entirely part of
the nature of German cultural development that there is a
profound relationship between German cultural life and
the path which leads to spiritual science. It is much to
be hoped that these things will gradually come to be
understood more and more clearly.
It really
has to be said that if you consider the events of the
present time, the enormous sacrifices that have to be
made, all the difficulties people have to live through
because of present events, it should be obvious that what
is coming to expression here is something far, far beyond
anything we are able to comprehend by taking an external
view. And we might paraphrase the words written by St
Paul: ‘And if Christ be not risen, then is our
preaching vain and your faith is also vain.’
[ Note 56 ]
Paul found
affirmation for what he had to give to the world in the
reality of the Resurrection. His words have been much
misunderstood. With regard to what is happening now, we
have to say: ‘These deaths give expression to the
belief, to the firm avowal, that man relates to more than
merely the things existing in the world accessible to the
senses.’ It is not only that religious feeling is
growing more profound, but it is possible to see that in
these very times we live in souls are forcefully
protesting against the whole of materialism, and they do
this by the way in which they enter into death. We have
to say that whatever else these events represent they
also contribute to the overcoming of materialistic ways
of thinking and the materialistic way of life which has
gradually evolved. Out of a profound awareness of current
developments, the human soul has to say to itself:
‘If it were to happen that materialistic attitudes,
materialistic ways of thinking were to prevail on earth
once the sun of peace is shining again, would we not have
to say that all these deaths must have been in vain
— unless a spiritual way of thinking develops on
the plane that lies open to the gaze of the dead?’
We might therefore paraphrase the words of St Paul as
follows: ‘All the infinite suffering would be in
vain, and all the many individuals would have gone
through death in vain at such a young physical age if a
materialistic way of thinking and a materialistic way of
life were to spread in the fields of peace.’ These
days will have to be like a great warning beacon for
those who live through them, a light entering deeply into
human hearts and minds and souls, that man shall develop
a genuine desire to live in the sphere of the spirit. We
cannot concern ourselves deeply enough with the events of
our time. And this is also why one hopes that vision will
broaden among those who profess themselves
anthroposophists to extend beyond the narrow horizon that
tends to limit it, towards an ever-expanding horizon. We
really must come to understand the way everything
happening here on earth is connected with events taking
place in the spiritual world. This will give us a feeling
for the tasks set for us in the difficult times of the
present.
Some people
have a facile way of saying that present events need not
have anything to do with the spiritual development
individual nations are undergoing. To anyone able to see
through these things and discern their true course,
everything happening in the external world is an
expression of something spiritual. Let us hold on to this
more and more, let us try more and more to use the very
experiences that can come to us through spiritual science
to take our self out of those narrower confines and to
unite this self, a self freed by spiritual science, with
the great events now taking place. Let us forget purely
personal concerns and grow together with the profoundly
disturbing events mankind as a whole must now
experience.
This is the
note I wanted to strike in your hearts with the things
put forward in these lectures. I very much hope that they
will be pondered before we meet again in April. An
element put through the test of the great events of our
time is now ascending into the spiritual world and
bringing an influence to bear from up there. It must be
met with the kind of understanding that can be won
through spiritual insight, for only then will it be
possible to achieve what these events are challenging us
to achieve. It is true that:
Out of courage shown in
battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.
|