The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Today we would like to point out a few facts about the supersensible life that, from a particular perspective, can demonstrate to you how significant—and increasingly so—it is for assessing what happens here in the physical world to look toward the supersensible, superphysical processes that are, after all, always connected to the physical processes on Earth. We are indeed standing at the threshold, at the end of one age and at the beginning of a new one—though, as you know, this is said of every age. But regarding this past age and the one now beginning, one will be able to say this in a completely different sense than of any earlier age. For we have experienced events—catastrophic events—of which humanity has become increasingly aware: they have not occurred with such intensity since the beginning of recorded history. The past era was one in which people here on Earth paid as little attention as possible to the supersensible world. If you wish to take such a matter entirely seriously, you must simply not confuse what might be called outward lip service to the church with a genuine orientation toward the supersensible world. It is truly not particularly difficult to see that what people have regarded for centuries as a certain religiosity is more of an outward matter—that it is not a genuine orientation toward the supersensible world. Right up to the present day, people have lived with a certain indifference toward the supersensible world. And the turning point in our times now demands that humanity reorient itself toward the supersensible worlds. People must learn to look toward these supersensible worlds once again, but in a different way than is often imagined today. People would like to cling to their usual, comfortable beliefs, which require little inner effort. Those who have clung to these comfortable beliefs are the greatest enemies of true progress today. The churches that resist the new paths to the supersensible are, in truth, already the driving force behind the influx of increasingly materialistic impulses into humanity. What is necessary today is to learn, in a very concrete way, to look into the supersensible worlds. We are living in an age in which, for example, the great, momentous transformation must take place whereby people go from being “thinking machines” to truly thinking human beings. Isn’t it terrible to say such a thing? After all, people today naturally consider themselves to be thinking human beings, and when one demands that they first become thinking human beings, they regard it more or less as an insult. But it is nevertheless true. Since the middle of the 15th century, people have increasingly become mere “thinking machines.” People today, so to speak, surrender themselves to their thoughts; they do not control their thoughts. Just imagine for a moment what it would mean if the same thing were to happen to you with regard to other parts of your body as is currently happening to most people with regard to their thinking faculties. Ask yourself whether people today are very inclined—I say this arbitrarily—to bring a thought to a close? Thoughts are constantly bubbling through people’s minds today. They cannot resist them; they surrender to them automatically. One thought arises, another fades away; they flicker and flash through the mind, and people think in such a way that one could actually best say: it is the thoughts that think within them. Imagine if the same thing were to happen to people with regard to their arms and legs—if they had as little control over them as they do over their thinking. Just imagine if a person were to behave today on the streets with their arms the way they behave with their thinking organ! You can imagine all the thoughts that flash through a person’s mind as they cross the street, and now imagine if they were constantly waving their hands and arms about as they pleased—starting a thought at random, their own thoughts, or even with their legs! And yet, we stand on the threshold of an era in which people must learn to exercise just as much control over their thoughts—that is, more precisely, over their thinking organs—as they do over their arms and legs. Humanity is entering this age. A certain inner discipline of thought is what must take hold, and from which people today are still quite far removed.

[ 2 ] We have, after all, been in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch since the middle of the 15th century. Before this period comes to an end, people must indeed learn to master their thinking just as they master their arms and legs. Then the true task of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch will be fulfilled for those who are able to do so. You see, this is a serious matter when one considers what is, in a sense, looming on the horizon of human development in the present age. Now, however, what I have just hinted at—this mastery of thought—will be linked to something fundamentally different. The more people begin to master their thinking, the more they will be able to visualize again and have imaginative visions. And people need these imaginative visions, for it is only through them that social impulses can develop within the antisocial impulses that are so prevalent today—by enabling people, through these visions, to truly put themselves in the shoes of others, of their fellow human beings. One cannot empathize with fellow human beings through abstract thinking alone. Abstract thinking makes people stubborn; it leads them to listen only to their own opinions. And above all, abstract thinking causes people to shut themselves off, to a greater or lesser extent, from the flexibility needed to live in harmony with the spiritual world. The fact that it is not easy to live in harmony with the spiritual world today can be seen in a very specific phenomenon that is extraordinarily common today.

[ 3 ] You see, for example, our “Call” has now spread throughout the world. It has, of course, been understood by a number of people—that much is obvious. All over the world, here and there, people have come forward who have understood it. But a whole number of other people have admittedly been unable to understand it. It’s even hard to imagine what it means not to understand the appeal, because there’s nothing in it that every person couldn’t actually understand from the outset. Yet many find it incomprehensible. Why is this? It is because today, true intellectual development has reached an extraordinarily low point, since people can no longer keep up the moment thoughts arise that interrupt their automatic thought patterns. People today are accustomed to automatically following a thought once it has gained momentum. Just observe the typical people of our time closely, and you’ll be able to tell them wonderful things—but when it comes time for them to say something themselves, what rolls off their tongues is what they’ve been accustomed to saying since childhood. Planting new thoughts in people’s minds has become extraordinarily difficult today. Anyone with even a little life experience generally always knows what most people will say about this or that event occurring in the world today. That’s how automatic people’s judgments have become—and how automatic their thoughts have become. This automatic thinking is what most disrupts what is demanded of people today by the forces of evolution. People like to have set phrases; they like what they’re used to. The further west you go, the more often you hear, whenever a certain phrase is used: “Yes, you can’t say that!” — How often do people say, for example, when something German is to be translated into Dutch, English, or French: “That’s not English, that’s not Dutch, that’s not French!” — You can’t say that the other way around. In German, anything is possible. You can put the predicate at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end—it’s always German. You can hardly ever use the expression “that’s not German” in the same sense that you’d say something isn’t Dutch, isn’t English, isn’t French, and so on. Certainly, there are certain habits of thought that are reflected in sentence structure; but one can just as easily use a different sentence structure than the one prescribed by grammar. In this regard, there is actually nothing wrong with it, and it is merely philistinism, narrow-mindedness, even though people often speak of it as wrong or incorrect. The automatism of thought is often expressed very clearly in language. People today should actually be attentive to such nuances of life, for such nuances are extraordinarily important for understanding our time. Thus, as the automatism of thought ceases and the flexibility of thought regains its place, the possibility for imagination will also be awakened in the human soul.

[ 4 ] There is one more thing that must be fought against, and that is the ignorance of our age. For the lack of education in our age is, in fact, extraordinarily great. People do not understand all sorts of things simply because they do not fit into their automatic patterns of thought. Preachers are usually found to be so generally understandable because, when it comes down to it, they say nothing other than what has been repeated countless times in the listeners’ automatic patterns of thought. People find this particularly appealing when they can think to themselves: “Oh, what he’s saying—I’ve always thought that myself—haven’t I said so?” How often do we hear precisely this kind of remark today, and how apt it seems when we can say, “Haven’t I said that myself?” It is hardly necessary to hear what one has already said oneself. It’s quite a waste of life to always want to hear what you’ve already said yourself. However, it’s not quite so comfortable when listening to spiritual science. Most people can’t tell themselves that they’ve already said it themselves. And because it doesn’t fit into their automatic patterns of thought, people today find it so difficult to understand. Today, the most uneducated people are often found precisely in those circles where one would least expect to find them. The specialization of science has led to a situation where scientists, of all people, plow away at a specific field. They burrow into it with their automatic thinking, and yet they are often the most uneducated people of all. Today we have university professors who are actually incapable of understanding the simplest of things, who are truly the most uneducated people—and we are deceived about their lack of education only because they so often say: “Such things are not popular enough for the people!”—One hears such things in other fields as well. How often, for example, do we hear theater directors in our major cities say: “We have to put on plays that are more accessible to the general public, otherwise people won’t understand.” — Most of the time, this stems from the fact that the theater directors themselves don’t understand anything better, while the people who go to the theater would actually be happy if they were offered something different. One really has to look a little deeper into the underlying issues if one wants to understand our time precisely in terms of what is necessary to carry this era forward a bit further.

[ 5 ] All of these things are important for forming a judgment about what can help people develop the imaginations that are so necessary for social life. If these imaginations gradually arise in people’s souls, then those souls will enter a state of mind in which they will find it unbearable to know that spiritual life, the education system, the school system, and the university system are dependent on the state order or the economic order.

[ 6 ] A time will come when people’s imaginations will be so strong that, within a spiritual life organized according to political or economic conditions, they will feel like a person who is bound and confined to a single track, so that they can move only in one direction. People who develop their imaginations will feel constrained by an education system that is dependent on political and economic life and is regarded today as the ideal. The forces of development in our time speak volumes in this regard, my dear friends. If current conditions were to continue, a strong discrepancy—a lack of harmony—would gradually arise between what people demand, based on the outer constitution of their souls, in terms of a free spiritual life, and what would exist if all education were constrained by state conditions. It may be nothing more than a caricatured precursor when, in certain cities of Central and Eastern Europe, schoolboys and schoolgirls are now sending their teachers packing and electing school boards from among their own ranks, but it is a mood that cannot be overlooked—one that is moving precisely toward casting off that which must not be allowed to continue. It is such a flash of lightning heralding a new era that one must not merely condemn it, but should already begin to grasp its impulses correctly. That is one thing. People will become increasingly dependent on having a free spiritual life. Why? Because in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, we are moving toward a sensory-super-sensory structure of the world in which those spirits of the higher hierarchies—whom we call Angeloi—descend more deeply than before, entering into a much more intimate communion with human beings than was previously the case. The relationship between the sensory and the supersensory worlds is to become more intimate from this age onward. People are not only to receive rain from the clouds, but they are also to learn to perceive, from higher regions, the inspirations of the angels who are increasingly mingling with human souls.

[ 7 ] As a result, the spiritual life that is liberated will indeed become one that, through freedom of thought, will receive what comes down as influences from a supersensible world. Establishing a spiritual life grounded in itself, one that is emancipated from political and economic life, is not an external program; it is something that must be learned in connection with the inner forces of human life that continue to develop humanity. Therefore, one can say: When one calls for a social orientation such as that sought by our threefold social order, one is not calling for something in the sense of a program, but rather for something demanded by the revelations of the spiritual world, which will speak ever more clearly to humanity and which will at the same time reveal how humanity is leading itself into ruin and pathological states if it refuses to heed what is revealed from the supersensible worlds for the salvation and healing of humanity. And besides the fact that the angels will enter into closer communion with human beings in this way—in Central Germany, this mingling of the nobility with the common people is called “making themselves common,” so the angels will make themselves common in the future—the archangels will do the same. This will provide further impulses; even if they speak much more softly, even if they speak like gentle inspirations, these inspirations will still come. And in the future, these inspirations will form the inner substance of the future states, which have established spiritual life on the one hand and economic life on the other—states that are thus true, self-governing constitutional states. The states that were founded, for example, in the third post-Atlantean, Egyptian-Chaldean era, can be called theocratic, just as the ancient Hebrew state can be called a theocracy. But these theocracies have gradually disappeared. Theocracies, however, are to return to the Earth. In earthly legal life, one should feel the influence of the archangels. We have indeed said that the opposite of a person’s supersensible life is expressed precisely in legal life. But into this legal life—which, as it exists on Earth, is the most unspiritual—the guidance and direction of the archangels, the Archangeloi, who are once again becoming more intimately connected with humanity, is to be woven.

[ 8 ] And the spirits of the age will become the bearers, the stewards of humanity’s economic cycle; they will play an ever-greater role in economic life once that economic life is truly organized. It will become a life of association. Since the mid-15th century, a tendency has emerged among people to focus solely on the production of goods, the accumulation of wealth, and the pursuit of profit. A reversal is necessary. In the future, when the economic cycle is self-sustaining, the focus will be much more on the distribution of goods among people and on the consumption of goods. Associations will form that will, in turn, regulate production based on consumption. If we make even a modest start on such a project today, it will be little understood or still hindered by other influences.

[ 9 ] Just think about how, some time ago, we tried to distribute bread to the people—not by producing it blindly at a single location and then putting it on the market, but by asking consumers, who were to be recruited from the Anthroposophical Society, to purchase the bread. That would have been a consumer cooperative supplied in this way from a specific location. In this way, the abstract principle of supply and demand would have been overcome at one point. In another way—as must increasingly be the case—the principle would have been implemented that production occurs only to the extent that consumption is possible. This is the only sound principle of the national economy. But as I said, such things are still difficult to implement on a small scale today. Yet this is precisely what we must strive for in economic life. Social democracy expresses this with the words: “Until now, production has been for the sake of profit; in the future, production must be for the sake of consumption.” However, the way Social Democracy intends to implement this principle would lead to a paralysis of the actual social organism. The principle is valid, but it is not yet conceived today in a way that would allow it to be realized for the benefit of the social organism.

[ 10 ] Thus, from what is, so to speak, flowing toward us from the future, the following seems to emerge: first, the necessity of an independent spiritual life, through which the angels become more intimately connected with human beings; second, an independent political life, through which the archangels become more intimately connected with human beings; third, an independent economic life, through which the Archai become more intimately connected with human beings. Thus the forces of human development are drawing near. The independent spiritual life must advance most rapidly, for—if humanity is not to face a great calamity—it must be complete, that is, independent, by the end of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. By the end of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, a new spiritual theocracy must be complete and independent, and by the end of the seventh post-Atlantean epoch, a true social community must be fully developed—one in which the individual would feel unhappy if not everyone were just as happy as he is, or if the individual had to purchase his own happiness at the cost of others’ deprivation. We have, of course, touched on these matters from other perspectives on numerous occasions.

[ 11 ] From a spiritual scientific perspective, one must see the supersensible development as the foundation for what one seeks to achieve in the physical world. We are just entering an era in which people will only be able to view the sensible world correctly if they also perceive the supersensible. Above all, even for understanding the immediate present, it is already necessary that the concept of repeated earthly lives not merely be understood in the abstract, but that it be grasped in a truly concrete way. If one merely knows that human beings pass from incarnation to incarnation with intervening lives in the purely spiritual world, then one knows only the abstract. One should not be satisfied with that. Knowledge of this abstract concept may provide a certain satisfaction, but only that knowledge which progresses toward the concrete becomes practically relevant to the world. Such concrete knowledge, which is connected to repeated earthly lives, leads, for example, to the realization that there is a certain connection between the experiences people have had here on Earth before passing through the gate of death and their experiences after death. After all, once people have passed through the gate of death, they actually continue, in a certain sense, the life they led here until their death, and what people have gone through on Earth continues to have a very strong effect after they have passed through the gate of death. So imagine this very vividly: People pass through the gate of death, bringing into the spiritual world whatever they have united with their souls here; this plays out there in a very, very real way. It is by no means insignificant what a person takes with them into the spiritual world as they step through the gate of death. For what a person takes with them through the gate of death into the spiritual world becomes an important experience for those who, shortly thereafter, descend into physical life through birth. A kind of significant, essential encounter takes place between those who died some time before that moment and those who are born afterward. Those who are about to be born have significant experiences with those who died shortly before. In a sense, those who are about to descend do not know what the Earth was like before those who are now ascending passed through the gate of death, but they do experience it. They are also, in a certain way, prepared for their descent by what those who passed through the gate of death shortly before this descent brought with them into the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] We have gone through a very materialistic age. A large portion of humanity left this world through death by 1913, having lived with a certain thoughtless acceptance of material interests. Far more people were taken into the spiritual world by 1913 than by 1914. There were souls in the spiritual world who saw these new arrivals. The souls who were to descend later—in 1914, 1915, 1916, and 1917—saw these new arrivals coming up with the remnants of the materialistic age still clinging to them. This transformed into a terrible longing within those souls.

[ 13 ] You see, this is what is peculiar about children born since 1912 or 1913: that in their childlike inner lives, in their smiles, in their tears—that they carry within their childlike inner lives the remnants of a longing they experienced before they descended into earthly existence through birth. And this longing has been implanted in them by the people who have ascended. They brought very little of the spiritual with them. This terrible lack of the spiritual that people have brought with them into the spiritual worlds during this time has caused a great many children—those born since 1914 or who will be born in the coming years—to feel a longing not to find on Earth the conditions that those who have ascended have left behind.

[ 14 ] At the very foundation of present-day life, one could perceive a remarkable force emanating from those who were about to be born. One can describe this force as the longing to wipe away the materialism that has gradually accumulated on Earth. Of course, such forces, which act so intensely in a certain direction, can be exploited by all manner of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in one direction or another, since they come into conflict with other forces. But imagine what I have just said, and you have one of the underlying contexts behind the sensory phenomena: the longing to wipe away an age that is becoming more and more materialistic. There you have one of the forces striving for the destruction of this age, which is becoming ever more materialistic. One might say: Among the forces that have been working—albeit out of a profound tragedy—toward the destruction of a culture drifting ever deeper into materialism in the course of human development, among these forces are the longings of the children born since 1913. They did not want to be born into a world that offers a continuation of what has been since then.

[ 15 ] This is the other side of the rampant destruction that has taken place; this is the other side of the call to learn from reflecting on the materialism of the past era. This is the impulse that should flow into our longing for true socialization. Thus, we must understand our time through supersensible facts; we must strive more and more not to remain stuck in the sensory realm, but to ask: What supersensible forces are at work in sensory life? — A great call resounds from the supersensible worlds through this age. At the end of the 1870s, behind this sensory world, Michael’s victory took place over those forces I have often described to you. People were allowed to live to the age of thirty-five, up until the year 1914; in the midst of their lives, the crisis had to break out. For if no crisis had come, even those born in the late 1870s who have passed the midpoint of their lives would have become more and more rigid in the automatism of thought which, because it is an automatism, is bound to physical life. From then on, these thirty-five-year-olds were not to continue working in the same state as that of the age. Those born since then must, on the one hand, tragically look upon the destruction of that world into which their fathers and mothers had lived, but for the life of their souls as a whole, it is better this way. The others, however, lack the ability to understand that the supersensible worlds demand a reversal of everything that people have regarded as modern civilization, and an immersion in spiritual worlds. Yes, my dear friends, it is the Spirit that demands of us an understanding of a new age dawning. Only those people who do not ignore this call of the Spirit will be able to contribute to the further development of humanity. Let us allow this to speak loudly within us. Only then are we truly at the heart of what the anthroposophical spiritual movement is meant to be and can aspire to be.

[ 16 ] We'll talk more about that next Friday at seven o'clock.