The Battle for Our Soul
Mephistopheles reigns large in the world today. He sits on the shoulder of our consciousness, whispering influences that drive us to desire one of two polar opposite ends of our existence. He cares not to which extremity we lean, only that we do not achieve the balance that wins us power over his own throne.
This is the war of all wars. It is the war that never ends while humanity is afforded the opportunity to incarnate in ongoing lives here on Earth. Without the blessing of incarnations, we are nothing. Having incarnated for X lives and choosing to cease, we proffer ourselves to the fate enjoined to our personal karma.
Dr. Fausto by Jean-Paul Laurens
This war is unavoidable. It is not for the faint of heart or weak of will. It is the contest between the Devil and Daniel Webster. It is the fight against the urge to sell our soul for even a moment of physical, psychological, even spiritual, ecstasy. We stand on the brink of our own demise. Sitting next to us is Faust and the dissatisfaction with his own life, seeking our accompaniment into his pact with the devil.
The following excerpt is from the book “The New Mysteries and the Wisdom of Christ”. It is one of the best images drawn in words of the polar opposites of the battle that rages within each of us that I have ever read. To deny such a battle is to by default choose one end or the other, which is indeed, the path to our end, our own demise.
As you read, contemplate what is being said. If questions arise, this is good – look further on your own. If denial rings immediate, take another – this time honest – look at yourself.
The New Mysteries and the Wisdom of Christ
Lecture 10, Logos and Anti-Logos – Sorat, the Sun Demon, and the Counter-world of the Trinity
Manfred Schmidt-Brabant
Page 143After the Mystery of Golgotha, some of the Mysteries[1] became followers of this Mystery of Golgotha. Other Mysteries remained at a distance, especially the Asiatic Mysteries that continued under the leadership of a luciferic inspiration and did not participate in the Mystery of Golgotha. Something similar happened with western initiates[2] who took no part in the Mystery of Golgotha and instead sought out ahrimanic beings. Both these kinds of anti-Christian Mysteries are widespread today, and can no longer be identified merely by their locale. Asiatic, anti-Christian Mysteries are found all across the earth as far away as California; western, anti-Christian Mysteries are found all over the earth as far away as Tokyo.
These anti-Christian Mysteries are active in the world through various societies that have two fateful intentions for civilization. The eastern initiates in these Mysteries see the reappearance of Christ in the etheric realm and they do not want to accept it. They hold the view that it would be better for souls to leave the earth, that individuals are better off in the world of the stars[3]. These eastern initiates are the source of every impulse to make the earth as uninhabitable as possible, so that souls no longer have the desire to incarnate. Their aim is to do away with repeated earth lives. Everything of this sort launched from the East is directed toward creating such chaotic, inhuman, miserable conditions that souls who witness this turn back before incarnating, preferring instead to remain in the spiritual world.
The impulse that emerges from the so-called western initiates in the anti-Christian Mysteries is completely different. They also see that human beings could look to the Being of the Etheric Christ[4], and they want to put another being in His place – a strictly ahrimanic being. Therefore, they present another impulse – to make earth so inhabitable, so pleasant, that souls will not want to leave after death. These initiates want souls to renounce the normal course of their existence – that they may pass after death through the world of the stars and undergo the transformations there that make a new earthly life possible. This renunciation means that these souls would remain connected with the earth after death, and reincarnation would stop for them. We live in an age when these Mystery battles take on frightening forms, but they are forms closely associated with the enmity of the human task. It literally comes down to undermining repeated earth lives or else the strengthening of them. This battle is a central theme of anthroposophy[5].
[1] These are the Old Mysteries that came into being as far back as Lemurian and Atlantean times, prior to the coming of the Christ to Earth. Many of them understood the Mystery of Golgotha as the fulfillment of their own Mystery traditions and prophesies. Others railed against the influence brought by the Christ and His Impulse that has connected itself not only with human beings, but the Earth itself through the Mystery of Golgotha.
[2] An initiate by definition does not always signify something positive. An initiate is one who has the ability to see into spiritual realities and there makes a choice to what side of those realities he will follow – either for or against.
[3] The “world of the stars” is the Spiritual realms, the heavens, or “spiritland” as Steiner sometimes called it.
[4] The Etheric Christ is referring to the return of Christ in the etheric realm of the Earth. His “second coming” is not physical. (And He has returned and exists in the etheric realm. To “see” Him today, one needs to be an Initiate in His favor)
[5] This is why Anthroposophy is rightly called “The battle for the soul.”
We can successfully find our way through these influences by rightly striving to “Know Thyself” and thereby finding within ourselves the middle ground between these influences i.e. finding inner balance. We must incarnate to develop, to metamorphize, into the hierarchical beings we are meant to become (the tenth hierarchy of the angelic hierarchy). However, with each incarnation, it is our task, our challenge, to learn more and more about our individuality and develop those strengths that aid us in not becoming chained to the Earth. Those who choose to renounce the normal course of their existence will find themselves bowing to Ahriman on what is termed “the eighth sphere” that will slough off of the earth as it transitions to its Jupiter stage in the distant future. We have time, but that window is closing…
There is one thing that is a particular characteristic of the fifth post-Atlantean period, something that one should inscribe into one’s soul every day anew. It is something that one should not forget, even though the human being is particularly disposed to forgetting this matter. That is, the human being in the fifth post-Atlantean period must be a fighter for the spirit; he will experience a dwindling of his forces if he does not continually control them in order to use them to conquer the spiritual world. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, the human being is left to his own freedom to the highest degree!
~The Electronic Doppelganger, pg. 98
To progress, we must face the facts of death and loneliness, as if the ground had been taken from under our feet, and quieted the mastiff by deliberately laying aside in special moments all sense-experiences, both of the world and of our own body. We are sustained by the faculties of clear, imaginative thinking and sound moral discernment, ‘the burning lantern’, the two-petal lotus flower in the brow. pg. 55, The Mystery of Arthur at Tintagel
Though we face death and loneliness, death is not an end (unless we make it so by our choices) and though ours is a solitary journey, we are not, are never, alone. We are all droplets in the Sea that is God. Encased in the (temporary) vehicle of the physical body we do live, move, and have our being separate from one another. But in reality – in the reality that IS the spiritual world – we are part of one another.