We are called to live with Ahriman in the right way
If Anthroposophy were to adopt a fanatic attitude, if Anthroposophy were ascetic, it would thunder against the modern civilization based on electricity. Of course, this would be nonsense, for only world-conceptions that do not reckon with reality can speak in that way. They may say: "Oh, this is ahrimanic! Let us avoid it!" — But this can only be done in an abstract way. For the very people who thunder against Ahriman, and tell us to beware of him, go downstairs after their sectarian meeting and enter an electric tramcar! So that all their thundering against Ahriman, no matter how holy it may sound, is (excuse the trivial expression) simply rubbish. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that we must live with Ahriman. But we must live with him in the right way, that is to say, we must not allow him to have the upper hand.
- Rudolf Steiner, GA220, 12th conference, January 28, 1923, Dornach, "Living knowledge of Nature. The intellectual fall of man into sin and overcoming him through the Spirit"
Consumerism was born on the inspiration of Ahriman and his ranks: their spiritual action consists in the oblivion of man's spiritual homeland. It has strengthened since the Second Industrial Revolution, when we understand how "the progress of the future" lies in the use of electricity and oil, both in a sense linked to the coming of Ahriman. From that moment, especially with the industrial use of fossil fuels, and the progressive disappearance of steam technology, technology has learned to become progressively independent from human evolution and therefore, it is man who becomes part of the industrial system supported by cars. Machines thus produce goods in bulk, so that their value falls, and everyone can start buying goods in large quantities at a lower cost. At the same time, for the more affluent classes who wanted to distinguish themselves, "luxury" was born. This is the age of external objects, thus replacing human internal contents.
The cry of the Ahrimanic entities could be characterized as:
God is dead!
This is their nefarious interpretation of a spiritual fact necessary for human evolution, as Nietzsche had rightly understood it, albeit with a now crepuscular [occurring or active during twilight] consciousness. The evolution of the human ego together with Lucifer's "gift" of solitude, which is also freedom, has led to materialism, which is instead a "gift" of Ahriman. As Lucifer opened the door to Ahriman, so Ahriman opened the door to the Asuras, and with them to nihilism [a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths], already implicit in materialism. But loneliness, materialism and nihilism are in truth an illusion created by the Obstacles: behind them lies the nature of the ego as a spiritual being embodied in matter, a creator god in power, a god of the future. Lucifer and Ahriman are evils necessary for human evolution, evils that can and must be redeemed.
The human being, after the Mystery of Golgotha, definitively acquires the perception of his own ego. This marks the turning point of human evolution, according to which what was previously a descent into matter can now become a conscious ascent into the spirit: but simultaneously with the full consciousness of the microcosmic ego, the ancient consciousness of the macrocosm is extinguished as abode of gods and spirits. Self-awareness requires man to experience the world firsthand and then, in complete freedom, return to the original spiritual source. However, if the conscience of the spiritual world does not intervene, the interior world of man thus individualized is alienated from its original spiritual source and therefore "feels abandoned".
In fact, in anthroposophy:
Without the action of Lucifer man would have had to gradually develop a double view: the ability to see both the physical world and the spiritual world that operated behind it. He would have perceived a total reality. Behind every sensible form the link with a spiritual entity would be seen. Lucifer extinguished, "removed" a part of reality, presenting man only the material part. In the mid-Atlantic era, another influence came from other laggards. These entities introduced "darkness" into the human etheric body, ie the mirror of consciousness was "smoked", distorting perceptions. Human vision became even more blurred. Lucifer "eclipses" the spiritual from the human soul, makes it foresee, hiding it. Ahriman covers matter with a veil of darkness, giving it a mineral appearance.
This pair of uncomfortable "gifts", loneliness and materialism, if not correctly interpreted in the light of the science of the spirit, causes human thinking to capitulate to hasty conclusions. Between the two, the Cat and the Fox, today the greatest evil is Ahriman. Lucifer has portrayed himself in the world of art, traditional religion, New Age, feminism and the cult of all that is past. Ahriman, on the other hand, proliferates everywhere: in the bureaucracy, in the economy, in shopping centers, in technology, in university classrooms where only materialistic science is taught. The conclusions of his radical materialism which becomes nihilism abound precisely in common thinking: "If God is dead, he is like man. If God is dead, the spirit world is nothing. If God is dead, nothing awaits us after death. So every action of mine counts as another, good and evil do not exist. " This Ahrimanic mentality is then ratified in natural science, fully permeated by the spirit of materialism.
Here is the metamorphosis of the "Gott ist tot!" by Nietzsche in:
The ego is dead!
Since the embodied ego is a void in the spirit world, such an overwhelmed ego will remain a fullness in the spirit world and rather a void in the physical world. He who believes the ego, the individual spirit, an illusion and acts accordingly, is actually emptying himself of the ego. He rejects it, leaving a void in the astral body. A void that can be filled by other Ahrimanic entities thus carrying out a further metamorphosis. The void left by the death of the macrocosmic God becomes the death of the microcosmic God.
It is the Nothingness that Michael Ende talks about in "The Neverending Story":
Fantàsia dies because people have given up hope, and forget their dreams, so The Nothing spreads, since it is the despair that surrounds us. I made sure to help him, since it is easier to dominate those who do not believe in anything.
This is the disturbing sentence that Mork, the black wolf agent of the Nothing (the equivalent of the Fenris wolf of the Edda), tells Atreyu. Mork is the agent of the Nothing charged with uncovering Fantàsia's only hope, Atreyu, and killing her before she saves the Infanta Empress with the Auryn. Mork is a lying being, that is, a being from the physical world who has been forcibly transferred into the imaginary world of Fantàsia. When a human being uses Fantàsia's imaginations to make others believe lies, human beings create beings of lies in Fantàsia. Mork himself is then devoured by the Nothing that does not spare even its emissaries. Yet even Atreyu, a being from Fantàsia, is inexplicably infected by Mork's nihilism, which thus wounds him to the point of almost bringing him to death ...
Even if we don't hear these thoughts being formulated, they are often implicit in the logic people follow in their daily actions. Tragically. Since this triple factual negation, according to the actions, (of God, of man and of the spirit) has as a consequence the arrival of a sense of emptiness that remains as the disturbing companion of the human being, in all daily actions. The consequence of the triple negation is in fact the extinction of morality in acting, and this in spite of the task of man: morality is precisely the purpose of the incarnation of the human spirit on Earth. Good and evil cannot be learned in the spiritual world beyond the Threshold.
This is the only unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit (Mark 3: 28-29):
Truly I tell you, all sins will be forgiven the children of men and whatever blasphemy they have uttered; but whoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit has no forgiveness forever, but he is guilty of an eternal sin.
To sin against the Holy Spirit is to renounce the highest part of the human being, the ego and therefore the relationship with the numinous spiritual world. Since the spiritual root, the Ego, has been lost, one begins to search in the material world for what actually belongs to the spiritual world. The result is that consumerism, the child of materialism, is nothing but an inverted spirituality. The meaning of consumerism is, first of all, consumption of the soul and spirit by the body. This reverse order of the things of the world is the manifestation of the occult symbol of the inverted Pentalpha. When the Pentalpha, the sacred symbol of man in which the spirit dominates the four elements, is overturned it is the four elements that dominate the spirit so that Ahriman's purpose in creating an anti-man is fulfilled,
Ahriman's materialism leads the ego to remain trapped in matter, once this bond has occurred, the asuric spirits or Asura intervene, those who have the ability to steal and destroy the human ego, binding it to the matter of "This World ”Of which Ahriman is Prince. In the occult constitution of man, what of the astral body ends up in the egoism of the unredeemed Luciferic spirits, what of the etheric body ends up in the materialism of the Ahrimanic spirits, what of the Ego becomes food of the asuric spirits will form the Eighth Sphere , which is a spiritual void and therefore a material fullness. This is the counter-imagination of the Trinity of Evil.
Therefore, once this void is created, it must somehow be filled. A spiritual consciousness darkened by Ahriman is a consciousness that sees nothing but nothing, a pneumatic vacuum which, like a black hole, sucks up everything around it. The Nothingness, the same that devours Fantàsia is the void at the center of Ahriman. It sucks up the soul and replaces it with physical objects, which are therefore outside the inner world, and which to block, at least temporarily this fatal gravitational attraction, must be filled by purchasing physical objects that "represent" what is missing inside.
This happens because this Nothing has an inexorable force of attraction that no material object, and therefore perishable, can ever fill. Here is the black magic of consumerism: if it is not spiritually opposed, it proceeds unstoppable, feeding itself. The Nothing produces more Nothing, which recalls further physical objects. Nothingness can even corrupt the existing world of human imagination if this is not well protected by an awakened consciousness! This explains Atreyu's wound. The black magic of consumerism is the inexorable greed of him.
In this distorted inner world, the beings that populate the spiritual world, of the imagination, therefore become reified, they become "things", they become "lies". It can be anything that can be consumed and that can repeat itself: the abuse of alcohol, drugs but also shopping, collecting, cars, food and so on. Therefore, not only harmful things per se, but literally anything that, taken in the proper doses, could lead to an encounter with the human dimension of life, becomes instead an inhuman mania, an extreme out of balance. Hence one of the evils of our times is born, disposophobia, the compulsive accumulation of objects that have no function. Even garbage.
What is the origin of this inner Cerberus? There are different levels of our spiritual constitution to which it is possible to go back (or rather to descend), to find the cause of consumerism. The ego or the reflection of the ego formed within the astral body, with its lunar and automatic nature predisposes man to follow the dictates of advertising, especially through television hammering. Television itself, with its images as colorful as they are dead, performs a hypnotic function that reinforces the false identity of the ego to the detriment of the ego. Here we are at the level of compulsive buying. The ego, which is under the aegis of Lucifer, then passes its hand to the double ahrimanic, that is, that dark part of us (the Shadow) which embodies all the negativity that has no place in the ego. Ahriman therefore works by activating the animal survival instincts in us to the detriment of others, thus fomenting competition, aggression and the will to power. Here the purchase becomes a way to overwhelm others: I own more therefore I am worth more. Finally, when this process reaches its extreme, the ahrimanic double opens the way to the so-called "center of destruction", a real destroyer of the form, the anti-ego. This center of destruction is both what threatens the ego and what can strengthen it, bringing it to maturity. the ahrimanic double opens the way to the so-called "center of destruction", a real destroyer of form, the anti-ego. This center of destruction is both what threatens the ego and what can strengthen it, bringing it to maturity. the ahrimanic double opens the way to the so-called "center of destruction", a real destroyer of form, the anti-ego. This center of destruction is both what threatens the ego and what can strengthen it, bringing it to maturity.
There must needs be such a centre within us, for only in such a centre can the Ego of man establish itself. It is a centre for the strengthening and hardening of the Ego. But, as I said, if this hardening of the Ego, if this egoism is carried out into social life, then evil ensues, evil in the life and actions of men.
You may see from this how complicated is the life into which man is placed. Here you have something which has its good use and purpose within man, for otherwise he would not be able to develop his ego, but something which must never be allowed outside. The bad man carries in into the outer world; the good man keeps it inside him. If it is carried outside, it becomes evil and wrong. If it is kept within, it is the very thing we need to give the Ego its right and proper strength.
When we are able to penetrate into this inner core of evil in man, and are able also to become conscious of how into this evil, where matter is destroyed and thrown back into chaos, moral impulses can find their way, then we have really found in ourselves the beginning of spiritual existence. Then we perceive the spirit within us in the act of creating. For when we behold moral laws working upon matter which has been thrown back into chaos, we are beholding a real activity of the spirit taking place within us in a natural way. We become aware of the spirit concretely active within us, the spirit that is the seed of future worlds.
- Rudolf Steiner, GA 207, "The seeds of future worlds", first lecture, Dornach 24 September 1921
Instead, a healthy spiritual conscience is essentially capable of moralizing the advancing Nothing. The imaginative capacity translates into creative capacity and therefore the internal world appears alive to the introspective investigation, to looking inside. The inner world is therefore populated by spiritual beings with whom it is possible to have a direct, conscious relationship if only one has "good will". The man himself who is aware of his cosmic individuality forges his ego in the fiery sea of destructive chaos, which thus acts as a forge. Evil is good out of place.
After all, there is really nothing in the world that would not bring blessing to man, were it only in its right place! We should be thoughtless and unreflecting, if we lacked this centre within us. For this centre enables us to experience in it something we would never be able to experience in the external world. In the external world we see objects in a material sense, and following the custom of present day science we speak of the conservation of matter, the indestructibility of matter. But in this centre of destruction it really happens that matter is destroyed. Matter is thrown back into nothingness, and we have the power within this nothingness to cause the good to arise. We do so, if instead of instincts and impulses, which are bound to work in the direction of egoism, we pour moral and ethical ideals into the centre of destruction. Then, in this very centre of destruction, the seeds of future worlds arise. Then we, as men, take part there in the coming into being of worlds.
– Rudolf Steiner, GA 207, "The seeds of future worlds", first lecture, Dornach 24 September 1921
In the Neverending Story, Fantàsia is destroyed out of thin air, but this destruction is only the beginning of a new cycle. Fantàsia is experiencing the last moments of her cosmic day, the manvatara, and is progressively becoming essential in the seed of the cosmic night, the pralaya. On the other hand, Bastiano enters the Book of the Neverending Story and arrives at Fantàsia from the material world just when it has returned to itself, in the seed of the pralaya. There made him the Auryn [a derivation of the ouroboros], and following the inscription "Tu, was du wilst" ("Do what you Wish!") he recreates the world of Fantàsia, from the very Nothing itself.
When the human soul encounters the spirit world, it can recognize its own spirit, the ego, as the discreet creator of the soul itself. The ego is the door to the spiritual world that dwells within us. We are not humans who have a spiritual experience, but spirits who have a human experience. When soul and spirit enter into this resonance, one is not abandoned, one does not suffer from loneliness, and the need for completeness is not projected onto one's neighbor. One has the center within us.
In fact, according to Rudolf Steiner, the last to come of those who could be defined as Prophets of the Ego:
The meaning of life is to give meaning to life.