Time to Spiritualize
Now more than ever, we must endow and embed spirituality into and upon everything we think, say and do in life. In the distant past it was a natural part of who we were as spiritual beings having a human experience. We are the same spiritual beings now as we were then, except spirituality was present in all that humanity lived. In our modern times it is necessary for us to strive within our freedom to rekindle this connection to the spiritual world. The spiritual world no longer holds our hand, guiding us directly as it once did, yet it waits with great anticipation for us to act, to break free from the chains of materialism and respond to the Impulse that resonated down from the Cross on Golgotha some 2000 years ago. It is time, the time is now.
You all have a soul and you all have a spirit. This soul and spirit are called upon to reach one day the highest stages of perfection. But you were already there before your first physical incarnation. You were first physically incarnated in the preceding races after the time of the Hyperborean and Polarian epochs. Before that you were purely beings of soul. But as beings of soul you were a part of the world soul, and as spirit you were part of the general world spirit. The world soul and the world spirit were spread around you as Nature is spread around you today. Just as the mineral world, the plant world and the animal world are around you today, so were the worlds of soul and spirit spread around you then. And what was once outside you is now your soul; you have made inward what to begin with was outside. What today is your inward part was once spread about outside. This has now become your soul. The spirit, too, was once spread around you. And what is now spread around you will become your inner life. You will take into yourself what is now the mineral kingdom, and it will become your inner part. The plant kingdom will become your inner part. What surrounds you in Nature will become your inner being.
You can take into [yourself] a world full of majesty, beauty and splendour if you make the world majestic, beautiful and splendid. To do something for the higher self is not selfish because it is not done only for the self. This higher self will be united with all other higher selves, so that it is [done] for all at the same time.
[This] is the significant thing: God once gave us the Nature that surrounds us, as mineral, plant and animal nature. We take these in [to ourselves]. It is not due to us that it is there; all we can do is to appropriate it for ourselves. But what we ourselves create in the world — that is what will, through ourselves, constitute our future being.
-Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, 23rd December 1904
But we must ask ourselves: Have we been living as spiritual beings having a human experience, or rather as human beings who live our lives chained to the material world as if it is the only reality that matters?
Castle Bravo, Bikini Atoll, 1954
Before the end of our present cultural epoch one will in fact have come so far that people will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. When one is able to grasp the materiality between the thought and the atom, then one will soon be able to understand the penetration of the atom. And then nothing will be inaccessible to certain methods of working. A man standing here, let us say, will be able, by pressing a button concealed in his pocket, to [explode] some object at a great distance, let us say in Hamburg, just as wireless telegraphy is possible, by setting up a wave movement and causing it to take a particular form at some other place. This will be within man’s power when the occult truth, that thought and atom consist of the same substance, is applied to practical life.
It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances if mankind has not by then reached selflessness. Only through the attainment of selflessness will it be possible to preserve mankind from the brink of destruction. The downfall of post-Atlantean culture will be caused by the lack of morality. The Lemurian race was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; ours will be destroyed by the War of All against All, [by] evil, through the struggle of men with one another. Humanity will destroy itself in mutual strife. And the despairing thing — more desperately tragic than other catastrophes — will be that the blame will lie with human beings themselves.
-Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, 23rd December 1904
Despite what lies in humanity’s future, there remains hope…
A tiny handful of men will save themselves and pass over into the sixth epoch. This tiny handful will have developed complete selflessness. The others will make use of every [imaginable] skill and subtlety in the penetration and conquest of the physical forces of Nature, but without attaining the essential degree of selflessness . They will start the War of All against All, and that will be the cause of the destruction of our civilisation.
In the seventh post-Atlantean cultural epoch, to be precise, this War of All against All will break out, in the most terrible way. Great and mighty forces will ensue from discoveries that will turn the entire globe into a kind of self-functioning electrical apparatus. The tiny handful will be protected in a way that cannot be discussed.
-Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, 23rd December 1904
Low Earth Orbiting satellites and geosynchronous satellites. As of September 2021, there were 7500 satellites orbiting the Earth.
We are living in the fifth period of the fifth great post-Atlantean epoch; we have still to live through two more periods of this great epoch. Then the seven periods of the sixth great epoch will follow and then the seven periods of the seventh great epoch. This makes sixteen stages of evolution in the future. Humanity has still to pass through these sixteen stages.
The fifth cultural epoch is a purely intellectual one, an epoch of egoism. We are now at the high point of egoism. The intellect is egoistical in the highest degree, and it is the hallmark of our time. And so we must make our way upwards through intellect to spirituality, which was once there…
-Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, 23rd December 1904
In lieu of this, we cannot tarry any longer to strive after the spiritual life within us. We face harder times – albeit in the distant future – than we have ever faced in the past. And we will all experience these times. The time is now to wake up to your higher self, who calls to you from deep within your breast. Break its chains, set if free… And set yourself free.
Bringing this levelling-out about will actually entail bloody war, and through such things as economic strife among nations, wars of exploitation, financial and industrial enterprises, conquests, etc, and through the adoption of certain measures, it will be more and more possible to set masses of people in motion and simply to compel them. The individual will acquire more and more power over certain masses of people. For the drift of this development is not that we will become democratic, but that we will become brutally oligarchic, in that the individual will gain more and more power. If the ennobling of morals is not achieved, then the most brutal forces will lead. This will happen, just as catastrophe by water happened to the Atlanteans.
-Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, 23rd December 1904