Continuing from:http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/understanding-rudolf-steiners.html
and the reference cited therein:Steiner's prophetic essay called (in English) 'The work of the angels in man's astral body': http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181009p01.html
**
I
have been pondering further the great prophetic utterance of Rudolf
Steiner from 1918 - which has worked on me in the way that prophecies surely are
intended to work in retrospect - the truth of the prophecy serving to
validate the interpretations and reasoning which led to it.
My
understanding is that it was during the 1960s that there was the
decision time: men then knew what was required of them - but for this to
happen it was necessary that there be a change in consciousness so that
Man's 'destiny' was accepted at the highest level of alert, conscious
awareness. What was needed was a metaphysical restructuring; a
transformation in fundamental beliefs and assumptions underpinning
daily, routine practice - such that Man began to work towards a
situation in which the spiritual perspective (in this fully 'awake'
sense) became the primary, daily, habitual mode of thinking to a greater
extent for more and more people.
The point is that
there was a choice presented - and a choice was required and unavoidable
- Man (and individual men and women) could accept or reject this plan.
It was decisively rejected.
The choice was made (by almost everyone) that the habitual mode of everyday thinking would be to sleep. And as a consequence, the new impulse would remain at the unconscious, instinctive, irrational level.
So
our lives and our cultures divided - between a rational
anti-spiritualism - which can be seen in the expansion and universal
invasion of pseudo-scientific bureaucracy and the world of 'careers',
work and 'official' discourse; and on the other hand an irrational,
instinctive surge of animalism which is most evident in the mass media
and leisure, daydreams or fantasy.
These two strands
are both very powerful, uninegrated, and in opposition. The semi-awake
rationality fences in life and drains all meaning; the hardly-awake
instinctualism is almost wholly selfish and destructive and negates all
purpose. We cannot behave rationally, not even with self-ineterst -
because this is contradicted by the anarchic irrational impulses; we
cannot behave according to our urges and hedonism because we our under
increasingly-total survellance and encaged with laws, rules, regulations
and managed-consensus.
The result has been - very
exactly - the situation that Steiner prophesied. The situation is now
one in which the reality of empathic identification between Men has been
perverted into a political tool of self-hatred and suicide; in which
the sexual impulse in pernicious forms has invaded and configured
conscious social life, such that this is seen as a higher moral state;
in which medical and therapeutic reasons are given for creating sickness
- and such sickness is regarded as desirable; in which the interaction
of human minds with physical technology is a pervasive daily reality.
The
only way out from this spiritual nightmare is by a fundamental change
in the way we think, underpinned (necessarily) by a change in the basis
of our thinking.
This necessity applies equally to Christians as to non-Christians - if your Christianity has been merely a
change in the set of propositions which you believe - a change in the
set of moral rules you endorse, a change in a checklist of propositions,
then this is not enough.
What is required, is that we
interpret our lives as the primarily a consequence and product of
spiritual forces - by restructuring our primary beliefs (ie.
metaphysical assumptions); and - building upon this and symbiotic with
it - by incremental steps trasnforming our actual, moment-by-moment
thinking to an alert, fully-consicous, fully-rational, awake and aware
higher consciousness of these spiritual realities.
This
means (among other things) rejecting political, economic, sociological,
scientific explanations as (in essence) post-hoc ratioanalizations of
the underlying spiritual warfare and evolutionary-change.
Steiner
suggests that we start with our own life - in recognizing that the
miraculous is everyday: that we could not get through a day without such
occurrences. As often as not, the miraculous is what did not happen,
rather than what did - the disaster that was prevented more than the
reward which was given. That important things did not today - contrary
to our expectations and perceived trends - get worse; but rather than
that, they remained the same.
Above all we must not
sleepwalk through life, must not dissipate our lives in unconsciousness
(whether from addiction to media, causal time-killing or
emotion-stimulating socialization, sexual or political fantasy,
unthinking obedience or unthinking rebellion, intoxication or
self-indulgence or whatever form of 'sleep' is most troublesome and
pervasisve in our lives)...
We must instead strive to live
for (and to increase in number and to extend) those moments of
alertness, clarity and awareness of our agency that are the first fruits
of evolution of cosnciousness, of metaphsyical metamorphosis.
And
we must, by whatever means are possible to us, strive to elicit the
same in others; whether Christian or not - everyone needs this.
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181009p01.html
