עברית This materialistic culture of despair, which starves the soul and spirit of man, forces the masses to look for meaning in the ghosts of race, nationality, blood and soil.
The Cause of Modern Evil: The Mutual Reinforcement Between the Materialist left and the Racist right
The Representative of Man Between Lucifer and Ahriman
This is the real cause of the repeated bloodshed cycles of our time: the Western materialistic religion of science and technology, which blocks the way to the real spirit, starves and dries up the human soul. Because it blocks the way to the living spirit seeking to grow now and in the future, it causes starving humanity to conjure up the ghosts of the ancient religions. These two fundamentalist religions, fighting each other, are cooperating to prevent the proper development of man and the earth.
From the materialistic left, which calls itself educated, liberal, and democratic, we are told that science and technology, which believe that only matter is real and man is a meaningless chunk of biomass in the universe, are the only forces of progress; But after over a century, it is clear that they are causing the loss of the human meaning and value of life and the destruction of the earth. The materialistic liberal and democratic West spreads throughout the world this sickness of culture and society, cultivated in Western universities, which dominates all areas of our global thought and life, and brings about the cyclic violent reactions of the impoverished and wasted human soul.
In my book America's Global Responsibility, I described the origin and nature of this Western scientific, cultural and economic domination. As an example, I referred to Alston Chase’s essay, Harvard and the Making of the Unabomer (The Atlantic Monthly, June 2000). Chase doesn’t limit himself to the single case of the Unabomer, Ted Kaczynski, and the horrendous mind control experiments on students in Harvard’s psychology department to which he was subjected. He sheds penetrating light on the otherwise well-hidden intellectual and spiritual roots of the devastating western intellectual-materialistic influence. This has universal, global implications, because we are all children of this western culture. ‘From the humanists,’ he writes, ‘we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. General Education had created at Harvard a culture of despair.’ He quotes a saying of Bertrand Russell’s in 1929, that succinctly expresses the fundamental religious dogma of this highly advanced and sophisticated, liberal and technologically, brilliant materialistic culture: ‘Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built’. This new materialistic scientific religion of despair was proclaimed by the Western intellectuals from the left in 1929 and received its overwhelming answer from the right in 1933!
This culture of despair, which starves the soul and spirit of man, forces the masses to look for meaning in the ghosts of race, nationality, blood and soil, because the version of science and technology that governs and destroys our lives, denies them the new meaning of life, and any hope for a living and developing human future.
This is why the creation of a living, human, and healing science, which serves the development of man and the earth, is the most important goal of humanity today. But the western forces that control science, education and media, culture, society and economy, make sure that humanity knows nothing about the existence of this science, and invest all the resources of knowledge and capital in creating the exact opposite.
Then, the hungered human soul, deprived of the meaning of life, reacts with outmost frustration and hatred, rising up to destroy those that cause her existential hunger and deprivation. In the intensifying local and global wars of the two mutually supporting adversaries, from left and right, the true human being is demolished, because his path to the treasures of wisdom and love that lie within his soul is blocked.
In modern times, the good of the human being cannot come by itself, without his conscious and active participation. It can only develop in full consciousness because we live in the age of consciousness, in which we must clearly understand where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going, beyond the limits of matter, birth and death. Without this knowledge and consciousness, we will not be able to understand, experience and realize our true being, and develop our potential future creative forces. And this narrow path to the true essence of man has been blocked and hidden for more than a hundred years by the intellectual and economic elites of the Western world.
What a Jewish sage said 2000 years ago about the Pharisees is true today about them: they hold the keys of science and technology, knowledge and education, communication, capital and global power, and tightly close the gate of the new spiritual knowledge, that grants each person free access to his and her true humanity. They control all mainstream venues of education and communication, with the power of the "liberal-democratic" state, to enforce the materialistic beliefs, as the only truth, which must be accepted as the unquestionable commandment of the global materialistic religion, which is taught and applied in the stage controlled research institutions, education, and schools.
This is the real reason for the bloodshed cycles of our time: blocking the way to the real spirit starves and dries up the human soul. But in the age of consciousness, man cannot maintain and develop his true humanity, if he does not know his real, creative, evolving spiritual essence. The human soul by its very nature requires the new spiritual knowledge just as the body needs food and drink, and like the starving body, it dies without the essential spiritual food. The hunger of the human soul raises from the abyss the starving human animal, which was deprived of the nourishment of the new living spirit, and therefore it conjures up, in its distress, the ghosts of the race, nation and blood religions, who will do everything to destroy what causes this hunger.
Thus both religions are reciprocally enhance each other, in a destructive circle, from left and right, scientific materialism and religious racism, strengthen each other and prepare the next war. On the left the path to the new spiritual knowledge is blocked, starving and emptying the human soul, and the right opens the abyss from which emerge the forces of blood and race, and these two devils: the new materialism and the ancient racism, combine forces, work in mutual reinforcement, in a continuous, repeating and deepening circle of blood, all over the world, to prevent the proper development of man .
In my article, "Riding the American tiger", published in "Haaretz" 21 years ago, I described how this cycle of destruction was created and managed in Israel-Palestine, by the century long meticulous realization the American-European strategy of the "clash of civilizations". It is responsible for eliminating any true attempt to reach an Israeli-Palestinian settlement and makes sure that the "bloody fault line" between "Western Christian-Jewish civilization", as it is called, and “Islamic civilization", will not stop bleeding, and how the ruling elites in Israel, on the left and the right, serve enthusiastically this destructive policy.
In the intensifying collaboration between modern materialism and ancient racism, the value of life and existence, the power of faith, hope and love of the modern man is erased and silenced, for more than a century. The true essence of man erodes and diminishes from generation to generation, and man is transformed into the evil opposite of his true, radiant and beautiful nature, which seeks to grow and develop if it receives the spiritual nourishment that it requires.
This is the cause of the catastrophic events of modern history, visible to every eye, which seeks to see the truth, without illusions, and realize with full understanding, what is happening here and now, every day and hour, in Israel and around the world.
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The Apocalypse of the Twentieth Century and the Gathering Storm of the Twenty-first Century
From the 4th Lecture: The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity
I must say this, even if it may be felt to be a bit harsh: All the sufferings we experience ourselves and see others experiencing all around us is not really the bad news. The wars are the external expressions and symptoms of the illness, not its causes. The wars, poverty, and global warming, are not the real bad news. The democrats and liberals are using the guilt and shame that we feel about the horrible economic inequality and abuse of nature, to intensify their materialistic propaganda that serve the purely ahrimanic economic and political strategies. The right wingers of all sorts manipulate the anger, resentment and frustration caused by the materialistic worldview and social order imposed by the intellectual elites; their continuous indoctrination of humanity with materialistic science, politics, culture, education and economy, is drying the human soul, preparing the wood to catch fire when the hellish fires of the old blood, race, and soil are ignited again. Through the political war between left and right works the great and truly horrific ahrimanic-luciferic delusion, instigated to maintain and increase the present chaos which guarantees the continuation and deepening of the same modern sleep; it aims to keep humans enslaved to confusion, despair, meaninglessness, brewing and cooking the swamps and morasses of this abyss and fuelling it by increased injustice and human suffering, and the destruction of nature and the earth. Of course, this is possible only because people desire this enslavement so passionately.
We are all humans of the modern time, aren’t we, despairingly wishing to believe everything, even the most horrendous, untruthful and cruel things, in order to protect ourselves from our One and greatest fear: the fear to experience and develop consciously our real spiritual being in a spiritual evolution of earth and cosmos. Naturally, therefore, we desire so passionately to be fooled and deluded in all possible and impossible ways, just to be protected from the truly horrible news—this is Ahriman’s conviction—that we are all god-created, creative spiritual beings, part of the most amazing, ever evolving, humanity, earth and universe; and we would do anything to prevent this knowledge from entering our minds and hearts, because we know very well that this amazing wonder of real spiritual existence and evolution, comes with the most challenging price tag. Each human soul knows in our age, that in order to experience and embody this infinite wisdom, truth, beauty and love and grow with it, each one must recognize, confront, heal and transform his and her lower nature. Yes, indeed, on this one decisive cliff, on the edge of this abyss, we repeatedly turn backward and therefore fall and lose our humanity. Better eternal ignorance in hell, so we tell ourselves, through luciferic bliss or ahrimanic misery, and their infinite number of combinations, because everything is preferable than true self-knowledge which requires us to accept, actively, that we are developing divine beings, and therefore eternally responsible for all our deeds and misdeeds, from immemorial times until today and for all future times to come.
The really bad news is the continuous ahrimanic victory over the whole Earth by means of the two apocalyptic Beasts, that stands behind all the intellectual and technological materialism of our time, which is bilateral of course, all-lateral, to which all parties subscribe with total devotion, from right to left and all shades in the middle, that has put humanity in a permanent spiritual coma, in a comatose moral and cognitive state since the end of the nineteenth century.
This materialistic sleep, including its more refined variations among spiritually inclined people—this is the real name of our continuous modern disaster. But what appears as wars and bloodshed and shaking of the earth and heavens, this is what appears as wars and bloodshed and shaking of the earth and heavens, this is what is called "the wrath of God", or the Kabbalistic force of Din, the Judgement of God. The profound esoteric truth, which was well known in all true esoteric traditions, and is especially central in the ancient Jewish esoteric traditions, is that divine wrath is an expression of God’s deepest love, because He’s trying to shake us out of the shackles of this materialism. And this shaking is the pain that we experience and see around us. Because the alternative is to fall totally into an absolutely materialistic hell-paradise, in which we are already gradually losing all our humanity. The terrible shakings, the wars, the sufferings, the changes of climate, are the physical expression of the love of God, helping us to wake up to the moral and cognitive, spiritual, sickness of our age. It’s a grace that is still given in this form, to shake and wake up those people who still wish to wake up. God’s love does come repeatedly to our help, but because it is the age of freedom, it cannot simply save us, because this will keep us immature, therefore it can only offer us these radical tremors and earthquakes, to break some of the hardening forms, and let us have some moments of greater freedom to choose again. This is after all the basic structure of human evolution in the course of the present, fifth cultural epoch, and it will assume many diverse forms along its path until the middle of the fourth millennium.
The wrath of God is not evil, it’s an expression of God’s love shaking us from this materialistic ahrimanic plot of sinking entirely into his deadly morass, while luciferic beings accompany our shipwreck, playing sweet spiritual lullabies on the deck. What humans really want today is to sleep and totally immerse themselves in the new forms of materialism and spiritualism. We are invoking this wrath of God. I’ll not say God’s cleansing and purification because this is too much to ask, this is something that humans have to do themselves, it’s not a service given by God anymore; but this great pain and suffering that is shaking us repeatedly is giving us yet another chance to change ourselves, before, indeed, this moment of true human freedom will be lost entirely. (Rudolf Steiner updated the ancient esoteric lore concerning divine wrath, as part of his testamentary lecture cycle, given to the priests of the Christian Community on the apocalypse, GA 346, 19.9.1924)
The true Michaelic movement now and in the future must be quietly busy, inaugurating the creative stream and the snowballing upward momentum that will grow positively from one decade to the next, and eventually from one generation to the next, that we described above, in such a way that the being of Anthroposophy, namely, Anthroposophia, will grow and develop organically through us on the earth in the coming decades. It must become, at least among some humans, the new group soul and chalice for the beings of Michael and Christ. And we will have more opportunities to speak about it, in much more concrete forms and details, the more our work grows and becomes directly and consciously connected to these divine beings and these tasks. The stronger we become, the more mature and younger we become, the more truly and accurately we will see it, because we will experience it in our real life.
The most important message that I wanted to deliver then and also today is that we have to be conscious of our role, as the bringing of the really good news. And the good news must always be spread around with peaceful, calm, and compassionate state of mind and heart. Whenever we go we must be messengers of peace in the midst of fear and bring love and confidence in the midst of hatreds and confusions. Because our knowledge of the answer to humanity’s situation, is not theoretical knowledge in our heads, but lives and works as real force in our hearts, souls and we embody it in our bodies and actions.