Lessons for the Participants of Cognitive-Cultic Work 1906–1924

GA 265a — 11 November 1913, Nuremberg

Against Confusion

Notes from the estate of Margareta Morgenstern

Our culture will increasingly sink into confusion. Lawyers, for example, will have a hard time finding their way out of the resulting chaos. People will become gaunt in body and soul and bald at thirty, thirty-three; they will become more and more desolate inside. The method of general time-saving comes over from America. No more thought is given to the work because the machine takes over all the manual labor, for example, in passing on bricks and so on, and so on.

Consider the shepherds in the fields in earlier times, when they slept in the open, whether in a hut or in an open field. They had the starry sky above them, and they still knew something of the cosmic connections. They saw not only this or that constellation, as people do today, but they still saw spiritual beings there. They knew they were united with them when they slept. They interacted with them from the cosmos. Matter is not an obstacle for spiritual beings to penetrate. Therefore, it is nonsense when it is said that the lodge rooms should not be aired, “because otherwise demons could enter.” A young member once asked: “Well, can't they just as easily come through closed doors and windows?”

When we sleep, we are still in the same situation as the shepherds in the fields of old, only we are usually unaware of it: spiritual beings work within us.

Some of us old folk, when we were young, met a real farmer and got into conversation with him. Of course, not every farmer felt this influence, and it was not easy for one who knew about it to open up to another. But when it happened, and in those days it could happen quite often, then such a farmer would say: “I have to rub the sleep out of my eyes so that the sun can enter me, so that I can wake up, otherwise I won't wake up.” When evening came, the sun went down and vespers were rung first, then they became sleepy, tired.

And the seasons, their change was felt quite differently in the past than it is today. People lived with the sun because they were still aware that we owe our ego powers to the sun. If we do not have these ego powers, then we fall asleep.

But more and more, people should free themselves from such bondage.

The Copernican system of the world. Just as if you were walking along the street to this room, and someone comes and asks you, “Are you walking?” - and you answer, “I don't know, I first have to observe whether I come to other houses.” - and you compare the time and the rows of houses and check whether you are walking or not. The same applies to the Copernican system of the world; it seeks a point of support in the universe.

After a hundred years many of you sitting here, even if not embodied, will become helpers for those confused souls who today no longer believe in a spiritual world and its workings.

... That is why it is said, because I want to give you the best I have to say from the spiritual worlds in these hours. We should draw strength for our outer life from these gatherings. Just the thought of it should give us strength for our outer life, strength for our thinking, purification for our feeling, strength for our will.

No matter what people do in the present, when they are reborn they will have a strong inclination and longing for their previous incarnation. They will experience something of this, want to know something, regardless of whether they are now striving spiritually or materialistically. We are currently at such a turning point in history, which leads people from an incarnation in which they want to know as little as possible about reincarnation and karma, to an incarnation in which they will have the most vivid sense of this: the whole life I am living now is hanging in the balance for me if I cannot know anything about my last incarnation.

And the people who now most of all rail against reincarnation and karma will writhe in agony in the next life because they cannot explain to themselves how the life they are now living could have come about. Theosophy is not practiced in order to acquire a certain longing for the previous life, but to awaken understanding for what will one day happen to all of humanity when the people who are alive today will be there again. The people who are theosophists today will share the tendency with the others to want to remember again; but they will have other insights and thus inner harmony in relation to their soul life. Those who today reject Theosophy will want to know about it and will feel something like an inner torment for something they do not understand. However, they will not grasp anything of what torments them; they will be at a loss, inwardly disharmonious. And it will have to be said to them in the next life: 'You will only learn to recognize what causes the torment when you imagine that you might actually have wanted this torment.

Of course, no one would wish for this torment, to go through it. But those who are materialists today will begin to understand their bleakness, their inner contrition, their torment in the next life when they follow the advice of the knowing ones, who will tell them: Imagine that this life, which you would now like to flee, is what you would have wanted yourself. Because you used to think that belief in an afterlife is futile, nonsensical, it has become futile, nonsensical and agonizing. You have planted the very thought in yourselves that makes this new life so bleak and so empty for you. Thus materialism will have a karmic effect in the next life. Thoughts that deny re-embodiment today are transformed into inner emptiness in the next life.