What I Have To Say To The Younger Members (continued)

Wherever the “youth movement” appears today, it reveals that it lives out of deprivation. What does the young person, who becomes aware of his or her youth, lack? After all, there is so much to “learn” in today's civilization. Not only is there a wealth of knowledge, but an overabundance. It is tempting to think that young people are confused because of this overabundance, that they cannot “understand” the content of the overabundance. But experience shows that this belief is wrong. Young people “understand” quite well what civilization offers them. One can understand what can be grasped in thought. And despite its overabundance, our present-day civilization can almost be grasped entirely in thought.

The young person becomes aware when he begins to develop a relationship with civilization that he understands. And a right instinct tells him that this understanding, this thinking grasping should also be his further destiny. But it is not possible to be young with “understanding” alone. One can only be young when one experiences with one's whole heart and soul what awaits understanding. And as a young person, one senses that one will grow old when one gradually leads the experienced into the understood.

Today's youth absorbs something from civilization that allows them to grow old, but not to be young. This civilization has almost nothing to give to the first age of life. One would have to enter the earth at the age of twenty today, then one could imbue oneself with the content of civilization.

This civilization has lost its spirit. It only brings matter into thoughts. These thoughts cannot be experienced; they can only be understood. And once they have been understood, they lie in the soul, as hard as stone, incapable of transformation. They are already fully ripe when they arise; they cannot grow because of this. But the young person must grow; and he wants what he takes up into his soul to be able to grow with him.

A real spiritual science can only reveal itself in thoughts. But these thoughts can be seen and experienced; they can be taken up by no one with a higher degree of maturity than he himself has. But they are akin to the human being. They grow and mature with him. If someone gives me material thoughts when I am eighteen years old, I take them in the same way as I would if I were forty or fifty years old. If someone allows me to experience thoughts that arise from the spirit, then they may be seventy years old; if I myself am only eighteen years old, they will harmonize with my eighteen-year-old state of mind and grow as I myself grow.

The materialistic way of thinking and looking at things demands that young people fill themselves inwardly with “old” things. But young people want to experience their youth. Therefore, “experiencing age” becomes a deprivation for young people. The Youth Section at the Goetheanum wants to give young people a living knowledge that can be used to grasp being young in a living way. Today's civilization has no thoughts with which one can experience “being young”. A real spiritual science will have such thoughts.

If you are an older person today and hear young people speak, you often have the feeling: Oh, how old the speeches sound that come out of young mouths! But these are the words that young people find among the “old” today. They absorb them, but do not unite them with themselves. In wanting to experience them, they feel untrue. They speak what cannot have truth in them; and they carry their truth within them, without being able to reveal it to themselves. It chokes them; it becomes a nightmare coming from within.

The young want freedom of breathing in a living spiritual life, so that the nightmare will disappear. They want to awaken to a healthy mental outlook so that their consciousness can be filled with the experience of being young.

Young people want to be awake when they are young; but the thoughts of materialistic civilization only allow them to dream of it. But one can only dream if one has dulled one's consciousness. So the consciousness of youth must walk through the mechanical reality in a dulled state. Its hammer blows, its electric waves pierce into dreams. But they cannot bring about awakening. For they are not human; they are extra-human.

Spiritual science can be for souls that want to awaken. It does not just want to impart knowledge to people, but to bring them closer to life. Then it will be given to their freedom to transform life into knowledge.

People who believe they are poets, but who are really just philistines, object: Take away the dreams of youth, bring them to awakening, and you take away the best of their youth. Those who speak thus know not that dreams attain their full value only when illuminated by the light of waking. Mechanistic civilization does not bring the dreams of youth to their joyful revelation, but rather wears them down as they emerge, so that they become oppressive and burdensome.

Only in such images can it be said here what the Youth Section wants to achieve. It will not publish a “programme”; it will not give an explanation of the “nature of youth”. It will try to bring to life what its founders themselves can experience of the deprivations of young people today. This will give rise to a “youth wisdom” that can unfold anew in life every day.

Immediately after the announcement of the Youth Section and ever since, young people living at the Goetheanum have expressed their desire to work within this section. Enthusiasm speaks from these expressions. In the first call, I said that the Youth Section will be able to work if it is understood for what it is meant. I truly believe that enthusiasm can bring about the right “understanding”. Not the “understanding” of which I have spoken here, and which is lacking in youth, but the kind of understanding that is designated by the same word but is quite different. An understanding that comes not from the intellect but from the whole human being.

The longing of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society can only be to feel a receptive enthusiasm. Then it may hope that the life force of spiritual science is sufficient to give this enthusiasm what it would like to take. This board would like to live with young people in such a way that they can lead their youth towards old age in true humanity, because it believes that in doing so it is addressing what young people lack and long for with all their hearts.

(continued in the next issue).