Spiritual Science and the Future of Humanity

GA 69e — 30 January 1911, Cologne

XXI. Spiritual Science and the Future of Humanity

Our consciousness withdraws into darkness when we try to follow within ourselves what is outside in the world. Man cannot be observed as if in a retort. Processes of the inner world elude consciousness.

That is one side of it; the other is what lives in the soul. We only experience soul life when we experience it in the outer world. Only, you cannot experience it in other people. As soon as it becomes external, for example, experienced in others, the soul life withdraws. The soul then disappears into an indeterminate darkness.

Natural laws are concepts of spiritual beings. For the ordinary person, concepts and ideas are only abstractions.

Spiritual science knows only one tool, the human soul. It is not something fixed, closed; there are forces and abilities slumbering in it.

Waking and sleeping.

We do not have a passive relationship to the outside world, but feel sympathy and antipathy. Sense of truth. As soon as you observe passions, they change. Self-knowledge transforms the person. - Mystics turn their gaze away from the outside world and into the interior. A small example: you can ask in the face of adversity: What forces and abilities have I developed since then? Without this, we would not have been drawn into a chain of events.

Discoveries of what is changing at the bottom of the soul, of what is there, cause temptations and trials. The little guardian of the threshold. This is how man gets behind himself to the core of human nature. Just as the outer world is built up by the spiritual world, it is built up internally by one's own karma. Just as the edelweiss only grows on mountains, so each being has its destiny according to its nature.

Since Redi, there has been a different belief in science. Nothing alive without a germ of life. So one will ask later: How is it possible that in the past people did not believe in Theosophy? Everything has the same basis, the great Monon, in the inner as well as in the outer world. We are incorporated in the spiritual and in the outer world. Common spiritual is behind both. The world becomes transparent on both sides.

The present time is one as it has never been there. The development of the future pushes up to individuality in the future. Through our own soul, we must find the best way to live. Steam propels us forward; truth is also a driving force, not an abstract concept. In Fichte, for example, there was already a presentiment of the spiritual world and of the possibility of transformation as human beings – soul power, as early as 1811. [...] Even thousands of years ago, Zarathustra came to the same conclusion.