Lecture IX

At the bottom of this lies a certain concealed egoism but people will not admit it. When we consider this, however, we see it is an important statement because a man really lives in an untruth when he denies that he looks up to his angel while declaring that he looks up to the one and only god. He lives in a nebulous conception; that is, an inner illusion, an inner maya, and this has important consequences. When we surrender ourselves to this inner illusion and to fantastic conceptions, we do not all change the spiritual realities that come about by virtue of our correct or incorrect conception. As a human being really looks up to his angel but does not admit this, believing on the contrary that he is looking up to God, while really not looking up even to an archangel, he deadens his soul by means of this untruthful conception. This stupefaction of the soul is everywhere present nowadays but, when the soul is stupefied, the consequences for human evolution are disastrous. This is so because the deadening of the soul brings about a suppression of the ego, a beclouding of the ego, and then other forces that ought not to work in the soul do actually slip in. That is to say, in place of the angel, whom the person at first wanted to revere but whom he wrongly names “God,” the luciferic angel slips in and it gradually comes about that the individual reveres not the angel, but the luciferic angel. Then, however, the steep incline is near that leads man downward because he is close to the utter denial of God; that is, the denial of his own angel, which is always connected with the denial of the true ego. I have shown you an example of this in the book by Leblais, Materialism and Spiritualism, where it is asserted that the cat has an ego just as a human being does, and where the author speaks of the “high priest of the dogs!”