VII. Whitsuntide Lecture

There is also another meaning to this Whitsuntide proclamation, and it is the most important—the strengthening of the realization that a man does not lose his value when he allows the other aspect to count; viz, that the spirit is continually flowing into mankind, and that man has to form the instrument for the spirit streaming down into humanity. Man retains his personal value notwithstanding. That is something which we cannot only see theoretically today, but for which it is necessary to draw the consequences for life and to carry over into our way of thinking about the construction of the state, about moral and social life. The point is that a thought should have an awakening effect, and an “awakening” it certainly was when the flames descended on the head of each one of the disciples. To be asleep today to the events of the time, a state which is only too prevalent today, is a sinning against the events of the time. But in the cycle of evolution which we are now entering, we cannot possibly be awake to the events if we do not observe them with a certain inner mobility of soul-life, if we are not able to distinguish the essential, the right thing, from what is unessential and wrong. What floods us today, especially in reading the newspapers, cannot be regarded as all of like value; for in the columns of a thousand books and newspapers there may be two lines which are of tremendous fundamental importance, pointing in a highly indicative way to the origin of the “phenomena,” to use the expression of Goethe—to what is really going on. The rest may all be a waste of printer's ink. It is a question of awakening an inner feeling in one's self as to what is important and essential, and what is unimportant and unessential. This feeling arises in the soul, if a man unconsciously acquires a vision for the great world perspectives of the present day, which Spiritual Science can disclose; only he must absorb this into his feeling, must try to gradually feel as he will when Spiritual Science becomes alive in him. It is certainly necessary to create an inner trust in what one feels inwardly, to a much greater degree than men are accustomed to do today. Anyone who expects that what he acquires today points immediately to far-reaching events tomorrow, while not as a rule attaining a true observation. It may be something right and correct, but events may so discount this that perhaps it may only come to expression in a distant future. It is necessary for us to have the right attitude to the world, and have correct ideas as to what is taking place.