III. East and West

There is apparent in the West, from certain mysterious depths, a tendency to oppose the teaching of repeated earth-lives. An opposition to it as regards the future is noticeable in certain very enlightened circles amongst the English and Americas . That is the paradox to be noted. It is desired in certain spiritual centres in the West to cause the gradual cessation of these repeated earth-lives, alternating between birth and death, death and rebirth, so that in the end a quite different arrangement of man's life may be brought about—and means do exist for achieving such a purpose. The object is this: through a certain schooling, a certain acquisition of forces, to transpose certain human souls into a condition in which, after death, they feel themselves more and more akin to the conditions and forces of the earth, acquiring almost a mania for the earth-forces—of course those of a spiritual nature—quitting the neighbourhood of the earth as little as possible, remaining in close proximity to it, and by means of this nearness hoping to live on as “the souls of the dead” around the earth, exempt from the necessity of again entering physical bodies. The Anglo-American race is striving after a remarkable and strange ideal: no longer to return into earthly bodies, but through the souls of the living to have an ever greater influence on the earth, becoming, as souls, more and more earthly. All efforts are thus to be directed to the ideal of making life here on earth and life after death similar to one another. Thus will be attained—in our day only by those instructed according to this rule, which will become more and more the prevailing custom—as immeasurably greater, stronger, attachment to the earth than the recognised “normal” one.