Twelfth Lecture

Today I would like to speak to you again about something that has been spoken about here often enough, but which can only be fully grasped if one looks at it from many different angles. Anyone who consciously lives today's spiritual and ultimately also material life and has truly settled inwardly and emotionally into what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, must feel a heavy cultural concern for our events. This heavy cultural concern can be described something like this: On the one hand, we see the necessity that what we call initiation science, spiritual science, which can only be fathomed through the method of initiation, that this science must spread as far as possible among all thinking people, at least in terms of the main points, if we are to avoid further decline. People simply need to take this up into their intuitive life and allow themselves to be stimulated by this initiatory science for their mutual intercourse and reciprocal action among themselves. On the other hand, the vast majority of people – we only need to look at the few adherents of spiritual science – feel that they reject this initiatory wisdom, that they should continue to live in the same way as they have lived so far, without being influenced in any way by what this initiatory wisdom can give them. One would like to say, therefore, that on the one hand there is the most urgent necessity for the revelation of the spiritual worlds, and on the other hand, the radical rejection of this knowledge.