Dangers Threatening the Spiritual Life of Today

But on the other hand there are very many in Middle Europe too who love to get hold of some fragment, whatever it may be, of ancient Eastern wisdom. This craze for dabbling in Oriental wisdom is a source of great pain to men of real understanding. Even in the case of the Bhagavad Gita, which is comparatively easy to understand, we must be quite clear that what a man of Middle Europe can get from the Bhagavad Gita today is at most something he himself reads into it. It is not the true wisdom of the East at all, for the East itself no longer possesses that. Many people are delighted to think that they can meditate on some passage taken from the Bhagavad Gita, but in essence they can get nothing of any real significance. They are merely falling back on something which gives them a sense of inner exaltation and well-being, because they are not courageous enough to absorb the spiritual atmosphere which in these middle regions of the Earth could work as a balancing factor. One cannot help saying that the advent of Eastern theosophy, as it is called, contains elements which for some considerable time now have been a harmful influence in Middle Europe. This, of course, does not imply that certain Eastern terms or certain Eastern concepts should not be used, or that one should not try one’s best to understand the East. It refers to quite other things, namely to those things I have been trying to indicate today.