8. The Elementary World and its Beings

But I do not want to talk about that. I would rather point out that here and there today there is a quiet awareness of the importance of the impulse of the times. The person who wrote what I am referring to here has no idea of the significance of what I said yesterday, for example: that we must not ignore what has been achieved in recent centuries within Western civilization as a culture of reason, that we cannot return to the ancient Indian yoga breathing techniques, for example, and that we must not seek in earlier, more primitive epochs of human development the forces that can enable us to penetrate the spiritual world. The author of the article is one of those who believe that there is no other way forward in the present, that since we are cut off from all real human dignity and all real human nature, we must return to earlier paths by which humanity entered the spiritual world. — That is the great error, that people cannot find their way into a path that is adapted to the immediate present, to the soul nature of the immediate present.