Lecture VI

But this means that when we adopt the spiritual-scientific view of life it can very easily happen that the steady direction of life we formerly knew, begins to waver. So that when we begin to grasp the reality of the spiritual worlds, it is a matter of mustering the forces of the whole man within us—because we need the “life-capital” breathed into us during childhood in order rightly to approach the things now to be revealed from the world on yonder side of the Threshold. And I showed you how easy it is, under influences which proceed as a matter of course from the different currents of the time, to go astray in one direction or another. An aberration such as occurs in Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism is due to the fact that the strong impulse of materialism can have an effect upon the souls of men—I say, can have an effect. Just because oriental influences were at work, a deviation was possible in the direction which led to a defamation of the whole nature of the present Moon, and on the other side aberration was possible because it was in the interests of certain persons not to allow the truth of repeated lives on Earth to come into the open. The one who had an interest—in this case it was not Sinnett himself but the one who was behind him—in helping materialism in human life to be, as it were, “ultra-materialised”, introduced into an otherwise true system, teaching such as that concerning the Moon, thereby giving a twist in a particular direction.