XIV. Aesthetic Education

Naturally, today there are many opinions that argue against introducing young people to practical life as described, but I speak here from a completely practical viewpoint. We can honestly say that, of all the past ages of human development, our present materialistic age is, in its own way, the most spiritual. Perhaps I can explain myself better by telling you something about certain theosophists I once met who were working toward a truly spiritual life. And yet they were, in fact, real materialists. They spoke of the physical body and its density. And the ether body was seen as having a certain density and corporeality, though far more rarefied. They described the astral body as infinitely less dense than the ether body, yet still having a certain density. And this is how they talked about all sorts of other mysterious things as well, believing they were reaching into higher and more spiritual spheres, until the substances they imagined would become so thin and attenuated that one would no longer know what to make of it all. All their images bore the stamp of materialism and, consequently, never reached the spiritual world at all. Strangely, the most materialistic views I ever encountered were among some members of the Theosophical Society. For instance, after giving a lecture to theosophists in Paris, I once asked a member of the audience what impression the lecture had made upon him. I had to put up with the answer that my lecture had left behind good vibrations in the room. It sounded as though one might be able to smell the impressions created by my talk. In this way, everything was reduced to the level of a materialistic interpretation.