Initiation or Consecration

The details will be presented in the following lectures. Today, we need only point out the enormous difference that has taken place in humanity over the course of a few centuries. We need only mention one thing that has had a profound impact on human development: the art of printing. Just think how people lived in terms of their souls and their spiritual education before the art of printing, how communication took place between those who knew something and those who wanted to learn something before books existed, and how today the communications of science and scholarship reach every soul through thousands upon thousands of aids, through popular writings and newspaper articles. And if you imagine this further, you will be able to picture that things look different in souls today, and you will not think that what lives in souls in terms of feelings, thoughts, and impulses has no influence on life as a whole. Those who believe that everything that is manifest is an imprint of the spiritual will say to themselves that people today have different physical and social needs than in times past. In the past, it was possible for individuals to know something about certain events, about truth and wisdom. Today, however, what was once the principle of initiation must be made accessible to everyone. Out of a sense of duty to humanity, the strict secrecy and seclusion of earlier times has been broken, so that today we not only speak about what can be said from the standpoint of spiritual research about the higher worlds, but also, in a certain way, at least in elements, about how human beings themselves can ascend to these worlds, how they can complete the first stages of initiation. From the outset, however, it must be pointed out that no one should believe that the principle of initiation is to be taken lightly and with little seriousness because today, basically, the first stages of initiation are accessible to everyone. These first stages, as you will hear, can be completed by anyone in any situation in life. But then higher and higher stages begin, up to what can truly be called an initiate in the true sense of the word.