12. Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

This is not the place to discuss truth and error in spiritualism. It certainly contains some grains of truth, not just error or deception and the like. I would just like to point out that those who stand on the ground of a materialistic worldview apparently do not approve of this spiritualism. If one thinks about it in this way, with a mind that is not internally animated, then one can only say that the materialistic worldview is as distant from spiritualism as it is from spiritual science. But if one really looks into the becoming of the world, then one knows something quite different. Then one knows that the soul's hunger for spiritual nourishment cannot be stifled, and that it is the materialists who give rise to spiritualism! Spiritual science is opposed from the materialistic side. But one will see that wherever spiritual science is prevented from emerging, spiritualist societies and circles are formed! The fathers of spiritualism are the philosophers and materialistic worldviewers. With a way of thinking that is only abstract, one cannot see through this connection. One makes the same mistake in thinking as the one who says: I intend to raise the child that has just been born to be a really good son; I am preparing everything for this. But the son will by no means always turn out as the father has imagined; under certain circumstances, he may become a rather bad brat. What materialists imagine about the connections in the world has nothing to do with living life. And so it may happen that they produce the “son,” the brat, whom they themselves do not know as such a son. For spiritualism is the son of materialism. Why is this so? Because the soul's appetite for spiritual life cannot satisfy its hunger, and it ultimately ends up doing what physicists or chemists do, where the external events of life are presented, where the “spirit” is to be presented without inner participation. This is more convenient than having to make an inner effort every moment when one is supposed to ascend to the spirit. But this is nothing more than a search for the same worldview that materialism produces. — I only want to cite this as an example of how abstract thinking enters into life. Such thinking will naturally believe that materialism cannot produce spiritualism. How could it! On the other hand, thinking that has inner power and influence in the sphere of truth will see through the world in a completely different sense, and through such thinking, human beings will be able to place themselves in the world in a completely different way than through abstract, dead thinking, which is also only a “homunculism,” as was explained last time.