On
several occasions in the past, I have called attention to a certain
conversation between Rudolf Steiner and Friedrich Rittelmeyer as told in the
latter’s autobiographical account (Meine Lebensbegegnungen mit Rudolf Steiner,
1928, translated as Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life). Of particular interest is the last part below, when Rudolf Steiner says,
"If humanity does not accept what is now being offered, it will have to
wait for another hundred years."
In this brief excerpt, Rittelmeyer cites several conversations with Steiner, all of which apparently
took place during 1915. One of the conversations about the Christ sculpture, The Representative of Man, took place “at Midsummer, in the year 1915, with
the thunder of the cannons rumbling from neighbouring Alsace, and the
searchlights playing over the countryside by night.”
Another conversation about
the sculpture, which Rittelmeyer calls “a grotesque happening” (concerning its
alleged resemblance to the German Crown Prince) is not dated. Then he mentions
a discussion about the Great War and how it may end – also not dated, but 1915
is most plausible. There is also a conversation about the need for grace in the
context of Protestant Christianity (Rittelmeyer was a Lutheran minister), and
then there is this:
"Did
you always think of Christ as you think to-day, even in your scientific
days?" I asked him. "I remember that in a conversation in the middle
of my twenties I spoke of Christ like this," he answered. "But then
of course it fell temporarily into the background. I had to pass through all
those other phases. It was a karmic necessity." "Why was it that in
spite of all you must have known even in those early years, you were so
completely silent about occult matters until your fortieth year?" I asked.
"I had to make a certain position for myself in the world first. People
may say nowadays that my writings are mad, but my earlier work is also there,
and they cannot wholly ignore it. And, moreover, I had to bring things to a
certain clarity in myself, to a point where I could give them form, before it
was possible to talk about them. That was not so very easy. And then - I admit
it frankly - it needs courage to speak openly about such things. I had first to
acquire this courage."
"Do
you really think that Anthroposophy will succeed in becoming more than a strong
impulse in our civilisation? Do you think it can really strike through as new
culture?" - He became amazingly serious. "If humanity does not accept
what is now being offered, it will have to wait for another hundred
years," he said. He seemed to be deeply moved. It was not merely emotion,
but something like the thunder of the Judgment. He said no more. Never before
or since have I seen how the soul of a whole age can tremble in one man."
The
first paragraph is relevant to the nonsense produced from certain quarters
about Rudolf Steiner being an atheist in his younger years who “converted” to
Theosophy at the turn of the century. Steiner was in his twenties in the 1880s,
and in 1886 (at the age of 25), he wrote TheTheory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (GA 2), which is
an overview of Goethe’s scientific epistemology. The conversation described by
Rittelmeyer, which is a primary source, makes it clear that there was no change
in Steiner’s world view or spiritual philosophy from his twenties to his
fifties.
The
second paragraph may be of tremendous significance if Steiner was a genuine
‘prophet’ in regard to his own movement and mission. Many aspects of humanity’s
evolution still remain to be seen during the centuries ahead, such as the
growth of the new, self-conscious clairvoyance. ‘Prophet’? Here is the rub:
According to Rudolf Steiner, the age of prophets and revelations is over. What
is needed today is not a new revelation but a new science; not prophets but
spiritual investigators. The very paradigm of religion is in the process of
becoming outmoded. Religious beliefs are becoming increasingly superstitious and fanatical, more and more divorced from reality. Atheists think that religion will be replaced by science.
Those who truly understand anthroposophy think exactly the same; the difference is
that while the former mean only materialistic natural science, the latter have
spiritual science in mind – or to be more precise: Spiritually extended science
enhanced by nothing less than the science of seership.
They're doing statistics on people's religious views. The number of Muslims is outpacing the number of Catholics and so on. People are counted like sheep, not just in thousands and millions, but in billions. There's also statistics done, I would think, about how many atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus and so on there are worldwide, and how many of each group in various geographic regions.
Back in the Middle Ages, and perhaps even more so after the Reformation in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, religious views and beliefs were a public and political concern. That's no longer the case; we live in a secular culture, which means that opinions of a philosophical or spiritual nature (or anti-spiritual for that matter) are private, personal matters. The question of what religion or philosophy a person identifies with is like what political party one votes for. Well now, the ballot is secret, at least optionally so, and the same is, or should be, the case with convictions and beliefs and soul-orientations. Besides, labels are bad and misleading things. I submit that nobody who volunteers such a label in surveys hasn't been thinking things through. Otherwise, we wouldn't get such preposterous claims that so-and-so many Muslim children are born here, so-and-so many Lutheran children are born there and so on. It makes one wonder how many agnostic and atheist children were born in the same countries or cities -- say, in the same year, -- as if those kids don't get to develop their own minds and do their own thinking when growing up.
That's why I decided long ago to defy all such labels and say 1) none of the above, or 2) none of your business; no concern of the public or of any institutes or governments. Who wants those stats and why?
Once upon a time, many years ago, I decided I wouldn't call myself an anarchist and not an anthroposophist either because I didn't fit any of those molds, so I coined a couple of new words, new terms: Anarchosophy and Tazism. And believe it or not, it didn't take long for certain people to write me emails and tell me what kind of views I should have in order to be an anarchosophist, so I had to ditch that too, my very own homespun label!
On my fb profile, however, I've still listed "Heterodox Anarchosophist" as my "Religious Views" and "Neo-Tazist" as my "Political Views" because nobody has proposed to understand any of that -- yet. And they're not supposed to. It goes like this: If you're ever questioned by the police or by intruding reporters or aggressive salespeople or anybody else who tries to control the conversation by asking all the questions, you should give them plenty of mumbo jumbo. That usually leaves them in total bewilderment, because they're use to hear "No comment" or "I wanna talk to my lawyer." And if you have some experience with anthroposophy, you can take this one step further by giving them anthro-babble. Believe me, they'll be at such a total loss you might as well be speaking an obscure Klingon dialect.
The problem is, people love to engage in small talk, to shoot the breeze, on every imaginable subject and shade of personal opinion and strictly private concerns, even when there are cops present who remember or even write down or record everything they say. And then the politicians get together and discuss how to influence or alter public opinion, as they call it, wherever they see this as expedient or necessary. It would be a lot better for the balance of power in the world if people would be much more reticent and reclusive and shy, to speak and act in such a way that those who wield power and influence can't figure out where they've got you, where you're coming from, what your paradigms are. In other words, keep your cards closer to your chest.
I can understand there are times when it's felt that people should show up in great numbers on the street in order to shout slogans to the rhythm of a drummer -- remember they used drummers on the battlefields too -- and fight with the cops, the riot squads, the Delta forces, which always stand ready to intervene, beat some of them up and haul them to jail. They often use horses. And I say, if the demonstrators were really well-organized, they should counter those horses with cattle, lots of cattle, and arrange stampedes. Right in the middle of the city, downtown. Now that's what I would have done, but I'm never in charge. I'm only being invited as a mindless follower from time to time, and I'm not into that sort of thing. It's like Carl Jung once said:
"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself."
On Saturday, November 6, 2010, The Sacramento Bee reports about the PLANS (People for Legal and Non-Sectarian Schools) lawsuit against the Sacramento City Unified School District because of Waldorf schools -- a course they've been pursuing for 13 years through a movement they launched in the Bay area more than 20 years ago.
This news item has created some not unexpected ripples in the hole, where they depart from their customary self-confident arrogance of assumed superiority and descend into incomprehension and extreme venom -- like a predator in the wild about to be eaten by a bigger one -- which they take out on their nearest target, namely Frank Thomas Smith, who posted the news. When they don't like the message, they attack the messenger. They even assault his magazine, Southern Cross Review.
In case you've forgotten where the Hole is, also known as the Abyss, the Unthinkable Facility, and the Unplumbable Toilet (the WC, intended to indicate the forum of the Waldorf Critics), see my previous blog on that subject under the title Anthroposophy and Race.Se also my blog from September 2009, titled The Abominable Abyss (descriptive illustrations included, not for the overly sensitive).
The thing is, those holefolks hate life. They hate freedom. They hate creativity and literature and poetry and paintings. The hate the human spark of divinity. They hate spirit. They love caricature, iconoclasm, sarcasm, hostility, intellectual masturbation and endless ping-pong and so on, and they lament that too few anthroposophists are attracted to their sour, hostile, and poisonous company.
Take their never-ending discussion about demon children as a classic example. (Rudolf Steiner suggested that some children are not really human but demons incarnated in human form.) Are children born that way, or do they become demonic? Rudolf Steiner is not the only person to suggest that some of them are born that way. Check out John Steinbeck. In East of Eden, he describes Cathy, who may be summed up as a freak who killed both her parents, killed her close friend Fay, attempted to kill Adam her husband, and attempted to kill Mr. Edwards. She had no sense of good, no conscience or guilt.
John Steinbeck writes:
"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.
"And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
"Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
"It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.
"There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious."
Notice that Steinbeck is giving the holefolks and all other atheists a convenient way out here by excluding and actually opposing all spiritual considerations like demons, reincarnation, higher cosmic beings and other non-corporeal life-forms. Instead, he seeks to define the phenomenon with Freudian concepts, which would have been right down the hole dwellers' alley if they hadn't been so philosophically confused and dysfunctional because of their hatred, fear and loathing.
In East of Eden, as Cathy's character evolves, Steinbeck changes his description from a monster to an animal. "Her head jerked up and her sharp teeth fastened on his hand across the back and up into the palm near the little finger... her jaw was set and her head twisted and turned, mangling his hand the way a terrier worries a sack". Cathy's sharp teeth fastened into a man's hand who was only trying to help. Cathy's sharp teeth sunk into the man's flesh like a dog's canines would have. She tore away at the skin and twisted and turned her head to resemble a dog. "Do you think I want to be human? Look at those pictures! I'd rather be an animal than a human," said Cathy. Cathy admits she would rather be an animal than a human. The physical features of Cathy are that of a human but the mental state of her resembles an animal. Although, Cathy seems to down grade and be paradoxical about herself because humans are much smarter than dogs, but she says she is smarter than any normal human. She knows how to manipulate any individual without trying. "Uncontrolled hatred shone in Kate's eyes. She screamed, a long and shrill animal screech"
This is John Steinbeck talking, one of America's most highly recognized authors and also Bob Dylan's favorite btw. I know it's hard to take it when your own child is a demon, just like it was for Cal Trask to discover that his mother was one, and that he himself was, literally, a son of a bitch. But he took it like a man and accepted the consequences, unlike the holefolks who hate truth and attack the messenger when they don't like the message.
The Unthinkable Facility is a blessing, though, because it gives those demon children a refuge to flee to when they grow up ;)
Taliban Christian fundies in the Hole struggle with astronomy
The curious thing about the hole dwellers is their bewilderment concerning geocentric and heliocentric astronomy. The apparent reason for this confusion is that the holefolks are Taliban fundamentaslists, and they have a lot in common with their Christian counterparts. One thing that struck me many, many years ago was the inherent absurdity in modern Christian theology as this is thought out and preached in all those churches in the West, Christian TV and what have you. Christian theology is completely divorced from all reality, floating in some kind of no man's land.
All this Bible teaching and Biblicism, the Bible being a book of absolute authority on all matters of existential importance -- these ideas are based upon texts that were written under the sway of Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy and astrology with constant references to it. And those theologians who put their blind fundamentalist faith in that stuff are completely unconscious of the fact that they themselves perceive the universe according to the Copernican heliocentric model.
They read Bible verses whose meanings have been altered beyond recognition by the tooth of time and the constant evolution of language, which not only changes from century to century but even from decade to decade. And all the Aristotelian Christian theology that was developed in the Middle Ages was likewise under the strong influence of Ptolemy with regard to the heavens that surround and influence us.
But in addition to the fact that these theologians are lost in space like astronauts without being aware of it and thus totally divorced from the old texts they promote, they're living in an electric world from dawn to dusk without thinking about that either -- gadgets, TVs automobiles, cell phones, computers -- and like Rudolf Steiner once said, when electricity penetrated people's everyday lives, even a century ago when it was basically limited to electric tramcars in the cities, this electricity would get into their system and literally drive the Spirit out of their blood, out of their ideas and make them hostile to spirituality. That's why not only natural science but also modern Christianity is so hostile to the Spirit, especially to spiritual science.
So it's easy to see how the Rapture was invented, the best-selling "Left Behind" series and all that -- they believe it's from the Bible when it's in fact from Star Trek, "Beam me onboard Scotty!" And they think like astronauts because of Copernicus; Star Trek just brought them one step further into the Rapture. But just like they refuse to acknowledge their electric lives and the discrepancy between their Copernican astronaut existence and the Ptolemaic Bible verses they keep memorizing and swearing to, they're also totally unaware of the influence of TV series on their religious beliefs -- not only Star Trek, but also soap operas, you know sticky day soaps where even police bullets are made from soap bars.
So they're making the Gospel into a soap-operatic melodrama, just like the holefolks are writing tear-jerking soap operas in the Abyss, about their life-and-death traumas in the captive claws of wicked anthroposophists, Waldorf teachers, and even Steiner himself.
We all know how natural science emerged from the theological thinking of the Middle Ages. And that's how it is with the hole dwellers; they see themselves as science-oriented atheist but they're in reality Middle Age fundamentalists lost in a Copernican universe with not only a geocentric solar system in their heads but also a flat earth. In the Unthinkable Facility, it is commonly believed that the world is flat, because that's how it looks down there, and they also believe that their Unplumbable Toilet is the center of the world, of the universe.
Did I just say that the hole dwellers are Taliban fundies? How can that be when they're atheists? Let me explain. They hate not only art and literature and love and freedom and so on -- they hate America too, and they support terrorists and pedophile child abusers. (I'll get back to the latter.) Here's what they say on the intro page to their unimaginable forum:
"All posts must be about Waldorf education or its foundation, Anthroposophy. Do not post non-Waldorf jokes, heart-rending appeals about the Taliban, etc."
In other words, the holefolks are using their Unthinkable Facility to collect contributions to the Taliban, and probably to Al Qaida too, and Osama bin Laden. It's because they hate love and freedom, they hate apple pie and the girl next door. Bin Laden said they'll show their Western enemies that they love death more than their opponents love life. That's the Hole in a nutshell, and they admit it openly on their forum page!
Critical thinkers have tried to tell them it ain't necessarily so, but they're too deep in denial, which is why they hate freedom and art and literature and America. They hate Christmas because they think Steiner invented it. Same with Easter and the other holidays. They hate the cross and the flag and the White House and even Congress. They say they want to stand up for the Constitution in court, but they hate the Constitution too, and the Founding Fathers as well. They're unamerican and should have been locked up in chains and shackles and pants down at Guantanamo Bay with daily waterboarding.
There was a time a few years ago when the Christian fundamentalists were part of PLANS, or part of the hole at any rate, based upon the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but the vehement anti-religious hardcore atheism in the Abyss seems to have chased the holy rollers away. What a shame, because the place has been no fun without them. And what a misunderstanding, because they're two sides of the same coin. The holefolks hate America and want to attack its freedom, and the fundies hate the rest of the world and want it bombed. Fear and loathing.
(For the record: I always avoid posting links to the Unthinkable Facility, and it's extremely rare that I mention this mythological place by its proper name because of superstition (bad luck), libel law suits and so on. Someone once compared it to Siberia because "everybody knows where it is, but nobody wants to go there." If you want to go there, do your own research and follow the odor.)
Holefolks supporting child abduction and pedophelia
"Davy" writes in a recent Abyss-post:
"Anthro bumpf will say that Steiner "left" The Theosophical Society to in order to found Anthroposophy. Some of us who look behind the veil a little know that what happened was that Steiner tried to take over the Theosophical Society, clashed with Annie Besant, and got himself booted."
In the same message, "Davy" concludes:
"Seems to me that AB made an immeasurably greater contribution to social development than her rival RS and this not setting aside later accusations to come her way."
And:
"Theosophy or Anthroposophy? If I had to, I know where I'd have taken my chance."
Incidentally, I've never seen or heard the word "bumpf" before and it's not in the dictionary, so I figured it was coined by Davy or a typo of his for buff (=a devotee or well-informed student of some activity or subject), but someone suggested consulting Urban Dictionary, which tells us:
bumpf
Useless printed instuctions and manuals.
Originated in England during World War II when English soldiers were overwelmed with unnecessary printed materials and used them as they would toilet tissue or "bum fodder".
Of course, it's Toiletese, I should have thought of that. It's the language they use in the the WC (the Unplumbable Toilet).
Anyway, it's good for Davy that he wasn't around a century ago with a young son, because Charles Leadbeater had an insatiable appetite for adolescent boys.
There were scandals resulting in Leadbeater's suspension from his work with youngsters, but Annie Besant always backed him and brought him back to the fold with full authority. And then it so happened that Charles Leadbeater -- one of our Stephens (Clarke?) called him quite appropriately Charles the Perv -- got involved with a beautiful and talented little Indian boy, namely Jiddu Krishnamurti, and in order to keep him as bedmate he suggested to Annie Besant that they should abduct him and present him to the world as a saviour and the very reincarnation of Jesus Christ as a countermeasure against Rudolf Steiner's Christian teachings.
This was done, and as the years went by, Krishnamurti's parents made innumerable attempts through legal measures to get their child back, in vain. And Annie Besant was as culpable in this atrocious injustice and child abuse as any.
It's easy to get the impression that the holefolks are sincerely concerned about child abuse and that they wish to rescue children from such, but that's obviously only a smokescreen. They're trying very hard to present anthroposophists as child abusers with not much substance, and if it suits their ideological hate-agenda, they're more than willing to defend any child abuser who has ever opposed anthroposophy, because the enemy of my enemy is my friend even if he or she is a serial killer or a pedophile.
How does the notorious resident "academic historian" in the Abyss usually sign off? "Yours for history"!
I've been sharing a lot of links to various lectures by Rudolf Steiner. These have been mostly appreciated by readers already familiar with the general background of Rudolf Steiner's works. Others may find this material extremely challenging without such preparation, regardless of how attractive and intriguing some of these lectures may be. There are, after all, more than six thousand shorthand transcripts of these lectures, but Rudolf Steiner never got the time to edit more than a handful of them for print, so they contain many errors, and the lecturer was frustrated by the necessity to authorize their distribution in these unedited conditions.
So it can be very difficult for some people to get a proper grasp of "anthroposophically oriented spiritual science," which is as complex as biology, chemistry, astrophysics or any other science, probably more so. And most people are simply not motivated to make the effort. Man has developed his intellect to an impressive degree, and through this instrument all our sciences and technologies have come into existence. The practical achievements have been astounding, albeit also destructive because of the high priority placed upon weapons technology, the science of killing our fellow man. But most people see absolutely no point in applying this wonderful intellect to spiritual endeavors and investigations. If there is any such thing as Spirit, people reason, give me that old time religion, because if it was good enough for Granddad, it's good enough for me. And what eventually becomes of this stupendous laziness with regard to the innermost, intimate aspects of our very existence, is little or nothing short of what the American public is being served by power hungry sinister ministers, namely the Christian Taliban, the Christian mafia, and imbecile tea parties obsessed with militarizing the planet while clinging to apocalyptic superstitions.
The intellect as a prime tool of cognition
Thus by refusing to use our divine intellect in the manner that higher powers, or progressive deities, have intended, we allow forces hostile to the welfare of humanity to drive our thinking deeper and deeper into subnature, into an abyss where there is no feeling and no free will, but only ice cold intellect through and through.
There are others, of course, who surmise that the ultimate origin of our existence is to be found in lifeless matter, an inorganic chemical soup or an electric explosion. In other words, life is supposed to come from non-life. This is contrary to everything we observe in nature, where life-forms are always traceable to other life-forms. Life proceeds from life, always and without exception, whether it's a single living cell, a seed, an embryo, or an amoeba. Young ones, including human children, are born from parents, not from inorganic minerals or chemicals. The flaw in our logic has nothing to do with any theory of biological evolution itself, and certainly not that of Charles Darwin. The flaw occurs when pure abstract speculation goes far beyond evolutionary theory and insists upon solving that which various documentaries on BBC, Discovery etc. call "the ultimate question," when they not only try to answer riddles that are inaccessible to materialistic, natural-scientific research, but insist upon this ultimate illogic through the power of persuasion based upon appeal to authority, namely "scientists" in general: The high priests of our age.
Atheism and religion
In the present scenario, however, atheism is positively preferable to religion. By religion I mean every kind of blind faith that is chained to authority and compels total obedience to theological dogma or some old book. The age of religion is drawing to a close; the last remnants of atavistic wisdom in religious traditions faded around the middle of the 20th century, i.e. about sixty years ago. Check it out; that's when the churches lost their last vestiges of political authority.
So what is left of religion today is sinking deeper and deeper into decadence and superstition. I'm talking about orthodox, traditional monotheistic religions here, not Buddhism, which is the only widespread spiritual tradition with a great potential for the future, because it has no theistic theological dogma, no books to be obeyed, and no authority. It's grounded in humanism, just like atheism and anthroposophy.
Anthroposophy is often regarded as religious, and although this categorization is justified to the extent that the overwhelming majority of its students base considerable parts of their worldview upon faith and trust in the movement's founder, it is misleading and untruthful to label it a religion.
The second approach is for the hard-nosed philosophical and scientific thinker, the critical, analytical mind, namely The Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4; written 1894, initially translated as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as recommended by the author).
This book has absolutely no supernatural content whatsoever; it provides the philosophical and epistemological foundation for everything Steiner gave out through his lectures later: Humanism, empiricism, and monism, with Charles Darwin's natural science as point of departure. This is the most important of all Steiner's works. 30 years later, when asked which of his works would be best remembered by posterity, Rudolf Steiner answered without a moment's hesitation: "The Philosophy of Freedom will survive all my other works."
The Philosophy of Freedom, often referred to as the PoF for brevity, is quite a heavy digest, however, and may need several re-reads, at least some of the chapters. For this approach, I would recommend first reading Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, Vorspeil zu einer Philosophie der Freiheit, translated as Truth and Knowledge and Truth and Science (because "Wissenschaft" means, interestingly, knowledge as well as science.) This is Rudolf Steiner's doctoral thesis, published in 1892 (GA 3) as an introduction to The Philosophy of Freedom. It's a nice introduction to the science of epistemology that also makes it clear why Steiner disagreed with Kant, who was, and still is, the most influential of epistemological philosophers.
Incidentally, I wrote an article about anthroposophy and anarchism about fifteen years ago for the Norwegian anarchist magazine Gateavisa, and some years later I translated it into English: Anthropos Anarchos.
This article puts major emphasis on The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 10 (Freedom — Philosophy and Monism) because it was addressed to skeptical anarchists with a penchant for atheism, or dialectical materialism.
The first approach, though, through the book Theosophy, is a much shorter and easier way to grasp the cosmological and evolutionary background that many of the lectures are based upon. This enormous body of lectures covers an incredibly diverse range of topics. They may be extremely challenging to follow without the foreknowledge outlined in the basic books. A very useful follow-up to Theosophy would be Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (GA 13, published in 1910), translated as Occult Science — An Outline or An Outline of Occult Science. This book is a sequel to Theosophy and deals with the evolution of Man and the Earth.
Sectarianism and the fear factor
It's not a good idea to get too hooked on reading Steiner, though, because he is such an overwhelming towering figure. Over time, it can easily lead to sectarianism and onesidedness based upon "The Doctor has said," something Steiner warned strongly against, echoing Buddha by emphasizing that nothing must be accepted on authority.
When one rejects the spiritual in favor of atheism, this may of course be based upon what one experiences as intellectual honesty because the ability to raise one's cognition to higher levels is absent. But this rejection of the supernatural is just as often caused by fear. Even worse, many people cling to religion because of fear: Fear of death and damnation and judgment, fear of freedom and self-dependence. By the same token, when the fear of Spirit is not subconscious and irrational, which is most common, it may be simply based upon an unwillingness to lose one's freedom and independence, which is a much healthier instinct that all the noblest and bravest of atheists can relate to.
In spite of the apparent contradiction between theism and independence, or individualist anarchism, there is really no reason to fear the anthroposophical teachings of Rudolf Steiner. On the other hand, the Opposing Powers of which he speaks -- not just the luciferic and ahrimanic forces, but especially the Asuras and Sorath the Sun Demon, whose influence will increase considerably in the future -- may give rise to fear, although such an emotion is useless, crippling, and destructive. Knowledge of those things and how they operate is the only protection we have, but that kind of knowledge is extremely effective, which is why it's important for such Opposing Powers to keep humanity in the dark about them.
Rudolf Steiner's greatness
Many people have wondered how come Rudolf Steiner was so great, or how he achieved such a stature. It seems that this particular individuality has been a major contributor to Christian thinking through the ages, primarily as Aristotle (whose works became the foundation of Biblical theology for the Scholastics in the Middle Ages), and as Thomas Aquinas, a very important Scholastic.
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner himself always refused adamantly to say anything about his former incarnations, or about the former lives of those who pestered him with such questions, which would sometimes make him shun such people for weeks. So some of his former incarnations have been deducted post mortem from private correspondence discovered between himself and his physician Ita Wegman. I feel this is like eavesdropping in a sense, so I regard it as theory, out of respect so to speak.
The opposing spiritual powers
But the question of Steiner's greatness reminds me of what I have come to regard as his historical significance. Anthroposophists may be divided on this, so I offer it only as my own personal interpretation of 20th century history, shared by a few others. It seems to me that not only the first world war, but both world wars were unleashed against Europe as a reaction to Rudolf Steiner's work on German-speaking soil. The outbreak of 1914 is easy to figure out, when all the state leaders were lulled into a state of decreased consciousness and the war itself caused such a disturbance in the astral sphere that Steiner's research into the holiest of mysteries with regard to the Gospel events in particular, had to be discontinued. This powerful opposition was awakened after the lecture cycle From Jesus to Christ in 1911 (GA 131), where certain secrets were revealed that very powerful individuals had a vested interest in keeping hidden from the public -- secrets that were known to a select few among the Jesuits and the Freemasons, and possibly some members of the High Church in England.
Especially after the first world war, this opposition became extremely vicious and aggressive, cutting Steiner's life short (he only became 64) and torching his major achievement, namely the first Goetheanum so it burned to the ground.
The first Goetheanum
Of course the policies of Woodrow Wilson were crucial in paving the way to the rise of the Nazis eight years after Steiner's death, which explains Steiner's exceptional and uncharacteristic hostility towards Wilson. Steiner did not predict the rise of the Nazis as such (although he said that if they came to power, it would no longer be possible for him to set his foot on German soil), but he did say in his very last lecture cycle in September 1924 (before his illness put an end to his lecturing) that the calculations done by a certain astronomer a century earlier indicated the rise of the Beast in the year 1933 (when Hitler actually came to power).
There is also another factor, or possibility, theory, to consider, that we discussed a few years back. When anthroposophy was disseminated through RS, it brought about some counterparts, two major evil mirror-images if you will. Like you have one Dr Jekyll and not one Mr Hyde, but two (at least). The first of these is Nazism; the second is Scientology. This topic would bring us beyond the scope of this article, however, so let's leave it for some other time. In the meantime, check out this cool dude as he explains Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy in a nutshell:
