It’s hard to think amidst all the distractions we have in our lives. The levels of media disturbance we accept in our own homes are exacerbated when we live within the unceasing hum of a city. No wonder so many of us abandon efforts to meditate after a few attempts; we neglect to pursue our own thoughts, let alone thoughts of higher knowledge. Yet connecting with our spiritual nature has never been more important.
Why? Because it’s our time to do it; we are at that point in our evolution. Just as once people lived among the spirits of nature in a dreamy consciousness and then lost that capacity four to five hundred years ago in order to acquire scientific reason, we are now able to find our connection to the spirit again with this hard-won intellect and reason. If we continue to live without a foundation in the spirit, rooted in materialism, we will sink ever deeper into egotism and despair. We will lose our moral grounding. Sound familiar?
The trouble is, we have to exert ourselves to acquire this connection to the spirit. Steiner says, “It belongs to the essence of spiritual science that it makes demands on soul activity, that you do not accept spiritual-scientific truths lightly, as it were, for it is not just a matter of taking in what spiritual science says about one thing or another, but of how you take it in… To make spiritual science your own you must work at it in the sweat of your soul…”
Of course, we can choose to disregard the call to spirit. We are, after all, free in this regard.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
Human beings will only attain the kind of connection they need to be truly human if they seek it in their inner life, if they delve so far down into the depths of their soul that they reach the forces that connect them with the spirit of the cosmos, out of which they were born and in which they are embedded, but from which they can be separated…
Only by penetrating into the depths of their own being will they find the connection with divine spiritual beings that they need for their salvation, the spiritual hierarchies that are progressing along a straight path. This connection with the spiritual hierarchies from which we were actually born, in the spirit, this living connection with them, is made difficult to the highest degree by the saturation of the world by modern technology. Human beings are dragged away from the spiritual-cosmic connections, and the forces which they should be developing to maintain their link with the spiritual-soul being of the cosmos are being weakened.
A person who has already taken the first steps in initiation will therefore notice how the mechanical things of modern life penetrate into man’s spiritual-soul nature to such an extent that a great deal of it is smothered and destroyed. Such a person also notices that the destruction of these forces makes it particularly difficult for him really to develop those inner forces which unite the human being with the ‘rightful’ spiritual beings of the hierarchies.
When someone who has taken the first steps in initiation tries to meditate in a modern railway carriage or on a modern steamer, he makes a great effort to activate the necessary forces of vision to lift him into the spiritual world, yet he notices the ahrimanic (spiritual beings desiring materialism) world filling him with the kind of thing that opposes this devotion to the spiritual world, and the struggle is enormous. You could call it an inner struggle experienced in the ether body, a struggle that wears you out and crushes you.
Other people who have not taken the first steps in initiation also go through this struggle, of course, and the only difference is that the student of initiation experiences it consciously. Everyone has to go through it; the effects of this are experienced by everyone.
It would be the worst possible mistake to conclude from this that we should resist what technology has brought into modern life, that we should protect ourselves from Ahriman (See: Here Know Evil) by cutting ourselves off from modern life. This would be a kind of spiritual cowardice. The real remedy is not to let the forces of the modern soul weaken and cut themselves off from modern life, but to make the forces of the soul strong so that they can stand up to modern life. A courageous approach to modern life is necessitated by world karma, and that is why true spiritual science possesses the characteristic of requiring an effort of the soul, a really hard effort.
Excerpt from: Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, Lecture 1, Technology and Art, by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach, December 28, 1914.
No one seems to be very happy with the current state of the world. Wars on all continents, political strife between families and friends, poverty, injustice, famine, you name it. Will we be able to address any of it with our established lines of thinking? Will we be able to penetrate to any truth with the shifting stories told through the lenses of deceit, arrogance, greed and malevolence we can witness every day in front of us or in the news? What if these maladies are recognized as evidence of a humanity that needs a perspective, a new voice? What if we could understand it all with spiritual insight?
We just won’t know unless we make the effort over and over again. Effort, by definition, isn’t easy, but then, neither is witnessing the world as it is today. Finding our own spiritual self could be the most important work we do in this lifetime.