By Douglas Gabriel
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Finding truth in our time is one of the most essential components of self-development. Lies, falsehoods, and evil are there to challenge and subsequently strengthen the seeker of truth. Without evil to run up against and provide resistance, self-development could not happen. Evil is best pictured by the biblical story of Lucifer, the “fallen angel” who can, someday, be redeemed and restored to his initial place beside the throne of God as the highest angel.
Evil only exists for a given period of time as fallen angelic hosts who wish to slow down and stop human development so that they (fallen hierarchical beings) might hang on to elements of their own development from the past. Evil is a force that wishes to freeze the present and drag it into the past where the evil one’s personal power and dominance can steal from humans their own personal self-development. In time, all evil will be resolved as the “fallen” ascend back to their original hierarchical positions and then move upwards again through the angelic hosts of heaven.
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The four-thousand year old lie of the priest-kings is now frail and the false narrative that the material world is all that there is in the cosmos is being dispelled because the threshold between the visible world and the invisible realms has been torn in two. The door to the supersensible world has been opened to the modern seeker looking for truth, beauty, and the good path of spiritual self-development. The invisible worlds have become visible and the old lies and scientific theories are of no help.
Science is seen as a new mythology, no more accurate or insightful than the cast off mythologies of the past. Science (scio) is defined as a ‘path to knowledge.’ Sadly enough, science has no sense of history and forgets that almost all theories of science are also cast aside as new theories supplant the old. Most scientific theories do not last more than a century until they are laughed at as the new “settled science” theories make the old ones look ridiculous.
Modern science is limited to observation from the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. But most scientific forces (gravitation, electromagnetism, weak interaction, strong interaction) are invisible. In fact, scientists tells us they can “reveal” and “work with” the forces of nature but fail to point out that their theories are shear speculation about what is invisible and supersensible. Science has forgotten about the other seven senses; life, movement, ego, balance, temperature, and thought which are the tools needed to understand the invisible supersensible worlds that manifest the visible world. Ancient philosophers believed the visible world was simply an illusion they called “maya.” Trying to understand illusion often leads to delusion unless the person looking at the visible world knows the invisible realms actually manifest the visible world.
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Scientists are barking up the wrong tree with their constantly changing theories (guesses) at the nature of reality. First, they are using the limits of the five senses rather than the whole spectrum of the twelve senses. Instead of pursuing the seven divine virtues (humility, love, purity, generosity, temperance, diligence, patience), science has chased after the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, anger). Science is used for profit and personal aggrandizement which has no checks and balance system for morally monitoring scientific innovation. In the modern materialistic, scientific mind, if something has been discovered and created by a “scientist” – then we must immediately build and utilize the new invention without any further thought.
Science has no philosophic foundation, moral injunctions, or common sense controls. Science is a conglomeration of specialized, transitory theories about the invisible. Science is less effective at revealing the beings behind the forces in the cosmos than mythology, dreams, fairytales, legends, and individual intuition. Science is a collection of dead, shadow thoughts that fantasize the foundations of our world with cheap lies and twisted deceit. Science abnegates the spiritual nature of the human being and the cosmos completely. Science is the enemy of living thinking, inspired ideas, and moral forethought. We would be better off with myths and fairytales rather than the thoughtless falsehoods taught by the ever changing world of “settled science.”
‘Truth’ is not given a place in modern science. Newly discovered inventions are simply opportunities for commercialism, consumerism, and warmongering as they are given names that are the opposite of reality. Science has been bought by the rich elite to reflect whatever agenda they desire. The good of humanity is seldom, if ever, taken into consideration when a new discovery comes along. The dominate world force of science is twisted into the evil intentions of those monarchs, priests, scientists, bankers, brokers, judges, and politicians who use transitory theories to rule and control the masses.
Often the non-scientists surrender, becoming sheep being led to the slaughter, or non-thinkers who become debt slaves to a system that treats them like lab-rats. But when the old theories are found to be false, science avoids making a correction to the textbooks and just lets the old lies (theories) still direct and confuse those people who are not part of the infallible scientists who determine that spiritual realms do not exist and that life ends at death.
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If you believe scientific theories (lies), then you are classified as a secular humanist. Essentially, this means you believe only in humans and the religion preached by scientists. This system of belief is considered superior to the past indulgences in the ‘opium of religion’ which was filled with non-scientific ideas. The modern science-believer laughs at anything except the latest theories and inventions and considers religious believers to be ignorant and misinformed. Science has not found God (or the God-particle), or for that matter, anything that cannot be grasped by the limited five senses.
More than half of the human senses (7 of 12) are ignored and considered unreliable sources of information, knowledge, or input. Science sees no truth, hears no beauty, and does nothing for the sake of goodness. Instead, by self-inflicting blindness, deafness, and evil into the scientific method, the modern scientist makes himself a god of the material world. This is why they pridefully name their discoveries of nature after themselves. What greater hubris than to name a force of nature after the scientist who supposedly observed it first.
Truth is the key to a new spiritual science that can penetrate into the unseen, invisible worlds with new organs of supersensible capacities (the other seven senses). This truth does not believe the lies of maya, nor the illusion of the world that subsumes its original spiritual source.
The truth of the matter is that all visible manifestations are but the shadow of the spiritual world. All things living come from the realms of the divine – what some now call ‘intelligent design.’
Finding the wisdom of the cosmos is the goal of truth. These truths can only be found by the striving, seeking soul who is in search of its own spiritual sources. Truth is the self-evident manifestation of the beings of the hierarchy – both above and below humanity. These beings are confused with scientific “forces” and phenomena that go beyond modern scientific cosmologies. Only a spiritual cosmology can answer the questions that swirl around truth and show the path of creation, destruction, and new creation beyond “seeming” death. In the past, these forces were known as the “Body of the Goddess” who controls the forces of birth, death, and rebirth.
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Truth and Poetry
by Gabriel
Truth and Poetry bespeak one source you see
For Nature speaks in all that She can be;
The windward rush, the crashing sea,
The northern lights, a redwood tree
All call the ever changing name of Thee.
The Oracles at Delphi, by vaporous tongues unsealed,
The poems of Homer and Hesiod, the nature of gods revealed,
The Winds of Dodona sounding the Oaks so tall,
Like Druid magic circles, speaking Nature’s call;
These are voices, still there for us all.
Merlin is still with us, watching from his home,
Under the Stone of Bardsey, by Nimue cast alone;
Not dead, nor too old and tired to speak,
Just enchanted, limited, and growing weak.
And Arthur lives too, sleeping in Avalon,
Until the time is needed, a Kingdom to be won.
From Broceliande, news of Fairy Quests came,
Was Merlin wrong to trick and send them on these games?
Do we conquer Nature, or seek Her for some fame?
Do we forget her Beauty, or try Her might to tame?
Can’t we listen? The surge is deep and strong,
For without Nature, you cannot live for long.
Christian Rosenkreutz listened and made a book called M,
The open book of Nature, your higher self within.
Alchemy tends that fire so true,
As time measures the moment’s due,
And gives to each its process and kind
As we manifest the will sublime.
In us, about us, around us and through
Nature’s ubiquitous harmony speaks to us too;
Just listen, then dance, then sing joyful strains,
To build the future’s hope and extinguish all our pains.
The time for male-dominated and power-centered religion is over. No one needs a king, priest, guru, or master to teach them the meaning of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. We do not need a mediator for intercession with the divine. Those control mechanism are part of the war-mongering, dominance-centered religious and cultural impulses that enslaved the freedom of the masses for millennia.
Truth must be personally sought after and attained through effort – what is often called the search for the holy grail. This grail is threefold to match the nature of the threefold human being who is body, soul, and spirit. Attaining the grail will bring truth to the grail seekers so that they might find beauty and love in their hearts and be inspired to do the good on the path of self-development. Each grail seeker builds a new religion, finds a new north star by which to direct their life towards the deeds of goodness and the seven divine virtues. Each person can now create their own religion and build their own temple of wisdom wherein they can serve the greater good.
It is not time to conquer evil in our age – it is time to recognize evil for what it is and understand that the temptation of evil is in every heart and must be wrestled with until the victory is won for love through Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. We too can become “fallen” and move backward in time and self-development – this is the nature of good and evil. Everyone, at all ranks of the hierarchy, must choose again and again the true, the beautiful, and the good out of freedom and love. When we do not choose to climb the ladder of divine virtues, we pave the path to hell through the seven deadly sins.
Virtue leads to life; vices lead to death. Virtue move us forward in ascension, while vices lead us backwards into evil and the fallen nature of the human being. This fallen nature is essentially a falling backwards into the animal nature that humans have already passed through in prior evolution.
It is incumbent upon each person who becomes a “religion of one” to take control of their own spiritual self-development and sort out the truth from the lies, beauty from the ugliness of evil, and good deeds from evil deeds.
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The choice to evolve or devolve is upon us. We are alone, homeless, helpless, and seemingly without hope if we let the lies and falsehoods of the modern age drown us in a fog of untruth, confusion, and ugliness. We may try to run from such evil influence, but it will simply travel with us in the unresolved and unevolved parts of our heart. We must grapple with evil, both in the world and in hearts. We may seem unable to conquer the world of doublespeak, propaganda, subliminal programming, environmental poisons, political evil intentions, demonic laws, empty phrases, platitudes, dark specters, ghosts of the past, and the rampant enthronement of the seven deadly sins as highest goals for fallen humanity. But the only goal necessary for the true believers in beauty and goodness is to find, control, and conquer the evil in our own nature.
We may not be able to fight the global fight against evil due to its incredible power and might in our materialistic age, but we can take control of our lives and turn them to love and the spiritual sources of the world. We can learn to develop new sense organs to perceive the supersensible beings and learn a new language, not made of words, to commune with the hierarchical beings above us. To do so, we must also know the evil, fallen ones who are below us and how they got there, and how they can be redeemed. All evil can be redeemed in time and we need not worry about conquering evil in our age – we must simply understand and acknowledge its improper place in our higher evolution.
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Oftentimes truth, beauty and goodness lead us beyond the physical, visible world into realms which cannot be seen, heard, or felt. Through Intuition, Inspiration, and living Imaginative thinking, the truth-seeker transcends this world and travels within to the heart of heart to find the “Lost Word”, a language of the spirit that is used by all the higher hierarchies. Crossing the threshold to the spiritual world, the supersensible world, is now a capacity that must be developed by the truth-seeker so that communion with angels can take place during spiritual meditation, sleep, and after death. This threshold is open like a door, but one must cross the burning ground and go down to the river to build a hut before the communion of saints can be found and a spiritual dialogue begun. We must take these matters into our own hands and face evil with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness to conquer our own tendency to become a “fallen human” – which leads to being an animal.
Rudolf Steiner tells us that we are in the Consciousness Soul era of human development. We have passed through the Sentient Soul and Intellectual Soul eras already and developed both selfish sentience and collective intelligence. Now we are developing the personal evolution of the soul towards the spirit. This era is not intended to be social. In fact, it is an age of loneliness, homelessness, and personal self-development wherein the individual may feel overwhelmed and lost in a fog of untruthfulness that wishes to annihilate the soul and spirit. This is a battle for the being of each human being. We are fighting fallen higher hierarchical beings – powers, mights, and dominions. Only with the help of the higher hierarchies in our own soul and spirit can we overcome this evil, these fallen forces.
The Consciousness Soul has the ability to reach up to our own personal Spiritual Self and develop the eternal thoughts, feelings, and deeds that we have created in the physical world. These are gifts of humanity given to the hierarchical spirits. These gifts are not developed in groups, societies, nations, or humanity as a whole. Only a single individual can glean the eternal elements insinuated in the physical, visible world and add them to the spiritual body in the spiritual world.
Of course, it is love that binds Truth, Beauty, and Goodness because love is eternal. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness change when they go from the physical world into the spiritual world – but love does not change. Love is the binding force that causes all of the virtues and the grace of the divine to enter into action. Love is activity that binds the threefold cosmos into creative intention that builds future worlds where love will be the very atmosphere we live it. The love you give now builds those future worlds. Thus, the individual person must take control of the threefold aspects of thinking, feeling, and willing in the physical world and turn them into living Imaginative thinking, Inspiration, and Intuition.
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We should be looking for truth that is eternal, a living imaginative idea that connects us to the forces of higher beings. This type of truth (Imagination) dispels the dark light of shadowy, grey thinking that rules science, philosophy, religion, and politics. The more the seeker finds eternal truths, the more temporal “truths” fall away.
The primary truth is the foundation – all things physical come from the life of the spiritual world.
Losing this connection to the spiritual worlds has led modern humanity into grotesque hyper-materialism. Truth has been replaced with falsehoods and only the truth-seeker notices. The more science and the modern thinker turns away from the truth that we come from a spiritual world, the more truth will be substituted with falsehoods and the modern person will be overwhelmed and feel helpless, hopeless, and overpowered. This is the condition of the modern soul. There is no way to avoid deciding which direction we will go – ascend to spirit or descend to materialism that leads to a cold, dark grave.
Beauty
Beauty is found in every piece of the cosmos as wisdom that is eternal and pervasive. It is balance, grace, mercy and all of higher virtues bound in visions, dreams, hopes, art, harmony, and all of the divine manifestations of the spirit. Beauty is the power behind everything. When Beauty leaves the room, imbalance sets in. Or as Shakespeare tells us in, Troilus and Cressida, Act 1, Scene 3:
“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the influence of evil planets,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of Earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick.”
The “harmony of the spheres” is the beauty of our solar system. The power behind Beauty is wonderfully described by Shakespeare, and the outcomes of the lack of Beauty are dramatic, if not cataclysmic. Beauty is the longing to be like the divine. Beauty is synonymous with power.
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The two pillars of the temple indicate that Beauty and Wisdom (also called Mercy and Severity) stand behind power (Beauty) and love (Wisdom). These pillars are sometimes called Jachin and Boaz. Rudolf Steiner gives us a verse that describes some of the areas of influence of Beauty and Wisdom – Jachin and Boaz – as found in the temple of human body. From, Verses and Meditations:
Jachin and Boaz
Jachin
In pure Thinking thou does find
The self that can hold itself.
Transmute the Thought into Picture-life
And you will know creative Wisdom.
Boaz
Condense thy Feeling into Light:
Formative powers are revealed through thee.
Forge thy Will into deeds of Being:
So shall you share in World-creation.
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The natural balance of thinking, feeling, and willing is found in this verse indicating that Beauty, Power (Love), and Wisdom (Truth) are found in the human body. First, Beauty arises in thinking that can identify the spiritual, individualized self of the seeker – the eternal part. Then, thinking arises to an enlivened thinking filled with moving images that connect one thought to another through Wisdom (Truth). Feeling arises next as the power of Inspiration in the individual is revealed. The act of willing creates beings who share in the balanced, beauty of the world through love and intuition.
The antidote to the Age of Untruthfulness, Post-Truth, and Falsehood Politics is to direct your path towards Truth, Beauty, and Goodness and then manifest this spiritual wisdom in the world. These three soul forces are given to us by the grace of higher beings. Once we have connected with, and can communicate with our own higher self, the grace and mercy of the higher hierarchies rain down upon us. Every good deed, thought, or feeling is food for the gods and creates a bridge from Earth to heaven. We feed the gods and the gods feed us.
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Higher thinking, feeling, and willing can transform into Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition through our spiritual efforts towards self-development. Once we have turned the illusion of the visible world into illumination, we can use that light to shine upon the supersensible realms and Imagination develops. When our hearts are tuned to the harmony of the spheres and the angelic hosts, along with the Love of Christ, we can hold Inspirations in our heart. When love, out of pure freedom, can drive our motives and fill our actions with wisdom (truth) and power (beauty), then our actions will unite our soul to our spirit which will serve all those around us as our heart becomes a grail of nourishment and ascension.
Goodness
Instead of “the Good” in our age we predominately see “the bad” – which takes many forms as hollow words, platitudes, and empty phrases that help create our culture of hyper-materialism. We are so used to an atmosphere of illness, evil, and bad intentions that we expect evil actions and are all too willing to accept them. We conform and adapt to the lies and eventually we live a lie by default. To speak the truth becomes dangerous and alienates friends. The “bad” has become the atmosphere of poison that we have come to live in every day and we need to find the antidote to heal the wounds. We expect the worst, and it often happens. We are used to being lied to on all levels and simply believe it is the way of the world since we can’t change it, in many cases.
Lies kill the soul and make negative karma that eventually must be resolved. Every lie comes back to the liar like the ‘Furies’ of the Greeks hounded the person who had violated the laws of the gods. In today’s world, each lie creates another addition to each liar’s personal “phantom” – a body of good or bad energy that hovers around the human body. When a person lies a great deal, the phantom body becomes filled with dark entities festering in the astral body. Once the lie is told to others and affects them in a negative way, a specter is created that has a life of its own.
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The specter continues to grow until the lie is called back, resolved, rectified, or redeemed. A specter has its own life and wants to become bigger and negatively effect more and more people. Some pathological liars become possessed by so many specters that they are open to other specters that delude the liar. A vicious cycle of lies imprisons the liar until he may not even know the truth any longer.
Professional (pathological) liars often become politicians who develop laws that are giant lies that enslave the common person, promote wars, and fill the pockets of politicians with money. These evil laws invite demons to possess the law and subsequently, politician-liars become the stooges for the demonic laws they have put in place to dominate and control others.
Anywhere you look for leadership – government, churches, schools, doctors, or lawyers – all you find are people who are overwhelmed by the onslaught of evil and who often succumb to the power, dominance, and control that comes with working with the forces of this Earthly realm. Lucifer was cast down to this realm, and Jesus Christ said that ‘his father was not of this kingdom.’ The old phrase applies: ‘We are born unto our father the devil.’ The material world leads to delusion because it is an illusion (maya) that tries to limit the human from seeing behind the veil of matter to the original sources of the spirit.
Simply observing matter for what it is liberates the spirit frozen in material substance. This perception, based upon truth, frees both the observer and the observed. Humanity has the power to see the world as the product of a spiritual cosmology and thus release those beings who sacrificed themselves to manifest in this world. The observer is now known, through “science”, to create that which is observed. Thus, the observer creates good or evil simply by their personal observation of the world. We create heaven or hell right here on Earth through the good or evil inside of us.
Ethical individualism teaches us that every action is only good or bad based upon the individual’s particular and specific circumstances. In other words, each person has to make a new judgment about every circumstance they encounter. Good and bad, like all things, can be relative or absolute (universal). What is one person’s meat is another person’s poison. This is true in many instances when it comes down to determining what is right or wrong, good or bad.
Oftentimes, in the modern materialistic world, good is looked down upon as weakness and submission. The war-mongers of materialism hate the greater good and choose personal gain at any cost. This type of materialism, mercantilism, commercialism, and worldly gain rules the modern, Western secular humanist. The negative aspects of capitalism rule our materialistic society until values and virtues decline into grotesquely “bad” behavior. In fact, the “bad” is applauded and praised like the victory of a general in a battle. Many come to respect, or even worship, the rich corporate capitalists who have conquered markets and commerce and become billionaires. Economic kings then come to rule over vast segments of the population – like cattle being led to the slaughter. As the “bad” comes to dominate society, human freedom is sacrificed.
The seeker in our time must come to know the landmines planted all around them. Poisons fill the air, water, food, drugs, media, and almost all aspects of life. Death is offered up instead of life. A warrior’s strength and courage is needed to just maneuver the daily decisions one must make to avoid poisons and the attacks upon our well-being. A spiritual cosmology is needed to combat the evil materialistic pseudo-cosmology of ever-changing scientific theories.
A sacred space in your heart of hearts is needed to nurture the holy grail of your eternal spirit. These spiritual elements are needed to replace what we generally are offered up by ‘main stream media’ and the globalists who control them. Essentially, we must recognize the truth in life and connect it to reality – not the propaganda sales-pitches offered by the dark side of evil.
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Below are some of the evils faced every day by Westerners. We have come to expect these things and we are learning how to cope with evil intentions in all aspects of life.
The Death of Goodness in the Age of “Post-Truth”
Disinformation Obfuscation Deception Misinformation Subliminal-Programming Lies Propaganda Mendacity Misrepresentation Fake-News Newspeak Scamming Fleecing Conflation Confabulation Misdirection Untruthfulness Evasiveness Prevarication Equivocation Vagueness Ambiguity Insincerity Hollowness Closed Deceitful Hypocritical Dishonesty Discombobulation Chaos Confusion Hidden Distractors Misdirection Manipulation Disaggregation Deconstruction Falsehood-Politics Virtue-Signaling Alibis Elitism Politically-Correct Plausible-Deniability Excuses Justification Misbehavior Settled-Science Delegated-Blame Demonizing Brainwashing Mind-control Globalism Debt-Enslavement Eugenics Depopulation Genocide Warmongering Open-Borders Socialism Chaos Marxism Communism Federal-Control Fascism Hegemony Imperialism Empire-Building Colonialism New-World-Order Subterfuge Defamation Fraudulence Distortion Evasion Fictitiousness Slander Treachery Trickery Double-Dealing Treason Hype Spin Indoctrination Physical-Immortality
Rudolf Steiner on the Karma of Untruthfulness
The twenty-five lectures that comprise the two volume set of books by Rudolf Steiner entitled: The Karma of Untruthfulness, are quite insightful for our times. Even though Steiner is speaking in 1916, as bombs were falling all around Dornach, Switzerland, where he was constructing the first Goetheanum (largest wooden building in history) he carried on the “good work.” Steiner’s words are just as helpful now as they were then. Workers from dozens of nations, many of whom were at war with one another, joined together in peace to build this beautiful ‘temple of wisdom.’
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As WWI raged all around him, Steiner and his followers built the most beautiful wooden building in history with love. Determined to not let the insanity and cruelty of his time effect his spiritual work, Steiner pushed on to accomplish this astounding deed. He looked evil in the face and then constructed the antidote – the path of spiritual development built, carved, painted, sculpted, and spoken into this temple. Truly, Steiner is an example of how to balance an imbalanced world, or how to confront evil by doing good.
The historic symptomology of WWI is given in The Karma of Untruthfulness and many amazing insights and predictions can be found in this work. It is a gold mine of spiritual insight into all wars and the sources of those wars. Steiner gives us a prediction that would have been surprising at his time, during the middle of the “great” war:
“It is hardly necessary to have knowledge of spiritual matters today in order to know that once this war in Europe has come to an end only a few years will pass before a far more furious, far more devastating war will shake the earth outside of Europe.”
Steiner knew this truth because he could see the “karma” of the untruthfulness (lies and propaganda) that started WWI. The seeds of WWII were already laid through the karma that would arise from the falsehoods of WWI. These lectures are a sobering and chilling appraisal of Steiner’s circumstance. His remarks were destined to come true with horrifying accuracy. Steiner was a spiritual warrior for Truth, Beauty and Goodness. His remarks about truth in The Karma of Untruthfulness bring great insight into why truth is so paramount in spiritual development.
Truth
All of the following quotations are from Rudolf Steiner’s lecture series entitled: The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume I, December, 1916, Dornach.
“Only if hearts exist which see things in their true guise and penetrate that terrible fog of untruth which shrouds everything in the world today, can we progress in an appropriate way.”
“The attention paid to historical and other connections of life in our materialistic age, is not permeated with the truth.”
“Truth speaks and will be an impulse which, when things are at their worst, can lead humanity to some kind of salvation.
“Falsehood is monstrously vigorous. Falsehood is nothing other than the corresponding counter-image for spiritual endeavor which ought to exist but does not.”
“Today so very much is born out of ignorance. This is caused by that black magic known today as journalism. It is a king of black magic, and there was a certain truth in the way folk legend felt the inventors of the art of printing were black magicians.”
“All these untruthfulnesses that buzz about in the world enter into what might be called the spiritual aura and generate there a thick fog which the dead find impossible to penetrate – which the spiritual world simply cannot penetrate. The thick fog contains all that black rubbish which comes from today’s journalism in the form of untruths which are printed and repeated, creating an aura of untruthfulness spanning the earth.”
“The greatest danger is an aberration into untruthfulness brought about by a failure to take reality into account in a living way. The insidious poison of untruthfulness seeps into the social organism turning into social poison.”
“Our time lacks a strong, intense urge for the truth. If the urge for truth had been sufficiently strong, it would have sufficed to lead mankind far more extensively towards spiritual life than has actually been the case. It is because of the lack of striving for truth today that current affairs are inversions of the truth.”
“People are inclined to pass by the very thing that matters. This thing that matters is the flight from truth into which souls have fallen today! Souls run away from the truth; they have a terrible abhorrence of grasping the truth in all its strength and intensity. People today flee from the truth.”
“The moment you believe history as it is written today you become a victim of maya, of illusion. For the truth is not a child’s game to be arranged according to personal interests. To adhere to the truth is a grave and holy act of worship. This must be felt and sensed. Yet the whole tendency today is none other than to make maya absolute and declare it to be the truth.”
“Wherever we strive to enter higher realms we have to reckon with living, not dead truth, and the living truth bears within it its own counter-image, just as in physical existence life bears death within it. The counter-image of Imaginative life is fabrication, the creation of fabrications about reality and a corresponding thoughtlessness in alleging this or that.”
“If you cannot develop the urge for truthfulness in yourselves, you will always be open to the danger of being infected, influenced, by the untruthfulness that lives in the world. For today one of the foremost demands made of those who are truly concerned with the welfare of mankind and the progress of mankind is that they should not allow themselves to be taken in by untruthfulness.”
“We have today this great desire to remain held fast in maya because we are far too exposed to the danger of taking the word for the fact. To a great extent words have lost their meaning, by which I mean the living soul-connection of the word with the reality that underlies the word. Words have become mere abbreviations, and the intoxication in which many people live with regard to words is no longer genuine ecstasy, because only a deepening as regards the spiritual world can make genuine the words we speak. Words will only regain real content when human beings fill themselves with knowledge of the spiritual world. Ancient knowledge is lost, and for the most part we speak in the way we do just because the ancient knowledge is lost and we are surrounded by maya, which gives us nothing but mere words. Now we must once again seek a spiritual life which gives the words their content. We live, in a way, in a mechanism of words, just as externally we shall gradually completely lose our individuality in a mechanism of technology until we are at the mercy of external mechanism.”
Propaganda
“You know how a crowd, a group, can be seized by a certain intoxication if it is handled in a suitable way. I have met orators who knew by instinct how to speak in a way which does not directly address the intellect but uses slogans and telling images to speak to a consciousness that is somewhat askew, somewhat delirious. The approach has to be stronger in the case of an individual, but for a crowd no more is needed.”
“First you force the other fellow to defend himself and then you treat him as the aggressor. It is a very effective method and one that plays an enormously strong role in the world today. The attacker hides behind the clamor he raises after he has forced the other to defend himself by labelling him the aggressor.”
“Much that is launched on the public from occult sources in not untrue, but half true, a quarter true, and eighth true, and just because it bears within it a part of the truth it can be used to achieve one aim or another in a one-sided way.”
“In certain communities these things have to be learned, namely, how to describe things in pictures, how to use images, bring about intensifications, and employ comparisons. This is a special art which is diligently practiced in the grey brotherhoods. But there is no need to belong to a grey brotherhood in order to practice such an art, one can use these methods.”
“There exists ways and means in the world of carrying out what I might call ‘mass hypnosis.’ To bring about a suggestion on a grand scale you have to place something in the world which makes an impression. Just as it is possible to insinuate an idea into the mind of an individual by using suitable means, suggestion can be made to whole group of people, especially when one knows what actually binds these groups together. It is possible to steer a force that lives in an individual person in a particular direction. It is a matter of exercising influence by means of suggestion. You can do one thing and say another and often do something that seems to be the opposite of what is supposed to happen.”
Secret Brotherhoods
“These occult streams which live through the secret brotherhoods have, as one of their basic doctrines, the teaching that the English-speaking peoples are for the fifth post-Atlantan epoch [our epoch] what the Romans were for the fourth [previous epoch].”
“There stood in England a powerful and influential group of people who pushed matters openly towards a war with Germany and though whom the way was paved for the world war. Until 1908, or even, 1909, there existed in England extensive circles quite close to King Edward VII, who considered it an impossibility that Russia should ever be allowed to approach Constantinople or enjoy free passage through the Dardanelles. It is impossible to avoid realizing how powerful was the group who, like an outpost for mighty impulses, stood behind the puppets in the foreground.”
“Since intellectuality is so well-developed in England, this is where spirituality can be systemized, organized. The English folk element makes it to a certain extent necessary to materialize what is spiritual.”
“At the end of the fifth period [our epoch] the nature of everything must be filled with the culture that is to arise out of the English-speaking peoples. It has always been taught that, just as the Germanic-British (English-speaking) element opposed the Roman, so will the Slav element come to oppose the English element.”
“The Western world never emancipated itself from the lodges. The influence of the lodges was always strongly at work. The lodges knew how to find channels through which to impress certain directions on people’s thoughts.” (Some of the other secret brotherhoods mentioned by Steiner were: Omladina, Narodna Odbrana, high grade Freemasons, Orange Lodge, Mazzini’s secret societies, Carbonari, Cortes of Spain, Illuminati, and high-level British politics.)
“The papal, hierarchical element strives for a kind of universal monarchy because it is the continuation of the universal Roman Empire. The British mission is to found a universal commercial and industrial monarchy over the whole earth.”
“Thus it comes about that certain secret streams which have set themselves some task or the other also set about achieving the exact opposite. These opposing tasks have the effect of obliterating all tracks. A certain Jesuit influence was brought to play so that the Masonic and Jesuit influences met; for there are higher instances, ‘empires’, which can quite well make use of both Masons and Jesuits in order to achieve what they want to achieve through the collaboration of the two.
“Those who enter the circle of certain societies practicing ceremonial magic are securing for themselves a power that reaches beyond death, a kind of Ahrimanic immortality. The more a person gains by way of materialistic immortality, or rather Ahrimanic immortality, the more he loses of the consciousness of true, genuine immortality. As a rule these societies are organized in such a way that the ceremonial magic they practice influences only those who are unaware of the implications, merely desiring to make contact with the spiritual world by means of symbolic ceremonies.”
Materialism
“Today’s tragic destiny of mankind is that in striving upwards today, human beings are endeavoring to do so not under the sign of spirituality but under the sign of materialism. The brotherhoods want to develop the impulses of the mercantile element, commerce and industry, in a materialistic way on a grand scale. This is today’s main conflict.”
“For many people, especially now in this materialistic age, thinking has come to be virtually contained in language. People today think hardly at all in thoughts but very strongly indeed in language, in words”
“Socialism is not something connected with truth; above all it is not connected with spiritual life, for what it wants is to connect itself with materialism.”
“The fifth post-Atlantean period [our epoch] is the one which is concerned with the development of the material world, and if the human being is not to degenerate totally into a mere accomplice of machines – which would make him into nothing more than an animal – then a path must be found which leads from these very machines to the life of the spirit. The priority for those working practically with machines is that they take spiritual impulses in their own soul. From machines, in particular, a path will truly have to be found into the spiritual world.”
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Truth and Spiritual Science
Truth for Steiner was the antidote for untruthfulness. Materialism was the karmic result of this untruthfulness. He saw materialism as “turning away” from the truth of the reality that behind physical material substance is the spirit. Materialism is the result of believing that maya (illusion) is real, the only real truth in the world. Materialism is promoted by science to teach that only material substance, discovered by the five senses, is real – the human soul and spirit are not real.
Modern materialists avoid truth at all cost and attempt to live in the physical world without any connection to the spiritual world or the spiritual development of humanity. Life ends at the grave and essentially means nothing. This is the karma of living in an untruthful age where lies, distortions of the truth, and evil intentions to extinguish the spiritual self of the individual are prevalent.
Our age is so filled with disinformation that the seeking soul can get lost in the fog of untruthfulness and be overwhelmed with the deadening forces of materialism. Only Truth, Beauty, and Goodness can raise the human soul to the spirit and leave behind the evil of a materialistic world. Through spiritual science, the evil of modern science can be defeated as the knowledge and wisdom of the spiritual world brings salvation to the seeker of Truth.
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Our Spirit 