It is the belief that spiritual entities and their activities have no part in human affairs. People do not like to speak of events in human affairs having spiritual causes. Anyone who knows the real situation, however, is well aware that psychic or spiritual influences from the spiritual world on human beings here in the physical world are, in fact, particularly powerful at the present time. It is not at all uncommon to find people today who will tell you that a dream, or something like a dream — they do not normally understand what is going on, but these are always non-physical elements — drove them to a particular course of events.
Psychic influences of this kind play a much greater role today than materialists are prepared to believe. Anyone who has the opportunity to go into such things will find them at every turn. If you were to take the published works of today’s better poets and do a statistical analysis of how many poems have come into existence in a way for which there is a rational explanation, and how many by an inspiration — a definite spiritual influence from the other world, with the poet experiencing it in a dream or something similar — you would be surprised how great is the percentage of direct influences from the spiritual world.
People are influenced by the spiritual world to a much greater extent than they are prepared to admit. And the human actions performed under the influence of the spiritual world are indeed significant ones.
Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 177 – Fall of the Spirits of Darkness – Lecture 9: The Battle between Michael and ‘The Dragon’ – Dornach, 14 October 1917
Translated by Anna R. Meuss
The great Rudolf Steiner Quotes Site 