Spiritualist seances: Torturing the dead

One way of torturing the dead, one way of failing to show them love, is to participate in spiritualist seances. For this forces them to manifest in a particular language. The dead person is expected to speak a particular language, for even with table-rapping the signs have to refer to a particular language.

What is done to the dead by forcing them to express themselves in a particular language might very well be compared with pinching someone living in the flesh with red-hot tongs. So painful for the dead are spiritualist seances which expect them to express themselves in a particular language. For in their normal life the dead are striving to free themselves from the differentiations between languages.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 174 – The Karma of Untruthfulness – Volume Two: LECTURE TWENTY-THREE – Dornach, 22 January 1917

This lecture is not available at rsarchive.org. This book  is still being sold and marketed by the publisher, Rudolf Steiner Press.

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Selfishness is combated through logical thinking

Selfishness is combated through logical thinking. If thinking regulates itself logically, desires can no longer come up and the body works automatically. We close our eye automatically if a fly approaches it. Spirits of Movement built this reflex into us. What we do automatically is always correct and wise; what we do voluntarily is subject to error. 

Sprits of Movement also had to learn; they made a lot of mistakes before movements like eye closure became automatic in us and before these movements could be carried out so wisely. Such movements are completely independent of our personal feelings, wishes, etc. That’s the way our thinking must become. The right sequences of thoughts must be strung together entirely by themselves; thoughts must not be produced for selfish reasons and purposes. They must proceed from previous ones in a purely logical way.

We learn logical thinking from anthroposophical teachings, when the mighty facts that can all be understood with the intellect, even if one can’t see and investigate them oneself, are placed before us and we try to grasp them with our thinking. Thereby we’re diverted from lines of thought that only group around our own small lower ego and we’re directed towards great, comprehensive ideas. That’s the way we work on our astral body.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 266 – Esoteric lesson – Kassel, June 27, 1909

The welding together of human beings with machines

I have told you that in this epoch we have to solve the problem of how the radiations from human states of mind are carried over into machines; of how human beings are to be brought into relation with an environment which must become increasingly mechanized. […]

The only question is whether in the course of world-history they are going to be brought on to the scene by men who are unselfishly aware of the great aims of earth-evolution and wish to shape these developments for the healing of mankind, or by groups of men who want to use them for their own or the group’s selfish ends.

The point is not what is going to happen, for it certainly will happen, but how it happens — how these things are handled. The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution. 

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 178 – The Wrong and Right Use of Esoteric Knowledge – Lecture 3 – Dornach, 25th November 1917

Translated by Charles Davy

Previously posted on January 27, 2018

About Intellectual Property and Copyrights

Nowadays lawsuits are enacted against the stealing of thoughts, of the spiritual property of others. Lawsuits against plagiarism were never instituted by the Rosicrucians. They did not mind what the personal source was from which such things went out; the main thing was that they came into the world. It is a vicious custom of our time to institute legal proceedings against the stealing of thoughts.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 284 – On Chaos and Cosmos – Berlin, October 19th, 1907

Previously posted on January 26, 2018

A day will come when we can no longer hide the good or evil within us

At the present time we can more or less hide the good or evil within us. A day will come when we can no longer do this, when the good or the evil will be written indelibly on our forehead, on our body, and even on the face of the earth. Humanity will then be split into two races. In the same way that we encounter boulders or animals today, in the future we will encounter beings of pure evil and ugliness. When a human being’s facial features become an expression of that individual’s karma, then people will separate themselves according to the stream in which they apparently belong. Everything depends on whether human beings have conquered the lower nature within them or whether this lower nature has triumphed over the spirit. 

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 94 – Reading the Pictures of the Apocalypse: Appendix: Cosmogony – Paris, 14th June 1906

Translated by James H. Hindes

Previously posted on February 27, 2017