Continuation of Waymark 12 on the lecture cycle by R. Steiner from 1917.
The highest spirits in the cosmos (superior to the solar system) decided that the spiritual nuclei contained in the lowest saturnine substance should be furthered by an activity of large groups of human souls. As support, they called in a group of more highly evolved spirit beings from other places in the solar system to guide and accompany the human souls.
The time estimated for this corresponds to one year on a cosmic scale. According to today’s human experience of time, this corresponds to hundreds of thousands of earthly years. The cosmogony conveyed in the Eastern spiritual teachings can be used as a basis for analysing the measures of time.
The whole process can be traced in cyclic up-and-down movements. The movement currently taking place, after a turning point in the middle of the 19th century, is now in an ascending process. According to the plan, the human souls, deeply immersed in the physical-material, in cycles of repeated earth lives, are to bring the spiritual grains to be refined, contained in physical matter, bound to the soul development of human beings, back to their spiritual origin in an ascending way and thus complement the cosmic-solar-spiritual. According to the present state of the plan, this would still require several thousand human years until the next intermediate point of ascent.
In the course of the temporally past descending processes, elemental beings and spiritual beings of the most diverse levels helped and assisted the souls in their immersion into matter. Their task was to promote this process with the help of heredity, procreation, development in groups and tribes and later in peoples. These groups of lower devas (Western: angels) carried out their task under the supervision of the higher spirit beings. Their leader was and is the entity that provided the lower physical substance to be refined for the bodies: Saturn or Yahweh/Jehovah.
If the descending development was characterised by blood ties of the human groups and the affiliations to families, clans, tribes (races) or peoples, this orientation should have ended since the reversal point. At the time of the point of reversal, a great conflict took place in the nearest subtle planes, which resulted in the lower elemental beings and lower spirit beings (devas) being thrown down from the higher subtle planes of the earthly to the lowest, that is, the physical plane. They, who had hitherto worked indirectly through the instincts of human beings, now became the incarnated human souls in the subtle-physical. But since they do not want to give up their fundamental saturnine orientation and can now have a highly active direct effect on human beings, entirely new conditions have arisen for the planet since then, for their leader, the name is given, does not deviate from his previous aim of further binding human souls to the earthly-material.
On the subject of dealing with the intensified Saturnian devas, R. Steiner gives the following hint:
“In the future man must step over the earth by saying to himself: certainly, I move into a physical body with my birth, but this is a transitory stage. I actually remain in the spiritual world, I am aware that only a part of my being is bound to the earth, that I do not step out with my whole being from the world in which I am between death and new birth. – This feeling of belonging to the spiritual world must develop. In earlier centuries this only cast a false shadow in that people did not want to understand physical life and practised false asceticism, believing that they could attain it through all kinds of measures to kill off the physical body. It must be understood, however, that the human being does not become aware through such false asceticism, but through connecting with the spiritual, the substantial-essential: In reality, this human being is not a mere earth being, but a being that belongs to the whole cosmos.”
The processes now initiated by the highest spiritual beings are to enable the human soul to complete the process of reincarnations through individual spiritual development and to realise the goal of ascent with the spiritual substance gained, released from the physical body, as well as the astral and the mental. It is an occult secret in what “quantity” this goal will be fulfilled, in the sense of the number of ascended human souls. As already said, what was planned was a process of this happening that would continue for thousands of years.
In response to the resistance of the saturnine elements clinging to the physical, the highest spiritual beings have initiated the instruction of human souls through the dissemination of spiritual truths. Thus, beginning at the end of the 19th century, the publication and dissemination of spiritual-scientific teachings is to be understood. Let us mention the most important ones, without disregarding other smaller impulses: H.P. Blavatsky (Secret Doctrine), Alice Bailey and the Tibetan Master, R. Steiner, H. Roerich and Mahatma M. (Agni Yoga). With these important teachings for the instruction of human souls, the process of resistance against the saturnine whispered was started. How difficult this daily spiritual struggle is can be seen in the appearance of the Nazi regime in Germany, its racist ideologies and the resulting world war. Today, almost 80 years after the end of the war, after a hopeful period of a few decades 50 to 60 years ago, with a strong Christ impulse into the emotional life of humanity (Rudolf Steiner announced this Christ mission for the 20th century, as did the Tibetan Master D.K.), we are witnessing the return of the blood-and-soil ideology and its racism. The saturnine whisperers are too successful. The Christian religions that incorporate the Old Testament obviously do not know what they are doing. All religions that lack the truth of reincarnation are, as already described, a damaging error. A former good or helpful thing became, after the turning point, an untimely good and thus evil.
Now, however, humanity additionally faces the chaos of increasingly destroyed nature, climate change and the looming consequences. In previous contributions in this place, the resulting dangers for humanity have been sufficiently pointed out and H. Roerich has described the possible processes in detail in her letters.
The text given here is based, as announced, on Rudolf Steiner’s lecture cycle of 1917 (see Waymark 12).
