For the descending arc of evolution, materialism has necessarily been the dominant trend. It has produced important developments in philosophy, science, religious expression, and technology throughout history, reaching a culmination point in the 19th century.
The heliocentric model
Since then, all cultural developments should have then been spiritual; those that are not — the vast majority — have gone against the evolutionary current.
The culmination of the materialistic world view lies in the middle or in the last third of the nineteenth century. [1]
The time when human progress was made possible through the constant refinement of the physical forces is already over. In the future, too, humankind will progress, but only through spiritual development, through development on a higher level than that of the processes of the physical plane. [2]
The common denominator of many of the “visionary” movements and ideologies that have appeared within the 20th and 21st centuries, has been that they sought to accomplish a spiritual aim, but through material means, owing to the retrogressive action of materialism.
Whether fascism, eugenics, communism, or zionism, the common thread throughout all of these ideologies is that they are executed through state imposition or military force, which is a miscarriage of the evolutionary process.
.jpeg)
In the case of fascism, its objective was absolute social cohesion through the mechanism of a centralized authority, essentially in place of God. The same applies for communism, with regard to social and economic equality.
What is today called socialism exists only as an abortive and impossible experiment, as a final, I may say desperate, struggle in a receding wave of humanity's [development]. It cannot bring about any really positive result. What it sets out to achieve, can only be achieved through living activity; the pillar of strength is not enough.Socialism can no longer be controlled with inanimate forces. The ideas of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity were the last ideas to flow out of the inanimate. Everything that still runs on that track is fruitless and doomed to die. [3]
At the extreme end of this type of reasoning, the Zionist movement has worked for decades on a militaristic project to bring about the appearance of their messiah, believing through such tactics, God’s hand can be forced.
The aspiration towards a societal utopia or a messianic age has been an unconscious driving force behind the various “world solutions” presented to humanity, and is the natural outcome of the expiry of the materialistic age.
Since the last third of the nineteenth century the spiritual has been streaming around us; it is streaming into earthly evolution…in those people who refuse…the spiritual streams unconsciously to them. [2]
But the parallel rise in materialism since this expiry has produced the extreme internal contradictions inherent to such aspirations, such that they have been catastrophic in their result.
Even post-war “progressive” movements or world-solutions are identical in essence, and the disagreements among any of the aforementioned movements have always been surface level.
For the abstract League of Nations will not solve the international problem. Such abstractions do not bring the people together all over the earth.If the raising of man is actually to occur, then the experiences we have with the physical world must lead us over into the spiritual world...They must not lead us, however, to dictate program truths. [4]
In recent years, the belief in technological means — the fulcrum of which is artificial intelligence — as a substitute for spiritual development, has appeared as the latest and possibly final embodiment of the materialistic worldview.
This is a continuation of the prevailing attempt to accomplish spiritual aims through material means; ideas that express one can talk to God or angels, or achieve immortality through AI, represent the furthest extreme of this trend.
Underlying these beliefs is a synthetic cosmology: one that presents the universe as a simulation or a hologram, rather than a living Being.
.jpeg)
Virtual spaces, like social media, are in essence, simulating a spiritual experience, that of connectivity. They are a synthetic version of the astral plane, which should be the next plane of development above the physical.
They are addictive precisely due to the receding potency of life on the physical plane.
The world in the near future will give men very, very little through the purely physical plane. [5]
Many of the ideologies of the 20th century have rightfully been regarded as failed experiments, as evidenced by their violent measures.
However, these measures are in contradistinction with this type of “spiritual materialism” unfolding in modern times. There is no imposing central authority, nor an ideological basis one must accept.
Once the technology is developed and spread widely, it is now an individual matter how someone chooses to interact with it, and whether they are susceptible to believing it can give them a real experience of the spiritual world.
The world has reached another turning point; a break with the past has been made, yet another danger presents itself that is entirely self-inflicted.
The only resolution is to cross the threshold into the spiritual world. If spiritual practices are not adopted, the soul will ultimately be weakened, and humanity will not pass into the clairvoyant age properly, for reasons I have described in this post.
There lives in mankind something that is not bound up with the already prevailing decline of the physical earth but becomes more and more spiritual just because of this physical decline. [2]
People choose to believe that things will continue in the same way. No, they will not. If life continues without the stimuli that come from the spiritual world, industry can go on, banks can be in existence and universities where all the sciences are taught, other professions can be developed—but everything will lead to decadence, to barbarism, to the fall of civilisation.
Those who are not willing to apply in practical life what can come out of Spiritual Science are working, not for ascent but for decline. And the majority of people today want decline and simply delude themselves into the belief that an ascent can still come out of it. [6]
.jpeg)
1. GA 204, Dornach, 3 April 1921: Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy, Lecture II
2. GA 193, Dornach, 4 November 1919: Lucifer and Ahriman, Lecture III
3. GA 93, Berlin, 2 January 1906: The Temple Legend III 20. The Royal Art in a New Form
4. GA 194, Dornach, 23 November 1919: The Mission of the Archangel Michael III. Michaelic Thinking. The Knowledge of Man as a Supersensible Being. The Michael Path and the Deepest Impulses of the Social Question
5. GA 186, Dornach, 21 December 1918: The Fundamental Social Demand of Our Times V. Understand One-Another
6. GA 202, Dornach, 26 December 1920: The Search for the New Isis, Divine Sophia, Lecture IV