Thoughts have no power, I said last time. And I tried to nuance that by saying that they can have power. And I really like that there are such nuanced responses to that, not only on YouTube, but also in the form of emails, that gives the courage to continue with this theme. One of the questions was: Isn’t there a text we could do or read together, through which we could jointly move toward a positive scenario, not a war scenario, but a positive world scenario. And I immediately know which quote from the work of Rudolf Steiner I would like to take for that. And so I took it. I will read it aloud in a moment. But before that I want to say something else, which is of course related to it. And that is that it would be important for us as human beings to reflect much more on the, let me say, spiritual part in us. We differ from the animal. Nowadays, saying something like that is a risky thing to do, but we really do differ from the animal, because we do not only have a soul, but we are also spiritual, we carry a part of our being in us that comes from the spiritual world and not just from the soul world. And yes, the question then of course is, where do you find that in yourself? Well, that is actually anthroposophy, one could say. And I try to go deeper into that in the other videos I make, those that I speak in German.

But when we talk about thought power?, and we say, well, by nature they don’t have that, but they can acquire it, then it is important that we reflect on this: Where in me is that part of my being that is not just soul, but that rises above it and comes from the spirit world? And it is precisely that part of our being that, in our current constitution, is extraordinarily deeply hidden. And on the other hand, it lies within easy reach. It is deeply hidden because the sensory impressions are so incredibly strong. And because of that, the spiritual part of our earthly life and our consciousness life is actually more or less suppressed. We live in a beautiful or a less beautiful or a terrible world that we take into ourselves through the senses. And those impressions are so strong that you fail to notice that you are constantly thinking within them. We naturally have the feeling that the sense impressions also immediately reveal to us what they are. If you think about it more deeply, then you know of course that that cannot be so, because then you would always know what you are seeing, what you are hearing, what you are feeling, and so on. That is not the case. So there is a certain other activity in us that adds itself to those sensory impressions, and we do not perceive that activity. We are constantly engaged in it, but it is overshadowed in a tremendous way by the sheer sensory impression, through which the conviction arises in us, more or less consciously, that we live in a purely material world. The sensory impressions conjure that up for us, more or less, that everything is material. And so it can happen that one is taught that thoughts, for example, also come from material existence. That they are a kind of exhalations or blossom-phenomena of the brain, and that in that sense, when we die, everything is simply gone. So that has to do with the overwhelming power of the sensory impressions and the mirror-image character of what actually tells us what we perceive. Namely, thinking. Now it is precisely that thinking in the human being which is the area where we are at home in spiritual existence. And that area is the very one we do not really notice. We do know the life of thoughts in the sense of associations, memories, thoughts of desire, thoughts of rejection, thoughts of fear, all sorts of things. And we also know scientific thinking, but we do not notice that this real, objective, spiritual thinking, that it is always at work in sensory perception, truly within it. So you know that something is a tree because you carry the idea of tree-being as a being of thought within you. And in small children, you can actually see that. I always find it so moving, that such a very small child, once it knows what a cat is, then it not only recognizes the one cat by which it learned what a cat is, but then also recognizes all cats as a cat. And even if it sees a picture with such a very simple drawing with a little head and two ears, a little body and two of those little legs and a tail hanging off the end. The child immediately sees: that is a cat. That is actually the proof that the human being is a spiritual being, and that it is something that, over the course of life, naturally becomes ever more developed. And that if you could grasp that, you would then recognize that spiritual part of being, that is purely active in all sense perception, within yourself.

Now Rudolf Steiner was an initiate in the spiritual mysteries at the beginning of the 20th century. And I do of course know how he was treated and how he is still treated, actually ridiculed and reduced from his greatness to a sort of unreliable little man. But when you know his work, you unlearn those thoughts and those feelings. This person, who was thus an initiate in the spiritual mysteries, experienced the First World War. He lived at that time and he experienced it up close and perceived the spiritual side of it – something an ordinary human being cannot simply do. One can have all sorts of ideas about it. But it is of course so that the whole event of such a war is also a factual event. And that factual event rests on certain spiritual facts. And you can reason about that, but that does not give you those facts. Someone who can look deeper has them, those spiritual facts, because they simply see them. Rudolf Steiner made great efforts to bring those spiritual perceptions and that spiritual knowledge he had – that he gained and also increased through continuous inner activity, so to speak – he made efforts to bring that spiritual knowledge to people. And on January 1, 1919 – so that is not long after the end of the First World War – he spoke about the actual cause of wars. And that seemed to me now a suitable text as a kind of first scenario, which we also need. So that we do not fall into the idea that you can write a scenario externally. That you can write about pretty little animals and flowers and trees. Because of course it’s not about that at all. It’s about human coexistence. And the question is, how do we envision that in the near and also distant future? And what could we do to make that vision become reality? So, when I got that question: Don’t you know a text that could serve as a kind of first scenario?, I immediately knew: this is the text, and I will now read it. It comes from a lecture volume in the Gesamtausgabe of Rudolf Steiner, number 187. And the quote is on page 179, as said, a lecture from January 1, 1919.

“When one gives oneself over to thoughts that exist according to the pattern of natural science, when one gives oneself over to them, then one cannot be equal to the present time. When one only wants to organize what exists here in the physical world, when one only thinks about what is here in the physical world and wants to recognize nothing else, then one only destroys. And one should not then be surprised when the struggle, whose rule one does not want to seek in the spiritual, when that struggle enters into physical life. Because that struggle, so to speak, strikes into the people. And when people do not want to fight out that struggle in their soul, then that struggle leads one against another, one people against another people, one human being against another human being. What happens here in the physical world can only be an image of the spiritual world. And it is thus: either the human being takes up the struggle in such a way that he fights it out in his own soul, that is to say, people deepen themselves spiritually, or this struggle, which passes through consciousness like through a sieve, when one only wants to think the way the present time thinks – either this struggle discharges by switching off the human being, the human soul, in the outer world, and that causes all that which you are now seeing. You will, if you think about such things, see that it is really time for present-day humanity to turn to the Spirit. This is, as it were, prefigured as a necessity by the events in the world.”

That is more than a century ago, not much, but about a century ago. And I think you will agree with me that this is not outdated. That it is the case that we as humanity are still in that condition in which we give all pride and dedication to the kind of thinking natural science does, while we neglect the thinking of the spiritual existence that pervades and penetrates all outer existence. And when we then see this terrible struggle, that we see in several places, that is unbearable to look at and in which you can only stand on both sides, in which you think of the people who are suffering there, and you must then realize that that is connected with the fact that humanity remains stuck in the sensory-material existence and does not rise up to the awareness of spiritual existence precisely in every human being… Yes, then you can only again and again try to awaken the awareness in yourself and in others that it really is high time that we realize this little piece of scenario.

I get the remark that I never laugh. Well, I’m doing it now. That of course has to do with the fact that what I’m saying is rather serious. But I have now laughed. And I hope to be able to continue next time with this form of scenario writing.