Yes, when one lives in this world, then one truly sees that an ever more chaotic picture is arising, a kind of insane untruth that is not only taking place in the heads and hearts of people, but that also becomes visible in facts on the world stage. One can actually no longer do anything with it. One would most prefer to withdraw somewhere on the Mookerhei into a little hut and have no newspaper and no telephone and nothing anymore, and just continue to live a little as it happens to present itself.

But yes, then one is also not a human being, so one cannot be satisfied with that either. One must of course nevertheless remain constantly awake to what is happening on the world stage, and then simply suffer along with the fact that it is such chaos. And then one can of course say, in the heads and hearts of people it is such chaos because it is chaos in the world, but I prefer to turn it around, I say, because there is such chaos in the heads and hearts of people, it ultimately also becomes visible on the world stage.

That is unavoidable. And then the question is, what is that actually based on, that there is such a decline in the human capacity of thinking, feeling and willing. A few years ago I made an attempt to publish my thoughts about that in three small books.

Learn to think, learn to feel and to do, with an exclamation mark. But one can actually say, if one is now a few years further on, then the picture has already changed enormously again and has fallen into further decadence. And on the one hand one can say, it has to do with it, and I of course always say that, that the human being essentially has a lazy animal within, is not that, I do not want to say that, but does have it within, which would most prefer just to enjoy and leave things as they are.

There is also still a bit of a life of thought, that can also be somewhat tormenting, and feelings can be entirely tormenting, but otherwise one would actually most prefer to be left alone, as in that hut on the Mookerhei. But that is of course one side of the matter, that a human being has no inclination at all to rise and to do something within oneself, through which the descending development that arises on the basis of passivity is reversed into an ascending development, but that always rests on activity. And outwardly one can still be quite active, but inwardly that laziness is a predominant problem, and it is not at all seen that it makes a difference whether one is inwardly passive or inwardly active.

One naturally lives with the question of how it can be that the human being in our time allows oneself to be seduced into thinking, feeling and willing along with a government, a world government, that thinks, feels and wills so crookedly. One would say that even if one is passive, one would rise up against that which is proclaimed to us as truth. I made quite a number of videos about this in the time 2020, 2021, when we were in a crisis, about the peculiar phenomenon that thoughts apparently break off after they have been thought, and when a next thought comes, one does not look back to the previous one, as a result of which the connection between the thoughts is not there, and one can therefore make us believe anything.

What one says today, one has forgotten again tomorrow; what is said today, one has forgotten again tomorrow, and so one does not notice that one thing does not agree with the other at all, and that it cannot be so, and that it is not logical. So one can rely on it that all sorts of things can be served up that are desired.

Now it has meanwhile become clear that I myself live, let me say, thanks to the inspiring effect of anthroposophy, and that I have been doing that for more than forty years, and that is par excellence a path of development.

That is a path in which one knows that one as a human being is a developing being, and that one is therefore not some kind of lazy animal that simply follows instincts, but that there is in one a possibility to rise and to set oneself to develop oneself. And now one of the remarkable exercises for that, and it is regarded as an exercise for love — and one can notice that it is so if one does it — that exercise is the so-called review exercise. That is that when one has the day behind oneself, one sits down quietly for a moment and tries to think back in reverse order what has passed that day and what one has done.

It is not at all about having regret about things one has done, or being extremely satisfied about things one has done, but it is about the backward-flowing time that one thereby of course enters. One notices, when one does that, that one keeps shooting back into forward-flowing time, that it is very difficult to truly remain in that backward movement, namely that one walks down a staircase when one had walked up it, and so on. But one can begin with a number of simple moments from that day. In any case, at some point one arrives at the moment of waking up in the morning.

It can also be that one does not reach that at all, but if one truly keeps trying, then naturally the moment comes that one can, and then one arrives at the moment of having woken up. And now it is remarkable that we as human beings are so accustomed to untruth and incorrectness that one does not continue then. And if one does continue, then one jumps to the previous evening.

And what does one do then? One excludes a whole part of one’s life in that thinking back. Why? Yes, because one knows nothing about it. One has no consciousness of what happened in that intermediate part when one was asleep.

And so one assumes, or one assumes nothing at all, because one does not think about it at all. And if one were to think about it, then one gets quite far with a number of scientific facts, namely that the brain waves then change and that one therefore no longer has consciousness. And then one can calmly switch that off.

In the last days I suddenly saw very clearly that this is a kind of fundamental error, which has to do with the fact that the human being thinks so poorly that one as a human being is capable of living in a complete untruth, because one has always already done so. One is accustomed to living in untruth. One may believe in a life after death, perhaps even in a life before birth, one may believe that at night one is somewhere in one way or another also with one’s consciousness, one can believe all that, but when it comes to factuality, then that belief suddenly no longer counts, because then one stops at waking up and one does not go back, because there is nothing.

One can of course fantasize a great deal about what might be there, and there are also people who have very vivid dreams, one can of course put those in place of that realm of nothingness in sleep. But one is in any case not honest in that, not even if one believes to have clairvoyant experiences from the night. It is about the fact that when one arrives at the morning, one thoroughly realizes that one has also lived in that time before waking up, and that from a spiritual point of view one has by no means been unconscious.

One is so for earthly consciousness, but that does not mean that one has been unconscious for all forms of consciousness. And it would be honest, at least upon waking, at that moment of thinking back at waking, to realize: in any case my body lived in those past hours, and perhaps something escapes me that I nevertheless experienced. And if one were to dwell a bit longer on that meditatively with one’s review exercise, then something would certainly change.

Not that one would then — that is of course what everyone who does that hopes — not that one would suddenly become a great clairvoyant, that is not it, but rather that one begins to experience a continuity in one’s conscious existence. Although one does not know it, it is so that by feeling it anew each time, that moment of waking up and the peculiar phenomenon that for one’s consciousness one was actually not there for hours before, one asks: can it be true that one really was not there? Are it only brain waves that then change, whereby one does not think and does not feel with one’s brain in that time? If one truly engages with that, then it must actually be so that one considers that that cannot be true.

And I think that here lies a fundamental error, one that also has to do with our time, with the disbelief in a spiritual world, also a fear of it — for one could also say that it is frightening that while one is asleep one nevertheless experiences all sorts of things and then no longer knows it, so one would rather not know that. But that does mean that even if one is an honest human being and truly makes an effort to speak and think the truth, that if one does not become aware of this abyss between waking up and going to sleep the previous evening, or in the middle of the night — one wakes up more often of course — if one does not become aware that this is an abyss in which something does indeed take place or could take place, in which one is also present as a human being, then one actually lives in a fundamental error, even if one tries to be an entirely honest human being.

I suddenly saw that in the past days, and I have of course seen it before, and I have also read it in Rudolf Steiner, that it is important in that review exercise not to stop at waking up, but to place oneself back into that abyss that lies before it. But it became so very clear in the past days, because one sees that humanity is moving toward a realization of a chaotic, erring thinking and feeling, and that is truly something to be very concerned about.

For one can of course think of oneself that one is doing everything right, and most people also have that, and one must also have that to a certain extent, because otherwise one cannot live. But it is of course about more than everyday morality, the everyday feeling that one is in the truth, that one tries to be decent, that one tries to do the good, that one tries to be kind, and so on. It goes beyond that, it goes far beyond that. And if we in our time do not awaken to the fact that we are also human beings when we sleep, somewhere, not in this body, but still somewhere, and that we were also human beings before we were born, and that we remain human beings when we have died, albeit in a certain metamorphosis, if we do not at least begin to have a question about that, then we live in a fundamental error.

And one can best become aware of that, I think, when one does such a review exercise and then arrives at the morning and does not ask oneself: what was actually before that? Then one lives in a fundamental error. And how then does one want to be in the truth in everyday life? So much for now. It is very difficult in this time to stand firm in the face of everything that is presented to one. And one nevertheless seeks standpoints in which that becomes possible.