Ordeal of the spirit

One of the necessary exercises for every person who wants to go beyond the soul's natural predisposition is positivity. We need it very much when we are dealing with technical development in the future. Negativity does come naturally, it is not difficult to panic in view of this development, or at least to have a fear of the future. I refer to the many places on the Internet where you can read about the dangers and the diabolical, satanic significance of this technical development. As a human being in our time, I can only assume that no trials will be imposed on us that we will not be able to endure.

When I became acquainted with anthroposophy, we had an older colleague friend who showed us the way through the Gesamtausgabe of Rudolf Steiner's work. He also pointed out the dangers of Ahriman's arrival in our time. He always said "Ahriman prepares his arrival well." But it also means that we, as human beings, have to prepare ourselves well for his arrival.

In nature, we are the only creatures that have the spirit directly with us and we are actually obliged to endure the ordeal of technical development with that spirit. The spirit is a triumphant phenomenon, but becomes paralysed by the fact that man does not want to connect his will with the spirit and prefers to cherish the possible downfall in a form of lust, in order to at the same time be afraid of it and to warn against it.

Positivity lifts us out of the undernature, but with the help of that positivity we then have to learn to give a different form to our thinking than it has by nature.

Anyone can do that. In these texts, on this website of philosophical reflections, I don't want that. I want to deliberately search for the positive possibilities for people to escape from this threat, whereby at the same time this escape will mean that the prepared arrival of Ahriman will be received as well as possible. I don't want to say at all that I can reform the world myself. But what I do know is that in every human being the spirit lives and that every human being is in fact able to come to a direct self-awareness of the spirit.

More than a century ago there was a great initiated on earth who has given us very specific possibilities to prepare ourselves for the arrival of Ahriman. Physically we can hardly prepare ourselves for this because our opponent in technology has a much greater power than we do. But from a spiritual point of view we can prepare ourselves and there we will have to look for areas to which this power does not have access. When people educate themselves in such a way that they can live in these areas, they have also formed a counterbalance for the rest of humanity against the downward effect of technology.

Thanks to Rudolf Steiner we know that electricity is decaying light from the cosmos, decaying light ether, and that magnetism is decaying chemical, sound ether. So in the electromagnetic field we live in an area that is as far below nature as the ether qualities go beyond it. Positivity lifts us out of the undernature, but with the help of that positivity we then have to learn to give a different form to our thinking than it has by nature. When we can hold out in that thinking for a long time, then we ourselves feel how we are elevated above our nature. And in the work of Rudolf Steiner we find the confirmation of this. As proof the following quote:

“From this way of thinking, to which the various forces that tear man apart have access, one must make a clear distinction with the other way, which is only applied in spiritual science. It is a very different way of presenting, a very different way of thinking. It is, contrary to the analytical way of thinking, a formative way of thinking.

If you look more closely, if you follow what I try to say in the various books on spiritual science, you will say to yourself: Not so much the difference in what is communicated - you can judge that in one way or another - but you have to become aware that the whole way of classifying the whole world, the whole nature of the representations, is different. This is form-giving, it gives enclosed image elements, it tries to give contours and colours through the contours. You will be able to follow this throughout the explanation: it doesn't have that distinctive, that the whole science of today has. This difference of the how as well as of the what must be emphasized. So there is a formative way of thinking that has been specially developed and that aims to lead into the transcendental worlds. For example, if you take the book "How to obtain consciousness in higher realms", which describes such a path in the transcendental worlds, you will find that in it everything that the thoughts and representations claim is built up on the form-giving thinking.

This is something that is needed in our time. Because shape-giving thinking has a very specific quality. If you think in an analytical way, if you think as the current natural scientist thinks, then you think like certain spirits of the Ahrimanic world, and therefore these Ahrimanic spirits can penetrate into your soul. But if you take the formative thinking, the metamorphosed thinking, I could also call it the Goetheant-based thinking, as it shows for example in the design of our columns and capitals and the like, if you take this formative thinking, which is also taken into account in all the books that I have tried to bring into the field of spiritual science, then this thinking is closely connected with the human being. As form-giving as man works with his own thinking, it can only be that of those beings that are connected with the normal development of mankind. That is the special thing. This means that you can never take the wrong path if you are involved in form-giving thinking through spiritual science. There you can never lose yourself to the different spiritual beings that want to influence you. Of course they go through your being. But as soon as you think in terms of form (shaping, creative), as soon as you make an effort to not only breed and distinguish within yourself, but to think in that way, if this modern spiritual science really wants, then you remain within yourself, then you cannot have the feeling of just being hollowed out. That is why, when one stands on the standpoint of our spiritual science, one so often emphasizes the Christ impulse, because the Christ impulse lies in the straight line of formative thinking.
(In German there is always 'gestaltendes denken', which I have translated as 'form-giving' thinking, but I would also like to call it 'giving shape', or even 'creative' thinking).”
GA 187, p. 178 et seq.

What is giving shape, form-giving, creative thinking?