The task of the Europeans

There are, of course, many different ways of trying to counteract, deflect, transform and so on certain tendencies in the world. We can take to the streets, we can start a revolution, we can wave flags, we can do all sorts of things, but who will give us insight into the answer to the question: what is the task of European people? Where does our strength lie? What is the intention that we develop in this period of culture?

The painful thing is - it appears to be painful for us - that this no longer concerns content. So far, the cultural periods have brought richness of content, but now we are at a turning point. And that turning point is, that with the power of the Representative of Man, we can come to the point that from now on we take everything that is in the world into our individuality and give it back, starting with intellectuality. Then we don't have a content for our culture, but we have a process, an act, something that has to be done. And that is a painful thing, and the human being really has to get used to that, that there is an enormous wealth of external appearances, but they can only come when something has been reversed in the inner self. That is a process you cannot stay out of as an individuality. You cannot place your instrument for artistic activity outside yourself and then set to work with it. The canvas and the palette with the colours and then paint a picture or take your flute and play a sonata by Bach. That is already closer, but it is still something outside of you, something you experience a lot of, but it is something that works outwards.

And now we are asked to take an inner step that is actually not seen at all. So the only thing you get for it is that you become a different person, but that someone else will really attach much special value to that is not the first thing that happens. So you can't reveal yourself as easily as it was the case in previous cultural periods. You can still do that, but then you do it with the old power and with the forces from the previous cultural periods, even when you are thinking. Then you can still do that very well with the forces from the soul of reason and soul of mind. But the consciousness soul is a process. And you don't reach it by going out on the streets to protest, or hoping that by writing articles you will stop the coming of 5G and so on and so forth, that's not possible. It has to be done in a completely different way, it has to resemble that image (the Representative of Man), namely that we here in Europe become people who are representatives of humanity as it is now. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is something to have great optimism and also great enthusiasm about and a certainty that, when the European people - not everyone has to do that - but when certain groups of people take up that enthusiasm and put it into action, then Europe fulfils its task, then there is the soul of Europe, then Europe knows its own identity, then there is no need for nationalisms, because then every people with all the individuals in it know who they are from the consciousness soul. Then there is no need to constantly contrast that with the other - this is also true in miniature, of course. Well, that is what I, since I understood it from Rudolf Steiner's work, what we have to develop: connecting the intellectuality with the individuality. That is the first task and it lies in an invisible area, but the realisation of that task has far-reaching consequences, also for yourself. So that is what I want to say over and over again. And whatever you may bring forward, whatever you may be able to do at this time, I will always find it less, however great it may be, than this reversal that man really has to make in his inner self.

And the anthroposophists have enough knowledge, enough know-how, enough background information, to really be able to do that.

That the societies, the secret societies, those groups have so much power has to do with the fact that they give their members in lower degrees certain signs and grips and words and prayers and images, whereby no understanding is necessary and is not given either. The understanding would be needed, but it is not given. Rudolf Steiner describes this and you can see it, you don't have to be clairvoyant to see it, that people who are members of such an order, of such a lodge, that in their etheric body - you may not see that - but you see that they are filled with an unconscious wisdom. That people who experience that going through the degrees, in an unconscious or subconscious way - not in the day consciousness, but in that other consciousness in the etheric, that they are imbued with wisdom. But because they have no conscious preparation for that, they are open to the influence of the higher degrees. That could not happen to us anthroposophists, because we do not have those signs, we do not have those words, we do not have those kinds of grips. We have knowledge, knowing, and we have the full possibility to study spiritual science. When you absorb all that knowing - even if you forget it immediately - you have consciously gone through it with intellectuality, with common sense and that protects you from all unconscious interventions from outside.

It is very special to know and be able to rely on it, that you cannot get into such a position, where members of brotherhoods are, who may have a much greater wisdom than we do, because it is symbolically brought in, but they are not aware of it and therefore they are susceptible to influence. That cannot happen when you study spiritual science, which proceeds in full sensible consciousness. So you also have to study, you have to study Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science. It doesn't have to be a lot, but it has to be done. You have to take that step of connecting the intellectual with the individual, and that means that you actually train and strengthen your thinking capacity in such a way that it does not withdraw from you in the end while you are awake, so that there are no moments in which you do not either see or hear what you want to.

For a doctor, that is a very special quality to try to develop, that when you are watching and listening to a patient nothing escapes you, that you don't say afterwards: Oh what did he say again? That you really follow that exactly, and of course that must also come about in the togetherness between people, that you do not float away in your own thoughts, which are half-dreams, but that you are fully conscious of reality. The awakening that then arises, that becomes greater and greater, protects you from those two forces that are constantly seeking to entangle themselves outside your being and then take you into their power. In fact, all the exercises that you find in Rudolf Steiner's work are set in that light, but from the state we are in, which comes from the past, we are always very well able to get round that and dream away again with the ordinary non-individual consciousness and call that meditation or something... What matters is that what we think is imbued with will. That is actually the basic sentence. In certain groups we are of course already well on the way to doing this, we have done it many times, but actually we should - let's say that the Netherlands plays an important role in the development of the consciousness soul in Europe and that in the Netherlands in all big cities or villages groups would arise that are regularly engaged in bringing the will into concrete thinking. Then you would get a very different effect in society, in culture. Not the will to go out into the streets and march there with slogans. No, you stay in your seat, but you bring the will that is an individual will into universal thinking.

Thinking is universal.

Not when you infuse your favourite thoughts with feelings, but when you take objective thoughts and you bring your individual will into them.

I have put that in the form that you consciously set your thinking in motion. That is the will. That is, you don't just start, but you reflect on the fact that you want to start thinking and you bring that thinking will into your thinking, so to speak. But there are also meditations given by Rudolf Steiner, where this is given in words, as a process.

The difficult thing is that most people do not believe that this is really where salvation would come from, that you should actually start doing this and that it would work miracles. People don't believe that. They think: No, you have to do deeds. But this is a deed and this is the deed, namely, that you connect the individuality with the universality. And when you learn to move with your individuality, to move in that universal realm of thought, then you enter a realm of mind, of which you then know more and more - the transition is abrupt, from one moment to the next: now I am no longer in the realm of nature, of the body, and certainly not in the realm of sub-nature, of electromagnetism, with my thinking - but I find myself with that universal thinking in a realm which has become so free, because I have brought the individual will into it. That seems to be something that is only valid for that one person, but it is not. It is something that, if it were to happen in many places, would really bring about a total transformation in Europe, and in all continents where it would be practised. I dare say that with all my heart. But you have to start with a kind of modesty, that you sit down together or alone in your chair, that nobody sees what you are doing, that you have faith in the power of the spirit, that transforming power, and that you go your way with very small steps and with hardly any content.

A listener says: I understand that this is parallel to the development of morality. You speak about the undernature, we need a compensation and this is the way of morality, the way of compensation. But morality cannot be done in the chair, it appeals to the collectivity.

But morality is first grasped individually in pure thought, and then collectively, possibly, in a community of action. But it is something that really has to be a priority, that you have to get away from sub-nature first and then also from nature itself, and as far as sub-nature is below nature, you have to go beyond nature with your thinking. And there is an enormous resistance there, because this electromagnetic radiation contains, as we know since Rudolf Steiner's lectures in St. Gallen, a human double (Doppelgänger), which ascends from the earth, as it were, shortly after birth and only leaves it again just before death. So in your whole life on earth you have a companion with you who has no intention whatsoever of letting you free in your supernatural thinking, who clings to you as it were and pulls you down and who has a very strong will and a very strong intellect, but no feeling. Therefore, when you bring the will into the thinking, that is where the feeling arises and the double cannot have that, precisely that, and that is where the access to morality lies - because that is what Rudolf Steiner also said in his time - with the same reasoning with which we now want to solve the problems, we also created the problems.

That is not possible, you cannot solve the problems with that same intellect, the problems that the intellect first created. Something else has to be developed from which you then get the right intuitions to solve those problems - and that lies in that willed but lived thinking.

I experience this as an area of untouchability for human beings, and at a certain point I had also read with Rudolf Steiner that this area really is untouchable - that Ahriman cannot enter it, but neither can Lucifer. Where did I read it?

You put the book away again and you know you've read it, but you can't remember where... Until at some point, after so many years, you suddenly read that book again and do write down exactly where it says. It's in the last lecture of GA 187. The moment thinking no longer thinks in abstract concepts, but becomes forming, shaping thinking, you have a willing, living, shaping thinking that is untouchable by those counterpowers and where you are living in the realm of morality. That is what you would like to see, that it would come about everywhere.

Question: Can you make such a statement concrete, without using terminology?

Well, yes, that is possible. Imagine that it is springtime and you see plants sprouting and blossoming everywhere, and eventually they get flowers and bear fruit. Then use your thinking not to think about that plant - not even to think about the primal idea of Goethe's plant - but use your thinking to grow with that plant, to really go into this image, but not into a static image, but into the growing image. That thinking is still thinking, is the same element as your conceptual thinking, but you are completely one with the growing process of that plant. Even if you do it wrong - that does not matter. Even if you do very strange things, which the plant would never do, it is not about that. It is about ‘Gestaltendes Denken', as Rudolf Steiner calls it. It is as if you are painting, but then of course painting is still much too superficial, it remains on a canvas. But here it is really the growing power of the plant itself, which not only grows but also forms. You could do such an exercise. Then you gradually begin to realise that it is really something quite different, whether you think a series of concepts or you think with the thinking something that is formed. Then, gradually, with the quality that you develop on the basis of that, you can go into deeper levels of conceptual thinking. That can also be so, that one concept can really grow out of the other

from the other as if it were a plant. But for the time being, if you haven't developed that, conceptual thinking is not suitable for that.

There is a book in which thoughts grow like a plant, and with that book you should be able to develop ‘gestaltendes Denken' in concepts. That book is Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom and then all his written books are growing and shaping thought. But then you really have to move with the thinking, dive into it, not look at it from the outside. Then you will experience that, this growing of thinking.

I must finish there this evening.

Europa and Zeus