Spiritual science of Perception and the dogma of Materialism.
It was only when I began to see materialism as a dogmatic religion that I began to realize that the natural state of the human being is to be in connection with spiritual realities all the time. Children are predisposed to it. We all have memories, some more distant than others, of innocently receiving the impressions of the spiritual elementals in our daily lives.
We remember as children, and witness it in our children, the awe and unabashed wonder with which we behold the world. That the sun would rise each day with absolute faithfulness and power. That the sky’s limitless expanse overhead would glow a beautiful azure blue in a deep comforting embrace. The countless phenomena which confront our senses over the course of life, all with feeling, thinking, and willing impulses.
What happened that so many of us turn away from our own inner perception and experience?
Quotes from Rudolph Steiner, GA 110 12 April 1909 Dusseldorf
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA110/English/SOL/19090412p01.html
The dogma of materialism has a definite consequence; the descent of our being from higher thought, feeling, and will, to the lower realms. It also has consequences for those beings for whom we, as humanity, are individually and collectively responsible for.
“Fundamentally, we are always surrounded by spiritual events and spiritual beings. Everything that happens in the material world is, after all, merely the expression of spiritual realities, and all things that appear to us in the material world are merely the outer shell of spiritual beings.”
“Nothing arises unilaterally in the world. Everything that arises has two sides: When light arises through heat, opacity, dark matter, arises on the other side. This is an ancient spiritual-scientific teaching.”
“So how do the spiritual-divine beings around us bring about the formation of solids, liquids, and gases on our planet? They send down their elemental spirits, who live in fire, and confine them within air, water, and earth. These are the messengers, the elemental messengers of the spiritual, creative formative beings. At first, these elemental spirits are in fire. In fire, figuratively speaking, they still feel at home, and now they are, so to speak, condemned to live in enchantment. And we look around us and say to ourselves: These beings, to whom we owe everything that surrounds us, have had to descend from the element of fire; they are enchanted within things.”
“Is there anything we, as human beings, can do for these elemental spirits? That is the great question the holy Rishis asked themselves. Can we do anything to liberate what is enchanted? Yes, we can do something! For what we humans do here in the physical world is nothing other than the outward expression of spiritual processes. Everything we do simultaneously has its significance in the spiritual world. Let us assume the following: A person stands before, say, a rock crystal or a piece of gold or something similar. He looks at it. What happens when a person simply stares, looks at some external object with their physical eye—what happens there? There is a constant interplay between the enchanted elemental spirit and the human being. That which is enchanted within the matter, and the human being—they have a connection with one another. Now let us suppose that the person merely stares at the object, so that they notice only what meets the eye; in that case, something from these elemental beings is always entering the person. Something from the enchanted elemental beings constantly enters the human being, from morning till night. As you perceive, a host of elemental beings—which was enchanted and is constantly being enchanted by the world’s processes of condensation—constantly emanates from your surroundings; such a host of beings constantly enters you. Let us now suppose that the person who stares at objects in this way has no inclination whatsoever to think about the objects, to allow anything of the spirit of things to live in his soul. He makes himself comfortable, simply goes through the world, but does not process it spiritually—not with ideas, not with feelings, with nothing at all; he remains, so to speak, a mere observer of what confronts him materially in the world. Then these elemental spirits enter into him and now sit within him; they are inside him and have gained nothing else in the world process except that they have entered from the external world into the human being. But let us suppose that the human being is one who processes the impressions of the external world spiritually, who forms conceptions of the spiritual foundations of the world with his ideas and concepts, who thus does not simply stare at a piece of metal but reflects on its essence, feels the beauty of the thing, who spiritualizes his impression; what does he do? Through his own spiritual process, he redeems the elemental being that flows from the external world to him; he raises it up to what it was; he liberates the elemental being from its enchantment.”
“To the same extent that he merely stares at things, to that same extent he simply allows these spirits to wander into himself and does not alter them; to the same extent that he seeks to process the things of the external world in his mind through ideas, concepts, feelings of beauty, and so on, to that same extent he redeems and liberates these spiritual elemental beings.”
“What does a human being do when he looks at any external object and, by explaining it, liberates the elemental spirit from it? Spiritually, he does the opposite of what happened in the past. Whereas in the past, smoke was formed from fire, so to speak, the human being in turn forms fire spiritually from the smoke; he releases this fire only after his death.”
“The fate of the elemental spirits is thus initially characterized for us: Through the wisdom that a human being develops within themselves, they continually set elemental spirits free at their death; through ignorance, through mere material clinging to sensory appearances, they bind elemental spirits to themselves and force them to return again and again to this world, to be born with them again and again.”
“To the clairvoyant eye, it is always evident that when the moon waxes, spiritual beings from a lower realm always ascend to a higher realm. But to maintain order, other spiritual elemental beings must also be enchanted down into lower realms. These elemental beings of a third realm also interact with human beings. When a person is serene, when they are content with the world, when they understand the world in such a way that they embrace all things with a serene spirit, then they continually liberate the beings who are bound by the waning moon.”
“Through a harmonious perception of the world and inner contentment with the world, the human being is a liberator of spiritual elemental beings. Through his grumpiness, his bad mood, and his discontent, a human being becomes a fetterer of elemental beings who could be liberated by his cheerfulness.”
“The mystery of the human being only becomes significant to us when we realize that everything we do—even our moods—has an effect on the entire cosmos, and that our small world has infinitely far-reaching significance for all becoming in the macrocosm. It is precisely this heightened sense of responsibility that is the most beautiful and significant thing we can gain from spiritual science. It teaches us to grasp life in its true sense and to take it so seriously that this life, which we must cast into the stream of life’s development, is cast in as something of significance.”
As Steiner has painted the picture for us, we can begin to clearly feel the reality of this thought-picture. How often have we gazed at a flower, and felt awe and inspiration of it’s beauty? How many times have we contemplated the sprouting of a seed, and felt the miracle of life emerging from the dark, hard, dry little orb? We do perceive the spiritual forces in everything. It is only when a thorough indoctrination into the religion of materialism, that we eventually learn to dismiss the elevated, the light, the divine, for base materialistic assumptions.
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