from Michaelites

„...from the last third of the nineteenth century he (Michael) wants to live in the human souls in which the thoughts are formed. Previously, people related to Michael saw Michael unfolding his activity in the spiritual realm; now they recognise that they should let Michael dwell in their hearts; now they consecrate their thought-borne spiritual life to him; now they allow Michael to teach them in their free, individual thought life what the right paths of the soul are.“

Rudolf Steiner, GA26, page 61, 17 August 1924

„In human life as a whole, the spirit demands the senses, and the senses demand the spirit. - In spiritual existence there would be emptiness if the experiences of the sense-experience were not there as memory; in sense-experience there would be darkness if the power of the spiritual were not shining in, although at first subconsciously. Therefore, when the human being has matured to experience the activity of Michael, there will not be an impoverishment of the souls in nature experiences, but on the contrary an enrichment. And also the emotional life will not tend to withdraw from the sensory experience, but there will be a joyful inclination to fully absorb the wonders of the sensory world into the soul.“

Rudolf Steiner, Goetheanum, February 1925.

„The vast majority of what is at work in culture today through technology and in which he is highly entangled with his life is not nature, but sub-nature. It is a world that is emancipating itself downwards from nature.

You can see how the Oriental, when he strives for the spirit, tries to get out of the states of equilibrium that come merely from the earthly. He assumes a meditative posture that brings him into pure cosmic equilibrium. The earth then no longer affects the orientation of his organism. (This is not said for the sake of imitation, but only to clarify what has been said here. Anyone familiar with my writings knows how Eastern and Western spiritual life differ in this respect). Man needed the relationship to the merely earthly for the development of his consciousness soul. In recent times, therefore, there has been a tendency to realise everywhere in action that which man must settle into. By familiarising himself with the merely earthly, he encounters the ahrimanic. With his own being he must bring himself into the right relationship with this Ahrimanic. But in the course of the technical age so far, the possibility of finding the right relationship to the Ahrimanic culture still eludes him. Man must find the strength, the inner power of realisation, in order not to be overwhelmed by Ahriman in the technical culture.

The sub-nature must be understood as such. It can only do so if man ascends in spiritual realisation at least as far to the extraterrestrial super-nature as he has descended in technology to the sub-nature.

The age needs a realisation that goes beyond nature, because it has to come to terms with an inwardly dangerous content of life that has sunk below nature. Of course, we are not talking here about returning to earlier states of civilisation, but about man finding the way to bring the new cultural conditions into a right relationship with himself and the cosmos.

Today, very few people realise what important spiritual tasks are emerging for man. Electricity, which after its discovery was praised as the soul of natural existence, must be recognised in its power to slide down from nature into sub-nature. But man must not slide along with it. At a time when technology did not yet exist independently of nature itself, man found the spirit in the view of nature. Technology, which was becoming independent, made man stare at the mechanistic-material as that which was now becoming scientific for him. In this, everything divine-spiritual, which is connected with the origins of human development, is now absent. The purely Ahrimanic dominates this sphere.

In a spiritual science, the other sphere is now created, in which an Ahrimanic element is not present at all. And it is precisely by recognising that spirituality to which the Ahrimanic powers have no access that man is strengthened to face Ahriman in the world.

Rudolf Steiner, Goetheanum, March 1925.