Heinz Grill 01.01.2023
For the future, only what is truly created will enter into its meaning
All those actions, thoughts, decisions and wanted ideals that are pursued for a long time, with wisdom and care, in connection with spiritual training and at the same time with a clear prevailing view of reality, gain a cultural and magnificent significance for the future. A lack of one’s own human wisdomful creative power, as happens in passive waiting or in blind surrender to quick ideologies, leads to the entire opposite and directly strengthens the tendencies to war and conflicts in the world. Spiritually speaking, people today want to enter into their growing creative power and for this they do not want to choose an ideological concept of God – with a God whom they place high up as creator and name themselves an obedient good people – but they themselves want to search for the sources of wisdom, and they want to begin to transform ideas into ideals. This activity, if it is done solely with reason and clear devotion to the ideal mental pictures, formed as well as possible, generates a peace movement on a universal level. It is non-violent, conscious, and it requires the sacrifice of personal egos, attachments and all kinds of compensations.
A great counter-movement is, however, present in the world today with a false concept of love. Many people are joining forces and experiencing themselves as the representatives of a new age. They speak of cultural missions. From a human point of view, the efforts are very praiseworthy, but the vision of the threshold that is pending for all of humanity is missing. What is a threshold? What is the meaning of the so-called guardian of the threshold named in Rudolf Steiner’s texts and also in my texts?
First and most practically, a threshold from one room to another is marked with a door, or people speak of a so-called mental threshold. Climbers who bring themselves into daring experiences must overcome the threshold of their fear. From a spiritual point of view, anyone who wants to make progress has to dissolve their attachments, subjective desires and karmic entanglements with the help of highly developed differentiation, so that beyond the threshold they enter into the completely different dimension of reality, more precisely the spiritual reality, and gain perceptions there. People today imagine this path to be far too easy. Unfortunately, they say things today that are not useful for a solid schooling, such as, for example, that one only has to turn away from outer thinking and enter one’s own essential inner self. Or they speak of a quickly reached experience of their own true being and confuse it with Christ, with the true self and with a self-realised state. In order to meaningfully cross the threshold between the earthly and the spiritual world with one’s own strength, an exact distinction is needed between that which is transient and insignificant and that which is of higher value with a lasting character.
As a result of the fact that many people unite but do not know this distinction between attachment and sound values, they get into human conflicts, and they will soon develop an unpleasant antipathy from the seemingly loving bond. Many newly forming communities will fail precisely because of a still very immature understanding of love. Best friends suddenly discover themselves to be enemies.
Human development, however, is constantly moving forward, and many people are actually entering a new door that involves a kind of threshold to establishing a next form of consciousness. If they have developed a good ability to distinguish between attachment and lasting values, they can become a shining star of the future, whereas without this distinction they feel as if they have been thrown back and experience conflicts directly with their friends and relatives. Not infrequently therefore friends become enemies and at the moment of need people who were previously viewed critically suddenly become helpers.
In any case, individual human beings today are moving ever closer to a threshold to the spiritual world. This threshold, however, does not let them pass as easily as one might think. It demands the utmost all of the forces of thinking, feeling and willing, and therefore, for the coming year, a daily, persevering and indispensable effort for truth, differentiation and goal realisation is required. A day without this effort throws the human being back into isolation and lack of relationship.