Twenty-first
Century Initiation Science and the Idols of America
What
one has dismissed will become one's downfall.
Preface
In
a lecture on the second of June, 1906, in Paris, Rudolf Steiner made a
statement that refers to what has given rise, nearly a hundred years later, to
the need for a book like this one.
He said, "Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration
of forces is necessary to raise him again."
The
"mighty concentration of forces" can be seen, for one who finds in
Rudolf Steiner the great initiate of this age, in the almost literally
incredible result of his forty years of writing and lecturing activity. What had emerged by the time of his
death in 1925 was nothing less than a comprehensive effort to address every
single field of human thought and endeavor with the insights that flow from a
cognition that has been elevated into the spheres where creation itself takes
place, and whence evolution itself has its originating and guiding
impulses. That cognition of the
objective reality of these spheres was possible--indeed, that it was the very
purpose of the emergence of scientific thinking to provide the path to this
objective, and free, cognition--is what SteinerÔs work has been given humanity
to demonstrate.
The
success of his efforts was weakened by his inability to speak to the deepest inner nature of man's fall from grace, to use
the theological phrase for the origin of evil in the human world. This inability was inevitable given the
circumstances within which the soul incarnating as Rudolf Steiner had to
unfold, in that lifetime, its capacities.
As a result, in part, of the weakening in question--which also led to
Steiner's premature death--something like a vacuum emerged that had to be
filled, and is being filled, by the emergence, at the far eastern and western
edges of the northern hemisphere, respectively, of two powerful twentieth-century
socio-economic, political, and religious impulses that resulted in equally
powerful organizations with authentically esoteric contents at their core: the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun
Myung Moon, and the Church of Scientology of L. Ron Hubbard.
The
author asserts that the Unification Church is the answer of the spiritual
worlds to the lack, in the culture of the Center, of requisite action in the
spirit of the three-folding impulse, and that the Church of Scientology is the
answer of the spiritual worlds to various insufficiencies--including ones
related to the three-folding omissions--in the way the impulse given by Steiner
for the development of psychosophy has been taken up. The truth or falsehood of these assertions is there to be
discerned; the path to discerning it has been given. Those serious about this path will find in the author of
these assertions only a colleague in pursuit of such discernment as can confirm
every truth and correct every error.
A mood of bitter argument is destructive to the dissemination of anthroposophical conceptions on the Earth. From the Tomberg matter to the ÒConstitutionÒ question, this infiltration of the spirit of Christian community by the forces that inspire contention and scorn can be prevented where two or more are gathered from opposing sides who can overcome, themselves, the impulse to compete, and become, in this manner, a gateway for the impulse of brotherhood to make its way into even the most embattled circumstances. This book is commended to--indeed, it is written in the name of--this Òtwo.Ò