Creating a new ground under our feet: Youthful striving in the Age of Light

Rudolf Steiner:

The Light Age has begun, and the relation of the spiritual world to the physical has become completely different. When I sit with spirits and minds of the nineteenth century and words resound, for instance of a Herman Grimm, they sound quite spiritually sensitive. But when I sit with the spirits that your souls want to become, it makes those fine, sensitive words sound like empty word-chiming. This is because at the present time such a great wealth streams down out of the spiritual world. One can experience this as spiritual snow flurries falling softly onto the souls of human beings.

The youth must find their way in what spurs them on to spiritual deeds...Now it is a matter of winning the Earth anew for thinking, feeling, and willing. It is a matter of your finding the development-stream of the world.

Then you will experience that the Earth-being disappears. The time will come when the ground is taken from beneath your feet. And when the moment comes in your life when everything physical plunges into the abyss, because the abyss opens up and the firm ground under your feet disappears, then the spirit light that shines in the development-stream of the world will become weaker and weaker. It will become like a thin thread, and you will experience that this thread burns. Then, however, you must have the courage to take hold of this thread, even though it burns. You must hold firmly onto this glowing, burning thread of the spiritual, and you must say to yourselves: We want to create a new ground under our feet.

Thus, you must learn to have soul courage!

There was an ancient sacred knowledge in humanity. You must have the courage to pick up the thread of this knowledge...Yes, the youth must learn to reach into that fiery thread, even though it burns. When everything sinks into the abyss, we must learn to find ourselves in the development-stream of the world. When earlier in ancient times there sounded forth to human beings out of stone and spring, out of tree and flower, the exhortation: "O Human Being, know yourself," the answer was then the sacred AOUM. The human being went into the sacred stillness to receive the Word of the gods. Now that the world has entered the age, however, in which human deeds are expected in the cosmos, when the human beings are called to their own activity, this sacred AOUM is no longer the answer that should resound. It should now sound forth to the spirits that want to become the spirits of your souls, as the answer:

Yes, I am there for your cosmic deeds.

The youth must make this come true.

Source: Esoteric Lessons 1913-1923, pp. 420-421