The nature of human earthly knowledge : Shiva the Destroyer

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "I am now giving you for the first time a definition of the nature of human earthly knowledge. It consists of the dim and dulled impulses of destruction. Shiva in his most terrible form, so far stupefied that he cannot freely find expression but is, as it were, made threadbare, compressed into the human world of ideas — this is the maya of the human being, this is the knowledge of man. Thus knowledge had to be so weakened — that is to say, the impulses and inner forces had to be so weakened — that the original terrible impulse, ruled by Ahriman — that Ahriman's power (for originally it is Ahriman who gives rise to this wish) should be so far weakened that he could not express himself through man, who would have thereby made himself permanently a servant of Shiva. The sum total of these forces had to be so weakened that its expression in man only enables him to transpose himself into the being of another with his conceptions and ideas. When we try to force an idea of our own into the being of another, when we try to imbue another with a conception of our own, this conception impressed into the nature of the other is the blunted weapon of Cain which was thrust into Abel."

Source: March 27, 1913. GA 145