Materialism turns your brain to mush

 

Think outside the botched!

   

from Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly":

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization

What the world needs now is Anthroposophy

Rudolf Steiner:  "A special feature of our time is that these attacks from Klingsor and Iblis, as they gradually lay hold  of people, are insinuating themselves into intellectual life, particularly the intellectual life that bears on education, with its popularization of modern science. Consider what people have been learning for quite a long time now and what they think it right to instill into children; consider what is accepted as  the basis of modern education — all this should not be judged in accordance with the views of someone who, believing he is very clever, says he understands these things and knows they are entirely correct. No, all this should be judged in accordance with how it influences and fructifies the soul, and in terms of the impressions it produces on the soul. And when a person becomes cleverer and cleverer, in the sense in which it is fashionable to call people clever today, he develops in his soul certain forces which in this incarnation may make him very well able to dominate the conversation in circles wedded to materialistic or monistic ideas; but then certain vital forces necessary for the human  organism are worn away. And when such a person has taken into himself only these typical dregs of modern education, in his next incarnation he will lack the forces that are required for properly building up the human organism. The “cleverer” a person is by the standards of the time we are now facing and the closer his intellectual attunement to it, the more of an imbecile will he be in a later incarnation. For those categories and concepts which relate only to the sense-perceptible outer world and to the ideas which hold it together — these concepts set up in the soul a configuration which may be ever so fine intellectually but lacks the force to work intensively on the brain and to make use of it, And to be unable while in the physical body to make use of the brain is to be an imbecile. If it were true, as the materialists maintain, that the brain does the thinking, then one could certainly give them some comfort. But this is as false as the assertion that the “speech-center” has formed itself. It has acquired its form through human beings having learnt to speak, and so the speech-center is the result of speech. Similarly, all cerebral activity, even in the historical past, is the result of thinking — not the other way about. The brain is plastically modeled through thinking. If only such thoughts are developed as are customary today, if the thoughts are not permeated by the wisdom of the spirit, then the souls occupied with thinking only about material things will find in later incarnations that they are unable to use their brains properly; their brain-forces will be too weak to lay hold of things. A soul which today is occupied merely with calculating debit and credit, let us say, or with the usages of commercial and industrial life, or absorbs only the ideas of materialistic science, is filling itself with thought-pictures which in later incarnations gradually darken the consciousness, because the brain would be an unformed mass — as today in cases of softening of the brain — and so no longer capable of being taken hold of by the forces of thinking. Hence for anyone who looks into these deeper forces of human evolution, everything that can live in the soul must be permeated by a spiritual comprehension of the world."

Related post: Ain't that America

Source: February 7, 1913