The Gods will not be ignored

Mariusz Lewandowski

The most completely and utterly wrong idea humanity has ever had is - to put it simply - that the spirits will put up with being ignored. 

You may consider it egotistical and selfish on their part, but the terminology is different in their world.
Egotism or not, the spirits take their revenge if they are ignored here on earth. 

This is a law, an iron necessity. 

One way to characterize the present time is to say that the present human chaos is the revenge of the spirits who have been ignored for too long...

Let us assume there was a time, say during the last twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century, when people put the same effort into their quest for the things of the spirit as they have put into achieving material knowledge and material actions during those twenty or thirty years. 

What would have happened if they had endeavoured to recognize the world of the spirit and used this to give a character, a foundation, to the physical world, rather than follow mere instinct and chase after more and more knowledge of a kind that has seen its ultimate triumph in the creation of instruments of murder and found its be-all and end-all in people enriching themselves with nothing but material goods?
What would have happened if people had sought to gain spiritual knowledge and spiritual impulses for their activities in the social sphere? It would have meant that the powers of destruction were paid off! 

If people had been more awake and not asleep in the last decades of the nineteenth century there would have been greater awareness and therefore no need for destruction in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

Spiritual awareness simply has to be greater than purely sensual and material awareness. 

If this had been the case during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the powers of destruction would not have had to intervene in the early decades of the twentieth century. 

-Rudolf Steiner