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

The Arterial Self- problem B

Problem b: Impulsiveness 

Two would-be parachutists are crouching at the airplane's opening. One, who stands now before the door, hesitates and cannot summon the 'nerve' to step out into the airy spaces and drop. His companion pushes him from behind and so he goes.

Commentary: 
In this further study we may set about to examine some scenarios of relationship whereupon one man contrasts another in action or in decision-making. The validity of our own personal requests of another or of decisions to be had for ourselves, may be weighed against not a few considerations, but of many. There is, of course, the arterial waver, and for those who know of themselves what their true desires and life may be, then that is all ... yet also, one great gift of the Arterial Self which is not to be overlooked, is that of it being the decider.

To decide implies that there is a period of time, a pause (no matter how long or short) when the deliberating between takes place. Now if the Arterial Self was purely impulsive then this would negate the opportunity for such actual deciding. Many an action which has been subsequently regretted has come of a nil-thought, impulsive and hurried action. When men or de-men urge an individual, it is always with the implication that there is no tomorrow - no second chance, no other offer, no greater moment, etc. They would indeed go to the length of pushing the other out of the 'plane, even if this was not the decision felt and known by the one who would fall...

So our first key to this arterial knowing is of its value as recognized in the considered pause. The pause being but necessary to it, also the very appreciation of what it is about to encounter consciously, to take in and work with, delight to and bring joy to, and so forth. The pause is verily the space between each dynamic and it becomes the sanctified realm of rest when we have commuted arterially to God and asked of Him what is correct or incorrect at any chosen time.

The urgency of there being no tomorrow is an untruth spiritually speaking. Of all things our tomorrows are the most likely to be in successive abundance, however it is our very own ability to partake in them that may be endangered if we behave as if there is a shortage, and that should somehow exaggerate our actions in the now.

Equally a man cannot represent the past and forever continue on as if there is no new future to be afforded him either. Not all days are to be repetitions of the former, for then the personality atrophies the soul within and chokes the Arterial Self into semi-submission. Rather than then becoming urged prematurely into a quickening future we can find that the man can be with a false face, living to maintain the appearance of a time already passed, 

Eternal & Transitory- Rudolf Steiner

James Henry Nixon

As human beings, we are a stage where the eternal and the

transitory meet.

Our knowing is an experience of the eternal, for which we ourselves

are the organs of cognition.

Our action is the action of the eternal, for which we ourselves are

only mediators.

Understand therefore:

You are the primal spirit’s eye —through you, the spirit sees creation.

You are the primal spirit’s hand—through you, the spirit creates.

—Rudolf Steiner,  Notebook, circa 1903

Manas, Budhi, & the Asuric Beings

Dylan Cole 

The Asuric beings missed out on the Budhi nature:

"It is not the substance in which man is now incarnated. But certain retrograde beings who had fallen behind on the Old Moon had discovered in this astral substance — food for their gluttony. They want to feed on it; it has for them a great force of attraction. This shows that we are continually surrounded by beings whose higher nature is related to our lower. When someone produces egotistical thoughts, this is very welcome to these beings. In other respects they are actually more advanced than man, but they have the craving to embody themselves in the astral forms which we ourselves create. They are the so-called Asuras. Through our baser thoughts we provide nourishment for these asuric beings.

"When people whose nature is not yet purified, not yet free from passions, meditate, creating strong thought forms, they conjure up around themselves a powerful aura of desires. In this incarnate asuric beings of this kind which are then able to draw such people downwards. If a person drowsy with sleep meditates and in so doing does not rise clearly enough into thoughts, he creates this substance, and because he has no counterbalance, such beings incarnate in his thought forms. These are higher beings because they had completely developed Manas on the Old Moon, before the coming of the Buddhi impulse; they therefore do not possess this impulse. Hence with them Manas is egotistical. Had not the human being on Earth, from that point of time at which Manas came to him from outside, also received the impulse of Buddhi, had he only developed further the forward urge of Manas, he would have become in the strongest sense of the word an egotistical being. Manasic evolution is one tending to egoism and independence. Its task was to make man independent, but then the Buddhi nature was necessary. The asuric beings already referred to, because they developed Manas too early, have missed this impulse of the Buddhi nature. On the one hand therefore they stand at a higher stage and on the other hand they cannot progress, but go on developing the Kama-Manas, which is egotistical."

-Rudolf Steiner, Foundations of Esotericism
LECTURE XIX 
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA093a/English/RSP1982/19051017p01.html