"It's times like these, you learn to live again...."

[Belphegor]

This being my first post, I thought I'd just see what kind of response I get from my sig.

Now, I'm sure your asking yourself...."What's so dern special about a sig?"?? Well, here's some background. It came to me one day while keeping up correspondance with a good friend in SoCal. After this friend's reaction, I decided to get the quote made up into B&W vinyl stickers. The stickers arrived 9/10/01. I had them in my hand 9/11/01.
Those individuals that received a sticker from me that day, found a new way to look at the "game we call life".

I look forward to posting more on this message board, just need to gather my thoughts accordingly.

[daniel]

I found an excellent introductory essay explaining Rudolf Steiner's conception of Ahriman (Satan - the demon of materialism), and Lucifer (the "light-bringer" who tries to pull us toward fantasy and Ego-trips), the two beings or forces which threaten humanity. I strongly recommend that people try to understand Steiner's articulation of these issues, as it gives a much deeper insight into what is happening now.

http://wn.elib.com/Steiner/RelArtic/MasonRS/Ahriman/

Here is one excerpt:

Ahriman in Modern Times

In the present, fifth cultural epoch the Ahrimanic influence in human culture is reaching a climax. The modern scientific revolution, since the fifteenth century, has been inspired largely by Ahriman. He is the inspirer of amoral, atheistic, mechanistic materialism, and the kind of cleverness that goes with it. The regular Gods' intent for the present epoch (also called the "Consciousness Soul Epoch") is that humanity should develop increased consciousness, together with the individuality and spiritual freedom that goes with that consciousness.

Ahriman opposes this; he wants the human being to live from unconscious instincts as an unindividualized, impulsive animal -- clever, but an animal nonetheless.
(Ahriman is the teacher of the lie that the human being is an animal: Darwinism and suchlike theories.)

To the modern mind it might seem a contradiction to say Ahriman opposes increased consciousness but promotes intelligence and science. This is because the modern mind is so immured in what is generally considered to be "scientific thinking" that it has almost no conception of the true nature of conscious thinking. (Steiner, especially in his book Die Philosophie der Freiheit [1894], has been our teacher of real thinking, but the general intellectual culture has not learned the lesson.) The fact is that the "scientific" thinking normal in this epoch, no matter how clever, is hardly conscious at all (possibly with some rare exceptions at moments of "insight" or mathematical discovery). In the kind of consciousness usual in our "scientific" culture, we become conscious only of the fixed results of the thinking, after it has been accomplished; we are not (usually) conscious of the thinking-process itself. And since it is unconscious, it is not our free action; it is automatic. When we think in the manner usual in our epoch, we are sentient automata, acting from instinct. (Formerly occult fact: this instinctive thinking in the wide culture had been inspired by Jehovah up to about 1840 A.D. Since then it has been inspired by Ahriman, resulting in the Nineteenth-Century torrent of materialism, which, aided by the withdrawal of the German folk-spirit, drowned the life-positive Romanticism in culture.) And this is what Ahriman wants: he wants to stamp out all traces and all possibility of free, individualized human consciousness; he wants the human not to be an individual being, but only a member of a general species of pseudo-humanity -- to be a clever, earth-bound animal, an "homunculus".

As indicated, Ahriman is the inspirer of the most extreme kind of "scientific" materialism: the doctrine that there is no spirit or soul in the world; that life itself is not in fact alive, but is only a complex of mechanical processes; that reality is at base only quantitative, that there is no reality in the qualitative -- color, sound, etc.; even that the human's inner being is a confluence of material forces. On the emotional level, he works in the human subconscious instincts, inspiring fear, hatred, lust for power, and destructive sex impulses. On the mental level, he inspires rigid, automatic thinking: (in Steiner's phrase) thinking almost entirely without thoughts, but tremendously strongly in the language, in the literal words, which easily become empty words, which in turn easily become lies. -- This "abstract" thinking is devoid of any conscious, inner activity and devoid of any real connection to living experience, and creates a darkened consciousness without light, color, or images.

The Degradation of Language

According to Steiner, it is characteristic of the present culture of Ahrimanic scientism and Anglo-American economic imperialism that language has lost its instinctive spiritual meaning; that is, the connection is lost between the literal word and the spiritual impulse that constitutes meaning.

Without real, spiritual content, language consists only of "empty phrases", such as "rule by the will of the people" or "the free world", "individual freedom", and so on. These phrases are largely devoid of reality in our socio-political structure; here the fundamental fact is the power of money over human beings and life. And where the empty phrase rules in language, mere conventions -- rather than living human contact -- rule in social life, and mere routine -- rather than lively human interest -- rules in economic life. And: "It is only a short step from the empty phrase to the lie." Again, this is especially true in politics and economics, for the prevalence of empty words makes possible the falsification of realities -- a potent weapon in the hands of those with occult, conscious intentions to manipulate people for devious ends. In our time, people en masse act as if they are possessed by evil forces, because, in a way, they are. The demons of materialism speak through empty words. A language in which the demons of materialism have taken the place of human spiritual impulses can lead only to destruction.