The MysTech online conference on the theme of ‘Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman’ was held from 7th to 10th August 2025. Organised by Andrew Linnell and his colleagues, it offered an impressive range of talks by some excellent speakers. I was not able to listen to all sixteen speakers, but I did manage to hear presentations from: Inessa Burdich, Harrie Salman, Bastiaan Baan, Benjamin Cherry, Adriana Koulias, Doug Smith, Florian Sydow, Robert McKay, Are Thoresen and Andrew Linnell. The text of my own talk is given below.
In a lecture given in Dornach on 18th November 1917, Rudolf Steiner said: “What people in our epoch must learn is the need to wage a fully conscious fight against the evil that is making its way into human evolution.”
The epoch to which Steiner was referring is our present stage of human development which he called the Age of the Consciousness Soul, or the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. This has been with us since the early 15th century and it will last for around 2,200 years, ending approximately in the year 3600 of our present era. Steiner tells us that, since the beginning of this Age, the propensity for evil lies in the subconscious of every person, and that there is no crime, however dreadful, that each one of us, as people of this epoch, does not have the potential to commit. Paradoxically, confronting this reality is the only way that we can solve the riddle of evil, which is the most important task of our age.
The existence of evil is also, of course, a powerful reason why many people say they do not believe in God, for how can a god of love who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent allow evil phenomena to exist? Yet initiates tell us that God has two aspects, which when understood and viewed correctly, enable us to see the purpose of evil. Evil can be seen as the unevolved and undeveloped aspect of life, the force which tests us and absorbs and removes that which is unwanted.
So this is the scale of the challenge each of us is facing in this very difficult period in human physical existence. Anthroposophists characterise our present time as one in which we shall see the actual incarnation of the great dark archangel, Ahriman. Ahriman could be defined as the power which prevents man in his physical-sense world existence from perceiving the spiritual-soul beings lying behind the surface of our physical world – but Ahriman is also an actual being, whose incarnation in physical form is imminent. This will be the last of three unique incarnations of which Steiner spoke – the first was the incarnation of Lucifer in about 3000 BCE (believed by many to have been as the Yellow Emperor in China, he of the terracotta army); the second was the incarnation of Christ in Palestine two thousand years ago; and the third will be the incarnation of Ahriman, which to quote Steiner will take place “before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed”, probably in the USA. Each of these incarnations is prepared for many years, indeed centuries, in advance, and we can see quite clearly already the kind of evil influences that the future Ahrimanic incarnation is bringing to bear upon our human societies.
In my view, the past one hundred and fifty years has been the most terrible period in the whole of human history and the evil is worsening and intensifying as we approach the actual incarnation. Some of the notable characteristics of what is happening across the world right now include:
A huge increase in personal stress levels
A loss of faith or confidence in governments and public institutions of all kinds, both nationally and internationally
Rancour and divisions between families, friends and colleagues, with irreconcilable positions taken on issues of the day
A collapse of the systems on which we all rely, including the international rules-based order
The gradual disappearance of many of the old certainties on which society is based.
For anthroposophists, these social phenomena indicate that what is happening is Ahrimanic, clear signs of the impending incarnation of the being that Christ called the ‘ruler of this world’. Wherever we look, we see many examples which are indicative of this and perhaps even of the actual incarnation itself. The signs are all around us, and you don’t need me to list them. We are all aware of the ever-increasing range of threats which confront humanity and the entire web of life.
For me, the Covid pandemic has been one of the most significant of the Ahrimanic phenomena. Covid is a viral disease, which means that it is mineral in nature and does not have its own life processes and therefore needs a host organism so it can reproduce itself. But it also has astonishing intelligence, for example in the resistance it can develop to medicines, or in the way it can mutate, partly in response to vaccinations. But I can’t help asking, where does this astonishing intelligence live? In what being does this intelligence reside?
Second, the Covid pandemic produced fear, much of it stoked by deliberate government policy, as well as anxiety and division between people, even within families. It also led governments to dismantle existing civil liberties with an ease that they had not expected to find in Western democracies. It became impossible to have a fruitful exchange of views between those taking different standpoints and we saw instead heightened emotions, rejection and hatred of other people’s opinions. This process was driven even further by our news outlets and social media, who censored the views of anyone, even distinguished professors of medicine, whose expert opinion did not fit the official line. Again, one must ask: whose interests are being served by this fracturing of social cohesion?
Such attitudes have also radiated out into wider society, causing dissension between ordinary people. We see it internationally and we see it also in our national lives, with both the USA and the UK having more divided societies than ever before. And during Covid we also began to see discord and division growing in our localities. Here are just two examples of these polarised attitudes from the time of Covid, from my own local community: the first one was told to me by a woman who has a mother in a care home. This woman did not want to have the jabs and was told that as a result not only would she not be able to visit her mother but that unless she had both jabs her mother would no longer be able to stay in the care home! The second comes from someone who runs a kindergarten, who at the height of the pandemic was told by some parents that if she herself had the jabs, then they would remove their children from the kindergarten. Tyranny runs in both directions… Such unkindness and the breaking-down of relationships are characteristic of the impending incarnation.
When contemplating a theme as weighty as the incarnation of Ahriman, it is helpful to have in our minds a picture of ourselves as human beings and our current evolutionary progress. For we are undoubtedly at a significant point of change and our evolution can go either in the way intended by the spiritual hierarchies or else in the direction wished for and worked towards by Ahriman and his helpers. The issue is still in the balance and the outcome depends on each one of us.
Anthroposophy teaches us that we human beings are engaged on a path of development that leads us to ever higher levels of consciousness and existence. And it’s clear today that we are at a critical point along that path. What we are now being called upon to do is to connect and work with our higher spiritual self, which everyone of us has and which Steiner calls the ‘I ‘or higher ego: the image of God, our true nature, which is within each of us.
It is particularly confusing for us at this time that there are three processes going on simultaneously, some of which are cause for despair and others which are as, Ita Wegman said in another context, “full of future”.
The first process is that we are coming to the end of the old path of development, which brought widespread prosperity and progress; but which also increasingly led us to materialism, selfishness, greed and disconnection from the environment and the spiritual world, and hence to the multiple crises facing us. It is the breaking-down of this first process which we tend to see reflected in our news media. That is also the aspect which Ahriman and his helpers want us to focus on because it induces great fear in us. This old developmental stage made us become who we are today: independent personalities with an ‘I‘ and self-consciousness. But now that humanity has accomplished this developmental stage, the old path is breaking up and is slowly coming to an end amidst chaos and confusion, which increases the fear and uncertainty felt by so many people.
The second process is that a new way of being is seeking to be born, as the old is breaking down all around us. This is occurring as people ask themselves questions on their life paths, search for answers, go through processes of change and, as a result, perceive, think, and do things differently. This new kind of consciousness, arising as it does from inner transformation, is happening everywhere and can be recognised worldwide. It is leading to the emergence of a new culture in which people connect to their feelings, think about what they believe, make conscious choices, know what values they stand for, and consciously interact and cooperate with other people and with nature. It is those who can ride the wave of this change who are creating the new culture.
The third process is about building new ways of being. Instead of an attitude of competition and rivalry, opposing and fighting each other, people are increasingly seeking connection and cooperation. Instead of blindly obeying an authority outside our self, we would rather trust our own authority, our own inner knowing. This is accompanied by a shift of perception from separateness to wholeness – the recognition that we are connected to the greater whole in all aspects of life and reality, our humanity, the earth, the cosmos, everything that lives. There is an increasing realisation that everything is dependent on everything else.
One way of looking at this might be to say that humanity has lived in a state of adolescence for two thousand years. Now it is time for us to grow up, become true adults and work for unity and understanding throughout the world. We have progressed in our intelligence and our mastery of scientific discoveries but our capacities for wisdom and love have not progressed to the same extent. We have uncovered the workings of the laws that govern Nature without being sufficiently attuned to the Cosmic Law as it is reflected in Nature; and have thus brought ourselves ever closer to destruction.
In this MysTech conference we are considering the role of Ahriman but we should also consider other adversary forces. Steiner spoke about another spiritual entity, an opposing principle to the Lamb of Christ, that he calls the ‘Sun Demon’ or ‘Sorat’. It is this being, the adversary of the Lamb, who is literally the anti-Christ. It is an open question for me as to how much Sorat, and his demonic helpers, the Asuras, have been behind the work of Ahriman during the last century and a half. Whereas Ahriman’s aim is to lead us into an ever-intensifying form of brain-bound, earth-bound materialistic thinking, and Lucifer’s is to tempt us into disembodied fantasy and to believing that we are gods, the aim of Sorat the Antichrist, the Sun Demon, is to destroy the human ‘I’ (the Self, the bearer of the Christ principle or the indwelling divinity in the human being), to drag us towards the so-called Eighth Sphere and to destroy the Earth itself, which our ‘I’ needs for the future development of the human soul. Yes, we and the Earth need each other for our evolutionary paths. Climate change, war, the sixth great extinction, genocide, materialism, racism, and transhumanism – these are all facets of attacks from the same enemy. This is the true scale of the battle with which we are now engaged.
A quick explanation about the expression just used, the Eighth Sphere. Anthroposophy teaches us that humankind in its total evolution from the very beginning to the end of time must pass through seven planetary spheres, which correspond to our seven bodies, which are members or aspects of our being. We are currently in the Fourth Sphere, which is our dear planet Earth and which corresponds to our ‘I’ or higher ego, the individuality which we take with us from incarnation to incarnation. Over aeons we have already lived through the first three spheres which are: Saturn, which corresponds to the physical body; the Sun, which corresponds to the etheric body; and the Moon which corresponds with the astral body. There are three further bodies which we have within ourselves as potential for future development, that is to say Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. (You can read more about these seven bodies or members of the human constitution in Steiner’s book Outline of Esoteric Science.) The adversarial forces are working together to try to divert us from our natural evolutionary progress through the seven planetary spheres, and to take us instead into the Eighth Sphere. If they are successful in this, it means that we would be unable to progress with evolution, nor have the possibility of the encounter with Christ, but instead we would be thrown back to a lower level. Both Ahriman and the Asuras work from the Eighth Sphere. This is the realm which the religions call Hell.
Steiner says that in their will to evil and in their fullness of power, the Asuras surpass both the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings:
“The Asuras – the evil ones – are beings who are again one degree higher in their will to evil than the ahrimanic beings and two degrees higher than the luciferic ones.“
“These are the beings who strive towards the Eighth Sphere. They want to compress matter more and more, so that it cannot be spiritualised again, i.e. returned to its original state. They want to drag human beings down into the Eighth Sphere and thus snatch us away from progressive development and its goal – the Christ.“
And alongside this, we are also facing the challenges brought to us by transhumanism. Many scientists, technologists and engineers are working on the development of these concepts, which in a nutshell are designed to transcend human limitations through technological interventions within the human body. Targeted genetic, neurotechnological, prosthetic and pharmacological interventions are meant to optimize our bodies, feelings and brain and broaden them so that biologically programmed human limitations, such as sickness, ageing and death can be overcome and ultimately left behind. Andrew Linnell, our conference organiser, and several other of our speakers, specialise in these matters and I am hoping they will have more to say about them during this weekend. (They did!)
A prominent figure in all of this is Ray Kurzweil, Google’s former futurologist, who is a leading computer scientist and inventor. His prediction, made in his book The Singularity is Near, is that we human beings will become more godlike as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technologists, people who are experts in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. Their work will produce new tools that will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons.
it is clear that Kurzweil, who is a highly intelligent man, is nevertheless one of the Useful Idiots preparing the way for Ahriman. As part-evidence for my statement that Kurzweil is an idiot, it should be noted that he has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his death, Kurzweil plans for his corpse to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him. If only he had studied Steiner, he’d know that his consciousness is already immortal and he could have saved himself $200,000!
But it does seem quite possible that those of us alive today are likely to be the last generation of pure human beings that the world will know. Within a single generation the transhumanists intend that we will become a hybrid species of biological and synthetic bodies. Ray Kurzweil says: “Some people find this frightening. But [The Singularity] is going to be beautiful and will expand our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine, like a person who is deaf hearing the most exquisite symphony for the first time.” But it’s surely also possible that these developments will limit our ability to think, to love, to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way. Behind all this is Ahriman, who wants us to lose our capacity for emotion, empathy, intimacy and forgiveness – the very qualities that we value and cherish in our humanness.
The historian of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, also points to a near future in which “people will no longer regard themselves as autonomous beings who follow their own wishes according to their life, but rather as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that are constantly monitored and directed by a network of electronic algorithms”. He says that “Humans, giraffes, viruses are all algorithms. They differ from computers in so far as they are biochemical algorithms which have evolved at the caprice of natural selection over millennia.” “The individual authentic self is no more real than the immortal Christian soul, Santa Claus or the Easter bunny.” As a not entirely humorous aside, my wife has a fear that in the future those of us who refuse to be microchipped or to accept technological improvements to our bodies will be forced by the rest of society to live in nature reserves where we can be visited and observed as quaint throwbacks by the medically enhanced ‘normal’ people, as a kind of millennium seedbank of the human genome.
Do all these phenomena mean that Ahriman has already incarnated? Rudolf Steiner predicted that Ahriman would incarnate in the flesh in the first part of the third millennium in which we are now living. The details of how, when and in whom this incarnation would happen have of course been the subject of much speculation since Steiner spoke about this over one hundred years ago. Steiner also said at a meeting with young people in Breslau that Ahriman will do everything in his power to advance the moment of his incarnation as much as he can. Steiner then mentions the year 1998, which for anyone interested in numerology is 666 multiplied by 3.
My own view is that, rather in the way that the incarnation of Jesus Christ was preceded for around 500 years by all kinds of what might be called precursor indications, the various phenomena we are seeing now are also indications of what is heading our way. At present, I don’t see any convincing candidates for the role of Ahriman, despite strong competition among current world leaders, so even if Ahriman is now here in a physical body, he has not yet assumed the prominence we might expect.
For how long will these evil times last? Here is a quotation from the great Bulgarian master, Beinsa Douno, also known as Peter Deunov (1864 – 1944), who was a contemporary of Steiner – they had a high regard for one another. This excerpt comes from a talk with his followers during the 1920s, and it still seems highly relevant to our situation now:
“The ‘end of the world’ manifests itself through the cleansing of the old humanity, so that a new humanity can come in that place. This cleansing (…) has been carried out for a period of 45 years. This period began in 1900 and will end in 1945. You are all eyewitnesses to what happened during this period.”
“From 1945 will begin another period, which will also last 45 years until 1990. Such times come and such power comes, that whoever opposes it will lay his bones on the ground. A great dictatorship ensues (…) “
“After this period there will be a short break until 1999 (…). And then a new period will come, with an even more terrible dictatorship (…). It will also last 45 years.”
That takes us to the year 2044. So, if Peter Deunov is correct, we can expect around another twenty years where these Ahrimanic phenomena will intensify and worsen, years which will perhaps include the actual incarnation.
Steiner did not specify what exactly Ahriman would do on earth, and what sort of person he might be in the flesh. But in a lecture given in Bern on 4th November 1919, he said that during his incarnation, Ahriman would seek “to utterly mislead and corrupt humanity on earth.” He also said in 1922: “And what is it that these Ahrimanic beings are seeking to bring about? They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve their purpose.”
But Steiner also says repeatedly in the lectures that this incarnation could not and should not be averted. It has to happen and, in the right conditions, might even benefit human evolution. The really important thing is that people should be sufficiently awake to recognise Ahriman for what he is. Only if Ahriman were to go unrecognised would this event be wholly calamitous for the evolution of the earth and humanity.
There’s no doubt that Ahriman has an easier task than one could wish. He finds it easy to persuade humans to give up their future to him, because Ahriman can work through the seat of human desires – our pride, greed, laziness, lust or wish for power – but Christ can only reach us through our ‘I’ or higher self and this means that the struggle is not an equal one. Our ‘I’ has so to develop that it can in time learn to recognise and resist the many temptations offered by Lucifer and Ahriman. These two adversarial forces work as allies at the present time, even though they appeal to different instincts in us. The way to deal with these two poles of Evil is to seek the point of balance between them, which is represented by Christ.
One has to recognise, however, that the behaviour over centuries of some Christians, some churches and some supposedly Christian nations has combined to make the name ‘Jesus Christ’ distasteful to many people today. This is another area where Ahriman has been working effectively.
To quote from the very useful AnthroWiki website, “Jesus Christ is the name for the unique and singular earthly embodiment of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Steiner’s research, this incarnation began with the baptism in the Jordan River, which occurred around the 30th year of Jesus’ life, and was completed with his death on Golgotha”.
“Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ Power, which originally worked from the Sun, united with the Earth. This is a spiritual fact that stands above all denominational religious confessions and is also not bound to the name ‘Christ’ that is in common use among us”. As Steiner emphasised: ‘Never will he who recognises the Christ-being insist that the name of the Christ remain.’ ” In other words, we shouldn’t get upset if other people use a different term for the universal fact of Christ. And Steiner has made the stupendous statement that “the ‘I’ in human beings is microcosmically the same as Christ is macrocosmically for the world.”
Just lately I have been reading Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation by the anthroposophical writer and seer, Are Thoresen, in which he offers an intriguing update on Steiner’s descriptions of Ahriman’s incarnation. Thoresen is in supersensible contact with the Nordic angelic being Vidar, whom he describes as continuing the work of Michael as an Archangel, and who is the outer and shining aura of Christ himself. Thoresen asked Vidar about the future incarnation of Ahriman. To quote from the book:
“Vidar’s answer was clear and simple, and as I slowly pondered this it made more and more sense. He said that Ahriman was already in the process of incarnating, at this very time, but he is incarnating in all of us, with the help – or by being given cover by – the asuric beings. It is extremely important to understand this.” Are Thoresen is one of the speakers who will be taking part in this conference so I’m hoping that he will be saying more about all of this during this weekend. (No, he spoke instead about ways of entering the spiritual worlds.)
And whether you agree with Steiner or Thoresen or even with neither of them, one real challenge of these times is how to get through them without succumbing to despair. For me, the pain consists in seeing what is happening and realising that the vast majority of our fellow human beings, although they know that we are living in a very troubled world, are oblivious to what is really going on. And what is really going on, to borrow the title of a book by Bernard Lievegoed, is The Battle for the Soul. According to Lievegoed, because the human spirit is unassailable, the opposing powers therefore direct their efforts against the soul. The human soul is the real battlefield of the war between the powers of good and evil. What the Ahrimanic powers are attempting is to obscure the human soul or even to destroy it, so that the human ‘I’ is unable to gain the experience it needs on Earth for its healthy evolution.
Ahriman is also working very hard to ensure that we humans are unaware of the second coming of Christ, which according to Rudolf Steiner will not be a physical incarnation this time around. That was done once and for all 2000 years ago and will not be repeated. Steiner says that since about 1933, the Christ has been available to human beings in the etheric field and that more and more of us will be able to have the experience of an encounter with Christ. We know how Ahriman dealt with this threat in 1933, by assisting the rise of Hitler to power in Germany, thus creating more assaults on the human soul that diverted us from awareness of what was happening in the etheric realm. By keeping the eyes of most of humanity fixed firmly on the material world, and completely unaware of any other reality, Ahriman has kept knowledge of the second coming from our souls.
Why is it that we have come to this particular crisis in our time? After all, humans have been killing one another and behaving with utter selfishness and greed for centuries. What has made the difference now? Why has there been this intensification, a kind of industrialisation, of the scale of evil on this Earth? And how can we wake up to what is really going on and begin to counteract “the evil that is making its way into human evolution”?
This relates to what Steiner called “the war in heaven” that took place over the period 1840 to 1879 between the Archangel Michael and the dark angels. Since that time, when Michael cast out these dark forces from heaven and into the earth, these adversarial powers have been working within the blood and nervous systems of human beings in an attempt to reverse both human and angelic evolution. It is no coincidence that since the fall to earth of these dark angels, humanity is being forced to endure what I have already called the most terrible one hundred and fifty years in the whole of human history.
But we should also bear in mind that at this time, in this 21st century, all signs point towards the emergence of a new world amidst the old, dying world. That new world originates not from outside our selves but from the inner life of us humans. It is derived from the divine core that lives and works inside every individual human soul. This means that the development of every individual on earth is of the utmost importance.
And what looks right now as though the triumph of Ahriman is a foregone conclusion, may not be quite as strong and solid as it appears, because as we know from the past, despite many victories in battle along the way, in the end Ahriman always loses the war. I suspect he will lose this time as well because there is a resilience in human life and the natural world which, when allied with the love of Christ and our innate capacities for empathy, compassion and kindness, give certainty that truth and real human values will outlast and survive the worst that can be done to us, or that we can do to ourselves.
But in the meantime, how can we counter Ahriman and find the strength and resilience to live through these terrible times? We can hope that increasing numbers of people will discover what it truly is to be a human being; that is to say, we humans are beings with one foot in the material world and another in the spiritual world; that spiritual world to which we return between earthly lives and which is our real home. Here on Earth, we have something which is not available to us in the spiritual world – and that is the privilege and the challenge of free will, something which allows us to experience both the good and the bad sides of our natures over many lives and through this process to grow and evolve in freedom through our own decisions.
In a way, we should be grateful to the Ahrimanic beings who, in this spiritual evolutionary process play an essential part. Not only are they instrumental in the forming of the human being’s constitution in all its beauty and darkness, but they also play an important role in bringing us face-to-face with the consequences of our actions and decisions and hence also the forming of our destiny and karma.
It is all too easy to feel that the struggle is hopeless. Whenever I am feeling overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the challenges facing all of life on Earth, the following words from Judith von Halle can give me new courage:
“The consistent psychical-spiritual work of an individual, or of a few individuals, can have an enormous influence on the physical and spiritual conditions of the world! When someone asks: What can I as one person do to influence world events? – the answer is: everything! If people could only see with physical eyes the effect on the macrocosmic context that the decision and its implementation to consistently practise only one meditation by a single person, then probably no one would hesitate to undertake such an exercise themselves. For the possibilities are enormous! Allow me to give you this as the greatest consolation, as the strongest ray of hope in the present situation. The individual person holds the world’s fate in his hands. This is the gift of the Christ, who sees the individual I as a deity, who treats it as a deity. (…) Spiritual life must become a reality in our hearts and therefore in our higher consciousness. We must develop a feeling in our souls for the true, the beautiful and the good that resides in this spiritual life.”
And I also feel it important to concentrate on those areas of life where one can make a difference, rather than wasting time and emotion on problems which are way beyond one’s capacity to influence. Each of us is now being called upon to do all that we can to help in the evolution and progress of human life. In the face of the current massive onslaught which is seeking to re-define what it means to be a human being, any project which concentrates on true human needs and values is a worthwhile antidote to the poison of our times. People are trying to help in their own myriad ways: artists through their creative work, teachers and parents through educating and bringing up children, activists through changing policies and laws, and any of us through our encounters in daily life. If we can be people of initiative, rather than passive sponges soaking up whatever is done to us, humanity will survive the incarnation of Ahriman.
We should remember a saying of St Francis that: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” A few people working with and for the light can counteract the negative workings of thousands of others. If you can get together regularly with one or two other people to pray for humanity and all life on the Earth, then the effect of this will be much greater than you can possibly imagine.
In a lecture given at Dornach on 1st November 1919, Rudolf Steiner said the following: “To the extent to which people can be roused into conducting their affairs not for material ends alone but also so as to incorporate a free and independent spiritual life alongside economic life, as an integral part of the social organism — to that same extent Ahriman’s incarnation will be awaited with an attitude worthy of humanity.”
I’m going to finish with a prayer by Paul King, who is a translator for Temple Lodge Publishing and also a member of the meditation group which meets in our house:
Light of the world,
Great Sun-Spirit of the Earth!
May Your light enlighten our heads,
May Your love warm our hearts,
May Your peace pacify our strife!
Thank you for listening and I look forward very much to the rest of this conference!
Category Archives: Cryonics
Facing the Incarnation of Ahriman “with an attitude worthy of humanity”
Filed under Ahriman, Anthroposophy, Archangel Michael, Cryonics, Evil, Judith von Halle, Lucifer, Ray Kurzweil, Sorat
Under the Gaze of Uriel
The following is the text of an address given as part of the Midsummer Festival organised by the Anthroposophical Society in Sussex, held on Sunday 23rd June 2019 at Emerson College.
We are now at the Summer Solstice and the St John’s Festival, that time of the year when in the Northern Hemisphere we have our longest day and shortest night. Rudolf Steiner, in a lecture given on 12thOctober 1923, said that the great archangel most associated with this time of year is Uriel: and that Uriel directs his countenance and clear piercing gaze down towards the Earth and perceives disturbing shapes which continually gather and dissolve, gather and dissolve again. These shapes, Steiner says, are “human errors upon which Uriel directs his earnest gaze. Here during the height of summer, the imperfections of mankind are searchingly surveyed and contrasted with the morality implicit in the natural world. Now we see how at midsummer human errors are woven into the regular crystals which are formed in the normal course of Nature. On the other hand, all that is human virtue and human excellence rises up with silver-gleaming lines and is seen as the clouds that envelop Uriel”.
Uriel directing his gaze at human errors. (Photo via Wikimedia)
So Midsummer is a time when, under the gaze of Uriel, the spiritual world looks with especial closeness at our human actions and motivations. This is a good time of year for us to do the same and look closely at what we humans are doing in the world.
Almost 60 years ago, someone who was inspired by anthroposophy wrote a book which woke up the world to the dangers of the unregulated use of pesticides. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. Her book has been rightly acknowledged as one of the all-time great pieces of science writing, detailing the scale of the damage being done by human-applied chemicals to the environment and all its denizens. It had a huge impact and led to awareness and legislation at least in part controlling the damage caused by pesticides such as DDT.
Rachel Carson (photo via BBC)
In a letter written in 1958 to a friend, soon after she began the research that would lead to her book, Rachel Carson spoke about how difficult it had been for her to believe what was happening. She said:
“Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one…that the stream of life would flow on through time in whatever course that God had appointed for it …And to suppose that, however the physical environment might mould Life, that Life could never assume the power to change drastically – or even destroy – the physical world. These beliefs have almost been part of me for as long as I have thought about such things. To have them even vaguely threatened was so shocking that, as I have said, I shut my mind – refused to acknowledge what I couldn’t help seeing.”
Today, sixty years on, we are witnessing even greater threats to the web of life on Earth and it is perhaps even more difficult for us than it was for Carson to acknowledge and take on board the scale of the challenges now facing all of life. This is the first time in our history, for example, that through the activities of humankind, the entire global climate is shifting to what may be our permanent disadvantage; and we are also in the middle of what scientists are calling the Sixth Great Extinction of species, again caused by our activities.
But if that isn’t enough, there are still other challenges coming up fast to confront us. It was last year, just shortly after Midsummer, that during the annual conference of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, we were shocked by the message that Nicanor Perlas brought about the threats posed by the advent of artificial intelligence. Nicanor has written a book about this, which no doubt many of you will have read, and it has a stark and scary title. His book is called Humanity’s Last Stand and in it he estimates that humanity has about 20 years to find ways in which artificial super intelligence, (ASI) can be aligned with human values; if we are not able to do this, we are likely to be totally overwhelmed by materialistic technology. If Uriel is casting his gaze on the leading advocates for ASI, he will be observing people who believe that humans are nothing more than complex biological machines.
Nicanor Perlas (photo via Right Livelihood Award)
If you believe human beings are nothing more than complex biological machines, then you open up your fellow humans to some disturbing outcomes; we can see, for example what is happening in China right now, where with the power of AI the governing Communist Party is developing extensive new tools for a comprehensive method of political and social control. They have given this a harmless sounding name – they are calling it “social credit.” But what it means is a total surveillance society, in which nothing you can do is hidden from the authorities. If the Chinese state gives you a poor social credit score, then your life becomes very severely constrained. You may be prevented from graduating, or travelling on some train lines, or buying an airline ticket, or buying a property, taking out a loan or even filling your car with fuel.
Now of course, no Western government would dare go so far as they are going in China, though no doubt some of them would like to. The irony of this is that the Chinese social-credit system is based explicitly on a familiar, Western model: the credit score, which we all know about. Data brokers trace the timely manner in which we pay our debts, giving us a score that’s used by lenders and mortgage providers. We also have social-style scores, and anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication, while Uber drivers and passengers both rate each other; if your score falls too far, you’re out of luck.
The Chinese genius, if you can call it that, was to take credit scoring as a tool of social discipline to its logical conclusion. They have extended their control across the entire range of interactions any member of modern society is more or less compelled to pursue by the very style and structure of contemporary life.
But of course there are many other phenomena of our time that are truly disturbing; there are so many shapes of human error for Uriel to gaze upon – but this evening I would like to focus on just one of them, which is the move to merge humankind with machines and technology.
Rudolf Steiner, of course, foresaw all of this, as far back as 1910. This is what he said in Lecture 12 of the series ‘The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric’:
(…) “the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution”.
That’s quite a statement, isn’t it? “The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution”. And in our time it’s being led not by people who structure these things for the health of human beings but by those whom Steiner describes as exploiting these things in an egotistical or group-egotistical sense.
How are they doing this? It is being presented to us not as a threat to our essential humanity but as a kind of species transformation through medical science and technology. The promise is that we will become new kinds of human beings as our bodies, minds and relationships with the environment and with mechanical devices become altered in fundamental ways.
The prediction by futurologists such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil is that we human beings will become more god-like as we become more machine-like and as machines develop more god-like powers. Kurzweil says that we humans are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul, there is no essential human self and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can in the future be modelled by algorithms. Our future lies in the hands of technical experts – in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science. New tools will become parts of our bodies. We will have bionic hands, feet and eyes, while nanorobots will move through our bloodstream looking out for disease and repairing the damage of age and injury. We shall have wearable and implanted devices to expand our senses and alter our moods, while biological tools will enter our cells, remodel our genes and give us new and better flesh, blood and neurons. Does that sound wonderful to you, or terrifying?
Ray Kurzweil (photo via Wikipedia)
Another futurologist, Yuval Noah Harari, says it is a fact that the “last days of Homo sapiens are fast approaching, and that our species will be replaced “by completely different beings who possess not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds”. Ordinary human beings will become surplus to requirements, as wars will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots: “Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be completely useless”. Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, which as Harari points out, is what biology and computer science tells us is all we really are anyway. Things have apparently gone so far that some in Silicon Valley already refer to human beings as ‘meat puppets’.
But things are going still further: Harari says that human beings will cease to be free agents, that their autonomy will be taken over by algorithms – written at first by human beings but ultimately by algorithm-writing machines. As this happens, liberal society will disintegrate as we will no longer be able to sustain belief in the uniqueness of the free human being as the basis of liberal social order. He says that: “We – or our heirs – will probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.”
Yuval Noah Harari (photo via Wikipedia)
This new religion will be called Dataism. It will be accompanied by the dissolution of the boundaries between humans, animals, machines and social systems, all of which will be seen as algorithmic information processing systems. The concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be replaced by the primacy of the free flow of information. The “cosmic data-processing system” will be what God once was: “It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”
Rudolf Steiner has told us what is the true challenge of our age: he says “it is humanity’s task in this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in the evolution of the world”. The task for the fifth post-Atlantean period, he says, is a particularly difficult one:
“As you see, a great many temptations face humanity. When the powers of evil gradually appear, it is natural that man is more likely under the circumstances to give in to this evil in all realms, rather than taking up the struggle to allow what appears to him as evil to be put in the service of the good in world evolution. Yet this must happen: the evil must to a certain degree be placed at the service of the good in world evolution”.
And it does seem as though we are indeed at a new point in world and human evolution. In this connection I remember a quotation from the late visionary poet and playwright Christopher Fry, who in his play, A Sleep of Prisoners, has one of the characters say the following:
The human heart can go the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move.
The thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the flood,
the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up,
to face us everywhere
Never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul
men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size,
The enterprise is exploration unto God.
So that is what we are about in this age – we have chosen to be here at this time when human beings are making a massive evolutionary shift. This is a terrifying but also really exciting time to be here on Earth; and adopting a Luddite approach to emerging technology is not the required response. Steiner tells us:
“It would be the worst possible mistake to say that we should resist what technology has brought into modern life, that we should protect ourselves from Ahriman by cutting ourselves off from modern life. In a certain sense this would be spiritual cowardice. The real remedy for this is not to let the forces of the modern soul weaken and cut themselves off from modern life, but to make the forces of the soul strong so that they can stand up to modern life. A courageous approach to modern life is necessitated by world karma, and that is why true spiritual science possesses the characteristic of requiring an effort of the soul, a really hard effort”.
Alongside courage and hard effort, we also need hope, what Steiner in one of his verses refers to as “all-sustaining hope”. So here are a few reasons why, despite everything, I’m still hopeful and optimistic.
On a personal level, I’m encouraged by listening to the speakers who come here to give talks at Emerson; we have had some wonderful speakers who are alerting us to what is going on in the world and who are giving us real pointers to the future. I was particularly impressed recently by a representative of the Youth Section from Dornach, and the work that that Section is doing on a research project into young people’s attitudes towards spirituality across 23 different countries. I’m also blessed to work on these Emerson talks with some fine young colleagues. And in Liz Attwell’s inspirational talk 2 weeks ago, we heard of her intuition that it is the young people of today who are birthing a new Christ impulse. She also said that many of the dark things we are experiencing are just the inevitable flotsam and jetsam thrown up by this new impulse – and I’m sure she’s right.
Because of all this and so much more I am conscious of how lucky we are to live here and to know that Emerson College, Tablehurst and Plaw Hatch farms, Michael Hall School, Peredur, Tobias and Nutley Hall are all here. We live in an island of sanity amongst the surrounding seas of illusion and although we have some adjustments to make so that we can look the modern world square in the face (what is happening to the Waldorf schools is a case in point here), we are nevertheless strong and resolute.
And beyond our locality, I see all sorts of hopeful developments happening. Just this week, for example, we heard that an American billionaire has given £150 million to the University of Oxford to fund a new centre to look into the ethics of artificial intelligence. His name is Stephen Schwarzman and he said: “I think the scientists agree that they want AI introduced in an ethical way, because they don’t want to experience the downsides. I think this is one of the major issues of our age, because AI is going to come, it’s really unstoppable. It’s not just AI, it’s robotics and all other kinds of computer science innovations”. That echoes what Steiner said back in 1910. And on 12th June the UK government committed us to zero net emissions by 2050, which is definite progress – and there are now 18 out of 28 EU countries which have also pledged to go carbon-neutral by 2050.
I am also amused by and take pity on the idiocies of our atheistic futurologists. Ray Kurzweil, for example, that incredibly clever man and chief futurologist of Google, is also, rather endearingly, an idiot. He believes in cryonics, which for those of you who don’t know about it, is a technique of freezing dead bodies in the hope that science in the future may find a way to bring the corpses back to life. Ray Kurzweil has booked himself a place for when he dies with a leading American cryonics company, which charges $200,000 to deep-freeze a full body or, if you’re a cheapskate, $80,000 for just a head. The process involves getting to the patient as soon as possible after clinical death has been pronounced and then cooling the body over the next few days to bring it down to -196C using nitrogen gas. Your corpse is then placed in a shiny steel capsule with a bullet-proof viewing window and stays there until the day when science has sufficiently advanced to bring you back to life. I am not making this up – this is genuinely what cryonics is about; and Ray Kurzweil has signed up for this. The poor man doesn’t realise that he is already immortal! If he’d just read Steiner and informed himself about what a human being really is, he could have saved himself $200,000!
I comfort myself with the thought that in the final analysis, Ahriman and his minions will always lose. They always lose because they lack the capacity to love or understand those who can love. Nicanor Perlas in his book repeats a story that Bernard Lievegoed says was given by Steiner in a letter to a widow. In this letter, Steiner says he saw the image of Ahriman sitting in a cave under the earth. He works. He writes things down, counting and counting, calculating and calculating. He tries to build up a whole world out of a new mathematics (and of course AI algorithms are part of the new mathematics). There, Steiner says, Michael stands beside him waiting. For Michael knows that he will make the final addition. Michael with his sword, will make the sum. The moment has not yet come. Michael is waiting, standing by the side, waiting. He can do this when people on earth are there fighting and going with him. With Uriel, we weigh up and understand; with Michael, we act without fear on the basis of that understanding. And that is the really important point – in this present age of the consciousness soul, Michael can only act if we help him to do it. But if we do, he will in turn help us to find much more positive outcomes from the extreme technologies that are threatening our existence today. So it really is up to all of us to play our part in this huge battle.
And finally, I would like to leave you with this verse of Steiner’s:
“We must eradicate from the soul all fear and terror of what comes towards Man out of the future. We must acquire serenity in all feelings and sensations about the future.
We must look forward with absolute equanimity to everything that may come. And we must think only that whatever comes is given to us by a world-directive full of wisdom.
It is part of what we must learn in this age, namely, to live out of pure trust, without any security in existence – trust in the ever-present help of the spiritual world.
Truly, nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us. And let us seek the awakening from within ourselves Every morning and every evening”.
Filed under Ahriman, Artificial Intelligence, Cryonics, Evil, Futurology, Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science, Uriel
Cryonics and the Fear of Death
A really interesting article by Courtney Weaver in a recent edition of the Financial Times Weekend magazine caught the anthropopper’s attention, not only because of the sheer weirdness of the subject – it’s about cryonics, a technique of freezing dead bodies in the hope that science in the future may find a way to bring the corpses back to life – but because of the astonishing beliefs about life and death processes that lie behind the concept.
As with the arms race and the space race, it is the USA and Russia which are slugging it out in a new and literally very Cold War to establish supremacy in the business of making money from individuals seeking the prospect of future immortality. People who believe in cryonics think that, if a human is cooled to -196C at the time of clinical death, it could be possible to resuscitate them later at a time when science has advanced sufficiently to cure them of old age or illness.
To accommodate people with this belief, the Russians have one of the biggest cryonics companies in the world (KrioRus), which will charge $36,000 to freeze and store a full body or, even more bizarrely, only $12,000 for a head. This has given them a huge price advantage over the leading American company (Alcor), which charges $200,000 for a full body and $80,000 for a head. Needless to say, you get what you pay for and in the cheaper Russian version, its 45 cryopreserved ‘patients’ are stored together in two containers, hanging by their ankles from individual pulleys in liquid nitrogen; while the heads and brains of those cheapskates who have chosen what is called a neuropreservation (head only) are stored on the floor of the same containers. KrioRus also stores more than a dozen deceased pet animals in these containers, which gives you a clue that this may not be the most upmarket kind of operation.
Cryostat interior at KrioRus facility near Moscow. Photo courtesy of Murray Ballard.
Alcor in the USA, on the other hand, keeps its 141 frozen patients in individual shiny steel capsules in a room with a bullet-proof viewing window and seems to be altogether a more classy kind of set-up that has attracted some famous clients. The head of US baseball star Ted Williams is stored at -196C in a steel flask in Arizona, while PayPal founder Peter Thiel and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil are booked in to be preserved when they shuffle off this mortal coil. News anchor Larry Page is also said to be about to sign up in preparation for when he signs off.
In both countries, though, the process is broadly the same: get to the patient as soon as possible after clinical death has been pronounced and then cool the body over the next few days to bring it down to -196C using nitrogen gas. To quote from Wikipedia, “the stated rationale for cryonics is that people who are considered dead by current legal or medical definitions may not necessarily be dead according to the more stringent information-theoretic definition of death. It is proposed that cryopreserved people might someday be recovered by using highly advanced technology.”
Cryonically-preserved bodies at Alcor in Arizona, USA. Photo courtesy of i09.com.
According to Ms. Weaver, people who choose to sign up fall into two categories. “The first consists of people who consider themselves pioneers and would be quite content to come back in the future, knowing no-one and nothing of the current culture. The second is of people scared both by the prospect of death and by the finality that comes of saying goodbye to a loved one for ever, a feeling most skeptics would find it hard not to empathise with.”
View from Alcor’s conference room into the cryonics holding bay. Photo courtesy of i09.com
Apart from the obvious weirdness, what is really odd is the mindset and belief system that lies behind cryonics. The article quotes two cryonics pioneers, a husband and wife, Maria and Gary from Los Angeles: “If you wait 100 years or 1,000 years or however much time it takes for the technology to develop, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure it’s a split second for your experience. It may be a one in one thousand chance. But the alternative is a 100 per cent guarantee annihilation of your existence. And if you don’t like it in the future, you can always die again if you want to. You can take a peek and say ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t. I’d rather be dead’. People think cryonics is freaky but lying in the ground and decomposing isn’t? What’s the difference?“
Evelyn Waugh! thou shouldst be living at this hour – the world hath need of an updated version of The Loved One, your short satirical novel about the American Way of Death.
But perhaps Maria and Gary and all the other people contemplating cryonic preservation for themselves or their loved ones would do even better to read Rudolf Steiner about death and what happens after death. Other cultures, eg the Tibetans in their Book of the Dead, or the Ancient Egyptians in their Book of the Dead have prepared their peoples in the knowledge of how to die and what will happen after death; but in the West, the only person I know who has done this in a really comprehensive way is Rudolf Steiner.
Have a look at Steiner’s Theosophy or his lecture series on Life Between Death and Rebirth. There’s also a useful video on Death & Reincarnation, presented on YouTube by Brian Gray of Rudolf Steiner College.
Maria and Gary and other cryonics fans, save your money and stop worrying – did you but know it, you are in fact already immortal!
Filed under Anthroposophy, Cryonics, Rudolf Steiner
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