The Impulse of Anthroposophy Between Good and Evil

In The Impulse of Anthroposophy Between Good and Evil, Russian Anthroposophist Gennadi Bondarev emphasizes the consciousness soul and the beholding thinking that accompanies it. Whereas the intellectual soul gives us the capacity to reflect, the much newer consciousness soul (15th century) introduces us to beholding. Freedom "in the sphere of conceptual intuitions within the sphere of the Spirit-Self where the motive engenders itself" depends upon the consciousness soul's "lofty ethical standard" that can finally free us from the group soul of the past. This struggle is taking place all around us as institutions and worker bee collectivity seek to destroy even the memory of an individual human path to the higher "I." Everywhere, we encounter undeveloped sentient souls mired in animal passions and blatant egotism even as the intellectual soul in the university-educated is generally deadened by empty abstracts and artificial intelligence machine consciousness. The human being, through his or her own forces, is now challenged to move into the future on a path of evolution entirely dependent upon developing the consciousness-soul. The intellectual soul (fourth post-Atlantean epoch) and sentient soul (third post-Atlantean epoch) are insufficient for what awaits us in this particular future of carving out our relationship with the machine. Bondarev refers to our need for a "Michael quality" -- meaning the warrior archangel Michael -- an "exclusively upward-striving character … to fulfill [our] evolutionary tasks [ourselves]" instead of depending upon nature and the Divine hierarchies to take up what we fall short of. With Ahriman's incarnation in process right now, it is up to us to develop our own forces to drive the development of an authentic "new imaginative form of consciousness" in the consciousness soul to counter the countless "spirits of hindrance" (Lucifer, Ahriman, the Asuras) we are now subject to in our wireless electromagnetic world with their "'gender' abominations and 'expansions' of consciousness by digital means" to irrevocably destroy the will in our thinking, which constitutes the core of the deep crisis we are mired in today as Ahriman moves to block human upward metamorphosis ("ennoblement, enrichment and purification of the soul-life"). In Chapter IV, "Migrants into the Eighth Sphere," Bondarev issues a clear warning about the digital counterfeit of the virtual world on the internet. As an example, he discusses how powerfully just changing the language can work on the soul (especially when digitized), like renaming the internet "space of creative communication," with Skype and Zoom as the new "Mystery spaces"; "the technology of the Round Table"; using "Manichaeans space" as protection against destructive criticism. He cites a seminar run by the online Club of the Alchemy of Exerting Influence renamed "the Resurrection of the Blood of the Social Organism." Bonderev states: "The sum of the ideas at work within us, the real content of our intuitions, constitutes -- universal though the ideal world may be -- what is individual in each human being. To the extent that this intuitive content is oriented towards action, it is the moral content of the individual. The allowing of free expression to this content is the highest moral spring of action and, at the same time, the highest motive of one who recognizes that all other moral principles are, ultimately, united within this content. This standpoint can be called ethical individualism. Whoever makes this his own is truly free. "The human being is free only to the extent that he is able to follow himself at every moment of his life" [Rudolf Steiner].