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by Terry M. Boardman
New Dawn Special Issue
Vol 17 No 4 -
August 2023
from
NewDawnmagazine Website
Italian version
In
a series of essays written in 2022,
Terry M.
Boardman revealed the deeper background
to the
Ukraine conflict, which he argues
is
actually a proxy war, an episode in a
much
longer-lasting war that the West,
or more
specifically, the 'Anglosphere',
has been
waging against Russia for about 200 years
for both
exoteric and esoteric reasons.
The
following extract from his new book
"Western
Hostility to Russia - The hidden Background to War in Ukraine",
looks at
the all-important
spiritual/esoteric dimension of the conflict...
This esoteric aspect has to do with ensuring that the Slavic
peoples, and especially the Russians, will not
fulfill their potential to become the world's 'vanguard culture'
from the mid-fourth millennium onwards, but instead will come under
the domination of the English-speaking peoples, whose current
'vanguard' status - which has become overwhelmingly driven by
materialistic concerns and ambitions - would otherwise come to an
end in the mid-fourth millennium (the end of the Age of Pisces).
What does it mean that the Slavic peoples
have the potential to become the world's 'vanguard culture' from
the mid-fourth millennium onwards...?
It means that in what Rudolf Steiner
called the Age of the Spirit-Self (the
Age of Aquarius), which, according
to Steiner, will follow the Age of the Consciousness Soul
(the Age of Pisces), the human 'I' (the essential self, the
spiritual kernel of the human being), in large numbers of
individuals, will have learned to see itself and other I's as
spiritual beings.
Rudolf Steiner
(1861–1925)
These spiritualized I's will then seek to form new communities on
the basis not of the old blood ties or traditional religions but out
of their own insight.
The Age of the Spirit-Self (the Age of
Aquarius) will be a new age of community, based on empathy for
others, an age of brother-and-sisterhood that we in the West today
can hardly even conceive of, just as people in Ancient Greece and
Rome would hardly have been able to conceive of our modern Western
individualist culture.
But we can see foreshadowings of this future today in the
remaining traditional communal behaviors of non-Western cultures,
although such behavior is instinctive and collective, based on blood
ties, whereas in the future (Slavic) epoch of the
Spirit-Self it will be based on the moral individualism
that will have been won as a result of our current (Germanic) Age
of the Consciousness Soul.
The seed of this new impulse to new community, new fraternity,
Steiner described, is already there in the Slavic peoples, who not
only have the impulse to community - which all eastern peoples too
have to a greater or lesser degree in comparison with the more
individualistic westerners - but the Slavs also have a Christian
culture.
The native Slavic sense of community has been
infused with over 1,000 years of an empathic Christian sensibility,
which one can see especially in the unfolding, for example, of
village life in Russia, the nature of the mir, a word
which translates variously as,
community, peace, village, world, cosmos...
Russian and Slavic literature is permeated with
this empathic sensibility.
The English-speaking peoples are a branch of the larger Germanic
group of peoples that originated in northern Europe (Scandinavia).
From the late fifteenth century onwards, these
Germanic peoples gradually replaced the peoples of southern Europe
as the arbiters of the destiny of the West.
The southern Europeans of the Greco-Roman or
Mediterranean region had been those arbiters since the eighth
century BC (the Age of Aries) when Greek culture began to flourish
and Rome was founded, but,
from the fifteenth century AD onwards, the
military, cultural and economic power of the Italian states,
Iberia and France (France straddles both south and north) gave
way, chronologically, to that of Switzerland, the Netherlands,
Sweden and eventually England...
Rudolf Steiner described in numerous
lectures how in the period of just over 2,000 years until the
fifteenth century, Europeans - a sizeable minority of them, at any
rate - had learned to think for themselves:
this was a key achievement in what he called
the Age of the Intellectual-Mind Soul...
No longer did they feel the gods or God
thinking through them or inspiring them:
now Europeans felt that they themselves were
thinking.
In the following Age of Pisces, from the
fifteenth century, the Germanic or northern European epoch, the
focus of development is on the individual human will - how
human thinking applies the human will and, essentially, how the
individual will becomes morally informed and directed by the human
'I'.
This is a very dangerous phase of development, in some ways rather
akin to adolescence in an individual's development, because its
early stage is usually one of considerable confusion, egocentricity
and selfishness as well as materialism, a view of life that results
from feeling alienated, to a greater or lesser degree, as an
individual from the rest of life and the cosmos.
We are only 600 years into this Germanic or northern European epoch,
the Age of the Consciousness Soul, as Rudolf Steiner called
it, with its American and Australasian offshoots, and though
there have been positive signs of growing human maturity over the
past 60 years or so, there is still plenty of evidence of a
thoroughly egocentric and competitive, materialistic
culture in the West, especially in economic life.
Steiner described that the spiritual counter-forces - which
exist to provide humanity with the resistance it needs to develop
inner capacities for love and freedom -
desire that these egocentric and competitive, materialistic
attitudes and behaviors (which have become extreme in the age of
American hegemony since 1945), should continue on into the next
epoch of human development, the Age of the Spirit-Self (the
Age of Aquarius).
Indeed, their aim is for human development, in
effect, to stop at our present stage.
Life on earth would then become so miserable
and oppressive that most people
would no longer wish to
incarnate on this planet, or if incarnated, would soon seek to
exit this life.
This is the goal of those spiritual
counterforces who oppose humanity's growth and development.
If it were achieved, the mission or task of
humanity and the Earth would be a failure...
Love and freedom
would wither in human and social development.
These counter-forces, Steiner pointed out, influence the
thoughts and actions of those at the helm of the English-speaking
countries in the modern age.
What is the aim, Steiner asks, of
the elite groups, once
secretive and only semi-visible, which are operative in the
English-speaking world?
In January 1917 he said:
They do not work out of any particular
British 'patriotism,' but out of the desire to bring the whole
world under the yoke of pure materialism.
And because... certain elements of the
British people as the bearer of the Consciousness Soul
are most suitable for this, they want, by means of grey magic
[he means the 'mass
media' - TB], to use these elements as promoters of
this materialism.
This is the important point.
Those who know what impulses are at work in
world events can also steer them.
No other national element, no other people,
has ever before been so usable as material for transforming the
whole world into a materialistic realm.
Therefore, those who know, want to set their
foot on the neck of this national element and strip it of all
spiritual endeavor - which of course lives equally in all human
beings.
Just because karma has ordained that
the Consciousness Soul should work here [in Britain]
particularly strongly, the
secret brotherhoods have sought
out elements in the British national character.
Their aim is to send a wave of materialism
over the earth and make the physical plane the only valid one.
A spiritual world is to be recognized only in
terms of what the physical world has to offer.
This last point can be understood in the ways in
which, in the West, spiritual practice has been taken over by, or
put in the service of, physical aims.
For example, the commercialization of
Christmas and Easter, the turning of Eastern spiritual
practices in martial arts and meditation from ways of living into
'techniques' of supporting 'health'... sport and 'mindfulness', and
more recently, the creation of alternative worlds in,
...in which individuals can supposedly live out
their fantasies...
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