70th Lecture on the Apocalypse of John (Documentation)

The core task of humanity - compassion and voluntary suffering... Voluntary suffering consists in being able to suffer voluntarily with the whole world. With fellow human beings, with animals, with plants, with the earth as a whole and the whole cosmos. The suffering in the world outside arises from the effect of the adversary forces. However, the adversary forces have been used to make freedom possible for human beings. This is only possible in reality if there is the possibility of falling into error, of straying and falling into evil. Error is the weak form of evil. Even if something is done out of error, it is something bad. We have to bear the karmic guilt for it. It is a question of becoming aware of this guilt. When we speak of compassion, it also means to become aware of all the things that have been inflicted on the world through our guilt. The adversaries are not the evil ones, we are the evil ones if we allow ourselves to be influenced by them. The adversaries are only carrying out their task. If we want a wholesome development for humanity, we have to work on our soul. Only we can do that. No other spiritual force, can do that, except our own. We must get a grip on our excess of egoism by raising to consciousness all the negative things we create in the world. That is, to suffer through all the suffering we have created and thereby dissolve and erase it. We can do this and will become even stronger to be able to do this. Real compassion means: "What positive forces can I generate to cancel out this suffering that is in the world? In order to transform the suffering that has been created through our participation, out of nothingness, into something positive, my spiritual, creative forces must be awakened in me and generate a force that dissolves and eradicates this negative. We breathe in the negative soul, extinguish it and replace it with a new, higher soul. This only happens to the extent that we have the necessary strength for it. We are only given tasks that we can also solve. Our I has the task, and can only develop through this, of generating spirit self out of our I. This is the transformation of spirit self. Spiritual self is transformed astral matter. Transformed in such a way that negativity is led into nothingness, is gone, is no longer present in the world, and instead, a new, better, brighter, spiritual astral comes into the world. We evolve by educating, renewing and improving our psychic. Our task is to produce a free, human, soul, Christian creation, out of nothing. If we seize this opportunity, we will create a blessed future. If we do not, we will join the realm of those beings who stand behind Sorat. This is a difficult task, but one that we can accomplish. It is a matter of doing these things with more and more consciousness. We live in the consciousness soul age. As long as we do not do it, our angelic being helps us to carry out the will of our ego, through strokes of fate in which we have to suffer in order to savour what we have missed in the present or in previous incarnations. It is about recognising, more and more, the connections in this regard. It is about the purification of the corrupted. In order to make an even higher purity out of it. We can do this out of our ego and only through this can our ego mature. The Christ helps us to transform our etheric body when he perceives that a good impulse comes out of our astral to transform vicious, bad habits. But before that, as a prerequisite, we must have worked accordingly in our astral body. That is, we must be able to experience the negative as what we have done. Therein lies the real compassion. To become conscious of what negative soul has created in the world through us. The worst thing that can happen to us is that we do not work through our karma. The adversaries want to lead us to a way to spare us this karma. They want to spare us this compassion, this suffering that we have caused in terms of negative things. The path to the evil side, which spares us this pity, will seem to be the easier path. We must strive in a just way to find compensation for what we ourselves have done wrong.