Esoteric Lessons, volume 1
GA 266-1
This book was fascinating.
The content is student notes from the esoteric lessons, which were private lectures given to committed participants. Many of the lectures included notes from more than one student, providing a view from different angles and different minds.
I talked a little about some aspects from the book here, particularly the section on fear.
But the parts on technology are worth reviewing again and again:
Everything that man builds today in the way of technical devices and machines will come to life in the future and oppose man in a terrible way. Everything that is created out of pure utilitarianism, out of individual or collective egoism, will be the enemy of man in the future. Today, we ask far too much about the usefulness of what we do. If we really want to promote development, we must not ask about usefulness, but rather whether something is beautiful and noble. We should not act solely out of a principle of utility, but out of pure joy in beauty. Everything that humans create today to satisfy their artistic needs, out of pure love of beauty, will also come to life in the future and contribute to the higher development of humanity.
Where this kind of thing goes on, the wish to yoke up human strength with the strength of machines is always involved. It would be quite mistaken merely to oppose these things. They are not going to fade away; they are on the march. The only question is whether in the course of world-history they are going to be brought on to the scene by men who are unselfishly aware of the great aims of earth-evolution and wish to shape these developments for the healing of mankind, or by groups of men who want to use them for their own or the group’s selfish ends. That is the issue. The point is not what is going to happen, for it certainly will happen, but how it happens—how these things are handled. The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution.
