The Detail about the Devil

It is all too easy to be critical of the many bad things that take place in the world today. How are we to make sense of the barbaric cruelty, the corporate fraud and the anger that is everywhere expressed? Are human beings really capable of damaging each other to this extent? Or is something else happening?

Hans Stolp, in his lectures and broadcasts in Holland, has observed a dramatic change over the last few decades and puts forward some very interesting ideas about what is happening.

“Thus we live increasingly in an atmosphere of inward unrest, insecurity and loneliness. It is precisely these emotions, rising up from the soul, that lead to one half of the country being in therapy with the other half (as is sometimes jokingly said). We can also see that feelings that can no longer be suppressed bring us inexorably to the point of facing and working on ourselves. This leads to an accelerated process of growth in which we enter more and more into a transformation or cleansing process.” Hans Stolp “Time for Transformation – through darkness to the light.”

So, essentially, Hans suggests that the light reveals the darkness. This light is our increased awareness of who we really are and what this world really is. The darkness is all that hides this. In the darkness, the unconsciousness, are forces that oppose the light. We can call these forces evil or the devil but basically they are forces of resistance. If we meet these forces of resistance in the right way we can fly – like a kite.

In reality we don’t notice these hindering forces. Why? Because of the world chatter that lulls us into unconsciousness. If we don’t see these forces, and we are unconsciousness, they will use us to create disturbances everywhere. So often human beings are not capable of doing what they do, they get help from these forces who take over and wreak havoc. This wakes us up and fires us into action. As Rudolf Steiner famously said when asked why we have evil and not just good, “Good is too weak.” These forces of resistance strengthen us and make us consciously aware of who we really are.

These anti-forces are also trapped in their cycle of resistance; they have actually accepted their opposing role. If we are more able to identify their work, instead of blaming their human puppets, we not only free ourselves from the hindrances, we free some of these beings from their entrapment. If we can grasp these ideas we start to see the scale of transformation that we are living through at the moment.