The End of the Dominion of Money

THE WAY OF THE GRAIL – SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS – November 25, 2024

Czech original: Konec Nadvlády Peněz · cesta-gralu.cz

It is something unworthy, how earthly men submit themselves, almost without any effort to resist, to the rank power of money

With most of them this happens more or less voluntarily, or even with enthusiasm for the cause, for the prospect of possessions acquired with money awakens in them the impression of a fulfilled success in this earthly world

By such men, among other things, thought-forms are nourished which proclaim that the more money anyone has, the more independent and the freer he is

Yet there can be no greater contradiction than the words that more accumulated money makes a man freer

To a great part of mankind money brings the very opposite

It is not for them a means to an honourable and pure life, but on the contrary it very often leads, through the threads unwinding from its influence, only to a long lingering of fettered souls in the vicinity of gross matter in the time between the individual lives

In the threads of fate it thus brings to the spiritual inner being predominantly oppression and the loss of freedom

The state is such that men are no longer even aware of their unworthy dependence upon a society which rests more upon money than upon moral values

Out of the pressure of money there forms an inward slavery, unnoticed by men, which draws the exalted spiritual forces of every single man into the oppressive round of a daily life of the lowest kind of mere survival

Truly only a very few can say of themselves that in complete freedom they rule over money and that through their spiritual attunement they stand permanently above the existing material ordering of the world

The world of money has become a rank, all-devouring beast which above all sucks the power of a spiritual kind out of all who are permitted to be born upon this Earth

It is on the whole a joyless recognition, if we look upon the earthly life of men from the most important point of view, from that of the urgent need for the development and the ripening of the spirit in the time of maturity

The world of today is in every respect far removed from anything of the kind

Precisely in the time of their adult years men have attention for everything else but spiritual progress, which is always bound up with pure and noble goals

To those who strive at least a little for something higher in their lives the present world therefore appears hopeless

It seems to them that under the pressure of money mankind is already utterly lost

Yet in spite of all this there is still a prospect, which the spiritual enlightenment now becoming a part of the world of thought bears within itself

It is the liberating work of the Light, which brings the complete breaking through of all the barriers hitherto existing

The world of thought will so change the disposition of men's daily life that gradually the whole of mankind will grow freer from the present constriction which arises out of the intellectually material ordering of the way of life

It is only a question of time when this will come, for the shift brought by the spiritual enlightenment swings wholly within the Laws of Creation, and these will thus bring the breakthrough exactly at the moment of the ripeness needed for it

This shift may be called the prevailing of the Will of God, which works independently of human volition

It is therefore possible to look with ever more hope towards the coming time on Earth

It will perhaps come more swiftly than anyone expects today

In part it will be brought about by the collapse of the hitherto existing ordering of the human world, and in part by the new building up in thought of those human spirits who occupy themselves with the questions of the true meaning of human life on Earth

In this very question there lie hidden so very many answers which, in right comprehension, will bring a becoming luminous in many connections as to how human life must look if it is to be called meaningful

Meaningfulness bears within itself inseparably, as a part of it, the spiritual progress of every single man, so that he, when one day he departs from the Earth, may advance to higher planes than those from which he came to Earth

Therein lie progress and ascent

Not only for the individual, but also for the whole Earth

This because the imprint of the ascent of a single spirit remains here and continues to work as a guiding thread offering support for further human spirits who are still to come to this Earth

This may be called the bearing of interest by wisdom in the world of human thought

Hitherto no regard whatever has been paid to this husbandry with the spiritual treasure of men

All the strength was concentrated solely upon the visible world of matter, where the concepts of worth and value were gradually taken over, in their easily abused manner, by money itself

Every human spirit is able to form values of inexpressible worth, if he so wills it

It is an immeasurable value which is laid into the circulation of the forces in the world of thought

That is something far greater than money can express today, money which has itself become a commodity for trading, which ought never to have been

Its multiplication takes place in every possible way, without regard for what its use in the end brings to mankind

In the world of today money is traded by men quite superficially, without regard for the inner worth of those who use it for their own enrichment

Through the intellectually ingenious transfer from one house of money to another, in the end even the money of otherwise well-meaning people serves at a distance to support the manufacture of weapons or to extend the sway of great companies which in their plans take no account of the state of nature, nor even of human health

Thereby arises a pulling down of the original purpose of money, which at its very beginning replaced the earlier kinds of means of exchange

The pulling down of the ancient, and perhaps even well-meant purpose in the use of money now leads to an ever greater falseness in which mankind finds itself in its comprehension of values

And this falseness is now ever more strongly accentuated by the pressure of money

It will go as far as complete disgust among men, however little anyone today yet sufficiently divines it

Already it begins to penetrate into the world of thought

First of all, however, men need to free themselves at least in part from the pressure of rampant envy

At the same time they need to raise themselves, through the inner worth of their own spirit, above the experiencing of bitterness over a supposed injustice, which is precisely the originator of the envy mentioned and of the hatred flowing from it

Only those who are inwardly able to perceive the world through a wise justice can be, for the approaching time, helping determiners of the new paths of development

This because such men will strive, in the recognition of the true meaning of human life, to draw ever nearer to the Wisdom of God

The Wisdom of God, or in other words the Will of God, needed for the development of the worlds, of the universe and of all the life contained therein no support in anything so rigid and so insufficient as the world of money-values

Everything is created out of the radiation of the Graciousness of God, bestowed by the Creator

Out of it everything has arisen and is also maintained in the living cycle of being

Thereby is formed the Harmony of the whole work of Creation

Giving and taking always unfold from the principle of how much radiant light is present in the particular happening of exchange or of the sharing of experience in the joint participation in the Harmony mentioned

That is a wholly different degree of the participation of individuals in the whole work of Creation, which is unknown to men today

Men were nevertheless permitted and able to take part in this great transmission of forces, in which since the beginning of the Earth all animistic activity also shares as the bearer of a great blessing

Thereby a material reflection of the spiritual paradise could have arisen here

It may therefore simply be said that in its beginning the world of men did not necessarily need for its prosperous development anything such as a medium of value in the form of money

The original direction of development, filled with blessing, which was here in the times of the working of the mature spirit Hjalfdar, was however abandoned by men under the pressure of the material intellect

Proceeding along the inevitable paths which unwind from this down to the present days, human society has arrived at a state of a gravely crippled material comprehension of life

Today it is for the greatest part of men something unimaginable that society could be other than its present ordering, in which money plays the most important part

Although here and there in public life various personalities speak in lofty words of the need for intuitive perception and for lovingness in human conduct, the dominion of money holds unbroken sway

The conception of anything such as being able to raise oneself above the present pressure of the monetary ordering of society is thus generally regarded by men as visionary idealism

By many it is again and again put forward as a warning cry pointing out how dangerous idealistic thoughts of a world without money are, although at the same time it is already divined that the present ordering of society brings to every man enormous harm of a spiritual kind

Since, however, the greatest part of men give no sufficient attention to the inner nature of man, this is regarded as something of secondary importance

Something so earnest as the spiritual development and the ripening of the human spirit is pushed entirely aside

However fundamentally it concerns the question of being or not-being in the work of Creation for every single human spirit, here on Earth only little attention is given by men to this earnest matter

But precisely in this there will now come that great and at the same time unexpected change

Together with the spiritual enlightenment the approach to the spiritual nature of man will change completely

In this all religions and philosophical currents, in the way they are established today and work upon men on Earth, will in the end remain entirely aside

The spiritual enlightenment will come by other paths than through the existing religious dogmas

And precisely in the moment when this enlightenment permeates more deeply the thought-disposition of mankind, the necessary changes in men's approach to life will follow

In that moment the fall of the dominion of money will then come about

It will however have nothing to do with political directions, as is expected today, but will go the way of the purely personal spiritual progress of individual men

The purity and moderation of the manner of their earthly life will be surpassed a thousandfold by the experiencing of their spirit

Receptivity for beauty and the full experiencing of every moment of the day will help to open the door to the living knowledge of the work of Creation as a whole, a door still locked today to the intellectual materialists

This living knowledge cannot be procured for money, for it does not originate from this world

It also demands first of all in man a pure soil, enabling him to gain such a state of attunement that he will be permitted to absorb that inexhaustibility of the knowledge of Creation into his inner being in a manner hitherto unknown to men on Earth

Inner joy and the all-fulfilling happiness in the experiencing of a pure spiritual ascent will suddenly be perceived as the highest goal of human striving

It will become the visible mark of those who experience it in themselves

This living recognition will be mirrored in their eyes, in their countenance and in every movement and gesture of theirs, as a new prototype of human life which will become most highly sought after

At the same time it will thus be precisely something that cannot be outweighed with money in order that a man may gain it

This recognition is thereby attainable, in the highest Justice of God, both for all men endowed with possessions and for men without great wealth

It is therefore a matter of something which shifts the content of human existence entirely to another level of perceived happiness, joy and beauty in the experiencing of the nearness of the living knowledge

In men who set out upon this path it will lead ever more to a state of fully conscious glorification of the Creator in the recognition of the perfection issuing from Him

In those men who remain inwardly closed to anything of the kind, it will then call forth, at the very same time when many men set out upon the path of spiritual enlightenment, an intellectual pressure of unrest and of hatred towards the Light

It will lead in them to short-circuited thinking and acting, in which everything that suddenly does not go according to their plans and conceptions will be felt as hostile, as something they will want to destroy

This will however strengthen still more the effects of the Light upon themselves through the most just fulfilment of the Laws of Creation

The hands of the weavers of the threads of fate will be able to lead to their brain cells a radiation which will bring them to a state of madness

This madness, strengthened by the collapse of their own intentions built predominantly upon the willing of the influence of power and of money, will in the end bring about complete insanity

Thereby the close of the period in which the dictate of money counted as the most influential among men will only be hastened

Some will come forth from it liberated and thus as victors over that dictate and over themselves, while others will move towards collapse together with all their intellectual conceptions of the uniqueness of a material dominion over all life

We are approaching this time with unbelievable speed, in direct proportion to the way in which the Ray of Parzival penetrates with heightened power the surroundings of the Earth

The Light encompasses the Earth, and there are ever fewer places where the influence of the intellect can still maintain itself in that unshakable certainty which belonged to it but a few years ago

It may be said that gradually, in all human striving, that which has hitherto been taken as the fundamental power ceases to hold good – the so-called sound intellect

“Sound intellect” as it is understood by men today can in reality never be a helper of the spiritual inner being of man, but always remains only an omnipresent dictator usurping power over every decision of men

In order that the intellect may be regarded as rightly and soundly working, it needs first to subordinate itself entirely to the rule of the intuitive perception of the spirit

That will then lead to its no longer standing independently as such, but becoming a part of the pure, or otherwise expressed, the soundly creative thinking of man

Thereby, among other things, its hitherto devastating conviction that it knows everything best will cease

The intuitive perceiving of the spiritual man will bring, in place of the previous intellectual desire to “know better”, the far more precious pure longing for knowledge

The ability to long for knowledge is today entirely lacking in many men, for the brain and the intellect are far too clumsy instruments for this inward pure longing

The clumsiness of the intellect we can also recognise, among other things, in all men who exercise implacable criticism towards their fellow men

They often call themselves those who strive, in their criticism of other men, to be implacably strict within the framework of their doctrinal comprehension of God and His Laws, in the supposition that thus alone it is right, that thereby they themselves are faithful and praiseworthy in the eyes of God, and that this all the more entitles them to pronounce judgment upon others in the sense of what must one day inevitably come upon them as divine retribution

They do not divine that for their judging of others they still use only the intellect, and not the intuitive perception needed for it

The intellect is easily recognisable precisely in how swiftly it is finished with all judging of other men, and at the same time in how self-assured it is that its conclusion is the best and highest degree of comprehension to be found far and wide

The measure which the intellect uses, however, will always be only of a heavily coarse kind, and therefore will never correspond to the all-embracingly finer and thereby more perfect standard of the Justice of God, which works in the most living manner within the Laws of Creation

Nothing in this fact will be altered even by the self-assurance of all criticising men that they are the ones who know how the Will of God is to look in this gross material world

Hitherto, whenever anything of the kind was left to the work of the intellect, there arose from it only dogmatism and

Besides this it holds good that if these men really wished to be strict in their intuitive perception in the sense of the helping Love of God, then, in the fulfilment of the longing truly to recognise the connections, they would first have to occupy themselves with whether they really know everything needful about the others of whom they speak, in order to be able to subject them to criticism and to condemn them

The strictness of the Love of God places upon man in the first place the demand to apply all the intuitive capacities of the spirit to a right approach towards his fellow men

The answer as to what the result of such an intuitively perceptive procedure in a genuine longing to recognise everything with sufficient care would then be, is more or less evident

The intuitive perception would never permit the transgression of the commandments thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not kill in the sense of exposing other men to superficial criticism and condemnation, for anything of the kind will always remain only a moral besmirching

It would therefore lead only the more to a deepening of mutual reverence, for in every man there would gradually be found many places which require ripening, and the intuitive perception ruling over the intellect is as such always ready in man's inner being first of all to help his fellow man, and not to condemn and criticise him

All this is a sign that the devastating dictatorship of the intellect takes part even in those efforts which men today quite mistakenly regard as spiritual work and spiritual activity

In reality there is nothing more spiritual in it than that the intellect has skilfully adapted itself and uses, in the circle of homogeneous men, the necessary spiritual concepts for ways that are otherwise not changed at all

The endeavour of the intellect to show itself great and at the same time also to harm, or at least to humiliate one's fellow men, remains in its core always the same

In the end it concerns absolutely all human activities on Earth where the intellect can demonstrate its endeavour to excel above others

Therefore we can meet with this manner of human conduct almost everywhere

Therefore we can see so much discord and enmity among men

The cause of it is the dictatorship of the intellect

And there is still something further which the criticising and condemning of others reveals about those who do such a thing

It holds good that men who criticise show therein their own weakness, that they themselves do not know how to go on

Such men are not capable of creating and building up of their own

Their strength suffices only to attack others with their criticism, lying in wait, and in this attacking to become for a time more visible and more audible

A truly strong spirit, however, goes calmly on his way, building and creating everywhere he is led by his intuitive perception and by his spiritual guidance

Thereby he already forms around himself a magnetism which must of necessity attract all who perceive and think homogeneously

With this the true building up begins, and not with what has hitherto been the custom among men, namely gathering-places filled with aggressiveness and hatred which, in the supposition that they render service to the Light, in their own weakness merely attack all those who go calmly and earnestly forward in the endeavour to shape better conditions of life on this Earth

The fulfilling of a pure human life is now conditioned upon the abandonment of all the old paths of the intellect

This part of the human stage of development on Earth has already shown itself to be erroneous and harmful to all that is purer, and therefore precisely now there is here the decisive time of a new spiritual enlightenment, which points the way rightly to those values for the sake of which men in reality come to Earth

These values are of a spiritual kind

It is needful to occupy oneself with this earnestly anew and independently of all the hitherto existing forms of applying dogmatic precepts and quotations from the most varied holy books

A living intuitive perception needs of necessity to be present in everything that is now to be a part of the building up of the new age on Earth

As this intuitive perception awakens in an ever greater number of men, it will go forward more easily and more swiftly

There is therefore no need to remain a single minute longer in the old ordering of the intellectual way of life, which again and again only fetters man in his noble impulses

All striving needs to be directed wholly and entirely only upon the creative manner of a true spiritual building up, which resembles the physician and heeds above all the esteemed principle “first do no harm”

From this point all building up for the new age needs to proceed, when the path of development will be determined by the pure guidance of the Light through an enlivened and rightly used intuitive perception

The expression “an awakened man” will thereby gain a wholly new measure of earnestness among men, for it will mean a man with an unprecedentedly enlivened intuitive perception

Precisely in men who walk thus money will swiftly lose its dominion over their life, and the place thus vacated will be taken by the rule of the full spiritual experiencing of every moment of the present

With full responsibility they will then approach money only as a necessary temporary means for expressing the value of human striving

All else that lies hidden behind money, such as the subconscious pressure upon the mind through the image of the craving for possessions, or conversely the pressure of blazing envy arising out of poverty, will become a thing of the past, for neither of them is a part of spiritual development

Money is only a temporary means for meeting the present conditions on Earth

Therefore it must never become a ruler over man, over the spirit

In the hands of spiritually enlightened men money will thus in the end bear a partial blessing from the fact that in their hands it will always serve good and honourable aims