2 1 6 ,@ The Secret Li@ of h'ature
possible, says he, to integrate one's efforts with theirs and to lead. this planet back to its proper state as a Garden of Eden, thriving and
healthy. But time is running out.
When fifteen hundred of the world's most distinguished and senior
scientists, including a hundred Nobel laureates, issue an urgent warn-
ing (as they did in Atlanta in 1992) that we are approaching a crisis sit-
uation, that the loss of natural ecosystems around the world promises
to approach catastrophic levels with the extinction of 20 percent or
more of the planet's plant and animal species, and that this could soon
render the globe unable to sustain life, it would seem to be time for ac-
tion.Yet the establishment continues to drag its filthied feet: especially
the chemical, drug, tobacco, and arms establishments.
The idea that a few moguls could deliberately set about destroying
the planet for mere lucre would seem preposterous were it not for
Steiner's warning that Ahriman (whom he equates with Mammon and
Mephistopheles) resides in gold. If nothing is done to stem this tide, the
result, Steiner prophesied, will be the "War of All Against All" from
which but a few will escape-by means unspecified-to repopulate a
reincarnated and redeveloped planet.
What we should be doing, says Steiner, is learning to transform na-
ture by developing our innate talents, cooperating with the world of
spirits. Human beings, says Steiner, need no longer be dependent on
what Nature freely gives us; as creative artists we can shape and trans-
form Nature by first becoming master crafters of the inanimate-vide
the transformation of minerals into Rolls Royces and stones into a
Pietci or a Taj Mahal-on our way to becoming master crafters of all
that is living-plant, animal, and human-which, as they appear today,
"are but germs of what they are to be."
For anthroposophists the world is not woven out of the atoms of
the scientist but out of "such stuff as dreams are made on," out of con-
scious imagination. The very being of the world, says Steiner, springs
-... not from dead matter but out of living thought. "Just as ice is frozen
water, the material world is frozen thought. What you think today, that
you will be tomorrow."
Humans, as artistic creators, can learn to build with atoms through
the power of thinking. "When man has learned to think right into the