An Objective Reason to Be Good
No matter how much morality one preaches, it will not help people. But such insights would not only strike people as insights; rather, if they were to become ingrained in cultural development, if they were instilled in children’s minds from an early age, they would provide an immense moral impetus. For all moral sermons lack anything truly overwhelming or convincing for the human mind. It is indeed true, as Schopenhauer says, that preaching morality is easy, but justifying it is difficult. People have a certain aversion to moral sermons. They say: What is being preached to me here is what someone else wants, and I am simply supposed to submit to it! — This belief will gain more and more ground as materialistic consciousness gains the upper hand. People say today: there is class morality, social-class morality, and whatever such class morality deems right is then imposed on the other class. Such an opinion has seeped into people’s minds, and in the future this will become worse and worse. People will feel more and more strongly that they want to discover for themselves everything that is to be recognized as right in this area, and that this should spring from their inclination toward objective knowledge. Human individuality wants to have more and more influence. — But the moment, for example, the heart realizes that it becomes ill when the entire organism becomes ill, the human being would do what is necessary to avoid becoming ill. And the moment the human being realizes that they are embedded in the entire Earth organism, that they must not be a boil on the Earth’s body, then there is an objective reason for being good. And the person will say: When I steal, I want to gain an advantage. I do not do it because by doing so I make the entire organism—without which I cannot live—sick. I do the opposite, and by doing so I gain an advantage not only for the organism but also for myself.
This is roughly how people’s moral consciousness will take shape in the future. Anyone who is motivated by theosophy will tell themselves: It is an illusion to think one can gain an advantage through an immoral act. When you do that, you are like an octopus squirting out a dark liquid: you are squirting out a dark aura of immoral impulses. Lying and stealing are the seeds of an aura into which you place yourself and through which you make the whole world unhappy.
It is said that everything around us is Maya. But such truths must become truths of life. If one can show that, through theosophy, the moral development of humanity in the future will be such that people must realize how they envelop themselves in an aura of illusions when they seek to gain an advantage, then it becomes a practical truth that the world is Maya, or illusion. The finger believes this in its dull consciousness, which is a half-asleep, dreaming consciousness; it is wise enough to know that without the hand and the rest of the body, it is no longer a finger. Human beings today are not yet wise enough to know that without the earthly body, they are essentially nothing. But they must become that wise. The finger, therefore, has a certain advantage over human beings. It does not cut itself off; it does not say: “I want to keep the blood within me for myself or sever myself as a limb.” - It is in harmony with the entire organism. Humanity, however, must develop a higher consciousness in order to come into harmony with the entire earthly organism. In today’s moral consciousness, humanity does not yet know this. One could say to oneself: I breathe in the air; just a moment ago it was outside, then it is inside the human body: an exterior becomes an interior. — And when I exhale the air I have breathed in, then an interior becomes an exterior again, and so it is with the whole human being. People do not even know this: that, separated from the air surrounding them, they are nothing. They must strive to develop an awareness of how they are enclosed within the entire Earth organism.
How can a person know that they are a part of the entire Earth organism? Theosophy leads people to this understanding.
Read more: Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation: The Christ Event as the central event of Earth's evolution, Lecture 9, The Significance of Spiritual Research for Moral Action, GA 127, 6 March 1911, Bielefeld.