Live a Balanced Life that is Material as well as Spiritual

“Only through the building up of a moral world order by intelligent self-conscious individuals can the world process be led towards its goal. … True existence is the incarnation of the Godhead; the world process is the Passion of the incarnated Godhead and at the same time the way of redemption for Him who was crucified in the flesh; morality, however, is the collaboration in the shortening of this path of suffering and redemption. Here, man does not act because he wants to, but he shall act because it is God’s will to be redeemed. Whereas the materialistic dualist makes man an automaton whose actions are only the result of a purely mechanical system, the spiritualistic dualist (that is, one who sees the Absolute, the Being-in-itself, as something spiritual in which man has no share in his conscious experience) makes him a slave to the will of the Absolute. As in materialism, so also in one-sided spiritualism, in fact, in any kind of metaphysical realism inferring but not experiencing something extra-human as the true reality, freedom is out of the question.
“Metaphysical as well as naïve realism, consistently followed out, must deny freedom for one and the same reason: they both see man as doing no more than putting into effect, or carrying out, principles forced upon him by necessity. Naive realism destroys freedom by subjecting man to the authority of a perceptible being or of one conceived on the analogy of a perceptible being, or eventually to the authority of the abstract inner voice which it interprets as “conscience”; the metaphysician, who merely infers the extra-human reality, cannot acknowledge freedom because he sees man as being determined, mechanically or morally, by a “Being-in-itself”.
-Rudolf Steiner
Moral World Order
It is true that we need to build up a moral world order in order to reach that state where the world can be one with the Godhead. Unfortunately, the number of people doing that is quite small, although growing. It is God’s Will that humanity be redeemed, but God is not going to force us to do so. God gave us a certain degree of free will so that we can choose to serve Him, or not. Without that free will, we would be little more than automatons doing what we are programmed to do.
Materialist and Spiritualist
The materialist acts according to what is happening in the physical realm, with no regard for the spiritual. As a result, they lack empathy and humility and are likely to be greedy and unkind. Most of them don’t believe in an afterlife. A few do, but their idea of an afterlife is probably something very similar to life in the material realm. You can see example of this on social media where they post memes of dogs with the message “This is what I think Heaven is,” or an image of fishing with the text, “I hope the fishing is good in Heaven”. None of that shows Heaven as the spiritual place that it truly is.
On the other hand, the pure spiritualist concentrates so much on the spiritual that he becomes ineffective in the physical realm. They may find it impossible to keep a job or to stay physically healthy.
Neither of these extremes is good. We all need to know that there is a God and we must obey his will, even in the physical realm. We must also recognize that while we are in the physical realm, we need to function in it to the best of our abilities.






