Michaelic Consciousness

Below is an automated transcript that I’ve lightly edited. Listen to the recording for the real deal!

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Andrew Linnell: Matt Segall was one of the featured speakers at the Mystech Conference on the Mysteries of Light this past summer. He received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has continued there, teaching courses on German Idealism and process philosophy. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination (a term challenging to pronounce but meaningful), exploring a post-Kantian process philosophy grounded in Schelling and Whitehead. His research grappled with Kant's limitations on knowledge and argued that Schelling’s and Whitehead’s process-oriented approaches offer a path beyond the Kantian threshold, allowing a renewed experiential contact with reality. This title indicates that he has deeply studied Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom. This brings us to this evening’s discussion. We are honored to have him here, so I’ll turn things over to Matt with great pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us.

Matt: Thank you, Andrew. I was very excited to get this invitation, just like I was when Mystech invited me. I enjoyed that conference so much and haven’t yet had a chance to congratulate you and the whole Mystech team for putting on such a beautiful and enriching event. I don’t often get opportunities to not just talk about anthroposophy—I get some, but not many—but to actually do anthroposophy. So, it was with both joy and a sense of seriousness that I accepted this invitation. It also gave me a reason to read a cycle of lectures by Steiner that I’d been meaning to read for some time.

I’m referring to the lectures Steiner gave to the youth movement in Stuttgart in October 1922, later published as Becoming the Archangel Michael’s Companions.

Steiner spoke to the young generation about the failure of education in their time, the rise of materialism, and what they might do to reengage with the older generation while also not forgetting those just coming into this world—the children even younger than themselves. Steiner was addressing 18-to-25-year-olds, and there were about 80 of them there. He met with them in smaller groups before giving the lectures and found that there were two main impulses seeking expression and support among them. Some wanted educational reform, while others wanted a deepening of spiritual community, and apparently there was little overlap. Some of them were at least skeptical of anthroposophy and esotericism, but they’d heard of Steiner’s attempts to renew education and were curious to hear him out. Others wanted a deeper connection to anthroposophy. Steiner faced a bit of a challenge in arranging these lectures to speak to both groups, but I think that what he had to say 102 years ago remains unbelievably relevant today.

Steiner taught that the Age of Michael began in the last quarter of the 19th century and is expected to last around 300 or 350 years, so we’re now nearing the middle of Michael’s reign, while Steiner was speaking toward the beginning. While many things have progressed since then, in other ways, our spiritual development has almost been arrested. I read Steiner and look for signs in our world of the things he foresaw, and sometimes I see resonances; other times I wonder if our world has darkened, or if Ahriman has risen with a rapidity even he couldn’t have anticipated. Today, divisive forces, nationalism, and technology hunt for our attention and freedom, addicting us to cheap pleasures that distract us from the difficult tasks we have as human beings. In Steiner’s time, cinema was already on the rise, and he saw how people were becoming addicted to moving pictures that captured their attention and did their imagining for them. And now we’re even more inundated by screens, always at hand, constantly notifying us of the next thing to pay attention to.

The previous Age of Michael was during the time of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. We can see Michael’s influence in Aristotle’s philosophy, which still had an anthropocosmic orientation. In other words, the human being had a central place in Aristotle’s cosmology. Alexander the Great was a conqueror, of course, but he also united East and West and helped foster cultural exchanges between previously isolated parts of the world. These were some of the challenges and opportunities of that age, and they resonate with our challenges today.

Steiner suggested there is a kind of secret evolutionary meaning behind the rise of materialism, that to foster human freedom, we had to be cut off from the in-flowing cosmic intelligence and wisdom. Only by cultivating our own insights out of our own soul-spiritual striving can we meet the cosmic wisdom in freedom and love.

Since Steiner’s time, these challenges have only grown. We’re threatened by nationalism and tempting technologies like artificial intelligence, which can rightly be described as hunting for our freedom and attention by addicting us to various forms of entertainment and distraction. Today, Ahriman—Steiner’s term for the spirit of materialism—has, if not fully incarnated, then certainly grown increasingly present in our world. So, what are we to do in this situation? I want to talk about the ways Steiner addressed these young people, showing them a path forward.

One of Steiner’s insights was that our individuality and freedom are threatened by materialism. But even as he emphasized ethical individualism, he was also concerned about our increasing self-centeredness. In the Age of the Consciousness Soul, it’s natural for us to be focused on ourselves, our standpoints, and our own opinions, but real individuality and strength of will means allowing others in, without fear that we’ll lose ourselves. Steiner suggested we need to be courageous enough to feel the world from other people’s standpoints, and not just our own. In other words, real power of soul isn’t about influencing others, but about allowing ourselves to be influenced by them. Steiner counseled these young people to cultivate the courage to welcome others without fear of being swallowed up by them. To have a strong will, then, is to welcome others in without being afraid of losing ourselves.

Steiner described Michaelic consciousness as a renewal of“knowledge as communion,” where we have to cultivate social feeling not only to feel close to others, but to truly know the world. He taught that the scientific enterprise itself depends on a healthy human community. When we isolate ourselves within the sense-bound intellect, seeing ourselves as separate, competing minds, we lose the communal bonds that allow knowledge of nature to grow and flourish.

Materialism shrinks our sense of knowledge to only what the sense-bound intellect can show us. We start to feel that each of us has our own opinion to defend, separate from others, and we’re cut off from the world of shared ideas. Steiner saw imagination as a way to escape this isolation, allowing us to step into that shared world of ideas, that world of formative forces that we can consciously engage with. He saw the Michaelic Age as a battle for Earth’s intelligence, describing how cosmic intelligence that Michael once guarded has now descended to Earth, and Ahriman is trying to gain control over it, reducing it to a purely earthly, mechanical form. This process, Steiner said, began with the rise of nominalism in the Middle Ages, which reduced ideas and concepts to mere labels. Nominalism claims that concepts are simply constructs based on sense experience, making each person’s concept a private generalization rather than a living truth. But Steiner argued for realism, that concepts are real, living beings with their own kind of life.

Steiner’s view aligns with Platonic realism, where concepts or universals, like the archetype of a lion, are real beings rather than mere labels or constructs created in human heads. The “group soul” of lions—the lion archetype—is a living being that informs all individual lions that exist or have ever existed. The archetype of lion is alive in a way, actively shaping the existence of each particular lion. The experiences of each individual lion also contribute back to this archetype in a reciprocal way, enriching it with each lion’s life experiences. So, these universals or archetypes aren’t just static forms—they are living, dynamic beings that transact with their individual instances in the world.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are based on the nominalist approach, drawing meaning from large data sets and producing generalized probabilistic responses. AI is very good at creating the illusion that it’s thinking. Machine learning mirrors the nominalist theory of education, where human beings are treated as computers, just hard drives to be filled with information.

Materialism, then, convinces us to see ourselves as machines. And Steiner remarked that the real danger of materialism isn’t that it’s false—it actually makes itself true when we believe it. We begin to think with our brains only. He thought that theoretical refutations of materialism, while well-meaning, ultimately miss the point. Instead, he advised that we speak not just about the spirit but from it, making our concepts “alive” through our own thinking.

Steiner argued that the philosophy of a time is a symptom, not a cause, of the spiritual mood of that age. Philosophy is the thermometer and not the heater. In his time, he saw this exemplified in the work of Herbert Spencer, who extended Darwin’s theory of natural selection into social life with the phrase “survival of the fittest.” In doing so, Spencer applied the idea of natural selection to ethics, reducing human impulses to instinctual urges. Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom was written to counter Spencer’s view by advocating for moral intuitions born from fully awake thinking. Today, after a period of widely appreciated welfare state programs, neoliberal social Darwinism has again become prominent, returning our society to a survival-of-the-fittest mentality.

Materialism ultimately tempts us to see ourselves as just biological computers, confined to a meaningless life from birth to death. We are just aging bodies. Young people today, like those of Steiner’s time, face a cultural nihilism in their educational institutions. Steiner’s advice to anthroposophists was to turn toward the nothingness and seek the All within it. This nothingness, he said, was where we find our deepest selves and cultivate organs of spiritual cognition. Michael is here to help, but we have to stand in the nothingness without fear, and invite him in.

There’s so much more to say, but I’d like to open the floor to questions.

Andrew: Thank you so much for being here. Many people believe that Steiner’s previous incarnations included Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. Aristotle’s time was marked by the fading of ancient mysteries and a shift toward individual intelligence. Alexander preserved this mystery knowledge by putting it in books, almost like the Brothers Grimm capturing fairy tales before they disappeared. Have you thought about that?

Matt: Yes, Andrew, that’s a helpful addition. Alexander’s preservation of the mysteries in books is in part an expression of how cosmic intelligence descended into a more early condition—somewhat diminished, but still present. These texts kept alive enough embers to spark our deeper soul capacities, reminding us of what was once known and perhaps helping us activate it today.

One last thought I’ll leave with you: education isn’t a one-way process, something the old give to the young. It’s something we discover between the generations, where the young bring new initiatives to this Earth and the old age in body while their souls remain young. Thank you all very much.