Cosmic meaning

"When someone plows the field with a horse and plow, working with the horse, the work with the horse still contains some natural forces and some significance beyond the present; that work has a universal significance. When a wasp builds a nest this structure has cosmic meaning. If someone starts a fire by striking flint against a stone, causing sparks to fly that then ignite the tinder, that person exists in unity with nature, and the act has cosmic significance. We have lost our connection to cosmic purpose through modern industrialism. There is no universal consequence when we turn on an electric light. Cosmic meaning is gone. When you go into a modern factory completely filled with machines, what you find is a cosmic hole, something without consequence in cosmic development. If you go into the forest to gather wood, that has some cosmic importance beyond earthly development. If you look at a modern factory with everything it contains, that has no importance beyond earthly development. Human will is misplaced there and has no universal purpose. Think about what that means. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, we have developed a cognition that is fantastic, distant from reality. We direct more and more of our activity toward serving machines; we carry out more and more of our activity within industry, and the will we put into this industrial activity is meaningless for cosmic evolution.
A great question now confronts our souls: Does the fact that our knowledge is, to a large extent, fantastic and our will meaningless have any significance for the totality of human development? Yes, it has significance, extremely important significance. It means that as human beings we must forge our way past that fantasy into an understanding of reality, into that understanding of reality that does not stop with nature, but continues on into the spiritual existing beyond nature. As long as people received the spirit along with their concepts, they could neglect to exert themselves to gain the spirit. However, since now only concepts remain, concepts devoid of the spirit, bur people still want to reach up to the spirit, many people long to rise above abstract understanding and gain real spiritual understanding. Since we have now industrialism and its lack of meaning, we must seek another meaning for the human will. We can seek that meaning only when we rise to a worldview capable of bringing meaning to what is meaningless, namely, to industrialism. We can do that by bringing meaning from the spiritual and recognizing that we are to seek tasks set for us by the spiritual. Earlier, if we wanted something from the spiritual, we did not need to exert ourselves, because instinct connected the spiritual with human will. Today, we must especially exert ourselves to will out of the spirit. We must counter meaningless industrial willing with a meaningful willing out of the spirit."

Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, August 10, 1919