Now that Rudolf Steiner has been dead for 100 years, we can say: Rudolf Steiner was the last guru! Not that there weren’t others after him, but he was the last that could have been one.
What makes a guru the last guru? The knowledge of self-awareness. It empowers self-empowerment and leads to self-leadership. The last guru makes himself superfluous as a guru and names you as the one who is to name themselves. Self-naming. He says, “You are the ‘I am.’ The ‘I am,’ however, is God.”
Are you saying that Steiner compares the individual with God? Yes, but, with one caveat: no one can create this knowledge for anyone else. No god and no guru can do it for you.
As early as 1892 in Weimar, Steiner was asked about his life motto. His answer was incredible: “In place of God, the free human being.”1 The human being as Homo Deus! Yuval Harari discusses this in his international bestseller of the same name; but, Harari describes its doppelganger: a transhumanist ghost of the human being. Death overcome by prolonging physical life. Death become extinct.
What does the real Homo Deus do? They know themselves. They knows they are the one who knows themself. This makes them not only a creature of God, but a self-creator. They produce themselves. They’re not simply something given, completed, finished, but something becoming itself. Homo Deus overcomes death by reincarnating themselves.
Esoterically, Homo Deus is the one who has the cognition: “It is I.” Steiner’s late mantric work in 1924 ends with these three words—a culmination. An end that contains the greatest possible beginning. Self-knowledge is the red thread of his entire work. Self-knowledge and self-empowerment of human beings in science, epistemology, esoteric science, religion, art, politics, economics, agriculture, and medicine. To recognize and seize oneself and to be active from out of oneself and through oneself.
The film critic Michael Sennhauser from Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF) [the main Swiss broadcasting company] coined the phrase: “If everyone is their own king, no one is the king of any other.” If every human being is sovereign, no one will put themselves above the other. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be sovereign.
If everyone is their own guru, no one has to be the guru of anyone else. Rudolf Steiner was the last guru. He gave the final instruction: go your own way. Empower yourself. Become your own guru.
The guru is dead. Long live the guru. I.
This year we bring you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death—sometimes an essay, sometimes simply a thought or reflection—always, an aspect of his being.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Footnotes
- Cf. Martina Maria Sam, “In Place of God, The Free Human Being,” Goetheanum Weekly Issue 1-2/2024—Trans. note.
