126. Second section. With the analyses of human beings in the first category and in the second category's first section we have been through to terrestrial mankind's furthest outposts and peripheries towards the light. In analysing people in the second category's following section we will come closer and closer to the masses and into the more universal stages of consciousness.
      Those human beings in the second section who approach nearest to the first section will naturally be very much like them from a spiritual point of view, but in relation to their faculty of feeling their ability to reason is even less developed than it is in people in the first section. And the further one departs from that section's surroundings the stronger this fact will manifest itself. So people in the second section, and all the following sections in the second category, will represent a long series of various forms of wrongly controlled and sometimes even misguided emotional life or faculty of feeling, and as the latter is the basis for what we call "religiousness" and the faculty of feeling is dominant in all these people, then they will be strongly religious. But again, this attitude will be to the same degree more or less unintelligent because the faculty of intelligence is too weak in relation to the feeling of the people in question. Their religiousness, therefore, will consist predominantly of unintelligent feelings, which is the same as "fanaticism". So in the second category described here we will meet a great deal of religious fanaticism. Among people in the second section we find many who are members of those outstanding spiritual communities, organizations or sects which have emerged in modern times. People from the first section who are members of such societies live in complete accord with the ideas, laws and principles of these societies and in harmony with the spirit of their individual founders and thus, as regards development, may be considered in a way as "born" members of the organization in question. However, people in the second section who might be found also as members of the same organizations cannot be considered either as "born" members, nor as members on the basis of their predispositions or qualifications, but on the contrary, they are members merely because they have acquired a membership-card. Actually they are no more than recruits or apprentices in those societies, which is shown by the fact that they have not yet achieved the tolerance, humility, unselfishness and moral standard that the founder or originator intended. This, again, is shown by their unbalanced faculty of feeling expressed in this case as indignation towards, and underestimation of, spiritual societies other than their own, while the latter they thoroughly overestimate, urging that it is the one and only true salvation. As they are still showing egoism and ambition to a very high degree and are blinded by the considerable theoretical knowledge which their organization has given them, they strive to raise themselves to important and leading positions in that same organization. This acquired knowledge - which in their naïvety and egoism they believe is their own - burdens them with a spiritual pride which then suppresses their faculty of reason to such a degree that they are unable to see their own lack of qualifications, and their true identity as recruits or apprentices in their organization. Thus it is possible to witness the strange situation where the management of such a religious denomination falls completely into the hands of its least developed members, so that its preachers, lecturers, and group leaders are exclusively mere theorists, consequently sometimes delivering lectures to audiences who are by far their superiors concerning practical application and observance of the traditions of that denomination, and who might even have sufficient qualifications to be their genuine, inborn teachers and leaders. Quite naturally the result will be that the latter gradually withdraw from that organization, which will then correspondingly lose its spiritual value and can no longer represent that spiritual standard which the founder originally intended should be expressed. When a religious organization has reached the point where intolerant, ambitious and egoistic people have taken over the leadership, it will inevitably start disintegrating. It is thus intolerance, ambition, egoism and pride which are the forces destroying it, and in the worst cases they may make such religious societies or denominations look like dead and extinct suns and planets which, in the form of moons, are on the way to crumble and disintegrate. When these factors have gradually taken over a religious organization, it indicates that the organization has finished its role and is now expiring and ending its mission.
      As the forces from the new world impulse have already been working beneath the surface for a long time, influencing people from the second section, they now feel that the world needs a spiritual renewal, and that such a renewal is actually taking place. However, because of naïvety, pride and ambition, some of them are practically immovable in their conviction that this renewal can be achieved exclusively through their own particular organization, and that its founder has given to the world all it needs of spiritual knowledge - yes, sometimes that founder may be acclaimed as a world redeemer, a new messiah, even against the latter's own open denial. Such people are quite against the spirit of their own organization and, because of over-enthusiasm and hypersensitivity, they will bear ill-will towards the new world impulse wherever it appears with ideas or phenomena outside the terminology and expectations of their own organization. Therefore the new world impulse will meet here its first dawning of opposition, confirming the words of the Nazarene: "The first shall be last".*
 
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* Translator's note: St.Mark. 9:35 - "If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last...".