The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Something about Spiritual Understanding and Experiencing Destiny

[ 1 ] This time, the messages and reflections addressed to the members here will include some things that may be suitable for giving further direction to the thoughts on the guiding principles.

[ 2 ] Understanding of anthroposophical knowledge can be promoted if the human soul is repeatedly directed toward the relationship between human beings and the world.

[ 3 ] When human beings direct their attention to the world into which they are born and from which they die, they are initially surrounded by the fullness of their sensory impressions. They reflect on these sensory impressions.

[ 4 ] By becoming aware of this: “I think about what my senses reveal to me as the world,” they can already begin to contemplate themselves. They can say to themselves: “I” live in my thoughts. The world gives me reason to experience myself in my thoughts. I find myself in my thoughts, in which I observe the world."

[ 5 ] Continuing in this way, the person loses consciousness of the world, and the self enters. He ceases to create mental images of the world and begins to experience the self.

[ 6 ] Conversely, when attention is directed inward, where the world is reflected, the events of life's destiny emerge in consciousness, in which the human self has flowed from the moment one can remember back to. One experiences one's own existence in the sequence of these fateful experiences.

[ 7 ] By bringing this to consciousness: “I have experienced a destiny with my self,” one can begin to observe the world. One can say to oneself: I was not alone in my fate; the world intervened in my experience. I wanted this or that; the world flooded into my will. I find the world in my will by experiencing this will in self-contemplation.

[ 8 ] Continuing in this way, settling into one's own self, the human being loses the self from consciousness; the world enters into it. He ceases to experience the self; he begins to become aware of the world in feeling.

[ 9 ] I think out into the world; there I find myself; I immerse myself in myself, there I find the world. When people feel this strongly enough, they stand within the riddles of the world and of humanity.

[ 10 ] For feeling: One struggles in thought to grasp the world, and yet one is only caught up in one's own thinking; this is the first mystery of the world.

[ 11 ] To feel oneself shaped by fate within oneself and to sense the flow of world events in this shaping; this leads to the second mystery of the world.

[ 12 ] In experiencing this mystery of the world and of humanity, a state of mind germinates in which the human being can encounter anthroposophy in such a way that it makes an impression on his inner being that arouses his attention.

[ 13 ] For anthroposophy asserts that there is a spiritual experience that does not lose the world in thinking. One can still live in thinking. It indicates an inner experience in meditation in which one does not lose the sensory world through thinking, but gains the spiritual world. Instead of penetrating into the ego, where one feels oneself sinking into the sensory world, one penetrates into the spiritual world, where one feels the ego strengthened.

[ 14 ] Anthroposophy further shows that there is an experience of fate in which one does not lose oneself. One can still experience oneself as effective even in fate. In the unselfish contemplation of human fate, it provides an experience in which one learns to love not only one's own existence, but also the world. Instead of staring into the world, which carries the ego on its waves of fortune and misfortune, one finds the ego that willingly shapes one's own destiny. Instead of colliding with the world, which shatters the ego, one penetrates into the self, which feels connected to world events.

[ 15 ] Human destiny is prepared for us by the world that our senses reveal to us. If we find our own effectiveness in the workings of destiny, our self rises up to us not only from within ourselves, but also from the sensory world.

[ 16 ] If one can even faintly sense how the world appears as spiritual in the self and how the self proves effective in the sensory world, then one is already safely within the understanding of anthroposophy.

[ 17 ] For then one will develop a sense that in anthroposophy the spiritual world that is grasped by the self may be described. And this sense will also develop an understanding that in the sensory world the self can also be found in ways other than through immersion in the inner self. Anthroposophy finds the self by showing how the sensory world reveals not only sensory perceptions to human beings, but also the after-effects of their pre-earthly existence and previous earthly lives.

[ 18 ] Human beings can now look out into the sensory world and say: There is not only color, sound, warmth; there are also the experiences of souls that these souls went through before their present earthly existence. And they can look within themselves and say: There is not only my I, there is also a spiritual world revealing itself.

[ 19 ] With this kind of understanding, people who are touched by the mysteries of the world and humanity can come together with the initiate, who, according to his insights, must speak of the outer sensory world as if it revealed not only sensory perceptions, but also impressions of what human souls have wrought in their pre-earthly existence and in past earthly lives; and who must say of the inner world of the self that it reveals spiritual connections as impressive and effective as the perceptions of the sensory world.

[ 20 ] Members who wish to be active should consciously make themselves mediators between what the questioning human soul feels as the mystery of the world and of humanity, and what the knowledge of the initiated has to say when it brings up a past world from human destinies and when it opens up the perception of a spiritual world from spiritual empowerment.

[ 21 ] In this way, through the work of members who want to be active, the Anthroposophical Society can become a genuine preparatory school for the school of the initiated. The Christmas Conference wanted to emphasize this strongly, and those who understand this conference correctly will continue to emphasize this until a sufficient understanding of it can bring new tasks to the Society.

[ 22 ] The guiding principles to be given in this issue may then flow from these indications.

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Further guiding principles sent out for the Anthroposophical Society from the Goetheanum

[ 23 ] 62. The sensory world brings to the surface in sensory perceptions only a part of the essence that it holds in its depths. Intense spiritual observation reveals that in these depths lie the after-effects of what human beings have wrought in times long past.

[ 24 ] 63. The human inner world reveals only a part of what it contains to ordinary self-observation. With heightened experience, it shows that it stands in a spiritually alive reality.

[ 25 ] 64. Human destiny reveals not only the influence of the external world, but also that of one's own self.

[ 26 ] 65. Human soul experiences reveal not only a self, but also a spiritual world that can connect the self with its own essence in spiritual knowledge.

(Continued in the next issue.)