Cosmosophy I
GA 207
The modern, materialistic world conception is a product of fear and anxiety. This fear lives on in the outer actions of human beings, in the social structure, in the course of history ... Why did people become materialists, why would they admit only the outer, that which is given in material existence? Because they were afraid to descend into the depths of the human being.
With these words Steiner characterizes the relationship between inner and outer realities. In a sense deeper than normally recognized, the mind/body split is the result of fear to penetrate the mind, the inner human being. This lack of inner courage rebounds on society and civilization producing the terrible conditions modern humanity finds itself surrounded by. Healing will come when we summon the courage to penetrate the hidden mysteries within. These themes and many more are explored in these insightful lectures.
Eleven Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, given in Dornach, September 23–October 16, 1921. Translated from shorthand reports, unrevised by the lecturer from the German edition published with the title Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie. Revised translation by Alice Wulsin. Lecture 10 was translated by Michael Klein and edited by Alice Wulsin.
| Foreword | ||
| Lecture I | September 23, 1921 | |
| Eastern and Western civilizations in a spiritual light; love and fear; world-knowledge and self-knowledge; the Western mysteries (Ireland); Bulwer-Lytton and his novel Zanoni; the inner nature of the human being as a reflecting apparatus; the source of destruction within the human being as the prerequisite of the independent, thinking human being; the origin of fear in Western civilization; the mystery of evil; the contrasting nature of Eastern and Western blood; the Washington Conference; the comments of General Smuts. | ||
| Lecture II | September 24, 1921 | |
| Filling the inner source of destruction with moral ideals; the Jupiter existence of the earth; ordinary consciousness as the world of the Father God; Adolf Harnack as the advocate of the Father God; Soloviev's differentiation between the Father God and the Son God; the inner word; the declining and ascending worlds; the rainbow and flesh color; Christianity as the religion of resurrection; the world of the moon and the sun as the world of the Father and the Son; the coming of Christ and man. | ||
| Lecture III | September 30, 1921 | |
| Foundations of an occult psychology out of Imaginative cognition; sleeping and waking in higher cognition; the world of objective streaming thoughts and of subjective thoughts; feelings as submerged dreams; the will as a sleep-experience, independent of the body; thinking, feeling, and willing in the spaces between the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; past and future karma. | ||
| Lecture IV | October 01, 1921 | |
| Dream consciousness in the animal soul life; plant consciousness in summer and winter; mineral consciousness as consciousness of our deeds; the relationship of the human being to the hierarchies in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition; metamorphosis of the worlds of thought and will in the life after death; the human being between the realms of the higher hierarchies and the realms of nature. | ||
| Lecture V | October 02, 1921 | |
| The thought world in the region of the sense organization; feeling as a subjective entity; Goethe's mood of soul in the year 1790; the meeting of past and future in the mood of soul; the will as a battlefield of moral ideals with human instincts and drives; the preparation of the future out of the nature of the will; the conscience; cosmic cold and earthly warmth in the constitution of the human being. | ||
| Lecture VI | October 07, 1921 | |
| Anthroposophy as cosmosophy; the spirit of the human being and life after death; coloring the mineral consciousness by moral feeling; the relationship of the human being to angel and archangel (folk-spirit); appearance of plant consciousness in the Midnight Hour of Existence; descent through animal consciousness in the realm of the archai; the Zodiac; the human being as the experienced environment; entrance into the planetary spheres; the soul-permeation of the animal organization; the significance of the soul-spiritual environment; self-knowledge and world-knowledge. | ||
| Lecture VII | October 08, 1921 | |
| The human being in life after death; mineral consciousness and plant consciousness; characterization of Goethe in relation to Shakespeare; animal consciousness; the relationship of the human being to the group-souls of the animals and organ-formation; preparation of the etheric body in the planetary world; the earthly germ as chaos; astral fruit of the earth and etheric-cosmic fruit; the influence of karma; the in-breathing and out-breathing of the cosmos in the human being. | ||
| Lecture VIII | October 09, 1921 | |
| The past of higher entities and the spirit of the human being; the mineral-plant realm and the plant-animal realm as realms of nature in the future; the animal-human realm; the human-soul realm; the manifestation of the inner being of man in the outer physical element on the Jupiter planet; Friedrich Nietzsche and “superman”; the bodily members of man as seeds for future worlds; world past and earthly future. | ||
| Lecture IX | October 14, 1921 | |
| Spiritual scientific presentation of today's intellectual human being; spiritual science as the bestower of life forces; quoting and characterizing a present-day human being (Gottfried Benn) and the necessity of spiritual science for him. | ||
| Lecture X | October 15, 1921 | |
| Dull, I-like life of will and waking thought shadow-pictures; the awakening of the dull I through the appearance of the senses; union with the dead through concrete mental images not through abstract thoughts; reversal of sense experience in the life after death; the philosopher, Feuerbach, and his teachings; Richard Wagner; the totality of sense perceptions: warmth, light, chemical workings, life; refutation of relativity; the problem of spiritual weight; the loss of one's own being in intellectualism and regaining it in deeds out of pure thinking. | ||
| Lecture XI | October 16, 1921 | |
| Viewing the Mystery of Golgotha in the age of freedom; the appearance of the senses as prerequisite for freedom; the modern human being's lack of freedom in the life after death; overcoming this through the experience of freedom in earthly life; the modern world picture without beginning and end; the earlier world picture between cosmogony and Last Judgment; Rotteck's World History; the senselessness of modern history; Arthur Schopenhauer; the Mystery of Golgotha as the sense-giving center to historical events; spiritual science and the evangelists; Christ as spirit sun being; Overbeck and modern theology. | ||