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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 141 through 150 of 262

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69e. The Humanities and the Future of Humanity: Theosophy as a Lifelong Pursuit 04 Jan 1914, Leipzig

The relationship between the natural order and the moral order cannot be grasped any more than the relationship between a mother and her child can be grasped through natural laws alone. The father could be there without the child being there. If the child is there, the child emerges from the father, but the father could be without a child. There is no necessity in the father, yet the father leads to the child.
Other theosophists are said to have stated that after death there is only consciousness but no self-awareness? This may be stated in some books, but it has nothing to do with the spiritual science referred to here.
69e. The Humanities and the Future of Humanity: The Tasks of Spiritual Research for the Future 25 Sep 1912, Basel

We can best recognize this when we observe the changing states between waking and sleeping and ask ourselves what occurs there. An external, experimental science cannot answer this.
And when this spiritual eye opens, then he notices, as the child enters the world through birth, this supersensible working and forming in man. Only then are the things that external research brings to light explained, when we are able to notice how the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child develops out of the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child, how speech develops, how the brain develops more and more, how the upright gait is achieved.
But in addition to this, which we have just placed before our souls, there is something else that can show us how powerless all thinking is, which has just formed itself on this flashing and dispersing star event. When we see a mother living with her child, we see her experiencing how the soul of the child works its way up; we see this mother connected with the first stages of maturation, the attempts at speaking and walking; we see her united with the child in love; we then see this mother at the child's deathbed, seeing the child die.
82. So That Man may Become Fully Human: Important Anthroposophical Results 11 Apr 1922, The Hague

The impulses of the will — I characterized this yesterday — also run in the waking person in such a way that the consciousness, the consciousness living in thoughts, has no knowledge of the inner nature of this will. I said yesterday that we plan to do something, for example, to raise our arm.
That would be like keeping one's hands and arms as small as when one was a child throughout one's entire life. If we want to teach a child ready-made definitions and concepts, it is as if we wanted to keep the limbs of a human being fixed so that they cannot grow.
This is the aim of the pedagogy of the Waldorf school. It is not just about the child, but about the whole human being; it asks how the child must be educated so that it can benefit from the education throughout its life; so that the child does not have to say to itself when it is thirty years old: Now you have learned, but your concepts have remained childish dwarfs; they do not grow.
80c. Man as a Being of Spirit and Soul: The Science of the Spirit and Modern Questions 20 Feb 1921, Hilversum
Translated by Michael Tapp, Elizabeth Tapp

We have to say to ourselves: supposing, for instance, we give a volume of Shakespeare to a five year old child—what will the child do with it? He will tear it to bits or play with it in some other way. If the child is ten or fifteen years old he will no longer tear the volume of Shakespeare to pieces, but will treat it according to what it is really for. Even as a five year old, a child has certain capacities in his soul which can be brought out and developed so that through the development of these capacities the child becomes different from what he was before.
We have arrived at quite a different form of self-consciousness since the time of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. We have progressed to abstract thinking. We are developing our intellectuality to an extent which was unknown to the ancient peoples with their less awake kind of consciousness.
297a. Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice: Educational, Teaching and Practical Life From the Point of View of Spiritual Science 24 Feb 1921, Utrecht

Thus, one must observe carefully: What then changes in the human being when he passes the age of changing teeth? Now, if we really have the necessary impartiality for observation, we can see how the child, when it passes the age of seven, actually only begins to have outlined, contoured ideas, whereas before that it had no such ideas.
The child grows older, and at first we do not notice how one or other of the special ways of playing comes to light in the child's later character traits.
Now, we try to teach the child in pictorial form what is to be taught to the child, so that the child is not introduced too early into an intellectualized life.
181. Anthroposophical Life Gifts: Lecture IV 09 Apr 1918, Berlin
Translator Unknown

The dissolution of the corpse into the Universe is nothing but the external picture of the collective Ego-consciousness; for in truth our Ego-consciousness belongs to the Universe into which our corpse is dissolved.
Only between our birth and death does this Maya-consciousness come to us, of being within that content of space which is limited by our skin. But that is a Maya-consciousness which is produced in us. And death among many other things also disproves this Maya-consciousness concerning the physical material world. It leads the particles of our corpse where in reality our Ego-consciousness always dwells.
59. Metamorphoses of the Soul: Paths of Experience II: Error and Mental Disorder 28 Apr 1910, Berlin
Translated by Charles Davy, Christoph von Arnim

Similarly, the intellectual or mind soul is in constant interchange with the ether body, and the consciousness soul is in a certain sense intimately connected with the physical body. That is why we are dependent on waking consciousness as far as everything which is to enter the consciousness soul is concerned.
The soul-life which takes place under the full control of the consciousness shows what is present in the consciousness soul on the one hand and in the intellectual soul on the other.
But here, too, the principle is the same. The work of the consciousness soul can find an obstacle in the active laws of the physical body. And when the consciousness soul meets these obstacles then all the things arise which appear so cruelly in certain symptoms of mental disorder.
32. Collected Essays on Literature 1884-1902: John Henry Mackay's Development 10 Jun 1899,

And he has every right to say of the volume of his poems under discussion here: “More than once a sentimentality, a self-deception, an exuberance has elicited a smile from me as the pen went through the pages, changing a word here and there - but always only a single one on purpose - into another. But this volume represents a development, and for that very reason, arbitrary gaps should not be torn into its independently created structure, quite apart from the fact that it was the desire to give a complete picture of this development that this edition owes its existence to in the first place.
It lies in the proud awareness that one cannot place oneself high enough. People with such a consciousness feel the great responsibility that the personality has towards itself. They do not want to omit anything that is suitable for developing all the wealth of their talents.
My ego, you raise your head! You were a child and became a warrior. He who always believed in himself remains the victor! This poem from the last part of the “Collected Poems” from the “Strong Year” expresses the attitude of a person who has found himself.
68d. The Nature of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science: Man and Woman in the Light of Spiritual Science 14 Nov 1907, Berlin

We see this antagonism arising on the astral plane as eternally changing life – powerful will and formed beauty. Sexual polarity is a special case. There is a law in the world that is much more significant than sexual polarity.
Man is immersed in many worlds, and whether a male or a female child is born somewhere does not depend on the parents, but on the forces that are outside of them. Imagine, for example, two vessels; one filled with a red liquid and the other with a blue liquid.
Spiritual science is called upon to bring this back to consciousness in people, and that will be the future coexistence of men and women longed for by the best of men today, when people will be aware of what stands above gender, what carries the highest interests and connects man and woman in itself.
279. Eurythmy as Visible Speech: Moods of Soul Which Arise Out of Gestures of the Sounds 10 Jul 1924, Dornach
Translated by Vera Compton-Burnett, Judith Compton-Burnett

If you employ this corrective action of the one type of child upon the other, these forms will prove to have a remarkably powerful effect. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] Now we have in the course of the past years made use of a number of eurythmic exercises and forms, based on such things as these.
In this way, out of the lines of the pentagram, you get a complicated and ever changing form. When this exercise is carefully practised the effect is very impressive and does actually convey the whole character of the word ‘Hallelujah’.
Naturally this need not penetrate into the intellectual consciousness. Even in our present age there are true poets who dance, as it were, with their etheric bodies before they produce a poem; and in earlier times too such poets existed, as for instance Schiller in his really beautiful poems.

Results 141 through 150 of 262

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