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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 191 through 200 of 1752

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36. Collected Essays from “Das Goetheanum” 1921–1925: Anthroposophy and Mysticism 13 May 1923,

This occurs in a kind of symbolism that is also present in dream images. It can be said that the mystic dreams of the processes of his own bodily organization. It is certainly a great disappointment for some who think differently about mysticism to discover the above. But for those who want to penetrate the mysteries of the world of reality, every kind of knowledge is welcome, including the fact that, when viewed in a certain way from the soul, the bodily processes appear as a web that is like nocturnal dreams. And if we follow this knowledge further, it shows that this fact is a guarantee of how the human body's organization ultimately has its origin in spiritual sources.
The anthroposophical researcher thus arrives at a vision of a finer, more ethereal body of formative forces, which is connected to the physical human body as a higher one. The mystic enters into dreams about the physical body; the anthroposophical researcher arrives at a superphysical reality.
68a. The Essence of Christianity: Germanic and Indian Secret Doctrine 22 Apr 1906, Munich

Then the environment has such an effect that the dream always takes on this form in a similar way. Laistner traces all these legends back to the riddle of the Sphinx.
It has nothing to do with folk poetry, but can be explained by what the dream does to the sleeper. The dream is the main symbol. You catch a frog in your dream, wake up and find the corner of the bedspread in your hand.
The dream, a means of occult development, gives symbols of a higher spiritual world. Then, in contrast to this ordinary dream state, a higher state of consciousness arises in which the human being becomes aware of sensory perceptions.
257. Awakening to Community: Lecture VII 28 Feb 1923, Stuttgart
Translated by Marjorie Spock

So long as a person continues in completely normal circumstances and is able, by reason of a normal psychic and bodily condition, to keep his isolated dream experience separated from his shared experience with others, he will be living acceptably in his dream world and in the world of reality.
Let us assume that the pathological condition he is in causes him to project into his waking consciousness a world of feelings and ideas similar to those of dream life. Instead of developing logically ordered thoughts, he produces a pictorial world like the picture world of dreams.
Something in the physical world can seem just as right as a dream content does to the dreaming person. But the carrying over of things of one's dream life into situations of everyday waking consciousness nevertheless remains an abnormal and harmful phenomenon.
183. Mysteries of the Sun and of the Threefold Man: Lecture II 25 Aug 1918, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Even in ordinary consciousness very little is known of what is connected in a soul-spiritual way with the thorax and the middleman. It is in itself of a dream nature. This middle, thorax consciousness sometimes pushes up into man's dream consciousness, but only very chaotically and irregularly. If a man is able to breathe regularly, when his heart beat even is when in fact all the functions of man's thorax, his middle part, are in order, the consciousness of this part is not so clear as that of the head; it too in ordinary life runs its course dream fashion. We dream in our feeling, as I have stated here during past years, in feeling we dream of this middle man.
Therefore while in your head consciousness in a dream way, in deep dreaming, you have unconsciously what was in your previous incarnation, in the dreams of your thorax you have what has meantime been passing since that incarnation up to your present birth.
80a. The Essence of Anthroposophy: Anthroposophy and the Riddles of the Soul 26 Jan 1922, Berlin

But if one looks with an unbiased eye at what is present in this dream life, one must say: This dream life mocks everything that puts the human being into existence in an orienting way in the waking day life, through which alone he can fruitfully place himself into the world between birth and death.
Precisely those who see through the fact that man is present as a spiritual-soul being during sleep and that his consciousness is only subdued, will, when studying the dream life, be able to observe this sporadic flashing of consciousness in the dream in such a way that man then, with his spiritual soul, only comes to the periphery of the physical, that he does not yet fully enter the physical sphere when he wakes up or, when dreams accompany his falling asleep, step out of it.
Yes, it is precisely those formations that arise when what should remain only on the periphery of the physical body as dream-like formations, as dream-like soul experiences, submerge too deeply into the physical organism that occur as pathological manifestations of the soul life.
243. True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation: Influences of the Extra-Terrestrial Cosmos Upon the Consciousness of Man 21 Aug 1924, Torquay
Translated by A. H. Parker

The moment man begins to strengthen his inner soul-forces in relation to the normally chaotic dream consciousness, the moment he succeeds in transforming this dream consciousness into an instrument for the apprehension of reality, in that moment he becomes aware that the accumulated Moon forces are present in his Ego during waking life. The moment he actually transforms the dream into reality through Initiation-knowledge, he feels the presence of a second being within him, but he knows that the forces of the Moon sphere live within this second being.
The first indication, the first experience, of man's dawning Initiation-knowledge is that he follows one of the two paths which have to be traversed—the path that leads through the development, through the conscious realisation of the dream world. And if he now becomes aware (in the dream state)—and, as I have pointed out, this is a necessary step—he realizes that though it is day without, within himself he bears the night.
235. Karma: The Threefold Man and the Hierarchies 02 Mar 1924, Dornach
Translated by Henry B. Monges

When you dream in pictures, your consciousness lives in pictures. But these pictures, in their picture character, have the same significance—although in another form—as our feelings. Thus, we may say that we have the clearest consciousness, the most illumined consciousness in our visualizations, in our thoughts. We have a kind of dream consciousness in regard to our feelings. We only believe that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than we have of our dreams. If on awaking from sleep we recollect our dreams and form of them wide-awake visualizations, we do not seize hold of the dream. The dream is far richer than our visualization of it afterwards.
199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture XVI 11 Sep 1920, Dornach
Translated by Maria St. Goar

I could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big one, how many people have come to me in the course of time and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams! What is important here is that even those imaginations that express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated itself from the actual content. The content which we receive and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is not the true course of the dream; it really has very little to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image follows another, the way complications arise and are resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a number of different ways as a dream.
68a. The Essence of Christianity: The Kernel of Wisdom in Religions 19 Jan 1906, Frankfurt

They did not have the same intellectual powers as we do, but they had others that we lack, which are similar to the abilities that our soul develops in dreams. Their imagination was not based on sensory perception of things; instead, the outside world appeared to them in images, symbolically, as it does in dreams.
The soul's experience of all of nature, this empathic feeling for natural forces in higher spiritual vision, gave rise to the belief in the “Great Spirit”, which is revealed in every sound of nature. Then came the time when, out of the soul's dream state, out of symbolic contemplation, intellectual life in the modern sense developed. People scattered to different countries and adapted to their climate and other conditions.
90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: On Clairvoyance 30 Oct 1904, Berlin

The normal person has two other states of experience, which are the so-called dream sleep and dreamless deep sleep. This second state of consciousness, sleep interspersed with dreams, does not plunge the person completely into the unconscious.
What a person experiences in a completely different world during dream-filled, not very deep sleep, are coherent, ordered facts. And of these facts, which he experiences but of which he does not become aware, he has some memory.
The next higher level is where the person no longer has dream-filled sleep, but is able to look into the higher world through intuition. This world is full of spiritual clarity; there is no longer any arbitrariness.

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