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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 1421 through 1430 of 2238

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67. The Eternal human Soul: The Animal and Human Realms. Their Origin and Development 15 Apr 1918, Berlin

What we get to know in the next talk as the human “mind,” which reveals itself in the ego at first, seizes itself in the human organisation in these conditions of balance that the animal does not have.
However, in that which the human being has as the same with the animal the ego does not at all live. The ego does not live in the bones and muscles, does not intervene there, but seizes itself in the feeling at first that rests in the equilibrium.
Because the human being breaks away from the diversity of the animals and gives himself his independent figure that is the dwelling place of the ego, he appropriates invisibly what is visible in the animal world. This lives in his thinking. In the animal realm is poured out in the most manifold forms what is poured out in us, while we survey the world with thinking.
82. So That Man may Become Fully Human: Anthroposophy and Contemporary Intellectual Life 07 Apr 1922, The Hague

We say, “We must become social beings,” because in modern times, precisely as the spirit of science has grown, we have basically only become strong in our ego, in our antisocial nature, and today we are seeking a balance between this strong ego and social demands.
This feeling of the powerlessness of one's own ego permeates modern humanity. This makes modern humanity approach life without joy, without inner devotion, even without understanding, because the strongly developed ego, the strong self-awareness, must always feel powerless even in the face of that life in which one has to work oneself.
330. Supersensible Being of Man and the Evolution of Mankind 11 Jul 1919, Stuttgart
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

When we imprint our super-sensible experiences into our etheric body and on into our physical body, we feel as though we were no longer master of our ego. We thought our ego filled our soul being through and through, but now it feels as though it were being sucked into the body.
Out of this continuation of the birth process, out of this increase of life which has to come out of our whole being, there then rays back to us the true, super-sensible nature of our ego, and enters into what we have imprinted into our body. Our ego arises again and again out of the grave of our partially dying head.
173c. The Karma of Untruthfulness II: Lecture XXIII 22 Jan 1917, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

And when we are unable to use them, as is the case between going to sleep and waking up, our astral body and our ego-being—which are recent additions from the time of ancient Moon and the earlier periods of Earth—are too attenuated, too intimate, to detect anything. Of course the spiritual world is ever about us, just as the air surrounds us constantly. And if our astral body and our ego-being were—let me say—sufficiently dense, we should always be able to perceive, to grasp, what is all around us in the spiritual world. We cannot do so because in our astral body and our ego-being we are too attenuated; they are not yet fully-formed instruments, like the physical senses or the brain, which our capacity for forming ideas uses in order to attain waking experiences in the soul.
174a. Central Europe Between East and West: Second Lecture 03 Dec 1914, Stuttgart

You see, we not only sleep at night, we also sleep during the day, only that at night our attraction to the physical body is so strong that it permeates our astral body and our ego like a fog and dulls our consciousness. When we now descend with the same astral body and the same ego into our physical body to satisfy our desires, then what we develop as consciousness is permeated by the influences of the national soul and there again consciousness is interspersed, so that down there, despite our belief that we are quite awake, there is always something asleep in us.
Just as the Italian people have to develop the sentient soul, the French the intellectual soul, and the English the consciousness soul, so the German has to develop the I, and much about the nature of the German people becomes understandable when one feels and realizes how everything that is German culture wells up from the I. This connection between the ego and the most sacred spiritual goods is a characteristic of the Central European people. It is particularly evident in one phenomenon.
Now we see how it is in the German to bring everything out of the ego, how the German has Jakob Böhme, how German cultural development is unthinkable without this occult influence.
174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: Third Lecture 14 Feb 1915, Stuttgart

When we are in the spiritual world from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, with our ego and astral body, we are not in touch with our folk spirit, with the folk spirit that, so to speak, presides over our nationality, but we are only in touch with this folk spirit during our waking day life, from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep.
You see, the human being, with its physical body, is based on the etheric body as its creator, then the astral body, then that which we call the ego carrier. All of this works on the physical body, and each higher body in turn works on the lower.
In addition to what enters the spiritual world through the ego and the astral body and has value for the individuality, the etheric body has a general value for that which passes into the general aura of human evolution on earth.
157a. The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death: Concerning the Subconscious Soul Impulses 14 Dec 1915, Berlin
Translated by Harry Collison

At a certain time, either in the second, third, fourth year of life, or even later with some people, we must recollect becoming aware of the individual self, the Ego. When we thus look back into ourselves, our soul gaze meets this memory, and in so far as we are physical men here, we really live inwardly in these memories.
We must presuppose that we have been consciously present with our Ego in all these memories, and have been able to retain them. If that were not so, the continuity of our Ego would be disturbed, and a soul disease would appear.
We spend the life which we embrace with the ordinary consciousness in the continuous comprehension of what we develop in this way, but behind it there lies another, a life following definite laws, which we do not perceive with the ordinary consciousness; in this life we share, when, between going to sleep and waking, we live in the astral body and Ego. Our consciousness is, however, then so lowered that we cannot perceive with ordinary senses what position we occupy in a spiritual world which pursues its own course, which continually lives around us, and while yet being super-sensible and invisible weaves itself into the sensible and visible.
336. The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge: Economic Demands and Spiritual Insight 07 Jan 1921, Stuttgart

What is all this surge of knowledge into the depths of the primeval world and into the distance when anthroposophy - here it says: “theosophy” - cannot say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. And why, in fact, are seven world ages necessary? And then this pastor and licentiate in theology says: the anthroposophist knows just as little about this as we do, so he also adheres to mere facticity.
For the spiritual knowledge that we have today is expressed in such a way that it is indifferent whether one knows why one is an ego or a non-ego. We need a renewal in the field of spiritual knowledge. And this renewal will lead us to something quite different, which has already been hinted at in these or those lectures that I have given, which always seems bold when it is spoken out loud, but which is absolutely a result of this spiritual science, as surely as any scientific result can be.
111. Introduction to the Basics of Theosophy: The Place of Purification and Devachan 23 Sep 1907, Hanover

The physical-sensual life is a necessary point of transition in our development and should not be confused with a sensualistic asceticism. We only have to give up the pleasures that the ego wants for its own sake. It is necessary to enjoy food. What is to be frowned upon is the desire for pleasure for the sake of pleasure, which plunges the human being deeper into the material world.
265a. Lessons for the Participants of Cognitive-Cultic Work 1906–1924: Christmas, the Physical Body and Christ Consciousness 25 Dec 1908,

Record A by Unknown People Elements Sun Spirits corresponds to: I fire light physicalbody astral body air sound etheric body etheric body water ether of life astral body physical body earth ardor of desire ego The four elements correspond to the four bodies of man in the manner described above.

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