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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 601 through 610 of 1058

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130. Facing Karma 08 Feb 1912, Vienna
Translator Unknown

Let us assume that a youngster has lived until his eighteenth year at the expense of his father. Then the father loses all his wealth and goes into bankruptcy. The young man must now learn something worthwhile and make an effort to support himself.
In this event, man, in reality, would be escaping from the grace that is given to him by the gods. Self-torture practiced by ascetics, monks and nuns is nothing but a continuous rebellion against the gods.
May joy and happiness be for us a sign as to how close the gods have attracted us, and may our pain and suffering be a sign as to how far removed we are from what we are to become as good human beings.
136. Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature: Lecture V 07 Apr 1912, Helsinki
Translator Unknown

The ancient Egyptians have, in their giving of names, made use of the concept of Child or Son—Father and Mother, as that which towers above individual man. Christianity endeavored in the succession of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to find a name for this Trinity. We may therefore say: “In the seventh place we should have to put the Holy Spirit, in the eighth place the Son and in the ninth the Father.” If therefore we look up to a being whose highest content disappears as in a spiritual Mystery we can say symbolically—Spirit, Son, and Father.
Inasmuch as we contemplate the life of the world of Stars, we contemplate the bodies of the Gods, and finally of the Divine in general.
74. The Redemption of Thinking (1956): Lecture I 22 May 1920, Dornach
Translated by Alan P. Shepherd, Mildred Robertson Nicoll

However, in this life both questions appear repeatedly in him. He is in a conflict. The father is a pagan; the mother is a devout Christ. The mother did her best to win the son over to Christianity.
—Augustine continues: “I asked the sea and the abysses and what they entail as living: we are not your God, search Him above us.—I asked the blowing winds and the whole atmosphere with all its inhabitants: the philosophers who looked the being of the things in us were mistaken, we are not God.”
Augustine felt this way. Hence, God decided to save a part of humanity—please note: to save a part of humanity—God decided that a part of humanity receives His grace by which this part of humanity is led back to the state of freedom and immortality which can be realised, however, completely only after death.
172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture I 04 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

His stern father guides the boy in a certain matter-of-fact way to what people in those days thought could provide support and direction in life. The father is a jurist who has grown up among, and is permeated with, Roman points of view; the son's soul, too, absorbs these views.
After Goethe had been introduced by his father to the field of jurisprudence, he was sent to the University of Leipzig, which he entered in 1765 at a relatively early age.
92. Greek and Germanic Mythology in the Light of Esotericism: The Prometheus Saga 07 Oct 1904, Berlin
Translated by Dorothy Lenn

The Titans are themselves sons of the ancient Greek god Uranus and his wife Gaia. Uranus means ‘heaven’, and Gaia ‘earth’. And let me draw your attention to the fact that Uranus is to the Greeks the same as Varuna to the Indians.
Because of Zeus's anger Prometheus was chained to the Caucasus, and was forced to endure there much suffering over a long period. Further, we are told that the gods, with Zeus at their head, then caused Hephaestus, the god of the smiths, to make a statue of a woman.
Prometheus warned his brother not to accept the gifts, but the latter allowed himself to be persuaded. All these gifts of the gods, except one, were showered upon humanity. They constitute for the most part human miseries and sufferings.
260. The Christmas Conference : On the Right Entry into the Spiritual World. The Responsibility Incumbant on Us 01 Jan 1924, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis, Michael Wilson

In all former civilizations there were ideas, concepts, which were turned first of all towards the super-sensible world, towards the gods, towards the world which engendered, which created, which brought forth. Then with those concepts, which belonged above all to the gods, it was possible to look down onto the earthly world in order to understand it with concepts and ideas which were worthy of the gods.
These concepts and ideas deal above all with anything that can be weighed and measured, but they are not at all concerned with the gods. They are not worthy of the gods and they are of no value to the gods. That is why the souls who have fallen entirely under the spell of the materialism of these ideas which are unworthy of the gods and valueless for the gods are met, when they cross the threshold in sleep, by the thundering voice of the Guardian of the Threshold: Do not step across the threshold!
Practise spirit-recalling In depths of soul, Where in the wielding will Of world-creating Thine own I Comes to being Within God's I. And thou wilt truly live In the World-Being of Man. For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway In depths of worlds begetting being.
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: On Heraclitus 19 Oct 1901, Berlin

However, Heraclitus expressly emphasizes that these shameless scenes only appear shameless when viewed in their popular form, but that there is something important underlying them. - They can be forgiven because this Dionysus is nothing other than Hades. On the one hand, Dionysus is the god of constant growth, the god of life, of pleasure, the god of debauched sex life. On the other hand, he also calls him the god of the underworld, the god of Hades. He regards these two as one and the same. The fact that Heraclitus regards the god of sprouting life and the god of death as one and the same entity is something he experienced within the mystery cults.
That is the living thing in which he can see his god Dionysus and his god Hades as a unity. That is why he can also say that these gods are difficult to understand, because they are the expression of deep, profound truths.
65. From Central European Intellectual Life: Why is Spiritual Research Misunderstood? 26 Feb 1916, Berlin

For more than a hundred years, philosophers have been gnawing away at the old Kantian word with which he wants to unhinge the concept of God. If you merely think of a hundred dollars, they are not a single dollar less than a hundred real dollars.
That is to be firmly held. But one could say: thank God for those who want to be materialistic: they no longer need to create their eyes, because these eyes are created out of the spiritual; they already have them, and by perceiving the world, they use these already finished eyes.
For anyone who looks into the way in which misunderstandings arise, it is of no great merit in terms of what the human soul really works for, whether one swears by the church fathers Gregory, Tertullian , Irenaeus or Augustine, and also look upon them as authorities, or whether one looks upon the church fathers Darwin, Haeckel, Helmholtz, insofar as they are really church fathers, and swears by them.
6. Goethe's Conception of the World: The Platonic Conception of the World
Translated by Harry Collison

Those who adhered to the conception that the relation of the sense world to the world of ideas has a significance apart altogether from man, arrived, together with the problems arising out of this, at the conception of a Divine World Order. And Church Fathers, faced with this problem, had to cogitate on the role played by the Platonic world of ideas within this Divine World Order.
The world becomes the imperfect reflection of the perfect world of ideas resting in God. As a result, then, of a one-sided understanding of Platonism, the human soul is separated from the relationship existing between idea and “reality.”
This mode of conception leads Augustine to the following view: “We can believe without hesitation that although the thinking soul is not of like nature to God, since He permits of no communion, the soul may indeed be illuminated as the result of participation in the Divine Nature.”
148. The Fifth Gospel III: Third Berlin Lecture 18 Nov 1913, Berlin

We also know from earlier lectures in past years that the father of the other Jesus, the Solomonic Jesus, had died, and that the two families of the two Jesus boys had become one family in Nazareth, within which Jesus was with his brothers and sisters and with the Zarathustra mother. We know that the father of Jesus of Nazareth died when Jesus was about twenty-four years old, after he had returned from a major journey, and that Jesus of Nazareth then lived alone with his mother, his foster or stepmother.
They fled, and in that moment he saw the whole transition of the old pagan world of gods into the world of demons and recognized that these were the reasons for the suffering of this people.

Results 601 through 610 of 1058

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