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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 771 through 780 of 1058

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68c. Goethe and the Present: The “Fairytale” of Goethe (Goethe's Secret Revelation Esoteric) 21 Jan 1909, Heidelberg

He shows how a person is initially somewhat unscrupulous, and thus stands at a subordinate level of soul development, to the point where he says: What belongs to my father also belongs to me. The practical result of this is that he commits theft at his father's checkout.
What Goethe so beautifully felt as the Spinozian love of God, the development of the highest powers of the soul, comes to the riddles, the secrets of the world, but as the highest of the secrets, which we only see again as a small temple in the great, the secret of man himself and his connection with the divine being.
Then one counts him among those spirits about whom, summarizing today's reflection, we can say: Like stars shining in the sky of eternal being are the spirits sent by God. May all human souls in the realm of becoming on earth succeed in seeing their flames of light!
68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: Tolstoy And Carnegie 06 Nov 1908, Munich

Now let us add the opposite: Carnegie. He is the child of a master weaver. His father has some work as long as there are no large factories. Carnegie's childhood falls precisely during the boom of big industry in this area. His father no longer receives orders. He has to emigrate from Scotland to America. He can only earn the barest necessities with difficulty.
Tolstoy, because he seeks inner certainty so strongly, can seek the kingdom of God within, but because that which has spread as a real current under the surface is embodied in him, he can, to a certain extent, have no heart or mind for what is happening around him as it dies away.
18. The Riddles of Philosophy: Reactionary World Conceptions
Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln

They attempted to replace the gray, oyster-like pure thought of Hegel by a life-filled, personal, primal entity, an individual God. Baader called it an “atheistic conception” to believe that God attained a perfect existence only in man.
On the contrary, the world must be God's free creation, the product of his almighty will. These thinkers approach the Christian doctrine of revelation.
Krause finds it impossible to accept a conception that seeks the primal being of the world in the things and processes. Whoever, like Hegel, looks for God in the world cannot find him, for the world, to be sure, is in God, but God is not in the world. He is a self-dependent being resting within himself in blissful serenity.
203. Opponents of Anthroposophy 08 Feb 1921, Dornach
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

—“Dogmas are not formulated by a person or the community as their basic religious experience (as in `addressing God') but God, the head of the church, speaks as Holy Ghost directly and immediately through the visible church ...”
Now to go into excess, invoke the Dadaism of religion on top of holy Paul who had also said that the single human being dare not research the final truths: “At this point we can listen to the words of St Paul to the Corinthians without the fear of Gnostic interpretation: What we are talking about is God's secret wisdom, that which is hidden, which God prescribed for all times for our glory, which none of the rulers if this world has acknowledged ... to us however God is revealed through the spirit because the spirit explores all things, even God's depths. Speaking of people—who of you know the inner being of someone according to how the spirit lives in him? Just so nobody has ever fathomed the depth of God as the spirit of God. Yet we haven't received the spirit of the world but the spirit which comes out of God, in order for us to understand what gift God has given us ...” and so on.
139. The Gospel of St. Mark: Lecture IX 23 Sep 1912, Basel
Translated by Conrad Mainzer, Stewart C. Easton

So He leaves them alone to see if they can stay “awake,” that is in a state of consciousness in which they can experience with Him what He is to experience. Then He goes aside and prays, “Father, let this cup pass from me, but let it be done according to your will, not mine.” In other words, “Let it not be my experience to stand quite alone as the Son of Man, but may the others be permitted to go with me.”
Indeed, He speaks of the cosmic when He speaks of immortality, and it is noteworthy how He speaks of this just in connection with His appearance as the Son of David. He proclaims that God is a God of the living and not of the dead, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Mark 12:26-27), because Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live on in their successors in different forms, in that God lives in their individualities.
Thus, after we have understood the mission and significance of the youth who slips away from the eyes and hands of men, we come to understand in an especially profound manner the words, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34.) Then the reappearance of the youth, whereupon it is briefly shown how the youth is a spiritual, super-sensible being, who becomes sense-perceptible only through special circumstances, when He first shows himself to Mary Magdalene.
166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture III 30 Jan 1916, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

What is important is that we realize that we ourselves are living beings and a part of a living world. If we realize this, we will not criticize the gods, the Elohim, for instance. For anyone wishing to set his own wisdom above that of the gods might say, “If gods are supposed to be gods, could they not see that the light would be good? Those gods do not even sound like prophets to me. If I were a god, I would of course only create light if I knew beforehand what light was like, and did not have to wait till later to see that it was good.”
It is not just our particular form with its nose, color of hair, and so on that we get from our father and mother, but our social position is also predestined through our ancestors' positions in life.
335. The Crisis of the Present and the Path to Healthy Thinking: Education and Teaching in the Face of the Current World Situation 10 Jun 1920, Stuttgart

An interesting sentence sequence can be found in Rudolf Hildebrand's diary pages “Thoughts about God, the World and the Self,” which were published after his death, in the chapter where he talks about education and teaching.
I have pointed out how, in the years up to the change of teeth, the human being is primarily an imitator, how his soul is shaped in such a way that he experiences, out of his instinct, what is going on in his immediate surroundings, how he does not, so to speak, detach himself from his surroundings. The hand movements that the father and mother make, the sounds that the father and mother utter, are imitated by the child because, in a sense, albeit not so visibly, the child is connected to the father and mother and the whole environment in the same way that the mother's arm and father's arm are connected to the body of the mother and father, only to a higher degree.
62. The Mission of Raphael in the Light of the Science of the Spirit 30 Jan 1913, Berlin
Translated by Rick Mansell

How utterly different,—divided by a deep, deep cleft, are those beautiful, majestic Gods of Greece, Zeus or Apollo, from the figure dying on the Cross,—a figure, it is true, full of inner profundity and power, but not beautiful in the external sense.
The Greeks poured into their statues their conception of the way in which the Gods worked upon the world. How this working of the Gods is experienced by man, so that he presses onwards to the foundations and causes of things,—this is what is expressed in the picture so often called “The School of Athens”. The conceptions which the human soul had learned to form of the Greek Gods is expressed in the Parnassus, with its new and significant interpretation of the Homeric gods. These are not the gods of the Iliad and Odyssey; they are the gods as perceived by a soul that had passed through the period of inward deepening.
141. Between Death and Rebirth: Lecture VIII 11 Feb 1913, Berlin
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond, E. H. Goddard

Hence we have in the world around us, not the thoughts of the immediately present, living, divine-spiritual Beings but the memory-pictures, the preserved thoughts of the Gods. As to the content of our memory, this may well be of interest because with our memory we grasp a tiny corner of world-creation, we grasp what has passed over from creation into existence.
The conditions of central importance here are quite different from those accepted by modern statistical biology which assumes that when a human being comes into existence through birth he simply inherits certain traits from his father, mother, grandparents and the whole line of ancestors. Quite an otherwise attractive little book about Goethe has recently been published, in which his characteristic qualities are traced back to his ancestors.
Thus what is later on to become the body of the human being has been prepared in past ages without any physical connection with the ultimate father and mother. It was then that the qualities transmitted by heredity were first worked into the process of development.
294. Practical Course for Teachers: The Teaching in the Ninth Year — Natural History — the Animal Kingdom 28 Aug 1919, Stuttgart
Translated by Harry Collison

And again—I have mentioned this before, too—at the age of seven he built his own altar to nature, taking for the purpose his father's music desk, laying minerals upon it, and plants from his father's rock-garden, and on top putting a little fumigating candle; then he caught up the beams of the morning sun in a burning-glass and offered a sacrifice to the great God of nature—a rebellion against what people wanted him to learn.

Results 771 through 780 of 1058

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