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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 821 through 830 of 1058

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214. Oswald Spengler, Prophet of World Chaos: Oswald Spengler I 06 Aug 1922, Dornach
Translated by Norman MacBeth, Frances E. Dawson

That is what is meant by the dream of those strange Dominicans, like Peter Peregrinus, about the perpetual motion device, through which God would have been robbed of His omnipotence. They succumbed to this ambition again and again; they extorted his secret from the Divinity in order to be God themselves.” So Oswald Spengler understands the matter thus: that because man can now control machines, he can through this very act of controlling, imagine himself to be a God, can learn to be a God, because, according to his opinion, the God of the cosmic machine controls the machine.
Man senses the machine as something devilish, and rightly so. For a believer it indicates the deposition of God. It hands over sacred causality to man, and becomes silent, irresistible, with a sort of prophetic omniscience set in motion by him.
260. The Christmas Conference : Continuation of the Foundation Meeting 28 Dec 1923, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis, Michael Wilson

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.
Practise spirit-beholding In stillness of thought, Where the eternal aims of Gods World-Being's Light On thine own I Bestow For thy free willing. And thou wilt truly think In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.
If you consider a small note in my memoires which are now appearing in Das Goetheanum—just at the beginning of the article coming out this evening52—you will see how very profound are the reasons for the motto over Plato's Academy: ‘God geometrizes’. And indeed it is only possible to penetrate Platonic instruction—I am speaking of Platonic instruction and not spiritual-scientific instruction—by means of mathematics.
55. The Occult Significance of Blood 25 Oct 1906, Berlin
Translator Unknown

In the religions of earlier civilizations, among the ancient Hebrews, for instance, this name was known as “the unutterable name of God,” and whatever interpretation modern philology may choose to place upon it, the ancient Jewish name of God has no other meaning than that which is expressed in our word “I.” A thrill passed through those assembled when the “Name of the Unknown God” was pronounced by the Initiates, when they dimly perceived what was meant by those words reverberating through the temple: “I am that I am.”
Father, son, grandson, etc., designated by one name that which was common to them all, that which passed through them all; in short, a person felt himself to be merely a member of an entire line of descendants.
68c. Goethe and the Present: Goethe's Secret Revelation (Esoteric) 09 Jan 1911, Frankfurt

He shows how a person is initially somewhat unscrupulous, he is in a subordinate soul development and says: What belongs to my father also belongs to me. He commits theft. Then conscience awakens, the soul rises, and precisely through the unrighteous deed he becomes a kind of moral center for all the people around him.
Goethe says meaningfully: If the eye were not solar, How could we behold the light? If not the divine power of God lives in us, How can we be enraptured by the divine? He immediately points out how we must respond to the light of nature's secrets if these secrets of nature are to shine back again.
Thus, in summarizing what is to be characterized here, one may say of Goethe's spirit: They shine like stars in the heaven of eternal being The spirits sent by God. May all human souls succeed in the realm of earthly becoming To see their flames of light.
354. The Evolution of the Earth and Man and The Influence of the Stars: Origin and character of the Chinese and Indian cultures 12 Jul 1924, Dornach
Translated by Gladys Hahn

The remarkable thing is that the Chinese have had something of the same kind. The Chinese do not venerate invisible gods. They say: What is here on earth differs according to climate, according to the nature of the soil where one lives.
He had no creed to profess; he simply felt himself to be a member of a kingdom. Originally the Chinese had no gods of any kind; when later they did have them, they were gods taken over from the Indians. Originally they had no gods, but their connection with the super-sensible worlds was expressed by the essential nature of their kingdom and its institutions. Their institutions had a family quality. The Son of the Sun was at the same time father to all the other Chinese and these served him. Although it was a kingdom, it partook of the nature of a family.
342. Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work I: Sixth Lecture 16 Jun 1921, Stuttgart

What is meant, when the Trinity – the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory – are summarized outwardly: “... for Thine is the Sun”, if one wants to look at the inner, spiritual-soul, and – addressing the Father, the One subsisting in the world –: “for Thine is the Son, Christ-Jesus, He is with Thee”. The Protestant Church has reached a state of complete unconsciousness regarding these matters; it knows nothing of these things and does not even know why it knows nothing, because it does not educate itself about the nature of such things.
[Gap in the transcript], who is always in danger of losing God. It can only lose God, never hold on to him, and the new godless science emerged, which, however, is a true science with regard to nature, only just cannot go beyond certain limits as such, but at the same time it has significantly advanced the education of man to freedom.
For without coming to this awareness of the spiritualization of all matter, you will not come to a real living conception of God. But if you want to speak in the sense in which you have set out, then what you say must be an outward expression of what is meant at the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word...” because it is indicated, by pointing to the word, to the Logos, that this Logos existed before matter came into being and that matter emerged from the Logos.
343. The Foundation Course: Religious Feeling and Intellectualism 30 Sep 1921, Dornach
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

For true Catholicism, the assumption is that there should be a mere emotional human relationship to God, without a religious dogmatic content, something quite incomprehensible; the religious dogma should connect itself with the supersensible world.
While most of us, actually in the realm human beings have the earth's processes, also with the father and mother, we have here—in this circle which I'm drawing—effects from the periphery, from the immeasurable expanse, so that, what is happening here, may be transferred and enter into the scientifically given world.
We often have the experience: What is wisdom before God, has become foolishness to the world. Then again what is foolishness before the world, in present times is so often wisdom before the gods.
70b. Ways to a Knowledge of the Eternal Forces of the Human Soul: The Forgotten Pursuit of Spiritual Science Within the Development of German Thought 29 Feb 1916, Hanover

This was pointed out to him. One day, his father meets him standing by the stream that flows past the simple house: “Der gehörnte Siegfried”, which the boy had thrown into the stream, is floating in it.
They themselves – these Asian peoples – have in a wonderful but true legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman that which has arisen and developed within their lives. They call Ormuzd the good god; Ahriman was always the evil god. But the Iranian peoples, to which the Indians and the Persians also belong, have placed themselves in the service of Ormuzd.
It is a tone that can never be anti-religious, the tone that will also grasp all knowledge in man in such a way that this knowledge is offered as if on the altar to the world spirit, to the spiritual, real world. that tone of which Jakob Böhme, the “Philosophus teutonicus” - as he was also called - has spoken in the beautiful words that suggest the true popular character of German knowledge: Wenn du, O Mensch, die Tiefe he means the depth of heaven, the blue and the stars and the earth, so you walk in God, so you strive in God, so you die in God, and so you will be buried in God. These are deep, German words.
22. Goethe's Standard of the Soul: Goethe's Faust: A Picture of his Esoteric World Conception
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

He describes this in Poetry and Truth: The God who stands in immediate connection with Nature and recognises and loves it as His handiwork, seemed to him the real God, who might enter into closer relationship with man, as with everything else, and who would make him His care, as well as the motion of the stars, times and seasons, plants and animals.” The boy selects the best minerals and stones from his father's collection and arranges them on a music stand. This is the altar upon which he likes to offer his sacrifice to the God of Nature.
It would have been an empty, even a dishonourable cult in his eyes if it had made sacrifices merely to the god of nature and of sense pleasure. But that was not the case. The worship was not alone directed to Dionysos, the god of the immediate sense prosperity of Life, but to Hades, the god of death as well.
172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture X 27 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

When we recall how the Roman Caesars had themselves worshipped as gods, how they really were “gods” to the people, we shall know that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha human beings had degenerated so far that they now no longer prayed to archai, archangels, or angels, but to man.
In her misguided ways, Blavatsky developed special malice in her Secret Doctrine by maligning the Jahve God as a mere moon god. She wanted to replace him with Lucifer whom she undertook to represent as the friend of the spirit. To be sure, Lucifer is just that, but only in the particular sense I have explained. Blavatsky tried to represent the Jahve God as the god of the mere lower nature, whereas what really constituted an opposition to Lucifer was implanted in the lower nature.

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