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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 1471 through 1480 of 6552

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253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: The Anthroposophical Society as a Living Being 11 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

1 Well, this is undoubtedly correct; it is an absolutely correct definition. But the next day, someone who had understood this definition brought in a plucked chicken and said, “Here is a living thing that has two legs and no feathers, so it must be a human being!”
It is much more than just a metaphor. For example, we need to understand the following. We have three points listed in our statutes.3 It follows from what I said before that statutes are only of secondary importance for us.
7. On March 5, 1616, under Pope Paul V and as a result of the turmoil surrounding Galileo, Copernicus's work, “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI” (1543) was placed on the Index of forbidden books by the Inquisition charged with that task.
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: Swedenborg: An Example of Difficulties in Entering the Spiritual World 12 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

As I said, Swedenborg was used to understanding the spirits' gesture-language. This time, however, he could see the spirits making certain movements, but was unable to understand them; their movements conveyed no sense or meaning to his soul.
Swedenborg learned a very significant lesson from this after realizing that these beings he could not understand were inhabitants of Mars—that there were in fact beings from Mars whose speech could not be understood even by someone who usually understood the language of spiritual beings.
He came to the realization that the beings from the hierarchy of the Angeloi did understand these Mars beings. He could not understand them, nor could the spirits proceeding from his own body, but the beings belonging to the class of the Angeloi could understand them.
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: Methods and Rational of Freudian Psychoanalysis 13 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

In any case, the underlying assumption is that there are unhealthy, proliferating islands present in the psyche below the level of consciousness.
It is a law of neurotic illness that these obsessive acts fall more and more under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer and nearer to the activity which was originally prohibited.
I and II (1912 and 1913), these articles appeared under the title, “Some Correspondences in the Inner Life of Savages and Neurotics.”6.
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: Sexuality and Modern Clairvoyance, Freudian Psychoanalysis and Swedenborg as a Seer 14 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

3 That is what the patient tells the psychoanalyst. A spiritual scientist using healthy understanding to contemplate a patient like this would have to consider the problem from many different angles.
As I told you on Sunday, he realized that he could not understand these beings because they had acquired the ability to conceal their soul life. If Swedenborg had been able to see with the kind of consciousness available to the Angeloi (which is what would have happened if he had really ascended to the spiritual world—that is, if he had also carried his consciousness up into the spiritual world), he would have been able to understand the nature of these Mars beings even though they concealed all their emotions.
There are several ways of avoiding this, and we are now at a crucial point in human evolution where these things must be understood. What I have just told you is ancient knowledge, and in olden times people knew how to protect themselves.
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: The Concept of Love as it Relates to Mysticism 15 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

My friends, just consider how much reading material we have to struggle through to understand that particular relationship of the human soul to super-earthly worlds that deserves the name “mysticism.”
He would be telling the truth if, having read Swedenborg, he were to say that he doesn't understand a thing when Swedenborg talks about inhabitants of Mars who can conceal their innermost impulses.
If you try to find how Mauthner discovers what underlies mysticism, the most you can say after having read the entry on mysticism in his dictionary is that he keeps going around in circles.
Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: Introduction

As supposed mechanisms of such manipulation he mentioned Steiner's repeated failure to keep appointments and physical contact with members through shaking hands upon meeting. Rudolf Steiner was understandably upset by both sets of accusations and even more so by the gossiping and dissension they caused among members of the Anthroposophical Society.
Steiner uses a discussion of Swedenborg's inability to understand the thoughts of certain spirit beings to make two fundamental points about spiritual cognition.
It should be noted that Steiner gave these lectures in 1915 and that both Adler and Jung broke with Freud over Freud's insistence on infantile sexuality as a primary interpretive framework for understanding psychological disturbances.3 Freudian psychology is discussed in Lectures Four and Five of this volume.
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: The Protagonists

In spite of all obstacles, however, the building continued to grow under the artistic leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who was well-loved as a teacher and felt by all to be a bulwark of constancy.
But when a role didn't sit well with me, it increased the pressure I was living under for quite some time. That is why I was not as unconcerned about these things as others might be; for me it was a matter of life and death.
The effect on Paul Goesch, however, was disastrous—his thin-skinned psyche cracked under these experiments. Analysis, it seems, had eliminated certain inhibitions he needed in order to maintain a secure hold on life.
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: Resolving the Case

Then we too must be allowed to break the bonds, to understand and work out of our own initiative and our own conviction. Let us, too, measure ourselves against the standards of this outer world!
But we cannot allow ourselves to lose the ground under our feet. We must not simply go into raptures, we must understand and work. For the first time since esoteric knowledge was granted to humankind, we women are allowed to receive this knowledge together with men and inaugurate a new era through this work in common.
Margarete Beutler, M. Friedrich-Freska, née Beutler, 1884–1949. Under the pseudonym Margit Friedrich, she wrote lyric poetry and stories on social themes.5.
254. The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century: Lecture I 10 Oct 1915, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

When we come to Aristotle however, the feeling is that we have to do with an academic, learned philosophy. Therefore to understand Plato requires more insight than a modern philosopher usually has at his command. For the same reason there is a gulf between Plato and Aristotle.
Such things used not to happen because people understood that they must hold together in brotherhood. So the exotericists could do no other than submit.
From all this it will be clear to you that materialism is something about which we cannot merely speculate; we must understand the necessity of its appearance, especially of the peak—or lowest point—it reached about the middle of the nineteenth century.
254. The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century: Lecture II 11 Oct 1915, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

As I had naturally refused to adopt this method of research and had insisted from the outset upon strictly individual investigation, and as what I had discovered at that time was the result entirely of my own, personal research, the questioner did not understand me at all, did not understand that it was quite a different matter from anything that had been done hitherto in the Theosophical Society.
One calls an explanation of the world Anthropomorphism which, starting from man, imagines that underlying the whole course of the world there is a being who guides that course as man guides his own actions.
Positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of Negative philosophy when this is rightly understood. It may therefore be said: In Negative philosophy the Lesser Mysteries are celebrated, in Positive philosophy the Greater.’

Results 1471 through 1480 of 6552

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