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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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155. Anthroposophy and Christianity 13 Jul 1914, Norrköping
Translator Unknown

The local members have also suggested the underlying theme of this evening's talk; I am to speak on the relationship of spiritual science—or anthroposophy, as it may also be called—to Christianity.
Only in order to show that Christianity is not a mere doctrine to be interpreted this way or that; it has entered the world as a fact that can only be understood spiritually. Nature didn't change because of Copernicus, nor does the truth of Christianity change when spiritual science is used as a tool for understanding it more completely than was possible in times gone by.
What I have been describing tonight about what every soul can undertake for itself to succeed in entering the spiritual world has been possible only since the founding of Christianity.
156. Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: The Human Being and his Relationship to the World 03 Oct 1914, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

If anyone reads my book Theosophy with real understanding, he will know that what I have just said is a self-evident truth of the spiritual world but that such procedures are not possible in our age.
The difficulty still standing in the way of understanding books on Spiritual Science is that people read them just as they read other writings and imagine that their contents can be absorbed in the same way, whereas the truth is that something will be changed within us when we have understood a genuinely occult book. It is therefore quite understandable that genuine occult books are rejected by most human beings to-day. For what ought to take place in someone who reads such a book at the present time?
156. Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Identification with the Signs and Spiritual Realities of the Imaginative World 04 Oct 1914, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

Suppose someone were to publish a book on the physical plane and were to demand that in order to understand the book, we must first eat it, consume it ... Then suppose we were so organized that we could digest an ‘A’ in a different way from an ‘I’ and, through the inner process, realise the difference.
We cannot approach a spiritual happening or a spiritual being until we have given up our whole soul to understanding the happening or being concerned. We must ourselves have become one with the signs or letters of the spiritual world.
What I have described is a spiritual experience and what matters about a spiritual experience is that we understand it. To understand it we must be able to practice spiritual self-observation. During the process of submerging ourselves in the pictures, something happens that we feel—we feel it in ourselves.
156. Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Inner Experiences and `Moods' of Soul as the Vowels and Consonants of the Spiritual World 05 Oct 1914, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

We heard that through the different forms of preparation which the seer has to undergo, he sees, first of all, a series of pictures, and he faces them just as he faces the things of the external world.
Why is this? We begin for the first time to understand why this is so when we have identified ourselves with Imagination, when we actually carry out the process I described yesterday. We really understand, then, why the human being cannot be conscious in the spiritual world that is round about him.
156. Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Inner Mobility of Thought 06 Oct 1914, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

But to reach a more spiritually adequate picture of the Archangeloi, we must understand through inner feeling something of the experience of being multiplied. For it is only gradually that we learn to understand these Beings of the Hierarchies. We only gradually learn to understand because in the physical world all human conceptions, all human thoughts are bound up with the ordinary conditions of space and time.
What is meant by this? I will give you a brief example of understanding this sign-nature. I can do it only very briefly and must leave it to your own earnest meditation to see what is meant.
156. How Does One Enter the World of Ideas?: First Lecture 12 Dec 1914, Dornach

Thus a definite tendency of motion develops under the influence of each constellation. Under the influence of this or that constellation, the astral body particularly stretches its upper part upwards, and under the influence of one of the other constellations, it particularly stretches its lower part. Twelve such special movements correspond to twelve such habits, and in turn seven special habits under the influence of the planets. These are more inner movements under the influence of the planets, whereby the inner parts move or bring themselves into a relationship with each other.
It may be said that most people today still have something against spiritual science because they cannot understand with their intellect what spiritual science is actually supposed to make of man. People today do not understand the basic nerve of spiritual science.
156. How Does One Enter the World of Ideas?: Second Lecture 13 Dec 1914, Dornach

A good deal of what we call aging is based on the astral body becoming dulled to tasting, and the fact that a single human organ loses the fresh ability to taste, that is, is not permeated by its astral body in the appropriate way, results in organ diseases. Now you understand that certain perspectives arise under this condition. Firstly, there is the perspective that is important in a pedagogical-hygienic sense: it is not to be underestimated to have a well-developed sense of taste.
That is one thing, my dear friends. Once our understanding of the outer experience in relation to eating is penetrated by our understanding of the astral body and its workings, then a healthy hygiene of eating will really arise, and we will need it because the unconscious instinctive life of the human race will gradually be lost and must be replaced by a conscious relationship with the cosmic environment.
It is part of the normal evolution that the human form has undergone under the influence of the cosmos that the shape of the head, having been directed upwards, has been directed forwards, turned towards the front.
156. How Does One Enter the World of Ideas?: Third Lecture 19 Dec 1914, Dornach

Today we want to undertake a consideration that may seem out of place in the series of considerations we have been pursuing here, but which will nevertheless be useful for understanding the whole.
The philosophies of all times have endeavored to deduce reality from the mirror images, to prove immortality from the mirror images. They have undertaken the task, symbolically speaking, of taking the table out of the mirror image, putting it in the room and placing plates and bowls on it.
Under the influence of moral action, the seraphim acquire the powers by which the cosmic world order is maintained, just as physical warmth maintains the physical world order.
156. How Does One Enter the World of Ideas?: Fourth Lecture 20 Dec 1914, Dornach

In the future, we will not approach the work of art by looking at it and then believing that we understand it only with our thoughts, but we will understand it by directly looking at it and experiencing it in our soul. Thus, by directly experiencing what he was looking at, the person who was initiated into the mysteries understood what he was meant to consciously grasp. What he was to grasp so consciously, what he was to understand by looking and to look at by understanding, was at the same time something beautiful, appearing in outer forms and colors, speaking in sounds and words: it was art at the same time.
For what was experienced in this way in direct living contemplation, in experiencing understanding and in understanding experience, was at the same time that which could be venerated, to which one could lift one's whole soul with religious fervor.
156. An Age of Expectation 07 Oct 1914, Dornach

One has only to realize how diverse human progress is in order to understand what it means that in any age like ours, new forms of beauty, new forms of the whole human soul-attitude, should emerge.
What a wonderful image of the court enthroned in the clouds, under which the nations know themselves! Does not all yearning for the hierarchies, for knowledge of what the hierarchies are for humanity, live in this?
There is only one thing we can do: we can try to let the atrophied etheric body - for it atrophies under today's necessities - move in the eurythmic movements of the physical body, which the gods want.

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