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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 4481 through 4490 of 6551

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163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: The Physical Body Binds Us to the Physical World, the Etheric Body to the Cosmos 05 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

This is right, of course, but it does not suffice for true understanding. Just imagine, for example, a person being born with a sensitive musical ear, but with no opportunity to get a musical education.
Everyone knows as a fact of experience that our physical bodies age; we grow older and older physically. And everyone understands what is involved in aging. But where our etheric bodies are concerned the opposite is true: we grow younger, ever younger.
Try to picture yourselves having to shape your entire physical instrument with the content of your consciousness. You would first have to have a thorough understanding of it. But every glance into external science makes it clear how little insight into our physical make-up we possess.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Death, Physical Body and Etheric Body 06 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

And it is just when someone says that they don't exist and that he won't trouble himself about them that he is very markedly under their influence. A statement of this sort is made only when the speaker has been led astray by ahrimanic forces.
When we go through the portals of death, the first phenomenon, the first fact, to appear is the laying aside of the physical body. We know that this physical body then undergoes dissolution into the earth element, regardless of the form of disposal chosen. So the physical body undergoes dissolution into earthly elements.
Fechner wrote a booklet entitled Proof that the Moon consists of Iodine and published it under the pseudonym Dr. Mises in 1832.13. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729–1781, German poet, playwright, and critic.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: Episodic Observation On Space, Time, Movement 20 Aug 1915, Dornach

So, my dear friends, remember: not time but velocity is what must underlie mechanics. You might say that making these distinctions is mere madness. But it is not madness. These things are fundamental to our understanding of certain aspects of reality, and I will point out to you in a moment something that shows how fundamentally significant they are.
If we consider the type of thinking that underlies such ideas as those of Mr. Lumen or Baer's Flammarions, one thing is important to note. Let's take Mr.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking I 17 Sep 1915, Dornach

This thinking is therefore a kind of work, a working, we could say. And because, for our spiritual scientific understanding, Leibniz, even if he is not absolutely right, is still more right than Aristotle, we can say: this thinking - or, better expressed, this thinking activity, this thinking work in man, which is a performance of the etheric body - that is not in the outer reality of the physical plane.
It is an inner certainty that convinces the intellect of its reality. But then one must understand this intellect, this working of the intellect, as an activity of the human subject; one must realize that the intellect, spiritually speaking, is only a hand that is stretched out to grasp something.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking II 18 Sep 1915, Dornach

What takes place in remembering can be compared to a swimmer sinking under the water, whom you see until he is completely submerged. Now he is down and you no longer see him.
They could even say, “Why isn't the hand on the knee?” It could perhaps be there too. He does not understand the whole organism as a living being, he believes that the hand could also be somewhere else, right?
Yes, there you see the whole difficulty Schiller had in understanding Goethe! Some people could learn something from this who believe they can understand Goethe in the twinkling of an eye and thereby elevate themselves above Schiller, even though Schiller was not exactly a fool when it came to those people who believe they can understand Goethe so readily!
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking III 19 Sep 1915, Dornach

One can experience a certain, very important, specific experience over and over again, which must be considered if one wants to understand these things at all. There are people who develop a certain visionary clairvoyance. This dream-like imagining, this visionary clairvoyance, always involves a regression to a lunar nature.
One can receive beautiful descriptions of spiritual worlds from people who have sunk a little back into the lunar stage, and who, when they want to apply their earthly acquired intelligence, cannot themselves understand what they have actually produced, and in most cases do not even want to do so. I said: In the ascent to imaginative knowledge one must gain something and lose something, and that people usually do not want to lose anything.
He said, [it was written on the board]: Dissipez vos ténèbres matérielles ei vous trouverez l'Homme With this part of the sentence: To disperse the material darkness and confusion - people who want to be mystics agree. But people today still hardly understand the second part of the sentence. [It was written on the blackboard]: Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu whereby we have to imagine the whole content of spiritual science for “Dieu”, because that is still colored by religious ideas.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking IV 20 Sep 1915, Dornach

The assessment of a person should not correspond to judgment, but to understanding; because the tendency should be to help, and not to judge, under all circumstances. To help, and not to judge!
But that is not the point, the important thing is to seek understanding under all circumstances and not to exercise judgment. In the context of our spiritual-scientific lectures, it was often necessary to speak of Ahriman and Lucifer.
Now, of course, we are looking everywhere, aren't we, for the possibility of understanding the phenomenon of egoism that must accompany the striving into the higher worlds. We must not judge egoism when it occurs in such a region, because we must understand it as a natural phenomenon.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Relationship Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science I 26 Sep 1915, Dornach

At the time, this essay was not that easy for me to understand, because it was titled “The force of attraction considered as an effect of motion”. Even then, I was dealing with an author who, so to speak, had also set himself the ideal of Laplace's mind; and he had expounded many other things in the same direction.
After the physical death of man, the existence of the human individual finally ceases, because the so-called spiritual life of man is bound to his physicality and cannot exist without it. This point can be understood by everyone as a consequence of the first point. The first point is the one that matters. The second and third are necessary consequences.
And only because people are so sloppy and cowardly in their thinking do they not ask themselves: What becomes of life under the influence of the materialistic-mechanical worldview? But it must be shown that it is inherently false, otherwise one would simply have accepted the consequence of delle Grazie.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Relationship Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science II 27 Sep 1915, Dornach

No, he recognized the law after seeing this phenomenon. That's how he understood it. It is not from the repetition of facts, but from the inwardly experienced construction of facts that we learn something about the essence of things.
If we go back to the facts, there is an enormous amount of facts underlying the formula “to be industrious”. We have seen many things happen and compared them with the time in which they can happen, and so we speak of “being industrious”.
So you can learn a great deal from these perceptive chapters on 'Measuring' and on 'The Principle Underlying Clocks', a great deal indeed. I cannot say with certainty when I will be able to continue discussing the following chapters of this booklet.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Relationship Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science III 02 Oct 1915, Dornach

If a conclusion is drawn from any empirical fact by a chain of mathematical or logical propositions, this latter is only correct within the limitations under which that empirical fact was observed; only under these limitations can the final result obtained be accepted as a scientifically proven fact of experience; this is often overlooked.
This is also done in a large part of the mechanical sciences, for example in statics, which is concerned with investigating the conditions under which equilibrium of forces is achieved, whereas dynamics investigates the conditions under which movements can be regulated, and so on.
We transform this into heat. Heat, in turn, can undergo another transformation - we see this in steam engines and so on - it can be converted into another energy.

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