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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture I 25 Jan 1916, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

This infinite series contains all the numbers included in the right column. 2, 4, 6, and so on are all there. I can continue underlining them. If you look at the figures that are underlined, you will see that they are exactly half of all the numbers together because every other one is underlined.
Well, all one can say to people like that is, “Surely one can understand that here on the physical plane people can easily be misled by Ahriman. But cosmic wisdom always knows better.”
All this is connected with the fact that nowadays people are unable to understand the relationship between the world accessible to their senses and their brain-bound intellect and the supersensible world underlying it.
166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture II 27 Jan 1916, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

But without hurting anyone's feelings it must be obvious that each one of you listens differently, and understands and feels what I say slightly differently. That goes without saying. In fact your understanding is in accordance with your life up to now and your previous incarnations.
This is an extremely important point of view for a spiritual scientist. He learns to understand the connection between past and necessity. Then he begins to examine nature, and finds necessity there.
What the souls of the people who were buried under the boulder experienced in the spiritual world may be infinitely more important than what happened physically.
166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture III 30 Jan 1916, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

The headmaster had to agree to it, and the school year got under way. The headmaster inspected the school frequently. He saw the first two teachers doing exceedingly well, but with the third he always found that things were not on a good footing.
It depends on the attitude you have to the previous year; if you study the character of last year's pupils, you acquire greater capacities to understand the character of the new pupils. I appreciate that more can be achieved this way.” “Yes, but you still cannot know anything in advance!
He even followed up what their pupils had achieved under other teachers, and he discovered that with different teachers the third teacher's pupils made much less progress than those of the first two.
166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture IV 01 Feb 1916, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

Where one thing borders on another we cannot understand them as easily as in our case above. On the contrary, we could say, “In all matters where we are absolutely conscious, our actions cannot be other than free.
Thus that person is most free of all who knows in full consciousness “what I am doing is nothing but spiritual necessity.” These things cannot be understood by pedantic logic but only by fully grasping reality in a living way. There is still another approach that can help us understand this completely.
We do become unconscious to the extent that we undertake to develop our consciousness to the point where we reach the gate through which streams and radiates what is to come from the spiritual world.
166. Necessity and Freedom: Lecture V 08 Feb 1916, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

This kind of will can be developed if people are determined to exercise the strong thinking necessary for the understanding of the truths of spiritual science. People who do understand these truths will be pouring more strength into their will, and they will therefore acquire, instead of a will that is deteriorating to the point of paralysis, a powerful will, able to act freely out of the I.
At this point, however, we encounter a hypothesis that used to be almost universally taught by psychology and which the ordinary human understanding has always arrived at apparently unconsciously. I refer to the assumption of a distinct will as the cause of our actions.
If you take an ordinary person, someone who wants to base his whole world view on natural science, they mean nothing to him; he cannot understand a thing. If he is honest, he will say, “Here we go again, it makes my head spin.” Which means he plops down with a thud.
167. Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man: Examination of Anthroposophic Literature 13 Feb 1916, Berlin
Translated by E. H. Goddard

You must, I might say, take hold of the significant phenomena of our age in order to obtain a real understanding of what is actually happening. For example, one can meet four people who, shall we say, have been brought together by karma.
One will never be able to understand things from the standpoint which is possible today if one is not able to see such karmic connections.
However, you cannot enter into Christianity as it is now with our priests of the holy order, because you do not understand these things. Take what you yourself have performed. Has it done anything to make people happy?
167. Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man: Deeper Secrets of Man's Soul-Spiritual Nature 07 Mar 1916, Berlin
Translated by E. H. Goddard

And, indeed, then we know that after the astral body has dissolved into the external world and man lives on further with his actual inner being in the time between death and a new birth. When we want to understand something of this life between death and a new birth, we must make many points of view valid for ourselves. Our goal is not to be one-sided but to make various viewpoints valid so that gradually a comprehensive understanding of these processes can open themselves to us. Thus you must keep the following in view. Just as man through birth enters natural processes which around him in the mineral world, in the plant world, in the animal world, so he enters into a world where things are happening around him with the beings of the Hierarchies which we have mentioned.
And only this fructification will make it possible to be able to understand the spiritual facts as anthroposophical spiritual science gives us. And unless this happens, the great world tasks will not be solved.
167. Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man: Shedding Light on the Deeper Impulses of History. Blavatsky 28 Mar 1916, Berlin
Translated by E. H. Goddard

And to understand that, we must cast our attention on the special folk characteristics of the Russians, how that is different from the Central and Western Europeans.
One can say that the way in which the physical body is mechanized through as is the case in West and Central Europe cannot occur with the Russians in so far as this people remains in its national quality. You cannot understand the Russians with West European science. You can only understand them when you know that an ether body exists.
However, the most important thing is what lies between; and to understand what does lie between one must become clear that in Western Europe, particularly from the British beingness, an extensive working in of occult science proceeds which always was present as far as one can speak of the English history.
167. Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man: Secrets of Freemasonry 04 Apr 1916, Berlin
Translated by E. H. Goddard

Then one is prepared to see something which one knows about, something which one can at least understand. However, as a general rule, this is not done in these occult brotherhoods. People are taken up in the first grade or any other occultism and sign, grip and word and many other things are transmitted to them.
The consequences that you can adapt these people to become tools for all sorts of plans, because when you are able to work over the ether body in such a way that be does not understand what is going on, you eliminate those forces which would otherwise be present his understanding.
Martin translated Jacob Boehme's works into French and this was then translated back into German in a way which made his works much easier to understand than they were in the original German. St. Martin's book Errors and Truth was very beautifully translated by a very worthy German poet, Matthias Claudius.
167. Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man: Comenius and the Temple of PanSophia 11 Apr 1916, Berlin
Translated by E. H. Goddard

This is a very often used formulation: The Elevated Grand Architect of the world. For those who can understand the development of mankind from spiritual science, it proves the fact that in truth such brotherhoods go far, far back.
However, beyond the 14th century certain sensitive people did feel that the spirit still plays in, that if, for example, you want to understand the 15th, 16th, 17th century, you must get an idea that those were still times in which the breath of spiritual life still streamed over the earth.
I wanted to characterize this for you so that you can understand that there was a sudden transition from the 14th to the 15th century in the soul mood in reference to how these men connected themselves with the spiritual world.

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