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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 4621 through 4630 of 6548

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199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture XVI 11 Sep 1920, Dornach
Translated by Maria St. Goar

The essential thing is to be in a position to understand such things by observing the individual phenomena of social life and the life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life shall be our topic.
Therefore, the name itself originally caused people to infer from the words what lay behind them. All words, the whole language, will undergo the same development in the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a development which in their case we can clearly survey.
One who has insight into the whole character of our time, however, will understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with might and main to understand something that is incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain.
199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture XVII 17 Sep 1920, Berlin
Translated by Maria St. Goar

Nothing at all materialized of the expectation that I had concerning this pamphlet, the understanding that I had expected. A new edition would have been meaningful only if my expectation had been realized.
It was a question of protecting and nurturing what could be fostered based on the initiative of some friends there. If mankind had understood at that time what was at stake, had it not failed even under the lesson taught by distress, it would have been enough to do something like this from one center, for it could have had an exemplary effect.
Truly, I am longing for times when the horizon of my activity can widen again, but this does not depend on myself alone. It depends, above all, on the understanding that people will show toward this activity. I may perhaps find the opportunity in the next few days to point to a number of things which pretend to be “understanding” and which proceed from certain quarters, which work more in an underground manner by means of counterfeiting of letters, falsifying interviews, by defamations and lies.
199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture XVIII 18 Sep 1920, Berlin
Translated by Maria St. Goar

How great will be the intimate ardor with which such a developing human being will be viewed when one has the underlying awareness: Before this human being was conceived and born, its soul-spiritual entity was above in soul-spiritual worlds.
To begin with, we will not speak about what really lies beyond death, only about the motives that underlie the preaching of the doctrine of immortality. Spiritual science cannot appeal to these motives.
Everywhere we look, and especially when we look upon the human being, we find that spiritual forces are the basis of the world. We only begin to understand man when we actually envision the interchange between these spiritual forces. Mankind will take up all of this in the future.
Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Foreword
Translated by Maria St. Goar

The lectures would then provide truly new ways of understanding the impulses and efforts of community life. They would demonstrate what it means to become free from those often highly developed thoughts which have, nevertheless, led the actions of individuals, groups and nations into catastrophic situations for several hundred years.
But it will require healthy, clear and sober thinking in the sense of anthroposophy. A deeper understanding of all this can be obtained from the present volume of lectures. If Rudolf Steiner's printed work needs a preface or an introduction at all, it is to emphasize that it cannot be read like other books.
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture I 17 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Paul King

And we shall have to give up if, before then, an understanding is not forthcoming which dips vigorously into its pockets. It is thus a matter of awakening understanding in this respect. I don't believe that much understanding would arise if we were to say that we wanted something for the building in Dornach, or some such thing—as has been shown already. But—and one still finds understanding for this today—if one wants to create sanatoria or the like, one gets money, and as much as one wants!
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture II 22 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Paul King

This socialist conception of life, however, developed in such a way that it stands entirely under the aegis of economic strife, for it is permeated by economic concepts, thoughts and struggles that are little penetrated by the struggle for a philosophy of life (Lebensanschauungskämpfen).
The more recent life of humanity can only be understood if one understands this differentiation—a differentiation into the Western economic element, the Central European political-legal one, and the religious element—the spiritual element in the East which takes on a religious character but is actually the momentum of a decadent spirituality that still finds expression in the East.
Whereas Germany has gone to pieces because the State has absorbed the economy, because industry and commerce have submerged and bowed down under the power of the State, we see in the West how the State is sucked up by the economic life and everything is flooded by the economic life.
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture III 23 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Paul King

If one wants to understand how the human beings of the European Centre are wedged in, as it were, between the West and the East one must look more closely into the underlying spiritual conditions and at everything in the physical-sense world that expresses itself out of these spiritual conditions.
Reason, bound to body and soul, is what is asserting itself here. If you go to the East there is no understanding at all for a rationality of this kind. This already begins in Russia. For, has the Russian any understanding at all for what is called rational in the West? Let us be under no illusion here. The Russian has not the slightest understanding for what, in the West, one calls rationality.
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture IV 24 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Paul King

Anyone who, like myself, has seen how Goethe's own copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is filled with underlinings and marginal comments knows how Goethe had really studied this work of Kant's which was abstract, but in a completely different sense.
But if one takes these two things [Goethe's Fairy-tale and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters], Schiller's Aesthetic Letters were little understood in the time that followed them. I have often spoken about this. People gave them little attention.
His articles opposing Anthroposophy were published as a collection under the title Metaphysik and Anthropasophie in ihrer Stellung zur Erkenrunis des Obersinnlichen (Metaphysics and Anthropasophy in their Position Regarding Knowledge of the Supersensible), Berlin, 1922.
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture V 29 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Paul King

Later on there developed in the central regions of the earth that which came under the dialectical-legal spirit. It is out of this that intellectuality was born. Spiritual culture was retained as a heritage from the ancient Orient.
But it had to develop further and could only do so under the influence of the dialectical-legal life, under the influence of the economic life arising from the West, and in the decadent continuation of the spiritual life which had been received from the Orient, to which the doors were now closed as I described.
Here the educational factor becomes a specifically social one. It is a matter here of gaining a true understanding of the child one is educating so that one can see that a certain quality in the child is good for this, and another quality is good for that.
200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century: Lecture VI 30 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Paul King

If an understanding for what one can call the reappearance of Christ is to find its place in the soul in the right way it is necessary to create a preparatory understanding for the course that the Christ-idea, the image people have had of the Christ, has taken in the course of human development.
Jesuitism already contains in itself a complete rebellion against the original understanding of Christ. The first understanding occurred in Gnosis with the remains of the oriental clairvoyance.
And even today we still see how theologians get hot under the collar whenever there is any talk of Gnosis! We have to understand this on the basis of the development of European humanity.

Results 4621 through 4630 of 6548

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