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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 4781 through 4790 of 6551

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205. Therapeutic Insights: Earthly and Cosmic Laws: Lecture I 24 Jun 1921, Dornach
Translated by Alice Wuslin, Gerald Karnow, Mary Laird-Brown

And that is what is so characteristic of our cultural evolution since the first third of the fifteenth century, that the understanding for these connections has simply been lost; thereby the understanding for the living human being was also lost.
We have often heard that this phase in the history of humanity's evolution had to come, had to come for other reasons, namely, so that humanity could undergo the phase of the evolution of freedom. However, in the process a certain understanding of nature and the human being has been lost since the first third of the fifteenth century. The understanding of natural science up to now has limited itself to this one element, earth, and now we must find the way back.
205. Therapeutic Insights: Earthly and Cosmic Laws: Lecture II 26 Jun 1921, Dornach
Translated by Alice Wuslin, Gerald Karnow, Mary Laird-Brown

If we are confronted with that wonderful reciprocal play that takes place within the human rhythms, through breathing and the pulse, we actually perceive something in this rhythm that is regulated from extra-spatial spiritual depths and brought into the world in which the human being also finds himself as physical man. It is impossible to understand the airy element if we do not reach such a concrete understanding of the rhythmical expression of man within this airy element.
I looked up the process that the good Swedish scientist could not understand in the same literature that he had read: the process described there was actually an aspect of the embryonic process, of embryonic development in the human being!
All things that were described in the ancient literature, however, have also been described again today under the influence of the concepts of a new spiritual science. If these writings are not rediscovered, one cannot read them at all.
205. Therapeutic Insights: Earthly and Cosmic Laws: Lecture III 01 Jul 1921, Dornach
Translated by Alice Wuslin, Gerald Karnow, Mary Laird-Brown

If we are confronted with that wonderful reciprocal play that takes place within the human rhythms, through breathing and the pulse, we actually perceive something in this rhythm that is regulated from extra-spatial spiritual depths and brought into the world in which the human being also finds himself as physical man. It is impossible to understand the airy element if we do not reach such a concrete understanding of the rhythmical expression of man within this airy element.
I looked up the process that the good Swedish scientist could not understand in the same literature that he had read: the process described there was actually an aspect of the embryonic process, of embryonic development in the human being!
All things that were described in the ancient literature, however, have also been described again today under the influence of the concepts of a new spiritual science. If these writings are not rediscovered, one cannot read them at all.
205. Therapeutic Insights: Earthly and Cosmic Laws: Lecture IV 02 Jul 1921, Dornach
Translated by Alice Wuslin, Gerald Karnow, Mary Laird-Brown

From the Midnight Hour of Existence until the next birth, the I passes over into what the ancient mysteries called the underworld. On the detour through this underworld it takes the path through fertilization. There the two poles of the human being basically meet, through the mother and the father: from the upper world and from the underworld.
The Egyptian mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they called at that time the upper and lower gods, the upper world and underworld of the gods; and it may be said that in the act of fertilization a polar equilibrium of the upper world and underworld of the gods is brought about.
In ancient times there were not at all the strange connotations that many today connect with upper world and underworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper world as the good and the underworld as the bad.
205. Therapeutic Insights: Earthly and Cosmic Laws: Lecture V 03 Jul 1921, Dornach
Translated by Alice Wuslin, Gerald Karnow, Mary Laird-Brown

I have often pointed out facts that show how the disturbance of this memory can undermine the entire normal life between birth and death. I told you of an example showing that the capacity for memory can extinguish itself in the human being.
This picture hovered like a nightmare before this Austrian poet—Hermann Rollett was his name—and he described it very visually, for it weighed upon him terribly, this picture that human beings will become rolling heads due to our civilization. There is something quite true underlying this picture, however. What underlies it is that, in fact, in our time the powers are extraordinarily strong that would like to develop our heads more and more.
In fact, already today, without people knowing it, there are all kinds of underground societies that work toward things that lead in a direction similar to the one decided upon in 869 at the Council of Constantinople.
205. Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit I: First Lecture 16 Jun 1921, Stuttgart

I would like to start from phenomena that cannot really be understood today because only the physical is considered, and which nevertheless, I would like to say, are there as great questions before man.
This corporeality of the human being is only understood to a very small extent, even by today's science. This corporeality is a very, very complicated one.
Please reflect on this sentence, which is indeed very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: One should not only speak about the spirit or of the spirit, one should let the spirit speak in a spiritual way.
205. Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit I: Second Lecture 28 Jun 1921, Bern

It is nice of you that you can differentiate and specify this earth and also think of it in great variety, split into seventy-two or seventy-six elements, that is all nice; we were not yet ready to get to know these interesting details, but we have summarized all this under the expression “earth.” But what we understand by water, air and fire, you understand nothing about, and because you understand nothing about it, you cannot have any knowledge of human nature.
We cannot dictate to nature how she should be understood; instead, we must listen to how she wants to be understood. And it can only be grasped in its watery element of the plant world through imagination, and it can only be grasped in its rhythmic life, out into the rhythms of the world, through inspiration, through the pursuit of rhythmic life, through living into the life of breathing.
But it is precisely in the rhythm of the physical that one learns to understand rhythm in its essence. Thus one learns to understand the cosmic rhythm, and one cannot understand the cosmic rhythm without understanding the sources, the origins of the moral world.
205. Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit I: Eighth Lecture 08 Jul 1921, Dornach

But it is always there. You will always notice: there is an undercurrent. Thoughts swirl around in just as pictorial a way as they do in dreams, where the most colorful things line up next to each other.
And we must say that a large part of what inspires people artistically, poetically, and so on, comes from this undercurrent of waking dreams during the day. That is one side of the matter. It should certainly be taken into account.
This passage in particular of my “Philosophy of Freedom” has been understood by very few people; most have not known what it is about. It is no wonder that in an age in which abstraction flourishes to the point of being taken for granted, in an age in which this view, which is admittedly extremely ingenious in itself but absolutely abstract, is presented to the world as something special, that which seeks to introduce reality, true reality, is not understood.
205. Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit I: Ninth Lecture 09 Jul 1921, Dornach

And when we become so attentive to that part of the human being that is composed of the ordinary life of thought and of the undercurrent that I characterized yesterday, then we will also understand how the human being, through the possession of this part that has been so to speak set apart from the cosmos, is a free, self-reliant entity.
But even a person who is well aware of himself will always notice, if he lets himself go just a little during waking life, I would say, that this confusion of thoughts is present in the main, underlying current. The will, which strikes there when one wakes up, it strikes this web of thoughts. Where does it come from?
We must therefore fulfill tasks that are, so to speak, guided by the fact that humanity has returned to its starting point, that it must undertake something in its soul life that corresponds to this return to the starting point. Today I only wanted to hint at what can be derived from such a consideration of the importance of the present human period of time.
205. Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit I: Tenth Lecture 10 Jul 1921, Dornach

These are the kinds of considerations that must be made if one wants to have an understanding in the full sense of the word of what it actually means: we live with our consciousness in the world of illusion, of maya.
If the whole weight, one thousand three hundred and fifty grams or something like that, were to press on the veins under the brain, the veins would be crushed, they could not exist; but the brain only presses with about twenty grams.
Of course, that gives a nice general concept, but one cannot understand anything about what really is. So, these are specifically human processes that I have described to you.

Results 4781 through 4790 of 6551

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