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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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179. Historical Necessity and Freewill: Lecture IV 11 Dec 1917, Dornach
Translator Unknown

In these considerations, I should like to give you a basis for the understanding of freedom and necessity, so that you may obtain a picture of what must be considered from an occult point of view, in order to understand the course of the social, historical and ethical-moral life of man.
But ideals alone cannot effect anything. I can carry out an action under the influence of a pure idea; but the idea cannot effect anything. In order to understand this, compare once more the idea with the mirrored image.
We are free human beings because we carry out actions under the influence of Maya, and because this Maya, or the world immediately around us, cannot bring about or cause anything.
179. Historical Necessity and Freewill: Lecture V 15 Dec 1917, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Just consider that our ego is the bearer of what we call our understanding, or our thinking consciousness of self. When our understanding and our conscious thinking are within our ego, then this understanding and conscious thinking are really essentially younger than we ourselves apparently are, according to our physical body.
But this will show you that when a human being of 28 gives the impression of one whose understanding has developed to the age of 28, only one fourth of this understanding is really his own. It cannot be helped; when we have a certain quantity of understanding at 28, only a quarter of this is our own; the rest belongs to the universe, to the world in which we are submerged through our astral body, through our etheric body, and through our physical body.
When this knowledge of the spiritual impulses will have become one of the essential demands of our time—it will then correspond to the living reality of the myths in ancient times—it will permeate human beings with impulses leading them to deeds and actions that will make them free. These things must first be understood; they will indeed influence real life when this understanding spreads over an ever-wider sphere.
179. Historical Necessity and Freewill: Lecture VI 16 Dec 1917, Dornach
Translator Unknown

In our age humanity should be educated to understand a very great event in the course of human evolution, namely, to believe in free will also in historical evolution.
One becomes Christian through freedom, and in our modern age we must understand, above all, that one can be a Christian in a real sense only through complete freedom and not through the compulsion of historical documents. The task destined for our age is that Christianity shall gain the truth through which it will become the great impulse for the human understanding of freedom. That this shall be understood belongs to the fundamental truths of our age—then an insight must be gained into the fact that the evidence for Christianity must be sought in the spiritual world.
179. Historical Necessity and Freewill: Lecture VII 17 Dec 1917, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Certainly, a necessity underlies man's nature; but this necessity ceases as disintegrating processes begin, as the sequence of causes comes to an end.
The whole mistake consists in the fact that people have been unwilling to understand not only the up-building forces in the organism, but also the disintegrating processes. However, in order to understand what really underlies man's nature it will be necessary to develop a greater capacity to do this than in our age.
Thou 'rt free to hasten, ere the day, From flame to flame, and seek her so: Who to the Mothers found his way, Has nothing more to undergo. Homunculus says:— Who to the Mothers found his way, Has nothing more to undergo.
179. Intellectuality and Will – The Necessity of New Cognitive Powers 22 Dec 1917, Dornach

And this realization must be followed by the inner soul impulses that are involved in this question of knowledge, a real will to understand the life of man in a concrete way, including how it proceeds between death and a new birth. Because without an understanding of this disembodied life of man, a real understanding is also not possible for the existence of man within the physical body, namely an understanding of the task of man within the physical body is not possible.
For all of them, Basilius Valentinus has already written the necessary dismissive words himself, in that he writes in his “Twelve Keys to the Universe and Its Understanding”: “If you now understand what I am saying, then you have opened the first lock with the key and pushed back the bolt of the approach.
Certainly, that can never be the demand, that we should understand today what we should do in order to somehow take the first steps tomorrow, to undertake something that will make a world epoch.
180. On the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Times: Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Times 25 Dec 1917, Dornach
Translated by George Adams

No, we should rather frame it thus: “In what personality does the sum-total of those impulses, whereby the humanity of the 19th century became so utterly materialistic, find the most characteristic expression?” To understand what was really happening, we must realise that by this last transformation, at the end of the 18th century, the understanding of the Mysteries was completely lost to humanity.
But these thoughts were contained in the spiritual consciousness of all educated people. And it was under the pressure of these thoughts that all the theological absurdities of the 18th century developed.
It was under the pressure of this thought that for the later theologians of the 19th century Christ gradually vanished into thin air.
180. On the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Times: The 33 Year Rhythmical Cycle 26 Dec 1917, Dornach
Translated by George Adams

Through the Holy Spirit, the Church must perpetually conceive the Christ. That is to say, the Church is under perpetual inspiration from the Holy Spirit, and that which the Church reveals is none other than the Word, the Logos.
The thought in your head, and the configured air that passes through your larynx,—these two arc wedded and united under the influence of the Spirit (that is to say, when you are voicing things of the sense-world, united by the percept itself).
This is the very method of his Theory of Colour. People have failed to understand the fundamental point. Goethe wanted the associative intellect to refrain from putting constructions on the sense-impressions; he wished it to take another path.
180. On the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Times: Realities Beyond Birth and Death 29 Dec 1917, Dornach
Translated by George Adams

I refer to those Mysteries which place into the very centre of their life what the profane world calls the Sacred Fire; ‘Sacred Fire’ is very different from what the profane world can understand. It is essentially Man himself—the super-sensible Man who underlies the human being of the sense-world.
This, then, is the type of the Mysteries which takes its start from the super-sensible Man who underlies the man of the sense-world—the super-sensible Man who passes through birth to clothe himself with a sensely garment.
And we may add: those Mysteries which afterwards merged into the real secret of Christmas, are the ones which really underlie all that humanity possessed by way of Mystery secrets, before Golgotha, in ancient India and Egypt.
180. Ancient Myths: Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution: The Nature of Mythical Thinking, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew 04 Jan 1918, Dornach
Translated by Mabel Cotterell

When a Greek heard the name Osiris, he could picture something from it, he identified what the Egyptian understood under the name Osiris, with something of which he too had certain concepts. Although the name was different, what the Egyptian conceived of as Osiris was no stranger to the Greek.
One could sometimes wish that there might be as much common understanding among modern men as, let us say, between the Greeks and the Egyptians, so that the Greeks understood what the Egyptians expressed!
They understood an imaginative consciousness, an atavistic Imagining, which was connected with the use of this active sulphur in man.
180. Ancient Myths: Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution: The Change of Soul in the Change of Consciousness 05 Jan 1918, Dornach
Translated by Mabel Cotterell

Hence they also sought to fathom the social mysteries under which men live together, through the link which bound them with the macrocosm, they sought for social wisdom through the star-wisdom.
Such truths must no longer in our present age be kept under lock and key. Certain Brotherhoods have been able to keep them under lock and key, because in the strictest sense of the word they have excluded women.
This brings us to the fact that people must understand something which it is above all necessary for our time to understand: how will Osiris be revivified?

Results 4891 through 4900 of 6551

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