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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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174a. Central Europe Between East and West: Seventh Lecture 19 May 1917, Munich

Today I would like to take a starting point that can lead us to an understanding of many things that surround us in the present time and that we face with questions. Our time demands to be understood in such a way that man places himself in it with a deeper, a spiritual understanding. On the other hand, however, there is a deep-seated aversion in the broadest circles to a spiritual understanding of human affairs; indeed, there is such an aversion that the attempt at spiritual understanding, the attempt to understand such impulses, which are capable of supporting human actions in our difficult times, is rejected from the outset as something fantastic, something impossible, something childish. Nevertheless, these reflections, which we are able to cultivate here together, should be devoted to what, though it does not speak directly of the circumstances of the time – as is easily understandable – cannot, as is well known, lead to some understanding for those who make an effort to arrive at such an understanding from truly deeper starting points.
174a. Central Europe Between East and West: Eighth Lecture 20 May 1917, Munich

However, we can only find our way around in this if we have a little insight into the plight of the time, into what underlies such an attitude. We must look back a little into the meaning of human evolution if we want to understand what we must understand in the present if we are to move forward.
We see this instinctive element diminishing in more recent times, and the terrible explosions of hatred that we are now encountering can only be understood if we understand their real basis, if we understand how the old instincts are diminishing. These instincts of hatred are much more serious than is still recognized today.
As for those inventions — and this is what matters — to which I referred yesterday, it may still be possible to somewhat undermine them if only the two-part measure mentioned yesterday is vigorously implemented. Please understand this, because by understanding this you show understanding for the nature and task of the anthroposophical movement.
174a. Central Europe Between East and West: Eleventh Lecture 02 May 1918, Munich

It must be recognized that an impulse must be laid in man in his earliest youth so that man may learn to grow older. People today do not understand growing old. At most, they understand that they are getting gray hair or – particularly common today – early baldness or similar signs of aging.
But as this spiritual science gradually begins to spread, seriousness also begins, and this seriousness can only consist in wholeheartedly engaging with what is to be taken in connection with what is developing around us. It is necessary to understand these things and to understand them as deeply as they can be understood. It is necessary to develop the flexibility of mind that makes it possible to move beyond sectarianism to a worldly grasp of what our spiritual science is supposed to encompass.
The folk spirit works on the American people through the undergrounds of the earth, through the magnetic and electrical forces slumbering in the earth. It is the underground that radiates up and that in America provides the medium through which the national spirit directs the people.
174a. Central Europe Between East and West: Twelfth Lecture 04 May 1918, Munich

Contemporary humanity is challenged in many ways, it is necessarily led to understand this and that; but some things that are to be understood are just uncomfortable to understand, and require a certain unreserved, unprejudiced assessment of one's own human nature.
We are gradually learning to understand that we know nothing about ourselves as human beings if we restrict our interest in a philistine way to our immediate surroundings.
In the East of Europe, we see something being prepared, I would say in the extract, for which Europe today has terribly little understanding. We have often pointed out the developmental germs of this European East in our field. This European East wants to learn to understand that all human life has meaning!
174a. Central Europe between East and West 18 Mar 1916, Munich
Translated by Anna R. Meuss, Johanna Collis

Working together with Olcott,18 who was far from satisfied with the situation in America at that time, she had great plans for America, plans apt to make Anglo-Saxon Western occultists feel extremely hot under the collar. Even Dr Faustus would not have felt that hot under the collar, nor even Richard III, as Goethe once put it when speaking out of a certain mood.19 Apart from this something else had now also happened, something that had not yet happened in Paris, and that was that Madame Blavatsky knew and understood too much of the underlying aims. Something had been done that certainly was not entirely justifiable if one went by the ancient and most sacred rules; yet it was something that had to happen in order to prevent what might have been a great disaster.
Something is preparing in the world of the spirit and if those who are able to understand see it in the right way, then it will turn into powers in future that souls who have understanding and occult feeling then transform into powers that take humanity onwards.
174a. The Weaving and Living Activity of the Human Etheric Bodies 20 Mar 1916, Munich
Translator Unknown

During the Sun, Moon and Earth epochs, it then underwent a constant transformation. It was gradually transformed under the influence of the processes which were taking place: it was transformed through the fact that the etheric body was incorporated with it.
I mention Planck, that strange man, who lived for many years an extremely lonely life at Ulm and was not even offered a chair at the university of Tübingen, because nobody really understood his true value and significance; the significance of a man concerning whom obtuse persons would certainly say: “Towards the end of his life, he grew so nervous that he said all manner of things that sounded like megalomania.”
But all this shows us that at the present time, in particular, a soul of Dostojevski’s kind could be influenced by the real facts in such a manner that his soul felt induced to describe throughout his book, in a chaotic way, these four brothers, who possess the qualities just described, whom we can only understand if we know this and if we are able to feel it. In that case, we shall understand why the brother in whom the etheric body predominates and the one in whom the astral body predominates, must be the sons of a mother afflicted with hysterical fits.
174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: First Lecture 30 Sep 1914, Stuttgart

All his later works arose entirely from this first foundation drawn from Novalis. This also sheds light on how our time understands justice. Today it is by no means sufficient to hear the voices that are spoken here and there under the influence of passion; rather, it is necessary that we visualize the facts.
Moreover, my childhood fell at a time when I myself became acquainted with hatred of Germans in Austria, when German-Austria was still under the impression of Prussia's victories, when even the Germans in Austria hated the Reich Germans.
There is a cycle about the folk souls. But if we cannot understand it in the most sacred seriousness in these serious times, then all our previous work with this cycle would be a theoretical game.
174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: Second Lecture 13 Feb 1915, Stuttgart

What will be understood by the sixth cultural epoch? It will be understood as a cultural epoch in which a large part of the Eastern people will have sacrificed their humanity to that which has been achieved in popular culture, in that, like the feminine, the Eastern will have allowed itself to be fertilized by the masculine Western.
On purely humanistic ground, we understand each other as human beings. But if we leave this ground and enter into the struggles of nations, we should be clear about the difficulties standing in the way of mutual understanding.
Only the realization of what one has done oneself will bring some understanding of the matter, but not the word that comes from others, that comes from those who stand on a different national soil.
174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: Third Lecture 14 Feb 1915, Stuttgart

Not the human concepts of Christ are important, but the living Christ, who works through the impulses that are His. When people did not understand Him, He entered into a realm where there is no need to understand, where one absorbs in dreams what is to pass into the sphere of the will.
And after it became clear that the child could be under a fallen furniture truck, the truck had to be lifted in the middle of the night, and little Theo Faiß was pulled out from under it, dead.
Then you understand things in a completely different way, then you also understand the connection between what happened and the further course after death.
174b. The Spiritual Background of Human History: Fourth Lecture 22 Nov 1915, Stuttgart

And for the one who immerses himself in spiritual science, many a riddle must be solved in order to understand life, not from a theoretical point of view, but from a life point of view, from the life point of view that not only occupies thinking, but the soul in its entirety and in its entirety. Let us try to imagine what we can understand from ordinary life in relation to death. The dead person leaves us. What changes externally is that our eyes no longer see them, that we can no longer exchange a handshake with them, that our words no longer go from us to them, from them to us.

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