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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 5041 through 5050 of 6551

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210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture V 12 Feb 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

Angels are the beings next above man, closest to man, yet under certain circumstances we cannot approach them. Only by endeavouring to make a picture of the angel world while we are here on earth can we prepare to form relationships with it.
Through Anthroposophy we strive for higher knowledge in order to grasp the reality of the higher realms of life and in order to fill our souls with the content of what lives in the spiritual worlds. Those whose common sense has helped them to understand what the spiritual seeker has to say, experience something else as well. They can say to themselves that human beings in the state of incarnation between birth and death are constantly counteracting the death forces at work in their body.
If we did not bear the forces of death within us we should never have developed our understanding for our physical environment. One of the most important facts given to us by higher knowledge is that our forces of intellect are bound up with our forces of dying.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture VI 17 Feb 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

As I have often said, cultural life since the first third of the fifteenth century is entirely different from that of earlier times, and now we are faced with the necessity to return, but in full consciousness and with deep thought, to an understanding of the spiritual part of our life in the cosmos. The spiritual part of our life in the cosmos was understood in ancient times by an instinctive clairvoyance, and this was the case most of all in the most ancient ages of earthly civilization.
That is why the course of scientific development is reckoned, by those who understand these things, to have started in the time of Thales.2 I have discussed this in my book Riddles of Philosophy.
The unique spiritual configuration of the early medieval centuries is only comprehensible in the light of a clear understanding of this fact. Now this fact can be greatly clarified by something that was regarded as being of paramount importance in very many Mystery centres.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture VII 18 Feb 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

Another thing, even though it is not yet fully understood, is the way our eurythmy impresses the widest circles—not intellectually, but in what comes from the imaginative foundation of human beings.
If you consider this and meditate on it a little you will gradually come to understand what I mean by thinking with exactitude. In ordinary life we have little opportunity under today's conditions to practise thinking with exactitude except in geometry or, over and above that, in mathematics.
They were expected to follow Bismarck's speech as they would a speech made by someone they had previously never heard of! Such a thing is unthinkable under normal conditions. And yet for someone who really desires to undergo a kind of initiation it is certainly necessary to develop an impartiality which enables him to take everything he sees as something entirely new, however many prejudices his soul might previously have harboured in that respect.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture VIII 19 Feb 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

In the period prior to physical life something lives in the soul which, as fear, fills it entirely. You must understand, however, that fear as an experience outside the physical body is something quite different from fear within the human physical body.
This is an indication of the metamorphosis undergone by our element of soul and spirit when it comes into earthly existence from pre-earthly existence.
These thoughts and ideas simply flowed into mankind in earliest times, when understanding was still instinctively clairvoyant. Human beings used to have a strong feeling of what they had been before they descended into earthly life.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture IX 24 Feb 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

But these dead thoughts live in a house which can only be understood pictorially; it is an image arising out of the metamorphosis of our organism of limbs and metabolism from our former earthly life.
As Christianity spreads externally, the best spirits wrestle to understand it inwardly. Both streams had come down from the far past. On the one side there was the heathen stream which was fundamentally a nature wisdom.
Satan sets about this task. Human beings find it difficult to understand why Satan—who is, of course, an exceedingly clever being—is ever and again prepared to tackle tasks at which he has repeatedly failed.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture X 25 Feb 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

But this can only happen when thoughts are transformed—first into Imaginations, and then the Imaginations transformed into Inspirations and Intuitions. What is needed is a full understanding of the human being. Not until this becomes a reality, will what I told you yesterday be fully understood: That the world around us must come to be seen as a tremendous question to which the human being himself provides the answer.
But Goethe is honest; he does not say it because he has not yet fully understood it. But he is striving to understand it. He is striving for something which can only be achieved when it is possible to say: Learn to know man through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.
So much is said about Faust, yet there is no understanding for the task of the present time, which is to bring fully to life what Goethe brought to life in his Faust, especially in the second part.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture XI 26 Feb 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

Both impulses work in his soul. The whole of the Hamlet drama stands under the influence of these two impulses. Hamlet—both the drama and the character—stands under the influence of these impulses because, when it comes down to it, the writer of Hamlet does not really know how to combine the spiritual world with the intellectual mood of soul.
Now add something else to the great question which is so important for an understanding of the spiritual revolution which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.
Those who only describe external facts and have no understanding for what lives in the souls of Goethe and Schiller—and also of course many others—may describe these facts very well, but they will fail to include what plays in from a spiritual world—which is certainly also there, although it may be present only in the heads of human beings.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture XII 19 Mar 1922, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

Goethe, not only by nature, but also because of his whole attitude, was incapable of expressing these things in the form of abstract concepts. Instead, under the influence of the kind of thoughts developed by Schiller, he wrote his fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.
We can only reach such an understanding by contemplating the striving of the whole human spirit towards a particular goal of evolution.
It must be practised in such a way that it leads to Imagination. We must understand that the power of the intellect chases away the spirit, but if the power of the intellect itself can be developed to become the faculty of Imagination, then we can approach the spirit once more.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture XIII 19 Jan 1922, Mannheim
Translated by Johanna Collis

If we fail to take note of the spiritual background, we also fail to understand history, and with it the chief factor in humanity today. It is especially important to depart from the usual external characterization of everything.
Then he is taken prisoner by some Croats, after which he roams about the world undergoing many adventures, until finally he ends up once more at the hermitage where he settles down to live for the salvation of his soul.
Only by taking the interconnections into account is it possible to understand what lies hidden in the figures brought by spiritual and cultural life out of the past and into the present.
210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture XIV 01 Feb 1922, Wrocław
Translated by Johanna Collis

This is a point of view from which opposition to Anthroposophy can very well be understood. Human beings do not want freedom in the spiritual realm. They want to be compelled, led, guided by something.
It is not insignificant for the soul when an effort is made to understand something that has been discovered through Imagination. For instance, it is extremely difficult today to make medicines effective for the treatment of illnesses.
If people school their common sense by means of inspired truths, even if they do not undertake any spiritual development, then they acquire a delicate sense for the living truth, and for what is healthy and unhealthy in human thinking and in human endeavour.

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