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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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158. The Balance in the World and Man, Lucifer and Ahriman: Lecture III 22 Nov 1914, Dornach
Translated by Mary Adams, Dorothy S. Osmond

Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world.
On the one hand man learns in a conservative way to understand the conditions that are in the world, he learns to understand how they have come about from cosmic, karmic necessity.
158. The Kalevala: The Essence of National Epics 09 Apr 1912, Helsinki

And the deeper we penetrate into this national epic, the clearer it becomes to us that we cannot understand the meaning and spirit and significance of it if we do not take this saying seriously at the outset.
There we find, however, that in the human soul those powers still prevail unmixed, which we today have separately as powers of reason, and those powers, which we today carefully separate from the powers of reason and lead to science, the powers of imagination. Imagination, understanding and reason, they all work together in those ancient times. The further back we go, the more we find that we can no longer speak of what prevailed in the soul of human beings, what worked there as imagination and understanding, as we call a soul power today, when we call it imagination.
We see a supersensible physicality of human nature that underlies it and that we can only address as something that works and creates like a kind of inner architect, inner foreman, that permeates our physical body in a living way.
158. The Kalevala: First Lecture 09 Nov 1914, Dornach

I would like to contribute to a deeper understanding of what has already been said, more or less in connection with the development of our building, so that we can add more in the future, which will be better understood through such an episodic consideration, as today's is intended to be.
It is not so simple to understand what is alive in the world and what is connected with the whole evolution of the world. And just as it is on the eastern half of the European peninsula that souls are prepared to experience something special, so it is for all other cases on the earth's surface, so the individual national characters are prepared in a complicated way.
The word of Maya and the truth is often spoken, but it remains theory, because anyone who looks into the spiritual world and sees what underlies the physical world is overcome by the feeling of the most tremendous shock when he seriously penetrates from Maya to truth and finds the truth behind what lives in Maya.
158. The Kalevala: Second Lecture 14 Nov 1914, Dornach

Only when we can see the forms that appear to us in nature as expressions of the spiritual can we understand nature itself in its connection with the human being. We can understand nature when we do not simply look thoughtlessly at the sea and land borders, but understand what is expressed in these forms.
There the flesh and the air border each other. — If someone says this, however, little will have been understood of it. It is only understood when it is grasped as an expression of the human being, as a face.
You see, this is another example of how we actually have to penetrate behind the Maja if we really want to understand what is in the world, namely if we want to understand the human being with all his expressions.
158. The Kalevala: Third Lecture 15 Nov 1914, Dornach

This cannot be recognized today. But this will be understood when the teachings of spiritual science are applied in the appropriate way to explain spiritual phenomena in the evolution of the earth.
In this way the impulses interlock and so we can understand how, above all, if we want to characterize Western Europe, we cannot come to an understanding unless we take into account everything that intervenes in the etheric body.
I ask you not to take what I have to say today as if it can be understood or speculated upon rationally. One must observe in the spiritual world, otherwise one will not be able to arrive at the right conclusion.
158. Olaf Åsteson: The Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson 01 Jan 1912, Hanover

There I was able to say that the establishment of Christmas is by no means an imaginary one, one that has arisen from thought, but that the establishment of Christmas arises during the course of the year from very specific inner processes that can take place in the human soul when this soul comes to clairvoyant visions as the highest fruits of the soul, either through certain powers inherent in the natural course of things or through trained clairvoyance. We can best understand what may actually lie at the root of the human soul by visualizing the following thought. All the plants, all the sprouting and sprouted growth that sunlight and solar warmth conjure up in spring and allow to flourish throughout the summer, all this, as it were, enters into a winter sleep, into winter darkness, on a kind of winter path at the time when Christmas was moved from the historical consciousness of humanity.
It is said of him that during these thirteen nights he underwent in a kind of clairvoyant experience what the Nordic man can feel as a vision in his way. He first learned how human deeds continue to unfold after the human being has passed through the gate of death, but he also learned how that which we call the Christ-being , how the office of judge of Jesus, the Christ, enters into the Nordic spiritual order of life after death, as the old world judge, the so-called face of Jehovah, the archangel Michael.
158. Olaf Åsteson: Olaf Åsteson: The Waking of the Earth Spirit 07 Jan 1913, Berlin

Now there is a beautiful folk tale in the old Norwegian language, a tale that was rediscovered only recently and has quickly become popular again due to the peculiar understanding of the Norwegian population. It is about a man who still had a connection to the spiritual world, about Olaf Åsteson.
The fact that something like this is spreading will, among many facts prevailing at present, also be one that proves how it is pushing towards an understanding of the mysteries that anthroposophy can bring us today. For that something like what is described here is taking place in a soul, or at least could take place relatively recently, is not just a 'fiction'.
But what led to our wanting to include this poem in our spiritual scientific program, so to speak, is that one can also go into the details more and more. Through anthroposophical understanding, one finds oneself delving ever deeper into what comes to light in the poem. For example, it was significant to me that Olaf — which is an old Norwegian name — has the epithet Åsteson: Åsteson.
158. Olaf Åsteson: The Awakening of the Human Soul from the Spiritual Slumber of the Dark Age 31 Dec 1914, Dornach

It was a profound necessity that these words should resound in modern culture at a particular time. We will only truly understand these words when we understand the threefold structure of human nature, because only then will we know what meaning these words can have for human nature in the true sense of the word.
That is precisely the peculiar thing about our time: that much is striven for, much is said, without being understood. But this too can lead us to reverence and devotion to the spiritual world. For when we consider that many in the third century of the fifth post-Atlantic period strove for and spoke the words brotherhood, freedom and equality without them being fundamentally understood, then we already have the opportunity to understand and find an answer to the question: where did these words come from? The order of the spiritual world, which is divine, has implanted them in advance in the soul of man, which does not yet understand, so that it may cling to such guiding words and so attain a true understanding of the world. Even in such facts we can observe the wise guidance in the evolution of the world.
158. Olaf Åsteson: The Dream Song by Olaf Åsteson

These thirteen days play a role in many folk traditions. To understand what is expressed in such traditions, one must imagine how, relatively recently, people in rural and mountainous areas felt an intimate connection with the course of nature.
158. Addresses for the Russian Attendees: Following the Lecture Cycle “The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and Kingdoms of Nature” 11 Apr 1912, Helsinki

When Westerners speak of Christ, Eastern peoples feel that they, the Eastern peoples, are far, far ahead in terms of their spiritual understanding of the world, in terms of what these peoples know of the secrets of existence. These Eastern peoples know this.
To the average Western European, this is folly or madness, for he still cannot understand Paul's words: “What wisdom is with God is often folly with men, and what is folly with men is wisdom with God.”
I have often thought that the children of this national soul still have a long way to go to understand their national soul, to understand what this national soul actually longs for and how much still separates them, these children of the national soul, from the national soul itself.

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