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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 661 through 670 of 6551

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107. The Being of Man and His Future Evolution: Illness and Karma 26 Jan 1909, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

But the ways of karma are very intricate and manifold, and we must study the more detailed composition of karmic connections before we can understand anything about them. Let us talk today about a few aspects of something that is very interesting for people to know, namely, how illnesses are connected with causes made by man himself in earlier lives.
This is something that is difficult for newcomers to anthroposophy to understand at first. Man passes through the Kamaloca period which lasts roughly a third of the length of his earthly life—in reverse sequence.
We must not, of course, conclude from this that if someone is knocked down by a train it should be explained in the same way. That sort of thing does not come under the same heading as illness nor what we have just been discussing. But there is another kind of karmic cause of illness which is just as interesting, and which we shall only understand if we look at it in greater detail.
107. The Being of Man and His Future Evolution: Laughing and Weeping 27 Apr 1909, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

Thus the breathing process changes when the human being is under the influence of the phenomena we have been describing. And you only need a little imagination to find the reasons why this must be so.
By means of this example we have shown that really the most everyday things can be understood only when we take spirit as the starting point. We can understand laughing and weeping only when we understand the connection between the four members of man's being.
That is why man must laugh or weep; whereas if it only lies within man, we cannot understand why he is laughing or crying because then it is always unfounded egoism. That is why it is so moving when Homer says of Andromache, when she is under the twofold grip of concern for her husband and concern for her baby: ‘She could laugh while she cried!’
107. The Being of Man and His Future Evolution: The Manifestation of the Ego in the Different Races of Men 03 May 1909, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

That is why the people living around the North Pole at that time were in the highest degree ethereal beings with highly developed etheric bodies but underdeveloped physical bodies; beings that as it were could grasp all the wisdom of the world with their etheric bodies, as though they had great clairvoyant faculties, and who looked out to the starry Heavens with an understanding of the beings who were weaving the life of world spaces.
A teaching such as this would not have been understood in Europe. Europe was situated much too near the North Pole for that, and the countries have kept a certain similarity right down the ages.
Therefore it spread to the West, and we see it meeting with understanding, when envisaged as the idea of a God people could think of as a person. That is why we see it developing in this way almost as a necessity just in this particular belt.
107. The Being of Man and His Future Evolution: Evolution, Involution and Creation out of Nothingness 17 Jun 1909, Berlin
Translated by Pauline Wehrle

But only an extremely enthusiastic dog-lover would want to deny that there is a radical difference between the education of a human being and what can be undertaken with animals. We need merely bear one particular anthroposophical insight in mind, and we shall understand the basis for this apparently superficial fact.
But as we have been working for some years in this group, we ought to be able to understand them. Let us start by taking a fully developed plant, for instance a lily of the valley. Here you have the plant before you in another form, as a small seed.
Where does this new element actually come from? In what way are we to understand the fact that man receives and takes in something new? I beg you to follow very closely now, for we are coming to a most important and most difficult concept.
107. History of the Physical Plane and Occult History 23 Oct 1908, Berlin
Translator Unknown

We will bring forward something regarding the chapter of “occult history” and in order to make these matters clear we will keep to quite definite spiritual facts. In order to be able to understand we must begin far back, right back in the Atlantean period. Today we have progressed so far that when we speak of such an epoch we assume something known to you all.
With all his sympathies in the physical world man did not understand the existence in the world beyond. He felt as if he had lost everything and the spiritual world appeared valueless to him.
That which is related in the Gospel regarding that visit which Christ made after the Event upon Golgotha to the dead in the underworld is not a legend or a symbol. Occult investigation shows you that it is the truth. Just as truly as Christ wandered among men during the last three years of the life of Jesus, so did he cause the dead to rejoice by visiting them immediately after the Event of Golgotha.
107. Concerning the Nature of Pain, Suffering, Joy, and Bliss 27 Oct 1908, Berlin
Translator Unknown

This consciousness of an overflowing strength which could be used productively, which may be guided from within, since the external body no longer claims it for itself, this implies blissfulness. What meaning underlies the fact that some religious communities do certain things in order to mortify the flesh, the physical body?
It is meant to give man the feeling: Through pain and suffering and many hindrances approach me, seeking to undermine what is most important to me, my mission—I will stand upright, though I stand alone! If someone practises these feelings for months, indeed for years, he will finally experience this feeling of headache, as if sharp points or thorns were prickling his head.
But when the physical brain is in a certain way injured under the influence of these feelings, the etheric body must loosen itself from it; it must withdraw from the brain, it is driven out of it, and knowledge is the result of this emancipation of the etheric head.
107. Four Human Soul Groups 29 Oct 1908, Berlin
Translated by Manfred Maier

Such things, however, must be taken in a holy, earnest sense, if we will understand them aright. It would be easy for those who have studied human anatomy, to deduce the anatomical differences between the physical bodies of man and woman from these lion- and bull-natures.
Let us take that with us as a content of feeling and try and work externally in such a way that this spirit of the most inner understanding may become effective.
107. The Development of Christianity in Present Humanity 15 Feb 1909, Berlin

And precisely when we study St. Francis of Assisi and cannot understand how, as modern people, we have his conscious ego and yet must have the deepest admiration for his entire emotional world, for everything he did, it becomes understandable from this point of view.
It is most important that we should learn to understand this again and again in the field of spiritual science, that the will to discuss may actually be regarded as a sign of ignorance; on the other hand, we should cultivate the will to learn, the will to gradually understand what is at stake.
Read David Friedrich Strauß. Try to see the way he thinks. Try to understand his train of thought: how he wants to show that the whole life of Jesus of Nazareth is a myth.
107. The Astral World: The Astral World 19 Oct 1908, Berlin
Translated by M. Gotfare

The human being stands, and must stand for all our studies, is the central point. Understanding human nature means, really, to understand a great part of the world. But human nature is difficult to understand, and we shall gain a small piece of this understanding of the human being, if we speak today of a few facts, only a few facts of the astral world.
There is a possibility—and there it shows us how we can penetrate into the understanding of the spiritual world through knowledge of the true, the right—there is a possibility that we can lose the directing control over what streams into us.
Let us suppose that in the course of life an individual man has had a number of friendships. Under the influence of these friendships, quite definite feelings and sensations have developed, especially in youth.
107. The Astral World: Some Characteristics of the Astral World 21 Oct 1908, Berlin
Translated by M. Gotfare

It is to show that spiritual science—or rather the special way of observing the world, which underlies it—stands in fullest harmony with certain results of the specifically scientific method. It is not quite easy for the anthroposophist (as can be seen particularly in public lectures) to find complete understanding in a totally unprepared public.
One must not, on this account, be too unjust towards those who cannot understand anthroposophists; they lack all the preparation that is definitely required in order to be able to grasp the results of spiritual research.
There are very singular sea-creatures, which you will understand if you remember what we have now described to some extent of the mysteries of the astral world.

Results 661 through 670 of 6551

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