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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: The Rejuvenating Power of the German National Soul 06 Mar 1915, Leipzig

Rudolf Steiner
What still appears to many people today as fantasy, as absurdity, is to be introduced into today's culture precisely through spiritual science. It is understandable that people say: spiritual science contradicts everything that the five senses comprehend. It is understandable that people who speak in this way regard spiritual science as a form of dreaming or fantasizing.
Herman Grimm always wants to point out that one can only understand the world if one is able to look not only at what [gap in the text], but also at what protrudes from the supersensible into the sensual.
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: Why do you Call the People of Schiller and Fichte “Barbarians”? 11 Mar 1915, Nuremberg

Rudolf Steiner
And when one sees how little heart and mind were actually present in those who have often called themselves the leaders of other nations, one understands a lot. One understands a lot when one really delves into what one can experience together with the German spirit.
But when we now see how what is German spiritual life is to be trampled underfoot from the east, how this German spiritual life, in alliance with the western peoples, is to be trampled underfoot from the east, then we may ask: What about the understanding and the possibility of understanding on the part of what is there in the east, with regard to the German essence?
In this respect, many things can be instructive for us. We believed that an understanding would dawn, especially among the French, for the German way of being. Strangely enough, even shortly before the war, there were people who believed that an understanding could be found for the German way of being in youthful France.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: Roots and Blossoms of German Intellectual Life 20 Mar 1915, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
The German entered European culture in manhood. Thus, one people can be understood while another people is going through a completely different age. One must know that all peoples went through a clairvoyant age before that.
In the West and Northwest, among the British people, there is no understanding; it is impossible for them to even absorb the basic nerve of the German being, nor in the East.
With the Russian people, it hovers over the experience, which is why the Orthodox religion, which has become completely rigid, is allowed to spread over the individual, who bows down under it but is not seized by it. He does not strive to receive spiritual life, but humbles himself under the yoke, bending from the outside.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: What is Immortal about the Human Being? 21 Mar 1915, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
For one may say: in the face of the claim to really treat such a question scientifically, the most diverse habits of thought, the most diverse ways of imagining our time, which - I say again quite understandably - want to fight what can be said from the point of view of spiritual science, quite understandably, on the basis of the prerequisites for what they consider to be genuine science.
And when we have completed the first step and what we undertake in intimate soul development continues to have an effect on this soul, then we arrive at another step.
This external science leads - we must admit - in a quite understandable way to denying the possibility of answering the question: What in the human being is immortal?
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: The Essence of Spiritual Science and the Knowledge of the Transcendental World 09 Apr 1915, Basel

Rudolf Steiner
But if you look at this human life without prejudice, you will come to a different view of fate in ordinary life. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in this moment of life – not in the abstract, but in reality. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in reality.
Dreams are formed from the body mirroring the soul life. In this state, the human being does not understand what is happening. Only as a spiritual researcher can one understand that during sleep one is really outside of the body. Only a spiritual researcher can understand that the body is an object for the sleeping soul outside of it. Because the human being does not yet have a full understanding of these things, they interpret everything in the context of ordinary life.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: The Value of Extrasensory Knowledge for the Human Soul 06 May 1915, Vienna

Rudolf Steiner
Today, because I would like to touch on what the spiritual scientist can and may feel in our fateful time, I will only be able to briefly and sketchily hint at how spiritual science comes to its insights, to these insights that are just as contested and so difficult to understand today. The first objection that must be raised, quite understandably, precisely in the souls of the present day, which are among the most educated, is that spiritual science seems to contradict everything that has been gained on the firm ground of natural science.
But this life of the will is different from that which underlies outer actions. What underlies outer actions develops a life of the will in which the will is asleep.
This Central European culture will only gradually be understood in its deepest peculiarity by those who live in it. This Central European culture is truly the expression of what is also written in “Faust”: “Whoever strives, we can redeem” - eternal striving.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: The Destiny of Man in the Light of the Knowledge of Spiritual Worlds 08 May 1915, Vienna

Rudolf Steiner
Basically, you are nothing other than this ability, this ability to understand, this ability to act. That you understand something more or less spiritually, that you act in one way or another, that is basically what you are.
And now Herman Grimm describes even that which only the spiritual researcher can understand in its full significance: he describes how the spirit form, which passes through death into the spiritual world, really rises.
And this, esteemed attendees, is still a great and mighty undertaking, for we recognize this spiritual life of Central Europe not yet as blossoms and fruits, but as a germ that must develop.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: Supernatural Knowledge and Its Invigorating Soul Power in Our Fateful Time 14 May 1915, Prague

Rudolf Steiner
And just as one does not need to be a chemist to have the products and their uses that the chemist produces, so one does not need to be a spiritual researcher to understand - I now say “to understand”, not just “to benefit from” - what the spiritual researcher brings forth in his spiritual laboratory, if one only overcomes the prejudices that come from clinging to the usual habits of thought.
Today, anyone who adheres to the conventional ideas of science can quite understandably come and say: Yes, what such a fantastic spiritual researcher says goes against common sense, against the healthy five senses!
This Central European spiritual life cannot be destroyed by its enemies. For anyone who understands its nature knows that it still has much to do in the world, that it is not only growing and justified outwardly, but that it is strong within.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: The Supernatural Cognition and Its Strengthening Soul Power in Our Fateful Time 17 May 1915, Linz

Rudolf Steiner
This other path – I can best make it understandable through the following – is connected with an understanding of what the word “fate” encompasses for human life, which is infinitely significant.
That which comes to us as suffering or joy, as pain or pleasure-inducing fate, is usually understood as coincidences that happen to people. And the course of our fate between birth and death is understood as a sum of events, in the context of which one does not look further than whether one finds one thing pleasant or another unpleasant.
The spiritual researcher in particular will find it quite understandable in the present day when such things, when they are expressed, only meet with ridicule and scorn.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: Why do you call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “Barbarians”? 14 Jun 1915, Elberfeld

Rudolf Steiner
However, my dear attendees, one has already objected to much of what has been said – especially to what has been said from the standpoint of some kind of spiritual understanding of our present events – that one is dealing first and foremost with a purely political matter of nations.
What kind of judgment is this, ladies and gentlemen? That is, a person understands, a person who is one of the leaders of his nation understands that what he has recognized in German intellectual life is related to other things that have been offered to him [like differential calculus to elementary mathematics].
In the depths of his being, he feels powerful secrets that must still mature. How can a wish for his end, without understanding,

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