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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 1101 through 1110 of 6456

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71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: Revelations of the Unconscious in the Life of the Soul from the Spiritual Scientific Point of View 12 Feb 1918, Norrköping

Rudolf Steiner
Then, honored attendees, we shall consider those other phenomena in which so many today seek to gain insight into something that underlies the human being as soul and spirit. We shall consider the phenomena which are summarized under the term somnambulism, which includes everything that is still observed by many people today with such hopes of insight: the phenomena of mediumship and the like.
You cannot compare the dream with anything that the waking consciousness understands. The seeing consciousness is primarily familiar with the pictorial experience of the human being.
In purely scientific terms, by numbering all the different parts of the brain under the cerebral cortex, we do not get to know the essence of these things. Now we can also understand why: because only the soul is grasped in dreams, because the human being is removed from the body, he has no relationship to the external sense world in dreams, as to the actions of the body.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: The Human Being as a Spiritual and Soul Being. Research from the Perspective of Spiritual Science 16 Feb 1918, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
Spiritual research shows, in turn, that what underlies the human soul as spirit is the same on the other side as what underlies the human soul as body.
One will be convinced when one gets to know a method that one can already judge well with the ordinary healthy human understanding whether the spiritual researcher says something absurd, foolish, stupid, fantastic, dreamy, or whether he is able to show a way that makes it seem to the healthy human understanding that one is really finding something spiritual.
They have said: If we look at nature, we do not understand it; so it is rooted in something. We uproot it, we pull it out of its soil, then we survey it.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: The Revelations of the Unconscious in the Life of the Soul from the Spiritual-scientific Point of View 18 Feb 1918, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
I do not need to characterize this area in detail, not because it is unknown and little observed, but because it is so obvious and so understandable to everyone that the unconscious reveals itself in this area. A special area where, as already mentioned, one could deny the character of the unconscious, where the conscious and unconscious play together, can be understood as the area of human destiny.
This psychoanalysis, which is an exploration of a certain area of the soul, albeit with inadequate means, does not lead to an understanding of the true character of the areas under consideration. This psychoanalysis also works with the dream images of the human being.
The one who develops the gift of second sight learns to understand through the kind of experiences he has in the spiritual world, that he experiences them separately from the body, and learns to understand that this life between birth and death, this life in the sense world, the life in the physical body, must not be seen as a life in captivity.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: Life in Art and Art in Life from the Point of View of Spiritual Science 28 Mar 1918, Berlin

Rudolf Steiner
When you try to penetrate it, it becomes all too understandable that the artist is afraid to have what he experienced with art burned or singed. If you assume a moral original sin, then you have to assume two original evils for art.
Through spiritual science, the otherwise dormant consciousness can become so strong that the person perceives the spiritual world, that he not only experiences dull things during sleep, but also undergoes the most diverse entities and experiences. One can say that the dream life comes from the soul approaching the waking life, but not absorbing it.
What wants to gain strength in life is what is in the underground, that wants to be demystified. You can't do that in the abstract. Art can only fertilize life if you strive to find life in art.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: The Supernatural Man and the Questions of Free Will and Immortality Based on the Results of Spiritual Science 01 May 1918, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
And you will see that a purely philosophical consideration, as it is usually understood, cannot approach what actually wants to approach the human being with these questions that take root so meaningfully in every single human mind.
Anyone who thinks up this image will find it understandable that the difficulty of human self-knowledge must lie in the fact that, although one will be able to see other things with all the organs available to a person for their knowledge, one's own self can be seen spiritually as little as the eye can see itself.
But now, when we have these two things before us, which I have characterized, we cannot understand them by merely considering them externally and conceptually. We can only understand them by using spiritual scientific methods, which I will now describe.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: Man and the Historical and Moral Life of Humanity according to the Results of Spiritual Science 03 May 1918, Munich

Rudolf Steiner
With regard to the historical life of humanity and the understanding of this historical life, as it was striven for in its time and is still striven for in our time in much the same way, Goethe made a significant statement that can force one to reflect.
All the more reason to go into the psychological underpinnings, which are at issue here. In Hermann Grimm's work – and the same can be seen in Karl Lamprecht – there is a personal struggle for historical judgment.
One goes back to an age in which the human soul worked under completely different conditions. It is a prejudice today that the human soul has not changed since the time when it can be observed.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: The Supernatural Man and the Questions of Free Will and Soul Immortality 11 May 1918, Leipzig

Rudolf Steiner
Much comes up that we call memory and so on, that we do not understand, that belongs to the subconscious. When you think about all this, you actually have to despair of really getting to know what is in the human self.
In the free play of ideas, there always lives – and this must be taken into account – the one pivotal point of the human soul: we have to admit that, from our own organization, we understand the play of ideas, associations and so on, but we cannot grasp the interplay with scientific ideas, thinking, the logical distinction between “right” and “wrong” in thinking.
Other reasons can be distinguished from some actions. We have to understand this form of action. What happens when we love someone? We usually say: love is blind. No – I say: love is giving.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: How Can One Scientifically Recognize The Supernatural Life And Being Of The Human Soul? Results Of Spiritual Reality Research 27 May 1918, Vienna

Rudolf Steiner
One must have fully experienced certain experiences and events. One experience is to be undergone with that which is rightly admired today in the widest circles and by those people who understand something of the matter, because it has been brought infinitely far by people, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and in the present day.
Rather, it turns out that concepts with which one brings the forces of nature to one's understanding cannot be penetrated by the scientific mode of knowledge, but remain standing and ultimately shape themselves into a spiritual reality.
But this ordinary mysticism and all that is hidden under different names such as occultism, transcendentalism, and so on, is just as unsuitable for penetrating into the depths of human existence in true reality.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: The History of Mankind in the Light of Supersensible Reality Research 29 May 1918, Vienna

Rudolf Steiner
One simply comes to the question: Is there a way to look at our usual way of understanding history in such a way that we can draw conclusions about the present from our immediate life practice?
Herman Grimm made some very correct remarks about this and he understood many things very correctly in relation to the history of mankind and felt very clearly how the spirit of science can emerge again.
What occurs in the Orient and in our regions is quite different, and one understands it only if one can grasp it in the way described. But then one must say: it is as if someone develops from childhood to the age of thirty.
71b. The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being: How Can We Recognize the Supernatural Life And Nature Of The Human Soul? 14 Jun 1918, Prague

Rudolf Steiner
The first is the failure of knowledge of nature, the second is the failure of another kind of knowledge, which very many people seek at the moment when they often only instinctively doubt knowledge of nature. That is mysticism. Mysticism is to be understood only in the sense that I myself will characterize it. Mysticism in the ordinary sense is understood to mean immersing oneself in one's own soul life with the means available in everyday consciousness.
This momentous experience becomes particularly harrowing for the soul when this soul comes to truly understand how this prenatal life, this spiritual, soul existence, is connected to the things we otherwise have around us in our ordinary consciousness.
Man also has something in him spiritually, soulfully, that also goes beyond the physical, that which passes through the death of man. One can only understand human immortality by really understanding the other state of consciousness, by experiencing in a certain way every day, the consciousness that is not dependent on the physical organization, that becomes independent of the physical experience.

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