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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 321 through 330 of 6552

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134. The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit: Lecture I 27 Dec 1911, Hanover
Translator Unknown

How difficult it is to form correct conclusions in this respect I endeavoured to show from various instances in two lectures which I recently delivered. In the first it was my aim to awaken an understanding for the ease with which one can become a sincere opponent of the anthroposophical world conception if one lets oneself be ruled by the thoughts and ideas that prevail in the world to-day.
How strange it would seem to a man of the present day if some-one were to come and say to him: “The Theorem of Pythagoras is quite comprehensible to you, but if you want to have a deeper understanding of the hidden meaning of the statement: ‘The sum of the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square on the hypotenuse’”—or to take a still simpler case, if someone were to come and say to him: “Before you are ripe to understand that three multiplied by three is equal to nine you must go through this or that experience in your soul!
It is an interesting fact that one will never understand how Goethe pursued his study of natural science unless one has this conception of wisdom, where one has to let the objects themselves do the judging.
134. The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit: Lecture II 28 Dec 1911, Hanover
Translator Unknown

And yet, although it is impossible to take such a line absolutely, we can take it under certain conditions. Constituted as we are as human beings in the world, we cannot on every occasion suspend judgment on the things of the world.
And when this takes place man finds that he has an altogether new way of beholding the world. The world has undergone a still greater change for him than was the case when he penetrated through sense appearance to the ruling will.
In connection with this power of vision man has to undergo, when he is a little further on, a very hard test. For with each single being that he meets and that makes itself known to him he will always find that while some parts of the being arouse in him the feeling of budding and sprouting life, other contents or parts give him the feeling of death.
134. The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit: Lecture III 29 Dec 1911, Hanover
Translator Unknown

In these words lies a very deep truth. We are not to understand that the eyes only are to be opened. The eyes are here representative of all the senses. If we understand Lucifer's words aright we may render them as follows: “All your senses shall work in a different way from the way they would work if you were going to follow the Gods and not me”—i.e.
A right and proper relationship will come about when man undertakes a wise and energetic and patient self-discipline and acquires the qualities we have described under the names of wonder, reverence, feeling in harmony, surrender.
For his intelligence is Lucifer's gift to him and is not adapted to understanding things that have nothing to do with the working of Lucifer. You see what deep connections lie behind these things.
134. The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit: Lecture IV 30 Dec 1911, Hanover
Translator Unknown

And that is exactly what shows itself to occult knowledge. When certain forms, created under the influence of the Spirits of Form, have developed up to a certain point, then they break to pieces.
It all depends ultimately, as you see, on the conditions under which the matter sprays up and scatters when it arises out of spirit. Keep well in mind what I have told you even if you have not been able to follow every thought in detail.
And then, owing to the very conditions he had himself induced under the Luciferic influence, he received into him an inrush of breaking spirit, of matter. Matter is thus something with which we are filled but which does not belong to us.
134. The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit: Lecture V 31 Dec 1911, Hanover
Translator Unknown

And so to from the system of nerves, when the nerves themselves have undergone their process of decay, we have left after death the Intuition. All these are actual constituent parts of our astral as well as our etheric body.
But in blood we have something which has directly undergone, as substance itself, the Luciferic influence. You will remember we saw how the manner in which physical body, etheric body and astral body work into one another would be different, had it not been for the Luciferic influence. But there we have to do in a certain respect with super-sensible things which only afterwards take up matter into themselves; which work upon matter with the Luciferic influence they had themselves first undergone, and make it what it is. The substance of nerve and muscle and bone owes its existence to the fact that certain bodies of man are irregularly put together.
134. The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit: Lecture VI 01 Jan 1912, Hanover
Translator Unknown

In order that man may be able to take his place with full understanding in this new task in earth existence—to this end is Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science there in the world.
I think I need not spend words in pointing out what moral principles and will impulses for present-day humanity can proceed from a real understanding of occult science.1 For out of a rightly understood wisdom will a rightly understood goodness and virtue be born in the human heart. Let us strive after a real understanding of world evolution, let us seek after wisdom—and we shall find without fail that the child of wisdom will be love.
135. Reincarnation and Karma: How can a direct conception be gained of the inner kernel of man's being? 23 Jan 1912, Berlin
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond, Charles Davy, S. Derry, E. F. Derry

And the very people who now inveigh most bitterly against reincarnation and karma will writhe under the torment of the next life because they cannot explain to themselves how their life has come to be what it is.
People who are anthroposophists to-day will share with those who are not the desire to remember, but they will have understanding, and therefore an inner harmony in their soul-life. Those who reject Anthroposophy to-day will wish to know something of it in the next life; they will really feel something like an inner torment concerning their previous incarnation but they will understand nothing of what it is that most distresses and torments them; they will be perplexed and will lack inner harmony. In their next incarnation they will have to be told: “You will understand the cause of this torment only if you can conceive that you have actually willed it into existence.”
135. Reincarnation and Immortality: Need for the development of a ‘feeling-memory’ before direct experience of reincarnation is possible 30 Jan 1912, Berlin
Translated by Michael Tapp, Elizabeth Tapp, Adam Bittleston

Then let us imagine that we had climbed on to the roof and placed the stone so that it was bound to fall, and that then we ran quickly under it so that it had to fall on us. It is of no consequence that such ideas are grotesque; the point is what we want to acquire through them.
Those who have gone a little way into Anthroposophy will understand what has often been said: that our conceptual activity—including the conceptual activity related to memory—is something which, when roused by the external world in which we live in our physical bodies, has meaning only for this single incarnation.
—most of the teachers knew nothing of what they themselves had been teaching to their pupils. Yet this man was an examiner who understood how to draw out of people what they knew. This is only one example of how unobservant people are of what takes place around them, even when it concerns their own affairs.
135. Reincarnation and Karma: Knowledge of reincarnation and karma through thought-exercises 20 Feb 1912, Stuttgart
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond, Charles Davy, S. Derry, E. F. Derry

The theme was to have been that Plato, reincarnated as a school-boy, received the very lowest marks for his understanding of the Plato of old! We need not remind ourselves that some teachers are severe, or pedantic.
He guides us to the sorrows and sufferings, directs us to undergo them. This may, to begin with, be an oppressive thought but it carries with it no obligation; we can, if we so wish, use it once only, by way of trial.
Life is clarified if we do not simply accept such things passively—not to say dull-wittedly; it is clarified if we try to grasp, to understand, what comes to us in life in such a way that the relationships which are bound to remain elusive as long as karma is only spoken of in the abstract, become concretely perceptible.
135. Reincarnation and Karma: Examples of the working of karma between two incarnations 21 Feb 1912, Stuttgart
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond, Charles Davy, S. Derry, E. F. Derry

That interest dwindles is, after all, very understandable. Men have their places in external life, they hold various positions in the world. With all its organisations and institutions the modern world appears not unlike a vast emporium with the individual human being working in it as a wheel, or something of the kind.
That, of course, is not possible. The essential thing is to understand how the truths of reincarnation and karma can penetrate into external life in such a way that they become its guiding principles.
In the social life this must lead to respect for human beings, respect for the dignity of man. And this can be achieved only if we understand individuals as they can be understood when the law of reincarnation and karma is taken into account.

Results 321 through 330 of 6552

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