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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 4451 through 4460 of 6552

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172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture V 13 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

Yet, it would be recognized if the present age were not entirely under the influence of the most far-reaching faith in authority, stupor of opportunism, and dominated by what is called public opinion, which a philosopher of the nineteenth century termed “private foolishness.”
We may say, then, that for a proper understanding of things some psychologists already presume it to be necessary to posit the presence or absence of an obscure, unconscious capacity in the soul.
The patients are told that such experiences still reside in the deepest regions of the psyche, apparently forgotten by the upper level of consciousness, and that they must be drawn to the surface. If, under the influence of a skillful interrogator who, according to the views in vogue, must be a psychologist, they are thus brought to the surface, and if the person comes to understand the matter, then things will be better.
172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture VI 18 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

It really contributes nothing whatever to an understanding of the personality concerned. When someone forms such concepts, he actually slashes—spiritually, I mean—into the person with whom he is dealing.
By contrast, if you simply trace the consecutive events of life, you will understand nothing whatever of its totality. This is the way the historians do, in a sense; they draw threads from one event to another but do not understand life at all because what is needed is to view the world symptomatically.
Indeed, they have much to do with this, and we shall undertake to go into some of them in order finally to reach the goal toward which we are really striving.
172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture VII 19 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

These two ideals, the bourgeois and the pilgrim, face each other and, unless we realize the significance of this for life, we cannot possibly develop the understanding that is growing within us. In earlier ages men could face life without understanding since they were guided by divine spiritual powers; today, however, as we develop toward the future, we must have understanding.
If such things are to become impossible in the future, it is necessary that a number of people shall not have that constricted understanding and energy of life to which Mill refers; rather, they must have the sustaining understanding and supporting life energy that come from spiritual science.
Things are interrelated in the world, but it is not always necessary that people should understand what the interrelationships are, because for many these connections can play their role in the subconscious.
172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture VIII 25 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

It is the fault of the philosophy that has developed under such influences and that proposes to project living impulses into the future, asserting that it is the only philosophy today worthy of the human being.
A child had run across the street, had been caught under a wheel and was carried away dead. We continued our way. From this moment on something within me was paralyzed.
Now bear in mind how often I have said—I have brought this to your attention for years—that the first generation will still be able to live with materialism because it lives under the spiritual influence received from its forefathers, but that the succeeding generation would degenerate under materialism and would go to ruin.
172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture IX 26 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

It indicates that in those very circles there is absolutely no understanding of what the spiritual needs of our time really are, since it is not important if a man imagines he can find the way to his god, but rather whether he actually can.
Especially where there is much talk about these things without the necessary will to understand much, as is frequently the case among the Masons, a great deal of nonsense is practiced; people talk superficially about these things without knowing too much.
They must bring about a balance that can be created only if humanity again comes to understand the Christ principle, if humanity finds the way to Christ. For a time humanity has been led away from the Christ.
172. The Karma of Vocation: Lecture X 27 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, Gilbert Church, Peter Mollenhauer

It is necessary to understand clearly that in every human being something supramundane in his nature comes to meet us, something not to be understood by earthly human means.
She wanted to replace him with Lucifer whom she undertook to represent as the friend of the spirit. To be sure, Lucifer is just that, but only in the particular sense I have explained.
The degree to which this ego was subdued in ancient times is greatly underestimated. It was subdued and appeared only during the centuries just prior to the Mystery of Golgotha.
172. The Karma of the Individual and the Collective Life of Our Time 05 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translator Unknown

This illness was of course a natural phenomenon connected with his body; but we can never understand a man who works out of the elemental forces of the world, nor indeed can we understand any human being at all, unless we also take into consideration events such as these, which take place in the course of their Karma.
We might bring forward a very great deal to show into what deep layers one has to delve in order to understand the world. And yet, how much of the wisdom required to understand the world is contained in even the very first parts of Goethe's Faust!
What did that signify in his life? We must first understand what an event like this signifies in the life of a human being. Otherwise we can get no further in the understanding of his life.
172. The Cyclic Movement of Sleeping and Waking 06 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translator Unknown

This too makes it necessary for us to begin to speak of many things in connection with spiritual science, which alone will enable us to understand them rightly. In spiritual science, as you know, we describe the human being as follows.
This too must be added, to illumine the full reality and so to understand the human being in his totality. To understand what I have just said, we must however also realise the connection of the soul and the physical being of man in the following respect.
They who thus experience the interwoven strata of the 4th and 5th Post- Atlantean epochs,—what if they only knew what a certain member of their being, all unawares, is doing within them? They would have quite a new understanding of what Goethe as a young man secreted into his Faust. For unconsciously, countless individuals who enter the modern life of education are undergoing this.
172. Insertion of Early Human Destiny into Extraterrestial Relationships 12 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translator Unknown

And precisely inasmuch as it is thus severed from man, it will increasingly become what in the further development through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan will undergo a similar process to what was undergone for the Earth through Saturn, Sun and Moon. It is strange.
Their foolishness only passes unobserved, because, for the moment, there is still a great respect for those who have undergone such education. The time is yet to come, when it will rather be the prevailing feeling that a litterateur, a journalist, a schoolmaster—trained in the way schoolmasters generally are nowadays—understands least of all of the real facts of life.
Because it is in the world of the senses, people understand this. In the Spiritual World they fail to understand the corresponding ‘crankiness.’ And yet, for spiritual things it is precisely the same when anyone imagines that external evolution can go forward by itself.
172. Factors of Karma 13 Nov 1916, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Somehow they try to get out of human souls the joys and pains, the disappointments of life which they have some time undergone and in their every-day power of thought have forgotten. What is forgotten, so these theorists declare, has not therefore vanished.
The soul is not exhaustively contained in what it knows. In the underlying levels of consciousness the thing is still there, and presently it finds expression. For though the lady in her outer life is happy, she suffers from an indefinable, pessimistic leaning, a partial weariness of life or something similar.
So do the men of our time find themselves driven to the very quarters where they should indeed investigate; but as they cannot understand spiritual science they have no guiding lines for such investigation. Therefore they rummage about in the most clumsy way in these realms which are assigned to them by their profession, or by their own agitations.

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