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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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173c. The Karma of Untruthfulness II: Lecture XVIII 13 Jan 1917, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

Indeed this purpose has been served to a greater or lesser degree by the discussions we have been having here. To speak of spiritual science in the way we understand it means to fill ourselves with knowledge of how our world, which we observe with our physical understanding and senses, is in fact a revelation of the spirit.
I wanted to give you this introduction to what we still have to discuss because I wish to show you certain important spiritual facts which cannot, however, he understood unless we can link them to life, and unless we can penetrate the really tangled undergrowth of untruths which today buzz about in the world.
What made Treitschke typical was his daimonic nature. And it is true to say that to understand Treitschke is to understand much—not all, but much—of what was characteristic of the German people in the second half of the nineteenth century.
173c. The Karma of Untruthfulness II: Lecture XVIX 14 Jan 1917, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

I should add, though, that vegetarians should take care not allow themselves to become too undernourished. If they are undernourished they are in danger of damaging themselves, and then their chains—the prison for their devil, who shows himself in wiliness, lies and so on—are weakened.
If you take into account what I have just said, you will well understand what this intelligent individual wrote. His illness involved the freeing of all three higher components.
If, as I said, we were heads, it would be easy for us to reach an understanding about all kinds of things. It is less easy to reach an understanding about matters which have to be comprehended via the tool of the spinal system.
173c. The Karma of Untruthfulness II: Lecture XX 15 Jan 1917, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

Thus true spiritual knowledge must come to the possibility of understanding the material world and existence on the physical plane. It is important now, of all times, to pay attention to the interaction of spiritual and material elements in the human being, because now it is necessary properly to understand the intervention of something not material, namely, the folk soul, in the human being.
But we must be clear that we surely ought to understand these things properly. It is easy to ask the question: What can I myself do in these painful times?
They do intervene to the extent that we open ourselves to them, if we have the courage to do so. But first of all we must be serious about understanding things; we must be deeply serious about trying to understand. As a contribution to this understanding it is necessary that a number of people muster the strength to oppose the surging waves of materialism with their deepest personal being.
173c. The Karma of Untruthfulness II: Lecture XXI 20 Jan 1917, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

But, at the present stage of their evolution, human beings do not understand the strange language of dreams. Dream pictures remain incomprehensible, and this is quite natural.
An attitude appropriate for today is one that never accepts things which are given out by many secret societies, and which are not understood, for indeed a great deal that has not been understood is today both given out and accepted. Today it is appropriate to treat what these societies give out as something that is at most a failure to give the spoken word its true value, that is, something that uses words as mere concepts.
This points to something exceedingly important. When we understand how the living testaments of these societies—not written testaments left over for those still alive, but testaments which are forces going beyond death—when we understand how these work and are preserved, which is something that ought not to happen, then we understand something of the magical power wielded by such societies which often enables them to impress the stamp of truthfulness on to something untrue.
173c. The Karma of Untruthfulness II: Lecture XXII 21 Jan 1917, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis

In our present context it is particularly important to understand that in the world through which man passes between death and a new birth an evolution, a development is taking place just as much as is the case here on the physical plane.
They are beyond the door of the East. And in this connection the experiences we undergo now, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the sphere of development of materialism are very significant.
It is because human beings in this materialistic age—human beings in general, rather than those who understand these things—are too spiritual—paradoxical though this may sound. That is why they can be so easily approached by purely spiritual influences such as those of Lucifer and Ahriman.
162. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Tree of Knowledge I 07 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translator Unknown

And suppose that here were a worm or some little creature, that lives and burrows under the earth and has its home under the earth and never comes above the surface. This little grub or caterpillar, or whatever it is, creeps about inside and learns by its creeping about to know the roots of these plants.
He would have to realize that what he himself underneath has had as perceptions of differences, is up above. It is just the same when one raises oneself from ordinary human sight to spiritual sight, for one notes how then something comes into the sense-world which cannot be perceived under ordinary circumstances.
Then it must also get accustomed to viewing things not merely under time-conditions, but under conditions, for which that which takes its course in time is nothing but an outer sign, like a letter of the alphabet.
162. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Tree of Knowledge II 08 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translator Unknown

During the Saturn condition they were still lifeless germinal organisms, which then underwent changes and only through the various processes which have acted on man from the cosmos have become capable of perceptions.
And the true causes of the antipathy are hidden behind what the man alleges he has undergone. It is obvious that in face of such facts of the spiritual world, it can be asked: how does one protect oneself from such things?
We men as physically incarnated beings can only understand this through spiritual science. The question is how these thoughts work upon that which separated, upon what lies outside thought.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Probability and Chance, Fritz Mauthner's Studies of Improbability 23 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

You will find that what I am going to tell you today will make it easier to understand certain matters that will occupy us in the next lecture. I will be speaking then about the important concepts chance, necessity, and providence. And I want to begin today with an introduction that, though it has its difficulties, will nevertheless contribute something vital and significant, not only to our theoretical understanding, but to the feeling we will then be able to develop for the way to seek truth. I have often had occasion to mention the fact that there is a contemporary philosopher by the name of Fritz Mauthner who has written a Critique of Language.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Consciousness in Sleeping and Waking States 27 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

Just as in the earth's case the only thing that makes sense is to say that it undergoes an alternation between day and night because of its position in space, so human life undergoes an alternation between interest for the inner and interest for the outer scene.
What really matters is to note the salient facts in the case under study. We only know something about these higher beings if we are familiar with the state of consciousness in which the various hierarchies live and if we can describe it.
I'd like to show you at hand of an example that there are indeed individuals who possess understanding for such nuances of consciousness. Today is the 27th of August, Hegel's birthday, and tomorrow, the 28th, is Goethe's; they follow on one another's heels.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Necessity and Chance in Historical Events 28 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

And he believes that they can be answered only if he understands “productive powers and germs,” understands, in other words, how outer experience contains a hidden clue to the way the thread of necessity runs through everything that happens.
When we look at the phenomena surrounding us, we seek the spiritual life, the truly living life of the spirit that underlies them, whereas Hegel, since he could go no further, sought the invisible idea, the fabric of ideas, first the fabric of ideas in pure logic, then that behind nature, and finally that underlying everything that happens as a spiritual element.
Where, then, must we look for the facts underlying history? That is the question now confronting us. In the case of individual lives we have to look for the thoughts underlying gesture.

Results 4481 through 4490 of 6552

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