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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Necessity as Past Subjectivity 29 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

It may be that the falsity was inherent, or else became attached to the concept as language underwent changes over a period of time and did not need to wait for a scientifically and critically advanced generation to discover it.
You see that if we are really intent upon understanding life, we have to deal seriously and conscientiously with matters like these. We have to try very conscientiously indeed to develop our thinking, noting errors of thought where they occur, for they are intimately bound up with errors in the way our lives are lived.
Only if people bestir themselves to grasp that the events that took place in the ancient moon, sun, and Saturn periods are now reflected in us, and are merely reflections of those ancient events, will they come to understand necessity. And now think back to our discovery that our conceptual world is of moon origin.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Necessity and Past, Chance and Present 30 Aug 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

But they should not encounter the kind of aspirations brought in from the world we formerly lived in or be pursued according to our erstwhile habits. The spiritual movement should not be undermined by them. In most cases, spiritual movements have been undermined by people's failure to adapt their habitual ways to spiritual truths, instead of bringing their accustomed habits to the reception of those truths.
And we prepare ourselves to make the right kind of understanding ascent into higher worlds by taking in, in the form of sharply defined concepts, the world we live in.
We have two streams: our present life, which we think of as simply chance, and the reflected past or necessity flowing along underneath it. What is considered real from the ordinary physical standpoint can only be related to the past, to necessity, if reality is taken to mean conformity with what already exists.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Imaginative Cognition Leaves Insights of Natural Science Behind 04 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

Now in earlier lectures I've already shown that the spiritual energy underlying thinking changes when a clairvoyant seeker frees himself from the instrumentality of his physical body.
If you want to understand a watch, you must study the laws governing its mechanism, and it would be ridiculous to say, Ah ha!
We understand the mental state of gnomes, then, if we become cognizant of the state of consciousness involved in the relationship of physical knowledge to the world reflected in it.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: The Physical Body Binds Us to the Physical World, the Etheric Body to the Cosmos 05 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

This is right, of course, but it does not suffice for true understanding. Just imagine, for example, a person being born with a sensitive musical ear, but with no opportunity to get a musical education.
Everyone knows as a fact of experience that our physical bodies age; we grow older and older physically. And everyone understands what is involved in aging. But where our etheric bodies are concerned the opposite is true: we grow younger, ever younger.
Try to picture yourselves having to shape your entire physical instrument with the content of your consciousness. You would first have to have a thorough understanding of it. But every glance into external science makes it clear how little insight into our physical make-up we possess.
163. Chance, Necessity and Providence: Death, Physical Body and Etheric Body 06 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Marjorie Spock

And it is just when someone says that they don't exist and that he won't trouble himself about them that he is very markedly under their influence. A statement of this sort is made only when the speaker has been led astray by ahrimanic forces.
When we go through the portals of death, the first phenomenon, the first fact, to appear is the laying aside of the physical body. We know that this physical body then undergoes dissolution into the earth element, regardless of the form of disposal chosen. So the physical body undergoes dissolution into earthly elements.
Fechner wrote a booklet entitled Proof that the Moon consists of Iodine and published it under the pseudonym Dr. Mises in 1832.13. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729–1781, German poet, playwright, and critic.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: Episodic Observation On Space, Time, Movement 20 Aug 1915, Dornach

So, my dear friends, remember: not time but velocity is what must underlie mechanics. You might say that making these distinctions is mere madness. But it is not madness. These things are fundamental to our understanding of certain aspects of reality, and I will point out to you in a moment something that shows how fundamentally significant they are.
If we consider the type of thinking that underlies such ideas as those of Mr. Lumen or Baer's Flammarions, one thing is important to note. Let's take Mr.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking I 17 Sep 1915, Dornach

This thinking is therefore a kind of work, a working, we could say. And because, for our spiritual scientific understanding, Leibniz, even if he is not absolutely right, is still more right than Aristotle, we can say: this thinking - or, better expressed, this thinking activity, this thinking work in man, which is a performance of the etheric body - that is not in the outer reality of the physical plane.
It is an inner certainty that convinces the intellect of its reality. But then one must understand this intellect, this working of the intellect, as an activity of the human subject; one must realize that the intellect, spiritually speaking, is only a hand that is stretched out to grasp something.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking II 18 Sep 1915, Dornach

What takes place in remembering can be compared to a swimmer sinking under the water, whom you see until he is completely submerged. Now he is down and you no longer see him.
They could even say, “Why isn't the hand on the knee?” It could perhaps be there too. He does not understand the whole organism as a living being, he believes that the hand could also be somewhere else, right?
Yes, there you see the whole difficulty Schiller had in understanding Goethe! Some people could learn something from this who believe they can understand Goethe in the twinkling of an eye and thereby elevate themselves above Schiller, even though Schiller was not exactly a fool when it came to those people who believe they can understand Goethe so readily!
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking III 19 Sep 1915, Dornach

One can experience a certain, very important, specific experience over and over again, which must be considered if one wants to understand these things at all. There are people who develop a certain visionary clairvoyance. This dream-like imagining, this visionary clairvoyance, always involves a regression to a lunar nature.
One can receive beautiful descriptions of spiritual worlds from people who have sunk a little back into the lunar stage, and who, when they want to apply their earthly acquired intelligence, cannot themselves understand what they have actually produced, and in most cases do not even want to do so. I said: In the ascent to imaginative knowledge one must gain something and lose something, and that people usually do not want to lose anything.
He said, [it was written on the board]: Dissipez vos ténèbres matérielles ei vous trouverez l'Homme With this part of the sentence: To disperse the material darkness and confusion - people who want to be mystics agree. But people today still hardly understand the second part of the sentence. [It was written on the blackboard]: Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu whereby we have to imagine the whole content of spiritual science for “Dieu”, because that is still colored by religious ideas.
164. The Value of Thinking for Satisfying our Quest for Knowledge: The Value of Thinking IV 20 Sep 1915, Dornach

The assessment of a person should not correspond to judgment, but to understanding; because the tendency should be to help, and not to judge, under all circumstances. To help, and not to judge!
But that is not the point, the important thing is to seek understanding under all circumstances and not to exercise judgment. In the context of our spiritual-scientific lectures, it was often necessary to speak of Ahriman and Lucifer.
Now, of course, we are looking everywhere, aren't we, for the possibility of understanding the phenomenon of egoism that must accompany the striving into the higher worlds. We must not judge egoism when it occurs in such a region, because we must understand it as a natural phenomenon.

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