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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 481 through 490 of 6456

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The Renewal of the Social Organism: Foreword

Joseph Weizenbaum
They call for a proper separation of these three spheres of activity arguing that only this would allow each to express its essential nature and thereby enable human society to revitalize itself. To understand this separation we must understand the component activities. For law the essential characteristic is human equality.
On reflection, however, it becomes clear that what is usually meant by freedom is equality under the law. Indeed, by majority consensus absolute freedom is limited. For example, a person is not free to murder or steal.
Each of these activities originated in the creative depths of a unique individual. It issued forth from soul and spirit under the guidance of his or her own volition and intentionality. No external compulsion can bring forth inner creative activity.
24. The Renewal of the Social Organism: Preface to the First Edition
Translated by Ethel Bowen-Wedgwood, Ruth Marriot, Frederick Amrine

Rudolf Steiner
These views result in all manner of unrealistic and impracticable tendencies. What they actually undertake is hopelessly utopian, while they dismiss as utopian suggestions that come from actual life experience.
However, we shall never succeed in healing our civilization until the actual will of the age, so deeply hidden beneath the underbrush of impractical and illusory party schemes, is raised to full consciousness. [ 5 ] For one who knows only too well that he is not suffering from foolish delusions it is hard to write what, among many today, will earn him the reputation: “He thinks himself wiser than all those actually engaged in practical life, who have therefore won the right to a voice in such matters.”
[ 9 ] Midway between these two groups lie the forces that are striving to bring forth this “threefold order of the social organism,” buried under the rubble of the past, out of the real and present will of this age. The bearers of this impulse feel they possess what the present hour needs.
24. Capital and Credit
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
Their vague character lives on in the institutions that arise under their influence, and these in turn result in social conditions making life impossible. [ 1 ] The conditions under which men are living in modern civilisation arise from such chaotic impulses of thought.
[ 16 ] Now in modern life there is no possibility of bringing about that relation of man to economic values which was possible under the old system of barter, nor even that relation which was still possible under a simpler money system.
Under the capitalistic system, demand may determine whether someone will undertake the production of a certain commodity.
24. The Requirements of Spiritual, Social and Economic Life
Translated by Richard G. Seddon

Rudolf Steiner
Only when life becomes complicated in form, as it has under the technical methods of production of the modern age, then the Will that dwells in the thoughts loses touch with the actual social facts.
The life of rights, that grows up out of economic power, in its actual working undermines this economic power, because it is felt by those economically inferior to be a foreign body within the social organism.
Then human beings will find it possible to give their wills a social bent, and to bring them constantly to bear on the shaping of social circumstances. Under the free spiritual life the individual will will acquire its social bent. Under a self-based civil state of Rights, these individual wills, socially attuned, will result in a communal will that works aright.
25. Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy: The Three Steps of Anthroposophy 06 Sep 1922, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
These schools of thought either refer to ancient spiritual traditions which are no longer properly understood, and which give in a dilettante manner all kinds of imagined knowledge of supersensible worlds, or they ape outwardly the scientific methods which we have to-day without realizing that methods of research which are ideal for the study of the natural world can never lead to supernatural worlds.
The results of research in these lines are put together to make a picture of cosmic development, and from this picture one can no doubt understand the human physical body. But the etheric body remains unintelligible, and in a still higher sense that part of man which has to do with the Soul and the Spirit.
[ 14 ] We must first re-establish a clear cognition and knowledge of the true ‘Ego’, if Religion is to have its proper place in the life of mankind. In modern Science man is understood as a true reality only in respect of his physical nature. He must be recognized further as etheric, astral and spiritual or ‘Ego’ man and then Science will become the basis of religious life.
25. Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy: Exercises of Thought, Feeling and Volition 07 Sep 1922, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
And when this Philosophy is once there it can be grasped and understood by the ordinary consciousness; for it speaks out of ‘imaginative’ experience in a form which springs from spiritual (etheric) reality, and whose reality-content can, through the ordinary consciousness, be recalled in experience.
25. Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy: Exercises of Cognition and Will 09 Sep 1922, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
It has the shape and the limbs of a man, but life has gone out of it. If we understand the nature of the corpse, we do not regard it as an end in itself, but as the remains of a living physical man.
25. Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy: The Relationship of Christ with Humanity 12 Sep 1922, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
[ 1 ] I attempted to show in my last observations how, in the realm of human evolution, the psycho-spiritual existence is transferred to that of the physical senses. Now it depends on the understanding which man can bring to bear on this transference whether he can gain a relationship, in accordance with modern consciousness, to the event of Golgotha and its reference to man's development on earth.
[ 3 ] But it must be once more emphasized that it is not a case of individual knowledge derived from observation, but rather of understanding with one's whole nature and being what observation has brought to light. Only a few men achieve the former, but the latter is possible to all.
And through the re-awakening of the half-forgotten knowledge of the ‘Eternal Man’, the human mind is led out of the purely sense-world in which the ego-consciousness develops, to the spirit, which can be experienced with full understanding by the soul in conjunction with God the Father and the Christ in a renewed perceptive knowledge of Religion.
25. Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy: The Event of Death and Its Relationship with the Christ 13 Sep 1922, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
Possessing this power the soul can attain pictures of that which in the universe underlies the etheric organism just as this underlies the physical. [ 10 ] And thus the soul is faced with its own eternal nature.
25. Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy: The Destination of the Ego-consciousness in Conjunction with the Christ-problem 14 Sep 1922, Dornach
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
In this copy the sum-total of the formative powers underlying the earthly course of man manifests itself. And a copy of the outer world is present in man at every instant.
He will lead you out of the soul world into the Spirit Land; under His guidance you will be purified, so that you will be able to prepare a physical organism for the next world during your stay in the Spirit land.

Results 481 through 490 of 6456

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