Human Questions And Cosmic Answers (eBook)

Rudolf Steiner (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
252 Seiten
Rudolf Steiner Press (Verlag)
978-1-85584-655-5 (ISBN)

Infos

'In the case of a solar eclipse, the evil that has spread over the earth can be carried out into the cosmos to wreak more havoc there, whereas in the case of a lunar eclipse, people who absolutely want to be possessed by evil thoughts can receive them from the cosmos.'In the first full translation of this lecture course, Rudolf Steiner implores his audience to recognize the connections between the material and spiritual worlds. Eclipses of the sun and moon, for example, are 'forces at work in the universe, just like those we study today in the clinic or in the chemistry or physics laboratory'. Even everyday thinking can have a strong impact on the outer world. Materialistic thought, he says, can quite literally atomize our surroundings: 'if all human beings start to think that everything has to be explained in terms of atoms... then the earth will actually turn into atoms... these false ideas create false realities...'Steiner speaks of the 'world of will' as being three-dimensional, the 'world of feeling' as two-dimensional, and the 'world of thinking' as one-dimensional. The ego itself is dimensionless, and only inner, living thinking can grasp the spiritual-mental. He discusses key cultural figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Grimm and Julian the Apostate, and introduces multiple additional topics, including the effect of planetary forces on humans; the healing impacts of metals and other substances; the revitalization of thinking through meditation and concentration; the effects of the separation of science, art and religion; and the necessary transition from philosophy to anthroposophy.Thirteen lectures, Dornach, Jun.-Jul. 1922, GA 213

Textauszug

Second Lecture

DORNACH, 25 JUNE 1922

Yesterday I attempted to show in a rather obscure way how we can find the transition from the spatial-physical, including human corporeality, to what can be thought of as spiritual, in that three dimensions are reduced in a sense to two or one dimensions and to a point. Now today I want to contrast yesterday’s observations to some extent with a more cosmic point of view, which should show you how we can also develop ideas relating the world that forms our environment to the soul-spiritual. For modern consciousness it is completely impossible to view the material world surrounding us in a way that the soul-spiritual in human beings has a direct relationship to it. We have to explain this cognitively, if the modern person is not to say they cannot understand why anthroposophy alleges that the soul-spiritual, meaning the I and the astral body, leave the physical and ether bodies and are then outside of them. Where are they? asks that person, whose understanding is grounded in modern materialistic consciousness. A modern person is incapable of thinking that the soul is to be found somewhere in space. At most they are able to think that air is somewhere in space, that space is filled with light; but that the soul-spiritual is somewhere in space, this they cannot think. And from this impossibility it is but a short path to the other: that this modern person, who has grown up with a materialistic awareness, is incapable of imagining where the soul-spiritual goes when it leaves the human body at death.

Of course, the modern person claims to be able to believe these things. However, at that moment when they have to use their own faculty of thought they immediately get into various conflicts. These conflicts cease when we try to understand spiritual science. But the ideas we then have to absorb are so unfamiliar for contemporary human beings that they can only approach them slowly and gradually. Therefore, it is good to begin with the facts of soul-spiritual life, facts that nowadays are little known in the outside world.

As we all know, what humanity has today as venerable, old, traditional beliefs that have flowed into the various religions, can be traced back to an age-old knowledge; we know that in ancient times there were sacred mystery sites, which were churches, schools and centres for the arts in one and from where there originated all that has spread out among the mass of the people as knowledge, but also as impulses determining people’s actions.

In these mystery schools there were so-called initiates, who had achieved a higher awareness through having undergone specific processes. Through the trials they had experienced they had gained a certain relationship to the world through which they could learn about world processes, world developments in whichever area they were interested in.

In external history we only find a degenerate kind of notion of world processes. You have all read about how in Greek temples, oracle sites, they made use of certain personalities, a kind of medium, who through exposure to vapours arising from the earth would fall into what nowadays people, who have only a dilettantish idea of the spiritual, would call a trance; this sort of trance is a spurious kind of hocus pocus which does not reveal the truth or any aspect of reality. However, in those times when the ancient paths of relating to the world had already degenerated, people took refuge in these oracles. And they accepted what was revealed in these trance-like states as revelations, so as to understand what the intentions of the real spiritual powers were, those divine-spiritual powers which are really behind all that happens in the world. They then acted in accordance with the revelations of the oracles.

However, these oracles were not the originals. Those were something very different. At the time people sought refuge in the oracles, the old faculties that initiates had cultivated in the mysteries were lost and the oracles had resorted to external procedures. I would like to describe to you one of these procedures through which in very ancient times the initiates of the mysteries listened to the secrets of the world, the secrets of the intentions of the divine spiritual beings, which are behind all natural phenomena.

Such initiates prepared their whole person over a long period of time to pay careful attention to life processes and they could put themselves into a certain emotional state at the time of the rising sun. This was an exercise that the ancient initiates practised repeatedly: putting themselves into a very receptive, spiritually receptive state at dawn, towards the rising sun. Particularly the dawn, the rising sun should evoke in these old initiates a reverential soul state, permeated by feelings of devotion. We cannot imagine today what such a state these initiates achieved in the face of the rising sun was like—if they were properly prepared then it was part devotion, part thirst for knowledge. I think we can only catch a glimpse of such feelings towards the external world—and this is more than a century ago—when we read the beautiful descriptions that Johann Gottfried Herder,4 that fine poet and writer, gave of the dawn; not as a more modern, more trivial writer would have done, but from the dawn as a symbol for all awakenings, awakenings not just in nature but in the human soul. In a way this evokes in the human soul itself a kind of dawn, as if the sun is rising internally. Herder described this wonderfully as he attempted to show how the poetic mood had once made itself felt in human development and how this poetic mood could originate with what people could experience at dawn in the face of the rising sun.

The secrets of the dawn and of the rising sun were felt even more intensively by people like Jacob Boehme,5 whose first work, as you know, is Aurora or the Dawning of the Day in the East. And the words such as those in Goethe’s Faust6 are not unrelated to the mysteries of the dawn: ‘Disciple, up! Untiring, hasten. To bathe thy breast in morning red!’ The further we go back in the history of human development, the more wonderful we find the moods of the human soul at the first rays of the morning sun, which are in a sense carrying in on their waves the vital, active light of the world. The ancient initiates in the mystery schools had prepared themselves so that they could send out from their hearts into the expanses of the world their most serious, most holy questions to the world spirits during the dawn. They said to themselves: When the sun sends out the first ray of light to the earth, this offers the best way for human questions to flow out to the expanses of the cosmos. And so in a sense these initiates radiated their questions, the riddles of their hearts and of humanity, out in to the wide expanses of the world. And then they did not approach the answer in a trivial or banal way, as we would do today in our physical sciences, but put themselves into a mood in which they said: Now we have transmitted our riddles and questions to the cosmic expanses; now they rest in the bosom of the world, the gods will receive our riddles and questions.

I am only describing here. We can think what we like about these things, but once they existed and this was how things were done. Then the initiates waited and during the night hours they prepared their hearts to be receptive. This in turn was not a mood in which questions were raised, but a responsive one in which they opened their hearts to a receptive and devotional mood. And they brought their devotion to the full moon shining down upon them. And then they felt: now we are receiving the answers from the universe.

In the old mysteries this was a very common process. At a certain point in time, they offered their questions as a covenant with the world by sending them out and then they received the answers, which at the full moon, in the light of the full moon were sent to earth by the gods.

This is how people used to communicate with the world. They were not so arrogant as to pose a question in their heads and then to look for the answer immediately, as do philosophers today, or so arrogant as to think that they could sit down with a blank piece of paper and work out the great riddles of humanity on their own. In fact, these old initiates believed that they should communicate with the divine spiritual powers which flow in and through the world about the questions and answers relating to the riddles of the world. They did this because they knew that outside in the world are not only the content of physical, sense perceptions, but also flowing in and through everything is the spiritual. And when the ray of sun touches me, I can send out to it the substance of my will.

This secret is wholly lost in human research. It was once real knowledge, actual human insight. One of the last people in Europe to have a not really clear, but still lively tradition in these things and who was also prepared to fight was Julian the Apostate.7 He was incautious enough to still take these things seriously and thus succumbed to his opponents.

The modern human being would sketch—this is only a rough diagram, but it is just to show what the issue is—the earth and the sun (there would of course have to be a much greater distance between them) so that the sun sends its rays down to the earth. The old initiate would have said: This is just physical, the spiritual aspect is that people are living on the earth and there they develop their will [red] and while the sun’s rays come down to the earth, human beings can send their...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.11.2024
• Einführung: E. Marshall
• Übersetzer: E. Marshall
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
• Themenwelt: Weitere Fachgebiete ► Anthroposophie
• ISBN-10: 1-85584-655-1 / 1855846551
• ISBN-13: 978-1-85584-655-5 / 9781855846555