Donate books to help fund our work. Learn more→

The Rudolf Steiner Archive

a project of Steiner Online Library, a public charity

Search results 21 through 30 of 181

˂ 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... 19 ˃
63. Spiritual Science as and Essential in Life 23 Apr 1914, Berlin

Rudolf Steiner
No, spiritual science hopes to be able to be a real new element of life, something that can penetrate into the whole human being, and that the human being thereby gets a real treasure for life. What I have suggested in this respect already at the suitable places of the single talks I do summarise not only today, but I will also explain it somewhat more in detail.
While spiritual science appeals to this what exists, indeed, in any soul, but slumbers in the souls, it calls forces in the soul for the spiritual life which—if they are used for it—represent a high treasure for life which the human beings need more and more.
We can only characterise the single categories, overall. There I would like to start from that what is connected directly with the single human being. I have repeatedly pointed in other contexts to the rhythmical change that happens in the human life in the course of 24 hours, waking and sleeping.
70a. The Human Soul, Fate and Death: The Destiny of Man in the Light of the Knowledge of Spiritual Worlds 08 May 1915, Vienna

Rudolf Steiner
Now, ladies and gentlemen, since we can say that the spiritual-soul content awakened in the spiritual researcher actually slumbers in the human being in ordinary life, it must be said that even in the fully waking life, when a person is engaged in action, when a person acts in such a way that he uses his outer body and the outer sense world to carry out actions, something in the person also sleeps.
Just as the essence of the other person, who has been described and discovered through spiritual science, is hidden in the everyday life of the person, so this core of being is hidden in the human being. Only through those special occasions in our particular life, in our dream life for example, does the human soul core, which is free of the body when we fall asleep or awaken and is not yet completely at one with the bodily life, reveal itself. how it is mirrored in the bodily life, with which it is still imperfectly united, and what has passed through the human being in every action, but has been stored away, what has remained, what we have not fully lived out, what we have incorporated into our inner self.
Spiritual science leads us straight back – you can read more about this in my 'Occult Science' – to very different conditions on Earth. There, the human being has also developed out of very different conditions into a life that leads him through repeated lives on Earth.
52. What Does Mankind of Today Find in Theosophy? 08 Mar 1904, Berlin

Rudolf Steiner
There we see that—on the one side—the researchers make every effort to trace all religions back to nature worship originating in the simple, childish, naive human beings.
On the one side, we see the world of the figures and forms, on the other side, the world of the imperishable spirit, and both associated with the world of the psychic. In this discussion I have merely taken a thoughtful self-reflection into consideration which every human being—if he finds the necessary rest in himself and is involved not only in external observation—can see with the eye of the spirit.
We recognise the human being only in his innermost being if we get to his spirit. If we recognise the innermost core of the human being, we recognise the spirit in ourselves.
68d. The Nature of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science: Health Issues in the Light of Humanities 08 Feb 1909, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
When the words “health issues” are spoken, many of our contemporaries may reflect on how our views, our opinions of everyday life, of life in general, of all its blessings and woe; when the words “health issues” are spoken, however, it is particularly a feeling that may be evoked here that slumbers more or less consciously or unconsciously in every human soul: that man rightly regards health as a precious possession in this physical life.
They got to know the then famous and widely significant anatomist Hyrtl, the man who provided the basis for hundreds and hundreds of young doctors at the time, the basis that every doctor needs, the anatomical foundations... When he stood before his audience and built up the human being from the components of the human organism, which seemingly can only be expressed in the driest of terms for scientific observation, when he built the human being out of anatomical parts, then, listening to him, you had the feeling that behind this description, this explanation of the structure of the human organism, something else was still alive, something lived from a deep understanding of the spiritual, which builds the wonderful structure of the human organism... there was just something... something... there was something in Hyrtl's presentation that can only be expressed as follows: just as the creative power of nature itself, as the spirit of nature, allows the individual structures to sprout and grow into the entire structure of the human organism, so this human organism was anatomically built up before the audience.
They also know that the first higher limb in human nature, which truly and really lives for those who can observe human beings with higher abilities, is what we call the etheric or life body in spiritual science: the mysterious master builder who is there and builds up this human organism.
62. Errors in Spiritual Investigation: Meeting the Guardian of the Threshold 06 Mar 1913, Berlin
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
As we have seen, this development of the higher spiritual organs, which can be brought about by a rightly applied concentration, contemplation, and meditation, depends upon the starting point in ordinary, everyday life. Every human being who wishes to evolve upward to a view of the spiritual world must, and this is quite natural and proper, take his starting point from ordinary soul development, from what is right and normal for everyday life and also for ordinary science.
We must now emphasize that the soul life of the human being is, as it were, twofold. In the soul not only does there exist what man ordinarily knows, but in the depths of the soul life things are happening that cast their shadows—or their lights—into ordinary consciousness.
It is in order to investigate the spiritual world that the human being is endowed with the higher organs of observation.
56. The Mission of Occult Science in Our Time 10 Oct 1907, Berlin

Rudolf Steiner
Who are such initiates? Imagine that there are human beings who live in a distant area where no railways and no machines exist. Now one comes along on the way to Europe and sees that there are railways and machines.
Everything that will be said in this winter course as a result of the research in the higher world could not be found without clairvoyance, not without developing the spiritual eyes and ears slumbering in every human being.
However, we search not so much satisfaction of the mind but deepening of the soul, of inner life. We want to find the divine in the feeling, in the sensation. This objection is done out of the depth of sensations, and just the human beings who stand firmly in the occult science can appreciate the significance of such an objection completely which says there: give us soul!
253. Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality and the Spiritual Teacher: Swedenborg: An Example of Difficulties in Entering the Spiritual World 12 Sep 1915, Dornach
Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

Rudolf Steiner
From the very beginning, then, he was advised by these spiritual beings that are present in each human being. These inner beings were joined by others Swedenborg was able to recognize on the basis of their consultation with the beings that proceeded from within himself.
I told you that we perceive external beings and objects out there on the physical plane as existing outside us. We face these objects and take something of them into ourselves in the process of perception.
Out of deeply embedded habits, we expect the spiritual world to be essentially a copy of the physical world—a subtler or more refined copy, but a copy nonetheless. And so there are more than a few people who imagine that being at a gathering of spirits would be just like standing here in this room among physical human beings—the spirits would be assembled just like people on the physical plane, but they would be a bit less dense, so you could stick your hand right through them.
335. The Crisis of the Present and the Path to Healthy Thinking: The Peoples of the Earth in the Light of Spiritual Science 10 Mar 1920, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
And just as the life of feeling and emotion is bound to everything in the human being that originally runs rhythmically, so the life of will is bound to everything in the human being that is metabolism.
And if we come to this spiritual, we can say to ourselves, in the Orient it is that the human being is able to express the connection between the human being and the divine as something self-evident in greatness.
Therefore, the Westerner seeks what the Oriental seeks out of his innermost nature as an expression of his connection with the divine, what the Central European seeks as an expression of the human in the Goethean full human being or in the legal human being, who is equal to all other human beings.
69e. The Humanities and the Future of Humanity: Spiritual Science in Its Relationship to Religious and Social Movements of the Present Day 13 Mar 1914, Basel

Rudolf Steiner
Every human being develops soul powers in the first years of their childhood that they could not get through life with if they remained throughout their whole life as they were in their first childhood years.
Just as the forces slumbering in the human being in the first years of life are developed in such a way that the human being can orient themselves in their sensory world, so too, if the human being really wants to recognize, look at and perceive the spiritual world, a change must take place in them in later life.
This language only needs to be developed. It slumbers in every human soul. It approaches the human soul directly and is awakened by the spiritual truths that the spiritual researcher brings from the spiritual world.
226. Man's Being, His Destiny and World-Evolution: Our Experiences at Night, Life after Death 18 May 1923, Oslo
Translated by Erna McArthur

Rudolf Steiner
Yet these people, who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, avowed from their innermost depth that the great Sun-spirit was also the great guide and helper of the human being, who approached him every night in sleep and relieved him of the fear of being disseminated into the universe.
This question must be answered in the affirmative. And just as human beings knew that they had been together, in their pre-earthly existence, with the exalted Sun-spirit who had given them the strength to pass through death as immortal beings, so they also consciously remembered after every sleep that the exalted Sun-spirit had stood at their side, helping them to become real human beings, integrated personalities.
During sleep, the human being also ceases to talk. Only in abnormal cases, which could be explained, does he talk in his sleep.

Results 21 through 30 of 181

˂ 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... 19 ˃