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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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26. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: Understanding of the Spirit; Conscious Experience of Destiny 24 Mar 1924,
Translated by George Adams, Mary Adams

[ 1 ] This week something will be given in the communications addressed to members in these columns, which may serve to bring us to a further understanding of the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts.’ [ 2 ] The understanding of anthroposophical truth can be furthered if the relation which exists between man and the world is constantly brought before the human soul.
[ 10 ] For to have the feeling: I have taken endless pains to understand the world through thinking, and after all there is but myself in this thinking—this gives rise to the first great riddle.
It was the intention of the Christmas Meeting to indicate this very forcibly; and one who truly understands what that Meeting meant will continue to point this out until sufficient understanding of it can bring the Society fresh tasks and possibilities again.
55. The Origin of Suffering the Origin of Evil Illness and Death: What Do We Understand by Illness and Death 13 Dec 1906, Berlin
Translated by Mabel Cotterell, Violet E. Watkin

Whoever is not content with a merely superficial understanding of both Old and New Testament records but penetrates really to their spirit, knows that a quite definite method of thinking—one might call it that of innate philosophy—forms the undercurrent of these records. The undercurrent is something of this kind: All living creatures in the world are directed towards a determined goal.
These concepts will be brought to mankind by spiritual science. Today this may well speak to the understanding of many people, but when the understanding has fully accepted the matter it will bring about in man a deep, harmonious mood of soul which will then become the wisdom of life.
4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1963): Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World
Translated by Rita Stebbing

In thinking we have a principle which exists by means of itself. From this principle let us attempt to understand the world. Thinking we can understand through itself. So the question is only whether we can also understand other things through it.
However, the philosopher is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the understanding of it. Therefore he has to find the starting point, not for the creation, but for the understanding of the world.
There is no denying: Before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood. To deny this is to fail to realize that man is not a first link in creation, but the last.
36. Collected Essays from “Das Goetheanum” 1921–1925: Understanding People (Brentano and Nietzsche) 16 Jul 1922,

Here we shall not go into the relationship that Brentano, in his way, finds between Jesus and Nietzsche, but only into Brentano's absolute rejection of the whole of Nietzsche's way of thinking. As understandable as this rejection may be for someone who knows the natures of both personalities, it is just as significant as an expression of a significant phenomenon of our time: the lack of understanding in general with which people today can face each other, who draw their education from the culture of the time.
But anyone who looks at certain social facts of today's life with an open mind can see that an immense amount will depend on an understanding accommodation of the most diverse individual views for the progress of civilized humanity, especially in the near future.
Recognition of the spiritual world will bring understanding of the human being; doubt in the paths of knowledge into the spiritual breaks the bridges from soul to soul.
45. Anthroposophy, A Fragment (2024): The World that Underlies the Senses
Translated by Steiner Online Library

One need only think of how eyes do not develop in beings that live in the dark; or how, in beings that have developed eyes under the influence of light, these eyes atrophy when their bearers exchange their stay in the light for one in the dark.
One must distinguish between a world as it is given to man through the senses and one that underlies it. Is it impossible to say anything about this latter world through mere reflection? We can say something if we consider the following.
45. Anthroposophy, A Fragment (2024): The World Underlying the Sense Organs
Translated by Steiner Online Library

When a concept is perceived, the concepts acquired in the person's previous life prove to be what absorbs the new concept. A person proves to be understanding of a concept that approaches him to the extent that he has previously absorbed this or that concept. In the understanding of a concept, there is therefore an opening of the person to the outside and a sinking of what has been absorbed into the structure of the already existing concept organism.
Not the visual experience, but the inner nature of light that underlies the visual experience, arouses a warmth that lives in the organ-forming power of the visual sense in the same way that the substance lives in the interaction with the sense of taste in the taste experience.
45. Anthroposophy, A Fragment (2024): The World Underlying the Organs of Life
Translated by Steiner Online Library

The life processes must, before they can be present, be prepared by the organ-forming forces of the life organs. The forces that underlie the life organs are even more remote from human consciousness than those that build the sense organs.
If we now consider the forces that form the sense organs, also as a reversal of movement impulses and desires, we have an idea of how the human astral body, as the shaper of the sense organisms, is taken from an imperceptibly imperceptible world. - This presupposes a world underlying the world of sense experiences, which has been called the 'astral world'. We then have to take everything that man experiences through the senses as immediate reality and assume an astral reality hidden within it. The first is called the physical world. The astral world underlies it. It has now been shown that the latter is based on yet another. The formative forces of the life organs and the predispositions for hearing, warmth, sight and taste are rooted in this.
46. Posthumous Essays and Fragments 1879-1924: Goethe's Understanding

What Goethe actually means by understanding becomes clear to us when we consider the three stages of mental activity through which, in his view, man rises to the highest possible understanding of things.
Here, the phenomena as they appear to us in nature are intensified in an attempt to understand them. Man not only observes nature, he sets up the conditions himself so that nature answers certain questions he asks of it.
Then he has the rational phenomenon, and with that he has succeeded in climbing the third form of knowledge. Those who lack an understanding of this third way of knowing will never understand Goethe. And unfortunately the whole of modern natural philosophy is far removed from it.
46. Posthumous Essays and Fragments 1879-1924: There are Many Stages to Understanding Higher Truths

There are many stages to understanding higher truths. From the dark foreboding of the mysterious paths that the soul of man and the spiritual forces of nature have to travel, to the direct (spiritual) comprehension of the entities that are hidden from the lower forms of knowledge, there are all possible intermediate forms.
91. Inner and Outer Evolution: Helpful Concepts for Understanding Ancient Legends and the New Testament 19 Aug 1904, Graal

But they have an occult power which acts on people, and with fidelity they reproduce sayings of a depth which can only be an expression of what is called the highest wisdom. [... ] As long as occultism was at the bottom of religion, the stone kingdom was regarded as that which is most perfect; the plant has only a small part of Kama in itself, but it has it nevertheless; animal and man are filled with it; the chaste, desireless of the crystal was put up as an ideal to the disciple; the human intellect serves desire, concupiscence; it is therefore not perfect at its present stage, it serves the special being, while the mineral emerges from the general nature and dissolves into the general. As the emblem of man striving for understanding, one has considered the serpents - Naga - who brought understanding to men, [they were] therefore called seducers, since they brought with understanding the freedom to choose between good and evil.
Again by an initiate, Heracles is an initiate - descends into the underworld. Everywhere we find similar Prometheus sagas, with the remarkable addition that through spiritual wisdom, through an initiate, comes redemption.

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