THE YOUNGER GENERATION, GA 217, Lecture XI Given in Dornach TODAY 13 October 100 years ago in 1922
The human being who is growing into the epoch of the consciousness soul is held fast today in the abstract ideas of the head…It is as though everything that comes to the human being from the world were to pour itself into the head, as though the head were entirely choked up so that it lets nothing through its dense layers that could bring about a relation with the world. Everything remains stuck fast in the head.
But he cannot, after all, live merely as a head. For joined to the head there is always the rest of the organism. The life of the rest of the organism remains dull, unconscious, because everything is directed towards the head. Everything stops short there. The rest of man receives nothing from the world because the head allows nothing to reach it. The head has gradually become an insatiable glutton. It wants everything that comes from the world outside, and man is obliged to live, where his heart and the rest of his organism is concerned, as if he had nothing whatever to do with the surrounding world. Then it goes out of the head into the hair where it cannot be retained because at thirty they no longer have any hair!
But really I am not saying this as a joke, nor for the sake of being critical, for this is all part of the necessary development of humanity. Men had to become like this to find through inner effort, inner activity, what they can no longer find in a natural way; in other words, to experience freedom.
But these other parts of the organism develop wish, will, capacity for desire; they feel themselves isolated. For instance, the eyes catch colors and allow only scanty remains to be experienced in the head, so that the colors cannot work down, they cannot reach the blood nor the nervous system in the rest of the body…
If you educate the human being by what is abstract and scientific, he experiences nothing of the soul. He only experiences the soul if you approach him through art. For in the realm of the artistic everyone is individual, each one is a different person. It is the ideal of science that everyone should be alike. In the realm of the artistic each human being is an individuality in himself.
Education must have soul, and as scientist one cannot have soul. We can have soul only through what we are artistically. We can have soul if we give science an artistic form through the way it is presented, but not through the content of science as science is understood today.
My dear friends, it is never the head that recognizes what man brings with him out of his pre-earthly life. The head is made for the purpose of grasping what is on the earth…
Yet this indefinite, indefinable element that comes upon us when we meet as adults is what shines through from earlier lives on earth into the present. Not only the pre-earthly existence but everything the human being has passed through in the way of destiny in his successive earth-lives.
Human beings pass one another by because they stare at each other only with the head, with the eyes — I will not say, because they knock their heads together! Human beings pass one another by because only what plays over from repeated earth-lives can work between man and man, and modern culture does nothing to develop a sense for this. But this must also be brought into our education; we should be able to experience what is deeper down in man, what plays over from previous earth-lives. This will not be achieved unless we draw into our education the whole life of man as it is lived out on earth.
Every human being is a teacher, but he is sleeping and must be awakened, and Art is the awakener.
For what does it mean to experience another human being? We cannot experience other people with dead concepts. We can comprehend them only if we meet them in such a way that they become for us an experience which takes hold of us inwardly, which is something for our own inner being. For this, however, activity in the inner being is needed. Otherwise our culture will reach the point which it is fast approaching.
People go out to luncheons, dinners and teas, without knowing much about one another. Yet it is only about themselves that modern people care most about. And what do they instinctively make of their experiences? Suppose they go about among the people they meet at lunch or dinner. At most they think — Is he like me or is he different? And if we believe him to be like ourselves, we consider him a fine fellow; if he is not like ourselves, then he is not a fine fellow, and we do not trouble ourselves about him any longer.
There is too little inner strength and activity, too little kernel, too little inner individuality developed, so that people for fear of losing themselves dare not experience the other human being. Thus men pass one another by. ~Rudolf Steiner
13 October 2022 – “Speaking with the Stars“: Moon, Mars, Pleiades … and Aldebaran…O my! Stay up late & watch waning Bella Luna dance wwith the red planet Mars, the pretty, dipper-shaped Pleiades star cluster – & the red star Aldebaran – also nearby.
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” ~H.G. Wells
Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
In 1307 October 13 was a Friday – Hundreds of Knights Templar in France are simultaneously arrested by agents of Phillip the Fair, to be later tortured into a “confession” of heresy. Once freed of the Inquisitors’ torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310 Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris. With Philip threatening military action unless the pope complied with his wishes, Pope Clement finally agreed to disband the Order, citing the public scandal that had been generated by the confessions. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, which officially dissolved the Order. As for the leaders of the Order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his confession & insisted on his innocence. But he was declared guilty of being a relapsed heretic & was sentenced to be burnt at the stake in Paris on 18 March 1314. De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, calling out from the flames that both Pope Clement & King Philip would soon meet their end. Pope Clement died only a month later, & King Philip died in a hunting accident before the end of the year
1792 –The cornerstone of the United States Executive Mansion (known as the White House since 1818) is laid
1917 – The “Miracle of the Sun” is witnessed by an estimated 100,000 people in the Cova da Iria in Fátima, Portugal. The people had gathered because the 3 shepherd children, who originally claimed to have seen Our Lady of Fátim, had predicted that at high noon the lady who had appeared to them several times would perform a great miracle. According to many witnesses, after a period of rain, the dark clouds broke & the sun appeared as an opaque, spinning disc in the sky. It was said to be significantly duller than normal, & to cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the people, & the surrounding clouds. The sun was then reported to have careened towards the earth before zig-zagging back to its normal position. Witnesses reported that their previously wet clothes became “suddenly & completely dry, as well as the wet & muddy ground that had been previously soaked because of the rain that had been falling.” According to reports, a panorama of visions, including those of Jesus, Our Lady of Sorrows, & of Saint Joseph blessed the people. The event lasted approximately ten minutes.
~The river flows on
tall, thin reeds rock against the current
& the wind, like a woman envelops me…
~hag
