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
Good morning Hazel!! We have been having fog morning and night, so will probably miss that waltz of the moon and the planet. Rats!
That is one wild boat ! Leonardo d V would have dreamed up something like that.
That description of the appearance at Lourdes ….changes my usual reaction to climate change discussions. . . . .well here is to raising our cultural understanding of how to lovingly guide our culture into renewal! ( Thats my more evolved response– the first one was Holy____!)
Hi C – Well even when we can’t ‘see’ the planetary dance – we can tune into the music of the spheres in our imaginative thinking…
re: the boat – I love the art of Remedios Varo. He is really capturing the inner planes…
The “Miracle of the Sun” witnessed by 100,000 people in Fátima, Portugal happened right at the end of the 1st World War & can really be seen, as all the Mary Apparitions, as a hearld to the Christ in the Etheric realm…Which I beleive the ‘climate Crisis’ (as well as the Cornoa crisis) is also pointing to…
this link has a listing of many of these sightings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marian_apparitions
What happened to the Templars then, still can be felt today. It is remarkable how Steiner illustrates this using one instance (though he says there are many) and that is in the book Robinson Crusoe. It doesn’t seem an obvious connection. But on a personal note, I always feel a connection somehow to what the Templars faced, and sacrificed for. There is a sense of sadness, awe, hope, bravery.. many emotions. Perhaps this is why the Templar ‘stream’ is so compatible with Art.
INNER IMPULSES OF EVOLUTION, THE MEXICAN MYSTERIES, THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
GA 171 Lecture 7
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19161001p01.html
Thanks for bringing this lecture, very enligtening:
“Founded in 1119, the Knights Templar were first active in the Crusades. Then they spread out toward Europe, and through special circumstances many of them became victims of the avarice, the gold avarice, of Philip the Fair…countless numbers of these Knights were tortured after having previously experienced a Christian initiation through the principles and impulses living in the Templar Order…What was inculcated in the Templar Order was this, that each member of the Order should realize that his blood did not belong to himself but to the task of familiarizing Western mankind — and to some extent Eastern also — with the Mystery of Golgotha in the spiritual sense. What streamed to the Knights from this devotional mood toward the Mystery of Golgotha changed gradually into a kind of Christian initiation, so that a great number of them could actually see to some extent into the spiritual worlds.
Through this power, however, they were exposed to quite special danger when their consciousness was dulled through the agonies of torture, as happened in hundreds of cases. Their consciousness was darkened through the torture; their day-consciousness was crippled and a subconscious was aroused. All the temptations to which one who strives toward such spiritual heights is exposed came to expression on the rack. So it came to pass as Philip the Fair had foreseen; in his own way he had a touch of genius, inspired by avarice and covetousness, as I have described. It came to pass that a great number of Knights admitted, in a subconscious state, not only the extraordinary charge of denying the Christian religion and the Mystery of Golgotha, an admission which, arising from their temptations, was understandable, but they also accused themselves of other crimes. A certain number afterward recanted when they were released from the rack and consciousness returned; others could not recant. In short, fifty-four of them met with a cruel death, including the Head of the Order, Jacques de Molay.
Souls thus passed through the gates of death who had not only looked into the progressive spiritual world in waking consciousness by having attained a Christian initiation and beheld the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha, but who also knew something of evolution and could work into it by having learned to know those forces opposing human effort that spoke through their lips on the rack when they, in innocence, had accused themselves of crimes. These horrible and terrible experiences assumed an appropriate form when these souls were in the spiritual world. I have already related how, after these souls had gone through the gate of death, impulses streamed from them that would then work further in the super-sensible impulses from the fifteenth century on into our time. The inspiration living in different gifted personalities comes, if one observes its real cause, from the fact that souls were carried up into the spiritual world having first experienced what Philip the Fair had subjected them to before they died.
This has all been a preparation for the time in which we are now living. These causes, and many others, would first have to be described if one would fully understand among what thoughts a man born since then has been placed. What flowed out of the events I have recorded lived in everything; one can prove that by actual history. I will only refer to one instance, but I could point to many. In the age of which I speak, a most powerfully effective educational book, Robinson Crusoe, was produced…All of Robinson Crusoe would have been unthinkable if it had not been preceded by those events I have related.
All these things have their inner connections, and this is true down to the actual details.”
Thanks Hazel for today’s post – it was what I needed to hear, and so inspired me. The excerpt from the lecture especially. It’s message is timeless and just as applicable today as for when it was written. Interesting about the baldness; I have noticed a lot of that lately, even to the extent where we were being told this is the new “style”, to be proud of being bald. I’m inspired to examine my relationships less for their external connection, and more for their rooting in earlier lives on earth. Thank you.
Yes, Most of the work of Rudolf Steiner resonates & seems to speak directly to our time now. I especially love to tune in to the themes Steiner choose to talk about at the 100 year anniversary’s – for as Rosicrucianism wisdom teaches us, an impulse given a century before calls us to apply resurrection forces to renew what perhaps was just left in its seed form. The image of opening the tomb of Christian Rosencrantz every 100 years lives strongly in me. There is no doubt that THE YOUNGER GENERATION, GA 217, needs to be taken up today.
Agreed, the test of time tells us that his teachings were not a passing phenomenon, but speak to the heart of human nature. They obviously touch you to the core.
Yes, Art is at the center of my heART, haha, & Spiritual Science sets it ablaze