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| "Open the shutters!" —Goethe's last words |
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| Open the shutters! |
"For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." — Revelation 7:17
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| Open the shutters! |
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| Open the shutters! |
Rudolf Steiner:
Man's feeling of belonging to the cosmos beyond the Earth is in this cosmic epoch so dim that he does not notice it within his consciousness. And it is not only dim, it is drowned by his feeling of belonging to the Earth. As man is obliged to find his self-consciousness in the elements of the Earth, he so grows together with them during the early part of the age of the Spiritual Soul that they act upon him much more strongly than is compatible with the true course of his soul-life. Man is to a certain extent stupefied by the impressions of the world of the senses, and during this condition, thought which is free and has life in itself cannot rise within man.
The whole of the period since the middle of the nineteenth century has been a period of stupefaction through the impressions received by the senses. It is the great illusion of this age that the overpowerful life of the senses has been considered to be the right one — that life of the senses whose aim was to obliterate completely the life in the cosmos beyond the Earth.
In this stupefaction the Ahrimanic powers were able to unfold their being. Lucifer was repulsed by the Sun-forces more than Ahriman, who was able to evoke, especially in scientific people, the dangerous feeling that ideas are applicable only to the impressions of the senses. Thus it is exactly in these circles that one can find so little understanding for Anthroposophy. They stand face to face with the results of spiritual knowledge and try to understand them with their ideas. But these ideas do not grasp the spiritual because the experience of the ideas is drowned by the Ahrimanic knowledge of the senses. And so they begin to fear that if they have anything to do with the results of spiritual investigation, they may fall into a blind belief in authority.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the cosmos beyond the Earth became darker and darker for human consciousness.
When man becomes able to experience ideas within himself once more, then, even when he does not support his ideas on the world of the senses, light will again meet his gaze from the cosmos beyond the Earth.
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| Open the shutters! |
Rudolf Steiner: "We grow into the spiritual world. Instead of what surrounds us in the sense world, we are surrounded by the choirs of the spiritual world. We become witnesses to what the gods say when they speak about their concerns for the world of human beings. We witness what they create from their concern for humanity. Only then do we experience true reality — when our meditation transitions from the complete elimination of what we are here on Earth to a feeling of awareness of what the gods on the other side, through their divine speech, make into a world. Only when we've experienced this reality do we also have the truth about what actually surrounds us between birth and death. Because behind the world of appearance that surrounds us between birth and death lies the true reality that we live in between death and a new birth."
Sources:
Lesson 18
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