Anthroposophy: the redemption, the revivification, the rejuvenation of thinking

  

"Be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."  ~ Ecclesiastes 12:12

Rudolf Steiner:

As human beings we really live, as it were, throughout the day in a kind of autumn and winter mood. Indeed, the soul's summer mood only exists when the soul is asleep, and the sleeping human body, the physical and the etheric body, is like a plant. And the I and astral body outside shed their rays upon the physical and etheric body like the Sun and the stars, and they call into life again the forces destroyed during the day; vegetable life begins to grow. And the day's thinking activity exists in order to eliminate what the night calls forth as growing life.

When we wake up, we lightly pass over our whole plantlike existence, just like autumn over the plants of the Earth. And when we are awake during the day, we do what winter does to the vegetation of the Earth by destroying in our physical and etheric body the budding, growing life produced at night in the soul's summer time when we are asleep. From this standpoint, it can easily be grasped why people who do not bring at least something of their soul's summer into their waking daytime life dry up so easily. Parched, dried-up little professors are people who do not like to absorb things which are not fully conscious. They do not like to take in anything of the soul's summer seasons. Consequently they dry up; they acquire a pronounced winter character.

"You are trying to measure the universe with a foot ruler." — Swamiji, frequently

"In reading the doctrines of Heraclitus, 'The Obscure,' we still find immediate experience, the experience of the higher worlds, shining through between the lines. Then came his successors who no longer realized that those doctrines originated in direct experience. They no longer understood them, so they began to improve them, to spin them out in concepts. They began to speculate intellectually, and this method persisted through the generations. Everything we have in the way of philosophy today is but a heritage of ancient doctrines squeezed out and sucked dry of all life, leaving only the skeleton of the concepts. Yet the philosophers take that skeleton for a living reality"  — Rudolf Steiner

"You are trying to measure the universe with a foot ruler." — Swamiji, frequently

Rudolf Steiner:  "The Asian fundamentally despises the nature of European and American thinking because it always presents him with a utilitarian standpoint which can only be governed by the intellect, by the rational mind."

"You are trying to measure the universe with a foot ruler."

 — Swamiji, frequently

  The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.— I Corinthians 3:19 

Rudolf Steiner:  "We will only come to know ourselves fully if we can say to ourselves at every moment of our life that we are not only a person of flesh and blood, with consciousness, as most people today are aware of, but also someone who hatches or emerges from his body between falling asleep and reawakening. And that during this time of sleep we live in quite different conditions than in ordinary waking life. Only then, during sleep, is our I in its own, true element."