Tuesday, January 24, 2023

The goal of yoga: The fire and the rose are one




Rudolf Steiner:  "Knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge — such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this — to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life — about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to supersensible knowledge. Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered — a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the supersensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world — indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life, understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and supersensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the supersensible, so that this light of the supersensible causes him to awaken in a supersensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world."




 

“The self is formed out of, born out of, the whole universe, and our own ascent leads us finally to merge in the whole cosmos. The aim of self-knowledge is to give man his place in the great world in order to reveal to him there the true meaning of the word 'self-knowledge'…”  — Rudolf Steiner




The conclusion to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets:


We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.












Source: September 29, 1923 GA 84
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