20. How Does the Soul Find Its True Essence?

GA 69d/1914-05-08/p040 ·1914-05-08 · English High

Record: mixed sources. This volume draws on more than one kind of record (transcripts, notes, documents). Check the volume's own front matter before weighing a single passage. Evidence: «Im Anhang Notizen und Berichte von weiteren Vorträgen» (In the appendix, notes and reports of further lectures). Rudolf Steiner Verlag Gesamtverzeichnis 2022, volume subtitle. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

Everywhere we can see how, on the one hand, souls still resist spiritual science because it makes demands on habits of thinking that the soul is not yet familiar with, but how, on the other hand, souls more or less unconsciously thirst for spiritual science. Here we encounter something that is often expressed, but which we must understand correctly. Our time has been called a transitional period. But it is not important that it is called that; what is important is what our time actually has to seek in its transition. What does it have to seek? It has to seek the transition from passive devotion to purely sensory science, where the soul cannot find its true essence, to spiritual science, where it can find it. We can become aware of this when we see that at the beginning of our religious document of the West there is an image; we do not want to discuss the image here, you can take it as you will, but one thing will be clear to everyone: that it is connected with good and evil. The words are:

Read this passage in another edition

DEoriginalENEnglish

Raw JSON: /v1/steiner/en/ga/69d/1914-05-08/p040.json
Cite: GA 69d/1914-05-08/p040 · edition English