| 英文說明 |
Two Lectures Cycles, Followed by Two Christmas Lectures Dornach,
October 3–7 and December 12–20, 1914; Dornach, December 26 and
Basel, December 27, 1914 (CW 156)
These two lecture courses, given just after the beginning of World War I, stand as
a kind of unexpected gift. A few months later, once the war became a reality,
the possibilities for esoteric work would change and it would become more difficult
to do spiritual research. But in the short interval before the true horror of the conflict
unfolded, Rudolf Steiner—almost by the way—was able to give these lectures, which
lay out in the clearest fashion the path of anthroposophic meditation, and its assumptions,
language, and consequences.
The first lectures expand on the idea of inner “reading” and “hearing” as the path to
spiritual knowing. The spiritual world gives something and we, as spiritual researchers,
receive and then read or interpret it. Spiritual knowledge is not a matter of will, desire,
or intention on our part, but a gift from the spiritual world for which we must prepare
ourselves by silencing our desires, emptying ourselves, and presenting ourselves in
humility and devotion to the spiritual world. Then we become aware of the reality that
the spiritual world is nowhere else but here, all around us; and if we dissolve the sense
of being skin-bound, we can become open to it, reflect its images in our astral bodies,
and then learn to read them by identification. Steiner describes this complex, subtle,
existential and living process, in which ultimately we can become one with the universe,
in a masterful way from which anyone who meditates, or wishes to begin to meditate,
will gain a great deal.
The second lecture cycle, “How to Achieve Existence in the World of Ideas,” deepens
the themes developed in the first cycle, so that the two together provide a useful guide
to the processes underlying meditation or learning to know the spiritual world. At the
same time, because work was just beginning on the building that would become the
Goetheanum, Steiner connects the esoteric principles of its design with the overall
theme of the suprasensory human being in relation to meditation and spiritual knowing.
The volume closes with two wonderful lectures in celebration of Christmas. Here Steiner
has a threefold emphasis: Christ, supraearthly, glorious, and divine, fully united with
humanity and the Earth and born in each human heart. To celebrate Christmas truly
means that we recognize all three of these as one in the spiritual world, in the earthly
world, and in ourselves.
CONTENTS:
- Introduction by Christopher Bamford
PART I: Inner Reading and Inner Hearing
- 1. The Human Being in Relationship to the World
(Dornach, October 3, 1914)
- 2. Identification with the Signs and Spiritual Realities of the Imaginative World
(Dornach, October 4, 1914)
- 3. The Vowels and Consonants of the Spiritual World
(Dornach, October 5, 1914)
- 4. Inner Mobility of Thought
(Dornach, October 6, 1914)
- 5. Times of Expectation
(Dornach, October 7, 1914)
PART II: How to Achieve Existence in the World of Ideas
- 6. The Human Organization, Memory, and Inner Reading
(Dornach, December 12, 1914)
- 7. Microcosm and Macrocosm: Human Gestures and the Life of the World
(Dornach, December 13, 1914)
- 8. Human Beings as illuminators of the Cherubim, heaters of the Seraphim
(Dornach, December 19, 1914)
- 9. The Separation of Art, Science, and Religion
(Dornach, December 20, 1914)
PART III: The Celebration of Christmas
- 10. Toward a New Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha
(Dornach, December 26, 1914)
- 11. The Birth of Christ in the Human Heart
(Basel, December 27, 1914)
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