Guidance in Esoteric Training - Rudolf Steiner - E-Book

Guidance in Esoteric Training E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

0,0
8,99 €

oder
-100%
Sammeln Sie Punkte in unserem Gutscheinprogramm und kaufen Sie E-Books und Hörbücher mit bis zu 100% Rabatt.
Mehr erfahren.
Beschreibung

Selected from material given by Rudolf Steiner to members of his Esoteric School (1904-14), this volume features exercises, meditations and practices for spiritual self-development. In contrast to oriental methods of spiritual training, they derive from the western, Rosicrucian stream and are fully adapted to modern consciousness.Various exercises are given - for morning and evening, for the days of the week and the months of the year. In addition, there is much explanatory material to deepen and enhance meditative work, including several articles on the path of inner development and the obstacles to be faced on the way to attaining true consciousness of the self.This enlarged edition contains further clarification of the exercises, descriptions of the future evolution of the world and humanity, plus later advice given by Steiner on the nature of breathing exercises and ancient and modern methods of initiation.

Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:

EPUB
Bewertungen
0,0
0
0
0
0
0
Mehr Informationen
Mehr Informationen
Legimi prüft nicht, ob Rezensionen von Nutzern stammen, die den betreffenden Titel tatsächlich gekauft oder gelesen/gehört haben. Wir entfernen aber gefälschte Rezensionen.



RUDOLF STEINER (1861–1925) called his spiritual philosophy ‘anthroposophy’, meaning ‘wisdom of the human being’. As a highly developed seer, he based his work on direct knowledge and perception of spiritual dimensions. He initiated a modern and universal ‘science of spirit’, accessible to anyone willing to exercise clear and unprejudiced thinking.

From his spiritual investigations Steiner provided suggestions for the renewal of many activities, including education (both general and special), agriculture, medicine, economics, architecture, science, philosophy, religion and the arts. Today there are thousands of schools, clinics, farms and other organizations involved in practical work based on his principles. His many published works feature his research into the spiritual nature of the human being, the evolution of the world and humanity, and methods of personal development. Steiner wrote some 30 books and delivered over 6000 lectures across Europe. In 1924 he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

GUIDANCE IN ESOTERIC TRAINING

From the Esoteric School

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Translation revised by C. Davey and O. Barfield, with supplementary material translated by M. Barton, J. Collis, R. Stebbing and M. Cotterell

Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, E. Sussex RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

This volume contains extracts from the book first published in German under the title Anweisungen für eine esoterische Schulung, number 245 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. (Volume 245 has now been discontinued and replaced by the fuller publication of esoteric texts in volumes 264–268.) This authorized translation is published by kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

This edition also includes an extract from lecture XI of The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution (Anthroposophic Press, 1984) and ‘Advice on Meditation given by Rudolf Steiner’ from Anthroposophical Movement (November 1951 and January–April 1952)

Translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 1994

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 309 7

Cover by Andrew Morgan Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition

Prefatory Note

The Task of Spiritual ScienceBerlin, 1903 or 1904

I GENERAL REQUIREMENTS(SUBSIDIARY EXERCISES)

General Demands which Every Aspirant for Occult Development Must Put to Himself

Additional Rules in Continuation of the General Requirements

For the Days of the Week

For the Months of the Year

II MAIN EXERCISE

Main Exercise (October 1906)

Main Exercises Given Individually to Various Pupils (I-XIII)

III MANTRAS

Meditations which Express the Time Substance of the Hierarchies

Further Mantric Verses (I-VII)

IV EXPLANATIONS GIVEN IN ESOTERIC CLASSES

Berlin, 24 October, 1905

Concerning the Union of the Image with the ArchetypeBerlin, Good Friday, 13 April 1906

Building up the Spiritual BodyBerlin, 2 October 1906

The Awakening of Man to Self-consciousnessBerlin, 14 November 1906

The Foundations of Esoteric TrainingMunich, 6 June 1907

The Importance of the Year 1879. Commentary on a MeditationBerlin, 9 October 1907

Commentary on the Meditation ‘In purest outpoured light’

Concerning the Breathing ProcessMunich, 16 January 1908 and Berlin, 26 January 1908

V THE GOSPEL OF KNOWLEDGE AND ITS PRAYER

Prefatory Note by Marie Steiner

The Laying of the Foundation Stone of the First Goetheanum at Dornach, 20 September 1913

VI

Exegesis to Light on the Path by Mabel Collins

VII

Modern and Ancient Spiritual ExercisesDornach, 27 May 1922

Advice on Meditation Given by Rudolf Steiner, recorded by Martina von Limburger

Publisher’s Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures

Foreword to the Second Edition

Since the year 1972 when this book was first available in English, the demand for esoteric training has increased to an overwhelming degree. Just at the time of the first printing, a whole generation of younger people world-wide had begun to experience that the mechanistic, utilitarian, materialistic attitude and relationship to life no longer could provide a basis for their own entrance into twentieth-century civilization. They began to search in a far more intensive—sometimes even frantic—way for means towards self-discovery than had been the case for their parents or grandparents, who were absorbed and burdened through war and the immense technological challenges which accompany war and its aftermath. Now, in retrospect, at the end of the century it is apparent that the last third of this century bears witness to countless human beings who know with inner certainty that their own development in the skills of modern life, in social relationships and in spiritual dimensions is not limited in effect to them only but simultaneously affects the earth, the universe and humanity in general. Thus they have become earnest seekers imbued with the will to find various means for self-development.

Rudolf Steiner’s life work was devoted to these needs of modern humanity. Today we find the impulses which sprang from his initiatives in numerous fields of endeavour, such as education, medicine, art, social work, agriculture and many others. Behind all these impulses, however, lies the path of inner schooling, which enables the individual human being to fructify every sphere of life to which he actively applies his energy. This path of inner schooling, which Rudolf Steiner developed out of his own experience, permeates the entire corpus of his life work. Thus each single publication can represent only a small part of a mighty spiritual edifice. During the different phases of his work Rudolf Steiner forged the language and the structures that were appropriate for the substance conveyed.

It is clear, however, that although the language and structures undergo various stages of metamorphosis, the entire work of Rudolf Steiner springs from the source of anthroposophy, from the beginning with his natural-scientific and philosophical writings, throughout all his lecture activity, to the end of his life with the founding of the Anthroposophical Society and the School of Spiritual Science, which continue their active work today throughout the free world.

In this new edition of Guidance in Esoteric Training the reader will be able to experience the type of esoteric work which marks the early activity of Rudolf Steiner during the years when his work was contained within the Theosophical Society, although from the beginning as an independent stream. This language with its structures and content may then be compared with excerpts from the lecture of 27 May 1922 which has been included in this edition. Here one finds intensive further illumination on aspects of spiritual training which are present in the early Esoteric School. It is in accordance with Rudolf Steiner’s own wish that people who approach his work may do so from as many aspects as possible: ‘I try to present spiritual facts again and again from fresh points of view, in spite of my having described them from other points of view in other works. Such accounts are complementary to each other, like photographs of a person or an event taken from various points. In every such description, made from a certain standpoint, there is an opportunity for communicating knowledge which is not attainable from the other points of view.’ (Introduction. The Threshold of the Spiritual World, Munich, August 1913.)

February 1994

Virginia Sease

Goetheanum

Dornach

Switzerland

Prefatory Note

The contents of this book are selected from the matter of Rudolf Steiner’s original Esoteric School. The School remained in existence for ten years from 1904 to 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War prevented its continuance. During that period Rudolf Steiner was still within the Theosophical Society, and he used the words ‘theosophy’ and ‘theosophical’, though always (as he tells us in his Autobiography) in the direction in which his anthroposophical spiritual science had from the first been pointing. After the lapse of a further ten years, when he went on to found the General Anthroposophical Society and himself became its President, he founded an entirely new worldwide School of Spiritual Science, with a progressive esoteric schooling at its centre and sections relating to the different fields of scientific, artistic and social life. The institution of the Esoteric School in 1904 had been quickly followed by publishing descriptions of the path which pupils should follow, in the book Theosophy, in the series of essays Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? (also entitled How to Know Higher Worlds), first published in book form in 1909, and also in Occult Science: An Outline, which appeared early in 1910. A description of the basic conditions for inner development, particularly of the ‘subsidiary exercises’, is also to be found in these books, and after their publication Rudolf Steiner sometimes alluded to such exercises by reference to them. In Chapter V of Occult Science: An Outline (‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Concerning Initiation’) he lays down as follows the necessary precondition for all the exercises:

We can however understand from this how necessary it is that man should not demand entry into the spiritual world until he has learned and understood certain essential truths of that world by the simple exercise of his everyday intelligence, developed in the physical world. If spiritual development follows the right and normal path, then before he aspires to enter the supersensible world the pupil will already have mastered with his ordinary intelligence the whole of the earlier contents of this book.

In 1947, 33 years after the First World War had interrupted the Esoteric School and two years after the end of the Second, Marie Steiner, in response to requests from members of the Anthroposophical Society, set about publishing the most important of the Contents of the Esoteric School. Numerous works on oriental training methods (yoga, etc.) were making their appearance, and it was her object to set against these something from the European discipline of Rudolf Steiner. ‘By making available,’ she wrote in a letter, ‘examples of Rudolf Steiner’s careful, personally delivered advice, I wished to ensure that something could come forth from that Rosicrucian stream which is more in tune with the present age than decadent Indian and Tibetan methods.’

Three separate series of selections in English translation, entitled From the Contents of the Esoteric School, have previously appeared in 1948, 1949 and 1954. The following includes a revised translation of all that they contain together with some additional material not previously published in English.

Owen Barfield

(revised 1983)

The Task of Spiritual Science

Notes of a lecture given in Berlin in 1903 or 1904

There is a beautiful saying by Hegel: ‘The most profound thought is bound up with the historical, external figure of Christ. And the greatness of the Christian religion is that it is there for every stage of development. It is within the grasp of the most naive consciousness and at the same time it is a challenge to the deepest wisdom.’

That the Christian religion is comprehensible to every stage of consciousness is shown by the very history of its development. Properly understood, it must be the task of theosophy, or of spiritual science in general, to show that the Christian religion calls for penetration into the deepest Wisdom teachings. Theosophy is not a religion, but an instrument for understanding the religions. Its relation to the religious documents is rather like the relation of mathematics itself to the writings in which it was originally taught. A man can understand mathematics through his own spiritual faculties and comprehend the laws of space without having to refer to any such early text. But if he has really absorbed the truths of geometry, he will value all the more highly the original texts through which these laws were first presented. So it is with theosophy. Its sources are not in ancient documents, nor do they rest upon tradition; they lie in the reality of the spiritual worlds. It is there that they must be found and grasped by the development of man’s own spiritual powers, just as he grasps mathematics by endeavouring to develop the faculties of his intellect. Our intellect, by means of which we are enabled to comprehend the laws of the world of sense, is supported by an organ, the brain. Similarly, in order to grasp the laws of spiritual worlds, we need appropriate organs.

How have our physical organs developed? Because forces from outside have worked upon them: the forces of the sun, the forces of sound. Thus did eyes and ears come into being out of neutral, sluggish organs into which, at first, the sense-world could not penetrate, and which opened only by degrees. If our spiritual organs are worked upon by the right forces, they too will open.

What then are the forces which surge in upon our still inert spiritual organs? During the daytime, the astral body of modern man is assailed by forces that work against his development, and even destroy such organs as he formerly possessed before the dawn of his clear day-consciousness. In earlier times, man received direct astral impressions. The surrounding world spoke to him through pictures, through the form in which the astral world comes to expression. Living, inwardly organic pictures and colours hovered freely in surrounding space as expressions of pleasure and repugnance, sympathy and antipathy. Then these colours wrapped themselves, as it were, round the surface of things, and objects acquired fixed outlines. This was when the physical body of man was steadily gaining in solidity and becoming more highly organized. When his eyes opened fully to the physical light, when the veil of Maya spread itself over the spiritual world, his astral body received impressions of the surrounding world by way of the physical and etheric bodies. The astral body itself transmitted these impressions to the ‘I’ and from the ‘I’ they passed into his consciousness. Thus he was personally involved and continuously active. But the forces working upon him were no longer plastic, weaving forces akin to the nature of his own being; they were forces that fed upon him, destroyed him, in order to awaken the ‘I’-consciousness. Only in the night, when he sank down into the rhythmic spiritual world homogeneous with him, did he acquire new strength and become able once more to feed forces into his physical and etheric bodies. Out of this conflict of impressions, out of the deadening of the astral organs formerly working unconsciously in man, the life of the individual ‘I’, the ‘I’-consciousness, arose. Out of life—death, out of death—life. The ring of the serpent was complete. And now from the wakened ‘I’-consciousness there had to arise forces that would kindle life again in the defunct vestiges of earlier astral organs, shaping and moulding them.

Mankind is moving towards this goal, guided by its Teachers and Leaders, the great Initiates, of whom the serpent is also the symbol. It is an education towards freedom, hence a slow and difficult education. The great Initiates could have made the task easier, for themselves and for man, if they had worked upon his astral body during the night, when it is free, in such a way as to impress the astral organs into it from outside. But such an act would have operated in man’s dream-consciousness; it would have trespassed on his sphere of freedom. The highest principle in man, the will, would never have unfolded. Man is led onward stage by stage. There has been an initiation in wisdom, an initiation in feeling, an initiation in will. True Christianity is the summation of all stages of initiation. The initiation of antiquity was the prophetic announcement, the preparation. Slowly and gradually the man of later times emancipated himself from his initiator, his guru. Initiation, to begin with, proceeded in deep trance consciousness, but was equipped to imprint in the physical body a remembrance of what had transpired outside the body. Hence the necessity of releasing the ether body, the bearer of memory, as well as the astral body. Astral body and ether body sank together into the Ocean of Wisdom, into Mahadeva, into the Light of Osiris. This initiation proceeded in deepest secrecy, in absolute seclusion. No breath from the outer world might intrude. The man was as if he had died to outer life, and the tender seeds were nurtured away from the blinding light of day.

Then initiation came forth from the darkness enshrouding the Mysteries into the clearest light of day. In a great and mighty Personality, the Bearer of the highest unifying Principle, of the Word—of Him who is the expression and manifestation of the hidden Father, and who taking on human form became the Son of Man and thereby the Representative of all Mankind, the bond uniting all ‘I’s—in Christos, the Life-Spirit, the Eternal Unifier, the initiation of mankind as a whole was accomplished as historical fact and at the same time as symbol, on the plane of feeling. So potent was this Event that in every individual who modelled his life on it its power could continue to work—right into the physical, expressing itself even in the appearance of the stigmata and in the most piercing pains. Feelings were shaken to their innermost depths. An intensity of emotion, the like of which has never surged through the world before or since, arose in mighty waves. In the initiation on the Cross of Divine Love, the sacrifice of the ‘I’ for All had taken place. The blood, the physical expression of the ‘I’, had flowed in love for mankind, and the effect was such that thousands pressed forward to this initiation, to this Death, letting their blood flow in love and devotion for mankind. That blood untold was poured out in this way has never been sufficiently emphasized; the thought no longer enters the consciousness of people, not even in theosophical circles. Yet the waves of ardour which in this streaming blood flowed down, and then ascended, have fulfilled their task. They have become the wellsprings of powerful impulses. They have made mankind ripe for the initiation of the will.

And this is the legacy of Christ.

I GENERAL REQUIREMENTS(SUBSIDIARY EXERCISES)

General Demands which Every Aspirant for Occult Development Must Put to Himself

In what follows, the conditions which must be the basis of any occult development are set forth. Let no one imagine that he can make progress by any measures applied to the outer or the inner life unless he fulfils these conditions. All exercises in meditation, concentration, or exercises of other kinds are valueless, indeed in a certain respect actually harmful, if life is not regulated in accordance with these conditions. No forces can actually be imparted to a human being; all that can be done is to bring to development the forces already within him. They do not develop of their own accord because outer and inner hindrances obstruct them. The outer hindrances are lessened by means of the following rules of life, the inner hindrances by the special instructions concerning meditation, concentration, and the like.

The first condition is the cultivation of absolutely clear thinking. For this purpose a man must rid himself of the will-o’-the-wisps of thought, even if only for a very short time during the day—about five minutes (the longer, the better). He must become the ruler of his world of thought. He is not the ruler if external circumstances, occupation, some tradition or other, social relationships, even membership of a particular race, the daily round of life, certain activities and so forth, determine a thought and how he works it out. Therefore during this brief time, acting entirely out of his own free will, he must empty the soul of the ordinary, everyday courses of thoughts and by his own initiative place one single thought at the centre of his soul. The thought need not be a particularly striking or interesting one. Indeed it will be all the better for what has to be attained in an occult respect if a thoroughly uninteresting and insignificant thought is chosen. Thinking is then impelled to act out of its own energy, the essential thing here, whereas an interesting thought carries the thinking along with it. It is better if this exercise in thought control is undertaken with a pin rather than with Napoleon. The pupil says to himself: Now I start from this thought, and through my own inner initiative I associate with it everything that is pertinent to it. At the end of the period the thought should be just as colourful and living as it was at the beginning. This exercise is repeated day by day for at least a month; a new thought may be taken every day, or the same thought may be adhered to for several days. At the end of the exercise an endeavour is made to become fully conscious of that inner feeling of firmness and security which will soon be noticed by paying subtler attention to one’s own soul; the exercise is then brought to a conclusion by focusing the thinking upon the head and the middle of the spine (brain and spinal cord), as if the feeling of security were being poured into this part of the body.



Tausende von E-Books und Hörbücher

Ihre Zahl wächst ständig und Sie haben eine Fixpreisgarantie.


/* */