The Oriental thinks everything in the sense-perceptible world is 'maya'; everything perceived by our senses and all thinking connected with sense perceptions is 'maya,' the great illusion. The only reality is the reality of the soul. What a human being achieves in his or her soul is reality.
When children draw or do rudimentary painting, the whole human being develops an interest in what is being done. This is why we should allow writing to develop from drawing.
In earthly life, a person can conceal whether evil or good is active in his soul. After death, this is no longer possible. The spirit form presents after death the physiognomical expression of what the person was on earth.
Normally, adults process their waking experiences during sleep. Children cannot yet carry their waking experiences into sleep. Thus, in sleep, they settle into the general cosmic order without taking their physical experience into the cosmic order.
Gothic architecture requires individual craftsmanship. The wish to create an enclosed world for the congregation gives rise in Gothic architecture to the need to create something wherein the activity of the congregation plays a part.
Only a person who has passed through the gate of humility can ascend to the heights of the spirit.
When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture.
In order for the students' development and the outer development of civilization to coincide, we need a faculty whose interest is not limited to specialized educational practices. Rather, this faculty must be fully involved in the broader aspects of life.
You can go from object to object, from plant to plant, from animal to animal and regard them as symbols for the spiritual. In this way, you make your imaginative capacities fluid and release them from the sharp contours of sense perception.
All things which have a directing force here in the physical world cease to exist when one arrives in the imaginative world. If, on the physical plane, you imagine yourself to have done something you actually have not done, you will soon be persuaded by the facts of the physical world that this is not so. This is not the case in astral space.
The knowledge we gain about the secrets of the spiritual world is at every hour, at every moment, of vital and profound significance for our souls; what seems to be remote from us personally is often what the soul inwardly needs.
The main difference in the effectiveness of teaching comes from the thoughts the teacher has had during the entire time of his or her existence and brings into the classroom. A teacher concerned with developing humans affects the students quite differently from a teacher who never thinks about such things.
Prenatal education can only be an unconscious result of what the parents, particularly the mother, do. If, until the child is born, the mother acts in such a way that she expresses what is morally and intellectually correct, then what she accomplishes in her own continuing education will transfer to the child.
Descriptions of inner, spiritual processes are much more liable to misunderstanding than descriptions of events in the physical world. Such misunderstandings arise easily because the life of the soul is in constant movement and because we fail to bear in mind that the life of the soul is very different from life in the physical world.
In raising children, we need to continuously keep in mind how we can best create the most favorable environment for their imitative behavior. Everything done in the past regarding imitation must become more and more conscious and more and more consciously connected with the future.
It is not possible to educate the will and the healthy soul that underlies it unless we develop insights that awaken energetic impulses in the soul and will.
Above all, we must be conscious of the primary pedagogical task, namely that we must first make something of ourselves so that a living inner spiritual relationship exists between the teacher and the children.
The subject of the lesson itself should not become more important that the underlying basis. Drawing thus provides first the written forms of letters and then their printed forms. Based on drawing, we build up to reading.
A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth.
A philosophy of freedom must set out from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience of thinking that a human being discovers his own self, finds his bearings as an independent personality.
When we have learnt through a period of finely honed training to live in Imaginative Thinking, when we can engage the whole of our being in this Imaginative Thinking, we find that it immerses us in a reality hitherto unknown to us.
One can ascend to a higher development only by bringing rhythm and repetition into one's life. Rhythm holds sway in all nature.
In our will, there lives something which is perpetually observing us inwardly. It is easy to look upon this inner spectator as something intended to be taken pictorially; the spiritual investigator knows it to be a reality, just as sense-perceptible objects are realities.
Anyone who believes that it is possible to educate the will without cultivating the insight that enlivens it is succumbing to illusion. Clear-sightedness on this point is a task for present-day pedagogy, but it can come only from a life-filled understanding of the whole human being.
You can get an idea of human nature only when you can see the relationship of the individual human being to the whole cosmos.
We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people.
You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.
The whole of ancient astrology owed its origin to conversation with the cosmic intelligences. But by the time of the first centuries after the rise of Christianity, ancient astrology - that is to say, conversation with cosmic intelligences - was a thing of the past.
A feeling for equal rights for other human beings cannot exist in adults if a feeling for authority is not implanted in them during childhood. Otherwise, adults will never become mature enough to recognize the rights of others.
We can find Nature outside us only if we have first learned to know her within us. What is akin to her within us must be our guide. This marks out our path of enquiry.
It is one of the sternest judgments confronting a human being after death that insofar as he is himself evil, he can see only what resembles himself because he can reproduce in his own being only the physiognomy of other evil people.
The vision of the human being is confined today to the physical body. One regards this as a reality; one cannot raise oneself to what is spiritual. The souls who now look upon their own physical bodies with their eyes, and are unable to rise to what is spiritual, were incarnated among earlier peoples as Greeks, as Romans, and as ancient Egyptians.
A living art of teaching, one that rests on a true understanding of the human being, has a thread of strength running through it that stimulates individual students to participate so that it is not necessary to keep their attention through direct 'individualized' treatment.
Acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited: between death and a new birth - and this begins immediately or soon after death - the soul has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still living on earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already been karmically connected on earth in the last or in an earlier incarnation.
The strength people need to proceed along the path of human development can come only from the spiritual worlds.
Adults need to live in a society that is economically social, governmentally democratic, and culturally free.
In the life of our organism, we are continually dealing with a development of force followed by a state of equilibrium. Of course, the human being has no conscious knowledge of what is really going on within him, but what takes place is so infinitely wise that the cleverness of the human ego is nothing by comparison.
We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment.
Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.
Just as future eclipses of the Sun and Moon are indicated in the present relations of those bodies, so are future earthly lives indicated in what now lives within us.
Esoteric or inner knowledge is no different from other kinds of human knowledge and ability. It is a mystery for the average person only to the extent that writing is a mystery for those who have not yet learned to write.
Thinking is a picturing of all our experiences before birth or before conception. You cannot come to a true understanding of thinking if you are not certain that you have lived before birth.
May my soul bloom in love for all existence.
When you objectively observe the most spiritual area to which modern people devote themselves, the religions, ask yourself if the basis of modern culture, particularly in religion, is not human self-interest. It is typical of modern sermons that the preacher criticizes people for their selfishness.
Through systematic exercising of our thinking faculties, we can train ourselves for exact clairvoyance. Imaginative Knowledge is the first step in supersensible perception, and through it we reach the first element of the supersensible it is possible to reach, namely, the supersensible body that we bear within our earthly body in physical space.
We have to realize that when we talk in front of other people about things only we can understand, those people will not be able to avoid getting wrong impressions.
What is of the nature of spirit and soul must be gleaned from facts belonging to the spirit and soul; we shall then know that in the living thinking which is liberated from the will, a life-germ has been discerned which passes through the gate of death, goes through the spiritual world after death, and afterwards returns again to earthly life.
We have to push aside what generally concerns us most in our thought life, namely, the content of our thoughts, and learn instead to make conscious use of the element of will in our thinking.
However superficial prevailing views of heredity seem to be, it must be admitted that a person is indeed the bearer of inherited characteristics. This is the one aspect. He must often battle against these inherited traits and rid himself of them in order to bring to fulfillment the talents laid into him before he entered earthly existence.
