Free-ness

Were it not that, during his earthly life, man could preserve some part of what before his birth became purely thought life, he would never be able to achieve freedom. For, in that case, man would be bound up with what is dead, and the moment he wanted to call into free activity what in […]

Concrete thinking

While the preparation for the seminar in Switzerland – with the theme Michael – is in full swing, I look back to the three-day deepening of the theme Incarnation that we tried to realise in May in Ulvenhout in Brabant. From my first introduction to anthroposophy, I experienced the michaelic impulse to be able to […]

The I in thinking

A few pages further on in this lecture by Rudolf Steiner we find: ‘In other words, the human being in general today has not yet come to pour the reality, which he experiences as an independent reality in his sleep, into the thoughts of the waking life, through willpower during the waking life. If one […]

The human being at night and the human being during daytime

Last week’s quote is balanced by the following. Of course, with purely intellectualist thinking, we cannot think any further about Rudolf Steiner’s work, but we do have to do something about our thinking. I will try to substantiate this with this quote and next week’s quote. The I-being can be moved into pure thinking. ‘For […]

Unlimited further thinking of the texts by Rudolf Steiner

A long, long time ago I read in a book from the ‘Gesamtausgabe’ from Rudolf Steiner a passage that gave me the courage to think so intensely and warmly about the contents of Anthroposophy that they begin to grow and flourish in my own spiritual activity. Within anthroposophical circles there are people who think that […]

The other hemisphere

At the beginning of May there was a three-day intensive seminar in Werkhoven, in Samaya. After we had studied the theme of karma and reincarnation in the past few years, we had decided to look at ‘the other hemisphere’ for these three days, i.e. the life between death and birth and the life with the […]

Freedom and Love

‘Our inner life is constantly deepened when we send will — our own inherent force — into our thinking, when we permeate our thinking with will. We bring will into thinking and thereby attain freedom. As we gradually perfect our actions we finally succeed in sending thoughts into these actions; we irradiate our actions — […]

Dionysius Areopagita

The second evening in Zeist was dedicated to the transformation of Eros into Agape. Again I wanted to express how ineffable and inexplicable love is, and I took the writings of Dionysius Areopagita to show that love is something like God Himself, who cannot be understood with common sense and who cannot be described in […]

Socrates

The uninvited guest who comes in drunk and after the guest meal is Alcibiades. He complains about Socrates, but also praises him in all the keys. He complains about the fact that Socrates could in no way be seduced into a physical love game, as a result of which Alcibiades became the rejected lover… But […]

Eros

In the spring and in the autumn there are three meditation evenings in Zeist, the theme is chosen for a series of three together. This spring the theme was: Love. The love as seen by Plato, the love as seen by Paul and Dionysius Areopagita and the love in our time. During the preparation, the […]