Steiner Online Library Spiritual Science for Human Evolution

Man as a Being of Sense and Perception
GA 206

Table of Contents

  • Title Page
  • Colophon
  • A Note About the Transcripts of Lectures
  • Lecture I 22nd July, 1921
    • Ego-consciousness and the content of the senses; the ego as reality. The sphere of transmission of sense-perception: the four subjective outer senses, the four senses oscillating between outer and inner, the four objective inner senses. Man's soul-life and his cosmic being. The inner activity of soul-life and its outwardly directed activity. The specific characteristics of individual senses. Analysis of the field of experience.
  • Lecture II 23rd July, 1921
    • The distinction between upper and lower man; both representative of the world-process. The two poles of our experience show the relationship of morality to natural necessity. The separation between the spheres of knowledge and faith. Historical consciousness must be acquired by the survey of ever-greater periods of time. The Greek philosophers. The real connection with the spiritual world later became tradition, but with the mark of knowledge; Gnostic ideas. By the fourth century the content of these ideas lost. Augustine. Transition to the abstract intellectualism of the fifteenth century. Ancient oriental culture based on the six upper senses. Western culture based on the six lower senses. Aristotelianism in Christian theology. Attack on the doctrine of pre-existence.
  • Lecture III 24th July, 1921
    • The faculty of memory and the capacity for love, though facts of soul-life, belong to the bodily life. Faculty of ideation dependent upon the formation of the head, faculty of memory upon the metabolic-limb organisation; relation to world of feeling. The images of the members of man's being bound up with the physical organisation. Teething as an example of a kind of image in the physical. The spiritual members as either free or bound to the physical organisation. The interplay of the spiritual and the bodily in memory and love. The pictorial representation of the spiritual world in the material world gives us an insight into the origin of matter from spirit. Within the soul-spiritual we experience morality, within the physical-bodily, natural necessity. The dematerialisation of the human being. “I am free.”

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Quotes

"You can see from this, my dear friends, what mischief will be set on foot if the truths of Spiritual Science are withheld. For man will be exposed to the forces of evil, and he will only be protected from it by giving himself up to the spiritual life of the good. To withhold the spiritual life of goodness from men is to be no friend to humanity. Whoever does this, be he Freemason or Jesuit, is no friend to humanity. For it means handing men over to the forces of evil. And there may be a purpose in doing so. This purpose may be to confine goodness to a small circle, in order by the help of this goodness to dominate the helpless humanity who are thus led by evil into the follies of life."

—Rudolf Steiner,
Spiritual Science Notes On Goethe's Faust, Vol. II, No. 273-8.

Spiritual Exercises

Calendar of the Soul

In 1912 Rudolf Steiner offered a “calendar of the soul” with weekly verses that express how the changing seasons in both the outer natural world and our inner lives help humanity evolve. Download and read the verses in four translations with commentary by Eloise Krivosheia of the Los Angeles Branch of the Anthroposophical Society.

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2022-2023 Calendar Dates