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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 4: Anthroposophy and Religion.
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  • The words “lotus flower” is a borrowed expression from oriental wisdom but what I have indicated (in my book ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment’) is certainly not borrowed from oriental wisdom. This is what I’m asking, for you to always take this into consideration, when on occasion I need through necessity to borrow expressions from history, as I have to do today.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 11: Insights into the Mystery of Golgotha, Priest Ordination.
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  • In this depiction of our conversation I wanted to firstly stress the kind of perception of truth we lived in during the middle of the 15th Century. The Catholic clergy was not experiencing the perception of truth like modern consciousness does, but a truth-conception corresponding to an earlier time epoch. They were not aware of the view of truth that reckons with the consequences of truth for the inner life of a human being. Quite a different attitude to the truth existed, and as it had changed from olden times, was not clearly understood. We need to look back at the evolution of humanity which means that the soul constitution essentially has changed. Basically, there is no incorrect expression other than that nature had made no leaps. Nature in fact makes continuous jumps. Take for example a green foliage leaf to the coloured flower petal — that is a jump. In the same way we have leaps in the course of time, apparently quite a sharp advancement from one soul state into another. However, people don’t always grow in the same degree but allow old points of view to continue and as a result their souls atrophy, as we are able to notice if we look at the enormous leap which has come about in modern human soul constitutions and which has not been participated in by a large number of people.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 13: The Sacraments, Evolution and Involution
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  • Speaking about evolution today, you actually have a one-sided imagination of it, to a certain extent. People believe, when they talk about evolution, they must have some starting point; and this starting point, like a seed, provides the second step, and from the second comes a third and so on. In this way evolution is considered to be a process of actually always going from one previous step resulting in the next one. This evolution concept is quite one-sided in contrast to reality because evolution does not happen this way. When you look at a plant and the condition of having fully developed its leaves, flowers, right up to organs of fruit, you could kind of think how this relates to the characteristics of the evolution concept. (He draws on the blackboard, on the left.) But you can’t imagine it in the same way if you start from the root, actually from the seed, and then look for the seed in the flower once again. You have to admit: there is a condition in the unfolding growth process where it involves a greater unfolding outward, and there is another condition where it involves the slightest outwards unfolding. Then a rhythm of unfolding alternates with the reverse, where, in a way, the essence of the thing pulls back so that the outer sense perceptible element becomes the most inconspicuous imaginable, but the full power, so to speak, is concentrated to a point.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 15: Ordination and Transubstantiation
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  • We can look at the development of leaves on a plant, the development of the flowers, the ovary, the stamens and see the ovary mature. (He draws on the blackboard, left.) We then observe how the pollen flies around, how it fertilises the flowers. If you only observe outwardly then you will evaluate according to the sense perceptible outer processes which you then combine in your mind. Someone who has become mature in spiritual seeing, must see a supersensible weaving which expands as a kind of wavering transmission over plant growth and all that is involved in plant fertilization. Through this however, the earth in which the plants have their roots, is brought into a reciprocal relationship with the spiritual environment of the earth.
• Title: Foundation Course: Letter from Friedrich Rittelmeyer
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  • They want a clear, safe way to be indicated up high, which recommends itself to them convincingly and invitingly, a way they can walk forward to with a clear conscience and joyful courage. Now they hear of all kinds of exercises, which could and should be done, through which one laboriously acquires all kinds of abilities which do not seem essential and decisive to them — how one for example focuses your mind on the blossoming and withering of a plant in order to get an impression of the transience of life, the spirituality of a flower and so on. A confusing wealth of advice spreads itself out before them, on the one hand from the moral, known and obvious side and on the other hand, from the ‘occult’ strange or even questionable side. They would gladly feel free and great, striving at the pinnacle of humanity so to speak, but now they must find that some individuals with deep insights should be far ahead of them, and that they have no prospect in life to even come close to reaching them. As a result, they feel themselves pushed into a lower human class and even robbed of their human kingdom. They feel like an assassination attempt on their human dignity, even if they don’t say it out loud.