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• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 3: Theoretical Thinking and Living in the Spirit.
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  • You see, the moral exercises, which are mentioned here as familiar, are such that according to their wording, they certainly would be known if they were moral instructions. Firstly, according to the anthroposophic context, this is not what they are. In an anthroposophic context they are indications for the attainment of higher knowledge. It is certainly presented in such a way that it must be clear: they are indication for the attainment of a higher, supersensible knowledge. One must after all admit: If I would say a person necessarily longs for the attainment of supersensible knowledge, as opposed to if I say, that a kind of tranquillity in relation to “exulting to the skies, grieving to death” provides humanity with a moral stand, there is certainly a more radical difference between them. By me expressing something like the demand for serenity, I’m expressing something which could perhaps be quite well known, and which could initially sound like an obvious moral instruction, but which is not a discussion based on the demand for serenity. Is it said in my book ‘Knowledge of the higher Worlds and its attainment’ that for the purpose of morality, for the purpose of obtaining moral support it is necessary to develop serenity? No! Something quite different is said. It is said that an exercise needs to be done, it is said that this exercise needs to be repeated, in this way the exercise should be done in a certain rhythm in such a way that one could describe it as done in tranquillity. To repeat a certain exercise is quite different to a moral action. Above all you need to consider what is given in my book ‘Knowledge of the higher Worlds and its attainment’.
  • You see, it is actually the most natural thing that one person can say to another: you need to make an effort to search for the truth. That is a self-evident fact. Here the important thing is that within the rhythmic sequence of thoughts, thoughts are rendered to the truth, in relation of human beings to the truth. This exercise, this making-oneself-conscious-in-the-present within such a content, this repeated rhythmic making-oneself-conscious-in-the-present is what is involved. It is about applying quite a particular mood for spiritual knowledge. I want to explain this attitude to you in more detail. I will deviate from the strict formulation of the letter but maybe this will make some things much clearer.
  • These are things which have disappeared from Western consciousness. What this Western consciousness is, shows also in other things. People have come to me who say: There’s something awful about the Buddha speeches, they contain mere repetitions; one should surely produce a publication with only the contents of the speeches and leave out the repetitions. — Yet, no one really understands the Buddha-speeches who can make such a statement because the essence of the Buddha speeches depend upon following the rhythmic sequence in very small slots, always repeating the same one. This is an oriental method which does not coincide with our work here and in order to clarify this, I will make some comments.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 7: Formation of Speech.
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  • The Greeks recited in hexameter. Why? Well, hexameter is an experience. A person produces speech, as I’ve already said, in his breathing. However, breathing is closely connected to other elements of rhythm in the human being; with the pulse, with blood circulation. On average, obviously not precisely, we have 18 breaths and 72 heat beats; 72 equals 4 times 18. Four times 18 heart beats gives a rhythm, a collective inner beat. In a time when man sensed in a more primordial and more elementary way according to what was taking place within him, man experienced, when he could, in uttering the relationship of the heart beat to the breathing, bring the totality of himself into expression. This relationship, not precisely according to time, this relationship can be brought to bear; you only have to add the turning point as the fourth foot (reference plate 3 ... not available In German text) then you have a Greek hexameter half-line, in the ration of 4 to 1 as a pulse beat to breathing rhythm. The hexameter was born out of the human structure, and other measures of verse were all born out of the rhythmic system of the human being. You can already feel, when you treat language artistically, how, in the process of treating human speech in an artistic way, language is alive. This makes it possible to acquire a far more inner relationship to language, yet also far more objectivity. The most varied chauvinistic feelings in relation to language stops, because the configurations of different languages stop, and one acquires an ear for the general sound. There are such things which are found on the way to gaining the power of creative speech. It does finally lead to listening to oneself when one speaks. In a certain way it’s actually difficult but it can be supported. For various reasons it seems to me that for those who are affected by it, it is also necessary not to treat the Scripture in the way many people treat it today. You will soon see why I say these things.
  • In grasping with our arms, creating with our fingers, we express something we need in order to model language. So it has a certain justification to return mankind to its connection with language, bringing the whole person into it, to train Eurythmy properly, which really exists in drawing out of the human organism what is not fulfilled in the human body, but is however fulfilled in the ether body, when we speak. The entire human being is in movement and we are simply transposing though the eurhythmic movements, the etheric body on to the physical body. That is the principle. It is really the eurythmization of something like a necessity which needs to be regularly brought out of the human being, like the spoken language itself. It must stand as a kind of opposite pole against all which rises in the present and alienate people towards the outer world, allowing no relationship to be possible between people and the outer world any more. The eurythmization enables people in any case to return to being present in the language and is on this basis, as I’ve often suggested, even an art. Well, if you take into account the things I’ve just proposed, then you arrive at the now commonplace speech technique basically under the scheme of pedantry.
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 10: Composition of the Gospels
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  • You see, this leads us to, as at that time — which we know about from other anthroposophic foundations — a clear differentiation made between the organisation of hearing and the organisation of seeing. People in the present day clearly know nothing about this. They don’t know for example, that the total organisation which stream out from the rhythmic, goes up into the head organisation, and encircles an inner organisational harmony between hearing and speech. Hearing and speech belong together. Hearing and speech is to a certain extent combined in a single organ complex, which today’s physiology doesn’t list. When I show you my wooden sculpture group you will be able to use this practically demonstrated physiology — but which it doesn’t want to be — to see how it appears these days, out of anthroposophic foundations, that they are a unit: breathing, speaking and hearing. These three are also present in seeing. Take this for example (writes on blackboard):
• 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.
  • If you want to speak in the Goethean sense, you would say: At one stage in the unfolding, the spiritual is withdrawn and the sensory aspect developed in the farthest periphery (he draws on the blackboard) and here where growth has been drawn inward, is where the spiritual develops and the sensory is squeezed into the most inconspicuous germ imaginable. So, we certainly have to take into account that when we speak about a concept of development, we have to speak about rhythms, but we don’t come right with the development concept if we actually look at what nature is. In that moment we come up with history, things get a bit more complicated. Take for instance the course of historic development in that time span which I’ve characterised yesterday, from Augustus to Luther. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • Only when we do an overall study of the alternate rhythms from evolution to involution, we are able to fully understand development.
  • Through observation, through thinking, we allow dying processes to be integrated into us. This is the opposite process of the developmental process at birth. Like humanity developed since the time epoch a bit before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity experienced those changes of which I have spoken, and people had to a certain extent turn the involution processes into something holy, in contrast to the contrasting evolutionary processes. Evolution is natural, it is a gift of nature; that which is given to us at birth and continues to work, is a gift of nature. If we begin to feel the involution process starting to take hold of us as a dying process is, then it must be sanctified since that divination of the world which I spoke to you about this morning, which means, it must be included into what comes out of the Christ impulse. So we see since the development of Christianity something which should be added into the sacraments due to this dying process, and that is the sacrament of baptism. We will still speak about the ritual involved. In order for us to say: what is an evolutionary process at birth, the baptism should take place as a process of involution. We should add to this rhythm in which we are placed in at birth, the repulsion through the pendulum of baptism. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • Added to this, if we now look for the corresponding process of involution, then we must above all see, my dear friends, that the human being, through the immersion of his soul-spiritual into the physical body, has evolved an admirable power in his being, continually being in the state of oscillation in which there is a return to the soul-spiritual, in the repetition of the re-immersion into the physical bodily nature so that it contains a rhythm, which threatens him to be either lost in the ecstatic soul-spiritual aspect or to fall back into the animalistic, in complete incorporation. Human beings need something which stand opposite this evolutionary process as a process of involution, and this process is reception to Holly Communion. The process of involution for the incorporation is Holy Communion. (He writes on the blackboard.)
  • In our discussion about evolution and what the case has been up to now, we could say the following. It is so, that the human being in his soul-spiritual nature, confronts the physical bodily nature at every moment; at every moment the human being must take care to move in the correct rhythm so that his or her soul-spiritual nature is not allowed to sink into animalism, or that the physical is left alone and to a certain extent the unworldly rises into the soul-spiritual which would weaken the soul-spiritual. Bringing the altar sacraments into the right rhythm is what the human being must look for in the reception of sacraments.
  • Earlier evolutionary processes we’ve always contrasted with sacramental action and processes of involution; however, the evolutionary processes have gradually become similar to processes of involution. The process of involution during repentance is in a certain way the outer unfolding of quite an inner decisive recollection process; it is the process of involution which is slowly approached by the process of evolution. We need, when we now want the sacramental action for this natural involutionary process of death, to introduce it in a somewhat cultic, ritualistic form, in which something of a spiritual side of nature’s knowledge can be perceived, which serve to confront the dying person and manage to do something to the dying person which is simultaneously stimulated in his soul-spiritual life, stirred by the natural processes of his physical bodily being. It shall, expressed in a rhythm, let the physical-bodily aspect disappear upon death, and the soul-spiritual in turn take shape. For certain reasons, which we will still discuss, one can always see in oils, in everything oil-like, that something leads back to the soul-spiritual. In nature as well, oiling processes are regarded as processes of salvation. Therefore, the holy last anointment is performed here. (He writes on the blackboard.)
• Title: Foundation Course: Lecture 15: Ordination and Transubstantiation
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  • Today experiments have already been done to make the gentle sensitivity of a flame visible, by placing a flame somewhere and a person speaking rhythmically at a distance from it, to see the flame copy the rhythm. Here a rhythm is being copied by something inorganic. If I know the right words in the right word correlation over the salt substance, then the salt substance will change. If I now allow this salt substance which has been permeated, to enter into water, then I have kindled a process, which, if I understand it, when I have performed it in spirit, is a sacramental act. We must be able, once again, to look at the nominal as such. This we will address tomorrow.
• Title: Foundation Course: Summaries of Lectures
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  • Answers to questions of the participants: Power of speech formation/moulding: gaining sound understanding, sense of speech and language conscience. Vocals, consonant and rhythm. Connection of speech with the totality of mankind. Eurythmy. A new understanding of the Bible: experiencing language and the start of St John’s Gospel. Apostolic succession: meaning of the priestly “Family Tree.” Celebrating the Catholic Mass as essential/real action. Outlook towards a new form of sacramental life.
  • What does it mean, to experience shaping the divine within? Fundamental ideas on the being of the sacramental. Seven sacraments and their relation to life. Rhythmic exchange from evolution to involution processes in nature and life’s history. Healing these processes through sacraments. Regarding birth, maturity, incarnation, memory, death and sanctification through baptism, confirmation, act of consecration, penance and last anointment. Human relations to the soul-spiritual, which are no longer of an individual nature and their image of the sacrament: marriage, priest ordination.