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Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies Vol 2
Sixteen lectures given at Dornach, Switzerland, between 6th April and 29th June, 1924. Published here with the kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
- GenresNonfictionSpirituality
256 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1974
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About the author
Rudolf Steiner
4,353 books1,100 followersAuthor also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 1, 2017
Steiner studies lives like Goethe studied plants. He sees the Ur-person:
"In these investigations it may be more important to observe a man's gestures or some habitual mannerism than to consider what he has achieved perhaps as a figure of renown. The mannerisms of a person, or the way he will invariably answer you — not so much what he answers but how he answers — whether, for example, his first tendency is always to be negative and only when he has no other alternative, to agree, or whether again in quite a good-humoured way he is rather boastful ... these are the kind of traits that are important and if we pay special attention to them they become the centre of our observations and disclose a great deal. One observes, for instance, how a man stretches out his hand to take hold of things; one makes an objective picture of it and then works upon it in the manner of an artist; and at length one finds that it is no longer the mere gesture that one is contemplating, but around the gesture the figure of another human being takes shape.
The following may happen. — There are men who have a habit, let us say, of making a certain movement of the arms. I have known men who simply could not begin to do anything without first folding their arms. If one visualises such a gesture quite objectively, but with inner, artistic feeling, so that it stands before one as a plastic, pliable form, then one's attention is directed away from the man who is actually making the gesture. But the gesture does not remain as it is; it grows into another figure which is an indication, at least, of something in the previous incarnation or in the one before that. It may well be that the gesture is now used in connection with something that was not present at all in the previous incarnation — let us say it is a gesture used in picking up a book, or some similar action. Nevertheless, it is for gestures and habits of this kind that we must have an eye if we are to keep on the right track."
Some other cool insights:
- If you ponder a lot, you'll be thin and delicately built in the next life. If you think a lot, you'll have great skin.
- Spotted skin, freckles, or some other kind of skin impurity means that there was not very much thinking in the past life.
- If a person's upper trunk is longer than the lower trunk both passed through the spiritual world before life quickly and need little sleep (which are parallel). On the contrary, a long lower trunk and a short upper trunk means that you passed through the last life slowly and need more sleep.
- Those who ascend very high in the spiritual world after death will "eat to live" in the next life. Those who don't go do high will "live to eat."
- Those who laugh at everything, even serious things, he went through their past life without paying attention, half-asleep, as it were. Those who are more serious led their lives to good purpose.
These parallel Swedenborgian correspondences very strongly: skin corresponds to everyday thought (memory-knowledges), the stomach to the purgatory-like world of spirits, and laughter corresponds to permeability in thought. You can imagine Swedenborg describing those in the spiritual world receiving the kinds of bodies there that Steiner says they will receive in their next life. This is not insignificant, especially considering that everything trickles down.
"In these investigations it may be more important to observe a man's gestures or some habitual mannerism than to consider what he has achieved perhaps as a figure of renown. The mannerisms of a person, or the way he will invariably answer you — not so much what he answers but how he answers — whether, for example, his first tendency is always to be negative and only when he has no other alternative, to agree, or whether again in quite a good-humoured way he is rather boastful ... these are the kind of traits that are important and if we pay special attention to them they become the centre of our observations and disclose a great deal. One observes, for instance, how a man stretches out his hand to take hold of things; one makes an objective picture of it and then works upon it in the manner of an artist; and at length one finds that it is no longer the mere gesture that one is contemplating, but around the gesture the figure of another human being takes shape.
The following may happen. — There are men who have a habit, let us say, of making a certain movement of the arms. I have known men who simply could not begin to do anything without first folding their arms. If one visualises such a gesture quite objectively, but with inner, artistic feeling, so that it stands before one as a plastic, pliable form, then one's attention is directed away from the man who is actually making the gesture. But the gesture does not remain as it is; it grows into another figure which is an indication, at least, of something in the previous incarnation or in the one before that. It may well be that the gesture is now used in connection with something that was not present at all in the previous incarnation — let us say it is a gesture used in picking up a book, or some similar action. Nevertheless, it is for gestures and habits of this kind that we must have an eye if we are to keep on the right track."
Some other cool insights:
- If you ponder a lot, you'll be thin and delicately built in the next life. If you think a lot, you'll have great skin.
- Spotted skin, freckles, or some other kind of skin impurity means that there was not very much thinking in the past life.
- If a person's upper trunk is longer than the lower trunk both passed through the spiritual world before life quickly and need little sleep (which are parallel). On the contrary, a long lower trunk and a short upper trunk means that you passed through the last life slowly and need more sleep.
- Those who ascend very high in the spiritual world after death will "eat to live" in the next life. Those who don't go do high will "live to eat."
- Those who laugh at everything, even serious things, he went through their past life without paying attention, half-asleep, as it were. Those who are more serious led their lives to good purpose.
These parallel Swedenborgian correspondences very strongly: skin corresponds to everyday thought (memory-knowledges), the stomach to the purgatory-like world of spirits, and laughter corresponds to permeability in thought. You can imagine Swedenborg describing those in the spiritual world receiving the kinds of bodies there that Steiner says they will receive in their next life. This is not insignificant, especially considering that everything trickles down.
September 14, 2021
The writing is good, it's fun to listen to all the gosip in between, but it feels like this guy just pulls things out of his ass and expects the bewitched crowd to worship it. I couldn't finish it, I got past the halfway mark and it's just all the same slop and superficial details, no umpf.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews