Concern for friends, relatives and children

Concern for friends, relatives and children may also act as a kind of gravity that holds souls (post mortem) back in the earth sphere. It is important to pay attention to this because by taking it into account we can also help the dead. If, for instance, we realize that the departed soul feels anxiety for a living person — and much can come to our knowledge in this respect — it will help the dead person in his further development to relieve him of this anxiety. We ease the life of someone who has died by relieving him, for example, of anxiety about a child whom he has left behind unprovided for. By doing something for the child, we relieve the dead person of anxiety, and this is a true service of love. Let us picture such a situation. The dead person has not available the means to rid himself of anxiety. From his realm he may be unable to do anything that would ease the circumstances of a child, a relative or a friend. He is often condemned — and in many cases this weighs heavily upon the seer — to bear the anxiety until the situation of the one left behind improves of itself or by circumstances. Therefore, if we do something to better the situation we will have performed a real deed of love for the dead one.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 140 – Life Between Death and Rebirth: Man’s Journey through the Cosmic Spheres after Death – Munich, 12th March 1913

Translated by Rene Querido

Previously posted on November 29, 2014

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A faint reflection

What we experience in pre-earthly existence in working together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies leaves in us a heritage for our earthly life, a faint shadow of this communion with the Hierarchies. If between death and a new birth we had no such community of life with the Beings of the Hierarchies, we could not unfold, here on Earth, the power of love. The power of love we unfold here on Earth is of course only a faint reflection, a shadow of our communion with the Spirit-Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between death and a new birth, but it is a reflection of that communion. That here on the Earth we are able to unfold human love, sympathetic understanding for another human being, is due to the fact that between death and a new birth we are able to live in communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 219 – Man and the World of Stars: IV: Rhythms of Earthly and Spiritual Life. Love, Memory, the Moral Life. – Dornach, December 15, 1922

Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

Extraordinarily complex

As soon as the veil that is spread before man in order that he may see only the sense-world and not the spiritual world behind it, is drawn aside, life becomes extraordinarily complex.
It is found to begin with that man is influenced not only by those Beings and their physical reflections, the Stars, which can be directly observed, but that within earthly existence itself, supersensible Beings akin to those of the world of Stars have so to speak set up their abode in the earthly realm.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 219 – Man and the World of Stars: III: Man’s Relation to the World of the Stars – Dornach, December 3, 1922

Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

Standing upon one leg

It is by no means mere nonsense to say that certain sicknesses can be cured more quickly if the bed of the patient is placed in the direction of East to West. It is no superstition but a fact capable of definite proof. But this is not intended as a recommendation to each of you to place your bed in a certain position!

I have had so many experiences in this direction, that I feel it necessary to interject here a word of warning! It once happened to me in Berlin, for instance, that at the end of an anthroposophical discourse I laid a certain emphasis upon the fact of being able to put on my galoshes when it was raining, without sitting down, saying that this could be done by first standing upon one leg and then upon the other, and I added ‘And one ought to be able to stand upon one leg!’ This was taken by some anthroposophists in such a way that I found upon returning from London to Berlin, that members of the Anthroposophical Society there were being recommended, as esoteric training, to stand upon one leg for a short time at midnight!

Many assertions made about us have just as good a foundation. Time and again things of this sort get said and then find their way into this or that newspaper article by the pen of some well — or ill — disposed person — generally the latter.

So I repeat, I have no wish at all to recommend you each to place his bed in one particular position.

Nevertheless, this fact and many others show that even today, in the inner or subconscious part of his being, Man still stands in a certain relation to these exterior spatial differentiations, into which he has been placed.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 201 – Man: Hieroglyph of the Universe: Lecture Five – Dornach, 17th April 1920

Translated by George and Mary Adams

Transformation/Inspiration/Instinct

Look at the blood that flows today, look at the people who are put against the wall and shot: those are the inspirations of good will from the spiritual world that want to come to the people, but are hated by them and then transformed into wild animal urges. If the human being does not want that which comes to him from out of spiritual worlds as inspiration then it transforms itself into wild emotions, into animal drives.

Source (German): Rudolf Steiner – GA 192 – Geisteswissenschaftliche Behandlung sozialer und pädagogischer Fragen – Stuttgart, Juni 22, 1919 (page 225)

Translated by Nesta Carsten-Krüger

Previously posted on April 17, 2016