Healthy and properly thinking is necessary for higher knowledge

In order to know how to relate these pictures (of the spiritual world) to the spiritual reality they represent, we have to apply to them the exact thought processes we have acquired as modern human beings. We really have to think within this world of pictures in the very way we have learnt to think in the ordinary physical world. Every thoughtless glance is damaging to modern initiation. All the healthy ways of thinking we have developed as modern human beings must be brought to bear on higher knowledge. Just as we can find our way about the ordinary physical world if we can think properly, so can we only find our way about in the world of the spirit — which we enter through modern initiation — if we are able to penetrate with the thinking we have gained here in the physical world into all the knowledge we attain through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 210 – Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture 7 – Dornach, 12th February 1922

Translated by Johanna Collis

Previously posted on December 7, 2014

The child reveals the deepest world riddles in a wonderful way

Anthroposophical spiritual science does not regard education as a science, nor as theoretical knowledge, but as a true art, as an art dealing with the most noble material we have in the world, with the human being himself, with the child that in such a miraculous way reveals to us the deepest world riddles, who year after year, one would even like to say, from week to week, illustrates how the spiritual, the soul, still deeply hidden as a divine gift from the spirit world, becomes visible in its physiognomy, through its gestures, through everything with which it expresses life.

Source (German): Rudolf Steiner – GA 218 – Geistige Zusammenhänge in der Gestaltung des menschlichen Organismus – London, November 20, 1922 (page 243-244)  

Translated by Nesta Carsten-Krüger