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Biography: Freedom and Destiny

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
264 Seiten
Englisch
Rudolf Steiner Presserschienen am03.04.2013
The path of an individual human life - our biography - is something of a mystery. Despite the abundance of published biographies and autobiographies of celebrities and historical figures, the scientific study of human biography remains in its infancy, with little understanding of the inherent laws in the path of an individual's life. Yet as Rudolf Steiner shows here, every biography, regardless of the individual's fame, perceived importance or outer success, is ruled by archetypal influences, patterns and laws. This broad-ranging anthology addresses some critical and as yet unanswered questions: What effects do education - and in particular contrasting education methods - have on later life? How do the various periods of life relate to each other? Do the effects of events on the individual become evident immediately, or is their true impact delayed - perhaps by decades? To what extent can an individual shape the stages of his or her biography? How much freedom of choice do we have, and how much of life is predetermined? Out of the higher knowledge Rudolf Steiner acquired from his spiritual research, he described the human individuality as a being with a continuing existence - before birth and beyond death. This eternal being experiences many varied conditions and situations, the effects of which are observable in our biography. This book addresses these and other issues such as freedom and destiny, the effects of heredity, illness, and the impact of education, offering answers based on a profound knowledge of the human being.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextThe path of an individual human life - our biography - is something of a mystery. Despite the abundance of published biographies and autobiographies of celebrities and historical figures, the scientific study of human biography remains in its infancy, with little understanding of the inherent laws in the path of an individual's life. Yet as Rudolf Steiner shows here, every biography, regardless of the individual's fame, perceived importance or outer success, is ruled by archetypal influences, patterns and laws. This broad-ranging anthology addresses some critical and as yet unanswered questions: What effects do education - and in particular contrasting education methods - have on later life? How do the various periods of life relate to each other? Do the effects of events on the individual become evident immediately, or is their true impact delayed - perhaps by decades? To what extent can an individual shape the stages of his or her biography? How much freedom of choice do we have, and how much of life is predetermined? Out of the higher knowledge Rudolf Steiner acquired from his spiritual research, he described the human individuality as a being with a continuing existence - before birth and beyond death. This eternal being experiences many varied conditions and situations, the effects of which are observable in our biography. This book addresses these and other issues such as freedom and destiny, the effects of heredity, illness, and the impact of education, offering answers based on a profound knowledge of the human being.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781855842991
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2013
Erscheinungsdatum03.04.2013
Seiten264 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1044 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.2855036
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe


Introduction

Nowadays, becoming conscious of your own biography throws up a great many questions. One of these questions is even being discussed in popular magazines: the many aspects of the mid-life crisis. This is really a bit of a misnomer. The crisis does not appear until after the middle of life, as people become aware of advancing age. The prosaic knowledge that death is one of life s certainties is now no longer merely a thought but is actually experienced as a projection of the person s own ageing. This awareness leads inevitably to having to make up one s mind how one is personally going to tackle the problem.

There are other questions, which, despite being discussed less frequently, are just as disturbing-for instance the after-effects of the wrong education in childhood, or the results of being overburdened by short unconnected lessons, which has a similar effect to the division of labour. There has as yet been very little research done on the resulting deformations that do not become evident until much later in life. Therefore we know even less about the possible means of avoiding these. What this is actually telling us is that we lack a real understanding of the path of life.

The biographies of people of historical importance have always attracted a wide readership. There is no lack of biographies of statesmen and artists, described down to the last detail. Yet despite this abundance of biographies hardly anything exists in the way of a theory of biography, its inherent laws. What we understand by this is the elucidation of those laws which form the basis of every biography, whether these concern important or historically unimportant people.

All human beings are appointed a typical span of time-the human chronotype-which distinguishes them from those of every other living species. Yet as, one and all, we pass through the gate of death we frequently do so in a time span radically contradicting our chronotype. Everyone experiences the course of their life divided into periods of time offering distinct possibilities, but which exclude others; although these-if you look at biography as a whole-are appropriate for other sections within our life periods. When scrutinized, a biography has an ordered time structure, although the underlying reasons for this cannot be adequately explained. This strikes us as being all the more astonishing, seeing that every single person has their own life cycles, and grasps the possibilities these offer, or suffers from their inherent resistance to these possibilities.

So one of the tasks a theory of biography would have to deal with would be to elucidate the conditions attached to the various ages of life, so as to get a more conscious grasp of them.

A further task would be to clarify how the various periods of life relate to one another. Why is it that deformations do not become evident the moment they occur, but only much later on, as long as 30 years later? Are there rules that determine the influence the environment contributes to the character of a person s biography? And is there a similar possibility-a conscious one in this case-of the personality influencing the shaping of the stages of biography? What does freedom of choice depend on, and to what extent does this have to conform to prescribed rules?

Just as a plant does not give us a finished picture of itself in advance, but we only appreciate its true nature when all its stages have shown themselves in the course of time, human beings, similarly, show themselves to our inner eye only when we look at the many very different ways they have of expressing themselves in the fabric of biography.

Out of the higher knowledge Rudolf Steiner acquired as a visionary he described the human individuality as a being with a continuing existence. Birth and death make their appearance within it as transformations of this existence. This long-lasting being, together with the life organism and soul organization, goes through very varied conditions. The effects of these conditions are observable in our biography.

The essence of the human organization and also of the individuality had their beginnings at the spiritual level. Even the processes, which their image and development have passed through, point beyond the biographical frontier of birth and death.

These few points have been made solely for the sake of drawing attention to the many diverse aspects that have to be considered if we want to get to the bottom of the phenomenon of biography. Nothing else is so intertwined as this is with a knowing of the human being through spiritual experience, in other words the whole of anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner never dealt on the whole with the specific theme of biography, yet his whole output contains points of reference. This has made it particularly difficult to choose lectures on this subject. Therefore an effort has been made to follow lecture themes beyond the framework of the lectures and give guidelines about Steiner s works. We have tried to show the reasons for our choices and point the way to further reading. Here is just a brief survey of the selection.

Whether we like it or not, people s mental faculties, drawn from the natural development of their bodily organization, are in decline today. They have now to be strengthened by the activating of soul-spiritual forces. This is called spiritual-scientific training. The first lecture in our collection, given on 11 November 1909, covers the essential points of such a training. The lecture is called Asceticism and Illness .

Our character, which develops in the course of our life, can also nowadays only evolve by way of self-education on the principle of such schooling. The reasons for this conclusion are given in the second lecture, held on 14 March 1910.

The third lecture, given on 28 February 1907, describes how the course of life as a whole can be seen as an ordered division into a number of periods of equal length, which acquire the characteristic stamp of the various age groups as people s bodily organism on the one hand and soul-spiritual organization on the other take them through different conditions.

The first three lectures included here were public lectures given in Berlin. The nature of these does not call for any special knowledge of spiritual science; the lectures themselves provide the basis for their understanding. Rudolf Steiner held them in order to bring the results of spiritual science into cultural life in general. They deal with themes of all kinds, which every contemporary person can feel a need to understand.

The fourth and fifth lectures (29 May and 5 June 1917) give a historical picture showing how the conditions applying to age groups nowadays did not apply in other cultural periods, but were different then. They tell us about the sort of things that were everyday knowledge in those days and what the social conditions were like. And they also tell us about the special tasks we are presented with today, of consciously helping our biographies to take shape. In these lectures the emphasis is on the problem of how to grow old with spiritual awareness.

The following three lectures (from 8 to 12 January 1918) concern this particular individual and social problem. In the last lecture especially (12 January 1918) certain circumstances are pointed to that have to be taken into account in education up till the age of 21, to prepare the young people for the ageing process and to enable them to go through it wisely.

These last five lectures we have mentioned (and the fragment of a lecture included at the end of this publication) were given to members of the Anthroposophical Society. It was taken for granted that the audience consisted of people familiar with the basic elements of spiritual science. Accordingly, their character is very different from that of the public lectures. In lecture cycles of this kind Rudolf Steiner put together for members of the Anthroposophical Society various aspects of a general theme. He wanted right from the start to stimulate in his audience a certain creativity of thought in their understanding of what he brought them, something he considered essential in every approach to spiritual-scientific study. The lecture of 5 June 1917 shows in an exemplary way how Rudolf Steiner familiarized himself with contemporary publications, making use of them to characterize the ruling spirit of the times. Rudolf Steiner wanted to help people really to understand the present time. According to him, the present time of his day-that of the First World War-was only comprehensible if at the same time one learns to make an assessment of large historical connections. And he says in the following lecture, given on 19 June 1917, and belonging to the same lecture cycle but not included here: So I have been trying from various points of view to draw your attention to the lengthy periods of time, an understanding of which is the only thing that can make the present time comprehensible, namely the whole period since the time of Atlantis. That he does not want to stop at a mere understanding of this is shown in a further passage taken from the same lecture: There is certainly a real and fully justified need for people of the present time not to remain asleep to the present age, in that they fail to take notice of the numerous winds of change affecting us nowadays for comparatively short periods, but to get to know what is required for the purpose of helping to further the spiritual and cultural currents available in our time. In an exemplary way we can read this endeavour from the very title of the third lecture of this group of five lectures: Which Impulses Work to Counterbalance the Principle of Heredity? It is not only a matter of observing, but in the last resort of using our...
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