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“Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge aiming to guide the spiritual element in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.”

Rudolph Steiner

The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity

In his booklet „The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity” which was first published in 1911, Rudolf Steiner for the first time publicly presents, among others, the recognition of the “two Jesus boys” and describes the development from Jesus of Nazareth to being Christ.

Also, in this work, he discusses the significance of the gods and heroes of mythology as well as of spiritual beings for the development of mankind.

“If we reflect upon ourselves, we soon come to realize that, in addition to the self we encompass with our thoughts, feelings, and fully conscious impulses of will, we bear in ourselves a second, more powerful self. We become aware that we subordinate ourselves to this second self as to a higher power. At first, this second self seems to us a lower being when compared to the one we encompass with our clear, fully conscious soul and its natural inclination toward the good and the true. And so, initially, we may strive to overcome this seemingly lower self.

A closer self-examination, however, can teach us something else about this second self. If periodically we look back on what we have experienced or done in life, we make a strange discovery, one that becomes more meaningful for us the older we become. Whenever we think about what we did or said at some time in the past, it turns out that we did a great many things we actually understood only at a later date. When we think of things we did seven or eight years ago — or perhaps even twenty years ago — we realize that only now, after a long time, is our mind sufficiently developed to understand what we did or said then.

Of course, there are people who do not make such self-discoveries because they do not try to. Nevertheless, this sort of soul-searching is extraordinarily fruitful. For in such moments as we become aware that we are only now beginning to understand something we did in our earlier years-that in the past our minds were not mature enough to understand what we did or said then-a new feeling emerges in our soul. We feel ourselves as if sheltered by a benevolent power presiding in the depths of our own being. We begin to trust more and more that, in the highest sense of the word, we are not alone in the world and that whatever we can understand or do consciously is fundamentally only a small part of what we accomplish in the world.”

 

From:
Rudolf Steiner: The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity. CW 15.

http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0015/English/AP1992/GA015_c01.html

Original title:
Rudolf Steiner: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit. Dornach 1987. S. 9f