The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. Something of the Atmosphere That Should Prevail in Branch Meetings

[ 1 ] The way of looking at human beings that was discussed here last time leads to a proper recognition of the effectiveness of the spiritual-soul in the physical and etheric human being. Once one has understood that what is perceptible in human beings is an image, it is easy to grasp that something other than what is contained in their material nature is at work in that image. However, one will also behave in a completely different way toward someone whose image one recognizes than toward someone whom one perceives only in terms of their material nature.

[ 2 ] And there is something awakening in this different attitude of the soul. If one feels very vividly how one behaves inwardly in such an attitude, how one is disposed, one feels the awakening of soul forces that lie dormant in ordinary life. And it is very important that those who take up anthroposophy already feel, in this taking up, that there are other powers of knowledge slumbering in the human soul than those they recognized before approaching anthroposophy.

[ 3 ] When you know you have an image before you, you adjust your perception to what is not immediately apparent to the senses. You are then seized by what is not immediately apparent to the senses, just as you are seized by what is immediately apparent to the senses in your everyday perception.

[ 4 ] When the lecturing members of the Anthroposophical Society draw attention to such things in the branch meetings, this will bring an anthroposophical mood to the anthroposophical teachings.

[ 5 ] And this appropriately evoked mood will give the branch meetings the spirit that should prevail in them. Participants will then feel that anthroposophy is not merely a theoretical communication about the spiritual, but that it is something powerful and essential in itself, which leads to the experience of the spiritual.

[ 6 ] In every appropriate way, active members should consider how this experience of the spiritual can be achieved in anthroposophical work.

[ 7 ] For only in this way can those who accept anthroposophy without being able to research the spiritual themselves overcome the feeling that they are only being told theoretically what others who have done the research have experienced. The right way to communicate what has been experienced in the spirit is to let others share in the experience of what is being communicated.

[ 8 ] If this spirit of sharing experiences prevails in the branch meetings, it dispels everything based on an unjustified sense of authority. Opponents of anthroposophy constantly argue that anthroposophists only profess what is communicated to them on the basis of this sense of authority. If anthroposophy is practiced in the right spirit within the society, this objection loses all meaning. For then the participants in our meetings do not feel that they can say they accept this or that because this or that person has said so; for they learn to know that agreement is not forced upon them from within, but arises naturally from their own experience.

[ 9 ] When we encounter a well-meaning person, we experience their inner kindness not because an authority instructs us to perceive kindness as beneficial, but because our soul feels directly touched by their kind nature. In the same way, we can become aware of the truth of anthroposophy through the way it is communicated, through its very essence.

[ 10 ] Branch leaders should do what is necessary to enable anthroposophy to have this effect. The esoteric character of anthroposophical gatherings should not be conditioned by evoking the feeling that mysterious things are being presented. Esotericism is based on the characteristic internalization of truths in communication. This internalization should be seen as part of the impulse that the Christmas Conference sought to bring into the Anthroposophical Society. The blessing that this conference has had, and which it will continue to pour out over the anthroposophical movement, will lie in the constant preservation of this intention and this will from the Christmas Conference.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 11 ] 26. Only when the astral body has been laid aside—when the judgement of his life is over—man enters the spiritual world. There he stands in like relation to Beings of purely spiritual character as on Earth to the beings and processes of the Nature-kingdoms. In spiritual experience, everything that was his outer world on Earth now becomes his inner world. He no longer merely perceives it, but experiences it in its spiritual being which was hid from him on Earth, as his own world.

[ 12 ] 27. In the Spirit-realm, man as he is on Earth becomes an outer world. We gaze upon him, even as on Earth we gaze upon the stars and clouds, the mountains and rivers. Nor is this ‘outer world’ any less rich in content than the glory of the Cosmos as it appears to us in earthly life.

[ 13 ] 28. The forces begotten by the human Spirit in the Spirit-realm work on in the fashioning of earthly Man, even as the deeds we accomplish in the Physical work on as a content of the soul in the life after death.