{"id":44395,"date":"2023-02-02T18:44:52","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T17:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=44395"},"modified":"2023-02-02T18:46:17","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T17:46:17","slug":"the-soul-awakes-in-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/the-soul-awakes-in-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Soul Awakes in Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Five thousand years ago, the soul directed divine or royal will \u2013 feeling and thinking were determined from the periphery. With the birth of personality, the soul became a condensed point, lost the relationship and gained itself – and today?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00abIt is not what we experience, but how we feel, it is that which we experience that determines our fate.\u00bb<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This is what author Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, giving us a hint, especially for the beginning of the year. Without a doubt, the new year will hold no fewer surprises, no fewer changes, and ruptures than the past. With each such jolt, the soul may see in it a death struggle or a birth pang. What often happens is that no actual feeling arises at all and instead a prevailing mood takes possession of the soul. \u00abIt’s all going to get worse anyway.\u00bb A reflex where the soul does not feel, but fits into a mood pattern. To become free, it is worthwhile understanding a three-step process of soul development. Here is an observation from the other end of the world: I was standing with a group of travellers at the foot of the Andes in the Atacama Desert. With the morning sun behind us, we were looking at the natural spectacle: The majestic 5,000 meter peaks were glowing red, while the foot of the mountains shimmered in the haze in an unreal blue \u2013 as if fire were swimming on water, that’s how this mighty natural spectacle looked. There, in the face of the color show, someone murmured, \u00abWell done!\u00bb expressing today’s alienation and indifference. Nature had presented its greatest spectacle and our soul had appreciated it with \u00abWell done\u00bb. Rarely has the alienation with which we humans today look at the world rather than ‘in’ it been clearer to me. Not unlike looking at the screen of a PC, the world in general is alienated and hardly capable of arousing feelings in the soul. How different it was in earlier times, in the childhood of mankind. As an example of this, here are the words of admonition of Ipuwer, an ancient Egyptian sage,<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> who poured his heart out, probably around 2000 BC, when everything was going haywire in Egypt. Excerpts from the long lament:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the face is pale.
Indeed, hearts are violent, pestilence has spread throughout the land.
Indeed, men are like ibises.
Indeed, the land turns around as does a potter\u2019s wheel.
Indeed, crocodiles are full of their catch, for men go to them of their own free will!
Indeed, the desert is spread throughout Egypt.
Indeed, laughter has ceased, it is no longer done.
Indeed, you become deaf from noise
Indeed, great and small say: \u00abOh, if only I were dead!\u00bb
Oh, if only there were an end to people, no more conception and no more birth 
Then the world would be free from noise and there\u2019d be no strife.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Proof of feeling 4000 years ago! What one experiences around oneself, the soul mirrors 1:1. We live \u2039in\u203a feelings. It is the \u2039feeling soul\u203a described in anthroposophy, in which the soul becomes the mirror of the outside. How differently then the emotional life in ancient Greece and Rome showed itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cultivating Feelings <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Be it the inscription in the Delphic temple of Apollo, \u00abMeden agan\u00bb (English: everything with measure), be it in the Aristotelian ethics of the \u2039middle,\u203a in Greece, it is always about cultivating feelings. What counts here is not to live in feelings that nature gives away, but to shape feelings. This is staged in ancient Rome: Caesar returns from his campaign in Gaul and millions are lining the streets \u2013 jubilation after jubilation. The commander greets the Gods, and it seems as if they return his greeting. There, standing directly behind Caesar on the richly decorated chariot, is a simple soldier whispering in his ear: \u00abMemento Mori \u2013 Remember, you too are mortal.\u00bb This is the mastery of feelings! If Egypt reminds us of childhood, the childhood of feelings, here is youth, in which one arranges and seizes feelings. In Egypt, the environment, the periphery, determines what we feel. In Greece, it is \u2013 driven by the invention of theatre \u2013 the personality that is able to grasp the highs and lows of the soul. The feeling concentrates itself into a condensed point and becomes the instrument of the personality. Every war increases the disciplining of feeling. The soul calls you with every fibre to flee, but the drilling and fear of one’s own rank forces one to stay. And today? Years ago, when I witnessed a serious accident on the highway, I understood: in the lane next to me, a driver had fallen asleep, rammed a small truck, which then skidded and overturned. In the rearview mirror, I saw the driver’s fear-distorted face without emotion – enraptured, as if I were a spectator of a movie and not of a real tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jasminka Bogdanovic, ‘Farbmeditation [Colour Meditation]’, 2013 Tempera on nettle, approx. 70 \u00d7 45 cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

What Grows in the Desert <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Modern art teaches us this in its paintings, compositions, and sculptures. One looks at the colors yellow and orange of Mark Rothko and feels nothing, there is also no title given, which could say, what one should feel here. If one doesn\u2019t give up here but looks and asks and offers feelings to the picture, then a secret conversation with the picture begins. And from the conversation, perceptions grow – quietly and deeply. Rudolf Steiner describes this moment in his saying \u2039Stars once spoke to men.\u203a<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> First, he outlines our current alienation from the world: \u00abTheir silencing is the fate of the world.\u00bb This is followed with the phrase: \u00abIn the mute silence, however, ripens \/ What men speak to stars.\u00bb If feeling became a point in ancient Greece with the birth of the free personality, today it unfolds from conversation, conversation with the world and with oneself. Whether in Islam or in Buddhism and Christianity: the saint finds a way in the desert, finds a way in this emptiness of feeling to address the word to God. The dialogue with oneself and the world has this barrenness as its source, and from this silent speech new feelings sprout. From speaking and listening, hearing and stammering, feeling awakens, and the heart begins to understand anew. How easily it happens that I overlook or disregard these feelings, because they do not burn like their emotional precursors\u2019 \u2039indignation\u203a and \u2039enthusiasm,\u203a but signify the future in silent glow. If the Greek mind-soul sought distance from the world to get a grip on feelings, today’s consciousness-soul seeks resonance in order to bring forth new feelings. Certainly, quite a few people faced this dilemma during the Christmas season: everything is composed for inwardness, the burning tree, the songs in thirds, the devotion of children, and one feels guilty that the spirit of Christmas doesn\u2019t want to set in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How would it be to feel no guilt here, but to enter quietly and energetically into conversation and to individually animate the lost present, to generate a new \u2039now\u203a? There are a hundred opportunities every day: the more boring a conference, the more trivial a human encounter, the more external a reading, the more attractive the moment is to now give it its interior. It is not about charging the moment emotionally \u2013 that would be to (Luciferian) sentimentality, (Ahrimanic) callousness. It is about forming in oneself resonant spaces so that something of the hidden and concealed can reveal itself. \u00abHuman beings are the soul of nature,\u00bb says Friedrich Hegel. To create feelings anew means therefore to understand this Hegelian sentence as a mission. While in today’s prosperity we consume the earth’s resources, consume its life, we thus give it new spiritual life. This is perhaps already a first splendor of the Aquarian Age. We humans give new life, and it comes, as in the image of Aquarius from the soul center, the feeling of the soul. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Will Arrives <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u00abBut Christ commands it!\u00bb These are the closing words of Pope Urban II’s speech at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. Thousands, hundreds of thousands are driven, by this statement, from family and home to Palestine. Just as the word of the Pharaoh called for the building of pyramids, it is once again the power of a higher authority of some kind that determines the will of human beings. To follow a higher will, that was the basic trait in the childhood of mankind, in ancient Egypt, Babylon and Assyria. \u00abI actually always make solo trips, but for once I didn’t want to have to decide anything,\u00bb is how a participant in a study trip explained his decision to me. To this day, this soul attitude of taking the will from the periphery persists. Particularly when a lot of people are together, it can drive groups and lead to terrible things. As in the development of feeling, the will of the Greek-Roman culture from the periphery also becomes a condensed point. Two and a half thousand years ago, Athens provoked the Persian Empire and the Great King Darius sent a force. The Athenians consulted the oracle of Delphi, which soon determined the destiny for the next 1,000 years: \u00abUnfortunate ones, what are you still doing sitting? Flee from here.\u00bb<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But against the commands of the gods, Miltiades faced the Persian superiority and against the 150 year tradition of warfare, he opened the phalanx and undercut the rain of Persian spears to win the battle. The will \u2013 and there are a hundred stories and incidents of this – drives the personality. The idea, the personally set goal, gives direction and strength to the will. Not unlike \u2039feeling, \u203a \u2039will\u203a also becomes a condensed point, an instrument of the free personality. No wonder that the ancient myths and sagas, from Oedipus to Tantalus to Antigone, have guilt as their theme. Whoever detaches himself and his will from divine reason and from tradition takes guilt upon himself.  <\/p>\n\n\n

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Jasminka Bogdanovic, ‘Horizonte [Horizons]’, 2017 Tempera on canvas, 200 \u00d7 80cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

He Who Knows Nothing of the Path<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u00abI want so much. I just don’t know what!\u00bb sang actress Marika R\u00f6kk in 1942. This is how the will often seems to be today. It doesn’t know where to go. The Greek ideal, where a thought leads the will, in its consequence, opens the door to fundamentalism and leads to the abysmal sentence: \u00abThe end justifies the means.\u00bb Everything is subordinated to the goal that the thought sets itself. Where \u2039will\u203a becomes a condensed point, it becomes destructive. We lose the periphery. In his book \u2039Klimapsychologie\u203a [Climate Psychology], Stefan Ruf has found the psychological causes of the climate crisis in this loss of the periphery.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> How does the will develop and how should it develop today? This is shown by the new way in which we tell stories cinematically worldwide. From James Bond to Schindler’s List, all feature films follow the Greek ideal of will: there is a villain to defeat, people to save, and achieving this goal determines the plot. The more obstacles there are on the way, the greater the tension. For about ten years now, the series format of streaming services has dominated. Here, the story doesn\u2019t follow a line, as Aristotle already gave in his Poetics, but the narrative opens a field, a field of fate. There is no longer a beginning and an end, but a network of relationships and life. What becomes of the goal? As in life, it can hardly be fixed in thought, but the path is formed in the dialogue between the inner compass and the present. The beginning of Christian Morgenstern’s poem: \u00abHe who does not know of the goal cannot have the way,\u00bb is therefore much more apt the other way round: \u00abHe who does not know of the way will not have the goal\u00bb: The question to young people: \u2039What do you want to become?\u203a \u2013 is therefore, a Greek question and not a contemporary one. It overlooks the fact that the path of life results from the dialogue between internal orientation and external observation. \u00abNavigating according to moving goals\u00bb is what this is called in economic language. As in feeling, today, the will unfolds in theconversation of the internal driving force and what is happening at the moment. Biologist and educator Wolfgang Schad has expressed this change in the formula that Goethe’s \u00abFaust\u00bb represents the 19th century and \u2039Wilhelm Meister,\u203a where it is no longer the will of an individual but rather the constellation of a group that drives the action forward, corresponding to today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the Part to the Whole<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the novel \u00abFr\u00e4ulein Smillas Gesp\u00fcr f\u00fcr Schnee\u00bb (Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow), the Inuit talk about snow. There are 60 different names for it \u2013 what a variety! The terms aspic and crusted, powder and cardboard snow might be known, but no one these days will be able to make 60 distinctions. Ancient Egypt is a cosmos of such details. For example, a surgical papyrus describes in 40 steps what to do in the event of a head injury. How different it is when the philosopher Thales stands at the pyramid of Cheops and asks a hierophant about its height. \u00abThis is mystery knowledge,\u00bb according to legend, the temple servant replied. Thales measures the shadow length of his stick and that of the pyramid and thus finds the building height: 150 meters. Today, students in 6th grade learn it as the theorem of intersecting lines. It is the one idea, the mathematical law, which summarizes all phenomena and condenses them into one point. \u00abEverything comes from water!\u00bb \u00abEverything comes from fire!\u00bb \u2013 these are the Greek cosmologies that trace all creation back to one idea. From the part, the mind progresses to the whole and begins to grasp the how and why and loses the who in the process. With Greek thinking it succeeds to dominate the world, to make nature subject to itself. But the laws, with which one grasps the world in the spirit, have no life, and so thinking in ideas and laws pushes back life, bringing death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Becoming a Master of Thinking<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A hundred years ago, physicists discovered that either-or does not always apply in nature, but contradictions are part of creation. What was shown by the light (it cannot be more contradictory) as particles and as radiation, shows itself \u2013 depending on how one asks \u2013 in all fields today. Objectivity and subjectivity blur into each other, the part and the whole come into conversation, and this is how thinking should be today, so that it enters into a conversation between the particular and the general. The teacher, who knows about temperament and the seven-year cycle, takes a particular student as an individual, unique student. Author Joseph Weizenbaum<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> thus distinguishes between human and technical thinking. He takes the three training levels \u2013 apprentice, journeyman, and master \u2013 as an image. The apprentice, the trainee, learns the rules of his trade. As a journeyman, he masters the rules. As a master, he knows when the rules do not apply. According to Weizenbaum, mastery in thinking means being able to play in the game of the one and the all, of rules and individual cases. It means accepting contradiction. As in feeling and in the will, the soul awakens in thinking, where it conquers the dialogue, the conversation of condensed point and circumference.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jasminka Bogdanovic, ‘Horizonte [Horizons]’, 2017 Tempera on canvas, approx. 180 \u00d7 80 cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

If in classical Greek times the soul became a point in the will, in thinking and feeling from a unity with the circumference and was thus able to seize itself and to push open the door to freedom, today it awakens to the conversation of circumference and point, of I and world. In Egypt the soul was carried by the environment. If it lost this circumference, it was itself lost. In Greece and Rome it became a personality, and where it did not succeed in this, it was lost, threatened with death. Transferred to contemporary times, this means that we exist today, that we actually exist where we find ourselves in this conversation. How do I become capable of this conversation? By seeking conversation in my soul where it is most lacking, where it is silent, where shadows of the soul are repressed and unseen. Where it is possible to say yes to one’s own shadow, to learn to ride the dragon, as author Veit Lindau<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> describes, the soul gains the key to learning how to celebrate the conversation of point and periphery, of I and world, and thus to rise in the will, feeling and thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Translation<\/strong> Monika Werner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five thousand years ago, the soul directed divine or royal will \u2013 feeling and thinking were determined from the periphery. With the birth of personality, the soul became a condensed point, lost the relationship and gained itself – and today? \u00abIt is not what we experience, but how we feel, it is that which we experience that determines our fate.\u00bb This is what author Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, giving us a hint, especially for the beginning of the year. Without a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9159,"featured_media":43942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8839,8793],"tags":[11287,8798],"class_list":["post-44395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature-experience","category-philosophy","tag-2023-1-2-en","tag-deepening"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}