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The Cycle of the Year: as Breathing Process of the Earth (CW 223)

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5 lectures, Dornach, March 31 – April 8, 1923 (CW 223) "Human beings must attain an esoteric maturity in order to think not merely abstractly, but to be able to think so concretely that they can again become festival-creating. Then it will be possible again to unite something spiritual with the cycle of sense phenomena." ― Rudolf Steiner These five lectures were given at Easter, 1923. Rudolf Steiner, in a fully conscious way, laid a foundation for celebrating the Christian festivals―Christmas, Easter, St. John's, and Michaelmas. This is begun with a description of how the festival year evolved over long ages from the Earth's cycle of inbreathing and outbreathing. These forces are the Earth's soul activities in relation to the cosmos. Rudolf Steiner reveals the deep relationship between humanity and the seasons of the Earth, the solstices, and the equinoxes. And through the festivals of the seasons, he reveals humanity's relationship to the Christ Being The esoteric realities behind the festivals are also discussed in relation to sub-earthly and supra-earthly forces, the ancient Mysteries, the activity of the Archangel Michael, morality, and the arts. This book is a translation from German of Der Jahreskreislauf als Atmungsvorgang der Erde und die vier großen Festeszeiten. Die Anthroposophie und das menschliche Gemüt (GA 223).

110 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1984

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About the author

Rudolf Steiner

4,454 books1,130 followers
Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

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Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.

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