Harmony

52 Weeks of Steiner – Week 37  

To practice these principles is the important point. Time must be taken to observe things as though we were inside the things themselves with our thinking. We should submerge ourselves in the things and enter into their inner thought activity. If this is done, we gradually become aware of the fact that we are growing together with things. We no longer feel that they are outside us and we are here inside our shell thinking about them. Instead we come to feel as if our own thinking occurred within the things themselves. When a man has succeeded to a high degree in doing this, many things will become clear to him.

Rudolf Steiner, Practical Training in Thought
18 January 1909, GA 108

Thinking clearly involves stepping out of ourselves and into the other. Whether the other is human, animal, plant or inanimate, we can only warm to and come to a relationship with something when we consciously and objectively look at things and then think about them in freedom from past experiences and habits.

The sixth exercise is to develop harmony with the previous five practices. In the lecture series At The Gates of Spiritual Science, Steiner describes this step as:

Inner Balance. This is a natural outcome of the other five qualities. The pupil must keep the six qualities in mind, take his life in hand, and be prepared to progress slowly in the sense of the proverb about drops of water wearing away a stone.“

Rudolf Steiner, At the Gates of Spiritual Science
September 2, 1906 GA 95

I really appreciate that he uses the term qualities to describe his exercises. It seems less pedantic to work on building qualities than it does to work on specific exercises. There are a mulitutde of different ways to build qualities within our selves, some will work better than others for each individual person. My hope is that you will find a way to build these qualities within yourself in freedom, choosing what works for you in the time that you are in.

Lastly, I wanted to add Steiner’s entire description of the six practices from the lecture above. In your travels through digging deeper into anthroposophy and these practices you’ll find some who will say the exercises should be done in a very particular way, and I’d like to remind everyone of Steiner’s translated words, that leave so much open to individualization and freedom.

I. Thought control. This means preventing, at least for a short time every day, all sorts of thoughts from drifting through the mind, and bringing a certain ordered tranquillity into the course of thinking. You must take a definite idea, set it in the centre of your thinking, and then logically arrange your further thoughts in such a way that they are all closely linked with the original idea. Even if you do this for only a minute, it can be of great importance for the rhythm of the physical and etheric bodies.

II. Initiative in action. You must compel yourself to some action, however trivial, which owes its origin to your own initiative, to some task you have laid on yourself. Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfil the same purpose.

III. Tranquillity. Here the pupil learns to regulate his emotions so that he is not at one moment up in the skies and at the next down in the dumps. Anyone who refuses to do this for fear of losing his originality in action or his artistic sensibility can never go through occult development. Tranquillity means that you are master of yourself in the most intense pleasure and in the deepest grief. Indeed, we become truly receptive to the joys and sorrows of the world only when we do not give ourselves over egotistically to them. The greatest artists owe their greatest achievements precisely to this tranquillity, because through it they have opened their eyes to subtle and inwardly significant impressions.

IV. Freedom from prejudice. This, the fourth characteristic, sees good in everything and looks for the positive element in all things. Relevant to this is a Persian legend told of Christ Jesus. One day Christ Jesus saw a dead dog lying by the wayside; he stopped to look at the animal while those around him turned away in disgust. Then Jesus said: “What beautiful teeth the dog has!” In that hideous corpse he saw not what was ugly or evil but the beauty of the white teeth. If you can acquire this mood, you will look everywhere for the good and the positive, and you will find it everywhere. This has a powerful effect on the physical and etheric bodies.

V. Faith. Next comes faith, which in its occult sense implies something rather different from its ordinary meaning. During occult development you must never allow your judgment of the future to be influenced by the past. Under certain circumstances you must exclude all that you have experienced hitherto, so that you can meet every new experience with new faith. The occultist must do this quite consciously. For instance, if someone comes up to you and tells you that the church steeple is crooked and at an angle of 45 degrees, most people would say that is impossible. The occultist must always leave a way open to believe. He must go so far as to have faith in everything that happens in the world; otherwise he bars the way to new experiences. You must always be open to new experiences; by this means your physical and etheric bodies will be brought into a condition which may be compared with the contented mood of a broody hen.

VI. Inner Balance. This is a natural outcome of the other five qualities. The pupil must keep the six qualities in mind, take his life in hand, and be prepared to progress slowly in the sense of the proverb about drops of water wearing away a stone.

Rudolf Steiner, At the Gates of Spiritual Science
September 2, 1906 GA 95

This is a wonderful lecture series and if you continue beyond this lecture you will see how Steiner tied together eastern and western religious practices into his own spiritual practice. It really is beautiful the depth of interest he had in the development of the human spirit.

There are also so many more meditations and exercises Steiner put forth for those who would like to continue to work on their ability to think, see, hear and feel things clearly. Two of my go-to texts are Start Now, edited by Christopher Bamford and Guided Self Study by Torin M Finser. They each provide an interesting view of spiritual development based on Steiner’s lectures. The same, but very different. These are only two of the book available that will show you how Steiner’s words have been individualized. Of course, I always recommend reading Steiner’s lectures on rsarchive.org.

(This is part of a weekly serial started on Michaelmas 2023. To see the other entries, please see the post linked HERE and scroll down to the bottom for individual links)

Until next time,
Marina