NEWSLETTER[Image: graphicform] Anthroposophical Society in America AUTUMN 1985 Published by the Anthroposophical Society in America for its Members contents Rudolf Steiner “Spirit” and “Soul” Explained to an English Audience, Oxford 2 1922 Willi Kux Recollections of Rudolf Steiner, 1924—The Christening 4 Christof Lindenau Toward a Spiritual Practice in Thinking, Part VI 5 Toward a Meditative Structuring of Group Study George O’Neil and How to Read a Book: A Study of Rudolf Steiner’s 7 Gisela O’Neil Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Part IX Rudolf Steiner On Poetry of the Future, and the Value of Humor 9 —Why a Satire, Berlin 1916 PUBLICATIONS Agnes Macbeth Rudolf Steiner: The Realm of Language and the Lost 11 Unison of Speaking and Thinking Agnes Macbeth Rudolf Steiner: Twelve Moods 11 Susan Lowndes Rudolf Steiner: The Human Soul in Relation to the World Evolution 11 Patricia Moreell Rudolf Steiner: Man’s Being, His Destiny, and World Evolution 12 Maria St. Goar Heten Wilkens: Faust—Freiheit auf dem Weg 12 Alice Bennett Ehrenfried Pfeiffer: Biodynamic Gardening and Farming, Vols. 12 1,2,3 Stephen Eberhart Arnold Bernhard: Projektive Geometrie 13 Diane Cohen Lois Schroff: A Painter’s Handbook, Experiencing 14 Color Between Darkness and Light Rose Herbeck Hella Krause-Zimmer: Bernward von Hildesheim 14 Ruth Mariott Olaf Koob: Erkennen und Heilen 15 Jerome Soloway Roy Wilkinson: The Interpretation of Fairy Tales 15 and Commentary on the Old Testament Gisela O’Neil Catalogue: Reproduktionen aus dem malerischen Werk 15 von Rudolf Steiner MEMBERSHIP New Members and Members Who Have Died 16 John G. Root In Memoriam Ernst Daniel 16 Rudolf Steiner Union With the Departed: In the Past and Today, Dornach 1917 17 Gladys Hahn Glimpses of the Earliest Anthroposophists 17 Henry B. Monges Christmas Conference 1923 Report: 20 The History of the Anthroposophical Society in America REPORTS Summer Conferences and Workshops 23 Sandra Doren Healing Forces: Movement, Tone, Color, Marlboro, N.H. 23 Eugene Schwartz The Art of Teaching in Grades 1,2,3, Sacramento 24 Marjorie Spock and Others The Second Translator’s Workshop, East Sullivan, Me. 24 Patricia Kaminski & Stephen M. Johnson North American Youth Meeting. Harlemville, N.Y. 24 Ernst Katz The Dornach Youth Center, Progress Report 25 NOTES Announcements 26 “Spirit” and “Soul” according as we form the sound with one organ or another—with lips or teeth. Vowels arise in quite another Explained to an English Audience way. Vowels arise while guiding the breath stream through the vocal organs in a particular manner. We do not give by RUDOLF STEINER contour, we build the substance of the sound by means of Oxford, August 17, 1922, Excerpt vowels. The vowels as it were provide the substance, the stuff. The consonants mould and sculpt the substance This is the first part of Lect. II in Spiritual Values in Education and provided by the vowels. in Social Life. Please note: Throughout the German text, Rudolf And now—using the terms spirit and soul in the sense Steiner uses the English term "mind" we are giving them here—we can say: In the consonants of speech there is spirit, in the vowels there is soul. I have been informed that there was something When a child first begins to say AH [A] it is filled with difficult to understand in what I spoke about yesterday. In a kind of wonder, a marveling—a soul content. This particular that difficulties had arisen from my use of the content of soul is immediately present to us. It streams out words “spiritual” and “spiritual cognition.” This occa­ of the AH. When a child expressed the sound AY [E] it has sions me . to discuss the use of the words “spirit” and a kind of slight antipathy in its soul. It withdraws, starts “spiritual life” [spirituelles Leben] . we will understand back from the thing affecting it. AY [E] expresses some­ each other better during the next few days if I give these thing antipathetic in the soul. Wonder: AH. Antipathy: explanations of spirit, soul, and body today. AY. The vowels show soul content. The word “Geist” [spirit] and also the word “spirituell” When I form a consonant of any kind I give contour. I [spiritual] as used from the point of view and world surround and shape the vowel substance. When a child outlook from which I now speak, are generally not says Ma Ma—“AH” twice over—the gesture of “M” shows understood profoundly enough. When the word “Geist” is the child’s need to reach out to its mother for help. “AH” used, people take it to mean something like “intellectual” by itself would be what the child feels and experiences or to mean much the same as the English word “mind.” about its mother. “M” is what it would like the mother to But what I mean here by “spiritual” and by “spirit” is do. So that Ma Ma contains the whole relationship to the something quite different. It must definitely not be con­ mother both according to spirit and soul. Thus we hear fused with all these things designated as “spirit” and language spoken, we hear its sense content, but we do not “spiritual” in mystical, fanatical, or superstitious sects and attend to the way spirit and soul lie hidden in language. movements; on the other hand it is quite distinct from True we are still occasionally aware of it in speech, but we what is meant by intellect or mind. fail to notice it in the whole human being. We see the outer If we can obtain an immediate concrete knowledge, a form of a man. Within are soul and spirit as they are true insight, into what is working in a small child up to the within speech. But this we no longer heed. time of changing its teeth—a working not directly percep­ There was a time, however, in ages past, when men tible, but observable in expressions of the child’s nature did heed it and they said not “In the beginning was the which may appear to us even primitive, that then is Spirit”—that would have been too abstract—but “In the “Spirit,” and that then is “Soul.” beginning was the Word,” for men still felt livingly how Nowhere in our observation of man and of nature are spirit was carried on the waves of speech. It is this spirit we confronted by spirit and soul so immediately as when and what is characteristic of it that we designate here when we contemplate the manifestations of life in a tiny child. we use the word “spiritual”—a thing not revealed in Here, as I said yesterday, in the moulding of the brain, in intellect, nor yet in what we call mind. Mind and spirit are the shaping of the whole organism, spiritual forces are at distinct from one another. They differ as much as my work, soul essences are at work. What we see are manifes­ personality differs from the reflection I see in the looking tations of life in the child; we perceive these with our glass. When I stand there and hold a mirror and look at senses. But what works through from behind the veil of myself in it, my reflection is in the mirror. This reflection sense perceptible things is spirit, is soul; so to be appre­ makes the same movements as I do, it looks like me, but it hended as nowhere else in life unless we have accom­ is not I; it differs from me in that it is an image, whereas I plished an inner soul development. am a reality. “Spirit” holds sway in hidden depths. Thus we must say: to immediate ordinary perception, Intellect only has the image of spirit. Mind is the reflected spirit is quite unknown. At most, soul can manifest in image of the spirit. Mind can show what spirit does. Mind ordinary percepts. But we must feel and sense it through can make the motions of spirit. But mind is passive. If the percept. someone gives me a blow, mind can reflect it. Mind If I may use an image to indicate what is meant—not cannot itself give the blow. Spirit is activity. Spirit is to explain it—I would say: When we speak, our speech always doing. Spirit is creative. Spirit is the essence of comes from words, sounds made up of consonants and productivity, productivity itself. Mind, intellect, is copy, vowels. Observe the great difference between consonants reflection, passivity itself: that thing within us which and vowels in speech. Consonants round off a sound give enables us, when we are older, to understand the world. If it angularity, make it into a breath sound or a wave sound intellect, if mind, were active we should not be able to 2 [Image: photograph]Rudolf Steiner with the Oxford audience understand the world. Mind has to be passive so that the on it, our footprints remain in it. Now suppose someone world may be understood through it. If it were active it finds our footprints; will he say: “Beneath the earth, below would continually alter and impinge upon the world. there, are certain forces that have shaped the earth so that Mind is the passive image of the spirit. it shows these concave forms?” No one would say such a Thus: Just as we look away from the reflection to the thing. Any person would say: “Someone has walked here.” man himself when we seek reality, so when we seek the Materialism says: I find imprints in the brain, the reality of spirit and soul we must endeavor to pass from brain has impressions.