To be updated soon!
Comparable to an “almanac” for many days of the year a freely translated quote will be given from a lecture that R. Steiner gave on, or close to, that particular day.
These passages may prepare us for appreciating the significance of individual days (like major Holy Days), understanding the seasons of the year, and more.
August 27, 1923
Have a look at a book from the Middle Ages. Every single letter is like a painting. One can see how the eye has rested on every single letter. The whole soul constitution of the person whose eye rested on those letters was more inclined to live itself into the revelations of the spiritual world.
And now have a look at something that has been written today-one can almost not read it any more. Those are not letters that have resulted from a joyful painting impulse but rather those are letters that have resulted as though they had been thrown out from a mechanical movement of the hand.
In addition, we are starting to write not even any more out of our humanity but rather by putting into motion machines, typewriters, and so on (keypads?) such that we have no more direct connection to that which is in front of us.
Put that together with the cars and you get those observations out of which can be seen that the Human Being is being driven more and more out of the spiritual world.
Do not believe though that I am an arch-conservative that would like to entreat for a banning of the automobiles, typewriters, and so on. These items must come and we must accept them as we accept night following day. They are justified. We must not seek to eradicate them but to the contrary to tend to them appropriately. But the enthusiasm for these items can become very one sided.
But in order to have a healthy development of mankind to all that is rumbling in the illegible letters and to all that races so terribly in the speeding cars, must be added a strong inclination towards spiritual knowledge, a spiritual feeling and a spiritual will.
March 10th, 1913
Many people today think that it is not necessary to worry about the details of the spiritual world while one is alive because one will have, so to speak, plenty of time to experience the spiritual world after death. This is wrong. After death one will not be able to interact properly with the spiritual beings that are there to help us and one will come in the next incarnation with even less ability to get all the fruits from the life on earth. This can lead in a third incarnation to one of two possibilities: either one becomes a very selfish person with even less interest in the spiritual world, (the inveterate materialist)- a Luciferic influence; or one adopts a very rigid, fanatic, closed minded religious attitude – an Ahrimanic influence.
(from the lecture cycle “Life between Death and Rebirth”)
February 6th, 2013
If one understands it correctly one can see in the descriptions about Parsifal, in the Holy Grail story, all those details of the necessary training for our consciousness soul so that out of this consciousness soul one can become master over the chaotic forces fighting one against the other in the Intellectual soul.
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A soul that is preoccupied only with the usual life of commerce, with the accounting books, or with materialistic science, fills itself with thought pictures that in later incarnations cloud the consciousness and make out the brain an unwieldy plastic mass that cannot be properly used by the thought forces. It is like a softening of the brain substance. That is why it is so important that we interpenetrate ourselves with spiritual conceptions of the world.
(from the lecture cycle “ The Mysteries of the East and of Christianity”)
January 1st, 1913
Our Movement is to be an anthroposophic one because through this movement it will be recognized more and more how the Human Being can come to a real Self Knowledge. The Human Being cannot yet come to full self-knowledge, not yet can Anthropos come to knowledge of Anthropos, Human come to knowledge of Human, as long as this Human regards the affairs that connect him/her to outer Nature only in a playful manner.
(from the lecture cycle “the Bhagavad Gita and the Letters of St. Paul” )