עברית This also belongs every year to my inner celebrations of the end of August as part of the sacred transitions and transformations at the gates of holy September: the birth of two of the greatest modern teachers and initiates of humanity, who were, are and always will be among the brightest stars that constantly illuminate and fructify our spirits with eternally working, active, spiritual creativity and innovation on the highest levels.
Every Year at the End of August: Double Birth at the Dawn of Fall
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 27 August 1770 (November 14, 1831)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 28 August 1749 (22 March 1832)
I am inwardly warming up when I write these halting words about these spirits to which I owe, with deepest awe, some of the most blissful moments of my life. I am inwardly warming up when I write these halting words about these spirits to which I return again and again, with deepest awe, to recreate in my soul some of the most blissful moments of my life. This also belongs every year to my inner celebrations of the end of August as part of the sacred transitions and transformations at the gates of holy September: the birth of two of the greatest modern teachers and initiates of humanity, who were, are and always will be among the brightest stars that constantly, ever anew, revive and reopen our path, illuminate it, fructify our spirits with eternally working, active, spiritual creativity and innovation on the highest levels. They belong to those human spirits that make spiritual science- as the future spiritual impulse of humanity- at all possible!
Hegel will always appear to most people so remote from real life, so abstract and cold. However, if you take seriously the most productive and blissful task there is in our modern spiritual life, to bring everything and everybody to new spiritual becoming and life; if you wish to join the great resurrectors of humanity and the world, well, then, if this is what you sincerely wish, it is just for you that I post below few of Rudolf Steiner's loving and truthful words- taken from his magnificent lecture about Hegel's eternal spiritual significance- that first portray the real man Hegel was, as a lecturer, which are so revealing about his whole humanness, and then move on to describe his eternal spiritual significance:
"Hegel was a strange personality even in outward appearance when he lectured. Before him were the written pages of his manuscript, which, so it seems, were always in disarray so that he was constantly turning and searching among his pages. He was somewhat awkward in his presentation and laborious in his delivery. While he was lecturing, the thought within him worked out of deep substrata of the soul, forming itself only with great difficulty into a word, which then issued forth as if in a stuttering, disjointed manner. Yet, his lecture, which reached its audience in this way as if constantly interrupting itself, is supposed to have made an extraordinarily grand impression...".
And then, bearing Hegel’s humanity in mind and heart, let us approach his immense, eternal spiritual significance, that which makes him one of the greatest teachers of humanity in all times:
As in a picture, humanity appears to be sinking into the material element, with Hegel standing in the center, working himself out of it with all his might and snatching away from Ahriman what he has that is good, namely, the abstract logic that we need for our inner liberation, without which we will not achieve pure thinking. Hegel wrests this logic from the powers of gravity, from the terrestrial powers, presenting it in all its cold abstractness, so that it may not live in the Ahrimanic element dwelling in man, but can rise into human thinking. Yes, this Hegelian logic is wrested from the Ahrimanic powers, torn free from them and bestowed on humanity. This is what mankind needs and without which it cannot progress — which, however, had first to be rescued from Ahriman. Thus, Hegelian logic actually remains something eternal; thus, it must continue to be effective. It must ever and again be sought for. We cannot do without it. (Rudolf Steiner, lecture of August 27, 1920, GA 199).
Becoming Goethe
or: frog becoming as a way to the higher worlds
Reminisces from Orust's summer festival, 2014, "The Art of Life"
Becoming Goethe means to experience how his real spiritual being is continuously becoming anew in the spiritual world, and not to hold onto what he achieved in his previous earthly life. Therefore, the phenomenological study of forms and the metamorphosis of forms, as Goethe and Goetheanism are understood today, can only be the preparatory stage, that must lead to learning from him the secrets of the spiritual forces of metamorphosis. To be in touch with the real spirit of Goethe, means, for example, to ask him: When you swim, fish-or frog like, or fly- bird like- in the life stream and move, become and act in the life stream, what are the etheric possibilities and actualities that you search for in order to enhance your own- and the world's- creative potentialities?- this is the most important question through which you become fully conscious in the etheric world. There Goethe stands in his full spiritual radiance as Guardian and teacher of the sacred forces of metamorphosis. This world is diametrically polar to our life in physical world. Everything is reversed there in comparison to here. What makes me more conscious here makes me fall asleep there- and vice versa. (for example, here I am fully awake when I am conscious of my own self-identity as an independent and different "I" than all other things and beings, whenever I think, feel, and will myself, out of my own volition, "I think, I feel, I will", experiencing and knowing very well that I move myself and not you. But out there self-centered-consciousness, all aspects of self-reference, is like going to sleep here in the night, you lose and forget yourself entirely when you are aware of yourself as an ordinary separate self. Now what wakes you up over there when you are becoming another being, a frog, or tree, a bird or a wasp? - (every night when we sleep we are actually becoming all these begins and many more... but we are unconscious of this life).
Truly, there you receive the Goethean power of metamorphosis, of becoming itself, not from your own being, or body, but purely through the power of becoming that flows through your actual becoming identified with this other being, and you experience it quite clearly: I am now a frog-like creature, I am really "kissed by a frog", in a manner of speaking, which is not only a simile or metaphor but rather very real (as long as we don't imagine "frog" to be what we imagine "frog" to be in our ordinary perceptions and representations; oh no, that's precisely the point: when we become "frog" we become something totally different than what we see, touch and hear physically as the physical being we call "frog", because we become one with the essence of “frogy-ness", which is an awe-inspiring, magnificently flowing, dynamically breathing, universal essence, cosmic even, spread far and wide around the whole earth, and has distinctive characteristics and life all of its own, which, in its turn, is woven with infinite multitudes of life streams, events and beings, with no end in sight: "Oh yes, Goethe's everlasting spirit radiance, resurrected, young and fresh than ever, how it lives and weaves, etherically, in our midst…!”