עברית The Centenary of the lecture cycle, The Boundaries of Natural Science, 27 September- 3 October 1920, at the unofficial opening of the short lived first Goetheanum and University of Spiritual Science: "Everything that was paralysing began to give way"
Michaelmas 1920 Michaelmas 2020: We must develop this New Yoga Will
“The development of a breathing of the soul-spirit within the cognitional process through perception and thinking”.
The Centenary of the lecture cycle, The Boundaries of Natural Science, 27 September- 3 October 1920, at the unofficial opening of the short lived first Goetheanum and University of Spiritual Science.
"Everything that was paralyzing began to give way"
Rudolf Meyer on the unofficial opening of the short living first Goetheanum and University of Spiritual Science:
And then came the [non-official] opening of the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel in autumn 1920. At the same time, it formed the prelude to those anthroposophical university courses, which were organized with great initiative in various cities in the following period and which brought the movement the influx of academic youth, but then also the most violent political opposition, which was preparing itself more and more threateningly for an annihilation blow finally put an end to his public lecturing activities within Germany through organized physical attacks on Rudolf Steiner.
I was lucky enough to have received an invitation to participate in the opening. As representatives of the various disciplines, we were able to gather around Rudolf Steiner, who sovereignly embraced them all: embodying a true Universitas of all sciences in himself and creatively performing for our time. (...)
The deepest impression in those days, however, was probably this: to experience Rudolf Steiner as the creative artist who did not want to leave the sciences without the healing power of the arts. Because the one-sided intellectual development of our time, which we cannot escape from, needs this balance if human beings are to experience themselves healthy. And how well the view of the Goetheanum building, whose architect was Rudolf Steiner himself, flowed through the whole attitude to life! ...
The early morning light of a coming world day that wanted to emerge from the night of hatred of nations and a civilization that denied the spirit heralded itself with this building. The creator of the Goetheanum ended the opening lecture in the words:
To turn towards the light
In dark times of need,
To the spiritual sunrise,
Send the gazes of the soul:
Let it be here and stay for evermore.
After such a festival of humanity, who could indulge in the cultural pessimism that had become fashionable? Everything that was paralyzing began to disappear from the soul.
(From Rudolf Meyer, Wer war Rudolf Steiner? Sein Leben und sein Wirken, Stuttgart, 2. Aufl. 1962).
COGNITIVE YOGA
Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality
From the Introduction
Rudolf Steiner started from the highest and most recent soul faculties that humanity has developed in the modern age: clear and exact thinking and lucid sense perception. This growing tip of the evolution of human consciousness can be transformed in a twofold way. On the one hand, the clearest and most exact thinking can be spiritualized. This takes place through The Philosophy of Freedom. On the other hand, clear and wide-awake sense perception can be spiritualized. This is done by a spiritualization of Goethe's study of the psychological effects of colours. Both can be transformed into new faculties of supersensible research. In relation to this task of spiritual science, Rudolf Steiner introduced the concept of a ‘new Yoga will’, in the comprehensive context of human and cosmic evolution, in his lecture cycle, The Mission of Michael (GA 194, 1919). He described it as a way to create the ‘future culture of Michael' and establish the ‘Christ-filled soul relation to nature’.
In the lecture of 30 November, he describes it as follows:
“Humanity's will and cosmic thought cross in this crossing point, just as the objective and the subjective element once crossed in the breath. We must learn to feel how our will works through our eyes and how the activity of the senses... brings about the crossing of cosmic thoughts and humanity's will. We must develop this new Yoga will”.
A year later Rudolf Steiner introduced this new yoga practice as a method of spiritual development and spiritual research in the inaugural lecture cycle of the High School of Spiritual Science, entitled The Boundaries of Natural Science (GA 322, 1920), given to anthroposophically oriented academics, scientists, artists, physicians and socially engaged people:
“What, in fact, is the process of perception? It is nothing but a modified process of inhalation. As we breathe in, the air presses upon our diaphragm and upon the whole of our being. Cerebral fluid is forced up through the spinal column into the brain. In this way a connection is established between breathing and cerebral activity. And the part of the breathing that can be discerned as active within the brain works upon our sense activity as perception. Perception is thus a kind of branch of inhalation. In exhalation, on the other hand, cerebral fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of cerebral fluid is bound up with the activity of the will and also of exhalation. Anybody who really studies The Philosophy of Freedom, however, will discover that when we achieve pure thinking, thinking and willing coincide. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. Thus pure thinking turns out to be related to what the Oriental experienced in the process of exhalation. Pure thinking is related to exhalation just as perception is related to inhalation. We have to go through the same process as the yogi but in a way that is, so to speak, pushed back more into the inner life. Yoga depends upon a regulation of the breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What can Western man do? He can raise into clear soul experiences perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which are otherwise united only abstractly, formally, and passively, so that inwardly, in his soul-spirit, he has the same experience as he has physically in breathing in and out. Inhalation and exhalation are physical experiences: when they are harmonized, one consciously experiences the eternal. In everyday life we experience thinking and perception. By bringing mobility into the life of the soul, one experiences the pendulum, the rhythm, the continual interpenetrating vibration of perception and thinking. A higher reality evolves for the Oriental in the process of inhalation and exhalation; the Westerner achieves a kind of breathing of the soul-spirit in place of the physical breathing of the yogi. He achieves this by developing within himself the living process of modified inhalation in perception and modified exhalation in pure thinking, by weaving together thinking and perceiving. And gradually, by means of this rhythmic pulse, by means of this rhythmic breathing process in perception and thinking, he struggles to rise up to spiritual reality in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. And when I indicated in my book The Philosophy of Freedom, at first only philosophically, that reality arises out of the interpenetration of perception and thinking, I intended, because the book was meant as a schooling for the soul, to show what Western man can do in order to enter the spiritual world itself. The Oriental says: systole, diastole; inhalation, exhalation. In place of these the Westerner must put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of a breathing of the soul-spirit within the cognitional process through perception and thinking”. (GA 322, 3. 10. 1920)
Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality