Pink, small, and punctual,
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May,
Dear to the moss,
Known by the knoll,
Next to the robin
In every human soul.
Bold little beauty,
Bedecked with thee,
Nature forswears
Antiquity.
—Emily Dickinson, “May-Flower”
***
Greetings one and all,
Many thanks, as always, for your help and support, in all ways, but particularly with our “spring cleaning” project mentioned last week.
It went so well, we’re continuing it this week, with a different set of books, so do take a glance at the list.
With warmest wishes for the week and beyond,
—John-Scott
Spring Sale! 60% off these highlighted titles. Use offer code SPRING at checkout. Valid until 5/24/23.
60% discount applies only to the books featured above.
Offer code SPRING must be entered at checkout and cannot be added after an order is placed. Online orders only. This offer cannot be applied to any previous orders.
From the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History
Translated by Dorothy Osmond and Johanna Collis
7 lectures in Dornach, Switzerland, March 11-23, 1923 (CW 222)
READ MORE | CONTENTS
Everything calls upon us today to be whole human beings, not only to surrender ourselves to passive ideas that stream to us from the outer world, but to unfold inner activity, to experience the life of thought, the life of ideas, too, with inner activity, with the will. But for this, human nature today is in many respects much too weak-spirited—not to say, too cowardly. For when a person applies his will to any combination of ideas, he immediately thinks: That is not objective; that is I myself; I myself am formulating the ideas. This is because he is afraid to shape his will in such a way that it can experience objective reality in the spiritual world. But without the will, he can experience nothing in the spiritual world, and therefore nothing objective either. Of course, the purely emotional will, the will that is dependent merely on the physical body, or at most on the etheric body, cannot penetrate into a spiritual world at all; it can only enable one to become a head-being. For the head is able—it does not move but lets itself be carried—the head is able to give itself up passively to what passes one by in the world like a film.
With the whole of our being, we must share in the world’s activity in order to reach the spiritual. This is what emerges again and again from all our studies and must be kept most clearly in mind today.
—Rudolf Steiner, lecture of March 12, 1923, in The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History (CW 222)