Listening while Acting

Drama is a red thread running through Rudolf Steiner’s career. He loved it. After all, drama is all about bringing the dramatic dimensions of life, the world, self-knowledge, the expansion of consciousness, and the realities within reality into living artistic forms.

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I am many. Marie Steiner reported that she’d never seen her husband happier than when he was working on his Mystery Dramas¹ in Munich. The images handed down through the generations depicting the end of his life are rather shocking: the moribund man making his way to the lectern for the so-called Drama Course² using his last ounce of strength, dragging his feet, and then, after making his statements on the art of drama, walking away rejuvenated with a slightly quickened step.

The red thread emerges:

• As a theater critic in his early adulthood, reviewing many performances in Vienna;³
• As director of the three Oberufer Christmas Plays;
• As director of two dramas by Éduard Schuré;
• With the staging of his four Mystery Dramas in Munich. As is well known, Rudolf Steiner did not continue his work on the Mystery Dramas due to the outbreak of the First World War and his many other priorities;
• In the further development of speech formation and eurythmy with Marie Steiner, along with artistic and cultural evenings with great stories and poems from world literature;
• By bringing the “path of initiation” into close connection with what is revealed in the arts in terms of forms, colors, sounds, words, and movements;⁴
• In regular collaboration with the famous Haass-Berkow acting ensemble, then in Gelsenkirchen, Germany; and with Georg Kugelmann and his ensemble, the New Artistic Stage Plays [Neukünstlerische Bühnenspiele] in Rostock, Germany;
• In his Drama Course, as a foundation of practical-artistic work for the revival of his Mystery Dramas (a fifth drama was planned) at the opening of the Second Goetheanum and for a later production of a play with the Haass-Berkow group.

From this abundance, a few practical viewpoints will be given below. The first surprising keyword in Steiner’s work with the dramatic arts is “listening.”

Listening Opens Deeper Dimensions

It was repeatedly reported how at ease people felt and how they seemed to grow beyond themselves as the Master selflessly listened to them, in an unconditionally open way. He gave himself entirely to the other person—without exerting any pressure on them. It was and is a redemptive experience. Such listening opens a listening space that lifts one up in liberation. Such a space makes it possible to express things that could not otherwise have been said. Selfless listening leads to a source of inspiration for both parties involved. This is exactly what artists such as the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the director György Tabori, and the clown Dimitri have reported. It wasn’t so much through instructions but rather through this unconditional listening that they were palpably able to change entirely the events on stage or in speech, opening up deeper dimensions of the work. This type of listening is much more difficult than one might think and requires constant practice.⁵

Rudolf Steiner practiced listening in an unusual way with actors. For example: In his Drama Course, he developed the texts out of movement.⁶ Using five Greek exercises,⁷ he recommended that actors listen to their text from the outside four times while they move to it gymnastically. The word comes to them from the outside! They move silently within it. This is a kind of listening contemplation. The inner dynamic of the word is transformed here into its own gymnastic movement—precise yet free at one and the same time. This turns everything inside-out and leads to the whole body becoming an ear, to speech becoming a movement, and not to the texts being “merely stamped upon the brain” and then—to quote Steiner—“the sounds being spat out.” Only with the final exercise, the throw of the javelin, do the protagonists finally speak themselves.

Metamorphosis of Speech into Drama

Whoever enters into this structure of intensive practice with a selfless self-initiative enters into a dialogue and begins to discover further layers of the roles, the speech, and the drama. But that’s not enough. This movement within the speech must become instinctive, must pass through the instinctual, that layer of the body’s cosmic wisdom, and thereby metamorphose into free intuitions on the stage.⁸ “More lives in you than you are able to bring to life solely through the contact of your nerve-sense organization with the world.”⁹ What is briefly described here contains a huge, dramatic inversion and paradigm shift for theater folk. One “becomes oneself the annihilator of what has become.”¹⁰ Inversion is not simply transformation, nor illustration. Something completely different emerges in the performance that is not present in the rehearsals. This may be made clear by the example of Marie Steiner reading as a muse for her husband Rudolf as he carved his large sculpture. The listening space was inspiring; what was heard was transformed. The metamorphosis from gymnastics and speech to a deed of artistic acting can be traced in a similar way.

This reveals a second keyword for Rudolf Steiner’s theatrical impulse: “metamorphosis”—of the instinctive, its inversion into artistic intuitions. Every performance is different from rehearsals. In between is a threshold, the Guardian, the dream life, and a journey to Hades, where one re-emerges from the River of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.¹¹ In the deed of acting, in waking-dreaming, in dreaming-waking, a will appears and resounds at the same time; a will that learns to understand and, above all, to experience what is only now beginning to emerge in a much larger soul-spiritual context.

“The actor snaps into action,” says Steiner.¹² This must be completely different in every action, in every scene. We see it intuitively, as self-evident, in every different articulation, tempo, tone, gesture, and facial expression of the actors.¹³ Within these elements, there is an inner space of soul and spirit, what we can call the expressive power behind the action. Without a change of will, a turn towards listening to this inner space, without this moment of death and resurrection, we see stage performers who always seem to simply act like themselves, sounding always the same regardless of the play or role or dramatic context.

Listening to See the Inner Gesture

The inner space of soul and spirit leads us to the third keyword: “gesture.” All manifestations of our world contain an inherent gesture. It’s essential to uncover this inner gesture of the role, of the action, of every sentence, of the atmosphere, of the sound. The gesture forms the bridge between the inner space of the scene, the speech, the character, the setting, etc., and one’s own inner space. This inner space actually does something: it ponders and stimulates creativity. Its external forms of existence are gestures.

This key opens a door called “listening all the way through.” If you recreate a gesture inwardly, a “sound mood” can emerge that underlies the event or scene. This inner sound makes it possible to objectify the often abstract, self-reflecting, psycho-subjective subtexts. Many theater artists search for “a second skin”¹⁴ where something resonates in the performance that’s more than what is seen externally on the stage: the play within the play in the here and now.¹⁵ In rehearsal, artists process the material until this immateriality can be revealed.¹⁶ The inexpressible of the infinite is part of this. One cannot speak about how intuitions work, nor about timelessness. In the Drama Course, Steiner repeatedly mentions how these kinds of things are not able to be explained by reason but are able to be experienced in action.

Everyone sees this intensity and feels it immediately when it occurs, when acting truly becomes acting. Everyone experiences a self-generating dynamic event. In the play, such a “magical” event must reinvent itself every time because it seizes something that wants to become, to come into existence, from out of the creative moment of the present (not from some current hype), and with a sense for detail. This creative moment instructs us in how the future is projecting into the present. Repetition and reproduction are of no interest to the spiritual world; all must be created anew every time.

Overcoming the Material

Along with the help of lights and sound, stage performances become imaginative transparencies. Vincent Baudriller, former director of the Avignon Festival, describes how theater is an act of overcoming the material: “an act of resistance and of freedom, a sensible experience of beauty, of violence, of the vulnerability of the living, of the complexity and contradictions of human society. . . . [Theater] freely finds its proper form, creating tension between words and images, bodies and languages, movement and space, fiction and reality.”¹⁷ Imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions of a transcendent world can be frighteningly true. Directors and stage artists live within them and thereby free themselves from the grip of fate, redeeming themselves by discovering their own destiny beyond the ego through the above-mentioned “inverted will,” the turning inside-out through deep, spiritual listening transformed into acting.

When we explore the questions involved with Rudolf Steiner and the art of acting, a spiritual reality must be confronted: “clairaudience.” Christian Morgenstern, as an audience member at the very first Mystery Dramas, asked himself in reference to the mental pictures of the author represented on the stage: “What are they? Did the poet see all of this or dream it?” Rudolf Steiner gave the answer: “He heard everything.”¹⁸ Steiner’s work includes an inner spiritual hearing. How often does he speak about what the spiritual world said or answered? It is an enormous expansion of consciousness for actors to incorporate this inner clairaudience in a wholly concrete way. What am I listening to when I listen inwardly? Who speaks?

In one of his poignant descriptions in the Drama Course, Rudolf Steiner described how, in his first Mystery Drama, he heard the three soul forces—Astrid, Philia, and Luna—beyond the threshold.¹⁹²⁰ With powers of rhythm, sound, and contraction, they weave “a soul-spiritual garment” and hand it to the painter Johannes Thomasius.²¹ Using the same means, Steiner as author, wrote down these words as he heard them. He wrote down the auditory side of language, the night side, with its rhythms, elevations, depressions, intensifications, and “glittering” sounds of German.²² The spiritual becomes sensible in the soul-spiritual garment that he gives it. Steiner emphasized that not one single thought, not one single mental picture, is contained within the spiritual aspect of language. These elements belong to the other side, the day side of language: the content expressed in words and sentences. We modern human beings constantly strive to understand what is written or what is said—and thereby ignore the night side. The waking day understanding can hardly understand the scene in the Mystery Dramas with the soul forces described above.

It is art itself (as in the scene of the soul forces) that can offer the field of experience needed to enter into a listening dialog with something conveyed from another perspective. Spiritual listening, through absolute silence, means opening up a much larger space than the earthly one.²³ Here, too, it takes some practice to listen all the way through to what is revealed between sounding and fading into silence, between appearing and disappearing.²⁴ In the experience of listening, this kind of spiritual listening becomes an interpreter, a translator. Of what? Of an immaterial substance, a presence, of both good and evil.

One encounters this in the play. Strangely enough, the environment, the preparations, and the post-production work are all an essential part of this. It’s part of the warming-up, the tuning not only of body and voice but also of the space of the stage to what will be present there, right down to the technical aspects of acoustics. It’s also exciting to feel what’s physically, soulfully, and spiritually present within yourself before you perform. And the reverberation, the echo, of practicing—of practicing to hear the silence within the silence—is an essential part of this.²⁵ Over time, this inner hearing makes possible direct inspirations that the reflecting brain, the eye of mental picturing, could never have imagined. Rudolf Steiner even says in the Drama Course: “Because that which is thought-like is actually the death of art, the moment the revelation of some essence passes over into thought, art is already passed by.”²⁶ Could it be, perhaps, that through what appears inwardly, between the moving pictures in the play, we gradually become able to hear all the way through and only then understand the meanings, motives, and ideas in the play? Can it be that meaning is revealed in the listening-seeing and seeing-listening of the dynamic movements, gestures, and activities?²⁷ Can it be that a Mystery play occurs in encounters between human beings that overcomes the separation of “I here” and “you there”?

The “inner ear” opens the door to the unimagined, opens up what is not yet words, but will become word, opens for the essence that wants to become form, and opens to the presence of the present moment. “And the reality is that it is only when you have this—this inner, soul listening—that you really become aware of what it means to see a role created by the stage artist out of this kind of intuition.”²⁸ What happens when we see this kind of acting? Let’s put ourselves before a well-known classical performance. I sit in a theater. In front of me is a stage or, even more classical, a closed curtain. The house lights go out, the stage lights come up, and the curtain rises. Who appears, what happens? What do I hear? One thing is immediately clear: in the theater, I enter into a completely different world. The drama (Greek for “action, deed”) begins immediately. “Who’s there?”²⁹ What layers of feelings, thoughts, and actions are revealed in the play of senses, in the sounds, in the movements, in the changing colors of the lights?

The Threshold between Performer and Spectator

Are we always conscious of the fact that when we actually watch or listen to the musical and performing arts, we are invited to cross a threshold, to overcome our reflective consciousness, to see through it, to hear all the way through it? When it “opens up,” space and time change, and we see and hear how everything is connected with everything else, everyone with everyone else, even our inner essences: beings with beings. We experience how soul spaces open up and how we suddenly realize how we owe our very existence to other human beings, even other times and other spirits. We see, or better, we hear inwardly how destiny works.³⁰ It is like waking up in a “beautiful glow,”³¹ like a waking dream—or nightmare. In the characters in the Mystery Dramas, portrayed by actors who are not themselves these characters, we actually see the truth of the characters’ entelechies through the real, living people who are acting. What an interplay of multiple dimensions where veils are lifted! We enter a realm of “polarity between understanding-through-hearing and hearing-through-understanding.”³²

Additionally, the exciting moment occurs anew each time (hopefully), when the boundary between performers and audience is dissolved. All becomes one. Zen Master Daito (1282–1337) said: “One who sees with their ears and hears with their eyes has no doubt. How naturally the raindrops fall from the leaves.”³³ The performers and the spectators slip into this experience. And one can increasingly see how many theater productions reveal “Manichean” insights in the play of forces between good and evil within the “potency of a crisis.”³⁴ These are truths and they are relentlessly mirrored to the audience under the motto: Wake up! This is part of the exoteric, wild side of Dionysus upon the Earth. It’s important to follow the traces of the inner transformations occurring within oneself through our experience of art. Every person goes out differently than they came in—swallowed up again by the noise of the world. “But, in the mute silence, ripens,”³⁵ something of the higher self that forms and awakens the soul to a new understanding of the world and an understanding of itself. This is the hidden, esoteric side of Dionysus “in his spiritual form.”³⁶

We are living in a dramatic time of transformation with daily occurrences of boundary experiences. Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas are gaining long-term significance because he developed scenes that show in detail what affects us on this side of the abyss and beyond. This will soon make Steiner’s work even more timely. At the same time, the noise of the waking, knowing understanding in us initially rejects his language. With drama, do we lag behind dance, music, and the visual arts? Whoever allows the Mystery Plays to have an effect on them—especially those with a listening praxis—can experience that here the processes beyond the threshold find an artistic-linguistic expression for what many so often say they cannot put into words. Present-day experiences in the etheric, countless invisible experiences and transformations in humans and nature, approach people every day—and “If ever he goes by me, I don’t know him.”³⁷ The Mystery Dramas provide the opportunity to find living, artistic forms for the unspeakable.

How did Steiner stage the Mysterium of his dramas back then? The first ensemble in Munich was actually a mixture of amateurs with a few professional actors (like Marie Steiner). How did Rudolf Steiner proceed? It can be described as a path from mimesis (Greek for “imitation leading to internalization, individualization”) to poiesis (Greek for “production, doing”).

Mimesis

The first thing Rudolf Steiner did was to open the actors’ ears to the new, to the not-yet-heard, by giving a lecture in the morning on the scene to be rehearsed (newly written down during the night) and elaborating every conceivable nuance. When actors don’t read the difficult text but initially only hear it spoken, the text becomes experienceable to the senses in an entirely different way: I heard it, it resonated within me, it’s possible. For the amateur actor playing Ahriman, Rudolf Steiner recited the text in such a way that people’s blood froze in their veins. Oskar Schmiedel reported on the long, potent silence after Rudolf Steiner read out the dramatic scene where Strader stands in front of Thomasius’ painting of Capesius for the first time (Scene 8, The Doorway of Initiation). Why did Steiner make such an intense impression as an actor or speaker? He heard the scene spiritually, and what he heard, he didn’t just write down, but—as he put it—“snapped into it,”³⁸ and so what he heard spiritually was able to be made audible.

Thus is the trail laid, and the mirror neurons have to pick it up. The waking day understanding that thinks it has to speak exactly the same way is now trapped and screams: “I’ll never do it!” A speech artist once told me: “In order to do this, one needs at least seven incarnations!” Still, for the artist’s soul, freed from preconceived notions, what is heard resounds deeper and continues to have an effect. Rudolf Steiner’s indications on the path of schooling are of great help, because along this path—just as in art—one deals with the unknown, the unforeseen, with threshold experiences. To quote Steiner: “The spiritual researcher . . . lets [his object of investigation] live in his own soul as an effective force. He lets it sink, as it were, as spiritual germ into the mother soil of his soul life and waits in perfect peace of mind for its effect on the life of the soul. He can then observe how, with repeated application of such a practice, the constitution of the soul does indeed change. . . . Then it awakens inspiration in the soul by way of its own force.”³⁹ In the lecture on the drama The Guardian of the Threshold,⁴⁰ he added: “And what the individual acquires is worth the disappointments . . . .”

Poiesis

It must be understood that it never could have been Steiner’s intention to remain at mimesis when he was reciting, and that everyone would simply repeat what he did. The poiesis of his directorial approach was precisely the inverse. After the ensemble heard the scene, he distributed the text, still wet with ink, to the various actors and then directed the rehearsals without interrupting or correcting the actors, but just having them play the same scene over and over again until they all had come together on their own initiative, through the rhythms, sounds, and actions. The sense of coherence is an inner hearing. The actor Max Gümbel-Seiling was flabbergasted that Steiner hardly gave any stage directions. The amateur actor Lutz Kricheldorff could “not remember with the best will in the world that Rudolf Steiner corrected him even once.”⁴¹

“The professional actor, who’d seen the premieres in Munich and was to play Ahriman in Marie Steiner’s production twenty years later, said that he’d never be able to play Ahriman as impressively as the amateur actor did in Munich.” In the Drama Course, Steiner adds a description by the actor Josef Lewinski from the Vienna National Theater [Burgtheater]. “Actually, I’m always three people on the stage: one is the small, hunchbacked, croaking human being, who’s very ugly; the second is someone who’s completely outside the hunchbacked, croaking one; who’s purely ideal, a completely spiritual being; and I must always have this second one in front of me; and then, then I’m the third: I crawl out of the two and am the third; and with the second, I play upon the first, on the croaking hunchback.”⁴² Here it becomes clear how concrete the spirit becomes in the art of acting. Here, the audience adds something. Through perceptions, through listening “from outside,” the “unheard” becomes possible. The actor brings what is outside into the character on the stage.

Thus, it is clear that today’s art of acting cannot be separated from a path of suprasensible schooling and our daily suprasensible experiences of life. The path of acting goes through the human being himself. And that is a deeply individualized process! Steiner again: “Precisely in the moment when the actor is an individuality, then we’ll always accept him; when he’s an actual real, inwardly, experienced instinct . . . in that he shapes his role as an individual, just as the piano player plays as an individual. And we will see how the audience looks at the stage full of understanding when roles are acted in this way, that they’re not rehearsed intellectually, not through so-called immersion in the content, but through a prior forming and shaping (e.g., pentathlon, speech formation—or acting etudes. M. Vereeck), so that, through what was formed previously, one can hear what is really to be formed on the stage through one’s own individual person. There are no certainties as professors and philistines like to have, but there are all possible, different opinions for which you can then give your reasons. But the reason why one has the opinion, if one has it in the justified sense, is that one hears the form.”⁴³

The doorway is and remains listening. Each person can only do this for themselves. “Speech formation is not achieved by saying, ‘shape this like this, shape this sound like this, shape this syllable like this, shape this sentence like this,’ but by practicing the right transitions . . .”⁴⁴ said Steiner.

Listening has actually become essential today for survival. The reason why we have so many problems and so many catchphrases everywhere is that we’re no longer a society that listens. Each person stays in their own cocoon. Not listening always leads to misunderstandings, to arguments, to divisions, to war. Can the performing and musical arts contribute to peace in a completely different way by developing a genuine culture of listening? The chemist and Nobel Prize winner Illya Prigognine said: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”⁴⁵ Here is our task. It can thus become Michaelic.

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This year we bring you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death—sometimes an essay, sometimes simply a thought or reflection—always, an aspect of his being.

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Translation Joshua Kelberman
Illustration Graphics team of the Weekly

1. Rudolf Steiner, Four Modern Mystery Dramas, CW 14 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2023).
2. Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Drama, CW 282 (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 2007), lectures in Dornach from Apr. 10, 1921 and Sept. 5–23, 1924.
3. Rudolf Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Dramaturgie, 1889–1900, GA 29 [Collected essays on dramaturgy, 1889–1900], GA 29, 4th edn. (Basel: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2014).
4. Rudolf Steiner, Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, CW 275 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2010), lectures in Dornach from Dec. 28, 1914–Jan. 4, 1915.
5. Anthroposophy contains an abundance of indications on listening along with “unheard” practices and words of truth on the subject of listening.
6. See Christopher Marcus, “The Body Becomes Word,” Goetheanum Weekly (Aug. 1, 2024).
7. Running, jumping, wrestling, discus, and javelin throwing.
8. Further developed in Marc Vereeck, 100 Years of Rudolf Steiner’s Drama Course. From the caterpillar to the butterfly in the play. The metamorphoses of running, jumping, wrestling, discus and javelin throwing into the art of acting (self-published booklet, 2024).
9. Rudolf Steiner, Art and Theory of Art: Foundations of a New Aesthetics, CW 271 (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2021), lecture on April 9, 1921.
10. Rudolf Steiner, Wahrspruchworte [True-verse words], GA 40, 10th edn. (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2019), [from the following undated note: “One should not want to renounce the drama of knowledge in favor of a grammar of knowledge; nor should fear of such drama prevent one from striking into the abyss of the individual; for, from out of this abyss, one rises in union with many spirits and experiences kinship with them; thereby is one born from the spiritual world: but one has absorbed death, becomes oneself the annihilator of what has become, relives it spiritualized, and is present in its annihilation.”]
11. This process contains the renewal of the ancient Mystery of Eleusis, linked to the descent of the god Dionysus into the underworld and his transformation.
12. CW 282, Apr. 10, 1921 (see footnote 2).
13. These are the metamorphosis of the Greek gymnastics! CW 282, lecture on Sept. 13, 1924 (see footnote 2).
14. Quote from the Jury for the 2024 Theatertreffen, Berlin.
15. The metamorphoses of Greek gymnastics and the sound moods are a novelty in the world of theater. The question of gesture was further developed by Michael Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht.
16. Of course, this also includes learning the “craft” of acting, speaking, stylistics, etc. This calls for a didactic methodology where listening and inverted will are integrated.
17. Vincent Baudriller, “The same air,” in Why theatre? (Berlin: NT Ghent, 2020), p. 34.
18. CW 282, lecture on Sept. 6, 1924 (see footnote 2).
19. CW 14, The Doorway of Initiation (see footnote 1).
20. CW 282 (see footnote 2).
21. CW 271, “Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics”: “Beauty is not the divine in a sensory-real garment; no, it is the sensory-real in a divine garment. . . . ‘beauty is a sensory reality that appears as though it were an idea’.” Translated by Dorit Winter and Cliff Venho (see footnote 9).
22. Heinz Zimmermann named this the “Being plane” [Seinsebene] of speech. See Vom Sprachverlust zur neuen Bilderwelt des Wortes [From the loss of language to the new picture-world of the word], 2nd edn. (Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2000).
23. Rudolf Steiner, Manifestations of Karma, CW 120 (Forest Row: East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1996), lecture in Hamburg of May 22, 1910.
24. Anthroposophy contains indications for a listening dialog with the spiritual world, including those who are “across the threshold.” “We human beings need the right hearing . . . .”
25. This is part of the culture of Michael.
26. CW 282, lecture on Sept. 12, 1924 (see footnote 2).
27. “If the banal . . . can reflect something wider in the very moment when it happens, the present moment opens up, beyond what would have been without the action.” Peter Brook, “When the Present Moment Opens Up,” Nov 26, 2019, Text und Bühne, YouTube, 5 mins. 22 sec.
28. CW 282, lecture on Sept. 23, 1924 (see footnote 2).
29. The first line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
30. Rudolf Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission, CW 276 (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2023), lecture of June 9, 1923: “However, tragedy will only be able to blossom when human beings experience karma.”
31. For Schiller, the secret of beauty lies in overcoming the material through form; cf. Friedrich Schiller, Kallias, or, On the Beautiful in Fidelio 1, no. 4 (Winter 1992).
32. CW 282, lecture on Sept. 10, 1924 (see footnote 2).
33. Quoted from Georg Kühlewind, Licht und Leere [Light and emptiness] (Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben, 2011).
34. Cf. Christine Gruwez, Die Wunde und das Recht auf Verletzlichkeit [The wound and the right to vulnerability] (Stuttgart: Verlag Urachhaus, 2023).
35. Rudolf Steiner, Verses and Meditations, CW 40 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2004): “The Stars Spake Once to Man . . . .”
36. Rudolf Steiner, Wonders of the World, Trials of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit, CW 129 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2021), lecture of Aug. 24, 1911.
37. Job 9:11.
38. See footnote 12.
39. Rudolf Steiner, “The Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy,” Esoteric Development: Selected Lectures and Writings, excerpts from GA 35, etc. (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2003), lecture of Apr. 8, 1911.
40. Rudolf Steiner, Initiation, Eternity, and the Passing Moment, CW 138 (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1980), lecture on Aug. 25, 1912.
41. Anthroposophische Gesellschaft, Zweig München [Anthroposophical Society, Munich Branch], ed., Rudolf Steiner in München. Zu seinem 100. Geburtstag [Rudolf Steiner in Munich. For his 100th birthday] (Munich: self-published, 1961).
42. See footnote 12.
43. See footnote 28. Italics by the translator.
44. CW 282, lecture on Sept. 8, 1924 (see footnote 2).
45. This quotation is often quoted and credited to Prigognine, but the actual source remains unconfirmed—Trans.