YOU SELF – LEAD YOURSELF!
“sjalfr leið þú sjalfan þik”.
(from the Edda: Grogaldur)
100 years since Rudolf Steiner´s course on “The Mission of the Folk Souls” Oslo 1910
“Wanderseminar” in Iceland June 30 to July 14, 2010
w/ conference at Solheimar July 7 to 11
Contributors:
Nick Thomas (GB), Hartwig Schiller (D), Henk-Jan Meyer (NL), Raphaela Frietsch (D), Gudjon Arnason (IS), Oskar Borgman Hansen (DK), Frits Burger (NL), Martin Aeschliman (CH), Dawn Nilo (Stratton) (USA), Frode Barkved ( NO), Hannes Weigert(D), Harald Haakstad (NO), Marianne Tvedt (NO), Magne Skrede (NO), a.o.
Rudolf Steiner´s lecture cycles on the folk souls (Die Mission einzelner Volksseele) has touched many people. Their content can be provoking as well as inspiring.
In the course Steiner emphasizes the necessity of the phenomena that each single folk – unregarded size and culture – plays a unique instrument with a specific voice in “the orchestra of mankind”. And in the introduction Steiner stresses that if you can remain unaffected by that what rises from your own nationality, you will be able to receive the actual challenge and task of mankind. Unaffected - but not unconscious! Because at the same time it is important to recognize oneself as a part of one´s own culture. The one who is homeless – who has become a true citizen of the world – also knows that he is in great debt of gratitude to his own native culture.
The course on the folk souls can also be read as a powerful – almost hymnical request to the Nordic countries and the possibilities within the culture there. But there have been only few opportunities to meet and develop further the great motives in the lectures on the folk souls – and there is very little working- and study material on the subject. The remarkable fact is that “the porridge is extremely thin” regarding <the Nordic> - after 250 years of scholar´s analyzing habits and traditions. The inside remains hidden – until each individual through inner work and activity, achieves an insight.
Knowledge that does not include my thought, feeling and will so deeply that it transforms me, becomes a burden, yes, can even be harmful. The one who has ears that hear, can observe that Heimdallur is blowing for a feast: “The art is the God´s child that bewares the human being from sinking down into the lie” (Rudolf Steiner 1919).
Gudjon Arnason (IS)/ Frode Barkved (N)