The Awakening of the Etheric Heart

The Step from Knowledge of the Outside towards Knowledge of the Depth, Online Presentation by Christine Gruwez

We have developed an understanding of our world, which in many ways has become insufficient to safeguard our humanity and the life of the planet. Through the organisation of our senses we perceive the outside of what the world offers to us. In response to this, out of our perceptions, we are able to form mental pictures. But also those mental pictures, which as concepts are at the basis of science, offer us the outer face of the world.

How to find what is within them? How to deepen those representations? How to see what is living inside of them?

This is where the heart as the new organ of cognition enters in. For the heart knows what is the living potential in the depth of our very being.
The first step is where knowledge is transformed into ‘imaginative cognition’. What manifested as pictures from the outside, can be seen and actualized through the depth of the heart and teaches us about our true spiritual being and how gradually to unite with it.

Suggested Reading: (CW 212) The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution: Lecture 4 “The Human Soul in Relation to Moon and Stars” (Dornach, 6 May 1922)

Christine Gruwez from Antwerp, Belgium, Europe, studied philosophy and linguistics at the KU Leuven, the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium. She met anthroposophy through the Waldorf school in Antwerp, which her four children attended, and where she taught from 1976 to 1986. She also taught for a decade in the Waldorf Education Training Program. Since 1997, Christine has led seminars and conferences at Emerson College, at the Goetheanum, in Europe, Asia, and the US.