Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/692/en

In practice, the ideas of the shared striving-goal descend into the living reality of the farm organism. As constructive as these ideas are, as capable as they are of creating living interconnections, one must before long confess to oneself that certain expectations have gone unmet. Things will not come together; one runs up against limits and is thrown back upon oneself. The ideal is shaken — one experiences it as a dying-away, a partial death of the soul. One refuses to acknowledge this and searches for outer reasons: adverse weather, one's own incapacity or another's, wrong decisions or failures of execution, misunderstandings, social discord, and so forth. Yet — as life itself does — dying-away, death, shows itself in veiled form as well. How is one to recognise what failure is trying to tell us? From this uncertainty there follow painful experiences, trials for the individual and for the community alike. When one faces these experiences squarely, self-knowledge awakens — and with it, from out of the depths of the soul, an unspoken question; and then, unexpectedly and all at once, the answer arrives from without. It is precisely this opportunity — of arriving unexpectedly at new, encouraging insights — that the weekly gatherings of shared spiritual-scientific work of cognition serve. In conversation, thoughts can be voiced without being asked for and without being expected, thoughts that give a reconciling answer to the quietly harboured, pressing question in one's interior, and that can open a new view of things and summon one to new exertions. What takes place here is "the awakening of the human being through the spiritual-soul nature of another human being." The shared anthroposophical study-work refreshes the spirit, lifts and broadens the motive out of its subjective narrowness, and awakens forces that help bring ever-renewed momentum to the practical work.