I recommend this animated video of a talk by Matthew Taylor at the RSA.

This was sent to me as a New Year's gift.  "A seed is a very small thing." I have no idea who wrote it but it rings true.

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A seed is a very small thing.

You plant it, and in that secret place under the earth, if feeds from the soil, it breaks, and then a shoot comes up from the ground.

This small shoot seeks the light as it grows, and in time, it turns into a large tree. If you had not been told, you would not believe this tree came from such a small thing that once was hidden in the depths.

We cannot see what happens under the soil, because it is hidden from our eyes. Only the seed is present when the change happens. But eventually we see a tree, which cannot be ignored.

We do not consider the strength that resides within the seed because it is such a small thing. But we cannot ignore the tree.

This is an illustration of a certain belief that we fall into very easily, because it makes sense when we first think about it. It is the idea that our private lives should not matter to anyone but ourselves.

We look at our private lives as hidden from view, and we think they add no meaning whatsoever to the lives we live in public.

We say things like "whatever a man does in his private life is nobody's business."

Even more so, whatever a man thinks in his own head, in the deepest recesses of his mind, has little or no influence on the way that he behaves in public.

The truth is that those things which we do in private, even our thought life, matter more than anything else we do in life.

Because our private thoughts are like seeds.

They are planted in our heads. During that time, no one but we are able to

German readers may not realize that there is an indexed handbook by Christian Karl in PDF format (65MB) covering all Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and books. 

How many anthroposophical tenets can you identify, that the speaker Jeremy Rifkin seems to accept as fact, in this animated video from the Royal Society of Arts?

 In its tenth anniversary issue The Southern Cross Review has some beautiful poems by Hermann Hesse among other contributions that are worth a look.

From a lecture to the Goetheanum workmen -

"Concepts fall apart in the physical body, and yet human beings do not want to learn to think with the etheric body. They do not want to think independently. Now you see why, in the year 1893, it became necessary for me to write the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. It is not the contents of this book that are so important, although obviously at that time one wished to tell the world what was said in it, but the most important thing is that independent thinking appeared in this book for the first time. No-one can possibly understand this book who does not think independently. From the beginning, page by page, a reader must become accustomed to using his etheric body if he would think these thoughts at all. Hence this book is a means of education - a very important means - and must be taken up as such.

Anthroposophical Leading Thought (4)

I would like to share these inspiring words from the author and poet, Ben Okri.
 
Mental Fight (selected extracts)
By Ben Okri