Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian New Age guru, philosopher, occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by (Christian) Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.

Excerpts

Human Beings Literally Lost the Ground of Their View

There are people who regard the deed of Copernicus as the biggest of the cultural revolutions which humanity has ever experienced as far as the historical memory reaches. One has to admit that the impression and the influence of this spiritual revolution was so significant for any outer thinking of the human beings that, indeed, hardly something more effective can be compared with it.

One can bring to mind also easily what it had to mean to the world of the sixteenth century, the earth on which one believed to stand firmly resting in the universe, not only to have to retrain the relation of the own residential place, of this planet, of the sun, of the whole universe.

The human beings literally lost the ground of their view. What they had regarded as firm up to then that the sun and the whole starry heaven circles around this firm earthly residential place, and everything that is spread out in space exists only because of this earthly residential place, one had now to assume that the earth is something that hurries with big speed through the cosmic space.

They had to imagine the sun as something that does not move in relation to the earth and the earth even as something moving.