Steiner begins this work by pointing to our awareness of a second self that guides us through life. It guides us as infants and children as we attain vertical balance in space, learn to communicate in community, and begin to think in the world. Through this initial wisdom (which is still connected to the spiritual hierarchies) we enter the physical realm and then, as we grow, we exchange it for self-awareness and memory.

What--or who--is this wisdom? Steiner suggests that it is connected with the "higher self" of humankind that lived in Jesus between his baptism and the...

This is the classic account of the modern Western esoteric path of initiation made public by Steiner in 1904. He begins with the premise that "the capacities by which we can gain insights into the higher worlds lie dormant within each one of us." Steiner carefully and precisely leads the reader from the cultivation of the fundamental soul attitudes of reverence and inner tranquility to the development of inner life through the stages of preparation, illumination, and initiation.

Steiner provides practical exercises of inner and outer observation and moral development. By patiently and...

During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result.

Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to form language has declined, but that we can still recover the seed of language, the penetration...

5 lectures, Bern, April 13-17, 1924 (CW 309)

These lectures on Waldorf education were given as a course during Easter week, 1924, in Bern. Although these talks were given more than eighty years ago, they remain remarkably contemporary. Every word still resonates with passion and dedication to the human adventure.

"We must develop an art of education that can lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen during the last few years and decades.... There is no escaping this chaos unless we can find a way to bring spirituality into human souls through education, so that human...

Moral teaching and moral preaching cannot establish morality. It is only by delving into the hidden secrets of life that we can advance not just to moral doctrines but to the moral sources of life, true moral impulses. At different times, humanity has manifested moral life in different ways.

To understand these differences, the evolution of consciousness must also be taken into account. Originally morality was a part of human nature, for in their essence human beings are good. But through evolution, there have come errors, deviations, times of falling away. In this small,...

Ever since nature and consciousness were separated in the late Middle Ages, giving rise to a science of matter alone, the spiritual beings who are the universe have felt abandoned and unable to complete their work, for this work depends for its success on human collaboration. At the same time, human beings have also felt abandoned, condemned to a speck of dust in an infinitely decaying universe. In these remarkable lectures, Rudolf Steiner reestablishes the human being as a participant in an evolving, dynamic universe of living spiritual beings: a living universe, whole and divine. And he...

Rudolf Steiner is perhaps best known for his influence and wisdom in the fields of education, agriculture, medicine, science, and art.

It is often forgotten that it was as a spiritual teacher that he made these contributions. Unfortunately, while his immediate students had the advantage of Steiner as a personal guide to their inner lives, later readers have had only his written works to guide them.

Steiner, however, did give a few lectures on inner development--especially on beginning a path of practice. This book now collects these lectures--some of which have never been in...

During the early seventeenth century, Europe was suddenly embroiled in controversy after the publication of the first Rosicrucian texts. Ever since, Rosicrucianism has been at the center of Western Christian esotericism. Forced underground by the Thirty Years War, it was secretly handed down by alchemists, hermeticists, and Masons to the nineteenth century, when it inspired new spiritual movements such as Theosophy, the Order of Golden Dawn, and Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Science.

The Secret Stream collects all of Steiner's discussions of the Rosicrucians, answering...

The rebirth of the feminine surrounds us in many forms--from the global movement for women's rights to a renewed interest in feminine spirituality, the Goddess, and the Divine Mother. What is the spiritual meaning of this rebirth? What is the feminine divine? Who is she?

The feminine divine has had many names in many cultures: Ishtar in Babylon, Inanna in Sumeria, Athena, Hera, Demeter, and Persephone in Greece, Isis in Egypt, Durga, Kali, and Lakshmi in India. She is the Shekinah of the Cabalists, and the Sophia of the Gnostics. To Steiner, she is Anthroposophia (or...

11 lectures, Stuttgart and Dornach, Dec. 23, 1919 - Aug. 8, 1921 (CW 320)

Rudolf Steiner's course on light, which includes explorations of color, sound, mass, electricity and magnetism, presages the dawn of a new worldview in the natural sciences that will stand our notion of the physical world on its head.

This "first course" in natural science, given to the teachers of the new Stuttgart Waldorf school as an inspiration for developing the physics curriculum, is based on Goethe's phenomenological approach to the study of nature. Acknowledging that modern physicists had come to...