These dazzling, radical lectures were given one month before the opening of the first Waldorf School--following two years of intense preoccupation with the social situation in Germany as World War I ended and society sought to rebuild itself.

Well aware of the dangerous tendencies present in modern culture that undermine a true social life--such as psychic torpor and boredom, universal mechanization, and a growing cynicism--Steiner recognized that any solution must address not only economic and legal issues but also that of a free spiritual life.

Steiner also saw the need to...

5 lectures, Stuttgart, April 8-11, 1924 (CW 308)

These talks were given during an educational conference in 1924. They are the last public lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Germany. According to one member of his audience, "Seventeen hundred people listened to him; the prolonged applause from this great crowd at the end of every lecture was deeply moving, while at the end of the last lecture the applause became an ovation that seemed as if it would never end." This kind of adoration was the result not only of who Steiner was as an individual but of what he accomplished as well. People...

As early as 1884, while tutoring a boy with special needs, Steiner began a lifelong interest in applying spiritual knowledge to the practical aspects of life. Steiner originally published the essay at the core of this book in 1907. It represents his earliest ideas on education, in which he lays out the soul spiritual processes of human development, describing the need to understand how the being of a child develops through successive "births," beginning with the physical body's entry into earthly life, and culminating in the emergence of the I-being with adulthood.

Also included here are...

10 lectures in various cities, February 3-March 29, 1913 (CW 145)

On February 3, 1913, the first General Meeting of the newly formed Anthroposophical Society was convened in Berlin. Six weeks later, in Holland, Rudolf Steiner spoke for the first time to an anthroposophic audience in a detailed, intimate way about individual esoteric training and the subtle effects of spiritual development on every level of one's being.

Beginning with questions regarding the body's experience of food and drink--meat, coffee, alcohol, and so on--he lays out the progression of...

Although Steiner did not often speak or write about love explicitly, love is at the very heart of his whole body of work and the foundation of his hopes for humankind and the Earth. Steiner teaches that, without love, nothing is possible; with love, however, we can do everything. Love is always "love of the not-yet." To love is to create; it is to selflessly enter the current of time that flows toward us from the future.

Reality, true knowledge of reality, is impossible without love. Only through love can we truly know as we are know, can we encounter the world and its beings in a...

"I hope that reading this book can become a kind of inner conversation. If this conversation unfolds in such a way that it reveals the hidden inner forces that can be awakened in every soul, then reading this book may lead to genu-ine, inner soul work. As a result you may find yourself gradually impelled to undertake the journey of the soul that truly leads to vision of the spiritual world." --Rudolf Steiner


Part one, "A Way of Self-Knowledge": Eight meditations that take the reader on a journey through human experience. Beginning with ordinary experience,...

"This is what it comes down to: that we learn to experience that those who have passed through the gate of death have only assumed another form. Having died, they stand before our feelings like those who, through life experiences, have traveled to distant lands, whither we can follow them only later. We have therefore nothing to fear but a time of separation. Spiritual science must help us learn to feel and experience this in the most living way we can." --Rudolf Steiner

"Living and working with the concepts and exercises in these talks and meditations has changed my life....

The mystics Steiner writes about in this book were early giants in the modern art of illumined self-knowledge. Their ways of seeing the world, God, and themselves foreshadowed all that we practice now in the best of meditation, both East and West. Here, you can read about their essential passion for unity, their practice of intensification of perception, and their ever-fresh insights into the process of knowing itself.

Contents:

• Foreword by Christopher Bamford
• Preface to the 1923 Edition
• Introduction: Mystics, Natural Science, and the Modern World...

The point, line, plane and solid objects represent the first three dimensions, but a kind of reversal of space is involved in the ascent to a fourth dimension. Steiner leads us to the brink of this new perspective--as nearly as it can be done with words, diagrams, analogies, and examples of many kinds. In doing so, he continues his lifelong project of demonstrating that our objective, everyday thinking is the lowest rung of a ladder that reaches up to literally infinite heights.

The talks in this series and the selections from the question-and-answer sessions on many mathematical topics...

5 lectures at The Hague, November 13-18, 1923 (CW 231)

What is our relationship to the planets we see in the night sky? Does the cosmos have any affect on our individual lives? Modern science tells us that we are an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe. Rudolf Steiner maintains that we are intimately enmeshed with the whole cosmos, right down to the very structure of our physical bodies.

In these talks, Steiner explores our relationship as individuals to the spiritual cosmos--where we will all become cosmonauts one day. The key to being at home...