Stumbling through life, gazing at the stars, we can miss the greatest treasure beneath our feet. For the ordinary faculties of our soul--how we think, how we feel, how we act--are the rough and fallen forms of our highest spiritual capacities.This book shows how six of these common abilities--thinking, feeling, doing, loving, opening, thanking--can be intensified infinitely. We already think; we can learn to think more deeply, more livingly. We already feel; we can learn to train o...

How much practical time do we usually devote to the general art of being human? This practical guide to self-healing consciousness--it is both a spiritual psychology and a contemporary manual of the inner life--begins by laying out clearly the unhealthy, unfree nature of today's consciousness.Methodical, self-observation leads to discovering the key to liberating consciousness from its habitual blind spots and automatisms--realization of the universal primacy of cognition and the u...

What is the power that Jesus calls to awaken in us? What does it mean to be healthy and whole? How can we open ourselves so that the healing power can heal what is sick? How can we awaken this power in ourselves?"Wilt thou be made whole?" This is the question Jesus addressed to the paralyzed man who had waited in vain for years at the Pool of Bethesda. Not really answering, he replies that he has no one to carry him down when the angel stirs the waters. "T...

What are Dreams? Every age, every culture, perhaps every person, have different answers. We can at least agree on one thing, however: dreams are other. Their presence in our lives demonstrates that we are not limited to a single mode of consciousness. The world of sleep is largely a blank for us, an abyss of non-consciousness, yawning between one day and the next, but the very fact that we can dream announces our potential for awareness within that abyss.We spend a third o...

"Perception of the idea within the actual is the true communion of the human being" --GoetheReligious ritual is often seen as a way of bringing divine influences down into the material world. In this profound and stimulating work, Rudolf Steiner and Friedrich Benesch introduce the idea of "reverse ritual"--a way that each of us can raise our souls to the spiritual realm.In this process, the everyday world becomes a portal...

11 lectures in Dornach, September 8-19, 1924 (CW 318)"Humans cannot be known by uncreative thoughts, because by their very nature human beings are creative. One must re-create if one wants knowledge. With today's passive thinking, one can understand only the periphery of the human being; one has to ignore the inner being." -- Rudolf SteinerToday we hear a great deal about holistic medicine--an approach to healing ...

"Truths cannot be transmitted simply as stable dogmas. Truths are always of a given moment and, at each moment, must be grasped anew. This demands at each moment a renewed activity in relation to the human gift of understanding." -- Jörgen Smit (from the foreword)The goal of this study is to cultivate the experience of living, intuitive thinking, such as we experience with every new understanding. As Kühlewind puts it, this unique contrib...

Written in 1894 (CW 4)"The realms of life are many. For each, specific sciences develop. But life itself is a unity, and the more the sciences busily immerse themselves in separate realms, the farther they move away from seeing the living wholeness of the world. There must be a kind of knowing that seeks, in the separate sciences, the elements that lead human beings back to full life again. A scientific specialist wants to become aware of the world and...

"The aim of this book is to show that the world, including human beings and their consciousness, is not originally a world of thing but a world of words; that fundamentally the world has the structure of a text; and that it is therefore possible to read it like a test." -- Georg KühlewindTo realize this goal, one must bear in mind three different approaches, or disciplines: epistemology, psychology, and linguistics. These are united by th...

Written in 1904 (CW 9)Theosophy is a key work for gaining a solid footing in spiritual reality as described by Rudolf Steiner. It is organized into four parts. First, Steiner builds a comprehensive understanding of human nature: physical bodily nature; soul qualities; spirit being, or "I"-being; and the higher spiritual aspects. This leads us to Steiner's description of the human being as sevenfold:• Material, physical body• Eth...

One who undertakes to represent certain results of scientific spiritual research of the kind recorded in this book, must above all things be prepared to find that this kind of investigation is at the present time almost universally regarded as impossible. For things are related in the following pages about which those who are today esteemed exact thinkers, assert that they will probably remain altogether indeterminable by human intelligence. One who knows and can respect the reasons which ...

"Egyptian Myths and Mysteries" is a book made up of a series of lectures which Rudolf Steiner gave at Leipzig in September 1908."Egyptian Myths and Mysteries" contains 12 lectures in all, covering things like the stages of evolution, the mysteries of the planets, Atlantis, old initiation centres and spiritual connections between ancient and modern times. He links all this to ancient Egyptian practices and beliefs with the penultimate lecture being the Egyptian doctrine of evolution...