The Rudolf Steiner Archive

115. The Essence of Anthroposophy

[ 1 ] On Tuesday, Rudolf Steiner spoke at the Konzerthaus before a packed audience. […] Anthroposophy, says Steiner, aims to awaken the latent powers of cognition that lie dormant within human beings and, with their help, to perceive the supersensible world. This is achieved through a progressive series of soul exercises, the first of which consists of intense concentration of thought. Attention is fully and consciously directed toward a single idea or a complex of ideas until the experience of thought becomes as vivid as an external experience. Through continued practice of this concentrated thinking, a person is to reach the first stage of anthroposophical knowledge: imaginative knowledge—that is, a picture of their entire life since birth, a picture of what has made them who they are. If, through a second exercise, they succeed in voluntarily emptying their consciousness of the image imprinted upon it, they have reached the second stage: inspired knowledge. The empty consciousness fills itself with the image of one’s pre-birth existence. Now exercises of the will begin. The aim is to free the will—which, with its moral impulses, already possesses something from the higher world—from its physical dependence. Once this, too, has been achieved, the individual reaches the third stage: intuitive knowledge. The organism, which until now had been like a clouded eye with regard to higher knowledge, becomes transparent and itself a sense organ. The human being recognizes his repeated earthly lives, his ultimate merging into the universe; he recognizes the soul life of the cosmos: the solar aspect that brings about growth, that makes one young and strong, and the lunar aspect that represents the forces of decay in the world. He sees the spiritual world reflected in all sensory phenomena. Then he is able to apply anthroposophy to all areas of knowledge and life. Steiner pointed to the medical institutes in Stuttgart, where anthroposophically oriented physicians are seeking new methods of healing, and to the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel, where the inner life of the anthroposophists has found expression in art. Work in the field of education and pedagogy is exemplified by the Waldorf-Astoria School, whose curriculum and educational goals are derived from the nature of the child. The field of education, in turn, leads back to the social sphere. However, anthroposophy finds its culmination in the realm of religion and morality, where it justifies religion and morality in the face of the natural sciences. […]