Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner (February 27, 1861, Murakirály, Hungary – March 30, 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker, who is best known as the founder of Anthroposophy and its practical applications, including Waldorf School, Biodynamic agriculture, the Camphill Movement, and the Christian Community.

A few aspects of Steiner's way of thinking

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists out of which the material one gradually condensed, so to speak, and evolved. The spiritual world, Steiner held, can in the right circumstances be researched through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline. Steiner described many exercises he said were suited to strengthening such self-discipline so that a practicioner's consciousness could enter the 'spiritual world'. Details about the spiritual world, he said, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, not infallibly, but with approximate accuracy.

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Yet Steiner was periodically at pains to discourage taking his spiritual research reports as either accurate or inaccurate 'information' -- an interpretation he considered relatively superficial. Steiner preferred for readers to enter into the process of his thinking and not cling too rigidly to the fixed results, i.e. the thoughts that crystallized out of that process. He often said there was a hidden life in thinking and advised people to attend more to the spirit or 'drift' of his words than to the letter. Otherwise readers would fall into an excessive literalism and turn his work into a doctrine, a result he said he wanted to avoid.

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Those of Steiner's students alert to this distinction (e.g. Georg Khulewind, author of From Normal to Healthy) are wont to affirm Steiner?s claim that remaining actively within the process, as opposed to the results of Steiner's thinking, can have the effect of awakening one gradually into forms of superconscious spiritual awareness. Steiner claims to offer a gradual experiential path from ordinary conceptual thinking into forms of thinking perceptive of living spiritual beings and mobile realities in the spiritual world. Perhaps because the spiritual path Steiner offers claims to be based, in many respects, on the gradual transformation of thinking into a wholly new activity of the whole person -- an activity of thought, feeling and will seamlessly integrated into a form of spiritual awareness that eventually leaves the body and peregrinates through spiritual worlds -- Steiner's teaching has attracted a number of trained scientists, physicians, and scholars in various fields.

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Steiner periodically affirmed that gaining access to the unusual forms of consciousness supposedly embodied in some of his works was not a matter of believing in or having faith in whatever he chose to say about spiritual beings. It was rather that some of the thinking in some of those works, if adequately penetrated with one's own active questioning, thinking and feeling, would eventually reveal itself as a kind of spiritual music full of aesthetic tensions and relaxations and various kinds of spiritual dynamism, and this spiritual dynamism, full of complex metamorphoses of form and color, would itself eventually be perceived as the speaking and singing of real, living spiritual beings and of a real spiritual world. And this would still be only a hint of what a student could experience who learned to enter the spiritual world fully and carry out further 'research.'

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Steiner also occasionally averred that this consciousness of the spirit was not so much related to the content of his statements, where he tells readers the characteristics of this or that spiritual being (or something similar) that he says he has perceived. It was not so much such content that was effective, he said, but rather something a bit deeper, within the content, that he indicated would lead one to begin to enter higher states of awareness and 'hear' or 'see' spiritual beings as one thought through his 'research reports'. The mere content was so to speak thrown up to the surface of Steiner's thinking by the style, or more precisely, by the movement and metamorphic-metaphoric process of his thinking, and it was this underlying formative process (or portions of it in some of his lectures and books), he said, that could gradually lead to a sort of superconsciousness awareness of living in spiritual worlds at least as real and persuasive as the physical world. Whereas mere content could be memorized like recipes, and then parroted mindlessly, formative process could only be experienced if one actively recreated it from within.

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Some of Steiner's more philosophically inclined students argue that an obstacle to 'getting' Steiner, in the just mentioned sense, is that reading for people today is rarely a process where the dynamic birth of the conceptual out of a pre-conceptual background is felt and recreated as we read each word. When reading is creative today, that creativity tends to be confined within conceptual life, and only rarely extends to the threshold between conceptual and pre-conceptual life, the threshold where not just this or that concept, but conceptuality itself, can be experienced in the process of its creative origination, and seen at its core as fundamentally an imaginative birthing activity. Lacking awareness of this particular threshold, we also lack consciousness of the elastic poetic dynamism at the very basis not only of our most 'literal' ideas and scientific terminologies, but at the basis of the world process itself.

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Again, some philosophical students of Steiner claim that one way of remaining within the process (as opposed to the results) of Steiner's thinking, would be to gradually learn through his works how to live consciously at the threshold where conceptuality comes into being. There one would supposedly no longer be confined to observing things that already are -- one would begin to see realities emerging into being, and that would mean seeing to some extent into 'non-being' itself, and discovering there more than mere nothingness: a hidden life of creative non-material beings and processes in a non-material world.

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