Encounter With The Self

Penetrating commentary on the Job story as a numinous, archetypal event, and as a paradigm for conflicts of duty that can lead to enhanced consciousness.

Addresses, Essays, Discussions, and Reports, 1920 -1924 (CW 217a) "Young people today turn away from older people not because the latter have grown old but because they have remained young--that is, because they don't understand how to grow old in the right way. Older people today lack this self-knowledge. Growing old in the right way means allowing the spirit to unfold in our souls as befits an aging body. When we do this, we show young people not only what time has done to the body, but also what eternity reveals through the spirit. Young people will find their way to older people who seriously attempt to experience spirit. To say that we must act young when we are with young people is just an empty phrase. As older people, we must understand--and demonstrate to young people--how to be old in the right way." --Rudolf Steiner (Mar. 9, 1924) Youth and the Etheric Heart, which comes to twenty-first-century readers in the somewhat deceptive wrapping of a historical document of Rudolf Stiener's addresses to young people during 1920 to 1924, is (at least for those concerned with the future of Anthroposophy or with the future of spiritual life in general) one of the most extraordinary and prophetic volumes in the collected works. This book is intended by its editors to be supplementary to the central turning point of the movement, the 1922 "Pedagogical Youth Course," published as Becoming the Archangel Michael's Companions.Together, they present Steiner's vision for Anthroposophy as he hoped it would permeate culture through young people able to take it up as a spiritual, intellectual, and socially transforming path. The task, which underlies the whole volume and to which we, too, are called by service to the Archangel Michael, is to open to the etheric heart in humanity. This becomes clear in Rudolf Steiner's final address to the young people attending a teachers' conference in Arnheim on July 20, 1924: "What is needed is not thinking about what should happen. People should feel that the spirit outside of us speaks in the flames of nature. The sunrise has changed. But also our heart has changed; we no longer bear the same heart in our chest. Our physical heart has grown harder, and our etheric heart more mobile. We must find access to our suprasensory hearts. This is the way we must understand spiritual science." In this respect, young people have hearts ideally suited to feeling when something is right. It simply requires courage to really think it. It is in the light of "our suprasensory heart" that we should approach this volume, and indeed Anthroposophy as a whole. Youth and the Etheric Heart is a great companion volume to Becoming the Archangel Michael's Companions (CW> 217). During the early 1920s, following the disaster of World War I, the youth of Europe faced many hardships and questions about their destiny in the world. The situation today is certainly different, but the questions are no less urgent. This volume is the first complete English translation from the German of Die Erkenntnis-Aufgabe der Jugend (GA 217a).

This text addresses the issues involved with the development of self-concept and growth of self-esteem.

William Blake is regarded as one of the greatest creative geniuses of the Romantic era, valued for the visionary power of both his poetry and his art. However, in his own time, he struggled to make ends meet and his work attracted little attention. The book contains a lengthy introduction to the life and work of Black by Norton as was as full page black and white copies of the etchings which Blake between 1823 and 1826 for his illustrated edition of the Book of Job. His Illustrations of the Book tell the Biblical story of Job, one of the books of the Hebrew Bible. It relates his trials at the hands of Satan, his discussions with friends on the origins and nature of his suffering, his challenge to God, and finally a response from God. The book is a didactic poem set in a prose frame and has been included in lists of the greatest books in world literature. William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify.

This book is about the individual's journey to psychological wholeness, known in analytical psychology as the process of individuation. Edward Edinger traces the stages in this process and relates them to the search for meaning through encounters with symbolism in religion, myth, dreams, and art. For contemporary men and women, Edinger believes, the encounter with the self is equivalent to the discovery of God. The result of the dialogue between the ego and the archetypal image of God is an experience that dramatically changes the individual's worldview and makes possible a new and more meaningful way of life.

Winner of the 2016 Marfield Prize In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke—then a struggling poet in Germany—went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet.

The collective belief in Armageddon has become more powerful and widespread in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. Edward Edinger looks at the chaos predicted by the Book of Revelation and relates it to current trends including global violence, AIDS, and apocalyptic cults.

Written by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as ′monstrous′ or ′vulnerable′ and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily ′normality′ and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.