Esoteric Development

"You should not have any mystical ideas about meditation, nor should you think it is easy. Meditation must be completely clear, in the modern sense. Patience and inner soul energy are needed, and, above all, it depends on an act that no one else can do for you: it requires an inner resolve that you stick to. When you begin to meditate, you are performing the only completely free activity there is in human life" (Rudolf Steiner). This completely revised edition provides an ordered sequence of statements by Steiner on the development of higher, suprasensory knowing --Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. Nine chapters take the reader from the idea of inner development, through the cultural and evolutionary need for higher knowing, and then to examples of the practices and inner gestures required by this work. Steiner describes the necessary steps and stages, always insisting on the free, individual, and cognitive character of anthroposophic spiritual research. This essential inner guide is for anyone on a path of true spiritual development.

This collection gathers a sequence of statements by Rudolf Steiner on how to develop the faculties of higher, or 'suprasensory,' knowing Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

10 lectures at The Hague, March 20-29, 1913 (CW 145) Address in Berlin, February 3, 1913 "The future of spiritual esoteric movements such as ours will depend more and more upon the realization that human spiritual development is necessary. Whoever rejects or is hostile toward spiritual development will thus have identified with what is no longer useful on Earth, with what is withered and shriveled, and will have abandoned cosmic evolution as willed by the gods." --Rudolf Steiner 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 anthroposophic spiritual inner work, up to direct perception of "Paradise" and the Holy Grail. He discusses the role of human beings in our evolution that takes place between the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. Included is Steiner's important lecture "The Being of Anthroposophy," which this volume introduces to the English-speaking world. This edition also includes Steiner's "introductory words," previously available only as an unpublished German typescript. The Effects of Esoteric Development is a translation from the German of Welche Bedeutung hat die okkulte Entwicklung des Menschen für seine Hüllen --physischen Leib, Ätherleib, Astralleib --und sein Selbst? (GA 145).

Selected from material given by Rudolf Steiner to members of his Esoteric School (1904-14), this volume features exercises, meditations and practices for spiritual self-development. In contrast to oriental methods of spiritual training, they derive from the western, Rosicrucian stream and are fully adapted to modern consciousness.Various exercises are given - for morning and evening, for the days of the week and the months of the year. In addition, there is much explanatory material to deepen and enhance meditative work, including several articles on the path of inner development and the obstacles to be faced on the way to attaining true consciousness of the self.This enlarged edition contains further clarification of the exercises, descriptions of the future evolution of the world and humanity, plus later advice given by Steiner on the nature of breathing exercises and ancient and modern methods of initiation.

Introduction to Esoteric Healing - Part 1: For centuries men have sought healing, and obtained it, long before our methods of treatment were elaborated. The methods used then have remained esoteric or veiled and only the outer shell, mainly nonsensical, has survived for history to ridicule. In centuries to come men will also marvel at how we healed in our own day with so many drugs that were later put on the poison list. Now, for the first time, the field of the esoteric healer is being revealed by scientific devices. This field of operation for the esoteric healer is the etheric body, the vitalising matrix underlying all tissue described by contemporary yogis who, even at this moment, are revealing facts about man's nature which are not only able to be demonstrated in the neurophysiologic laboratories of such esteemed medical establishments as the Meninger Foundation at Topeka and the World Health Organisation, but facts which don't yet exist in our medical, physiology and anatomy textbooks. Animals suffer intense stress but do not die from coronaries, duodenal ulcers and hypertension because of it. Many a man will suffer stress persistently and not die from it. Disciples all suffer stress, but their disciplines enable them to thrive on such situations. Only those who are unable to cope or to receive feedback on their reactions to stress, or are unable to stop thinking about their troubles or believe themselves to be continuously subject to them, go down. The difference between all these is not physical; it is supraphysical. It lies in those realms whose laws are understood, obeyed and used by esoteric healers. After twenty-five years of patient research in the ways of Orthodox Medicine and its esoteric counterpart, I have no reason to change my firm belief that the cause of ninety per cent of all disease lies in the inability of Man to express himself according to the purposes of his own Soul whether he be aware of these purposes or not... the inability to express in his way of life Truth, Beauty and Goodness which, after all, is not saying anything new, for this was the belief of Socrates and Plato twenty-five centuries ago. What will eventually be practised as Preventive Medicine is already established, in great measure, in the daily living of students of esoteric sciences, i.e. care about diet and nutrition, breathing exercises, relaxation and meditation.

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 universal availability of its ground, the free attention. Through the use of attention, a person practicing the exercise given here begins to expand the range of one's possibilities to understand and act. The exercises--based on the Eightfold Path of the Buddha and the cognitive spiritual path of Rudolf Steiner--lead to a new life in which superconscious intuitions gradually replace superconscious formations. This new life is a universal human life of improvising, living thinking--a life of presence and pure joy, which is health for a human being. "I believe that our central problem is that we do not know what or who a human being really is. We lack this knowledge because we have no valid picture of the human WORD, no image of human language, of words in general. This is why we have such trouble with words, why we hit upon the right word so rarely. Everything we do to, for, and against each other is speech of some kind, or ought to be. Yet we are interested in anything but words, these very words by means of which we do everything else. Because we don't know what words are we don't know what humans are" (from the foreword).