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Spiritual Ecology: Reading the Book of Nature and Reconnecting with the World
Today we face increasing environmental challenges, from climate change and extreme weather patterns to deforestation, threats to animal species, and ongoing farming and food-supply crises. Virtually every day brings new alarming reports. How are we to respond, especially if we wish to take a broader, spiritual view of these events? Steiner’s work is full of important, far-sighted perspectives on our relationship as human beings with the natural world. Indeed, his insights are more relevant today than they were in his time. Steiner offers us a new, conscious equilibrium with nature; we are not entitled simply to exploit the Earth, but neither should we view ourselves as devastating irritants on Earth’s surface. We are an integral part of the evolving natural world from which we arise. This world surrounds us, and we can rediscover ourselves within it, just as we can find all of nature transformed within us. In the extracts compiled in this volume―presented with commentary and notes by Matthew Barton―Steiner discusses human perception, the Earth, water, plants, animals, insects, agriculture, and natural catastrophes. Spiritual Ecology offers a wealth of original thought and spiritual insight on the future of the Earth and humanity.
- GenresNatureSpirituality
256 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2008
7 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Rudolf Steiner
4,362 books1,110 followersAuthor also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 22, 2013
Absolutely loved everything about this book. If you are interested in nature and our environment or find yourself curious about spirituality of the natural earth processes this book is an absolute must!
September 24, 2023
Read only half of it. The love for the natural world and its complex relationships was the strong point. But the theories put forth are offered with virtually no evidence or logic behind them, we are supposed to accept their truth without questioning. Maybe they're better explained in Steiner's longer works; it is a weakness that this was short excerpts, many from lectures. Anthroposophy has some noble aspirations and nice terms (etheric, astral) but still privileges the human being like Abrahamic religions. Steiner willfully misunderstands experimental science and the value of trying to isolate variables, his holism is total and oppressive.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews