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Nature Spirits: Selected Lectures

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Based on knowledge attained through his highly trained clairvoyance, Steiner contends that folk traditions regarding nature spirits are based on spiritual reality. He describes how people possessed a natural spiritual vision in ancient times, enabling them to commune with nature spirits. These entities also referred to as elemental beings became immortalized as fairies and gnomes in myth, legend, and children s stories. Today, says Steiner, the instinctive understanding that humanity once had for these elemental beings should be transformed into clear scientific knowledge. He even asserts that humanity will not be able to reconnect with the spiritual world if it cannot develop a new relationship to the elementals. The nature spirits themselves want to be of great assistance to us, acting as emissaries of higher divine spiritual beings.

197 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1998

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About the author

Rudolf Steiner

4,342 books1,100 followers
Author 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.

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Profile Image for Antonio Rossano Mendes Pontes.
29 reviews5 followers
June 22, 2015
Rudolf Steiner was above everything a nature lover. He believed that clairvoyance was necessary to see all the spiritual life that abounds around us in the air, on earth, and underground. He also believed that no material life was possible without the extra-terrestrial spiritual beings that command it.

According to him clairvoyance won´t change anything in the human nature or individuality, since enything that enters human consciousness was already there in the depths of human existence. Accordingly, the innermost nature of the human being can only be brought about through cçairvoyance.

His thoughts raised me an inner question: if existing elemental beings from nature need our spiritual evolution to follow behind, but we instead are destroying nature, what will be of these beings? and of the planet?
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