Featuring more than ninety of Rudolf Steiner’s best-loved verses and meditations, this volume collects a range of material on various themes, such as working with spiritual beings, connecting with loved ones who have passed over, developing "I"-being, and celebrating festivals and seasons. Countless people have worked with these meditations over the decades and can testify to their power, as well as to the strength and comfort they offer for meditation and contemplation. Although there are various translations for many of these verses, George and Mary Adams’s renderings can truly be said to be “classic” and are the most widely used in the English-speaking anthroposophic movement. George Adams was Steiner’s personal interpreter whenever he lectured in Britain, and Adams thus developed an intuitive understanding of Steiner’s esoteric work. Those who know these verses will be delighted that they are available again, while those who approach them for the first time will discover a treasure of wisdom and an abundance of tools for inner transformation. This edition also features the original German texts where applicable.
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.
This is a beautiful book and a must for everyone interested in anthroposophy. It contains Rudolf Steiner's spiritual poems, prayers and meditations, as well as advice on the path of self-growth.