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Angels
Religious and spiritual writings have always made reference to beings from the spiritual hierarchies, especially those known in Christian tradition as Angels. These spirits are the closest to human beings and act as our invisible guides and companions. They influence the life of the individual as well as the evolution of humanity and the cosmos.
From his own clairvoyant vision, Rudolf Steiner confirmed the existence of such spiritual beings and showed how modern minds could gain access to their world. As he explains in these inspiring lectures, it is important for us to understand and cooperate with the work of the Angels today as this is crucial for the further development of humanity.
From his own clairvoyant vision, Rudolf Steiner confirmed the existence of such spiritual beings and showed how modern minds could gain access to their world. As he explains in these inspiring lectures, it is important for us to understand and cooperate with the work of the Angels today as this is crucial for the further development of humanity.
182 pages, Paperback
First published July 31, 1996
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About the author
Rudolf Steiner
4,339 books1,100 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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September 11, 2022
I came to Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical writings via Saul Bellow, notably his Pulitzer-winning 1975 novel Humboldt’s Gift in which the soulful protagonist is occupied with the teachings in 'spirit science' of none else than Steiner. It was a curious book to read, albeit one that makes your thoughts run on a different track. For me, reading Angels resulted in jotting down ideas of a fictionalized cult. I wonder what it did for Bellow.
To give you a taste of the lectures collected in the book, here are some highlights:
"We observe things as they are, not as they might become. We can only grow conscious of spiritual reality by shifting our perception from finished to developing creation. Our past can become the foundation of what we may become in the future."
"People who want to believe in the spirit, make spiritualistic experiments, letting the spirit manifest, because they only want to believe in a spirit that can take material form. That is no spirit, however, which appears in a gleam of material light. Spiritualism is the most extreme form of materialism. People seek to deny the spirit by accepting as spirit something that only presents itself in the material world."
Thomas Aquinas made reference to Aristotle's De Anima, paraphrased by the Intro's author: "When we attain knowledge and understanding of these realms [the angelic realms, in which process of perception and the object of perception cannot be distinguished], we enter a domain in which we become one with the object of perception. Knowledge of the Angels leads us therefore to being Angel-like ourselves."
Strange? Indeed. But also fascinating, at least for this reader.
As Douglas Brenner writes in the New York Times' T Magazine, Steiner was the obscure spirit man of his time (the 1st half of the 20th century) with admirers abounding. "Practically no one outside anthroposophical circles, it seems, lifted specific shapes or motifs from Steiner, but his concepts fascinated creative figures across the aesthetic spectrum. The exhibition will include pages from Wassily Kandinsky’s diary with jottings about Steiner, fan mail from Piet Mondrian, a note from Franz Kafka requesting Steiner’s comments about a new manuscript and a 1923 invitation from the architect Richard Neutra, then a disciple of the Expressionist master Erich Mendelsohn, to visit the new Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany."
To give you a taste of the lectures collected in the book, here are some highlights:
"We observe things as they are, not as they might become. We can only grow conscious of spiritual reality by shifting our perception from finished to developing creation. Our past can become the foundation of what we may become in the future."
"People who want to believe in the spirit, make spiritualistic experiments, letting the spirit manifest, because they only want to believe in a spirit that can take material form. That is no spirit, however, which appears in a gleam of material light. Spiritualism is the most extreme form of materialism. People seek to deny the spirit by accepting as spirit something that only presents itself in the material world."
Thomas Aquinas made reference to Aristotle's De Anima, paraphrased by the Intro's author: "When we attain knowledge and understanding of these realms [the angelic realms, in which process of perception and the object of perception cannot be distinguished], we enter a domain in which we become one with the object of perception. Knowledge of the Angels leads us therefore to being Angel-like ourselves."
Strange? Indeed. But also fascinating, at least for this reader.
As Douglas Brenner writes in the New York Times' T Magazine, Steiner was the obscure spirit man of his time (the 1st half of the 20th century) with admirers abounding. "Practically no one outside anthroposophical circles, it seems, lifted specific shapes or motifs from Steiner, but his concepts fascinated creative figures across the aesthetic spectrum. The exhibition will include pages from Wassily Kandinsky’s diary with jottings about Steiner, fan mail from Piet Mondrian, a note from Franz Kafka requesting Steiner’s comments about a new manuscript and a 1923 invitation from the architect Richard Neutra, then a disciple of the Expressionist master Erich Mendelsohn, to visit the new Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany."
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