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Heart Thinking: Inspired Knowledge

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Theconcepts of “thinking with the heart,” or EQ (“emotional intelligence”), are often used today, usually in contrast tointellectual thought. When Rudolf Steiner used the phrase “heart thinking,”however, he meant it in a very specific sense. Drawn primarily from hislectures, the compiled texts in this anthology illuminate his perspective―thatheart thinking is intimately related to the spiritual faculty of Inspiration.The heart, he says, can become a new organ of thinking through the practice ofexercises that work towards the transformation of feeling, shedding itspersonal and subjective character. Theexercise sequences presented here call for two fundamental gestures. First, renunciation ,extending from extinguishing images engendered in meditation through innersilence to conscious suppression of sensory perception. The second gestureinvolves the development of new feelings toward natural phenomena, aswell as toward the reports of spiritual-scientific research. By practicingthese methods we can attain thinking that is in harmony with the true nature andreality of what we seek to know. Rudolf Steiner’s texts arecollected together by Martina Maria Sam, who contributes a lucid introductionand notes.

136 pages, Paperback

Published July 7, 2017

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About the author

Rudolf Steiner

4,362 books1,106 followers
Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

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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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