6 selected lectures in various cities Traditional folklore depicts guardian angels as beings who guide and protect us. However, although there are numerous stories of the miraculous intervention of these beings, many people continue to dismiss guardian angels as myth, superstition, or allegorical. Based on his personal experience and cognition, Rudolf Steiner speaks of guardian angels and other spiritual beings as real entities. Their existence, he tells us, is a spiritual and scientific fact that can be researched and studied through clairvoyance. One of his aims was to enable people to reconnect with these spiritual beings, not only for their own benefit, but also for the benefit of the other kingdom of nature and the destiny of the earth's evolution as a whole. In writings and lectures, Steiner intended to lead people from belief to recognition, knowledge, and real understanding of spiritual beings. In these six selected lectures―previously hidden away in early publications or journals―he describes the role of the guardian angel and our relationship to the heavenly hierarchies of spiritual beings as a whole, as well as how they shape our human form as a result of their cosmic activity. People today are increasingly awaking to the angelic guidance in their own daily lives and beginning to seek it consciously. These lectures will help these individuals to understand their experiences and to make their communication with spiritual beings more conscious.
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.
The title here is perhaps misleading, since there is not much in these six lectures dealing specifically with guardian angels and how to connect with them. The lectures, from diverse occasions between 1908 and 1923, deal with different aspects of the hierarchy of beings we call angels, along with sundry other things to do with human spiritual development.
So the material I was hoping to find in this book was scattered throughout it in a handful of sentences. Nonetheless, Steiner is always interesting, and I found myself intrigued and challenged by the things he is presenting. The important thing is to recognize that we share the cosmos with many beings existing at a higher level of spiritual development than ourselves, and we would be wise to keep this fact central in our thinking as we live our lives.
Can't believe it took me so long to get to this book. It lead me to write about the role of angels in our lives through Lent. You can read these thoughts on my Facebook page The Esoteric Connection
In places revealing some knowledge and contact, still a painful example of extrapolating too much about the spiritual from a merely intellectual level.