RUDOLF STEINER | ANAKI77

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 February 1861 – 30 March 1925)

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.

Followers of anthroposophy aim to engage in spiritual discovery through a mode of thought independent of sensory experience. Though proponents claim to present their ideas in a manner that is verifiable by rational discourse and say that they seek precision and clarity comparable to that obtained by scientists investigating the physical world, many of these ideas have been termed pseudoscientific by experts in epistemology and debunkers of pseudoscience.

Anthroposophy has its roots in German idealism, Western and Eastern esoteric ideas, various religious traditions, and modern Theosophy. Steiner chose the term anthroposophy (from Greek ἄνθρωπος anthropos-, 'human', and σοφία sophia, 'wisdom') to emphasize his philosophy's humanistic orientation. He defined it as "a scientific exploration of the spiritual world"; others have variously called it a "philosophy and cultural movement", a "spiritual movement", a "spiritual science", "a system of thought", "a speculative and oracular metaphysic", "system [...] replete with esoteric and occult mystifications", or "a spiritualist movement", or folie a culte, or "positivistic religion", or "new religious movement" and "occultist movement".

Anthroposophical ideas have been applied in a range of fields including education (both in Waldorf schools and in the Camphill movement), environmental conservation and banking; with additional applications in agriculture, organizational development, the arts, and more.

The anthroposophical view is that good is found in the balance between two polar influences on world and human evolution. These are often described through their mythological embodiments as spiritual adversaries which endeavour to tempt and corrupt humanity, Lucifer and his counterpart Ahriman. These have both positive and negative aspects. Lucifer is the light spirit, which "plays on human pride and offers the delusion of divinity", but also motivates creativity and spirituality; Ahriman is the dark spirit that tempts human beings to "...deny [their] link with divinity and to live entirely on the material plane", but that also stimulates intellectuality and technology. Both figures exert a negative effect on humanity when their influence becomes misplaced or one-sided, yet their influences are necessary for human freedom to unfold.

Each human being has the task to find a balance between these opposing influences, and each is helped in this task by the mediation of the Representative of Humanity, also known as the Christ being, a spiritual entity who stands between and harmonizes the two extremes.

Paths of spiritual development

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists, evolving along with the material one. Steiner held that the spiritual world can be researched in the right circumstances through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline. Steiner described many exercises he said were suited to strengthening such self-discipline; the most complete exposition of these is found in his book How To Know Higher Worlds. The aim of these exercises is to develop higher levels of consciousness through meditation and observation. Details about the spiritual world, Steiner suggested, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, though no more infallibly than the results of natural science.

Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.... Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst.

Steiner regarded his research reports as being important aids to others seeking to enter into spiritual experience. He suggested that a combination of spiritual exercises (for example, concentrating on an object such as a seed), moral development (control of thought, feelings and will combined with openness, tolerance and flexibility) and familiarity with other spiritual researchers' results would best further an individual's spiritual development. He consistently emphasised that any inner, spiritual practice should be undertaken in such a way as not to interfere with one's responsibilities in outer life. Steiner distinguished between what he considered were true and false paths of spiritual investigation.

In anthroposophy, artistic expression is also treated as a potentially valuable bridge between spiritual and material reality.

Prerequisites to and stages of inner development

A person seeking inner development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one's mind. They must be so incorporated into one's being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never conclude anything inwardly about these truths.

— Rudolf Steiner, "On the Inner Life"

Union of science and spirit

Steiner believed in the possibility of applying the clarity of scientific thinking to spiritual experience, which he saw as deriving from an objectively existing spiritual world. Steiner identified mathematics, which attains certainty through thinking itself, thus through inner experience rather than empirical observation, as the basis of his epistemology of spiritual experience.

Anthroposophy regards mainstream science as Ahrimanic.

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