Love & Its Meaning in the World

by Rudolf Steiner, Christopher Bamford (Compiler)

Selected lectures and writings “For human beings, love is the most important fruit of experience in the sense world. Once we really understand the nature of love, or compassion, we will find that love is the way spirit expresses its truth in the world of the senses.... We may even say that, in love, the spiritual world awakes in the physical. The more truly a soul inhabits the spiritual worlds, the more it experiences lovelessness and lack of compassion as a denial of spirit itself.” ― Rudolf Steiner (Aphorism 9, The Threshold of the Spiritual World ) Although Steiner did not often speak or write about love explicitly, love is at the very heart of his whole body of work and the foundation of his hopes for humankind and the Earth. Steiner teaches that, without love, nothing is possible; with love, however, we can do everything. Love is always "love of the not-yet." To love is to create; it is to selflessly enter the current of time that flows toward us from the future. Reality, true knowledge of reality, is impossible without love. Only through love can we truly know as we are now and encounter the world and its beings in a living way. Without love, knowledge becomes manipulation, domination, control; the world becomes a space of dead things. But, when we know through love, we enter into a pattern of dynamic, potentially redemptive relations and the world becomes a living world of beings working for the good. This collection gathers all of Rudolf Steiner’s main lectures and writings related to love. From earthly love to the nature and function of spiritual love, these pieces are essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of humanity and the Earth. Love and Its Meaning in the World is essential reading for anyone who'd like to gain a deeper understanding of our true mission as human beings and the purpose of evolution on Earth.

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1998

About the author

Author 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.

Reviews

[Bianca Lesman-Hinderks]

" Het ergste wat tegenwoordig wordt gepresteerd is het op een hoop gooien van liefde en seksualiteit."

"Seksualiteit en liefde hebben in hun ware betekenis helemaal niks met elkaar te maken."

"De liefde is voor de wereld wat de zon is voor het uiterlijke leven. Er zouden geen zielen meer kunnen gedijen wanneer de liefde uit de wereld verdwenen zou zijn. De liefde is de morele zon van de wereld."

Prachtig boek met mooie inzichten over het verschil tussen liefde en seksualiteit. En hoe Freud en de zogenaamde psychoanalyticus van deze tijd al het menselijke verklaart als getransformeerde, omgevormde seksualiteit, gekleurd door eigen en dus subjectieve instincten, maar niet berusten op enige objectiviteit/ waarheid.

[Roger Buck]

100 years after these lectures about love in the world, we behold the death of love in the world of which Steiner warned. We behold the powerful ascent of the steely cold forces of materialism he called “Ahrimanic”. We see that the Anthroposophical movement which he hoped would be helping millions by now is like a damp squib compared to his hopes.

Faced by this ascending cold as steel dehumanised society, what does one do. My answer involves what Steiner says here:

http://corjesusacratissimum.org/2011/...

These are very strange things indeed. That what he was so opposed to was the only wakeful consciousness within our sleeping civilization …
For reasons indicated at the above link that I do not wish to rate this book.
I simply want to say I have read it and that whilst Steiner served to free me from Eastern Theosophy and the New Age scene I found at Findhorn, Valentin Tomberg, in turn, provided me with a very different hermeneutic with which to engage Steiner.

I hope the above link however can contribute a little to the tangled issues involving Steiner and Tomberg - and why I believe this "very different hermeneutic" is necessary for a world plunging into a dark, mechanised society ...