Community Life, Inner Development, Sexuality, and the Spiritual Teacher

Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner #CW 253

by Rudolf Steiner

This collection of lectures contains Steiner’s strongest statements on the issues of human relationships within a spiritual community. Occasioned by a scandal involving people influenced by psychoanalysis, these lectures are Steiner’s comprehensive assessment of Freud’s work and psychoanalysis as a whole. Steiner shows, our physical life, including human sexuality, has spiritual roots; and that looking to sexuality for the explanation of human behavior is therefore looking in the wrong direction. He also makes clear that becoming part of a spiritual community, such as the Anthroposophical Society, entails special responsibilities and a new way of being.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

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

[Roger Buck]

We enter the 21st century and the materialism which Rudolf Steiner warned of only continues its steely cold ascent. 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 Anthroposophical failure and 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 perhaps indicated at the above link, 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 ...