Weekly Meditations: Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul with Accompanying Reflections

by Rudolf Steiner

“Prayer in a human being is a conscious expression of the upward trend of nature found everywhere. So every impulse or desire of the soul for life, love, light, is a prayer.”
― Charles Fillmore , Teach Us to Pray

“I was surprised when I heard a ‘voice’ at about 3 a.m. while I slept one morning. I was told to write a series of reflections on the Calendar [of the Soul]. It seemed like a good idea, so I began the process. Every morning for a year I was awakened at the same time and ‘told’ what to write that day. Unlike some dedicated souls who get up and immediately write what they have heard, I went back to sleep. When I awoke, the message was still clear in my mind. So I wrote. Daily.”
― Patsy Scala (from the introduction) When asked how one might find a way into Christianity, the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast advised, “Meditate the sacred year.” In the same vein, when asked what a lifetime’s study of Anthroposophy had given him, the English philosopher Owen Barfield replied, “I now have some idea of the reality of the living year.” For readers who like to chew meditatively on poetry, Weekly Meditations will put them firmly on the path to realizing both of these great realities. Rudolf Steiner’s weekly verses allow attentive readers to follow the course of the year in body, soul, and spirit. In addition, from the perspective of one who has sought to live inwardly with the sacred, living year, Patsy Scala’s poetic reflections, which arose from her deep practice of the verses, provide an accessible and complementary guide to one’s daily practice. Weekly Meditations is a book to keep handy and reread throughout the seasons of the year.

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2008

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.