The review exercises bring the experiences of our daily lives to full awareness. By directing our attentive gaze to what has happened―whether during a single day or during a whole phase of life―we kindle light in our will. Undertaking such a review backward, in reverse order, or from an “external” perspective, requires a huge inner effort as we attempt to establish distance between ourselves and our daily experiences.
In this essential handbook, the editor has gathered virtually all Steiner's statements on the review exercises, supporting them with commentary and notes. Described from different perspectives and approaches, the book includes a surprising range of suggestions for practice. Individual chapters focus on reviewing the day (transforming the power of memory); reviewing events in one’s life (awakening the higher self); reviewing the perspectives of others (awakening social impulses); exercises in thinking backward (illuminating the will); and more.
This little will be helpful to all who are earnestly following the path of Spiritual Science.
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.