 A
Western Approach to Reincarnation and Karma
Selected Lectures and Writings by Rudolf Steiner
Edited and Introduced by René Querido
A Western
Approach to Reincarnation and Karma contains many of
Rudolf Steiner's lectures and writings on these subjects,
describing them within
the context of Western spiritual philosophy.
The
soul's immortality and its repeated earthly births are not new
ideas in Western thought. They are implicit in the Pythagorean
and Platonic traditions, as well as in some branches of
esoteric Judaism and Kabbala. But it was not until the early
years of this century that the West was given a detailed,
modern, evolutionary philosophy of human life based on the
reality of reincarnation and karma.
This
turning-point occurred when Rudolf Steiner began to make
public the results of his own spiritual-scientific researches.
Steiner viewed the revelation of reincarnation and
karma at this time in the West as one of his most important life tasks.
Steiner's
contribution, however, remains unique in its understanding of
the human being as an evolving, developing being of body,
soul, and spirit. Asiatic concepts of repeated earth lives, by
contrast, are not associated with evolutionary growth but are
seen as an "endless cycle of births and deaths."
On the basis
of his researches, presented in many books and lectures,
we can begin to understand how the complex interaction of
human lives between birth and death and between death and a
new birth gives new meaning not only to individual lives lived
on Earth in community with others but also to human history
and evolution as a whole.
A Western
Approach to Reincarnation and Karma collects for the first time many of Steiner's major
statements on the subject. The primary purpose of
this volume is to help readers meet the challenge of spiritual
research in the area of individual evolution of the soul and
spirit in the context of cultural and universal evolution.
Such a study can be tremendously revealing and provide
spiritual understanding in a time of increasing intellectual
confusion and spiritual poverty.
Trans. C. E. Creeger (Selected writings and lectures); 224pp
Anthroposophic Press
ISBN:
0 88010 399 X; paperback
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A Western Approach to Reincarnation and
Karma - Rudolf Steiner
Copyright © 2003 Skylark Books
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