 Working
with Anthroposophy
by Georg Kuhlewind
Working with Anthroposophy
by Georg Kuhlewind
has two goals: to stimulate both meditative working with spiritual
science and new, independent formulations of its content on the
basis of experience. For times are changing quickly, much more
quickly than before. The founder of spiritual science knew this
perfectly well. Truths cannot be transmitted
simply as stable dogmas. Truths are always of a given moment and at
each moment must be grasped anew. This demands at each moment a
renewed activity in relation to the human gift of understanding.
One way of working with
anthroposophy is presented and recommended here - a way appropriate
for today, and perhaps for tomorrow as well. This does not mean that
the author despises or condemns other ways of working with
anthroposophy. On the contrary, he bows down spiritually before
those who have transmitted anthroposophy to him in their very
different way, and also before those who, in the future, will
develop further methods quite different from his own. It is his hope
that this will take place—for a teaching lives only as long as it
grows and changes.
Anthroposophy appeals to thinking
as an idea and, through thinking, it can speak to the heart as a
luminous warmth. For about a hundred and fifty years a battle has
waged continuously around the question of thinking. The issue is,
Will thinking succumb to the mechanism of the brain? Will "the brain
thinks" become reality? Or will thinking strengthen itself in its
autonomy, and thereby become able to think actively, freely, and
even oppose the existing mechanisms of the brain, dissolving and
transforming them? When the cerebral apparatus dominates thinking,
it makes no difference what we think, or think we think.
Anthroposophy, for its part,
presupposes that thinking does not remain bound to the brain, its
instrument. It recognizes that when thinking is determined by the
brain it loses its autonomy and can no longer act freely—in which
case the assumption that the brain thinks becomes a reality.
Working with Anthroposophy can
help make our thinking and psychological being ever more independent
of the predetermined structures of the brain and the physical body.
The aim of studying anthroposophy, therefore, is not knowledge of
some contents falsely considered as information but is an activity,
an event. This aim would be completely illusory, however, were we
not to some extent already touching superconscious planes of
consciousness from moment to moment in our everyday lives with each
new understanding.
At the level of study, the goal
of working with anthroposophy is to extend this "touching," and
thereby increase the experience of these insight-flashes. Metanoia
or "change of mind" means that practicing readers - those who
exercise or meditate - transform not only the contents but the level
of their consciousness. The contents serve this goal because their
real meaning is revealed only to heightened consciousness. One reads
much more slowly when seeking the how of what is presented and not
simply its "contents." Study, therefore, in this context means
reading and exercising (meditating).
"The development that spiritual
science carries out in us is far more important than the content of
spiritual science." The Philosophy of Freedom - Rudolf Steiner
—from the Introduction
Anthroposophic Press
Translated by Michael Lipson and Christopher Bamford
95pp; paperback
ISBN: 0-88010-361-2
To purchase this title, please
click here:
Working with Anthroposophy - Georg Kuhlewind
Other books by the author:
Georg Kuhlewind is the
author of eleven books, including Stages of Consciousness,
Becoming Aware of the Logos, The Life of the
Soul, and From Normal to Healthy. A retired
physical chemist, he lives in Hungary where he is active in Waldorf
teacher training.
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