From Normal to Healthy (eBook)

From Normal to Healthy: Paths to the Liberation of Consciousness

How much practical time do we usually devote to the general art of being human? This practical guide to the self-healing of consciousness—it is both a spiritual psychology and a contemporary manual of the inner life—begins by laying out very clearly the unhealthy, unfree nature of today’s consciousness.

Methodical self-observation leads to discovering the key to the liberating consciousness from its habitual blind spots and automatisms: the realization of the universal primacy of cognition and the universal availability of its ground, the free attention.

Through attention, a person who practices the author’s exercises begins to expand the range of his or her possibilities of understanding and doing. The exercises—based on the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path and Rudolf Steiner’s cognitive spiritual path—lead to a new life in which superconscious intuitions gradually take the place of superconscious formations.

This new life is a universal human life of improvisatory, living thinking: a life of presence, pure joy, which is health for human beings.

“I believe that our central problem is that we do not know what or who a human being really is. We lack this knowledge because we have no valid picture of the human WORD, no image of human language, of words in general. This is why we have such trouble with words, why we hit upon the right word so rarely. Everything we do to, for, and against each other is speech of some kind, or ought to be. Yet we are interested in anything but words, these very words by means of which we do everything else. Because we don’t know what words are we don’t know what humans are” (from the foreword).

Contents:

1. Inventory
2. The Diseased Consciousness
3. A Little Psychology
4. A Little Psychology
5. The Health of the Soul
6. The Path of Knowledge
7. On Human Freedom

About the Author

Georg Kühlewind (1924–2006) was a Hungarian philosopher, writer, lecturer, and meditation teacher who worked from the tradition of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science. Setting aside his early interest in music and psychology, he pursued a successful professional career as a physical chemist. Meanwhile, he continued to deepen his spiritual practice and insights. A prolific author (most of whose works are still only in German), Georg Kühlewind spent much time traveling the world, lecturing and leading workshops and seminars in meditation, psychology, epistemology, child development, anthroposophy, and esoteric Christianity. He was the author of numerous books. Kühlewind died January 15, 2006 at the age of 83.

Michael Lipson, PhD, the author of Stairway of Surprise: Six Steps to a Creative Life (2002) and Group Meditation (2011), is also the translator of Rudolf Steiner’s Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom and of numerous books by Georg Kühlewind. After working with children with HIV/AIDS for nine years in New York City’s Harlem Hospital, he moved with his wife and two children to the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. Dr. Lipson conducts a practice in Clinical Psychology and teaches meditation internationally. He is a frequent host of the radio call-in show Vox Pop on WAMC, a local NPR affiliate station in Upstate New York.