Stages of Consciousness

Stages of Consciousness: Meditations on the Boundaries of the Soul

Here is Georg Kühlewind’s groundbreaking debut work, first published fifty years ago in German, and now available again in the English language.

Ordinarily we live under the tyranny of the past. All that we call thinking is the habitual association of finished, dead thoughts. But these thoughts were alive once and every new moment of understanding is a breath from the level of the living present.

Stages of Consciousness proposes that we train ourselves in the stage of consciousness that we occasionally glimpse as intuition. Beginning with the intuition of the true self in the living thinking―“the fundamental experience of the spirit”―the author goes on to describe practical exercise in concentration and contemplation. Georg Kühlewind describes his purpose in his foreword:

“Modern humanity’s most difficult task is to become aware of, to see and to overcome the threshold of mirrored consciousness. The first essay attempts to show how Rudolf Steiner proposes reaching this goal in his Philosophy of Freedom. Consideration of the threshold lying between thinking and what has been thought leads the one making this experiment to ‘the fundamental experience of the spirit.’ The third essay attempts to develop a methodology for the first steps in the realm of concentration and contemplation. The last essays set forth the outcome: how, in the observation of the soul’s boundaries, these boundaries become transparent and permeable. The form of the communication is such that the reader, tracing the lines of the movements of thinking, steps into its fabric.”

Contents

• Introduction by Christopher Bamford
• Author’s Foreword
• The Two Stages of Consciousness
• The Fundamental Experience of the Spirit
• Concentration and Contemplation
• The Boundaries of the Soul
• The Secret of Perceiving
• The Spiritual Communion of Modern Humanity
• The Sense of Being
• The Light of the Earth

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.