Working With Anthroposophy (eBook)

Working With Anthroposophy: The Practice of Thinking

“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.” — Jörgen Smit (from the foreword)

The goal of this study is to cultivate the experience of living, intuitive thinking, such as we experience with every new understanding. As Kühlewind puts it, this unique contribution to practice of anthroposophy has a twofold purpose: “to stimulate working with spiritual science through exercises, and to stimulate independent new formulations of its content on the basis of experience.”

Working with Anthroposophy will help guide beginning students and inspire longtime students of the path opened up by Rudolf Steiner. As with all of Kühlewind’s works, this book opens new insights with each reading.

“Anthroposophy was given to thinking as an idea and, through thinking, to the heart as a luminous warmth. But for about 150 years, a battle has raged around thinking: Will it fall prey to the mechanism of the brain? Will ‘the brain thinks’ become a 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…. – “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.” -from the book

C O N T E N T S:

Foreword by Jörgen Smit
Introduction

1. The Character of Spiritual Science
2. Healthy Human Understanding
3. Contents
4. Knowledge and Ability: Knowing and Doing
5. Enslavement
6. Temptation
7. Right Study

Afterword:
1. The Transmission of Anthroposophy
2. On Speculative Anthroposophy

Appendices:

1. Understanding Imagistic Descriptions
2. Deductive Reason and the Supersensible
3. Remember Contents and the “State of the Soul”
4. Healthy Human Understanding
5. Pure Thinking
6. Mantras: Their Origin and Practice
7. Enthusiasm and Mysticism
8. “Esplanation” of “Contents”
9. Temptation
10. New Concepts
11. First Steps
12. Study as the Way to Pure Thinking
13. Active, Clairvoyant Thinking
14. The Experience of Thinking
15. Wordless Thinking
16. The “Two Ways”
17. Building Community
18. Scientificality
19. The Cultivation of Spiritual Science
20. Understanding Spiritual Truths

Notes
References

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.

Jörgen Smit was born in Norway in 1916 and taught at a Rudolf Steiner school there for thirty years before becoming head of a teacher training college in Järna, Sweden. In 1975, he became a member of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society and was leader of the Education Section (until 1989) and leader of the Youth Section until his death in 1991. He was a well-known lecturer and the author of several works on Rudolf Steiner education and the meditative path of anthroposophy.