Anthroposophy: Encyclopedia II - Anthroposophy - Aspects of Anthroposophic Thinking

Anthroposophy - Aspects of Anthroposophic Thinking

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists out of which the material one gradually condensed, and evolved. The spiritual world, Steiner held, can in the right circumstances be researched through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline. Steiner described many exercises he said were suited to strengthening such self-discipline. Details about the spiritual world, he said, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, not infallibly, but with approximate accuracy.

Steiner regarded his research reports as being important aids to others seeking to enter into spiritual experience. He suggested that a combination of spiritual exercises (for example, concentrating on an object such as a seed), moral development (control of thought, feelings and will combined with openness, tolerance and flexibility) and familiarity with other spiritual researchers' results would best further an individual's spiritual development. He consistently emphasized that any inner, spiritual practice should be undertaken in such a way as not to interfere with one's responsibilities in outer life.

Steiner often advised people avoid turning his work into a doctrine. He emphasized that any researcher, in any field, was able to make mistakes, and that both science and the world continued to evolve, making all results outdated after a certain time.

One of the central exercises of anthroposophy is to focus on a given content (this can be an outer object or a spiritual imagination) for a given time, and then to consciously eliminate the content from one's consciousness, allowing the process of attention to continue. We can become aware, thereby, of the activity of attention itself. A further step is then to dismiss this activity from one's consciousness. Behind the activity, Steiner suggested, would be found another level of spiritual reality.

Some of Steiner's students support his claim that remaining actively within his process, can have the effect of awakening one gradually into forms of superconscious spiritual awareness. Steiner claims to offer a gradual experiential path from ordinary conceptual thinking into forms of thinking perceptive of living spiritual beings and mobile realities in the spiritual world.

They claim that gaining access to the unusual forms of consciousness embodied in some of Steiner's works is not a matter of believing in or having faith in whatever Steiner chose to say about spiritual beings. Rather, they claim that Steiner's thinking, if adequately penetrated with one's own active questioning, thinking and feeling, eventually reveals itself as a sort of spiritual music full of aesthetic tensions and relaxations and various kinds of spiritual dynamism. This spiritual dynamism, they see as full of complex metamorphoses of form and color, and can itself eventually be perceived as the speaking and singing of living spiritual beings and of a real spiritual world.

His students say that an obstacle to 'getting' Steiner, in this sense, is that reading for people today is rarely a process where the dynamic birth of a concept out of a pre-conceptual background is felt and recreated as we read each word. They see one way of remaining within the process of Steiner's thinking, is to gradually learn through his works how to live consciously at the threshold where a concept comes into being. In this way they say, one is no longer confined to observing things that already are, instead one begins to see realities emerging into being, and that means seeing to some extent into 'non-being', and discovering there more than nothingness but a hidden life of creative non-material beings and processes in a non-material world.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Aspects of Anthroposophic Thinking", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki