eBook Breathing the Spirit: Meditations for Times of Day and Seasons of the Year ePub

A prophet is seldom appreciated in his time. Steiner will be rebuked by the quick-fix prove-it mentality. What they really mean is prove it--materially. Steiner rejects the material as the ultimate reality. He says the spiritual plane behind the material is the ultimate reality, that it remains hidden because folks are too indolent and arrogant to apply themselves to it.
In Christ's name, one might read Steiner three times, just three times over the course of a lifetime even, before dismissing him. Steiner questions the very survival of the human soul (as human). He sees for man one singular hope:the Christ impulse; a living practice of personal human spirituality drawn from the occult implications of the Christ phenomenon. A mystical Christianity that demands personal response from the individual as an individual all his life, and just as particularly in death.
Steiner's position is that the very evolution of our species is tied hard to Christ, Christ's message and death, and our understanding of what actually happened at Golgotha.
The dogma and ritual of the churches and varying religious ideologies do not address the mystery fully enough if at all Steiner says because their time has long passed, that man is due for an evolutionary morph in consciousness that the dogmas cannot possibly address. This morph will occur Steiner predicts sometime in this the third millennium.
Many of us now dismiss the gravity of Golgotha, that Jesus of Nazareth was a decent enough fellow. We fail to recognize that a God, Christ the Logos, the most powerful Spirit of the cosmos, descended into the man Jesus, taught and spoke through Jesus' human consciousness, that the entirety of the human consciousness would be altered to compassion.
That God Himself died on that cross that man's view of death might be altered to the understanding that man is spirit, that he will reincarnate eternally. God allowed His own blood to fall, for a specific reason; Steiner says.
The mystical power of God's blood soaked into the Earth altered all of our blood. All human blood was changed forever at Golgotha;the false course of human evolution diverted, at Golgotha; Steiner says.
That the Earth, the spirit behind the planet was changed too in acceptance of the sacrifice, is understandable.
Steiner gives intricate reasons and historical data to support his position none of which contradicts the materialistic science of our time but does point to materialistic science as shallow abstraction that only scratches at the surface of a material reality that is entirely the projection of far more vast and powerful spiritual reality acting behind the material, giving rise to the physical and demise to the physical.
I suspect that Steiner is intentionally ambiguous at some points, sometimes he mists over, requiring one to read more of his message--sink deeper into it, put the pieces together. Give our hearts to it, if we have any heart left.
I've read several of his books, some three times. He's a genius. His work is a form of initiatory process; one must struggle through it, rather as Christ struggled under the cross; wrestle with Steiner's revelations, somewhat as Jacob did the angel. Tremendous spiritual substance. In all that Steiner offers. Food for the hungry soul.

I have read this book repeatedly and each time I understand it more deeply.
Steiner starts with a description of the physical body then progresses to the more subtle bodies as the etheric, astral bodies and the spiritual Ego which leads to an understanding of the human body in its totality. This is all written methodically and systematically. To read Steiner requires full attention and should be read slowly and consciously. It is an effort well worth making in order to acquire an understanding of the spiritual world and how it interpenetrates the physical. Steiner writes with a clarity and insight given to few. He was a true clairvoyant and wrote and lectured about the Universe and evolution of Humanity going back before Atlantis. Just the act of reading Steiner transforms the reader. It takes time to assimilate this new way of perceiving the world as well as ourselves but well worth the effort.

Rudolf Steiner was the founder of the Anthroposophical movement in Germany in the early 1900s.
He was a most gifted and inspiring teacher and was responsible for the advent of Waldorf education and Biodynamic farming among other new and more enlightened ways of functioning in the world. He has been my spiritual teacher since the early seventies and certainly has changed my life through his books, lectures and workshops. Theosophy is an excellent start.

A fine piece of work. Steiner provides a clear and persuasive explanation of his construct of the human condition. How we human beings can work positively for self-development and effective support for the needs of the world is nourishing food for thought.

My first book from Rudolf Steiner I read when I was 16. Now being 50, I still read it from time to time as it is one of his foundational books. Love it!

This book was made by scanning an original version and then binding the scanned copy. They say they do this because it keeps the cost down which is fine by me. The problem is, if you have ever scanned a document you will find that the words in the scanned document often get jumbled and the document has to be edited so the sentences can be corrected. THEY DID NOT EDIT THIS BOOK. I REPEAT, THEY DID NOT EDIT THIS BOOK. They say they did not edit this book so that they can keep the cost down. I DID NOT FIND THIS OUT UNTIL AFTER I BOUGHT THE BOOK AND READ THE DISCLAIMER THAT IS WRITTEN INSIDE. Reading Rudolf Steiner is complicated enough but try understanding a book where the sentences are jumbled up and make no sense. AMAZON SHOULD STOP SELLING THIS PARTICULAR VERSION OF THE BOOK.

I recommend to all seekers for truth about themselves. I have most of his books. one of my favorite authors

This is a review of the General Books edition of Teosophy, and not of the content of Teosophy itself. The General Books edition (at $8 here on Amazon) is obviously a scanned version of the book, with no apparent proof reading after the text recognition (OCR) was done. The result is a book with lots of typos, and some pages are pure garble. Reading Steiner is hard enough, so stay away from this edition unless you totally have to save the few extra dollars to get a read-through version.

UGH, why didn't I read the other reviews before I bought this edition? This book is FILLED with the most bizarre typesetting errors you can imagine, which makes it incredibly difficult to read. Sometimes you really do get only what you pay for. I will order another edition, but never again buy a book published by General Books LLC.