Care for the Soul

Whenever I read Steiner - whether on bees, agriculture or even the electrification of the early 1920s in relation to the current rollout of 5G – I am struck by his prescience with respect to many contemporary challenges. This book selects and comments on his writings as a possible basis for a psychotherapy founded on anthroposophy – a 'science of the spirit' based on his own perception and understanding as well as the development of imagination, inspiration and intuition. Steiner was an inheritor of German idealism as well as the scientific work of Goethe, but with a highly developed spiritual perception as well as philosophical understanding of the limitations - still present - of a scientific outlook where 'only the ordinary mind exists, and this in turn is entirely dependent on our bodily organs.' (p. 27) Steiner goes beyond this to what he calls 'beholding consciousness' (c.f. witness), and awareness rooted in the world of spirit and enabling him to understand that the activity of the brain is in fact instrumentally that of the spirit (p. 121). Science as presently constituted is incapable of 'delving into an intrinsically inward realm of soul.' (p. 58)

Steiner recommends methods of meditation and contemplation that do not call upon faculty of memory or input from sense perceptions. These practices develop 'imaginative consciousness' while training the will and developing the feeling life along lines already practised by Goethe, eventually leading to supersensible cognition. The soul needs to undertake what he calls self-strengthening to achieve a spiritual vision of itself from within as a creative entity. Here a certain courage is called for in overcoming a fear of the void and realising the fullness of emptiness which is in fact the fullness of spirit that we intrinsically are. We exist on a spectrum of inwardness and outwardness, and our task is to become more intentionally aware of and oriented towards the underlying spiritual nature of reality.