from the Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts
In the last six months of his life, in the period 1924/5, Rudolf Steiner gave the words for his book Leading Thoughts.
Here one will find a compact expression of Steiner’s work. He brings intense, guiding principles. These principles are to be ‘inwardly unfolded, transformed’ and metamorphosed in the human soul, which is itself a cosmic being connected to both the world and to other human souls.
Anthroposophy as a Path of Knowledge
Here are the first three of the Leading Thoughts:
- Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe. It arises in humans as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling; and it can be justified only in as much as it can satisfy this inner need. He/she alone can acknowledge Anthroposophy who finds in it, what one in their own inner life feels impelled to seek. Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of the human and the universe as an elemental need of life just as one feels hunger and thirst.
- Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way. Yet it only does so because everyday life and the science founded on sense perception and intellectual activity, lead to a barrier along life’s way – a limit where the life of the soul within, would die if it could go no further. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to compel us to stop short at it. For at the very frontier when knowledge derived from the sense-perceptible ceases, there is opened through the human soul itself the further outlook into the spiritual world.
- There are those who believe that with the limits of knowledge derived from sense-perceptible the limits of all insight are given. Yet if they would carefully observe how they become conscious of these limits, they would find in the very consciousness of the limits, the faculties to transcend them. The fish swims up to the limits of the water, it must return because it lacks the physical organs to live outside this element. The human reaches the limits of knowledge attainable by sense perception but can recognise that, on the way to this point, powers of the soul have arisen in him- powers whereby the soul can live in an element that goes beyond the horizon of the senses.
Jane Bradshaw
General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Australia
References
Rudolf Steiner, 2021-2024. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, GA 26
Rudolf Steiner, 2013. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: Anthroposophy as a Path of Knowledge-The Michael Mystery. Rudolf Steiner Press.
Feature image: The great hall of the Goetheanum in the afternoon light, March 2024. Photo courtesy of Jane Bradshaw.