Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment

Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment - Rudolf Steiner

2024 Reprint of the 1947 Edition. A Revised and Enlarged Edition of The Way of Initiation and Initiation and Its Results. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Rudolf Steiner developed exercises aimed at cultivating new cognitive faculties he believed would be appropriate to contemporary individual and cultural development.  According to Steiner's view of history, in earlier periods people were capable of direct spiritual perceptions, or clairvoyance, but not yet of rational thought; more recently, rationality has been developed at the cost of spiritual perception, leading to the alienation characteristic of modernity. Steiner proposed that humanity now has the task of synthesizing the rational and contemplative/spiritual components of cognition, whereby spiritual perception would be awakened through intensifying thinking. He considered this relevant not only to personal development, but as a foundation for advanced scientific research.

Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment constitutes a fundamental guide to the anthroposophical path of cognition or knowledge. In human consciousness, faculties are sleeping that, if awakened, lead to life-giving wisdom. With great clarity and warmth Rudolf Steiner details the exercises and moral qualities to be cultivated on the path to a conscious experience of supersensible realities.

This book, perhaps the most controversial of Steiner's extensive literary legacy, suggests the possibility of a person in the 20th century developing sufficient skills of concentration, empathy, etc. to be able to obtain first-hand knowledge of spiritual realities consciously.