The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: Fundamentals of a Modern View of the World (The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner, 4)

This is a landmark book not only in the field of philosophy, but also in human evolutionary physical, psychic, and spiritual development. By using the same exacting, precise methods of observation, thinking, experience, and reason, the tools so grandly developed by Western humanity over the past 2,500 years in respect to nature and culminating n the scientific method, Steiner creates the basis for a philosophy and science of the human being, as well as a science of the spirit. Rudolf Steiner clearly points out how each of us can make the gigantic leap of transforming these very methods and tools into the means for people to free themselves of the limits we have thus far placed on ourselves. This book is not limited to a reexamination of the fundamental questions of thinking, free will, love, and morality, nor is it about the logical beauty and organic development of the psychic process of human remembering and experiencing activities, the responsibilities and consequences of the application of the spiritual activity of freedom. Rather, it moves beyond these various human experiences. Steiner points to our own means of becoming aware of the very force in us that makes these soul and spiritual experiences consciously understood and manifest in practice. That power is the reality of the self-aware "I" that is the essence of our human being, and further, it is a Self that can become conscious of itself through its own spiritual activity. We are free beings, capable of acting in fredom because, at our core, we are spiritual beings. That is why The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is a truly unique book: it places the free, self-aware, human spirit at the very center of all human activities.