Two Lectures Cycles, Followed by Two Christmas Lectures Dornach, October 3 7 and December 12 20, 1914; Dornach, December 26 and Basel, December 27, 1914 (CW 156)These two lecture courses, given just after the beginning of World War I, stand as a kind of unexpected gift. A few months later, once the war became a reality, the possibilities for esoteric work would change and it would become more difficult to do spiritual research. But in the short interval before the true horror of the conflict unfolded, Rudolf Steiner almost by the way was able to give these lectures, which lay out in the clearest fashion the path of anthroposophic meditation, and its assumptions, language, and consequences.The first lectures expand on the idea of inner reading and hearing as the path to spiritual knowing. The spiritual world gives something and we, as spiritual researchers, receive and then read or interpret it. Spiritual knowledge is not a matter of will, desire, or intention on our part, but a gift from the spiritual world for which we must prepare ourselves by silencing our desires, emptying ourselves, and presenting ourselves in humility and devotion to the spiritual world. Then we become aware of the reality that the spiritual world is nowhere else but here, all around us; and if we dissolve the sense of being skin-bound, we can become open to it, reflect its images in our astral bodies, and then learn to read them by identification. Steiner describes this complex, subtle, existential and living process, in which ultimately we can become one with the universe, in a masterful way from which anyone who meditates, or wishes to begin to meditate, will gain a great deal. The second lecture cycle, How to Achieve Existence in the World of Ideas, deepens the themes developed in the first cycle, so that the two together provide a useful guide to the processes underlying meditation or learning to know the spiritual world. At the same time, because work was just beginning on the building that would become the Goetheanum, Steiner connects the esoteric principles of its design with the overall theme of the suprasensory human being in relation to meditation and spiritual knowing. The volume closes with two wonderful lectures in celebration of Christmas. Here Steiner has a threefold emphasis: Christ, supraearthly, glorious, and divine, fully united with humanity and the Earth and born in each human heart. To celebrate Christmas truly means that we recognize all three of these as one in the spiritual world, in the earthly world, and in ourselves. CONTENTS:

• Introduction by Christopher Bamford

PART I: Inner Reading and Inner Hearing

• 1. The Human Being in Relationship to the World (Dornach, October 3, 1914): Inner reading and inner hearing as a method of spiritual scientific research. Acquiring new forms of judgment, thinking, sensing or feeling for the spiritual world. The significance of thinking, feeling, willing on the physical plane as preparation for the investigation of the spiritual world. Difference between perceiving in the physical world and in the spiritual world. Suppressing the self in meditation. Experiences of the soul while learning inner reading. Learning inner hearing.
• 2. Identification with the Signs and Spiritual Realities of the Imaginative World (Dornach, October 4, 1914): The physical organism as a mirror for experience in the outer world. Experience of the astral body in the spiritual world reflected in the etheric body images of spiritual realities. Differences between natural and trained clairvoyance. Cosmic vowels and consonants.
• 3. The Vowels and Consonants of the Spiritual World (Dornach, October 5, 1914): Experience of the cosmic vowels. Human thoughts and ideas as shadow pictures of real imaginations. The beings of the hierarchy of angels. Practicing loving interest in the world. The animal world as the physiognomy of nature; the plant world as the facial expression; the mineral world as the gesture of nature. The capability to change into other beings. The evil misuse of higher spiritual forces.
• 4. Inner Mobility of Thought (Dornach, October 6, 1914): Space and time relationships and imaginations of the angels, archangels, archai. Experience of the Cosmic Word. Reflections of the seven cosmic vowels in the etheric body and the twelve cosmic consonants in the physical body. Perception in the spiritual world between death and new birth. The future organ of thinking during the Jupiter and Venus periods.
• 5. Times of Expectation (Dornach, October 7, 1914): Christian Morgenstern s connection with the spiritual-scientific movement. Christian Morgenstern s soul after death as spiritual guide for souls that had felt on Earth the yearning for the spiritual. Goethe, Hermann Grimm, and Christian Morgenstern and their relationship to the suprasensory worlds. Spiritual science as fulfillment of this expectation. The nature of eurythmy.

PART II: How to Achieve Existence in the World of Ideas

• 6. The Human Organization, Memory, and Inner Reading (Dornach, December 12, 1914): Human memory. The astral body as reader of the esoteric script. The sacred art of writing in ancient times. Goethe s relation to color. The significance of judgments out of the folk nature, of sympathy and antipathy for a particular folk soul.
• 7. Microcosm and Macrocosm: Human Gestures and the Life of the World (Dornach, December 13, 1914): The transition of the I into the astral body, from conscious to subconscious experience. Possibilities of a plant therapy. Ideas in Maeterlinck s book, "Der Schatz der Armen" the treasure of the poor] and Fichte s "Reden an die deutsche Nation" addresses to the German nation] as examples of the striving for the re-enlivening of human spiritual development. Spiritual-scientific impulses for artistic creating. The building of the human form under the influence of the cosmos.
• 8. Huma