Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment

First published in 1904, ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment’ by Rudolf Steiner is the classic account of the modern Western esoteric path of initiation. This work 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.

Steiner begins with the premise that “the capacities by which we can gain insights into the higher worlds lie dormant within each one of us.” Steiner carefully and precisely leads the reader from the cultivation of the fundamental soul attitudes of reverence and inner tranquillity to the development of inner life through the stages of preparation, illumination, and initiation.

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. By patiently and persistently following his guidelines, new ‘organs’ of soul and spirit begin to form, which reveal the contours of the higher worlds thus far concealed from us.

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.

In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.

Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.