Perhaps I was simply messed up as an early adolescent. While others around me sought speaker system upgrades for their cars or moments of numb bliss through substances, I was slowly building a small library of P.D. Ouspensky, G.I. Gurdjieff and  Jiddu Krishnamurti. The rationale escapes me for why I decided to pull the trigger on Amazon, July 15th 2005 to order Freedom from the Known by Krishnamurti. That simple act has had profound ramifications on my life and the lives of those around me. Simply put, the me you know today would not have existed without this action. Concepts such as dying psychologically every moment to remove the anxiety of the future and the weight of the past, knowing that reflections of my inner world are manifest in people around me, understanding that the world cannot change until I change and that belief is the outcome is fear are revolutionary concepts to many, especially to an eighteen year old. It has been said that recognition of truth is the intersection of external perception and internal reality and Krishnamurti’s thought rang as a refreshing breath of fresh air to the mundane world of injustice around me. These words rang as truth to me.

After years of contemplative thought on these ideas, I was caught up in learning the history of Krishnamurti and his involvement in the odd Theosophical movement around the turn of the century, which led me to Steiner. Side note: One of my favorite stories became the account of how Krishnamurti told everyone he wasn’t the new Messiah.

In the first half of the 1900’s, counter to Krishnamurti in the east, the spiritual revival in the west was catalyzed by Rudolph Steiner. I often ponder what form our modern world could have taken if the practical ideas of these deep thinkers were not interrupted by decades of war… but that discussion is for another time. When I first read Steiner’s How to Know Higher Worlds I was struck with the same power of pure original thought as with Krishnamurti. The practices for spiritual development as an aspect of my individual responsibility was an important understanding. Steiner was telling us that even if we never sought esoteric knowledge, integrating values of patience, reverence, open-mindedness, respect and tranquility would have far reaching effects in positive ways otherwise. The process for developing these principles have been crucial to my foundation towards becoming a psychologically free person. I sought to learn more about the man behind these concepts as I discovered a rich heritage of agricultural methods, curative education and alternative schooling. Gary Lachman’s biography on Steiner proved an excellent guide through the enigma of a truly spectacular man. Tracing Steiner’s development in rural Austria, to Vienna, through Germany and ultimately as Theosophical hero and finally as founder of Anthrosophy, Lachman’s approach renewed my excitement about the period of spiritual revival at the turn of the century.

Steiner designed many buildings but none as spectacular as the first Goetheanum which burned shortly after WW1

Summarizing a career as broad and spectacular as Steiner’s is no easy feat. As Lachman describes in the introduction,

Steiner’s ideas about consciousness, the nature of thought and the relationship between the mind and the external world were, quite literally, revoluationary, and they had me rethinking the history of Western philosophy. Yet I could turn to another lecture and there Steiner would tell me about reading to the dead or about the work of the Buddha on Mars…and a kind of ‘Tilt’ sign would light up in my brain

Practical revolutionary practices, followed by seemingly zany and impossible claims. Can we remove the parts we like from Steiner’s amazing body of work while dissecting the imaginative but bizarre accounts of reincarnation, death and spiritual beings? I don’t know if we can, curative education, biodynamic farming and Waldorf Schools have yielded amazing results but are ultimately based on Steiner’s perceptions of the spirit world. Quite a paradox.

What I appreciated the most about Lachman’s work were his attempts to summarize the most revolutionary concepts from Steiner’s writings and lectures which, to my knowledge, these summaries were successful and are important in their own right. The balanced approach towards Steiner’s life is equally important, I feel like I could pass this book along to a friend to introduce Steiner’s ideas without scaring them off when they would have reached Steiner’s dissertations on Atlantis, Lemuria, Ahriman Jesus and Lucifer in his original works. Steiner may be ridiculed by the more rational among us, especially the evangelists of materialism,  yet he had insights almost a hundred years ago that are only prepared to receive. He was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Yet it is a puzzle why few recognize his Philosophy of Freedom as such a seminal work.

Some of the ideas I found most important included the concept that our eyes may perceive a world that is a simple, immediate perception yet really that world is already infused with the content of our inner world. That the world is merely physical and absolute is half the equation. Descartes sitting and contemplating was failing to contemplate that his perceptions were already influenced by himself. Steiner wrote,

When one who has a rich mental life sees a thousand things which are nothing to the mentally poor, this show as clearly as sunlight that the content of reality is only the reflection of the content of our minds

Additionally he argued that our cognition and awareness is not something extra, tacked on to our biology. Our knowledge of the world is part of the world, as important as our life is to the ecosystem. This isn’t new age jargon, it is an argument against Kant’s limits to knowledge. Steiner challenged humanity in the same way as Nietzsche, that there is more to the human than we can ever imagine. Yet Steiner took it a step farther to say that there were no limits to knowledge other than those set by laziness. Through a focus on timeless ideas and growth/creation process of the world around us, we can develop the active imagining most humans fail to curate.

The thoughts I shared above are just the top layer of a deep career filled with thousands of lectures and revolutionary concepts. At the end, I had to conclude for myself that the fundamental practical solutions Steiner offered cannot be accepted if the  tremendous imagination of his mind is ignored. This account of Steiner’s life is the perfect introduction to the most important philosopher you’ve never read.