New Release – Classic Translation

Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Rudolf Steiner’s fundamental handbook for spiritual and personal development has grown more modern as time has passed. Yet his methods remain clearly distinguishable from the many others now publicly available. Steiner’s path of spiritual growth is based on the type of self-possession and clarity of thought normally associated with scientific observation. Rather than denying clear thinking, his aim is to extend it beyond its present limitations as simply something subjective and representational. Steiner recognizes – as all genuine spiritual teachers always have – that the path to spiritual experience is an arduous and sometimes even dangerous one, calling for the utmost self-control in thought, word and deed. Human beings comprise a unity, and we cannot develop knowledge without a corresponding development in moral feeling and will. This emphasis on deepening and strengthening human faculties as well as heightening moral sensibilities, contrasts sharply with many of the “new age” approaches to opening one’s faculties to the higher realms and brings about a markedly different worldview as well. Unlike channelling and other mediumistic experiences, which require a diminution of one’s “presence”, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds emphasises an extension of one’s cognitive and moral faculties through meditations and practical exercises, and it is through this heightened presence that one is able to behold the spiritual realms in full discriminative self-consciousness. This path is what is known as the right-hand path of spiritual development and is considered by occultists like Steiner to be the one most appropriate for Western humanity today.

Steiner foretold that, as the twentieth century progressed, humanity would begin to experience a longing for forms of experience that transcended intellectual, materialistic thinking. One hundred years after the first publication of this book in 1904, there are countless systems which attempt to achieve such transcendence, such as eastern meditation, channelling, remote viewing, and astral projection. As an answer to this fundamental longing, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds – reproduced here in the classic Osmond/Davy translation – is needed more than ever, given its unique, precise instructions for inner training, its protective exercises, and its indications for grounding and centring. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds begins with the conditions required for personal development, and guides us through the stages of initiation, its practical aspects and its effects.