Steiner believed results of this form of spiritual research should be expressed in a way that can be understood and evaluated on the same basis as the results of natural science: " The anthroposophical schooling of thinking leads to the development of a non-sensory, or so-called supersensory consciousness, whereby the spiritual researcher brings the experiences of this realm into ideas, concepts, and expressive language in a form which people can understand who do not yet have the capacity to achieve the supersensory experiences necessary for individual research.

Steiner described numerous exercises he believed would bring spiritual development ; other anthroposophists have added many others.

Steiner believed he had thus located the origin of free will in our thinking, and in particular in sense-free thinking.

* Steiner differentiated three contemporary paths by which he believed it possible to arrive at Christ:

** Through initiatory experiences whereby the reality of Christ's death and resurrection are experienced ; Steiner believed this is the path people will increasingly take.

* Steiner also believed that there were two different Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ: one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke.

While claims of racial bias in the writings of Rudolf Steiner and Alice Bailey were made, Bailey was firmly opposed to the Axis powers ; she believed that Adolf Hitler was possessed by the Dark Forces, and Steiner emphasized racial equality as a principle central to anthroposophical thought and humanity's progress.

Steiner believed that young children should meet only goodness.

Steiner believed that such discipline and training would help a person to become a more moral, creative and free individual – free in the sense of being capable of actions motivated solely by love.

Rudolf Steiner emphasized the importance of the four classical temperaments in elementary education, the time when he believed the influence of temperament on the personality to be at its strongest.

Through spiritual or esoteric practice, Steiner believed mankind could find its way back to a connection with higher realities and to renewed harmony with the universe.

Steiner believed that these preparations mediated terrestrial and cosmic forces into the soil.

Peter Schneider calls such objections untenable on the grounds that if a non-sensory, non-physical realm exists, then according to Steiner the experiences of pure thinking possible within the normal realm of consciousness would already be experiences of that, and it would be impossible to exclude the possibility of empirically grounded experiences of other supersensory content.

In the Steiner Variation ( also called the Bronstein Variation ), 5 ... Bg4, White may be discouraged from e4 by the possibility 6. e4 e5.

His primary interest was in applying the methodology of science to realms of inner experience and the spiritual worlds ( Steiner's appreciation that the essence of science is its method of inquiry is unusual among esotericists ), and Steiner called anthroposophy Geisteswissenschaft ( lit.

Steiner contrasted the anthroposophical approach with both conventional mysticism, which he considered lacking the clarity necessary for exact knowledge, and natural science, which he considered arbitrarily limited to investigating the outer world.

* The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, by Zoologist Gerolf Steiner, purports to be a non-fictional natural history study, and was written, published, and presented as if it were an actual scientific treatise documenting the recently-extinct indigenous wildlife (" Rhinogradentia ") of the equally fictitious Hi-yi-yi archipelago.

As well as the introductions for and commentaries to four volumes of Goethe's scientific writings, Steiner wrote two books about Goethe's philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception ( 1886 ), which Steiner later regarded as a foundation and justification for his later work, and Goethe's Conception of the World ( 1897 ).

In his commentaries on Goethe's scientific works, written between 1884 and 1897, Steiner presented Goethe's approach to science as essentially phenomenological in nature, rather than theory-or model-based.

The distinction was important to Steiner because he sought with Anthroposophy to create a scientific, not faith-based, spirituality.

Upon Steiner's ascension to leadership, and throughout his term in office, this German branch worked quite independently of the rest of the Theosophical Society ; in particular, Steiner sought to link to European esoteric, philosophical and scientific traditions in a way quite foreign to the main society, which was geographically and spiritually based in Adyar, India.

Steiner hoped to form a spiritual movement that would free the individual from any external authority: " The most important problem of all human thinking is this: to comprehend the human being as a personality grounded in him or herself.

Steiner added to this the conception that a further step in the development of thinking is possible when the thinker observes his or her own thought processes.

In this connection, Steiner examines the step from thinking determined by outer impressions to what he calls sense-free thinking.

Steiner identified mathematics, which attains certainty through thinking itself, thus through inner experience rather than empirical observation, as the basis of his epistemology of spiritual experience.

Steiner postulates that the world is essentially an indivisible unity, but that our consciousness divides it into the sense-perceptible appearance, on the one hand, and the formal nature accessible to our thinking, on the other.

Albert Schweitzer wrote that he and Steiner had in common that they had " taken on the life mission of working for the emergence of a true culture enlivened by the ideal of humanity and to encourage people to become truly thinking beings ".

Current research on the connection between the two seers Max Heindel and Rudolf Steiner describes that " he felt that what Steiner was doing was not appropriate for America where pragmatism and clear linear thinking is predominant " and " that he did not find what he was looking for there ( a Western oriented spirituality that was accessible to the general public )".

She was influenced by the thinking of both English Theosophist, Annie Besant and Austrian philosopher, Rudolf Steiner.

Leadbeater, Rudolf Steiner, and Alice Bailey, Blavatsky's description of the seven bodies or principles remained a central part of western esoteric and New Age thinking ever since.

Anthroposophy, a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner, postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development.

By this time, Steiner had reached considerable stature as a spiritual teacher.

In a number of works, Steiner described a path of inner development he felt would let anyone attain comparable spiritual experiences.

As a spiritual basis for the refounded movement, Steiner wrote a Foundation Stone Meditation which remains a central meditative expression of anthroposophical ideas.

This requires developing new faculties of objective spiritual perception, which Steiner maintained was possible for humanity today.

" For Steiner, the human capacity for rational thought would allow individuals to comprehend spiritual research on their own and bypass the danger of dependency on an authority.

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists, out of which the material one gradually condensed and evolved.

Steiner held that the spiritual world can be researched in the right circumstances through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline.

Details about the spiritual world, Steiner suggested, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, though no more infallibly than the results of natural science.

Steiner regarded his research reports as being important aids to others seeking to enter into spiritual experience.

** Through inner experiences of a spiritual reality ; this Steiner regarded as increasingly the path of spiritual or religious seekers today.

Though Steiner saw that spiritual vision itself is difficult for others to achieve, he recommended open-mindedly exploring and rationally testing the results of such research ; he also urged others to follow a spiritual training that would allow them directly to apply the methods he used eventually to achieve comparable results.

Steiner founded a holistic educational impulse on the basis of his spiritual philosophy ( anthroposophy ).

In the first, more philosophically oriented phase, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and mysticism ; his philosophical work of these years, which he termed spiritual science, sought to provide a connection between the cognitive path of Western philosophy and the inner and spiritual needs of the human being.