You Say You Want a Revelation?

New Online Seminar Starts on February 22

You Say You Want a Revelation?

A month-long exploration of Rudolf Steiner’s visionary thinking and its meaning for our time

Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925) was a visionary philosopher famous for starting Waldorf education, Biodynamic agriculture, and Anthroposophy, an occult movement. But those initiatives represent only a small part of his incredible legacy. In dozens of books and hundreds of lectures, Steiner explored vast evolutionary cycles and humanity’s spiritual destiny. A monistic idealist, he predicted the prophetic transformations of the Earth and humanity underway now. While often dismissed as a marginal and eccentric figure and ignored by the academy, he could be the most relevant and important thinker for our world today. Synthesizing an esoteric form of Christianity with Eastern and animist worldviews, Steiner offers a redemptive approach to human existence in a universe of consciousness, restoring meaning and coherence to the world.

In this seminar, we explore how Steiner’s wise and compassionate vision of reality is essential for us now — and for our future. How do we understand and personally integrate his most important ideas? What special significance does his work have in this age of AI and technofeudalism, as psychedelics and other psychoactive substances attain mass popularity?

There will be classes on Saturdays and open discussions on Thursdays. All sessions will be recorded and participants will be able to access them. The seminar is $199.99.

Paid subscribers get $75 off: See the bottom of this newsletter for a link.

Part One: Idealism and the Ontological Revolution

We explore the intersection of quantum nonlocality, monistic idealism, and the contemporary psychedelic movement, including DMT experiences. Today’s cutting-edge ideas and trends provide a compelling framework for revisiting Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric claims. Learn why Steiner’s vision is not only relevant but essential for understanding our interconnected reality.

In our first session, we explore how recent discoveries in quantum physics, psychology, philosophy and other fields provide a new path to understanding and integrating Steiner’s cosmological vision into our postmodern world. Steiner defined himself as a “monistic idealist” who believed we live in a universe where consciousness is the fundamental reality: “Fundamentally, there is nothing in the universe but consciousness… The only true realities in the universe are beings in different states of consciousness.”

In his first book, Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner refuted Kant’s dualism between noumena and phenomena. He proposed a different approach to philosophy, as a creative, imaginative and transformative act. Today, the ideas of monistic or analytic idealism have been advanced and formalized by thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, and Amit Goswami, among others. We are in an ontological revolution, breaking from the reductive materialism and atheist nihilism of the past centuries, to discover a new connection to the cosmos.

Quantum physics has established the universe is “not locally real,” revealing the primacy of subjective awareness in the shaping of reality. In psychology, Internal Family Systems theorists such as Robert Falconer explore the reality of spirits and spirit possession, beyond the model of “subpersonalities.” Professor Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia compiled evidence for reincarnation, studying hundreds of children around the world who spontaneously recalled their past lives. Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory gives us a way to approach to local knowledge systems and occult realities.

Part Two: Steiner’s life and influences

Who was Rudolf Steiner? what ideas, movements, and historical conditions shaped his visionary philosophy? From his early influences to the pivotal moments of his life, we investigate the evolution of Steiner’s groundbreaking ideas. Discover the origins of anthroposophy, biodynamic agriculture, Waldorf education, and his profound vision of human and planetary evolution, continuing in our time.

Steiner was born in Croatia, on the Austrian border. According to his autobiography, he possessed visionary perception, second sight, from early childhood, and could see the spirits of the dead, nature spirits, and so on. Finding that very few people still possessed this capacity, he didn’t speak openly about his esoteric investigations until he was 40 years old, with a Doctorate of Philosophy. We will explore influences on Steiner’s “spiritual science,” including Madame Blavatsky, Nietzsche, Goethe, Swedenborg, the Rosicrucian movement, and Jakob Böhme.

For a time, Steiner was head of the Theosophy Society in Germany, founded by Blavatsky. He later distanced himself from Theosophy to start his own occult school, Anthroposophy. In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, Steiner was a famous figure with a large following. He feared the development of a “black occult” movement — realized by the Thule Society and the Nazis — and consciously sought to create a “white occult” movement as an antidote. An artist and architect as well as a thinker, Steiner built the Goetheaneum in Dornach, Switzerland, which became a center for Anthroposophic thought. Steiner was a product of his time, and some of his ideas unfortunately suggest an inherent racism, an Aryan chauvinism, that may have contributed to the racist ideology of the Third Reich. We will explore these contradictions instead of minimizing them.

Part Three: Steiner’s Esoteric Cosmology

Steiner said that bringing the knowledge of reincarnation back to the West was a central part of his mission. In this session, we’ll delve into his teachings: We will look at his ideas on karmic relationships, the subtle bodies and reincarnation, including the reincarnation of the Earth. We will explore humanity’s role in cosmic evolution, according to Anthroposophy. We will investigate Steiner-ian concepts such as the influence of “super-sensible” beings like Ahriman and Lucifer on our development, the angelic hierarchies, nature spirits, and the meshed destinies of humanity and the Solar System.

In dozens of books and hundreds of lectures, Steiner developed a very extensive esoteric cosmology, where our current Earth was the fourth in a series of world-incarnations where humanity developed its physical and spiritual capacities while transforming the Earth itself. In this epoch, we are cultivating our unique individuality, our “I” or ego, while we also possess a physical body, astral body, and etheric body. We are currently developing a new “body,” which Steiner called the “Spirit Self,” as we transmute the energies and yearnings flowing into us from the astral world.

As an esoteric Christian, Steiner had a particular perspective on the incarnation of the Christ: Christ supported healthy individuation and showed us, as a model, the path for positive esoteric development. Steiner defied a variety of spiritual beings accessible to “super-sensible” perception, and proposed a path for attaining non-atavistic clairvoyance. He wrote about imagination, inspiration, and intuition as higher forms of cognition which we could develop over time. For Steiner, scientific materialism was necessary to evolve humanity up to a point, but this had to be reintegrated with knowledge of the subtle realms, or “higher world,” without collapsing into irrational or unconscious states.

Buddha said, “As perceived, so appears.” Steiner, similarly, warned that the beings we encounter through super-sensible cognition reflect our level of development, including our unconscious and shadowy aspects. He talked about “The Guardian of the Threshold,” a being we encounter as we develop, reflecting our own malevolent impulses in magnified form. Steiner also believed we were approaching the incarnation of Ahriman, a being or force linked to excess rationality and materialism: This seems to be happening now via Artificial Intelligence and advanced robotics. Steiner proposed how we handle this inevitable, epochal event.

PART FOUR: Influence and Legacy

We examine Steiner’s influence, looking at thinkers and artists who have continued his work. The list includes William Irwin Thompson, David Spangler, Owen Barfield, Hilma af Klint, Joseph Beuys, and the contemporary Anthroposophy movement. What value does Steiner have for today’s psychedelic renaissance and the Christian revival? As his work inspires new generations of seekers and visionaries, we explore how to apply his ideas today.

Today, reductive materialism remains the dominant ideology in our institutions and academies. However, this dominance is starting to wane. We are seeing growing interest in idealism, panpsychism, and the “Simulation Hypothesis,” a materialist reframing of ancient esoteric ideas. Suffering from a lack of meaning and purpose, many people are finding their way back to traditional religions. But these religions are often regressive; they require acceptance of irrational doctrines and obsolete social constructs. By integrating monistic idealism along with Steiner’s approach to the super-sensible realities available to clairvoyant insight, we can define a new, holistic relationship with the cosmos, without rejecting scientific inquiry or empirical evidence.

Over the course of the Twentieth Century and up until today, Steiner influenced many artists and thinkers such as Joseph Beuys and Hilma af Klint. In this session, we will also compare Anthroposophy with other occult movements of the Twentieth Century, including Gurdjieff and Ouspensky’s groups, and the work of Alesteir Crowley and Dion Fortune, who created magical orders in the UK, and the Traditionalists, including René Guenon and Julius Evola.

What, ultimately, is the meaning and value of Steiner’s work for our time? How do we anchor and integrate his visionary cosmology and “spiritual science” into our daily lives? How do we separate what remains relevant in his work from parts that are antiquated and regressive? As the seminar ends, we will explore answers to these questions.