This third foundation stone of Steiner’s books is in a new 1995 translation. It is the book that he himself believed would have the longest life and the greatest spiritual and cultural consequences. It asserts that free spiritual activity—understood as the human ability to think and act independently of physical nature—is the appropriate and available path for human beings today to gain true knowledge of themselves and of the universe. This is therefore no hard, cold, abstract philosophical volume, but rather a warm, heart-oriented guide to the practice and experience of living thinking: “the conscious experience of a purely spiritual content.” With such thinking, Steiner says, “we lay hold of a corner of the secret of the universe.”

Here Steiner lays down a path whereby, starting with our ordinary thinking, we can rise to the level of pure spiritual activity where we can become co-creators and co-redeemers of the world.