Toward Imagination

Book excerpt: Selected lectures and writings "For human beings, love is the most important fruit of experience in the sense world. Once we really understand the nature of love, or compassion, we will find that love is the way spirit expresses its truth in the world of the senses.... We may even say that, in love, the spiritual world awakes in the physical. The more truly a soul inhabits the spiritual worlds, the more it experiences lovelessness and lack of compassion as a denial of spirit itself." -- Rudolf Steiner (Aphorism 9, The Threshold of the Spiritual World) Although Steiner did not often speak or write about love explicitly, love is at the very heart of his whole body of work and the foundation of his hopes for humankind and the Earth. Steiner teaches that, without love, nothing is possible; with love, however, we can do everything. Love is always "love of the not-yet." To love is to create; it is to selflessly enter the current of time that flows toward us from the future. Reality, true knowledge of reality, is impossible without love. Only through love can we truly know as we are now and encounter the world and its beings in a living way. Without love, knowledge becomes manipulation, domination, control; the world becomes a space of dead things. But, when we know through love, we enter into a pattern of dynamic, potentially redemptive relations and the world becomes a living world of beings working for the good. This collection gathers all of Rudolf Steiner's main lectures and writings related to love. From earthly love to the nature and function of spiritual love, these pieces are essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of humanity and the Earth. Love and Its Meaning in the World is essential reading for anyone who'd like to gain a deeper understanding of our true mission as human beings and the purpose of evolution on Earth.