How do adults learn? What is the task of the adult educator in adult education? What can adults do to take charge of their learning process? Learning means change and transformation. But in order to learn, argues Coenraad van Houten, we must first awaken our will. True adult education, he says, enables our spiritual ego to accomplish this. He describes the forms in which learning can be meaningfully structured, and offers advice and ideas to help overcome specific learning blockages. The book regards the business of adult education as a full profession, and it provides a theoretical and practical basis for its true task: an awakening of the will.

More and more people are beginning to realize that education needs to continue throughout life. As individuals and collectively, we face the choice of either staying as we are, or striving constantly to develop. Over decades of seminars and training work, Coenraad van Houten has developed three paths of learning for adults, each involving its own distinct method: Vocational Learning, Destiny Learning and Spiritual Research Learning. Although quite separate, the three paths are closely linked, with each building on the previous one. This book depicts the sevenfold path of Destiny Learning. It is a path that leads through working in groups to a practical knowledge of karma. In addition, the seven professional fields of the adult educator are developed and described as an aid to self-training.

'Destiny Learning', a path of adult education conceived and developed by Coenraad van Houten (based on the work of Rudolf Steiner), is here expanded to show a threefold way of working with karma: understanding, transforming and ordering. This threefold approach opens new vistas for healing relationships and conflicts, for developing creative faculties for community building, and for taking initiatives based on freedom. The author widens and deepens his previous work on the theme, showing that learning from destiny, as well as awakening the forces of will, are ongoing processes. He offers practical advice that is directly applicable to everyday life. Although this book can be studied on its own, it is also a development and completion of themes from van Houten's earlier works, Practising Destiny and Awakening the Will. Crucial aspects of the threefold path of 'destiny learning' are here discussed and explained in greater detail. Anyone seeking to take their personal development in hand will find many nuggets of spiritual wisdom, based on a lifetime's work, in this short book.

This book...will appeal to those who are in touch with their inner creative impulses, or are motivated but do not know how to begin. The aim is to make this spiritual path possible for every person. It can change the way one relates to life and work - at first simply by an attitude shift, as a questioning, caring human being, taking seriously the spiritual forces that manifest in all outer phenomena.' How do adults learn and develop? How can adult learning become a living, growing process? Based on the application of the 'seven life processes', Coenraad van Houten has successfully developed the methods of 'Vocational Learning' (Awakening the Will, 1999) and 'Destiny Learning' (Practising Destiny, 2000). Here, in the culmination of his research trilogy, he presents a new path of adult learning which he calls 'Creative Spiritual Research'. Based on the inner spiritual path of the individual, this is a method that relates to esoteric schooling, thresholds of consciousness and human creativity. Part One of Creative Spiritual Research features guidelines and exercises for individual practice, whilst Part Two focuses on the general schooling path as a preparation or precondition, opening the inner space needed for research as well as a questioning attitude.