Every spiritual practice, every exercise of consciousness, all meditation-indeed, every moment of true awareness-we do with the "gentle will," even if we are unaware of it initially and cannot fully activate it yet. In the course of practice, however, the gentle will begins to shine, and we gradually gain the ability to access it in our ordinary, daily activities, allowing our lives to become infinitely richer, meaningful, and creative. The gentle will is relaxed, receptive, expressive, creative, soft, light, and playful. It is not rigid or cramped. We use the gentle will in artistic activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing a poem, or painting a picture. It is the original will of the human being, the will of the "I." The gentle will is not the determined, useful, goal-oriented, egoistic, working will of Sisyphus, who will never be able to roll his boulder up the mountain. The gentle will is free of me-feeling and egoism. In this way, it differs from the "hard will," which works through egoism. Today, however, all life is governed by the principle of usefulness, utility, comfort, and efficiency-the hard will of egoism. This approach has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe, regardless of what technocrats say or think about it. Georg Kuhlewind writes in this book that the only hope he sees of avoiding destruction is a change in human consciousness; the "hard will" must become the "gentle will." To this end, he provides exercises through which we may transform the hard will into the gentle will.

For Most of us, life is often a humdrum course of the same-old and the nothing-new. We may dream about running away to exotic lands or retreating to distant monasteries, but the whirligig of life won't let us out of its clutches.

Michael Lipson offers a fresh way of looking at this old predicament. Using exercises pioneered by the great spiritual teacher Rudolf Steiner, he gives ancient yet very timely keys to freshening our perceptions and opening our horizons.

The six steps on this stairway are thinking, doing, feeling, loving, opening, and thanking. If they sound simple, that's because -- in a way -- they are. They show us how to infuse consciousness and mindfulness even into ordinary and overlooked parts of life. Practiced for just a few minutes a day, they can reveal the surprise in the universe that is usually hidden by stale, habitual attitudes.

'Wilt thou be made whole?' is the question Jesus addresses to the paralyzed man who had waited in vain for years at the pool of Bethesda. Finally he says, 'Take up your bed and walk.' This thoughtful book asks what power within ourselves Jesus's call can awaken, that can help make us whole and healthy. Kuhlewind presents meditations to help the reader think about Jesus's various psychological and physical healing in the Bible. These exercises lead us to a new, deeper understanding of the healing process, and how we might heal ourselves.

Every age, every culture, perhaps every person, have different answers. We can at least agree on one thing, however: dreams are other. Their presence in our lives demonstrates that we are not limited to a single mode of consciousness. The world of sleep is largely a blank for us, an abyss of non-consciousness, yawning between one day and the next, but the very fact that we can dream announces our potential for awareness within that abyss. We spend a third of our life asleep-a fact that dream theorists rarely consider. This startling collection of lectures by Rudolf Steiner, selected and introduced by the psychologist Michael Lipson, provides a truly unique way of approaching dreams, based on an understanding of the spiritual nature of human beings. A radically new view of dreams "as the threshold to spiritual reality" arises, once we acknowledge that physical existence is only the tip of an iceberg hidden largely in the spiritual world. Sleep, death, and meditation are the three realms in which consciousness has the opportunity to deepen its immersion in the divine flow of existence. In principle, we can become infinitely more self-aware in each of them, since human consciousness is not fixed-neither in contents nor in terms of alertness. All day long, the contents of our consciousness change, and during the night, the level changes. These lectures permit readers to glimpse the fantastic depths of experience we normally "sleep through" and to contemplate Steiner's astounding program: to maintain self-aware consciousness through sleep, through death, through all being.

The goal of this study is not any particular content, but a process, a method, an event: the cultivation of the experience of living, intuitive thinking such as we experience it with every new understanding. This unique contribution to the practice of anthroposophy will be of interest to beginning students, as well as to longtime students who wish to revitalize their approach to the path opened up by Rudolf Steiner.