What is true happiness? This perennial question preoccupies many experts, including biologists, psychologists, sociologists and theologians, but their findings usually confirm what we already knew: that happiness is one of the most sought-after but elusive commodities.

Speaking just months after the end of the First World War, Rudolf Steiner urges his audience to awaken to the practical relevance of spiritual knowledge. Serious engagement with contemporary spiritual-scientific concepts can awaken healthy forces of the will, which in turn facilitate constructive action in the outer world.

In these concentrated and aphoristic lectures, Rudolf Steiner speaks of twelve main philosophical standpoints, and the importance of comprehending each one of them. Appreciating the variety of world-views not only sharpens our thinking and makes it more flexible.

These majestic lectures speak of the threefold human being – of body (head, heart and hands), soul (thinking, feeling and will), and spirit (waking, dreaming and sleeping). This previously-unpublished course of lectures ­– released in tandem with the twin course in CW 206 – features an introduction by William Forward

Intrinsic to this reassessment of ourselves and our place in the universe is a recognition of death as a gateway to continuing existence. Only by acknowledging our journey into the afterlife and our return to earth (reincarnation) will we take charge of a truly human evolution. (Released in tandem with the twin course in CW 205).

In the first full translation of this lecture course, Rudolf Steiner implores his audience to recognize the connections between the material and spiritual worlds. Eclipses of the sun and moon, for example, are ‘forces at work in the universe, just like those we study today in the clinic or in the chemistry or physics laboratory’.

This anthology offers a survey of the diverse aspects of Imagination and imaginative cognition. As the thematically re-ordered texts reveal, Rudolf Steiner's spiritual philosophy - anthroposophy - is itself often pictorial and imaginative in nature.

In this highly-original anthology of Steiner's work we are led to a therapeutic, meditative approach that - through working with the imaginative life tableau - can strengthen and heal body, soul and spirit.