It is easy for a teacher to be didactic and to say something along the lines, of, "You have seven chakras, they are here and this is how you activate them." Or perhaps, "There is no reality, all is illusion." And people nod sagely and then head home. It takes a completely different kind of approach to sneak in below your intellectual radar and help you to re-program yourself so that you can find the Innate Freedom that has always lain deep within you.
I have the greatest respect for any approach that helps people to uncover their true nature, but I know from long experience that the didactic approach can only take you so far. So often it is the teachers who "Teach without teaching" who have the most profound effects on their students.
Steiner is one of a dozen writers and teachers whose work I did not "Get" until years after a first reading. I kept waiting for him to tell me exactly how I should meditate or focus my attention, and his instructions always seemed a bit vague. It was only later that I understood that it was deliberate. The language seems stilted and archaic. Thinking that it was a case of bad translation, I began to look at some of the lectures in German and soon found that Steiner really did speak that way. Initially I thought that he was being pedantic, but after a great long while I realized that he was using language to prod me in a precise direction.
When you first start reading Steiner, some of his ideas seem to be odd, and at times he made the mistake of trying to marry his ideas to scientific findings. A mistake only inasmuch as the science of a hundred years ago was a very different animal from the science of today, and some of his speculations have long since been superseded. That being said, in his own day leading scholars in many sciences and in such disparate fields as agriculture and education sought his opinion and he scored a remarkable number of home runs. He even clearly predicted the causes and consequences of "Mad cow disease" almost eighty years before it first appeared.
As you can see in the "product description," this short book contains four of Steiner's best known and most practical lectures. Each is worth reading carefully, and you can see for yourself if they affect you, as they have many tens of thousands of people around the globe. The book is also one of the best with which to taste Steiner and his work and see whether or not he is your cup of tea.
Very highly recommended.
Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life