From Normal to Healthy: Paths to the Liberation of Consciousness

by Michael Lipson Georg Kuhlewind

Overview

How much practical time do we usually devote to the general art of being human? This practical guide to self-healing consciousness--it is both a spiritual psychology and a contemporary manual of the inner life--begins by laying out clearly the unhealthy, unfree nature of today's consciousness.

Methodical, self-observation leads to discovering the key to liberating consciousness from its habitual blind spots and automatisms--realization of the universal primacy of cognition and the universal availability of its ground, the free attention.

Through the use of attention, a person practicing the exercise given here begins to expand the range of one's possibilities to understand and act. The exercises--based on the Eightfold Path of the Buddha and the cognitive spiritual path of Rudolf Steiner--lead to a new life in which superconscious intuitions gradually replace superconscious formations.

This new life is a universal human life of improvising, living thinking--a life of presence and pure joy, which is health for a human being.

"I believe that our central problem is that we do not know what or who a human being really is. We lack this knowledge because we have no valid picture of the human WORD, no image of human language, of words in general. This is why we have such trouble with words, why we hit upon the right word so rarely. Everything we do to, for, and against each other is speech of some kind, or ought to be. Yet we are interested in anything but words, these very words by means of which we do everything else. Because we don't know what words are we don't know what humans are" (from the foreword).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584202035
Publisher:	SteinerBooks
Publication date:	02/01/1988
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	527 KB

About the Author

Georg Kühlewind (1924-2006) was a Hungarian philosopher, writer, lecturer, and meditation teacher who worked from the tradition of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science. Setting aside his early interest in music and psychology, he pursued a successful professional career as a physical chemist. Meanwhile, he continued to deepen his spiritual practice and insights. A prolific author (most of whose works are still only in German), Georg Kühlewind spent much time traveling the world, lecturing and leading workshops and seminars in meditation, psychology, epistemology, child development, anthroposophy, and esoteric Christianity. He was the author of numerous books. Kühlewind died January 15, 2006 at the age of 83.

Michael Lipson, PhD, worked with children with HIV/AIDS for nine years in New York City's Harlem Hospital before moving with his wife and two children to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Dr. Lipson conducts a practice in Clinical Psychology and teaches meditation internationally. He has been a frequent host of the radio call-in show VOX POP on WAMC, an NPR affiliate station in Upstate New York. He is the author of several books and the translator of Rudolf Steiner's Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom and several books by Georg Kühlewind.

Table of Contents

C O N T E N T S:

Foreword

1. Inventory
2. The Diseased Consciousness
3. A Little Psychology
4. The Health of the Soul
5. The Path of Knowledge
6. On Human Freedom

Afterword