The rousing story of the last gasp of human agency and how today’s best and brightest minds are endeavoring to put an end to it.It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills—and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. Th...

The rousing story of the last gasp of human agency and how today’s best and brightest minds are endeavoring to put an end to it.It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills—and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These “bots...

An extraordinarily insightful and thought-provoking look at how our society and culture are going to change, and change rapidly, as the price of gasoline, heating oil, and all other everyday consumer products that are derived from oil continue to escalate.Imagine an everyday world in which the price of gasoline (and oil) continues to go up, and up, and up. Think about the immediate impact that would have on our lives.Of course, everybody already knows how a...

An extraordinarily insightful and thought-provoking look at how our society and culture are going to change, and change rapidly, as the price of gasoline, heating oil, and all other everyday consumer products that are derived from oil continue to escalate.Imagine an everyday world in which the price of gasoline (and oil) continues to go up, and up, and up. Think about the immediate impact that would have on our lives.Of course, everybody already knows how a...

An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of studyThe study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strive...

Selections from the Works of Rudolf SteinerWithout the spiritualist movement and the amazing personality of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the creator of the Theosophical Society, the spiritual revolution of the twentieth century--the so-called New Age, with all its movers and shakers--would be unimaginable. And the work of Rudolf Steiner, G.I. Gurdjieff, René Guénon, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sri Aurobindo, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, and C.G. Jung could not have become what ...

Selected lecturesDuring the early seventeenth century, Europe was suddenly embroiled in controversy after the publication of the first Rosicrucian texts. Ever since, Rosicrucianism has been at the center of Western Christian esotericism. Forced underground by the Thirty Years War, it was secretly handed down by alchemists, hermeticists, and Masons to the nineteenth century, when it inspired new spiritual movements such as Theosophy, the Order of Golden Dawn, and Ru...

9 lectures, Oxford, England, August 16-29, 1922 (CW 305)These lectures follow from those presented in Soul Economy. Given during a conference on spiritual values in education and life and attended by many prominent people of the time, Steiner's Oxford lectures present the principles of Waldorf education at the highest cultural level.The Manchester Guardian reported: "Dr. Steiner's lectures...brought to us in a very vivid way an ideal of hu...

"This is what it comes down to: that we learn to experience that those who have passed through the gate of death have only assumed another form. Having died, they stand before our feelings like those who, through life experiences, have traveled to distant lands, whither we can follow them only later. We have therefore nothing to fear but a time of separation. Spiritual science must help us learn to feel and experience this in the most living way we can." --Rudolf Steiner

8 lectures, Dornach, December 2-22, 1917 (CW 179)With a single observation, Rudolf Steiner can sometimes outline a radically new reality that changes everything. Here, he introduces these extraordinary lectures by proposing that the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds "lies right in the middle of the human being."One indication of this boundary may be found in what science mistakenly differentiates as the sensory and motor nerves, which for S...

Selected lectures and writings"For human beings, love is the most important fruit of experience in the sense world. Once we really understand the nature of love, or compassion, we will find that love is the way spirit expresses its truth in the world of the senses.... We may even say that, in love, the spiritual world awakes in the physical. The more truly a soul inhabits the spiritual worlds, the more it experiences lovelessness and lack of compassion...

"There is a delicate distinction between these two sentences: 'To find the others in oneself' and 'To find oneself in the others.' In the higher sense, it means 'You are that.' [Tat tsvam asi]. Above all, in the highest sense, it means to recognize oneself in the world and to understand that saying of Novalis from The Disciple at Sais... 'One was successful. He lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais. But what did he see? Miracle of miracles! He saw himself.' ...