To summarize the words of the philosopher Hugo Bergman about the spiritual thinker and seer - R. Steiner from the introduction to the Hebrew edition of the book How to Know Higher Worlds:

“I am not an anthroposophist and I was not a member of the anthroposophical movement, but when I heard Rudolf Steiner's lectures in 1911, new broad horizons opened up to me. It was the time when the worldview of the natural sciences had complete control over the spirits. And here before me was a man in good standing as a member of the community of the natural sciences and was already well-acquainted with the history of Goethe's research in this field, who claimed that the prevailing view in the natural sciences, which has bought it unrestrained control over the opinion of the general public, is too narrow and compatible only with a small segment of our reality. More than that: Steiner claimed that our entire being that is known and transparent to us is nothing but fragmentary, just a small piece of a more comprehensive being and that we cannot understand ourselves as long as we are satisfied with a partial point of view. What we perceive with our senses, is but a tiny part of the true cosmic being in which we live. In order to understand our essence, it is necessary that we use a cosmic point of view and standards.

Man's life between birth and death is only a part of a development which began long before birth and which will continue even after what we are accustomed to call death. We must see the present waking consciousness of man as part of a more comprehensive consciousness in which we reside. It turns out: the great part of our being and our consciousness is hidden from us.

The consciousness of the ancient man was different from the consciousness of man today and you cannot understand the achievements and failures of the ancient man without taking into account the changes in consciousness that have taken place since then. Along with this, Steiner developed a theory that provides a plausible explanation to what was the purpose of these changes, of this narrowing of our mental horizons: only in this way was it possible for the waking "I" of the new person to develop. But now that this development of the “I” has reached a certain peak, we must again expand our consciousness towards the knowledge of higher worlds which is now locked before us. Who was the man Rudolf Steiner?

Steiner was born in 1861 in a town in southern Hungary, where his father served as a railway station manager. He studied at the Vienna Institute of Technology. His education was in the natural sciences, something of great importance for understanding his views. After finishing his studies, he turned to the investigation of Goethe's writings on the natural sciences. What particularly attracted Steiner's interest in these writings was Goethe's method of investigating nature, that is, the search for the ideas that work behind visible nature. Steiner was interested in directing the researchers' attention to the principle side of Goethe's way of investigating nature. His extensive knowledge of these writings of Goethe led to Steiner being called to the Goethe-Schiller archive in Weimar and was tasked with publishing Goethe's writings in the natural sciences in the great Weimar publishing house. For seven years Steiner lived in Weimar and there he wrote his book "The Philosophy of Freedom," which was published in 1894. The book rejects Kant and all those who say that behind our perceptible world there is something that is itself unknown to us. Contrary to this, Steiner instructed, that the world of the senses is actually a spiritual world that is not closed to us.

Steiner was 40 years old, when he decided to break the silence he imposed on himself in relation to his mystical experiences. He entered the Theosophical Society. Entering this company is like divorcing the representatives of cultural life who dominated that period of time, severing ties with his friends and with the circle in which he worked until then. By entering this world, Steiner committed himself to a war on two fronts: against the dominant materialism of the time, but also a war against those theosophists who leaned towards spiritism, or were content to receive inspiration from a subconscious dream world, or the occultism that moved away from the precision of the scientific method.

The result of these disagreements was that Rudolf Steiner separated in 1913 from the Theosophical Society and founded the Anthroposophical Society, which established its center in Dornach (near Basel). Steiner defined anthroposophy as "a path of knowledge, intended to guide the spiritual in man towards the spiritual in the world. Anthroposophy appears in man as a need of the heart and of emotion. Only those who find in it an answer to the deepest and most sublime desires of their soul can appreciate it at its true value.

Therefore, people can be called anthroposophists who feel that asking certain questions concerning the essence of man and the world is for them a kind of life necessity and they need this knowledge like a hungry person needs food for his body."

This definition of anthroposophy emphasizes the emotional roots of the aspiration, but it is necessary to add that the method of anthroposophical inquiry, or as Steiner would later say of "spiritual science", demands a rigorous scientific methodology and does not allow any reliance on emotion. Although the foundations are the experiences of the "seer" or "Spirit Researcher", the processing is done using a scientific method. Anthroposophy includes, like theosophy, the theory of reincarnation. One incarnation is connected to the next incarnation by the law of "karma" which is a law of moral causality from which a person cannot escape. What is sown in one incarnation, will be reaped in the second. The next incarnation is the organic continuation of this life, a further development - a continuation of the skills we have acquired in this life. An individual’s personality consists of parts: the material body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. These parts separate with death, and the I that had been connected from birth temporarily with the other parts, is freed from them and continues its way towards further developments. Man's I was assigned the task of developing in himself additional powers that had not yet developed. The reader will find details about this in Steiner's book "Body, Soul and Spirit," which is also published as “Theosophy.” 

After the First World War, Steiner came out with a political plan, a new organization of the state: instead of one state that unites and centralizes cultural, legal, and economic functions, a threefold state should separate these functions from each other. The borders of these countries do not have to overlap each other. And it would be possible, for example, to unite in one country members of one culture, even though they are not citizens of the same country from an economic or political point of view. Through this plan, Steiner hoped to curb the entire capacity of the state, to separate the cultural-national questions from the political and economic problems. The plan provoked much debate at the time, but it did not have the power to stop the fateful development that the Holocaust brought upon Europe. Today there are bodies in Germany fighting for this plan and trying to show that it can be used as a remedy for the sufferings of humanity: satisfying the cultural needs of the nations, especially the small ones, and at the same time creating the large blocs necessary for the technical and economic development of humanity today, without these economic entities threatening the self-reliance of the cultural-national states. It is appropriate to mention here Steiner's educational ambitions, which found expression in the foundation of special schools. They were first called "Waldorf schools" after the factory that first introduced a school of this type for the children of its workers. Today there are many such schools in Germany, England, and the United States, and others like it were founded on Steiner's initiative, or in his spirit, including schools for intellectually and developmentally disabled children who are disadvantaged by fate. Steiner also ordered new approaches to healing and medicine. He also influenced agriculture and his fight for organic manure and biodynamic agriculture is known to experts in many countries.

In the last twelve years of his life, Rudolf Steiner lived under enormous tension: giving non-stop lectures all over Europe, writing many books, and being involved with art courses, a new Eurythmie movement, workshops for doctors, farmers, and educators, and all while the world war continued.  He also conducted countless conversations with people from all over the country who sought his advice on private and public matters, while he led the construction of the "Goetheanum," the center of the movement in Dornach. In the meantime, the persecutions on all sides also increased, as if the oppositional forces he discusses in his teachings had increased against him. The peak of the persecution was directed against the Goetheanum, when on New Year's Eve 1922, a fire broke out and completely burned down in one night the wooden building, which Steiner designed himself and which he and his friends worked on for ten years. Steiner planned and designed a concrete building to replace the original wooden building that burned down, but he did not get to see its construction. He died in March 1925 at the age of 64 years. His life was all work and struggle; he was one of the greatest teachers of mankind.