In his autobiography,
The Course of My Life
(chapter 35
and
chapter 36),
Rudolf Steiner speaks as follows concerning the character of this
privately printed matter:
“The contents of
this printed matter were intended as oral communications and not for
print ...
“Nothing has ever
been said that was not the purest result of Anthroposophy as it
developed ... Whoever reads this privately printed matter can take it
in the fullest sense as that which Anthroposophy has to say.
Therefore it was possible, and moreover without misgivings ... to
depart from the accepted custom of circulating these publications
only among the membership. But it will have to be remembered that
faulty passages occur in the transcripts, which I myself did not
revise.
“The right to form
a judgment on the content of such privately printed matter can be
admitted only in the case of one who has acquired the requisite
preliminary knowledge. And in respect of all these publications, this
is, at the very least, the knowledge of man and of the cosmos in so
far as it is presented in Anthroposophy, and of what is to be found
as ‘anthroposophical history’ in the communications from
the spiritual world.”
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