Review: More Radiant than the Sun

More Radiant than the Sun - A Handbook for Working with Steiner’s Meditations and Exercises

Review by Sara Ciborski

By Gertrude Reif Hughes; SteinerBooks, 2013, 97 pages.

For newcomers to anthroposophy, finding entry into Rudolf Steiner’s indications for meditation can be challenging. They are spread over many lectures and books, are addressed to audiences of varied familiarity with spiritual science, and assume different levels of advancement in inner self-development. Because of this, More Radiant than the Sun is especially important: Gertrude Hughes has carefully selected from Steiner’s wealth of verses and meditations a few that in her lifelong experience as a meditator have proven most fruitful.

And the book is timely: as Hughes says in a wonderful introduction, many more people now than at anytime in human history are meditating or attempting to. With a brief overview of the evolution of consciousness, she shows why meditation is a critical need of our times. For we are no longer “embedded in the creativity of… [our] spiritual origins” and must develop for ourselves “a creative mental life in our souls and with it a morality not of right and wrong, not even of good and evil, but of a free consciousness ready to explore morality and experiment with its essences by means of our awakened powers, both individual and social.” She also gives a brief account of the threefold nature of the human being, which (as constituted today) makes possible the training of the free attention that leads to the experience of the true “I” of selfless selfhood.

Four chapters present three meditations each. “Three Meditations on Self” includes the “More Radiant than the Sun” verse from one of Steiner’s esoteric lessons; the fragment “Life becomes clearer around me” from a verse given to eurythmists; and the version of the six essential (also known as supplementary or subsidiary) exercises from 'An Outline of Esoteric Science'. Here and throughout, Hughes introduces Steiner’s words with a description of how and in what circumstances she herself began, overcame obstacles, and continued to work with these contents. In each instance she gives the full and exact reference from Steiner’s work.

In “Three Plant Meditations” she offers perceiving growth and decay; the seed meditation; and the plant meditation, all from 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. “Three Meditations on the Cosmos” includes the aphorism “In thinking, I experience myself united with the stream of cosmic existence” from 'A Way of Self Knowledge'; the rainbow colors exercise derived from a verse in 'Speech and Drama'; and the triangle exercise from 'Human and Cosmic Thought'. Her description of her struggle to work rightly with the aphorism is very interesting. All of us who meditate according to Steiner’s indications eventually come to that threshold of experiencing (and knowing with certainty), for perhaps only the flash of an instant, that our thinking is not merely subjective and private (though its content may be) but is itself (as activity) the same everywhere for everyone.

In “Three Meditations on Moral Ideas,” Hughes presents the rose-cross meditation and meditating on a feeling of joy, both from 'An Outline of Esoteric Science', and the point and periphery exercise from 'Education for Special Needs'. She ends with the Foundation Stone Meditation, complete with the daily rhythms, which are “an intimate nod” toward the full verse with its complex structure. She gives her own translation (acknowledging help from Christopher Bamford’s in 'Start Now!'), which I like very much.

She concludes by discussing writings pertinent to theme of anthroposophy and religion by two Christian Community leaders, Emil Bock and Michael Debus. And at the very end—Hughes is a professor emerita who loves, teaches, and writes about poetry—she gives us a poem by W. S. Merwin.

The growing number of good books on anthroposophical meditation suggests that comparison may be in order. Among the best are the eminently practical and accessible books of Georg Kühlewind, Arthur Zajonc’s 'Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry', and Michael Lipson’s 'Group Meditation' (which despite its title is an excellent guide for the individual). While these authors are inspired by Steiner, they draw mainly from their own experience as meditators and from other spiritual traditions. If I wanted to recommend only Rudolf Steiner’s indications to someone new to anthroposophy, I would choose Hughes’s book over the longer, more comprehensive 'Start Now!' The latter is almost too rich with verses and themes for every occasion, every purpose, every level; the title seems inviting to a newcomer, but such a reader could conceivably be unsure where to begin with so much content. Whereas Hughes’s personal vignettes are a gentle way of assuring a newcomer that anyone can start; all it takes is perseverance. But 'More Radiant than the Sun' is not only for beginners: these meditations can never be exhausted, they are the work of a lifetime.