A Consideration from an Anthroposophical Point of View The reflections in this book by Peter Selg and Sergei Prokofieff on the soul-spiritual, ethical, and medical-therapeutic issues surrounding physician-assisted suicide (and suicide as such) will provoke one's thought, feeling, and volition. Its inspiration arises from both Rudolf Steiner and the Hippocratic Oath. Peter Selg begins by showing how Rudolf Steiner views the principle of life as immanent spirit and the living medium of the “I,” or individuality and as inviolable and wise beyond our understanding. It is the sacred task of healing always to attend to, honor, and serve life in this sense―to affirm, enhance, and strengthen the life forces of the sick. As Rudolf Steiner puts it, “The will to heal must always function as therapeutically as possible...even when one thinks that the sick person is incurable.” These words were spoken before the full consummation of materialist, technologically enhanced medicine, but Rudolf Steiner, as Peter Selg shows, was well aware of the dangers related to the direction of modern medicine. Sergei Prokofieff links the initiatory origins of Hippocratic medicine in the Mysteries with the return of the Mystery origin of medicine and healing in Anthroposophic medicine. Turning to Steiner’s spiritual research, he considers suicide to be an “illness” of our time and examines the spiritual consequences of suicide for the after-death experiences of those who have taken their own lives―specifically, that suicide results in the soul’s profound disorientation. He goes on to show how suicide makes the after-death experience of Christ infinitely more difficult, as it does the “resurrection of the spirit” and the relation to the spiritual world. Far from being a “free” act, Prokofieff concludes, suicide is quite the opposite. Anyone seeking insight into suicide will find in this book a profound and esoteric introduction to this controversial problem.

Honoring Life: Medical Ethics and Physician-Assisted Suicide

Self-Help

Peter Selg

Sergei O. Prokofieff

Death & Grief

SteinerBooks

From 1933 to 1935, Ita Wegman was confronted by both Nazi fascism and internal crises in the General Anthroposophical Society. During those years, she traveled to Palestine in the fall of 1934 following a grave illness that nearly ended with her death. Her correspondence during this period, as well as her notes on the trip, reveal the great biographical importance to her of these travels and indeed the whole scope of her spiritual experiences in 1934. Ita Wegman had unambiguous perspectives and a uniquely clear view of both the political threat and her social-spiritual task during this period. There was, however, a radical change in her inner stance toward the opposition, aggression, and defamation she encountered within anthroposophic contexts in reaction to her intense, purely motivated efforts. She tried to live and work in true accord with her inner impulses and, ultimately, with Rudolf Steiner’s legacy, especially within the anthroposophic movement. Doing so, she increasingly found her way to her own distinctive and uncompromising path. The author reveals the general nature of those three years―a period whose distinctive spiritual and Christological task and dramatic dangers Rudolf Steiner had foreseen in 1923: “If these men [the Nazis] gain government power, I will no longer be able to set foot on German soil.” Ita Wegman’s efforts in 1933 to confront the dark powers of National Socialism and the convulsions in Dornach, which she experienced firsthand, as well as her subsequent illness and the clarity of her “Christological conversion” in 1934 to ’35, reveal a very specific, intrinsically comprehensible and forward-looking quality whose spiritual signature is clearly prefigured in Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-scientific predictions. In this book, Peter Selg focuses exclusively on Ita Wegman, her development, and her words, simply presenting the processes she went through and, implicitly, their extraordinary spiritual nature, without any attempt at interpretation. This focus arises from the governing premise that the mysteries of a great life such as that of Ita Wegman reveal themselves in the details. Tracing the subtle steps in her life allow us deeper insight into Ita Wegman’s being. She herself wrote, “In general meetings or gatherings, people always understood me poorly because I lacked a smooth way of expressing myself. But people of goodwill always understood what I meant.” This book was originally published in German as Geistiger Widerstand und Überwindung. Ita Wegman 1933–1935 by Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, 2005.

Spiritual Resistance: Ita Wegman, 1933-1935

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Wir muessen vorwaerts. Rudolf Steiner und Marie Steiner-von Sivers

Verlag des Ita Wegman Instituts

Ungeborenheit. Die Praeexistenz des Menschen und der Weg zur Geburt

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Books by Peter Selg