Mieke Mosmuller

Gerrit, a proud handsome Dutch fifty-five-year-old, who has made something of himself, meets the twenty-five-year-old Italian doctor Beato, who manages to cause his whole carefully constructed façade to come tumbling down. Inferno tells the story of how inner balance can destroy evil.

If Rudolf Steiner had only been a thinker, his thoughts and ideas could have been criticized with intellectual thinking. However, if he was an initiate, a supra-intellectual thinking, a pure thinking would be required, and only through this could his statements be differentiated and tested.

Is there a concept that is more difficult to describe than love? To find an answer to the question: What is love? is as difficult as answering the question: Who actually is it, whom I refer to as I? Love and the I... These are the most important values in life. The one originates from the other but they are still in contradiction with each other. True love makes one forget one's own I, yet love streams from the I. Does love exist, or is it in essence always self-love? True love is only possible on the solid foundation of wisdom, which precedes love. With wisdom one finds self-knowledge and is able to distinguish between self-love and unselfish love, between erotic love and love for the true being of the other person. Not all women are wise, but wisdom has a feminine form. She lives as a quality in men and women who seek her. She is there to reshape every human intellect into a wise sureness if one asks her, if one loves her, if one seeks her. In ancient Egypt she was called Isis, the Greek sought her as Sophia, and she appeared in a human form as Maria -- that is how Christians know her. She pours herself out in every soul that goes through catharsis, purification. Each purification, however slight, gives wisdom wisdom is a woman.

For most people Intelligence is a beloved talent, a capacity to be proud of. At school it is one of the first things to be examined. There are diverse tests to measure the IQ quantitatively. Besides, human intelligence is the example for artificial intelligence. However ingenious this artificial intelligence may become, there is not even a remote possibility of its replicating human intelligence via some technical living artificial intelligence. Even the simplest human thought processes require endless sequences of decisions, when they have to be formulated by technical intelligence. On the other hand, for the machine it is possible in less than a second to come to conclusions to questions that would probably take a whole human lifetime... But as an area of spirituality - intelligence is not acknowledged. There seems to be a view that intelligence is a field that has to be abandoned if we want to penetrate into the deeper wisdom of existence. In this book the author has started to prove the contrary. Intelligence is the mind itself and through bringing the mind into activity - with no other purpose than this very activity - intelligence proves its spirituality itself. We dont even need a high IQ, although its level rises itself as a result of such activity. In addition, we dont need any faith - this also will emerge through this activity. The only thing we really need is a certain discipline to dedicate our time to intelligence - twenty minutes or so, two times a day.

Fear, doubt, insecurity, illness, loneliness, death... These are difficulties in every human life, from which one cannot escape in any way, and for which no worldview, science, nor social life seems to be able to give comfort anymore. For the Westerner, thinking is a main problem. As a result of the development of science, there is a continually growing body of factual knowledge; but faith is left behind, as well as certainty in knowing, in science. If we look for consolation in times of doubt and loneliness, must we leave the realm of thinking and turn to different areas of our soul-life (such as to be more in-touch with our feelings)? Or is it possible in this time of rational thinking, that thinking is precisely the key to coming to a faith that is based on certainty in knowing? In this book we are summoned to learn to experience this problem of the Westerner (the problem of thinking) ourselves, in order to come from this gained experience to our own insight in the path which leads us away from the darkness of rational intellect. Just there, where twilight falls, we find the light that enlightens doubt and loneliness, but also illness and death. Knowing for certain is not modern, and one could say that this book is a revival of an outdated idealism. That objection can only be made if one overlooks the fact that a decisive step is made in this work, enabling all old questions to arise in a new light. It is the step of the self-experiencing of thinking, through which a self-knowledge becomes possible which adopts a scientific character on the one hand, and is at the same time the pathway to a modern mysticism. "Thus sounds the ancient summons to the new self-conscious man in the 21th century" -- GNOTHI SEAUTON, Man, know yourself!