Unbornness

Peter Selg

Human Pre-existence and the Journey toward Birth

As anyone who has had a child knows, newborns enter the earthly world as beings different from their parents. They arrive with their own individuality, being, and history. From the beginning, they manifest an essential dignity and a unique 'I', which they brought with them from the spiritual world.

It was one of Rudolf Steiner's great gifts that he returned the concept of unbornness to human consciousness and language. In this brief, stunning and moving, almost poetic, work Peter Selg gathers the key elements and images needed to begin an understanding of - and wonder at - the vast scope of our unbornness. Drawing on and expanding Steiner's work, as well as Raphael's Sistine Madonna and the poems of Nelly Sachs and Rainer Maria Rilke, Selg unveils this deepest mystery of human existence. After reading it, one will never look at a child or another human being in the same way again.

October 2010; Trans. M. Saar; SB; 88pp; 21.5 x 14 cm; pb;