-LET THERE BE LIGHT-
Our Spirit,Come!
Educating the Etheric Body
Master Waldorf teacher, Douglas Gabriel, unfolds a comprehensive curriculum for wisdom children of all ages.
The mysterious and often hidden nature of the ethers are revealed in this one-of-a-kind manuscript. Douglas Gabriel brilliantly presents a Theory of Everything that encompasses a wide variety of spiritual teachings from ancient Indian sacred beliefs to classical Greek philosophies, from the voice of ancient gods to modern scientific theories.
The ethers were called the tattvas in the Hindu pranayama teachings, quintessence in Aristotle’s scientific philosophies, the ether by Newton, and the luminiferous ether by Einstein. These seemingly magical ethers are the component parts of creation that exist as the foundation of all space and are the eternal mechanisms that create life.
To truly see the ethers as a comprehensive theory that explains creation, destruction, and rebirth requires insight and spiritual scientific imagination that can create new icons that embody these fundamental forces that create the miracle of life.
At the heart of Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf curriculum is the belief that a child from age seven to fourteen recapitulates the intellectual and cultural development that humanity as a whole passes through over time. Until now, the exact scheme of how the Waldorf literature curriculum, grades one through eight, follow the model of collective humanity’s evolution was not clear, even though the effectiveness of the curriculum could be observed.
After three decades of being a Waldorf teacher and teacher trainer, the author discovered a comprehensive and practical scheme of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny while drawing the standard charts and diagrams that formerly had been used in attempts to explain this foundational concept of Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogy.
It became quite clear that since we teach the “etheric body” of the child from grades one to eight, teachers need to understand what the etheric body is and what it is composed of, and why the curriculum’s literature and cultural studies needed to be presented in a specific order that is not historically chronological.
Click here to listen to Tyla Gabriel's foreword to the book.
Intuitive Learning is self-evident to any learner who pays attention to the processes active in their own learning. The reader of Intuitive Learning will be asked to look at simple elements of education and question them from the ground up. Direct, observable phenomena can be compiled into a comprehensive picture of what a learner does to learn - good learning habits. Some principles of Intuitive Learning may come as a shock to educators trained in modern courses because direct observation is often contrary to theories of education.
Intuitive Learning suggests that basic questions about learning must first be honestly asked, and perhaps there will be no simple answers. Since human knowledge acquisition is constantly changing, we need a comprehensive philosophy and psychology of education, knowledge acquisition, and learning that can grow alongside evolving human development and adapt to current challenges without losing the wisdom of historical experience.
The introduction to Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf School curriculum presents an overview of the curriculum from different disciplines, such as history, mythology, child development, and religion. Many quotations from Steiner’s pedagogical works support these presentations, and a comprehensive example of the first-grade language arts curriculum is presented that is integrated with the seasonal changes of the school year.
Helpful block plans, outlines, and curriculum descriptions give the reader a picture of an entire first grade year that a Waldorf student might experience. Besides a full presentation of grade one materials, there are also plays for grades two, three, four, and five, which were written together by the author and his students.
