Steiner's evening practice of holding the day in the inner eye in reverse order, evening to morning, to strengthen the etheric body and loosen the I from time.
Backwards Review in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's evening meditative practice of holding the events of the day in the inner eye in reverse chronological order, from the last moment before retiring back to waking. Steiner systematised the exercise in How to Know Higher Worlds (GA 10, 1904-05) and the esoteric instructions collected in Guidance for Esoteric Training (GA 245). The practice strengthens the etheric body, loosens the I from the time-stream of the day, and prepares the soul for the panoramic life-tableau experienced at death.
In Steiner's Own Words
He must remind himself of the general rule: Rhythm restores power. Here you have an important occult principle. Most people today lead lives devoid of any regular rhythm, especially as regards their thoughts and their behaviour. Hence he has to strive to introduce a rhythmic element into his life. Thus he should, for example, do certain exercises of meditation and concentration at a chosen time every morning. He can also bring rhythm into his life if in the evening he reviews the events of the day in reverse order. If he can bring in further regularities, so much the better: in that way his life will take its course in harmony with the laws of the world.
What it Means Today
The Rückschau is the quiet centrepiece of Anthroposophical training. Steiner's instruction is specific: lying down in the evening, the practitioner holds the closing moments of the day in inner attention and then walks backward through the hours, scene by scene, until reaching the moment of waking. Each picture is observed as if it had happened to a stranger, with the inner calm of the assessor. The order matters. Running the day forward leaves the I carried along by habit. Running it backward asks the etheric body, the body of life and time, to move against its own current. That counter-motion is what strengthens it.
The lineage that has carried this practice most intentionally is the Christian Community (Die Christengemeinschaft), founded in 1922, where priests in formation at the Stuttgart and Hamburg seminaries practise Rückschau as part of daily devotion. Bernard Lievegoed's biographical work, developed at the Zonnehuizen in the Netherlands and now taught at the Rudolf Steiner Seminariet at Järna in Sweden, builds the seven-year-rhythm life review on the same evening gesture. The practitioner is not journaling, not problem-solving, not narrating to oneself. The exercise trains an organ of perception that anthroposophic medicine in clinics like Filderklinik in Filderstadt names directly: the etheric body as the carrier of biographical time, the same body whose pictures rise as the panoramic life-tableau in the three days after death. Evening Rückschau is the rehearsal.
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