In his autobiography, The Course of My Life (chapter 35 and chapter 36), Rudolf Steiner speaks as follows concerning the character of this privately printed matter:

“The contents of this printed matter were intended as oral communications and not for print ...

“Nothing has ever been said that was not the purest result of Anthroposophy as it developed ... Whoever reads this privately printed matter can take it in the fullest sense as that which Anthroposophy has to say. Therefore it was possible, and moreover without misgivings ... to depart from the accepted custom of circulating these publications only among the membership. But it will have to be remembered that faulty passages occur in the transcripts, which I myself did not revise.

“The right to form a judgment on the content of such privately printed matter can be admitted only in the case of one who has acquired the requisite preliminary knowledge. And in respect of all these publications, this is, at the very least, the knowledge of man and of the cosmos in so far as it is presented in Anthroposophy, and of what is to be found as ‘anthroposophical history’ in the communications from the spiritual world.”