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American Anthroposophy
- an introduction -
a celebration of the American Soul's unique
ability to contribute to the future of Anthroposophy,
and to the future of world culture
by Joel A. Wendt
social philosopher...and occasional fool
"...one can say that we in Europe develop Anthroposophy
in a spiritual way; the American develops it in a natural way..."
Rudolf Steiner, from a talk to the workmen
at the Goetheanum, Dornach, March 3, 1923
cover art bead-work by the author
Dedication
This book is dedicated to you, immortal spirit, who were
at one time known as Rudolf Steiner, and without whose presence on this
Earth for about 64 years, the essays in this book could not have been
written. I am grateful to you for wearing that name and bearing
the burden of being thought of as a great initiate. Thank you old
friend and may you continue to sail on to ever greater wonders and
delights, with as little suffering as necessary. Hopefully, the
content of this book may over the years of the future, serve to break
the chains by which great aspects of your spirit are currently bound to
the Earth, due to your having chosen to join your karma to ours.
In all our names, I beg your forgiveness for our many
errors and numerous follies connected to our having misunderstood much
of the essence of your teachings. With greatest affection and
love, your pupil, Joel A. Wendt
the Contents of this Book
introductory
materials
forward by the author - what is meant by American Anthroposophy?
preface for the neophyte - for the readers to whom Anthroposophy is quite new.
an apology (of sorts) - to the more experienced anthroposophical reader
introduction
the main
themes of this book
The Challenge
American Anthroposophy begins to come to
maturity in the situation of a given place and a given time. The
dominant characteristic of this time, outwardly,
is the Incarnation of Ahriman. As a
consequence the first essay concerns Ahriman's Incarnation:
Outrageous Genius - Discovering the in-the-Present
Incarnation of Ahriman in America through the Signs of the Times (Michaelmas* 2007) part 1: Honoring the Teacher and the
Teaching; part 2) The Wise-Earth as
Counter-force to Ahriman's Incarnation; part
3) Brother What
Ails Thee?; and, part 4) Waking the American
Anthroposophical Society and Movement for their true tasks in the 21st
Century.
*[The dates of writing here and below are
the time at which the original essay was produced out of the
spiritual-thinking activity described in the essay: In Joyous Celebration...]
Orientation
The dominant characteristic of this time, inwardly,
is the True Second Coming of Christ.
"From the kingdom served by Michael himself Christ
descends to the sphere of the Earth, so as to be there when the
intelligence is wholly with the human individuality. For man will then
feel most strongly the impulse to devote himself to the power which has
made itself fully and completely into the vehicle of intellectuality.
But Christ will be there; through His great sacrifice He will live in
the same sphere in which Ahriman also lives. Man will be able to choose
between Christ and Ahriman. The world will be able to find the
Christ-way in the evolution of humanity." R.S. Anthroposophical
Leading Thoughts.
The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the
Consciousness Soul (winter - spring 2006)
In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of
Discipleship (late summer 2006)
The Methodology Necessary for a New Social Science - a
brief introduction (written for this book
during the Season of Michaelmas, 2007)
The Natural Transformation of the Anthroposophical
Society in America (Michaelmas 2007)
The Mystery of Macro and Micro Evil: the relationship of
the Shadow (the threefold double-complex) to the American Soul (Michaelmas 2007)
Encountering the Mystery of America
What
distinguishes the now emerging natural Anthroposophy of the American
Soul,
from the anthroposophical work of the Twentieth Century
Present Day American Culture - four archetypal
personalities (after the Holy Nights, 2008)
Recollecting the True Roots of the American Soul - America's aboriginal
Peoples and the Hopi Prophecy (after
the
Holy Nights, 2008)
Anthroposophy and the Russian Soul - a lesson from life:
instruction for all three world-aspects of Anthroposophical activity,
in the West, the Center and the East - (written
over Christmas Eve and Day 2006)
The New, and profoundly human, Mysteries of the Earth (written in the remaining Holy Nights just after
Christmas 2006)
Rudolf Steiner's Own Path - The Philosophy of Freedom or
Spiritual Activity - a brief re-imagination (written
for this book just after the Holy Nights 2007-8)
a letter to a young anthroposophist (2003)
The Redemption of Eros: - Seeking Comfort and
Companionship in a time of increasing Social Chaos - or, Sex and the
Individual Anthroposophist (Michaelmas 2007)
The America Soul - an evolving synthesis at its moment of
birth: - much has
been written above - here a small effort at a summary, with a few
additional insights offered as the concluding theme. (written in the Season of Easter, Spring 2008)
End Stories
America: The Central Motif (by Patrick Dixon)*
*reprinted
with permission, and with a great deal of gratitude that this exists...
Bicycles: a Children's Christmas Story
for Adults
some final
verse: the Gift of the Word
***************************************
Ultimately,
all questions of truth and goodness come down to the application of
individual art and imagination - that is the creation of beauty.
It isn't so much that the Universe has or is an answer that we
seek and struggle to find, but rather that the Universe is an
unfinished symphony in which we are one of the creative sources.
Each individual i-AM is a song - continually knowing itself only
in the moment of its becoming...
***************************************
forward by the author
- what is
meant by American Anthroposophy -
To place the modifier "American" in front
of the noun Anthroposophy, may seem to some a rather curious, perhaps
even defective, construction. What about Anthroposophy,
apparently authored by Rudolf Steiner and mostly taught in Europe,
could ever be called American? Even so, the problem comes in
large part from Steiner himself, who said a great deal about America,
including suggesting this very idea - that there is to come an American Anthroposophy. Having gathered* together much of
what he wrote and spoke about America, I'll just start with some of
this material and basically leave it to Dr. Steiner himself to help us
start to understand why there could be something quite real about an American Anthroposophy. I'll also weave among the comments
of Steiner various other materials as seems appropriate [these will be
in brackets so as to not confuse anything].
*[with the help of the America Steiner
library in New York, ask them for their list]
One last introductory point...
There is an excellent question as to what
is truly America and/or American, given that there is a North and South
and Central America of which we routinely speak. I would say in
general that most of what is indicated by Steiner, and explored more
deeply by me in this book, refers principally to the United States of
America. To look at the wider questions has not really been
attempted here, although in the appendix in Patrick Dixon's essay: America:
the Central Motif, an introductory
perspective on some of these wider questions is given. Hopefully
- in the future - others, native to these wider regions of the Western
Continents, will be inspired by what is here to add their insights and
their voices, for no one should doubt that all the Peoples of the
Western Continents have a great deal to offer to the world.
*
here now, from Dr. Steiner...
"...America is the place at which races or civilizations die." R.S. The
Mission of the Folk Souls, lecture 6.
[This phenomena is discussed more fully
in an essay below.]
"The Indians then took over with them to the West all that
was great in the Atlantean culture. What was the greatest thing
of all to the Indians? It was that he was still able dimly to
sense something of the ancient greatness and majesty of a period which
existed in the old Atlantean epoch, in which the divisions of the races
had hardly begun, in which men could look up to the Sun and perceive
the Spirits of Form penetrating through a sea of mist. Through an
ocean of mist the Atlantean gazed up at that which to him was not
divided into six or seven, but which acted together. This
co-operative activity of the seven Spirits of Form was called by the
Atlanteans the Great Spirit...He clung firmly to the Great Spirit of
the primeval past." R.S. Lecture 6
above.
[While we might think that the Native
Americans have a degenerate spirituality as a consequence of this, it
would be a mistake to take this view. A Mohawk healer (a woman
friend of mine) is also a seeress, and it is clear to her vision that
when she holds a healing circle it is Christ in the form of an Angel
who does the actual healing. Another Native acquaintance of mine
described her first experience of a most sacred ceremonial enacted by
her Chief and spoken in the Cherokee language. In this ritual he
had used the word Christ several times, and she asked him following
this ceremony why he had mixed that particular word in with the
Cherokee in this way. His reply was that Indians had always known
there was an Earth Spirit, but now they know His Name.
The Saturn (Native American) Mysteries
still produce initiates (as it were), whose development takes a course
similar in kind to the Symbol in Tarot of the Hanged Man. Their visionary capacity comes from having given
over their will (which is why the Hanged Man is pictured upside down)
to the Celestial Influence. It is a spiritual capacity based upon
voluntary obedience to the Sky People (the ancestors and spirit guides of
the Native Americans) before whose judgment the seers, Chiefs and
healers tend to place all crucial questions of life. It is not a
blind obedience, but something more on the order of recognizing that
the Sky People have a superior vision of matters, and that as a result
their wisdom is to be given great weight in reference to all
significant questions.
By the way, many anthroposophists treat
Steiner in the same way, and with the same potential dangers to our
personal and individual development of inner freedom, so it perhaps
should suggest to us that we not cast stones.
The potential marriage, within the free
choices of the individual American Soul of this veneration of all that
was great in the primeval past of Atlantis with the New Sun Mysteries
(in its initial form as Anthroposophy) is very important for the future
(for details see the essay below: Recollecting
the True Roots of the America Soul - America's aboriginal
Peoples and the Hopi Prophecy).]
America was discovered in order to
provide a counter-balance to the Asian Great Spirit (luciferic
lightness). America leads man to heaviness and materialism.
(R.S. paraphrased from Lecture 2, Inner
Impulses Working in the Evolution of Mankind)
"...American civilization, on
account of the special organization of its people, is particularly
exposed to the temptation offered by what the eagle speaks (1)....Central
Europe...is particularly exposed to what is uttered by the lion (2)...Oriental civilization is preeminently exposed to what is
uttered by the cow (3)."
(1) "I give thee the power to create a universe in thine own head"
(2) "I give thee the power to embody the universe in the radiance of the encircling air."
(3) "I give thee the power to
wrest from the universe measure, number and weight." R.S. Lecture 8, Man as a
Being of Sense and Perception
[Not surprising then the importance of
the Eagle as a symbol both to Native Americans and the United States of
America.]
If European and American civilization
retain their present character, a materialistic cosmogony will cover
over the Christ Event. (R.S. paraphrased from lecture 9, Man as
Hieroglyph of the Universe.)
[The antidote to this is the Christ
centered cosmogony presented in my book: the Way of
the Fool: the
conscious development of our human character and the future* of
Christianity - both to be born out of the natural union of Faith and
Gnosis.]
The past brings fermentation that leads "Europe to the brink of the
Abyss, which will array Asia and America against each other." R.S. Lecture 3, The
Mission of Archangel Michael
Emigration to America is greater than all
other movements of peoples. (paraphrase, R.S. Lecture 4, Mystery
Centers)
[The People of Peoples (the Beacon of
Hope) continues to draw the world to itself, even during times of great
distress (witness Latino movements in the present, and Asia movements
following the Vietnam War).]
The Anglo-American victory over Europe in
WWI will lead to a domination of European spiritual-cultural life in an
external fashion. (paraphrase R.S. lecture 3, The
Mysteries of Light, Space and Earth.)
The threefold social order is needed in
order to overcome the influence of Anglo-American secret societies
(paraphrase lecture 4 above).
"...I believe that in the future my book [The Threefold
Social Order] should be read in the West and in Russia, but that it has
no chance of becoming effective in Germany. The West, for
instance, can learn much from this book, for in a non-utopian manner it
simply states how the three spheres co-exist and should interact.
For the West the moment in time does not matter, for much is still to be done
for the right interaction of the three currents, the spiritual life,
the economic life, the political-legal life."
R.S. Threefolding as a Social Alternative. [emphasis added]
In 1924, for a time, some in America showed that stars were hollowed out spaces (paraphrase, R.S. lecture 3, The Evolution of Earth and Man and the Influence of the Stars)
Following the American way of thinking,
an attempt was made to extend the mechanical over human life itself.
It will be an American Mystery to make use of the magnetism of
the Earth, its double-ness. (paraphrase, R.S. lecture 12, The
Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric.)
"Europeans prove, Americans affirm"
R.S. lecture to workmen 3 March 1923.
When the sun is in Aquarius: "only then will the true
American Civilization come." (same lecture).
"We in Europe develop Anthroposophy out of the Spirit.
Over there they develop something that is a kind of wooden doll
of Anthroposophy. Everything becomes materialistic." (same lecture)
"But for one who is not a fanatic, there is something
similar in American culture to what is anthroposophical spiritual
science in Europe. Only everything there is wooden, it is not yet
alive. We can make it alive in Europe out of the spirit, those
over there take it out of instinct..." (same
lecture)
"The time will one day come when this American woodenman,
which actually everyone is still - when he begins to speak. Then
he will have something to say very similar to European Anthroposophy*. One can say that we
in Europe develop Anthroposophy in a spiritual way; the American
develops it in a natural way." (same lecture,
emphasis added)
*[here is where I told you that Steiner
clearly suggested there would come to be an American Anthroposophy.]
"The American is a young materialist...So too will the
American's blatant materialism sprout a spiritual element." (when the Sun rises in the sign of Aquarius). (same
lecture)
[As to the Sun rising in Aquarius, its
actual date is mostly anyone's guess. I asked an astrosopher, and
he suggested any where from 2376 to 3575, with lots of if ands and buts
and complicated details - I tried to get an exact answer, but sorry,
none could be had. Wikipedia says 2600, and if you get on Google
you can find just about anything. As we know, popular American
culture thought that this was happening in the 1960's (This
is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius...
from the rock musical Hair). If we accept the role of spiritual inspiration
in the arts, then perhaps we can see that while Steiner referred to the
Sun rising in Aquarius, a dawning is something that
signals the coming rising of the Sun. I would place this book in
that category - the previously dark sky is gone, the stars recede from
sight, and bands of light illuminate the horizon, even though the Sun
has yet to fully appear. A transition of this kind, as is also
clear from Steiner's indications regarding the various epochs of the
post-Atlantean Age, is a gradual development that takes place over many decades if not a few
centuries. No fixed date has any real
meaning. The present then in America is a dawning, but the Sun has not yet risen.]
"But genuine Americanism will one day
unite with Europeanism, which will have taken a more spiritual path." (same lecture) [emphasis added].
[I have spent some time contemplating
Steiner's use of the adjective wooden in describing the
American's instinct for Anthroposophy. Clearly he could have used
an even more material metaphor, such as crystalline. That he did not, but chose instead to us a term
from the world of plants, particularly of the higher plant which is the
tree, can give us something to help our understanding. The tree,
while rooted in the earth, in making its wooden pillar makes the earth itself into a living form which
then raises the tree's leaves and blossoms much further in the
direction of the cosmos than those plants that remain nearer the earth
on the forest floor.
Our physical nature, as Americans, is of
the earth, and to the extent that we remain instinctive, so is our soul
life captured by this earth bound existence. Thus our
thinking is also earthly and material, unless we spiritualize it,
unless we bring moral forces into it consciously. The more our
native goodness penetrates our thought life consciously (instead of
instinctively), the more we do what the tree does when it spreads its
leaves and blossoms (on its way to bestowing its fruit for our benefit)
into the air far above the earth. Here is what I wrote in the
essay below on conscious thinking out of the American Soul (In Joyous
Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship): The
purified will (an appropriately moral intention and attention) creates
heart warmth in the soul-soil of feeling, out of which the light and
life filled flower of thought is born. ]
Subterranean forces possess the American
body - a geographical force, not a spiritual force. They chain
man to the earth. Something from the human head streams toward
magnetic and electric currents, neutralizing them - this is the human
will. What overcomes these dependencies, which are part of karma,
so that our inner life (if not our outward form) can come to freedom?
The answer: the Mystery of Golgatha. (paraphrase of R.S.
long discussion lecture 1, Anthroposophical
Life Gifts.
*
Not everything Steiner taught about human
inner life applies to Americans, and here again is what Steiner said
indicating the existence of something that has to be called American Anthroposophy: "The time will one day come when this American woodenman,
which actually everyone is still - when he begins to speak. Then
he will have something to say very similar to European Anthroposophy. One can say that we
in Europe develop Anthroposophy in a spiritual way; the American
develops it in a natural way." [emphasis
added].
Steiner was a very precise and exact
thinker, and as a consequence we can look carefully at his words,
expecting such characteristics. Here he has predicted a time when
the American would speak, and say something very similar to European Anthroposophy - not the same, but similar. He also points out that we develop anthroposophy
in a natural way, while the European develops it in a spiritual way.
What precisely and exactly does that mean?
We should not expect to answer such a
question by looking to Steiner, however. The answer to this
question is not his to give. The American has to speak the truth
and beauty and goodness of this question out of his own soul, and this
book is one American's answer to that riddle. American
Anthroposophy is similar to European Anthroposophy, but different,
because our basic soul gesture and relationship to the world is
fundamentally different. It will do no good to compare the two,
but all manner of good to struggle to see how these two approaches to
Anthroposophy fit together, for harmonize they do. Please keep
this in mind as you read the text below: to look not for the contrast
with what Steiner has offered, but rather to appreciate how what is
offered seeks to complement his work.
This in general can be added here.
The American is more of the Earth than any other people.
His youthful culture is also of the future, whereas the mature
European culture is mostly of the past (see the images of the Elder and
Younger Brother in the Hopi Prophecy essay below). Their
individual limitations may be overcome in the present by their mutual
respect and cooperation. At present, unfortunately, the spiritual
potential of the American Soul is not even decently respected in the
circles of the Anthroposophical Society and Movement here in America.
How then can the two work together without first raising into the light of consciousness the true soul
and spiritual nature of the American?
This condition of self-ignorance,
tragically fostered in anthroposophical circles, is strongly encouraged
by Ahriman through our unredeemed shadow nature, for
no people is more dangerous to his future plans than is the American.
Whatever my personal flaws that have influenced this work, I
offer it in full knowledge that Christ wishes for the American to find
his way to his own true nature, and from out of that discovery to
become, as is our task: the most formidable, spiritually endowed,
leader of the social healing gesture needed to counter the terrible
coming consequences of Ahriman's earthly reign.
Jessiah Ben-Aharon did not write his book
on America (America's Global Responsibility: individuation,
initiation and the threefolding) on a lark.
Nor did Rudolf Steiner point to this place, this people and this
time, in any kind of superficial way.
In the end, we come upon a second riddle
to add to the one of just what it means to come to Anthroposophy in a natural way. At its core, Anthroposophy is an act of
service to others. Who then is American Anthroposophy to serve?
Our instinct, which even Emerson would find correct had he known
formally of Anthroposophy, has so far been to be devoted to Rudolf
Steiner and to the cultural forces streaming from Europe.
We understand through Rudolf Steiner that
in this moment in Time the cultural Center of the world is weakened,
the two poles of East and West are too polarized, and as a consequence
the whole is unable to find their right inter-relationships precisely
because the attack on the Center in the 20th Century has been so
successful. Out of our freedom as Americans then we can continue
to follow our instinct in support of the spiritual insight pouring over
humanity from the Center. At the same time, however, we need to not do this while living in a state of confusion as to our
own yet unrealized soul forces and potentials. If Americans want
to truly foster Anthroposophy as a working partner in a threefold
world, they have to come to far greater self knowledge than is
presently the case. This book seeks to serve that effort.]
a preface for the neophyte
- for the
readers for whom Anthroposophy is quite new -
If you are new to Anthroposophy, or if
this is one of the first books related to Rudolf Steiner you have
picked up, then you need to realize that in certain degrees the book
you hold in your hand was written mostly for serious students of Rudolf
Steiner, and further that it represents a view of Anthroposophy not
common among most anthroposophists. At the same time this book
might be quite useful, for it hopes to restore the essential
foundational impulse to anthroposophical spiritual science from the
confusion into which it fell in the 20th Century, after its founding
spirit had died - had crossed over into the world of pure spirit.
As a consequence, each essay below will
have its own brief introduction for the neophyte, by which words I hope
to make it more accessible to those to whom most of anthroposophical
thought is new. For example, the term Anthroposophy is a kind of
unnecessary affectation - given that what it refers to it could
possibly be expressed using many different words. Generally
speaking if we look at the root meanings we have anthropos (man) and sophy (wisdom), thus: the wisdom of man.
Among Steiner students this itself has
been poorly understood, and as many new to this discipline may have
already discovered there is a certain kind of unnatural worship, among
the members of the Anthroposophical Society and Movement, of all the
Rudolf Steiner said and wrote. The fact is that Steiner was not
(ultimately) grounding Anthroposophy in the results of his research
into spiritual reality, but instead referring to a latent capacity
potential in all human beings. We
could, therefore, also speak of Anthroposophy as the new cognition, for it refers to what happens when any individual, with
a more or less intact mind, seeks to transform, through
their own will,
their given cognitive ability. With our will we take hold of our
cognitive faculty and cause it to undergo a profound metamorphosis, not unlike the transition from caterpillar to
butterfly. Our ordinary or given capacity for thinking, seemingly
bound to the brain and to physical causes, can out of our own
inner-will-activity become transformed into a capacity for direct
spiritual knowledge - what at one time was called: gnosis.
This is why Rudolf Steiner, near the end
of his life, wrote a summary of his work which was called: Anthroposophical
Leading Thoughts. In this work the very
first Leading Thought begins (as it should
have): "Anthroposophy
is a path of
cognition from the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the
universe." [emphasis added]
Anthroposophy then is a spiritual Way, rooted in the will of the
individual, yet when well understood it (the path or Way) is entirely
empirical and objective (scientific). The main text for this science of the new cognition is the book called: The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (or Freedom), and the neophyte will find the significance of this
book discussed extensively below.
Now among the various translations of the
First of the Anthroposophical
Leading Thoughts you will find that German
word Erkenntnis often translated as knowledge, not as cognition.
This has led to great confusion, for many today in the movement
mistake this indication as one connected to the requirement in Knowledge
of Higher Worlds for study. Thus the unceasing study of Steiner's writings,
rather than the objective and scientific introspection of one's own
mind, soul and spirit - that is: the reading of Steiner's works is
erroneously assumed more necessary and significant than the thinking
about thinking or the cognition about cognition.
This also means that in that
Anthroposophy is also the wisdom of man, it is
not a content given forever by Steiner to
which everyone must owe allegiance (thus the mistaken impulse to over
emphasize the study of this content), but rather a
method of active and awake thinking-cognition
that shows each individual how to be wise. Would that the leaders
of the Anthroposophical Society and Movement better understood this in
practice, which lead us next to....
an apology (of sorts)
- to the more
experienced anthroposophical reader -
It is possible that certain portions of
what is in this book might be seen as potentially critical of
individual efforts within the Anthroposophical Society and Movement.
Such is not really the mood in which this book's essays were
written. My principle studies and research have concerned the
social world, and in support of this it became necessary to learn, from
Steiner's writings on the science of objective philosophical
introspection (A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, and The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom), how to properly discipline my soul and spirit in order
to achieve the best results for this research goal. At the same
time, the Anthroposophical Society and Movement are systems of
complicated and multiple social forms, and so it was natural for me to
look at them out of the impulses connected to my social research.
In addition, it became obvious over the years of these studies
that very few in the Society and Movement had penetrated deeply into
true introspective life. The absence of success in that endeavor
has enormous consequences for the ability of the Society and Movement
to incarnate the New Mysteries via the New Thinking.
Here is Steiner himself, from Awakening
to Community (lecture three), on the
consequences of failing (which has happened) to take up The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (or Freedom): "The way it should be read is with attention to the fact
that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing
and looking at things....The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom
has not been read in the different way I have been describing.
That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if
the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far
behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind,
anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being
completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!"
Let me make this last a bit more explicit
with a little symbolism (only partially presented), based on my 35
years of introspective self observation:
sense world < soul < A/d (i-AM) L/d > soul > spiritual world
human double
(or karma of wounds)
I have kept in the threefold Shadow
elements (the double-complex):
< A/d L/d >
human double
(or karma of wounds)
as it is very much an aspect of American
Anthroposophy to need to face the Shadow in a fully objective fashion.
A/d above refers to the ahrimanic double and L/d to the luciferic
double. Steiner describes the reason for this in Lucifer
and Ahriman, at page 21: "...the very purpose of our
Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly
conscious of what takes
effect through him in earthly existence. [emphasis added]
What this means is that the opposing
forces enter into the social world of humanity only through the human soul, which then makes it such that
the real struggles involved in the Mystery of Evil take place within our souls, and only indirectly in the outer world.
Our souls are also the doorway through which the Good enters the
social world, and understanding this reality and our related freedom on
the Earth, in practice, is a core necessity for the future development
of Anthroposophy in the 21st Century (as to the exact manner of the
entrance of the Good, see the essay in this book: The
Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul).
Rudolf Steiner has made it clear that
there is a considerable difference between his personal path (The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, or Freedom), and the path outlined in Knowledge
of Higher Worlds. In the latter we make
our passage toward the spirit through the sense world [sense world < soul < A/d (i-AM)]
, and in the former we enter
directly into the spiritual world [(i-AM) L/d > soul >
spiritual world], through a highly
disciplined introspection. In the practice of a scientific
objective philosophical introspection, we begin already in the
soul/spiritual world as an active spirit.
Both the New Thinking and the New
Mysteries are extraordinary treasures much needed by humanity.
Because of this reality, it becomes necessary to ask how well the
Society and Movement are doing in bringing to incarnation the New
Mysteries and the New Thinking, given that only a very few are actually
seriously and successfully following the path of cognition (The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom) that Rudolf Steiner himself discovered and followed: [(i-AM) L/d > soul >
spiritual world]. Does this mean
something is being missed?
Here is Steiner on some of the
differences between the two paths (indirectly through the sense world
and directly through the soul/spiritual world), from near the end of
the 5th Chapter of his book Occult
Science: an outline:
The path that
leads to sense-free thinking by way of the communications of spiritual
science is thoroughly reliable and sure. There
is however another that is even more sure, and above all more exact [emphasis added, ed,]; at the same time, it is for
many people more difficult. The path in question is set forth in
my books The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception
and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. These books tell what
man's thinking can achieve when directed not to impressions that come
from the outer world of the physical sense but solely upon itself.
When this is so, we have within us no longer the kind of thinking
that concerns itself merely with memories of the things of the sense;
we have instead pure thinking which is like a being that has life
within itself. In the above mentioned books you will find nothing
at all that is derived from the communications of spiritual
science. They testify to the fact that pure thinking,
working within itself alone, can throw light on the great questions of
life - questions concerning the universe and man. The books thus occupy
a significant intermediate position between knowledge of the
sense-world and knowledge of the spiritual world. What they offer
is what thinking can attain when it rises above sense-observation, yet
still holds back from entering upon the spiritual, supersensible
research. One who wholeheartedly pursues the train of thought
indicated in these books is already in the spiritual world; only it
makes itself known to him as a thought-world. Whoever feels ready
to enter upon this intermediate path of development will be taking a
safe and sure road, and it will leave with him a feeling in regard to
the higher world that will bear rich fruit in all time to come.
It is because of the practical
understanding from experience, of this quality of surety and exactness
in the thinking developed along the following of Steiner's own path,
that I urge the reader (if they have not already) to renew their
interest in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom. Also, as a result of the practice of this
discipline on the nature and quality of thinking, when I turn my
attention as a spiritually oriented social scientist to the status,
nature and structure of the Anthroposophical Society and Movement,
certain difficulties become apparent. Some of these observations
enter into the work below.
All that said, this should be made clear. While some of what is here can be interpreted (and will be by some) to be negative and against this or that, the fact is that what is in this book is not against anything. It is for the truth about the history of the Society in the 20th Century. It is for the truth about our real tasks as regards inner development. It is for understanding the Love which surrounds us in earthly social existence. It is for preserving Rudolf Steiner's true legacy. It is for helping American anthroposophists find freedom of spirit in the soul. It is for illuminating the Mystery of America. And, mostly it is for moving the Anthroposophical Movement forward toward its real potential role as the serving-the-Thou source of the New Thinking and the New Mysteries so desperately needed by humanity.
Then, in being for
and in serving, we are on our way to becoming one with the Good.
*
*
*
[those very few readers of the previous
edition of this work, which bore the title "Dangerous
Anthroposophy", will by now have noted that
there have been substantial changes. These changes are due in no
small part to the many thoughtful comments I received during the early
stages of the publication of this book, such that I reconsidered a
great deal of that material and made significant changes. Because
I am self-publishing this book (which is only printed when ordered
on-demand), it was then possible to update the file and make many
corrections. I here want to thank those who were so generous with
their observations of various weaknesses and excesses in the original
text (and I am grateful for the many kind things that were said, as
well). A new edition of Dangerous
Anthroposophy, with a slightly different
emphasis and edge, will be published in the next few months after this
present book is released.]
introduction
I must begin by confessing that I don't like the way that Dornach and the Councils in America model Anthroposophy (for the most part, the Central Regional
Council in America is an exception, but seems not properly supported by
the rest). Don't like is of course a sign
of antipathy, but not all antipathy is unredeemed, some comes from
discernment. Recently, in conversation with a friend (Tom Last)
concerning observations of Rudolf Steiner in the lectures collected
under the title: Awakening
to Community, I came to understand that
Steiner had seen that significant differences existed at that time and
would continue among the members and friends, which led him to
providing us with a metaphor to aid our understanding. I have
interpreted it to mean today that we should think of each other as
sister souls, finding it necessary to travel different but parallel
paths, hopefully toward the same end: the bringing alive for the future
the New Mysteries and the New Thinking.
At the same time, I am confronted by a
peculiar moral dilemma, one that was faced by Irina Gordienko, when she
wrote her book: Sergei O.
Prokofieff: Myth and Reality. First,
after carefully presenting her version of the same argument as above,
concerning the significance of Steiner's science of knowledge
(objective philosophical introspection), she said next in her Author's
Forward:
"When a false or non-proven assertion appears in the
scientific press, this is taken as a signal for the opening of a
scientific debate, which continues until the matter is resolved, even
if further research has to be carried out. It is quite a
different situation in the Anthroposophical media. There one can
write whatever one likes, provided no interests are put at risk and the
familiar terminology is used. Any
attempt to criticize such printed assertions is condemned out of a
false ethical principle: tolerance towards a person is confused with
tolerance of his mistakes. The ideal of brotherly love comes to mean little
more than the maintaining of 'diplomatic relations' with ones neighbor,
while remaining indifferent to his spiritual destiny.
"This is, in our opinion, by no means a sign of
irresponsibility - this is only secondary - but is rather the
expression of a materialism that is deeply rooted in the unconscious [the Shadow, see above and below, ed], inclining one to experience
inter-personal relations in the present as absolutely real, while the
working of the counter-forces which stand behind every lie is ignored
or is at best passed off as an abstract theory, about which one can
hold clever discussions, but which, as soon as one returns to the
reality of life, will be forgotten. ' "An
incorrect result of research in the spiritual world is a living being.
It is there; it must be resisted, it must first be
eradicated"[R.S., ed.] ' (22.10.1915, GA 254)"
[emphasis added]
The consequence for me then is this: If I
discern flaws (errors of thought) in the work of the Society and
Movement, what is my obligation toward that work and toward those
personalities who make such errors of thought? This has been made
all the more acute by the fact that during the period in which several
people had opportunities to review the earlier version of this work, it
was common to hear expressed some form of: Don't you think you need to
treat in a more kind way, those who. in your opinion, have made errors
of thought.
The consequence of such a "materialistic" (as suggested by Gordienko) approach is twofold: First,
we collectively deny that Anthroposophy has anything to do with science
- that is, there is no real meaning for us to exactness and rigor in
the processes of cognition, and certainly not in holding each other to
such standards. And second, that we actually do each other a
kindness by treating so politely each others statements that clash with
our own understanding, particularly when such statements are publicized
throughout our communities as the expression of those presumed authorities, who hold positions of trust in our institutional social
forms (Dornach, the Councils in America and so forth).
When I first read this in Gordienko, I
realized that she was emphasizing the Truth
as the sole ideal, which is understandable given that she was a
practicing mathematician. I even wrote in that moment in the
margin of my copy of her book this question: What about Beauty and Goodness?
It is my view that the latter ideals, in practice, do justify temperance with regard to how we treat each other when we find ourselves convinced of an error of thought living in the other. In terms of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom, we enter here the realm of moral technique - that problem which follows after we have practiced moral imagination and moral intuition. This comes down to: What do we actually say (or write or do - what is the moral art or our technique), when we are convinced our brother or sister in Anthroposophy is in error? In some places in the above book, Steiner used the term tact as an indicator of the social technique of incarnating a moral intuition.
There is an aphorism from the
Middle-East, as follows: There are three gates to speech: Is it true?
(truth) Is it necessary? (beauty) And, is it kind?
(goodness) Where below I have felt it necessary to concern myself with the errors of thought in others,
I have tried to tactfully follow this advice.
Now suppose, for example, that I correctly discern that what is encouraged among the membership, by those in leadership positions, is a misleading (erroneous) path. Suppose that the general direction of the Society, in how it understands and practices Anthroposophy, is weak, lame and mostly inadequate. Suppose the practices that are encouraged cause us to miss our real tasks. Suppose that the Society got so far off the track during the 20th Century that we are not even close to truly bringing alive the New Mysteries.
Let us pause for a moment and consider
what I mean by the above term: lame. In a nutshell it
comes down to this: Those who do not know, cannot teach what they do
not know. If the vast majority of those in leading
anthroposophical positions do not know what lives within the experience
that comes from truly penetrating the meaning and significance for our
inner life of a proper study of The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom - of Rudolf Steiner's own Path (see essay far below),
and, if in this sense they don't know, again as an experience, true and exact living thinking (the New Thinking), then
they cannot teach that which can be learned in no other way.
Further, if they do not know that, then they logically also do
not appreciate what the absence of that knowledge will mean for their comprehension of the rest of what
Steiner gave to us.
Let us repeat this last point, in a
slightly different way. Steiner's books on the science of
objective philosophical introspection lead to knowledge of the inner life of the human being that cannot be
obtained in any other way. Certainly one can travel such paths
without these books, but to acquire the near mathematical precision and
exactness of introspective knowledge that Steiner himself developed
through "...introspective
observation following the methods of natural science", means something those who have not succeeded at this
cannot imagine or understand. There are considerable consequences
to the thinking of any individual not self-trained in this fashion,
which consequences will often lead to errors of thought.
The reader here is perfectly entitled to
wonder, that if the author of this knows all that much, where is the
evidence. Certainly not just saying things like the above can
count for much. To the extent possible, the essays that follow
are the evidence, are the demonstration - the product as it were - of
the New Thinking. Ultimately, of course, the reader will have to
form their own judgments.
Steiner gave us what he gave out of his
having himself first achieved the goal he sets before us in The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom and A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. These are not books about some matter that has
nothing to do with Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science. On the
contrary, these books are the foundational heart and soul of everything
Steiner later did in his life. They are the Key to the Kingdom of
the New Thinking. In the absence of knowing the experiences to
which these books point, we simply cannot truly and fully understand, or appreciate, all the rest.
That failure then lames (in different degrees) all our work since Steiner crossed over. We stumble
around in an inner darkness of soul, that only the science of objective
introspective philosophy can illuminate. We do not know ourselves
as knowing doers, the first and
essential goal of spiritual development which enables it to be scientific. [In the essays in this book, the details of these
problems will be laid out from a number of directions and within a
number of different contexts.]
Where this leads is to the necessity of
our recognizing that the Shadow forces have been having their way with
us (from inside our own souls, via the threefold double-complex), while
we've been trying to pretend that all the opposition only comes from
the outside. And, we also need to realize that this state of
being is exactly where karma was meant to lead us - to a fallen
condition. Rudolf Steiner crossed over, the Vorstand fell into
conflict, and the various National Societies took sides and split away
from the General Anthroposophical Society. Even though this split
was healed in a kind of political way on the horizontal plane of social
existence following the second Great War, it was not healed in a
spiritual - vertical - way.
Here is Ben-Aharon, from the forward to
his book on the Second Coming, The
Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century: "...those forces of hindrance
that brought about Rudolf Steiner's premature death in the first third
came to an outward victory in the events of the twelve years 1933-45, both
in the Anthroposophical Society and the world at large."
[emphasis added]
Since this seemingly negative view is not being said by those who organize
events, and run around the world giving lectures or writing big long
books (none of which activities are socially permitted to be publicly
and critically examined), it would appear that what I discern seems
completely off the mark. Everyone acts as if what we are doing is
just fine, while over here in the corner, mostly ignored, Wendt (and
others - such as Gordienko, and Ben-Aharon) are saying things like: Wait a minute guys, this is
all wrong. Isn't it really possible that we are failing our
Teacher, we are failing humanity and we are failing Christ?
Couldn't be true, right?
Clearly people are trying to do the right thing. Or so it seems, if we put
the best face on it. Most of our publications are self
congratulatory, and my experience is that when you suggest they should
be otherwise (critically honest and scientific), people get very
defensive. And, of course, Christ does forgive us; and our
Teacher, well he joined his karma to ours, so that must mean something,
must it not? Then there is that famous near magical (and
fantastic and probably false) semi-consciously shared mental picture of
the Meaning of
the Christmas Conference we all speak of as
if in a dream, so we can't be all bad, can we? As for
humanity...well all kinds of folks are bringing their kids to Waldorf
Schools - that must count for something, yes?
Lets try this. Imagine Rudolf Steiner in front of you and ask him if he thinks that its all peaches and cream in the Society and Movement, nothing is wrong, everything is perfect and there is no room for improvement. If you really believe he will answer yes to this question, then don't buy or read this book.
If you know in your heart that he'll have
to say no, its not all right, its not fine and somebody needs to wake
up, then ask yourself: How do we know what next right thing to do is? Maybe this book can provide some of the answers to
that question, or if not that, then at least some better questions.
* *
*
Let me begin this part of the
introduction by returning for a moment to an appreciation of what has
been and is being done. It is entirely possible and reasonable to
look at almost everyone working in the Society and Movement and find a
struggling and striving human being, often one full of a great heart,
who gives and bears much (something one can find all over the world in
many people, not just anthroposophists).
For example, all we have to do is to
think of the many Waldorf teachers, who work for so little for such
long hours. Everywhere in the Society and Movement we see much
that justifies our confidence and trust.
Yet, we are also required to cultivate
the ability to look at ourselves as a stranger (Knowledge
of Higher Worlds). Do we in the Society
and Movement practice such objectivity about our own activities?
Part of the purpose of this book is to do just that. I may
completely fail in such an effort, but not for want of trying.
Let me conclude by adding two
considerations to what I am certain are major matters of spiritual
import that are not yet clearly seen by our leadership and therefore
not brought as strongly as is necessary to our attention. These
are in addition to the errors that arise because so few have penetrated
to the kind of self knowledge only possible through an objective study
of the own soul based on the science of knowing as developed by Steiner
(A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World
Conception, and The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom).
The second matter (besides the above
introspective activity and books), left in the dust heap of our
confusions following the split in the Society, and what followed in the
20th Century, was the Reverse
Cultus. It was not that this was
presented to us by Steiner as an off hand remark, by the way. It
came about this way. Almost immediately following the Burning of
the Goetheanum, Steiner began giving a series of lectures (starting
January 23rd, 1923) in Dornach and Stuttgart, which has been collected
under the title Awakening
to Community.
In Lecture VI, he takes up a significant
subject, which he begins to approach by discussing the need for
religious renewal that was to be met through the creation of the
Christian Community. He then paraphrases Dr. Rittelmeyer, who had
recently said that the development of community in the Christian
Community is potentially one of the greatest threats to the
Anthroposophical Society possible.
Steiner then describes how a rite (and
certainly this includes the Rite of Consecration of Man that is to be
celebrated in the Christian Community) brings down into those present
in the Rite (cultus) a spiritual presence: "a shared comprehensive memory
of spiritual experiences". This, he goes on
to say, is a powerful community building force.
Steiner then adds: "The Anthroposophical Society
also needs just such a force to foster community within it". He then elaborates the underlying spiritual
principles that lead to the necessity for the Society to learn to enact
a reverse cultus, in which spiritual presence does not descend via the
Rite into the community, but the community learns instead to rise up
toward spiritual presence through a
rite of its own, in the nature of its groups
and their cultivated feeling life and qualities of conversation.
Now an honest (as of a stranger)
appraisal of the Life of our Society reveals that in comparison with
the community feelings one can sometimes experience in Christian
Community social gatherings, the Society has not achieved the same
level of fellow-feeling. In fact, most of the goals Steiner set
for us in his collection of letters written to the Society members in
1924, and published as The Life,
Nature and Cultivation of Anthroposophy, have
not been achieved.
As a place where one can find deeply felt
warm fellow-feeling, the Christian Community often succeeds where the
Society does not, and the danger to the Society predicted by Dr.
Rittelmeyer almost a century ago has come to pass. What is worse,
in my view, is that the priests of the Christian Community, at least
among their leadership, ought to have known this and apparently have
done nothing about it. In fact, it began to greatly disturb me
about 10 years ago, when I found more and more people in the Society
who had never even heard of the reverse
cultus or of this most crucial problem for
the community life of the Society.
Now this error of thought (not
recognizing the need for the reverse
cultus) is in a very few places now being
overcome (the Central Regional Council in American is trying, for
example), but at the same time its significance has to be brought into
the foreground over and over again, until we understand our loss, and
our potential.
In addition to the loss of the
reverse cultus, there is a further difficulty
for which Steiner had given warnings (sorry, I can't put my finger on a
quote at the moment, but most readers should be able eventually to
appreciate this). This danger is the intellectualization of the
Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence.
When Steiner wrote and lectured,
Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence lived into the room. Where he was,
It was. But once this Intelligence entered the minds of his
readers and listeners, a difficulty was encountered over which Steiner
had little control. This Living (experienced) Wisdom dies when brought into incarnation in words, and this death
can only be overcome by the inner activity of the reader and listener.
We have to meet what he offered in the right way, and he spoke of
this directly and indirectly over and over again (see the introductions
to both Occult Science and Theosophy).
If we look honestly back upon the work of
the 20th Century in the Society and Movement and see how it is
developed into its present form, we will not find this living
Intelligence, but mostly its lifeless intellectualized corpse.
Anthroposophy (the Wisdom of Man, which discovers how to
encounter and work with the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence) has become
in far too many souls mere Steinerism, a philosophy (world view)
attributed to the authority of the Great Initiate and Genius, Rudolf
Steiner. Over and over again, in conversations with others (deep
sincere people) and on Waldorf websites etc. one finds something
similar to this form of expression (here taken from an actual Waldorf
website): Anthroposophy
is a spiritual philosophy that reflects and speaks to the basic deep
spiritual questions of humanity, to our basic creative needs, to the
need to relate to the world out of a scientific attitude of mind, and
to the need to develop a relation to the world in complete freedom and
based on completely individual judgments and decisions.
What could be wrong with this?
Well, its not true in a living way, although it is more or less intellectually (materialistically) accurate. The flesh has been
stripped away, and all we have is the bones. Recall now what
Steiner wrote in the First Leading Thought:
"1. Anthroposophy is a path of cognition*, to guide the
Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe. It
arises in man as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling; and it
can be justified only inasmuch as it can satisfy this inner need. He
alone can acknowledge Anthroposophy, who finds in it what he himself in
his own inner life feels impelled to seek. Hence only they can be
anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and
the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and
thirst."
*[As previously noted, this is generally translated as knowledge, but it appears that the better English word for the German word Erkentnis or Erkennen is cognition.]
The two quotes above almost seem the same
don't they? But the fact is instead of quoting what Steiner
himself wrote, the mind of the writer on the Waldorf website
intellectualized the meanings, and lacking a connection to his own
feelings on this matter, then subtly and thoughtlessly took away the
heart of it, probably completely unconsciously and in connection with
how the corpse of this once Living Wisdom is taught among us
today.
Like any error of thought, the whole
misstep starts right at the beginning, where "Anthroposophy is a path of
cognition..." becomes "Anthroposophy is a spiritual
philosophy...". Something that I do out of my will and feelings and needs (a path I walk), has become, as a consequence of the
intellectualization, a mere point of view - something that I study in books and learn as a content (a spiritual philosophy).
The core difficulty is rooted (as the
reader now should understand) in the absence of an appreciation in
practice of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom. For example, a scientific introspective life
comes to recognize that there is a considerable difference among those
activities of spirit that lead in the soul to such states as: belief, understanding and knowledge. In the
essay below: Anthroposophy
and the Russian Soul, I go into a number of
details as regards this problem.
The consequence of this
intellectualization of the once Living Michaelic Cosmic Wisdom has led
to the displacement of the Living element of this stream of Wisdom,
away from the Society and Movement (what Ben-Aharon, in his remarkable
Imagination of the Second Coming: The
Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, calls
the conscious Michael Community to what Ben-Aharon calls there the
unconscious Michael Community). When I write in the essays
below on such themes as Civil Society, the Hopi Prophecy and the
Bioneers, it is this displacement to which I am referring.
The Anthroposophical Society and
Movement, having lost a connection to The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom and the reverse
cultus, failed to find their own way to the
Living Spirit and thus to true Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence.
Since the movement among humanity of forces of the Living Spirit
is not defeated by our failures, this wind or
breath of [holy] spirit (see the Gospel of John) moved elsewhere.
Mainly It abandoned the institutional
structures of the Society and Movement where the Living Wisdom had been
intellectualized, and entered into humanity at the level of the social
commons, which is why we can still sense Its Presence in our own anthroposophical communities, not from the
top down, but rather from the social below upward (a general trend in
all social forms in the present, by the way, not just the Society).
We actually come into contact with It when we participate as individuals in what the larger society is doing in such activities as the environmental movement or in political struggles (see the work of Ben-Aharon and Perlas). For details, read Ben-Aharon's book: America's Global Responsibility: individualization, initiation and threefolding.
How do we once more become a truly
conscious Michaelic Community on the Earth, carrying forward the tasks
set before us by our teacher, Rudolf Steiner? How do we overcome
the intellectualization of the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence (the
reduction of acts of will in the soul, to the mere study of Steiner
books)? We do this through re-awakening interest in the New
Thinking (The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom) and the New Mysteries (the reverse
cultus). Hopefully this book will also
help point the way.
To come at this from a slightly different
direction, it can also be pointed out that most of Steiner's books and
lectures (except when he could lecture in England) had to be put in the
language of the Intellectual Soul. His basic European
audiences were by education and cultural influences not yet in the
Consciousness Soul, and as a consequence Steiner found it necessary to
use certain forms of language and to often speak indirectly or
metaphorically as his listeners lacked the capacity (at that time) to
observe the needed soul phenomena of the Consciousness Soul.
This book you hold in your hand, dear
reader, is for example written entirely in the language of the
Consciousness Soul, which in fact in many instances had to be invented
in order to express Consciousness Soul experiences (see The
Meaning of....for example). This
is why there will be for some readers an apparent disconnect between
what Steiner said and what is said here. This is not a disconnect
at the level of the truth, however, but entirely a consequence of the
fact that only now is it possible to write so openly concerning that
which Steiner had to approach indirectly and often with a great deal of
circumlocution.
*
Lets wind up this discussion in the
introduction with a picture of the situation in America with respect to
Anthroposophy.
America is a battleground of the spirit.
It is where there is more individualism presently than anywhere
else on the planet. This makes possible both Light (the Life
Forces of Christ entering through the thinking of the heart) and
Darkness (the Shadow forces out of the threefold double-complex).
Both will be present, in spite of the New Age dream of an Age of
Light.
The actual battleground is within the soul and only indirectly in the outer world.
And, at this time only Anthroposophy truly understands this
(there are a few whispers out there, but they could use our support).
In America, from the Cultures of the
East, comes mostly decadent and luciferic spirit ways, wearing the
seductive guise of the mysterious (thus all the more lucifericly
attractive) satori or sudden enlightenment. From the Culture of
the Center, via scientific materialism, comes the ahrimanic to join
with the natural materialism of the youthful American culture.
But also from the Center comes an Ideal of the new Life of
Christ in the New Thinking and in the community work of the reverse
cultus (the New Mysteries).
At the same time, the American Soul has
unique (nowhere else in the world) forces, and these must be awakened
and applied within the soul - in the battleground between latent and
natural Christ forces of the heart (the true American Spirit) and the
mostly decadent spiritual life of the Cultural East, which has been
coupled to the excesses of the Ahrimanic Deception (materialism) given
birth in the Cultural Center at the heights of Western Civilization in
the 19th Century.
The American Soul stands as a mediating
soul-space between a luciferic ungrounded spirituality of the
East, and the ahrimanically rigid belief in scientific materialism born
in the Center. While the Society and Movement are focused on the
Center, in a social-spiritual sense this Center failed (in the same way
an overstressed beam fails) during the crisis events in the 20th
Century. Recall Ben-Aharon above: The
Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century: "...those forces of hindrance
that brought about Rudolf Steiner's premature death in the first third
came to an outward victory in the events of the twelve years 1933-45, both
in the Anthroposophical Society and the world at large."
[emphasis added]
This book seeks to illuminate that
battleground of the American soul-space, and the special role
Anthroposophy can play in its future resolution. In
particular, we have to begin with the Challenge presented by the fact
of Ahriman's actual incarnation in America, in the present. For out of this incarnation the battle has now
become fully joined, and as in much else the membership of the Society
and Movement are here far too asleep.
I noted above how the Spiritual World's
chosen displacement of the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence meant that It became a spirit breath weaving mostly among the
awakening social commons (the millions* of souls Steiner is said by
some to have hoped would be anthroposophists by the end of the 20th
Century - alas a dream that was apparently not to be).
Nevertheless, it is in this awakening social commons that
instinctive consciousness soul processes have burst forth within our
declining civilization among Civil Society, the environmental movement
and so forth.
*[see the essay below: The Natural Transformation of
Anthroposophical Society in America, for a
discussion of the so-called Michaelic millions]
Many anthroposophists find a kinship with
these social gestures. In them, for example, has begun the
opposition to Ahriman's incarnation so necessary at this time.
Yet, what about the Anthroposophical Movement and Society?
Is it to do something different than that which is
happening in Civil Society?
Yes!
We hold the keys to the kingdom of the
New Thinking (in the Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity) and the New Mysteries
(in the form of the reverse
cultus), matters never before possible on the
Earth. While these are appearing instinctively everywhere today,
only anthroposophists have been given (at this time, if we don't catch
the bus now it is gone!) the opportunity to foster in the School and
Society a scientific spiritual life. At present, the main thrusts
of the spiritual life in the planetary culture are unable (again, in
the moment) to connect to the true nature of the Sun Intelligence
living inside Natural Science. If you will recall from Steiner's
biographical statements, he was only able to enter the Sun Sphere of
the Spiritual World after he had brought deeply into his soul the real impulses
underlying the scientific enterprise.
If we, as anthroposophists, are unable to
make the core of our practices scientific, we will leave the greatest
of Steiner's gifts orphaned. He said, as we all know, that the
future would know him more for The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom, than any other deed. Why?
Because, in this book of Steiner's is the
process by which a human being becomes freely awake as a knowing doer of the spirit in a scientific way. If we drop this ball, the present may lose
sight of it, which then means the future will have to wait for another
time, perhaps even another age, to discover this sublime treasure.
Rudolf Steiner's greatest legacy is in our hands. What are
we going to do?
The Challenge
American Anthroposophy begins to come to
maturity in the situation of a given place and a given time. The
dominant characteristic of this time, outwardly,
is the Incarnation of Ahriman
[A
brief introduction to the neophyte: For some
it will come as a strange surprise (perhaps quite off putting) to find
this book begin with the following discussion concerning the present
day incarnation of a spiritual Being of whom they have perhaps never
heard anything. Ahriman is apparently first known to outward
history as a figure in Persian religious myths. Rudolf Steiner
discussed this Being in great detail, and represented both human nature
and the general structure of the social world as being threefold in its
most universal all-human characteristics. As represented
artistically in Steiner's sculpture: the Representative of Humanity, we
find above was Lucifer, who stood between the human being and his
experience of the divine spiritual worlds. Below was Ahriman, who
stood between the human being and his experience of the world of the
senses. In the Middle, as the balancing gesture, stood Christ as
the Representative of Humanity (what our true higher nature is to
become, as St. Paul had noted: Not I, but Christ in me).
This arrangement should be viewed as something not easy to
understand and as something that needs to
be approached carefully and without succumbing to any temptations to
sensationalize or exaggerate the real nature of Mystery of Evil, the
main structural Mystery surrounding humanity in the present.
This much should be recognized. The
social world consists of two parts, the first of which is an outer
structural aspect - a Stage Setting, the maya of nature, history
and social-political facts and processes. Here in this outside structure Ahriman is a main feature. More
essential is the inwardness, what is not visible to the senses. All our outer
actions (and inner actions) have a consequence for our soul and spirit.
This inwardness is not maya, but truth. But to arrive at
truth requires a rite
of passage. The governor of this rite of passage is Lucifer. As we progress in inner development,
we come to learn that the real essential aspect is Christ. He is
the predominant feature of the truth of the inner world (Lucifer
commands an inner world of temptation and illusion, while Christ is the Way, the Truth and the
Life - what receives our approach (the Way), in the middle becomes the
means (the Truth) leading us through this rite of passage to its
culmination (the Life).).
As the essay below progresses, certain
facts about this structural Mystery will be illuminated, and other
related facts will come forward as the reader gets deeper into the rest
of this book. The neophyte, who wants to go further into this
Mystery - particularly what is called: the opponents, may want eventually to read Steiner's works on the
subject of Lucifer and Ahriman very carefully.]
Outrageous Genius - Discovering the in-the-Present
Incarnation of Ahriman in America through the Signs of the Times
first, some
necessary preliminary considerations
Honoring the
Teacher and the Teaching
"And, just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer in the
flesh, and as there was an incarnation of Christ in the flesh, so will
there be, before
even a part
of the third post-Christian millennium will have passed, an actual incarnation of
Ahriman in the West: Ahriman in the flesh."
[emphasis added] R.S. lecture, 1 November, 1919
"The thing that will matter, though, will be for people in
the age of Ahriman to know that John William Smith* is only what
appears before them outwardly, and that inwardly Ahriman is there; they
must know what is happening and not succumb to any deception in the
drowsiness of their illusions." [emphasis added] R. S. 28
December 1919 [*a name Steiner made up]
The first and essential thing to realize
is that in thinking about the Incarnation of the near-god Ahriman, as a
human being on the cusp of the change from the 2nd Millennium to the
3rd, we must not conceive of this as an incarnation of Evil. What
Rudolf Steiner has called the "opponents" play a necessary and
ordained role in the Creation. They are the density and weight we
are to meet and learn to carry (in both the inward heavenly realm as
well as the outward earthly realm), otherwise our own incarnations
would be too easy, and we would never really learn anything. Macro Evil
(the opponents) are different from the Beast from the Abyss, or collective and conscious micro (human) evil.
The tempters and confusers tempt and confuse, they sow seeds of
fear and doubt and judgment and cynicism, but they do not bring
true evil into the social world. We
do that when we give into their urgings,
instead of the wise (though challenging and often difficult) promptings
of our own hearts. The more consciously we choose the dark, the
more the Beast
from the Abyss has free play in human social
existence. The more we consciously seek and choose the Good, the
more evolution moves forward in a balanced and harmonious
direction.
"...the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is
that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes
effect through
him in earthly
existence." [emphasis added] R.S. Lucifer and
Ahriman, lecture II, 2 November 1919.
Some anthroposophists create pictures
within their inwardness, in which they view the opponents as more or
less extremely powerful, and thereby capable of overwhelming humanity
(especially in connection with the hardly spoken of Soradt - the Sun
Demon - and the Asuras). Simple logic refutes such an assumption,
for if these Beings had the power some anthroposophists believe they
have, progressive evolution would already be over. The fact is
they are constrained, principally through the office of the Divine
Mother, whose golden realm is found on the other side of the Eight
Inner Spheres of the Earth (the Spheres of the Fallen Hierarchies).
As we more and more become able to do research into the Feminine
Mysteries (something Steiner could only hint at in order not to get
caught up in the web of the Mary Cult of European Catholicism), we will
discover that there is not only a male trinity (Father, Son and Holy
Spirit), but also a feminine trinity (Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul).
Steiner could only point out to us a few facts about this golden realm, and also the significance of the return of the
Imagination (the Holy Sophia) and as well the significance of
Anthroposophia. Some of the best present-day research on the
Divine Mother can be found in Tomberg's Meditations
on the Tarot, in the 11th Arcanum: Force.
It is through Hell to the realm of the Holy Mother
(the Eight Inner Spheres of the Earth) that Christ descended on the
Saturday following His crucifixion, whereby he obtained the forces
necessary for resurrection. [See Proverbs viii, 22-30 for some
hints.]
More detail will be developed on this
problem in my essay below: The Mystery of Macro and Micro Evil: the relationship of
the Shadow (the three-fold double-complex) to the American Soul, wherein knowledge of the Shadow obtained after 35 years
of introspection will be described. This much can be said
presently: Ahriman and Lucifer enter directly into human affairs through us - through our giving into the Shadow, the three-fold
double-complex. We are the gate by which the effects of the
opponents enter the world social order. In a like fashion, it is
also only through
us that Christ (and the Divine Mother - but
that is, as noted above, a whole other theme) can directly enter into
the social order.* The Fifth Cultural Epoch (the Age of the
Consciousness Soul) is the era in which greater and greater aspects for
the responsibility for earthly social affairs falls to human beings.
*[Obviously, both Christ and the Divine
Mother appear sometimes to make a physical contact with individuals in
various forms. This is one of the means through which they
influence a particular time, but still this is always done with great
respect for human freedom, and still keeps to the same rule: the
influence enters the social world through us. The recipient of such effects is not made into
a passive tool in any sense of that word.]
Ahriman in reality is a gift to humanity,
a two-edged gift to be sure, but a real treasure. His very
onesidedness teaches us, and this is teaching we need to face squarely,
for it not only teaches us about ourselves, but also about an essential
aspect of the real nature of the Creation. We all contain within
our souls the ahrimanic potential, the possibility to be calculatingly
cold and heartless, and if we are as brutally self honest as our
conscience would encourage, we have all made and will make judgments
that have such a quality - that are, from a human perspective, callous
and indifferent.
Do we not walk through the world turning
a blind eye away from all manner of suffering and pain, fully aware
that we do this in order to preserve our self interest, our comfort and
our far easier lives?
To fill out this picture, think on
Nature. In tooth and claw, in flood and earthquake, in all that
seems as powers of death and radical sudden change, we see in the
processes of Nature what appears as an absence of either compassion or
love. The Natural World (as against the Social World*) is a world
of profound and complicated laws, which seem in their results to have
not at all the same consciousness that one human being might bear, out
of compassion and love, toward another. In this indifferent power
of Nature and nature's lawfulness, lives Ahriman as he manifests as an
aspect of the sense world.
*[From another point of view this
distinction, separating the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms from the
human kingdom, does not work. But we have different purposes
here, if the reader will accept that reality (as Steiner himself
pointed out) is frequently paradoxical. Our bodies are of this
Nature, but our Spirit, in its freedom, stands outside those rules.
See Owen Barfield's remarkable book Worlds
Apart to explore some of the logical problems
here in a deeper way.]
Yes, Nature (as meant here) contains
beauty - it is a divine work of art, but in its processes and laws it
is basically finished, fixed and complete. It is essentially
done. That human beings may in the future have the possibility of
lifting Nature up out of this fixed and finished condition is a whole
other story. That Anthroposophy can yet teach humanity mysteries
of Nature unimagined by today's mankind is a necessary step in laying
the groundwork for this lifting up. Humanity must learn to truly
see, and it is a mission of Anthroposophy to enable this seeing.
All the same, Nature is Created (past tense), in which the last
act was the arising of thought. "Thought is the last member of a series of
processes by which Nature is formed"
[emphasis added] R.S. A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. This is why the path of Anthroposophy is a path
of cognition. To see the real secrets of Nature requires the
metamorphosis of thinking, a task not as well advanced as it should be
in anthroposophical culture (more later). What we haven't truly
understood in practice, we cannot teach.
Our social-political world has almost
completely emancipated itself from Nature. As we more and more
developed, we more and more separated away from Nature, so that today
the Social World is a world essentially all of its own, in which
callous indifference and compassion and love operate along side each other.
The Social World has out of instinct come to sit astride the
Natural World, using it for our egoistic benefit. We can now
choose whether to continue that course, whether to continue to
embody dominion
over or to transform and metamorphose that
into communion
with (see my book the Way of
the Fool). We can go to sleep and let raw
animality (callous indifference and appetite) rule us (instead of us
ruling it), or we can wake up.
Ahriman in entering into our world
confronts other powers than those which would be normal to his realm -
his usual place in the Creation. As a human
being he now enters this world of choice, not
of essentially fixed processes and laws.
Part of what bothers us, and will bother
us about this Cosmic Being, now to be seen as a human individual, is
not how much he has done that we see as wrong, but how much he is just
like a certain part of us. For example, many people have and will
in the future like and admire this individual. Even so, as a
human being, to the extent that he does evil, he does it as a human
being. Elements of his cosmic powers are restrained by being
incarnated, just as are ours.
In addition, recall that Rudolf Steiner
explained how our antipathy to another really acquires its strength and
passion from the fact that we semi-consciously know just how much we
ourselves are like that which we observe in others as failings.
Ahriman incarnate is a mirror to a common human failing, a
failing to which everyone living today in the world is prone. If
we want to avoid this, we must strive to know the true nature of our
heart, and at the higher levels of inner development, think our way to
an experience of the Ethereal Christ. This requires us to work
properly and consciously at soul metamorphosis, and not just whine and
complain about how awful the world is, and about how much everyone but
us is wrong, evil and dumb.
It is also important to realize that
Ahriman incarnates in a specific place and time in order to accomplish
something as a more or less ordinary human being (with extraordinary
intelligence - one-sided spirit-thinking) he can only achieve at this
specific place and time. Outside the social world of incarnate
human beings, the cosmic power Ahriman can only do certain limited
things, and these mostly indirectly through our Shadow (the three-fold
double-complex). Inside
the Social World, when with us as a human being, he can do directly
things he was unable to do before.
All the same, to act directly on the
world, as a member of the social order, he must still surrender some of
his capacities - some of his genius, that is operate as a extremely
gifted human being, not as a nearly divine power incarnate (what in
ancient times might have been called an avatar).
In this, Ahriman's teaching is harsh - it
is not for wimps, and his influence on our social existence is
necessarily profound, regardless of how dark we may be tempted to seek
to portray it. A cosmic power is on the earth living as a human
being, and this is a power that can only be called Outrageous
Genius.
Ahriman also belongs to America (the true West), in the same way Lucifer belonged to the East and Christ to the Center. American anthroposophists need to recognize that he is ours. Our materialistic society, mostly of our own making through our choices in terms of comfort and appetites, is ahrimanic because we opened the door to his influence and have benefited from it. For example, we have computers and all that goes with this electronic world, because of him. The genius of cold heartless calculation provides many gifts, and we have had to become awash in it - buried up to our necks in it - so that we will soon be forced to decide whether or not we really want it to rule us, or us to rule it.
Our task then in coming to knowledge of
this power is to recognize a part of ourselves in its nature, and to
also understand how fine and exact is the shape this power seeks to
give to our social life. This shape, crafted by outrageous
genius, can tell us a great deal. In so doing it reveals to us,
we who would foster the good - that is we who would be balanced instead
of so extremely one-sided - just what we need to do and how we need to
act in the social world to bring into that world just the healing that
is needed. Ahriman would overbalance the world in a certain
direction, and it will be up to that portion of humanity, willing to be
awake to him consciously, or instinctively, to strive to restore this
balance.
In a peculiar sense, he also points
directly at the true Second Coming, as began in its initial ethereal
world dynamics in the years 1933 to 1945, by pointing so strongly away
from it. He (Ahriman) comes to distract us, to move us away from
our true heart, and this is his temptation - to cause us to loose
ourselves in the world of the senses, and never look within at the own
soul and discover what lies there, for as Christ told us in Luke: "the kingdom of heaven is
within you". Ahriman would have
us be so absorbed in the Stage Setting, that we never notice that the
real battlefield is within - that is: It
is within this inner battlefield of soul that we as individuals act
most powerfully as creative authors in the Play.
Yet, by this very distraction and its
strength, he points the other way. He speaks into our lives and
says to us: go here, for you will like it, for all your lower impulses
will find there their satisfaction. He wants to pull us down into
too much self-gratifying gravitas. Even the excess of seriousness
in anthroposophical circles tends to have this ahrimanic character.
We have to engender the counter-levity out of our selves.
We have to overcome the cold-hearted and calculating
materializing lower senses tendency in our soul that otherwise remains
sub-conscious, and replace that with the ethereal forces of consciously
moralized thought. Only our wills can do this, and we have
incarnated just in this time precisely to learn this lesson and to
accomplish this task, which Rudolf Steiner has called: the unfolding of
the Consciousness Soul.
Moreover, if we learn to perceive the
real dynamics of social existence correctly, we will see that already,
in spite of Ahriman's incarnate activities, we have been instinctively
engaged in much that is already transforming the worst that he would
accomplish were we not to learn to understand his teaching.
We are learning even
now from this teaching how to make its
countering healing gesture. Everywhere there is a waking
up, and now it is time for Anthroposophy to step forward and find a way
to serve the world's hunger to wake up all the way. However,
first we need to rouse ourselves by facing the mirrored shadow of our
worst qualities as these manifest not just in American and World
Culture, but more importantly, as an absolutely necessary crucial first
step, in American (and world-wide) Anthroposophical Culture.
Were we simply to look at the outer
culture, without first looking inwardly and squarely at ourselves, we
will fail utterly. We must meet the Shadow in ourselves or we
will be nothing but the hypocrites to which Christ referred when he
said in Matthew 23: 25-28:
"Woe to you canon-lawyers and Pharisees, you fakes, for
cleaning off the rim of your cup and saucer while on the inside you're
bursting with greed and wild appetites. Blind Pharisee, wash out
the inside of the cup and saucer first, if you want the outside to end
up clean! Woe to you canon-lawyers and Pharisees, you fakes, for
being like dusty monuments that look pretty on the outside but on the
inside are full of the bones of corpses and all kinds of rot. You
likewise from the outside appear to the world to be decent, but inside
you're full of hypocrisy and ways around the law".
It is the thesis of this essay then that
Ahriman incarnated in the West in the latter part of the 20th Century,
and that his activity as an incarnated human being can be found in
various phenomena of social existence. He leaves/left a trail, as
it were, in events that mark his passage, and this paper means to
discover that trail, and mark that passage, so that we know who he
is/was and what he did, and can then begin to counter-balance this
influence. Not erase it, or eliminate it, but consciously
counter-balance it. Moreover, we must start to look also at its
examples that are nearest at hand in our Society and Movement (a great
deal in the collection of essays that follows does this). We look
outwardly to understand it, and then inwardly to correct it; for we
have nothing to teach anyone about this if we have not first understood
it, and mastered it within ourselves and within our own circles.
Anthroposophists are faced in this trial - of coming awake to Ahriman's Incarnation - by the problem of the mote and the beam on a very large scale (See Matthew: Chapters 5-7).
Those wanting to consider more details,
as regards the indications of Rudolf Steiner, are encouraged to read
and ponder the essay in the appendix to the book: The Future
is Now: Anthroposophy at the New Millennium,
which appendix was called: When did Rudolf Steiner Expect the Incarnation of
Ahriman? by Hans-Peter van Manen. This
is, of course, in addition to the obvious books Steiner wrote
specifically on Lucifer and Ahriman.
In order to fully appreciate this
incarnation of a near-god, we have to have a proper inner picture of
modern existence - to learn to perceive that Earth Events also have
Cosmic Meaning. What can seem to some, to be merely historical
confusion and social evil, has to be perceived by the anthroposophical
living picture thinking as Divine Drama, in which certain unusual
Actors enter Stage Left, cross the Stage, and leaving behind their
Effects exit Stage Right. I use the term Actors, because Ahriman
does not incarnate alone - many others are drawn to this place and time
precisely because of the unique characteristics Ahriman has stamped
upon it.
We also need to ask good questions about
where to look. Do we look in the Cultural Sphere that is:
Religion, Art or Science, or in the Economic Sphere (Production,
Distribution and Consumption), or in the Life of Rights (State, Media,
People)? Where would Ahriman work?
I am going to suggest the Life of Rights, because if we read Steiner's The Inner Aspect of the Social Question, we will come upon the understanding that while the Cultural Sphere and the Economic Sphere have spiritual world counterparts, the Life of Rights is completely Earthly. It is our Earthly existence to which Ahriman wishes to bind us (while Lucifer would take us to a world of unearthly and illusory spirit). Nonetheless, nothing here should be taken to confine the reader to coming to a different understanding.
Why the Life of Rights?
Humanity now possesses considerable
freedom with respect to the happenings in the human social life of the
Earth, as well as with regard to our relationship to the natural world.
We can build bombs that we believe make a small sun of death inside a
city. We can alter biological life in ways we can't predict out
of an almost cultivated arrogant ignorance (callous indifference).
We can consciously spread horrible diseases, perhaps killing all
human life, all animal life, all plant life.
We can also control the economy by the
hidden secret levers behind the issuance and management of currencies,
and then using the power that this concentrated wealth can buy, the
holders of these hidden levers subvert politicians and media outlets so
as to hold great temporal power in a few hands, which hands cannot be
challenged or often even named. A secret cabal tries to rule
mankind, and seems to direct through money (stones into bread) most of the scientific research of our great
industries. All this inside a world view dominated by ideas and
concepts that make little or no room for the reality of Spirit.
All to what end?
At this climatic point in world history,
one Nation State is behaving as if it is the main center of political,
economic and technological power - the United States of America.
The entire social and natural spheres of earth existence are
spread out before this power like live prey waiting to be devoured
(Americans literally consume far far more than a fair share of the
world's wealth). Since the United States Government is a nexus of
these powers, those who seek to rule from out of the economic and
financial circles still must work through the Life of Rights.
If then someone were to be inside this
nexus of power conduits, they would be able to sit astride all those
flowing streams of power running from the economic, and the cultural
(as in that which is controlled by corporations - television and movies
etc. and also the dangerous oversight of the State in education) in and
through the Life of Rights - the middle Sphere of the emerging
Threefold Social Organism.
Recognize also that of the threefold
nature of the Life of Rights (State, Media, People - see my essay Waking the Sleeping Giant:
the Mission of Anthroposophy in America http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/wkslg.html),
these streams of power are currently dominated by the State alone.
We could place then Ahriman's human
incarnation right inside the current Bush II Administration and not be
far off the mark in our efforts to see if some kind of heartless
calculating force is/was radiating from there outwards into the
political life of the United States, tilting it and the world in
certain directions. We should also expect that Ahriman will not
incarnate alone, but will bring with him (or along side him) those who
have some karma to work out with respect to such Genius. His cold
calculating genius does not need to be perceived as just localized in
him, but needs to be seen as distributed - as spread out
among many many individualities around or near him (and also throughout
the world).
We also need to recognize that there will
be those intimately within these circles (although more will be
outside), who oppose him and these tendencies. Christ is the Lord
of Karma, and through His Art as the arranger of the relationships of
all human biographies, He has allowed in the circles around Ahriman not
merely his closest allies, but also those who have the remarkable
strength needed to thwart much that he would otherwise like to achieve.
Michaelic warriors will be right next to those who have chosen to
be the Dragon's earthly spawn.
Moreover, Ahriman has no need to hold
directly any reins of temporal power, for the use of such power is not
his genius. His genius is to see how number relationships can be
gripped and thus give an excessive strength of fixed-like order to the
normal living and fluid nature of social existence. He knows
better than anyone, human or divine, what power lives in number, and
earthly temporal power has no attraction to him at all.
second, a
presentation of the relevant context in the form of a contemplation on
the social organism
The Wise
Earth* as Counter-force to Ahriman's Incarnation
*c.f. Paul
Hawken's http://wiseearth.org/
We need now to revisit the above themes,
but from an even higher and more picture-like level. It is
important for the reader to realize that our conventional conceptual
frame of reference as regards political-social themes, in particular
the Life of Rights, does not adequately take account of the related
spiritual reality. To speak or think of the political-social
using the same terminology as conventional media is to "materialize"
our mental pictures, concepts and ideas. In this next section I
will endeavor to help the reader overcome these habits of mind.
First, we should step back a little, and
see if we can see earthly events in the more mythic or imaginative
form. Events in the social organism are also a story, or perhaps
better said a Cosmic Tale as it were. Just like nature speaks in its
appearances, so does the logos nature of Christ speak into social
events, which He artistically arranges through His role as Lord of
Karma (see my essays below: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the
Consciousness Soul; and, The Methodology Necessary for
a New Social Science).
Picture the surface of the Earth sphere, that narrow spherical physical band in which unfolds all the visible phenomena of human lives and cultures. Literally, dear reader, consciously form this picture of a huge spherical band, perhaps only twenty miles in height, that at its upper limits is airless space (beyond which we cannot breath), and at its lower limit solid near impenetrable rock. Six billion plus people spread over the surface of the Earth, all held dear by the Divine Mystery. Waves of change move through this sphere of social existence, which in the 20th Century became truly global economically, at the same time it became more self-aware globally (via the Internet). In fact, if we think away the mental pictures we have of this world that are derived from the senses, and begin to substitute more imaginative, more fluid and dynamic pictures of the social world as the interplay of downward and upward flowing will forces of Cosmic Beings, in which the human being moves through fields* of thinking, feeling and willing born in the hierarchies, we will come closer to the truth. The apparently material earth sphere, in which the social world seems to have emancipated itself from Nature, is in fact a nexus of dynamic and inter penetrating cosmic spiritual activity. Rudolf Steiner gave us a very necessary picture of this activity, when he said that "man was the religion of the Gods".
There is a reason so much activity is directed from the Cosmic
Spiritual Heights and from the Earthly Spiritual Depths, at this in between center - at this narrow material-like spherical band
where human beings unfold their biographies. The Hierarchies
conceive of us as their religion, because inside us, in the i-AM, that
is the human spirit, exists something that can't be found anywhere
else. Rudolf Steiner wrote of this in his youth, in A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception:
"Man is not behaving in accordance with the purposes of
the Guiding Power of the world when he investigates one or another of
His commandments, but when he behaves in accordance with his own
insight. For
in him
the Guiding Power of the world manifests Himself. He does not live as
Will somewhere outside of man; He has renounced his own will in order
that all might depend upon the will of man."
[emphasis added]
*[See the lessons of the First Class of
the School of Spiritual Science.]
We are the father and mother of
all human action.
Within the consciousness of these many
billions of human beings, whose true mystery we are hardly ready to
acknowledge, exists struggles, which we call in general the Evolution
of Consciousness. In the current phase of this evolution, which
we call the time of the Consciousness Soul, the I seeks to awake in the
encounter with other I's. Within the soul, moral challenges appear out
of these encounters, as each biography confronts its necessary karma
and destiny. First, as if radiating outward in waves from the
Western Democracies (where individualism is most fully developing),
while at the same time appearing homeopathically in smaller communities
world-wide, the Consciousness Soul begins its unfolding. From out
of the totality of the invisible inner world of humanity the I faces
both outer and inner challenges (for the most part lost from the
insight of our thinking in an inner darkness of coagulated concepts,
such as rigid and arid religious beliefs, or a spiritless materialistic
natural science, or even to the Anthroposophical Society and Movement
via the intellectualization during the 20th Century of the Michaelic
Cosmic Intelligence).
Meanwhile, unknown to most, the Christ
works in between. He is able to work in between because having
arranged our karma - our integrated and finely interrelated
biographies - to the extent that our social relationships are informed
with moral qualities (even the most tentative impulses of the heart),
these moral acts in the Epoch of the Consciousness Soul also amount to
an encounter with the Eternal. In that we seek the Good, and draw
even a weak tea intuition of it into our social relationships, Christ
can be present precisely because of that qualitative vertical inner
gesture we make in our souls in order to seek knowledge of the Good in
the dramas of the moral challenges in modern life. (For every one step in
spiritual development, we must take three steps in character - moral -
development)
In the outer stage setting, which we
believe we know through our materialized conceptions of present world
history, itself a kind of polar opposite to the inner world of
spiritual awakening and moral challenge, gestures of change seek to
warp the slowly unfolding threefold social organism to their own uses
and needs. A Dark Prince of the World seeks to dominate the
Stage, while the Lord (Artist) of Karma weaves the biographies into a
musical-like harmony of inner conscious spirit evolution. The I,
under the influence of Christ, tends to become We. While we,
under the influence of Ahriman, are pushed to remain only I. [The
Rastafarians - a mostly now Jamaica based religious impulse - speaks
interesting enough of the idea of I 'n I - we - as something different from the idea of I and you. The idea of I and you comes from the devil,
according to their instinctive wisdom, while the truth is that we are
both I's - that is we are the same, "I 'n I".]
Ahriman divides communities into smaller
and smaller groups, ultimately to become isolated I's. Christ
unifies I's into communities through His in between support of the healing resolution of our karmic moral
challenges.
Let us look for a moment closer at the
threefolding of the social organism of the world social order.
Many in anthroposophical circles will
tend to believe threefolding is something we have to create and is not
the present condition of the social world. This is partially
true, but at the same time we need to recognize that the dynamics of
social life have been active in the history of civilizations for
thousands of years, and the slow evolution of the social organism has
been set on a progressive course for a long time. For example, in
the third cultural age the Cultural Sphere (the ancient Mysteries)
ruled the social order. In the fourth cultural age, a Rights
Sphere impulse was added at the foundations of Greek and Roman
civilization in the idea of the State on the one hand and of the
Citizen on the other. As the fifth cultural age emerged from the
fourth, the rights life itself threefolded (State, Media, People - or
citizen), just as the cultural life had already threefolded into
Science, Art, and Religion. At the same time that the on-looker
consciousness appears (as did the deepest aspects of the Ahrimanic
Deception, namely materialism in all its aspects), so began the birth
time of the economic life, which now struggles to differentiate into an
inner threefolding of producers, distributors and consumers.
Clearly we live in a time when the
concept of the threefold social organism had barely begun to be present
and was at the same time never more needed. Threefolding
manifests itself instinctively, but if we are to properly birth it in a
healthy social way, we have to know the Idea of it consciously. as well
as choose to embrace it consciously. Here again is a
teaching task which anthroposophists may fail entirely to bring into
our shared social life.
With Ahriman's incarnation, powerful
dividing forces entered into the nature of the Stage Setting - the
stream of historical events and its structurally embryonic threefold
relationships. America (as a political power ruled by an
essentially unelected elite) under this influence isolated itself on
the world Stage, taking the attitude that it could stand alone
(Ahriman's attitude). Within America, groups were set against
groups, communities against communities. Hate and mistrust was
fostered, for to some at least this was seen as an advantage.
This we know from the News, but other impulses were
simultaneously at work.
At the same time that this isolating gesture pushed against the instincts of the human spirit for community, the instinctively developing consciousness soul produced its counter-gesture. People did not really want separation, and felt in their hearts the social poverty of this tendency. As this situation ripened, it brought with it a certain developments in technology, which also contained both potentials - one for isolation and one for community building. This was woven into the the whole world's social fabric - a means of connecting across previously disconnecting boundaries. Someone in China could now meet and work with someone in Sweden, instantly in the moment.
Out of the earth, human intelligence,
guided in part by Ahriman's genius, raised up from the world of
metallic substances a network, perhaps a spider web of
inter-connectivity. A great power oozed out of its previous sub-natural
condition and took on form in metal and plastic, spreading its arms all
over the world.
Yet, Ahriman was not the only inspiring
genius, and other impulses from human beings took hold of this
transformation of substance and sub-nature and gave it higher potential
uses. It was after all capable of being only a tool, and the real
meaning of this tool was in the hands and hearts of those who created
how to set it to work.
One kind of work was the turning of human
beings into number. Everything that could be counted was being
counted and every fact that could be converted to data was being
converted. Human beings became capable of being known as mere
cyphers. As a result, when Ahriman incarnated, he could take hold
of this number meaning of human beings and use that tool to create a
top down driven political power machine, filled with the callousness of cold calculation exactly
in the center of the social organism: the Life of Rights.
A kind of social heart attack was created
in the instinctive relationship of Americans for the Consciousness Soul
(English speakers
are instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of Rights - R.S. The
Challenge of the Times). Just when the
most egregious terrorist attack of modern times shattered the world's
divisions and united them in a shared sense of loss and tragedy
(remember the Towers were centers of international financial activity), the political power elite of
America turned away from this warm-hearted world-wide joining, and used
this situation in the most callous and calculated fashion.
Centered in the most powerful Nation State in the history of
humanity, this heartless thinking flowed outward as a political foreign
policy out over the world, encouraging division and in the lie of all
lies, everywhere (domestically and internationally) suppressing freedom
in the name of freedom.
But, again as we have already seen,
Ahriman had not incarnated with only his minions as companions.
Michaelic warriors, some very aware but most only instinctive,
entered into incarnation as well. At their insistence and from
their genius, the tool of metal, plastic and sub-natural forces was put
to other uses. Reacting, the Consciousness Soul took on a
world-wide social form in thousands upon thousands of new kinds of
communities of association, something it had been slowly preparing to
do for a long time. Civil Society was born, and the tool -
the Internet - was placed in the service of heart-warmed thoughts.
In so doing we need to emphasize that this Sphere of
heart-centered activity (the Wise Earth) tended to arise on the
Internet as individual expressions of community service. The I's
sought out other I's and many kinds of We's were born.
The same tool Ahriman used to create a
social machine for the manipulation of political power in America, was
used by others to create a living organism of communities world-wide in
scope, while at the same time concentrated in America and active on all
political fronts. Above, in the top of a now decadent elite
political hierarchy, Ahriman worked, while below, spread out across the
social commons, the Consciousness Soul - the Wise Earth - spoke back.
In the Wise Earth impulse all manner of
spiritual voices are heard. The excesses of the Ahrimanically
driven assault via the Life of Rights on social order and individual
freedom has become so plain and obvious, that communities of opposition
are everywhere being formed. As a prime incarnate opponent, Ahriman does his duty, driving individuals toward the
necessary moral dilemmas and challenges. You could say that one
of the aspects of the Ahrimanic Incarnation is a kind of heating up of
social chaos - an inflaming of disorder. This engenders in
morally awake human hearts the will to do battle. The dragon
forces circle social life everywhere, and the knights of Michael,
themselves no doubt students of the spiritual world Michael School
before incarnation, take up their earthly social tasks. (see the book Blessed
Unrest, at: http://www.blessedunrest.com/)
Ahriman's teaching is harsh, and the I
must stand up within itself and in relationship with others, or succumb
to soul failures it would otherwise be unwilling to tolerate in what we
call: good
conscience. Inwardly, in the deepest
aspects of the soul, invisible to outer sense experience, the presence
of Christ in the Ethereal (the realm of human thought) is met with a
hunger to know the Good on the part of the I. This moral need for
knowledge of the Good (in order to know what is right to do in the face
of challenges forced upon humanity by Ahriman's intensification of the
heat and pace of social crisis) - this moral need instinctively hungers
for the Eternal, the experience of the Consciousness Soul.
There, inside the soul, this hunger for knowledge of the Good, coming
in the time of the Second Coming, leads to a Second Eucharist - a
communion of the I with the Being of the Good (for details see the next
essay: The
Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul).
What an amazing teacher and teaching is
this Outrageous Genius, we know as Ahriman, forcing us to awake to the
Good by driving into the Center Stage of social existence, in the
principle nation state in the world, obviously powerful impulses of
callous and calculated indifference to human suffering and need.
third, an entry more into the material, in the sense
of ordinary
political and social language
Brother What
Ails Thee ?
In the following discussion it is very
important to keep in mind that we are now mostly using a quite
materialized way of speaking and writing about something whose true
essence remains entirely spiritual in its most
significant meaning.
Such a personality as Ahriman incarnate,
in my view, can be found just here then in the American Life of Rights
(working from there upon the whole world), for after all these
preliminaries we must begin to name him. The question for us, however,
is: Will we recognize this "human" being as a brother?
Karl Christian Rove (birth name), was
born December 25th 1950. Karl's biological father abandoned him
early on, his adoptive father left home when Karl was 18, and it later
became known that this second father was a homosexual. His mother
committed suicide when he was 30. Karl described himself in high
school this way: "I
was the complete nerd. I had the briefcase. I had the pocket protector.
I wore Hush Puppies when they were not cool. I was the thin, scrawny
little guy. I was definitely uncool" [facts
and quote from Wikipedia].
[There will be a few quotes below about
Rove-Ahriman (hundreds could easily be provided). The reader
should realize that Rove has had such a strong influence (which
Outrageous Genius certainly would) that while Google only shows 630,000
entries for him and about 8 million for George W. Bush (and 1.5 million
for Dick Cheney), all that is said about Rove recognizes that his
influence from behind the scenes is the real dominant feature of the
Bush II Administration. He is the riddle and puzzle that many
have commented on seeking to penetrate his real nature and activity in
order to understand the policies of the Bush II White House. His
hand prints are everywhere, and no historical political figure has ever
inspired such interest, both positive and negative.
We could also keep in mind this idea from
Rudolf Steiner. In the lectures published under the title The Fall
of the Spirits of Darkness, he presents the
following for our understanding. Just like what happened after
the mid-point of the various ages of Atlantis, we in this the
Post-Atlantean Epoch are past the mid-point as well. Spiritual
capacities and impulses that are up-building and progressive in the
first half of an Epoch become in the second half forces of
degeneration. Decay sets in and the course the Evolution of
Consciousness takes must be unfolded in the context of this decay.
In addition, with the Battle in Heaven between Michael and the
Dragon, which Michael had won by 1879, the Spirits of Darkness were pushed down into the realm of the Earth.
These spirits have to be recognized as
being everywhere, in particular working with the dead and with the
various occult brotherhoods. So when we recognize in social
phenomena the prevalence of human evil, we have to see that the
tendency for this immorality to dominate social existence cannot be
avoided. In fact, our ability to properly work with the times,
requires we not be asleep and have fantastic visions of unrestrained
potentials for utopias. Our thinking has to root itself in
reality, and social reality cannot in our Age be forced into an
illusion of some kind of universal domain of freedom and happiness.
These facts then all the more call to us, who receive Spiritual
Science, to develop our own soul life so that we will be able to find
the down to earth healing social ideas that can actually be brought
into incarnation.]
Now we must tell a more detailed story of
certain changes in social life that have come at the same time as this
incarnation entered deeper and deeper into a core aspect of the Life of
Rights in America. Let us begin by considering certain changes in
law and other governmental emphasis that have accompanied the 7 plus
years so far of the Bush II administration (at the time of writing
these paragraphs). While doing this we need to keep in mind how crucial
is this moment in the Evolution of Consciousness. A great deal is
being decided by individual human beings just now, and we cannot blind
ourselves by assuming that the struggles for the future of America, and
as a consequence the whole World, are simply passing and insignificant
moments in history. These events are profound in the deepest sense of
that concept.
Not only that, we, living today, are in
the middle of them. It is no accident we too have incarnated in
the Time that Ahriman is to be discovered as our most significant
outer-world teacher. What Ahriman could not do, while excarnate
through the Shadow - the three-fold double-complex, he could now do as
a human being having incarnated just in this time into the heart-center
of human social life: the Life of Rights, and giving birth there not to
heart-warmed thoughts, but rather the most cold and calculated
conceptions possible.
Over the course of activity of this
Administration, several structural changes have occurred, which changes
by the way are not just confined to the time of the Administration, but
were authored further in the past, and then matured and polished off in
the time since the 2000 election, the election, remember, at the cusp
of the New Millennium. Let us list a few of those.
The Executive Branch, mostly through the
exercise of raw power has been able to achieve a certain freedom from
restraint by the other two Branches (the Legislative Branch and the
Judicial Branch). This breaking down of the threefold balance of
the U.S. Constitution gives to the will force, of those addicted to
power, extraordinary latitude in its conduct (this is how we must see
Cheney and Bush, as addicts to the most addictive temptation of all -
earthly power). This executive power has become so freed of any
restraint that it neither must feel (the significance of the
Legislative Branch - the People's House) nor be wise (the import of the
Supreme Court). The American Government, during Rove's strongest
period of influence, had no wise head, nor any open heart. Nor
would it do to see this as a reflection of just the Republican Party.
The Ahrimanic confusion and the influence of the Spirits of
Darkness is everywhere, and we have now mostly raw will forces owning
the Executive Branch of the dominant Nation State on the Earth, which
from there radiates out into the whole world social organism heartless
cold and calculating thought and will.
The Bush II administration's definition
of the meaning of the War on Terror has taken hold of the political
consciousness of both major American political parties. No major
candidate currently running for President wants to appear weak in the
War on Terror (a complete illusion by the way, once critically examined
as is being done out of the social commons by the Wise Earth appearance
of Civil Society).
Thus also has torture become officially
permitted in the conduct of self-interest by the U.S. government (using
the identical language of the Third Reich in its justifications for
torture). Included in this are the powers to remove any claim of
citizenship of a natural or naturalized Citizen. Anyone anywhere
in the world (including Americans in America) can be kidnapped and
taken anywhere anytime to places of prison and torture (extraordinary
rendition). To call these Imperial Powers, akin to that of Rome
at its most decadent, is to severely understate the case, for the
United States has far greater powers than ever Rome could dream of.
There is a quote, falsely attributed to
Alexis de Tocqueville: America is great because she is good, and if America ever
ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
While it turns out the great French thinker never wrote this, the
fact that it is constantly quoted in public life suggests that it
nevertheless has deep meaning for Americans.
Civil liberties, once taken for granted
in the United States have been neatly and nearly castrated. Since
there is nothing to require the government to admit to even possessing
the body of a single human being (habeas corpus exists as a rule, but
is consciously ignored and obstructed by the Bush II administration at
every turn), we have no idea how many have disappeared into the hidden
bowels of this out of control will. This is all the more
problematic if we recognize that to a certain extent America is very
much a cradle for future spiritual development, so that the unopposed
emasculation of major components of the Life of Rights in America is a
significant victory for Ahriman.
The power radiating out from the
imbalance in the State (the out of control Executive Branch), has been
joined by an ahrimanic corporate control of the Media (the heart of the
heart of the social organism). Thus it has come about that the
threefold social organism's inner core (the Life of Rights), itself is
out of balance such that (or so it appears) that the polar opposite to
the State - the People - is completely dominated through so much fear
and hopelessness, that many of the People have come to believe
themselves to be completely powerless.
"He [Rove] could carve up
constituencies with the best of them, and divide the country as easily
as columns on a spreadsheet -- and with no more thought" diarist "Hunter" DailyKos Aug.2007.
Yet, here is where the counter-pole
begins to appear, for recall that Rudolf Steiner spoke in a lecture
collected in The
Challenge of the Times: English speakers are instinctively in the Consciousness
Soul in their Life of Rights. Ahriman's
incarnation arouses the Consciousness Soul to action. Rove, by
pushing forward the callous and indifferent to consequences unconscious
will forces of Cheney and Bush II (and others), stimulates in those who
strive to follow their political conscience the opposite reaction.
This administration has made of the lie
an art never dreamed of even in the time of National Socialism (see
Steiner's The Karma of Untruthfulness).
They have lied so successfully that large portions of the People
of America have bought elements of it for years, and still buy into it
(polls still show that large numbers believe Iraq was connected to
9/11). Granted the culture of the lie is everywhere, from daily
advertising to individual human biographies, nevertheless the callous,
calculated and repeated nature of these lies offered by a United States
government is staggering. The only matter more staggering is how
much they have managed to simultaneously hide from view.
The art of secrecy is equally adept in
this government. No one knows what it is doing, and so clever has
been the manner of this hiding, that it is carefully layered such that
even if you think you have caught them out, they have a backup plan -
lies within lies, as it were. As time has gone on, and various
members of the administration became more publicly vulnerable, they
have easily blocked every effort to have them removed from office
(Rumsfeld and then Gonzales, for example), until it was time to cut
them loose and then install an even better buffer in between public
interest and the truth. For example, nearly every military
general officer who would not spin and lie about Iraq has been
systematically removed until all that is mostly left in positions of
power are career military general officers who are themselves
essentially politicians and sycophants.
The pure outrageous nature of the nerve
of this administration is extraordinary. They lie, and then
they act, and then even when caught out, continue to lie and lie.
Holding powers stolen from the other Branches (and to which these
Branches acquiesce) there is no motive to come clean in any fashion,
for almost no human heart forces are really present in this home in
which Ahriman created for himself and his priests to incarnate.
"That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when
we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that
reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do" Senior white house
official, assumed by everyone to have been Karl Rove, summer 2002. [An
earthly social-political act comparable to materialism - a kind
of political-social Ahrimanic Deception.]
"The great majority of mankind are satisfied with
appearances, as if they were realities"
Machiavelli
At the locus of this center of power of
Earthly streaming forces, he has come to rest, with his aides, in order
to imprint with his nature, the most earthly aspect of the potential
and unfolding threefold social organism: the Life of Rights.
One of Ahriman's qualities is hardening.
He desires that things become fixed, immobile.
This means that one Party in the United
States strives to achieve continuous dominance. Not only was a
world dominating power to radiate from the United States as a center,
but it was to have within itself a loss of what had been an otherwise
self-correcting fluidity - that more than one Party would hold power,
which would mean that no longer could any Ahrimanic excess of the Right
be balanced out through the pendulum swing by any Luciferic excess of
the Left . So it was desired that this swing of the balance be stopped
for a while, especially at a particular Moment in Time; AND, if this
unbalancing gesture was to take into itself an also rigid and arid
religious impulse, then the knowledge of the social effects of Christ's
True Second Coming could be hidden, if not completely blocked for
centuries, in that the otherwise good effects on the social world of
humanity, this Second Golgotha offered, were obscured and interfered
with.
Consider: Already, the Anthroposophical
Movement and Society had been eviscerated from within, and led in its
centers into great confusion (any honest rendering of our history in
the 20th Century shows this - for details see the essays below), so
that basically unopposed and unknown Ahriman could now undertake the
task to boldly assert temporal powers as an obstacle to spiritual
inspiration [for example, the New Freedom Act which enables the
government to test all for mental illness and require medicine to be
given to those who fail this examination]. In addition, granting
political power to an arid and rigid religious cult, calling itself
Christian, could do much to convince the world that Christ and
Christianity had nothing to offer. So drawing this already
decadent religious impulse deeper into politics does a great deal which
is far more than just to secure votes at a crucial moment, for whatever
the outer world press sees of the effects of this genius that radiates
out of the White House, you can bet this outer world press is
completely clueless to what is truly at stake.
The ahrimanic Christianity of the
Religious Right hates all that it judges (all beam and no mote), and
speaks into world culture in such a way that more and more the world is
pushed to hate such Christianity back. What better way to turn
minds away from the true Second Coming, than to raise up a such a false
and foolish alternative, that seemingly* rational people cannot but
think of the idea of Christ and the Second Coming as some kind of
insanity. How do we bring into such a world, a true appreciation
of Christ's Second Coming, and the related Second Eucharist, when
ahrimanic Christianity has gained such temporal power in the Bush II
administration to the dismay of so many intelligent people.
Ahriman is clever beyond our imaginations.
*[See Sam Harris's The End of
Faith; Christopher Hitchens' God is not
Great: how
religion poisons everything; and, Richard
Dawkins' The God Delusion, where what
are called the New Atheists have taken (hopefully briefly) center stage
in the public dialog on religion and Christianity.]
Craig Unger*, In an interview with Amy
Goodman, mid-November 2007: Well, LeHay** is one of the founders of the Council for
National Policy. Now, this is a not-very-well-known group, but it's an
umbrella group that oversees dozens of Christian Right groups, like
Focus on the Family, which is James Dobson's group. The Moral Majority
was part of it, and so on. And
within it was a much smaller group called the Arlington Group, of about
fifty religious leaders. Now, they were in regular contact with Karl
Rove. And what
you have in the Christian Right is as many as 80 million adult
evangelicals. You have about 200,000 pastors, and they operate almost
as precinct captains did in the labor unions for the Democratic Party.
So this is a vast populist movement that operates as part of the
Christian Republican Party, and they have regular contact with the
White House. [emphasis added]
[*author of: The Fall
of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized
the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils
America's Future. **one of the authors
of the Left Behind series of novels on
Armageddon.]
Christianity is not alone in being so
publicly compromised by the materialization of religion.
"The grim truth is that when George W. Bush declared "a
global war on terror", he was really announcing a jihad of his own - a
struggle to convert the whole world to American-style capitalist
democracy....Here lies the peril for the future. For how can "the Axis
of Evil" and "the Great Satan" negotiate a businesslike compromise on
the basis of live-and-let-live?" from the
article: Bush the Jihadist: How the world was plunged into an
apocalyptic war, by Correlli Barnett, Daily Mail, Sept. 2007.
"...these ahrimanic powers are present wherever disharmony
comes about between groups of people..." R.S.
lecture, 2 November 1919
Another matter to recognize is that after
9/11, the ahrimanic forces radiating out of the temporal power center
that is Washington, were able to bring about a Crucifixion of the
Imagination of America as a Beacon of Hope for the poor and
disenfranchised the world over. Previously America (which is at
root itself a Mystery) stood in the imaginations of the world's
downtrodden as the place of dreams, where one could go and find freedom
(spiritual-religious, as well as political and economic). So
Rove-Ahriman not only created and encouraged a debased Christian
Meaning in the World, but also cast down the single most important
aspect of the American Mystery in the present - its meaning as a Beacon
of Hope.
Let us now take a necessary but small
side trip here, and fit in two of Ahriman-Rove's chief allies: George
W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Both are addicted to power, but in two
entirely different ways. At the same time, let us keep in mind
the title to this section: Brother
what ails thee?. These are flawed (as
we are all flawed) human beings, placed by the Lord (Artist) of Karma,
in their biographies into very special places in relationship to all of
us. Like Ahriman-Rove, they participate in the creation of the
heating and speeding up of social chaos - conditions necessary for the
development of the Consciousness Soul through the I's necessary
encounters with real existential moral crises.
Bush appears to be what is called a dry
drunk. That is, while he is not actively drinking or drugging (we
assume) he still displays all the behaviors of a serious alcoholic or
addict: bouts of extreme anger (kept mostly secret from the public, but
well known to West Wings staffers), coupled with a psychological need
to never admit he is wrong - the problem always lies with someone else.
In taking up the outward (fake) posture of recovery, he adopted
the attitude of someone who has been saved by Christ. No doubt
encouraged by Rove (all the way back in Texas), Bush courted the
Religious Right, and here found fuel for his own (hopefully
sub-conscious) megalomania - a religious conviction which included him
as being an active and dominant world player in the End Times fantasy.
So rigid is his faith, as he constantly demonstrates by his
unchanging behaviors, that only this mega-illusion has meaning - the
truth has been banished from his consciousness.
"Mr. Greenspan described his own emotional journey in
dealing with Mr. Bush, from an initial elation about the return of his
old friends from the Ford White House - including Mr. Cheney and Donald
H. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense - to
astonishment and then disappointment at how much they had changed."
New York Times book review describing Alan Greenspan's (former
chairman of the Federal Reserve) book: The Age of
Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
"...much to my disappointment, economic policy making in the Bush
administration remained firmly in the hands of the White House staff.” He was clearly referring to
the political team led by Karl Rove at the White House. Mr. Rove was a
neighbor of Mr. Greenspan in a leafy enclave near the Potomac River,
but the two men almost never had a conversation."
[emphasis added]
"Rove's method is to plot out elaborate strategies well in
advance of the campaign, and stick to them vigilantly. John Deardourff,
Rove's media consultant for races in Texas and Alabama, says, 'This rap
Bush has of never changing his mind and never admitting a
mistake-that's Karl! That's where it comes from.' It is a tribute to
Rove's strategic skill that he is so often right." Joshua Green Atlantic Monthly 2007.
Already long before his incarnation,
Ahriman-Rove had cultivated the illusory religious impulse that has at
least captured the sub-conscious of Bush, probably through the help of
Lucifer's legions, for in its rigid End Times world picture and rigid
and fixed morality, it has hardened all that was once Life in these
aspects of Christianity, and turned that Life into a fixed and vain
system of beliefs in the soul.
The fixed nature comes from Ahriman, and
the vanity (pride of belief in ones moral righteousness) comes from
Lucifer. Both these, however, arise indirectly in the soul
through the three-fold double-complex (see the essay on the Shadow
below).
Then comes Cheney. Already a hard
line cold-warrior, well connected and supported by the elites of
industry and banking throughout his political career (Cheney won his
spurs here, while Bush was born into these circles), Cheney (again no
doubt encouraged by Rove) became Vice President, and having an
intellect of far more depth than Bush's, discovered that the child of
privilege had little interest in actually understanding and wielding
the reins of governmental power (Bush loves to playact as president).
These then fell by default to Cheney, and gave to his addiction
more temporal power than any human being has had in history, and of
such a nature that as a behind the throne power he could do much that
was unseen and thus experience as all the more delightful its private
pleasures (the addictive payoff). Think on it! No one could
really oppose his actions always taken in secret. He could tell
any lie he wanted and change them at will for everyone else was asleep.
Every urge and impulse to dominate his political enemies and
reward his rich friends could be immediately indulged. Nothing
stood in the way of this will to excess, while at his side, and in his
aid was the most clever of minds ever, able with just a word or two to
encourage Cheney's every desire, and at the same time to likewise with
silver tongue encourage the child of privilege to believe he was god's
chosen to stand in the world just in this time. [Recall Tolkien's
character Wormtongue in the Lord
of the Rings!]
So then we have around Rove, two
personalities, the one lost in a luciferic dream of egoistical
historical place, and the other, given the opportunity to wield
enormous earthly temporal powers, becomes instead the creature of those
very powers - possessed by them. Recall from above Greenspan's
dismay to discover the changes in his old friends.
Rove's truest and more profound contributions, however, are of a
whole other kind, even though he played a significant role in the
transformation of a child of privilege, from out of the culture of
Texas oil and wealth, into a public persona that doesn't actually bear
any relationship to the underlying human personality*. See: "Bush's
Brain: How Karl Rove made George W. Bush Presidential" by Wayne H. Slater and James C. Moore.
*[To appreciate this even more, just
consider how frequently it is now observed that Bush seems so often
inappropriately happy as his term of office nears its end (or
culmination?). A President, who honestly bore the necessary
wounds of leading American into such a state as it is today, should be
gray headed, careworn and full of melancholy.]
At the same time, we have to remember the
title to this section: Brother what ails thee?
It is essential (as will be discussed in later essays) to
recognize in such personalities that we are observing wounds of soul. Certainly there can be venality, and even
conscious choosing of evil, but if we were to be able to live through
the details of the biography of such men as these, and see how their
inner life developed over this long period of a lifetime, we would
discover how the soul has been wounded by life experience.
We all bear such wounds. It would
go too far here to go into details, but the question Brother what ails thee? is directed exactly at discovering the mystery of the
wounds that lie behind choices and actions, so as to be able to perhaps
help heal our brothers and sisters in life. With this thought in the background, let us continue our
examination of what has flowed out of the center of the American
government, and into our shared public life.
In order for a single Party to dominate,
certain possibilities inherent in our Time in relationship to
technology have become applied to the political process.
Computers are turned into ballot boxes. The striving for
power, which had taken possession of the Republican Party, found a
crucial inspiration in all that Ahriman had prepared before his
incarnation, and in all that he was about to accomplish during his
incarnation. Win at any cost is the goal, and the corruption of
the ballot box by electronic means provides an easy tool in a war in
which number is to play such an essential role.
Data is accumulated, not just State by
State, or city by city or neighborhood by neighborhood (voting precinct
by voting precinct), and when possible individual by individual.
Profiles are created showing, through the accumulation and use of well
tracked commercial purchases, just what attitudes each individual who
is potentially a voter is likely to possess. The out-of-strict
oversight computer powers, of the United States intelligence community
(and willing corporate allies), is through secret process turned on its
own citizens, and further data accumulated, such that there now is in
place and in the hands of a single party, exactly which voters to
encourage, and which to discourage in order to place in power and keep
in power a single political party as the dominant political force in
America, itself (at a crucial time) the dominant Nation State in the
World.
Nor is this done with any sense of the
individual itself, as an I. It is only their general
characteristics as a set of numbers on a spreadsheet that matter.
One young woman, who had worked with Rove, the human incarnation
of Ahriman, described in a televised interview how remarkable it was to
watch him pick up a newly generated spread sheet from a computer,
glance at it and then immediately begin to issue instructions, down the
well oiled machinery intended to coerce an election effect, from the
inside of the White House out into a neighborhood and then surrounding
an individual home.
In addition was perfected what became
called: the Republican talking points. Spreading
out from the political center of the West Wing of the White House, a
well controlled and perfected set of lies and spin was distributed
throughout Party officials (elected and otherwise) and among the
cooperative media, such as Fox News and the widely listened to
conservative radio talk shows. If one listened across this
spectrum, as well as to the President himself and his chief spokesman
the White House Press Secretary, the same reality was presented.
Remember that Rove's idea of the power of deception is
remarkable. Set the agenda, set the tone of what is to be claimed
to be true. Create our own reality (an earthly political
ahrimanic deception), and never ever give an inch.
Radiating from the imbalanced and
unhealthy will force of the Executive Branch had been created a huge
manipulative mechanism for coercing the vote, precinct by precinct,
drawing certain voters in, keeping certain voters out, and all the
while ignoring places, neighborhoods and communities that could be seen
by this cold calculating genius as having no meaning or worth at all.
Coupled with this was an enormous publicity machine, never seen
before, creating in that Nation State that believed itself most
virtuous to have unlimited free speech, a propaganda mechanism quite
beyond that known even in the time of National Socialism or Communist
Russia.
This lie machine is all the more devious
(and clever) for it was accomplished in what thought of itself as a
non-totalitarian state. In the center of the Life of Rights, this
calculated number driven process came into existence, in which data
streams about voters were turned into numbers on a spreadsheet. and
false ideas about social reality merely items on a sheet of talking
points. What genius created such a work!
"President Bush's powerful adviser is one part
spreadsheet-carrying, vote-counting political wonk, and one part
no-holds-barred, brass-knuckled political operative" Dan Froomkin.
"I'm looking at 68 polls a week. You may be looking at
four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes nationally,
but that do not impact the outcome -" Karl
Rove in a radio interview late October 2006. "You may end up with a
different math, but you're entitled to your math. I'm entitled to the math." same interview. [emphasis added]
In all this, the Legislative Branch was
compliant. Even so far as to pass legislation requiring all
States to issue common-in-nature drivers licenses, that individual
States could then require be presented in order to vote. This
process of making voting more and more difficult was another part of
the grand scheme, which then makes it possible to eliminate those most
inclined to vote for the Party that is not to dominate - namely the
Party whose fundamental traditions connected it to the poor and
disenfranchised. Remember, Ahriman incarnated with a community of
like-minded, already disposed through all his preparations to their own
weakness and self-interested heartless cold calculating judgments.
All he had to do was enter into the center of these streams of
downward radiating powers, take hold of the number relations, and
polish off the machinery that was to permit a solidified rule from the
top down, during one of the most significant moments of emergence of
the Consciousness Soul (the Dawn of the Third Millennium), with its
natural impulse to bring in social reform out of the social commons -
out of the social below.
Now in this work, he was not unopposed.
As a human being, his will was bound by many earthly laws.
He could not force those around him serve his will. He
could only, with extreme cleverness, encourage their weaknesses and
inclinations, thus the personality changes that can be observed in
those he influenced while in (and on his way to) this center of
temporal power (from which he himself recently resigned, which is, of
course, just an appearance - another kind of clever lie, his influence
is undiminished).
At that same time as all this ahrimanic
success, we need to come to understand that his very genius in its
one-sided nature was also a blindness. This blindness came to the
fore in the 2006 general election in America. Rove fully expected
to win, his spreadsheets told him so. However, human beings are
in fact not numbers, and not really predictable at that level.
Rove's numbers told him only of general characteristics, which
were all based on specific assumptions. When many of these people
walked into the polling booth, something happened (and will continue to
happen) which can't be reduced to number. People, when they vote,
are faced with what to them is essentially a moral choice (English speakers are
instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of Rights).
This righteous impulse, invisible
to number driven perception, expressed itself
strongly in the 2006 election, reacting in large part to all that was
being experienced as the callous indifference radiating from the White
House, and as political impotence, corruption and incompetence in the
Legislative Branch. The Democrats won the House with far more
seats than expected by any pollster (whose immature science suffers the
same perceptual limits as Ahriman), and further won the Senate as well,
something not expected by either Party. Since this victory gave
the chairmanship of the various House and Senate committees to the
Democrats, a very large shift in power occurred in the Life of Rights
in the United States of America (in the People's House especially, with
it role as regards "feeling"). While such a shift of power
is not able to manifest in a rapid fashion (in spite of the hopes of
the Left), this expectable time-delay has enabled the White House to
continue to act out its disdain for the People, treating them as
number-cyphers instead of as real human beings.
"Rovism is not simply a function of Rove the political
conniver sitting in the counsels of power and making decisions, though
he does. No recent presidency has put policy in the service of politics
as has Bush's. Because tactics can change institutions, Rovism is much
more. It is a philosophy and practice of governing that pervades the
administration and even extends to the Republican-controlled Congress.
As Robert Berdahl, chancellor of UC Berkeley, has said of Bush's
foreign policy, a subset of Rovism, it constitutes a fundamental change
in 'the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this
country.'"Neal Gabler The Los Angeles Times
Sunday 24 October 2004.
"The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and
extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack." Rove campaign memo from the early years in Texas.
"Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and
probably of any generation. He not only is a breathtakingly smart
strategist but also a clever tactician. He knows history, understands
the moods of the public, and is a visionary on matters of public
policy. But he is not a magician." Fred
Barnes, conservative commentator, editor The Weekly Standard.
"Dubbed the “architect” and “Bush's brain”, Rove plotted
the rise of George W Bush and departed the White House after the
disastrous 2006 mid-term elections. Successful punditry is a
combination of real political experience, intellectual nimbleness, a
provocative turn of phrase and a coherent point of view. Rove, a Fox
News commentator and contributor to Newsweek and the Wall Street
Journal, has all these qualities.
"Democrats may protest that they would rather see him in
jail than on their television screens but they can't help noting what
he says. Whether outlining what the Democrats should do or outlining
John McCain's rocky path to victory (and McCain has followed his advice
almost to the letter), Rove's take is important and often surprising.
Expect the name Rove to come up frequently on the campaign trail - and
in coverage of it." Comments in the
British newspaper The Telegraph, who ranked Rove (since leaving the
White House) as
the number one (of the top 50) pundits in U.S. Politics, Friday, May 2nd, 2008.
Ahriman-Rove's genius is seen by many,
and his incarnate influence is far from over. He has left the
realm of the State now, and is taking up his mature biographical
position in the real heart of the Life of Rights: Media. From
here he can continue his influence, for his very success is attractive.
Because of the influence of the ahrimanic shadow on people, many
will succumb, for that same callous and calculated indifference toward
which they are inwardly tempted, will now reside in those aspects of
Media open to making such views widely known and justified.
It is not an accident that Rove now works for two major Rupert Murdoch Media companies, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Many will read him, and his clever genius will guide and teach, all who will listen, into a life without any moral center at all - only the cold calculus of intellect, and its anti-human world views and impulses of will.
Ahriman-Rove has now risen to the
celebrity heights of the social world as a Media personality, respected
and trusted by many, for he reflects back to them all the
justifications they need for their own ahrimanic tendencies.
A quite neat fit, if you think about it. The Shadow
of Ahriman within, and the Stage setting influenced by Ahriman without.
Even so, the individual I in the Age of the Consciousness Soul would
chart its own course. His very presence arouses something in the
I that needs just that presence as a goad to its own awaking.
*
finally, a
look at the challenges to the role of the Society and Movement as a
consequence of recognizing Ahriman's present day incarnation
Waking the American Anthroposophical Society and Movement
for their
true tasks in the 21st Century
The above then is what happened on the
macro scale of modern human history. What then on a micro scale
has happen in the internal makeup of the Anthroposophical Society
and Movement? Were we somehow free of this influence? Did
Ahriman incarnate and just ignore us in the process? I think not,
and in the next essays it will be unfolded just what needs to happen
within our circles in order for us to be able to speak first honestly
among ourselves, before we can earn the moral authority to truly bring
Anthroposophy further into world incarnation. The greatest
potential for leading the instinctive Consciousness Soul into full
awakening lies in Anthroposophy, and by implication in the Society and
Movement. But these problems are not simple and many of the
essays below are required of anyone wanting to really learn what is
needed to be learned in order to meet the Challenge of Ahriman's
Incarnation on the Cusp of the New Millennium.
We have one last task,however, which is
most essential. Having discovered Ahriman's incarnation, how are
we to treat the living man, now and into the future? Ahriman-Rove
has a family - a wife and a son: should they think of him as evil?
Of course not, he is a genius, he is a cosmic power incarnate,
who will at the final judgment weep at the feet of the Mother and beg
forgiveness for all that he had, out of his given nature, the
responsibility to author.
Those seduced by Ahriman-Rove are to be
pitied. Our problem then is not to assume evil and seek to rub it
out, but to see clearly the
social processes so that we, who would do the
good, can discover how our work can be applied in the right places.
Many already are working in such ways, albeit instinctively, and
others will want to hate Rove, Cheney, Bush and their friends.
Should we follow such an example, or create another? How do
we redeem what Ahriman-Rove has done and properly honor it?
We are also frustrated by the scope of
the debacle - Ahriman-Rove has spread chaos in the world in a huge way,
and this is not yet finished, for much worse may yet be done by those
who have succumbed to his influence. This Ahrimanic Impulse,
living throughout the social world of humanity, has pushed that world
toward its breaking and fracture points in a quite precise fashion
through the influence of Ahriman-Rove within the excesses of the Bush
II administration. The whole social order of Western Humanity is
breaking down. Wherever we look, whether at global warming, the
crisis in the food supply, the corporate theft of the water supply, the
spreading of technological means of biological destruction, the
machinations of those in the banking and finance industries and the
interference with the genetic code itself, - all stands on the brink of
even further decay, while the political life by its everywhere pursuit
of dominance, engages all structure in war, at
a time when in order to survive humanity needs instead of war to
develop the greatest skills at cooperation.
One of the worst effects, as previously
noted, is the crucifixion of American Dream. All over the world,
that which had once been a Beacon of Hope to many people living amidst
poverty and despair, has now been tarnished, perhaps beyond repair.
Is this not then the next goal for America, to discover how to
restore what has been defiled? Who will lead here? Who will
understand this need for the imagination of the downtrodden the world
over to have once more a Beacon of Hope? Can there be a
resurrection of what was crucified? What kind of moral forces
could bring this about?
We are also right to be concerned whether
the political machine that has been created will live on into the future
inside the core of the America Government. Already, many wonder
whether the Democrats will roll back some of what has been done, should
they win the White House in 2008. A lot of people believe many of
the worst of the changes introduced by Rove and friends will be
permanent.
All kinds of debris live as the
after-effects of Ahriman-Rove's incarnation. The situation and
consequences will not go away, but reverberate on into the future, and
we have to not just come awake, but must learn how to stay awake.
Into the world the power, the tone, the
sound of number, and the searing light of geometry incarnated, with its
naturally given mission to draw downward the heart of the developing
social organism into rigid form and lifeless brilliance - what Rove
called "the math". Here too was "mission accomplished", because while the Anthroposophical Movement and
Society lost themselves in a massive forgetting of the true
significance of Steiner's scientific introspection (The
Philosophy of Freedom, and A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception), and in ignoring the beauty and potential for community
life given by Steiner in Awakening
to Community as the Reverse
Cultus, we also took the living Michaelic
Cosmic Intelligence given to us by Steiner through Anthroposophy and
converted it to dead intellectualized content, without any life at all:
the Steinerism displayed constantly in the excesses of Steiner-said.
There are no redeeming powers in
Steinerism, such that without The
Philosophy of Freedom (Spiritual Activity)
and the Reverse Cultus, with which to
meet the deeper spiritual after-effects of Ahriman's incarnation, the
Movement and Society are impotent. At the same time, American
Anthroposophy (which this book seeks to illuminate) offers just those
needed antidotes and inspiration for all of Anthroposophy world-wide.
The American Soul must awake now, and the best leaders for this
will be those American Anthroposophists who have the will and the
courage to find the truth of who they are, as a separate but equal soul
force in the threefold world.
For example, Ahriman accomplished a great
deal during the weaknesses of the 20th Century into which the Society
and Movement fell, such that all kinds of wisdom was lost and buried in
Ahriman's "preserving
jars", locked up either in books stashed in
libraries, and in books allowed to go out of print.
Hundreds of significant works, by early students of
Steiner, have been allowed to go out of print, while the
anthroposophical publishing houses reprinted again and again Steiner's
lectures, erroneously leaving aside all the work done by others during
the 20th Century.
Let me take up just one other theme left
in the dust heap of the 20th Century, along side The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and the Reverse
Cultus: namely Projective Geometry.
Nothing else has quite the ability to give to the Life of the
Mind the forces necessary with which to meet Ahriman's one-sided:
"...power, the tone, the sound of number, and the searing light of
geometry incarnated...".
Let us begin with an obscure out of print
essay by George Adams Kaufman: Space and
the Light of Creation: a new essay in cosmic theory. Just in the Chapter headings of this essay we can
feel/see the redemptive force of the new thinking as it penetrates the
very realm of Ahriman and lifts it free through the art of thought of
the tendency to an excess of gravitas: Chapter I: Radiation of Space; Chapter II: Music of Number; and, Chapter
III: Burden of
Earth and Sacrifice of Warmth.
One of the tasks of American
Anthroposophy will be to rediscover and ingest the art of others
besides Steiner, which has been given to us by European
anthroposophical endeavors during the 20th Century. This is
something far beyond what Steiner had provided, but which he certainly
inspired. In the essay far below: a letter to a young
anthroposophist, you will find details.
Olive Whicher's book: Projective
Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space and Time,
should never be out of print, and ought to be on the same shelf with
every anthroposophist's copy of The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Awakening
to Community. By the way, little or no
abstract thought is called for in this way of study - as all that is
essential is taught through drawing.
The significance of Projective Geometry
can be found here, quoted by Olive Whicher in her introduction to
Adam's remarkable Physical
and Ethereal Spaces: "Confirmed by Rudolf Steiner
in the knowledge that the quality of thought prevailing in the new
geometry is in reality indispensable both to the scientist in his
quest of world-reality and
to the individual on a path of spiritual development..."
[emphasis added].
The living (heart) thinking, to which
many anthroposophists today aspire (but believe comes far easier than
it actually does), needs to remain scientific and picture-like in all
its qualities. Nothing aids this need better than the study
through drawing of Projective Geometry, which teaches the I how to move
and weave living pictorial thought, through and from one metamorphosis
to the next, all the while never losing the exact and precise quality
of scientific thinking.
To truly meet and contain Ahriman-Rove,
we also need a living spiritual social science, whose scientific
qualities can only be found through pictorial thought trained in the
disciplines of Projective Geometry and Goetheanism (A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception). We meet his powers, with those of our own.
Then out of this soul training, the I can hear the World Song in
which is contained the logos speaking of the Christ
into the social world of humanity (as the Lord - the Artist - of
Karma). Just as Goethe learned to listen to the speech of Nature,
we must now learn to listen to the speech of the social world, and then
out of our own forces of art and story telling, render this logos speaking into pictures we share with each other.
Let me end by bringing forward one last
matter, which in its details can be found below in the discussion of
the true soul roots of the Mystery of America. This will be there
developed much more fully - here I only want to hint at its dimensions.
The roots of the American Soul, by the
way, are not found in Europe, but in America's Aboriginal Peoples.
The soul is determined by two main influences of which the most
earthly is the local geography, while the most heavenly is the
incarnating spirit. Spirit and place interact, and the soul is
born.
Among the various Nations of Indians,
there is one who has a very special relationship to the whole: the
Hopi. All the Elders of the other Nations recognize this.
It is from a Hopi that we received the idea in the 1990's: we are the people we have
been waiting for.
The Hopi Prophecy anticipates the arrival
from the East (from the rising Sun), of the True White Brother. This influence is to come at a time
when the Nations of Indians will be in dire need, for world conditions
will have brought about their near destruction. Only one or two
individuals may still be alive that are true to their deepest
teachings. In the most crucial words of the Prophecy we find this
statement: "This
third event will depend upon the Red Symbol, which will take command,
setting the four forces of nature (Meha) in motion for the benefit of
the Sun."
You can find details below, but let me
just render my best interpretation of this phrase in the language with
which anthroposophists are familiar (it will be well worth repeating in
greater depth later).
At the time of great crisis, the World
will be three times rocked into War. It is the last, the third
event, which is the most crucial. The outcome of this third
event (Ahriman's Incarnation) will depend upon the Red Symbol, or the People of the Rose-Cross. These People of
the Rose-Cross, the True White Brother (true in the
sense of also being awake to the living Being of the Earth Mother and
the Father in the Sky, as once were all Aboriginal Peoples), will then take command, setting the
four forces of nature in motion. These
are the forces of the Four Directions (honored in the Pipe Ceremony of
the Lakota Sioux), or the Cosmic Ethereal Forces (and their elemental
servant beings in Nature), which even Steiner recognized when he laid
the Foundation Stone for the original Goetheanum in the Earth, and then
later the Foundation Stone Meditation in the hearts of those who
attended the Christmas Conference.
All this for the benefit of the Sun. To understand this all we need to remember is
that the Hopi Prophecy originated in a People who remembered Atlantis
(see below). At the time of Atlantis, where was Christ? He
was in the Cosmic Sun Sphere! What then does all this come
to mean, especially given that the Prophecy also recognizes that this
needed work of the True White Brother can fail to
manifest?
The outcome of the Third Event - the third time the World is rocked into War (Ahriman's Incarnation) depends upon the People of the Rose-Cross bringing forward a scientifically based knowledge of the Ethereal Cosmic Forces, not just in the living aspects of the sense world, but in the life of thought itself. Moreover, all this in service to the Christ, by announcing His True Second Coming in the Ethereal, with all its majesty (a Second Crucifixion, a Second Resurrection, and a Second Eucharist).
Are anthroposophists up to such a task?
Apparently that remains to be seen.
Orientation
The dominant characteristic of this time, inwardly is
the True Second Coming of Christ
"...one can
say that we in Europe develop Anthroposophy in a spiritual way; the
American develops it in a natural way..." R.S. lecture to the Workman at the Goetheanum, March 3,
1923 GA-349
[For the neophyte: Ahriman's incarnation
as Karl Rove in the social-political world, really only effected the
Stage Setting, which serves as a background to our individual
biographies. Granted this Stage Setting is far more realistic
than the cardboard and paint of a theater, nevertheless the
relationship, between our individual lives and the historical backdrop
in which those lives unfold, is captured quite neatly by the Bard's
metaphor of Stage Setting and Actors in a Role. Ahriman is a
significant ruler of the characteristics of the Stage Setting, but as
regards the soul and spiritual element of the human being (our inner
world and life), Ahriman, through his influence via our Shadow (the
double-complex), is but a small though significant part, while we
ourselves can be the Star.
Ahriman is also not the Author of the
Play, Christ is - Christ as Lord (Artist) of Karma, and we as free
choice makers. Just as the East sometimes talks of there
being something that might be called (in the human being) a Buddha
Nature, so we in the West can speak of a similar characteristic of
being human - the Christ Impulse. Out of the Buddha Nature
of the human being comes Compassion, and out of the
Christ Impulse of the human being comes Love.
So the two combine: Christ Himself as Lord (Artist) of Karma, who
works with our freedom, so that we can out of that freedom ourselves
author human love in the form of the Christ Impulse.
In this realm (the inwardness) Christ can
have far more influence if we know how to choose to make that possible.
The inwardness belongs to our will (we know this instinctively),
but for the individual I to become the proper steward of all the
potential capacities hidden in this inwardness does require that we
wake up there and begin to be active. In this next essay I lay
out just how Christ has made himself available to us directly when we
strive to be moral - that is when we seek to know and do the Good (or
as Rudolf Steiner would say: become knowing
doers).
As such the essential lesson from the
story of Ahriman's incarnation can be seen in that his activities push
many people in the direction of such soul pain that they are confronted
by a choice as to whether to remain asleep or actually wake up to the
conditions of inflamed social chaos and insane speed of life.
Modern existence, for all its seeming unnecessary difficulties is
actually a blessing. Just as physical illness is a transformative
blessing, so are today's illnesses in the social existence of humanity.
Of crucial importance is to keep in mind
what was mentioned above, in that religious fundamentalism
(Christianity forced into arid and dead doctrines and dogmas, by the
influence of the ahrimanic double) acted in the world in recent years
in such a way that made a mockery of the True Second Coming.
Nothing Ahriman has accomplished is a potent as this
misdirection, which has made people shy of the promise Christ made to
come again. This essentially fake Christianity is simply a modern
version of what a similar impulse among the Hebrew people accomplished
at the time of the Incarnation - that is: People in that time were lead
away from the truth by those who sought to maintain their own power and
stature as religious leaders, rather than understand that Love begins
with Service to the Thou (washing the feet), and then leads ultimately
through trials to Love as a total Sacrifice of self for other.
We live in a time in which a similar
gesture permeates the Christian world. Religious leaders
tend to prefer themselves over others, and being in more in love with
their own thoughts of what is the truth, they keep their flocks (and
those who hunger for spiritual enlightenment) from knowledge of the
True Second Coming. In the essay below (and those that
immediately follow) I offer to the reader precise instructions as to
how to experience the True Second Coming, first as a Sacrament in the
Soul - a Second Eucharist in the Ethereal - in the world of thought,
that arises when we authentically seek to know the Good, or what I also
call: discovering the experience of Love Engendered
Free Moral Grace as that arises out of the spiritual activity of the
own I.]
This next
essay was abstracted from my book, the Way of
the Fool, in
order to submit it to the Newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society in
America in the winter-spring of 2006, where, as is typical of my
offerings there, it was ignored. For this book it has been
carefully rewritten, with entirely new material added in certain
places. By the way, the Way of
the Fool is, at
its core, the beginning of a courtship between that reality referred to
by the terms esoteric and exoteric Christianity - between Gnosis and
Faith (Kings and Shepherds), and this essay is the final
thought-picture in the main body of that book.
The Meaning of Earth Existence
in the Age of the Consciousness Soul
*[John 16: 12-15 "I have much more to say to
you, but you can't bear it just yet. But when the other comes,
the breath of truth, he will guide you in the ways of all truth,
because he will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears and
announce to you what's coming. He will glorify me, because he
will take of what is mine and announce it to you. Everything the
Father has is mine: that's why I said he will take of what is mine and
announce it to you."]
*
from the
book: the Way of the Fool:
There yet remains a small effort to make
a synthesis this work - to make a whole out of seemingly disparate
parts. I will try to be brief.
A principle aspect of the great Mystery
of our Time is the Mystery of Evil, both outwardly in the structural
backdrop to the shared social world of humanity, and inwardly in the
depths of our own souls. I have tried above to point out how it
is that the essential matter is not the outer social world, but the
inner soul world, and the trials and education of the i-AM,
in the biography. The context, which we need to call the maya
of history and current events, and which is receptively
held everywhere from below by the Dark
Mystery of the Divine Mother, all passes away, and only what is
Eternal, that is what becomes an aspect of the developing i-AM,
continues; and, this inner realm (the whole Inwardness of the Creation,
which includes human souls and spirits) only exists because of the Heavenly Mystery of the penetrating
thoughts of the Father, while the whole (the
outer social maya and the eternal inner mind) is created, loved, overseen and
mediated (wherever two are more are
gathered...), in all its Grace filled and
Artistic interrelationships, by the Earthly [new Sun] Mystery of the sacrifices of the Son.
We (humanity) now begin to move out of
our spiritual childhood, and in making our way through the Rite of
Passage that is Life as it leads us toward our spiritual maturity we
need to take hold of the complex of the doubles and the karma of
wounds, as these thrive within our souls, and which encourage human
evil through temptation and inner prosecution. Even so, this task
of meeting the Mystery of Evil within the soul is not as heavy as we
think, for through the Shepherd's Tale [Charles
Sheldon], the
King's Tale [Rudolf Steiner], the Healers' Tale [the community-created Twelve-Steps] and the Sermon on the Mount, we have all the practical instructions that we need.
In seeking to understand in ourselves
these three: moral
grace, freedom and love [each of these is
elaborated in great detail in the book], we set before ourselves what
is required to be learned in this Age and it is with these three
naturally unfolding capacities that we are Graced and strengthened so
as to be able to meet with courage the Mystery of Evil. If we do
dare this path, and seek for the deepest instruction in Christ's Sermon
on the Mount, then will come to us a change in the nature of our
biography, such that it more and more takes on the pattern, described
in the John Gospel, as the Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ (the washing of the feet; the
scourging; the crowning with thorns; the carrying of the cross; the
crucifixion; the entombment and the resurrection) (for a careful exposition of these Seven Stages, see
Valentin Tomberg's [anthroposophical] book: Inner
Development).
Whereas Christ lived this in an
apparently mostly physical way, those, who truly follow In His
Steps [the name of Sheldon's book,
as well as a critical phrase** in Ben-Aharon's The
Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century - a profound Imagination of
the True Second Coming], will in the main
feel these trials in their souls, as aspects of the joy and suffering
in the human biography.
**["Now when they identified
themselves with the situation of earthly humanity, the souls who
remained true to [Archangel] Michael prefigured, in their
planetary Earthly-Sun life, the great Sacrifice of Christ. They
walked again in His
steps [emphasis added] as they did in former
earthly lives, only now the order of following was reversed. They
went before Him, showing Him the way, acting out of free and
self-conscious human decision, and He followed in
their steps [emphasis added] only after they fully united themselves with the divided
karma of Earth and humanity. Only then could He offer His
sacrifice as the answer to the new, future question of human existence:
the question concerning the mission and fate of evil." Jessiah Ben-Aharon, The
Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century.]
These trials may seem difficult, but the
truth is they are merely human. It was Christ becoming human that
went to the Cross, for how could He place an example before us we could
not do out of our own humanity (just as Sheldon wrote in In His
Steps). [something written by a Shepherd (a
pastor) in America, at the same time Steiner (a King) was writing his The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom)]
It is the human in Christ that asks in the Garden of Gethsemane
that the cup be taken from him, but if not, He accepts the Father's
will. While later it is the even deeper human in Christ that says on
the Cross: "My
God, my God, why did you abandon me?".
Who among us, in the trials and sufferings of life, has not
uttered these same thoughts? [That Steiner teaches an esoteric meaning
for the end of life statements of Christ, in no way contradicts their
exoteric meanings, which are also true.]
It is here that Christ's teachings
strongly diverge from the Wisdom of the Buddha, for the Buddha would
have had us overcome suffering by learning not to know it (one version
of the third Noble Truth of the Buddha reads as follows: " ...concerning the Cessation
of Suffering; verily,it is passionless, cessation without remainder of
this very craving; the laying aside of, the giving up, the being free
from, the harboring no longer of, this craving.",
whereas Christ asks us to embrace our human pain so that we can pass
through the Narrow Gate of suffering to then know our deepest self, the
true i-AM, and then through this burning trial of knowledge of the
true-self, ultimately come to Him. If we would follow In His
Steps then we too must take on ourselves the
errors (sins)*** of the world, and the tasks of forgiveness and love,
for every love
engendered free act of moral grace takes up a
small part of Christ's suffering, so that we too participate in the
deepest creative acts of the Seventh Day of Creation - the transformation of evil
into love. [This is for
anthroposophists the teaching attributed to Mani, but the reason such a
personality even knows this is because the transformation of evil
into love is modeled for us in the deepest
felt actions of the Divine Mother and the Son. When we know
intimately these actions of the Divine Mystery, we know the true
spiritual meaning of the Mystery of Evil, and that this Mystery is
Itself the real source of the earthly doctrine connected to it that is
sometimes called Manichaeism.]
***[The word sin does not appear in the
original Greek, from which the Gospels were translated into the other
languages. The Greek word hamartia, misused to indicate sin, actually means "missing the mark" (it is a term from archery). See in this
regard the Unvarnished
Gospels by Andy Gaus.]
Is this foolish? Of course, but we
need not fear this Way of the Fool, for our Faith
in Christ's Promises will always be fulfilled, as we ourselves can
learn to become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Yes,
this Way is full of trials, but whoever has lived life, and reflected
upon their experience, knows that in the meeting of our biography's
trials with courage we discover what it truly means to be human: to struggle, to fall, to get
up and to learn - and, through this process, gently and humbly, begin
to take up along side and with Him, Christ's kind and light, Yoke of
Love.
Having said all this, it becomes
necessary to make one last picture for the reader, for clearly, in that
we read the news and hear of the horrors of man's continuing inhumanity
to man, we ourselves face a terrible trial. How are we to
understand a world seemingly so filled with Evil?
Picture, for a moment, the surface of the
Earth. Below dense matter and fiery substance, while above,
airless space. Humanity lives out its Earth Existence only in
this narrow spherical band of Life, whose diameter is just under 8,000
miles (and whose height is just three to four miles, because above
15,000 feet above sea level, the atmosphere starts to not contain
enough oxygen to support our breathing). The total surface area
of the Earth is 196 million square miles, and the habitable land area
43 million square miles Six billion plus human beings must
find all that they physically need, which when we consider actual
available arable land (land that could be cultivated for food, and
other necessary resources), means that each individual only has a
square 161 feet on a side from which to grow what they need. This
then is the
physical spacial aspect
of the social organism of the whole world.
Yet, we know that this spherical space is
itself often unwisely distributed, for human social arrangements,
whether rooted in dominance and selfishness (dominion over) or generosity and sharing (communion with), these social arrangements seem to determine this
social order. This stream of moral gestures (choices), of good
and/or of evil, moves out of and through human beings, organizing the
physical one.
As to this moral aspect
of the social organism of the whole world, it has reached in this Time a kind of climax of development,
and it will be important to appreciate the true nature of the logos order in which Christ has set modern human existence, through
His creative powers as the Artist (Lord) of Karma (the precise and love
based placement of individual biographies in relationship to each
other). Here is something Natural Science cannot do, for
the meaning of
existence is beyond the weaknesses of their
yet fanciful and spirit-empty images. This will also help us to
understand why so many (falsely, but with some degree of reason)
believe we live in the End Times.
In the Twentieth Century the world was
woven together into a single social organism, not just via the
globalization of economic matters, or the personal interconnections
offered by the Internet, but most centrally by the Media. At the beginning of the 20th Century, few knew
what went on elsewhere the world, in any detail or with any immediacy.
At the end of the 20th Century, at the same time that the
returned Kings' were unfolding the New Revelations of Christ [the
story of the 20th Century involves a return of the meaning-essence of
the Three Kings of the Gospels - that is a return of the knowledge of
Gnosis, hungering to be woven again into a single whole with true Faith
- an event which clearly had to accompany the True Second Coming], the
world itself was woven into a whole in the sense that no macro social
event was not to be almost immediately known everywhere the same day
(if not the same hour) that it happened.
We live in a time when has arisen a
Culture of Media - a kind of knowledge commons, in which vast resources
are used to create for us pictures of the meaning of the world and of
events. The more developed the country, the greater our daily
experience can be saturated with the messages coming from this Culture
of Media.
Moreover, great effort and expense is
gone into by those who would force us to believe what they want us to
believe. Between advertising, political propaganda, outright
lies, weak or lame reporting, and other similar failures to reach the
truth, this saturation of the soul by the Culture of Media would seem
to fail to offer us any service at all. What is not appreciated is that
the Christ is far wiser than even the deepest believers imagine.
Every evil is eventually turned to good, and next we will explore
the prime example for our time.
Recall what has been pointed out many
times now, that the
individual biography is the central reality of life on the Earth. What happens inside us as we experience life is
much more important and enduring than the outer events which surround
us. That Stage Setting (all the world's a stage....) is
but epiphenomena to the reality of the life of the soul. To help
us appreciate this then, let us explore these matters from the point of
view of the individual biography.
In this time, there are over six billion
plus of these biographies woven into the tapestry of the social
organism of the whole world. Six billion lives held delicately
and exactly within the Love and Divine Justice of the Mystery.
Within these biographies, all the individual i-AMs
experience that precise and personal instruction that hopes to lead
them to the realization of their own divinity and immortality of
spirit. [The epoch (rite of passage) of the Consciousness Soul is 2100
years long, going from the time of the beginning of the on-looker
separation (and the creation of Natural Philosophy - Science) in the
1400's, until the years around 3500 AD.]
To understand this we need to think it
from the inside out, and not from the outside in. The Culture of
Media only provides context, never essence. True, life is hard,
even harsh, even terrible. The naive consciousness wants to turn
away from this suffering, and cannot understand how God (the Divine
Mystery) could allow such things as torture, child abuse and the
genocidal acts which are dumbed down by the terms: ethnic cleansing.
The reality is that what the Divine
Mystery does is to allow for freedom. This most precious gift is
essential to the immortal spirit during its Rites of Passage we are
calling: Earth Existence. Moreover, the Mystery also makes
certain there is a true Justice through the post-death passages of
kamaloka and lower and higher devachan, in a manner no human social
structure can provide. Christ has told us this in the Sermon on
the Mount: "to what sentence you sentence others, you will be
sentenced". All this should be kept in mind as we proceed.
As a single ego, I wake in the morning.
From the night I bring the remainder of yesterday, perhaps worked
over. Surrounding me, as I live the day, are the lives of those
with whom I have a karma of wounds - with whom I have a debt of meaning
to creatively work over. This we carry together, each bearing a
part, each bearing their own wounds. These are wounds from
the past, from the present and from the future.
To observe the world of today, as we walk
the walk of our lives, is to observe trials of fire and suffering -
rites of wounding and being wounded. But not just this, for also there
is healing. Where we let love thrive, wounds become healed.
Thus flow all our days, often too fast to
even notice the beauty and wonder of the sea of personal relationships
and shared trials. Yes, there is misfortune, and evil deeds.
But do we really imagine Christ and the Divine Mother lets this
evil happen without recourse or justice? We may not know this
directly through Gnosis, but we also can have Faith.
Gnosis without Faith
is empty of Life; and, Faith without Gnosis is empty of the Truth. Only when we join
them together, do we get: the Way (the Mystery of living the Good), the Truth (the Mystery of knowing the Good) and the Life (the Mystery of union with the Good).
This then is the wonder of the outer and
inner biography, for often the wounds are not visible. Yes,
sometimes the wounds are visible to our eye or ear for we see people
too fat, too thin, too lamed in body, too poor, too physically or
mentally deficient. Often, however, so many of us suffer in silence that we really do not know the nature and personal
meaning of their wounds - only our own are visible to the eye of our
heart, unless we first learn to exercise and unfold certain powers of
soul and spirit.
Amidst all this visible and silent
suffering, we find ourselves woven into the Culture of Media.
Images and sounds flow around us, pictures of a world on the
verge of chaos and madness. Yes, we have the intimacy of our
personal biography, but through the Culture of Media we are drawn into
the painted backdrop of the whole world - a backdrop we all share.
War in Iraq. Global warming. Governments out of
control. Pandemics waiting in the wings. Local economic
recession, and even world-wide depression.
What lives in this painted backdrop - in
this Stage Setting - in the wise relationship of the Culture of Media
to the unfolding of our personal biographies?
The answer is this: the mirror of our own inner darkness
and light...
Inside us the double-complex - our
feelings of judgment, our temptations, our addictions and our sense of
failure. Inside us the darkness that belongs personally to us, and
outside us, carried to us by the Culture of Media, the mirror of that
darkness. But also inside us the Good that we would author.
Think on it. Do we not experience
the images and sounds brought to us by the Culture of Media as
something that is filled with what we like and we dislike? We
live our biographies and the Culture of Media confounds our souls with
pictures of dark and light to which we all respond individually.
The great masses of humanity do not make the News. The
great masses of humanity experience the News.
What is News? News is exactly what
the reporters and television personalities call it: stories. The Culture of Media provides us stories (tales)
of the world, which are often presented as if these stories are true,
something most of us have come to know they are not. News stories
reflect all kinds of bias, and in some cases the bias is deliberate.
Moreover, news stories reflect conditions of commerce living in
the agency reporting them.
For example, it is well understood that
in the last third of the 20th Century in American television the news
divisions of the major networks disappeared, and the entertainment
divisions took over the responsibility for the news. The
opportunity to inform and educate the receivers of news stories became
secondary to the need to keep them interested so as to be able to sell
commercial time and make a profit. In addition, the stories are
mostly about dire and tragic events, and little is investigated or
reported that is about the positive and the creative.
We are right then to wonder sometimes
about the News, about its harsh nature and artless excessive attention
to the dark deeds of many. Humanity in general bears within it
the beam that is not seen, while the mote
is exaggerated. But the world itself is not this beam, is not
this darkness. The greater part of darkness is inside us - in our
own souls, and from there projected onto the world. The Culture
of Media exaggerates this darkness further, at the same time it gives
us much that also arouses our own unredeemed antipathies and sympathies.
Once more for emphasis...
The world in its reality is not this
Media generated excess of darkness (so out of balance with the light
that is also everywhere present), which we all project from within the soul - the beam. Yet, in
the Culture of Media this whole processes of dark projection is
exaggerated so that the mirroring nature of the social
world itself begins to bother us. This logos order of the social world is complex and rich, and worth a
deep study.
Pictures of a distorted and untrue
meaning of the world abound, and while we share these pictures, we make
personal and individual our reactions. Just as the intimate
events of our biographies have a personal meaning, so does the shared
stage setting have a personal meaning. In a more general sense,
for example, many Christians today are confronted, via the Culture of
Media, with pictures of individuals whose actions as self-proclaimed
Christians either inspire us to imitation or cause us to turn away in
shame. The same is true in Islam. The terrorist who frightens us
in the West, also causes many ordinary Muslims to turn away in horror.
Everywhere fundamentalism rises, to continue the example, the
great mass of humanity, that are not so tied to such arid rigidity,
shrink away in antipathy. Do we not assert quietly, inwardly to
ourselves: this
is not me, I am not that - I will not be that!
In our biographies then, we are
confronted in the intimacy of our personal relationships with what are
sympathetic and antipathetic reactions to that which we would choose to
admire and imitate, and that which we would shun and refuse to be like.
Via the Culture of Media, we are met with that which approaches
us in the same way, yet on a larger scale. Just as we as
individuals have a Shadow (a double-complex), so nations, religions and
peoples have a Shadow, and the Culture of Media puts in our faces these
pictures and meanings with which we can identify or from which we can
turn away, often in shame.
Christ has arranged, in this particular
moment in time (the cusp of the 20th to 21st Centuries, which is also
the Dawn of the Third Millennium) to place in the dying away
hierarchical social forms of humanity, those biographies which do two
main forming gestures within that history. This is all connected
to a process in which social chaos arises in order to cause these old
hierarchical [third cultural age] social structures to let go their no
longer valid hold, and in many instances be eventually replaced with
new social form arising out of the social commons [fifth cultural age].
In the first instance, these biographies
living in the decadent social hierarchies (such as government,
corporate and church organizations) portray strong images, via the
Culture of Media, to which we react equally strongly out of our likes
and dislikes. For example, one of America's wise women, Doris (Granny D) Haddoch, has said that we should be grateful for such
as George W. Bush, because he causes us to awake from our sleep as
citizens. As a consequence, in our individual biographies we
react to the extremes of these dominant religious, business, cultural
and political personalities, and this brings about in us as individuals
certain inner judgments and calls to action.
The second effect of those biographies
unfolding in the now decadent institutional social hierarchies is to
drive the social order further into a needed condition of chaos,
something all 6 billion plus biographies require in order to birth the
moral dilemmas necessary for the Age of the Consciousness Soul.
This social chaos sweeps traditional moral authority aside,
and forces us as individuals into situations where we must rely on the
own I in order to properly face the moral crisis. In that human
beings are incarnating in massive karmic communities in order to have
these sometimes shattering moral experiences, this causes the present
world social organism to have the strong tendency to completely
dissolve into a condition of near total social conflagration [thus my
website: Shapes in the Fire].
The moral
aspect of the logos ordered social organism of the world requires crisis in order for the individual biographies
to live, not just intellectually, but fully and dynamically and
existentially into dilemmas of moral choice. Only true moral
choice can awaken in us what is offered in this Age to the development
of the Consciousness Soul.
Nothing in the world is not touched by
the Art of Christ, who as Lord of Karma - Lord of the Satisfaction of
Moral Debt and healer of karmic wounds, arranges in majestic harmony all the biographies so that even from the smallest detail to
the grandest historical event, meaning is put to the service of our development - the leaving
behind of our spiritual childhood followed by our birth into spiritual
adulthood.
The world historical crises of this time are a complex and rich Stage Setting, against which 6 billion plus souls live out the dramas of their individual biographies.
Thus, in this birth from spiritual
childhood to spiritual adulthood, the Time - the Age of the
Consciousness Soul - is a Rite of Mystery, a Baptismal Mass for all of
humanity, just as was told to us by John the Baptist. [in Matthew 3:11]
"Now I
bathe you in the water to change hearts, but the one coming after me is
stronger than me: I'm not big enough to carry his shoes. He
will bathe you in holy breath and fire."
(emphasis added)
Consider now more closely what happens inside
us as we experience the intimacy of our
biographies, and the shared pictures that come via the Culture of Media.
Choice confronts us. Do I be
like that, or like this? From what place inside do I choose?
In a time so filled with chaos that rules no longer apply, I
discover that I can rely only on myself. Out of myself I must
author the Good in response to the world of meaning that surrounds and
confronts me. So powerful, in its personal immediacy, are these
experiences, images and meanings, that we cannot turn away from them.
It is as if the World itself is on Fire, wanting to burn and burn
and burn until we run from it in terror, or stand up to it and give the fullest of our participation
to its moderation and its healing.
Yet by Grace, I contain the means to know
the Good that my biography and membership in the shared fate of
humanity draws out of me. What I source becomes a part of the
world, and I know that this is so. I know my freedom to
enact the moral grace that my heart comprehends in its deepest places.
Deep inside my soul my very own heart hungers to sing: Love will I give. Love
will I create. Love will I author.
So now we think away the physical - the maya
of the sense world, and let our picture thinking gaze only upon this
inner, invisible to the physical eye, moral act. An act more and
more emerging everywhere, for while in America, and the Cultural West,
the Consciousness Soul is first widely appearing, it will and
must appear everywhere that human beings let the world touch their
wounds, while they seek to share with others the trials by fire of
their biographies.
Invited by the Love and Art of Divine
Circumstance to look within and to reach into the depths of our own
being in order to source and author that Good which we know to be
right, we touch something spiritual and are Touched by something
Spiritual. In this time of the True Second Coming, in the
inwardness of our souls and invisible to all outer seeing, a Second
Eucharist is being enacted - the Good offers Itself - Its own Being - to us (Moral Grace). For the
Good we know is not just known in the soul as what we tend to think of
as a mere thought, but if we attend most carefully, it is true Spirit,
just as the John Gospel writer told us that Christ spoke: [John 3:6-8] "What's born of the flesh is
flesh, and what's born of the breath is breath. Don't be amazed
because I told you you have to be born again. The wind blows
where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it
comes from or where it goes; its the same with everyone born of the
breath."
[The existence of a Second Eucharist, to
accompany the Second Coming, in no way means to diminish or change the
Original Eucharist. On the contrary, we will find that via the
Second Eucharist our understanding of the meaning of
the Original Eucharist (the transubstantiation of matter) will deepen.
See in this regard, the small pamphlet: Radiant
matter: Decay and Consecration, by Georg
Blattmann. From the transubstantiation of matter we are being led
onward to learning how to participate also in a transubstantiation of
thought.]
Thus we are being truly and continuously
born again today (each act of moral grace is another Second Ethereal
Eucharist and birth), from out of our spiritual childhood and into our
spiritual adulthood, baptized outwardly by the fires of the times in
our biographies, and by holy breath within - a Second Eucharist where
Christ gives of His own Substance that biblical knowing of the Good -
His own Being. For us to truly know the Good, requires we join
our own soul to the Good. Our yearning to author the Good out of
ourselves is how we participate in the Baptism of being truly born again, and how we participate in the sacrament of
the Second Eucharist. Christ also participates by giving to us,
out of Himself, this very Good - this Moral Grace. When having
received within ourselves this sacrament of the Second Eucharist, an
act that only arises because we seek it and form its actual
application, we remain free - we create moral law - we author the
fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Given to us within by
Christ as a capacity, we then author its incarnate nature and pass it
on to the world of our biographies, - from out of us thence into the
outer world (or into the inner world), do we then ourselves author this
Good: love
engendered free moral grace.
But how does Christ do this? Is
this Good offered to us in this Second Sacrament as if it was a thing,
passed by hand from one to another?
No. Christ as holy breath breathes
upon the slumbering burning embers of our own good nature, just as we
breath upon a tiny fire in order to increase its power. He
sacrifices His Being into this breath, which gives Life to the tiny
ember-like fire of our moral heart. The holy breath becomes
within the soul of each human being who asks, seeks and knocks a gift
of Living Warmth that enlivens our own free fire of moral will.
The Narrow Gate opens both ways, making
possible thereby the intimate dialog and conversation of moral deeds
and thoughts that is woven between the i-AM,
the Thou and the Christ (wherever two or more are gathered...),
which intimate conversation leads ultimately to the consecration - the character development - of the soul.
In this way our thinking can now behold the Meaning of Earth
Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul:
A macro-cosmic Rite, a Second Ethereal Eucharist, in which we give
birth out of ourselves in the most intimate way possible, knowledge of
the Good, not as mere thought, but as Life filled moral will, breathed
into greater power by the sacrifice of the true ethereal substance of
Christ's Being in the form of holy breath.
The outer world is but a seeming, and
what is brought by the Culture of Media mere pictures of the Stage
Setting for the World Temple that is home to our biographies.
When we think away this outer seeming - this logos formed and
maya based sense world, and concentrate only on the Idea
of the moral grace (Life filled holy breath) we receive and then enact
out of the wind warmed fire of individual moral will - as individual
law givers, as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets - we create this Meaning of Earth Existence. Every act of moral grace, given greater Life
within in the deepest intimacy of our life of soul, is an ethereal
communion with Christ, even though we may only experience it as what to
us is a mere thought of what is the Good at some moment of need in the
biography.
Christ gives us this Gift, by Grace,
freely out of Love, and with no need that we see Him as its Author.
We hunger inwardly to know what the right thing to do is, and
when this hungering is authentic, we receive Christ's Holy Breath.
This does not come so much as a thought-picture of the Good in
response to our questing spirit, but rather as the contentless breathing substance of Christ's Being. We are
touched (inspired) by Love, and at this touch we shape
that Breath into the thought that we then know. The nature of its
application and form in which we incarnate this thought is entirely our
own. We shape the thought completely out of our own freedom - our
own moral fire of will, for only we can apply it accurately in the
individual circumstances of our lives.
As the Age of the Consciousness Soul
unfolds accompanied by this Second Eucharist, the Social World of human
relationships begins to light and warm from within. For each free
act of moral grace rests upon this Gift of Christ's Being to us - an
ethereal substance received in the communion within the Temple of the
own Soul, freely given in Love whenever we genuinely: ask, seek and knock during
our search for the Good. Our
participation in this Rite, this trial by Fire leavened by Holy Breath,
leads us to the co-creation of new light and new warmth - the delicate
budding and growing point of co-participated moral deeds out of which
the New Jerusalem is slowly being born.
This co-creation is entirely inward, a
slowly dawning Sun within the macro Invisible World of Spirit.
Moreover, we do it collectively (as humanity). While each
of us contributes our part, it is our collective conscious celebration
of the Second Ethereal Eucharist (creating the Good) that begins the
transubstantiation of the collective (presently materialized and
fallen) thought-world of humanity into the New Jerusalem.
Thought is real, and it is as equally
real as is matter. The Original Eucharist transforms the already
divinely given now-dying substance of earthly matter into Life-filled
Spirit through our ritual invitation of the active
Grace of the Divine Mystery; and, our participation in the Second Ethereal Eucharist transforms dead thought
into living ethereal Substance, through the mystery of our individual
spirit's active and embryonic grace, that becomes united into the
collective co-creation of humanity.
In the Invisible World of Spirit, we
co-participate, out of the own moral fire of will, in the Dawn of the
New Sun that is to become the New Jerusalem.
Let us now slow down here for a moment,
and take a deep breath, for these last thoughts above may seem almost too big - too idealistic - to be
easily contemplated. To ease our understanding and gently ground
it, let us consider this situation once again in it most ordinary
aspects.
The world of our biographies places each
individual into the fires of experience.
These are remarkable gifts that lead us toward moral questions -
often deep and troubling. We yearn to know what to do, and in
this circumstance we may ask, seek and knock. What
has been called earlier in this book Moral Grace is available to us,
yet the mystery of this practice of inner activity is where we ourselves
create moral law - where we become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.
In the King's Tale, we saw that Rudolf
Steiner's book The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity showed how
to come to this knowledge through the practices of Gnosis - to knowledge - in the form of moral imagination, moral intuition and
moral technique. In the Healers' Tale, we saw how the 12 Steps
helped us to master the soul through the elevation of the spirit, and
in this way come to know God's Will as we understand it.
Finally, in the Shepherd's Tale we came to understand that by
asking What
Would Jesus Do out of Faith, we could also
come to the needed individual moral beliefs.
Three different paths (among perhaps many
more) all leading to those individual invisible depths that each of us
must uniquely experience, which we have now seen must be properly
called: the
Second Eucharist of Holy Breath. So we
come now to perceive the Time - this Age of the Consciousness Soul -
where, if we seek it, we have made ourselves available to be baptized
with Fire and
Holy Breath, just as John the Baptist us told
Christ would do, 2000 years ago.
Even so, we
still have to truly want to know the Good - to authentically ask, seek and knock.
***************************************
[For the neophyte: So far we have
seen how with Ahriman's incarnation, humanity was driven deeper into
moral crisis - the opposing beings, by trying to create a world in
which evil triumphs, also create a tension in the social reality that
causes people to resist. Refusing to submit to this pressure,
human beings reach into their own depths and draw out of those depths
previously hidden capacities. Life makes a demand, and some fold,
and some stand up. This is nothing new in human existence, except
that in this instance we have come to see how, even though the Prince
of Earthly Dark can incarnate in a human being, and from that place in
the center of our social existence create all kinds of troubles, many
people refuse to bow down to this Prince. Instead, they turn to
their own inner resources and to each other, bringing out of the secret
aspects of their own will moral qualities perhaps they didn't even know
they had. If we start to look around us, we will see that more
people do this - reach to the deep inside - than those who fall deeper
into the dark. Who does this? Who stands up? Blessed
are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. The salt of the
earth refuse to stand by and let evil prevail. In them the seed
of the Father resides, and this mystery we will take up next.
Below is an in depth look at one of the
possible processes by which our own thinking can be changed in profound
ways, through the application of moral grace to our own inner activity.
Instead of just acting in the outer world, we wake up and become
an actor in our inner world. It is this transformed thinking that
enabled me to come to the knowledge that stands behind my ability to write the above two
essays. Many who read this will recognize that much of what is
described they already do, to some extent or another.
Recall that the American Soul as an natural instinct for
Anthroposophy and for the Consciousness Soul, such that every time a
reader of this says to themselves: I try to do this, you are recognizing this healthy instinct.]
In Joyous Celebration of the
Soul Art and Music of Discipleship
- a moderately serious introductory sketch unveiling
a mostly
American way of understanding the New Thinking -
first some necessary context
Recently in the News for Members of the
Anthroposophical Society in America (late 2005), was published a
wonderful lecture given by Dennis Klocek, elaborating the alchemical
foundations living in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual scientific work.
The essay below means to be something from just one voice out of
another of the streams that seeks to find its home within the
Anthroposophical Society and Movement - the stream of discipleship, of those who are karmically related to the original
Twelve and the direct participation in certain aspects of the Mystery
of Golgotha. [See the essay above (The Meaning...) for why I write in this way.]
In the essay that follows, it might help
the reader to understand that it is mostly written for, and out of, the
American Soul. About this Soul, Rudolf Steiner spoke in different
places and in the following ways, which I will paraphrase: The
American comes to Anthroposophy naturally. English speakers are
instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of Rights.
There is a hidden and unique form of Anthroposophy that is to
develop in America in the future, and one should look to Emerson and
his circle of friends to appreciate it.
The reader, of whatever Soul background
and gesture, who would seek inner stimulation from actively
engaging this essay, should understand that for the American Soul much
of what is described below is already instinctively present. This
instinctive relationship to the art and music of discipleship appears
first in the American Soul in the dominant tendency to be directed
outwardly toward the world, fully engaged in social reality, and
sometimes (often more frequently than appears on the Evening News)
seeking to heal the social world's wounds. Part of the hidden
mystery of this Soul is that it is possible to take what is so present
instinctively, and awaken it by gradual degrees into full
consciousness. This task may turn out to be far easier for the
American Soul, than has so far been imagined within Anthroposophical
circles.
To fully inaugurate this gradual
awakening, however, does require turning from the outer world and its
worries and wonders for a bit, and to look within - to practice
introspection. When looking within becomes a normal part of soul
life, American anthroposophists should not be surprised to find that
they already live instinctively in their wills in ways with
considerable kinship with the path of discipleship - the path of moral action in
the world through renunciation and love.
With the addition of this introspective looking within, we add to
the thinking we already do about the field of outer-world social moral
action, a complementary and much needed thinking about the soul-field
of inner moral action. Outer world thinking and action are
enhanced by everything we learn from the practice of looking, thinking
and acting within.
By the way, it is not the point of this
essay to encourage any divisive distinction, such as might be assumed
because of the emphasis on matters American. Nor is it being
suggested here, for example, that Americans are any better at
Anthroposophy in any way. On the contrary, we are just different. Each Soul gesture in the Threefold World has
unique gifts to offer, and this essay means to serve the potential
freeing of those yet untapped American gifts from a kind of child-like
imitation of things European. This tendency, to model our soul
practices on a kind of European anthroposophical idealism of the soul,
was a natural impulse connected to our admiration of the work of our
European brothers and sisters. It is time to grow past this
however, to discover our far more earthly and pragmatic way to the
Spirit. And, to do this not only for the benefit of the
American Soul Itself, but also for the benefit of the Anthroposophical
Movement world-wide.
There are then two themes, which while
related are also quite separate. The relationship of the
Alchemical stream and the Discipleship stream is one theme, and the
relationship of the American Soul to the wider world is another.
The point of intersection, between the Discipleship stream and
the instinctive capacities of the American Soul, shows only that the
Rosicrucian and Manichean streams of the Old World, and their
connection to Initiation, does not quite have the same meaning for the
American Soul as does the natural Christ Impulse inspired in Americans,
and revealed by their relationship to the outer world of social need
(in part a consequence of the fact, that due to its rampant
individualism, the Consciousness Soul is developing faster here - See
Ben-Aharon's "America's
Global Responsibility: individualism, initiation and threefolding").
The Alchemical stream is a stream of
studied spiritual knowledge and of initiation. It is more of the
Kings and of Gnosis than of the Shepherds and of Faith. The
Discipleship stream is more related to that moral work in life that
comes from following the Teachings of Christ, and thus is more of the
Shepherds than of the Kings. The disciples, who were meant to be
fishers and shepherds of human beings, were not (in general) of the old
mystery streams as were the Kings. The Shepherds belong to what
was being newly created - to the future Mysteries that are to arise
from the social commons. These future Mysteries are not to flow
out of the old, now impotent and dysfunctional hierarchically organized
Mystery Centers, but from finely and homeopathically distributed
Branches and Discussion Groups - that is the New Mysteries are to be
born out of and in ordinary social life where groups of individuals
draw together (wherever
two or more are gathered...).
At the same time, while the America Soul is more naturally of the Shepherd stream, - of the discipleship stream, because of its orientation to outer world moral action, it can by turning inward and seeking a pragmatic introspective life, begin to draw from the wisdom-well of renewed European spiritual life. Rudolf Steiner, in his works on objective philosophical introspection ("A Theory of Knowledge Implicit In Goethe's World Conception"; "Truth and Knowledge"; and "The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity") gives us a quite useful generalized map to this introspectively investigated inner territory - a territory that for the American Soul has many different and unique characteristics. With Emerson, we get a similar map, not as exact and scientifically rigorous, but one which nonetheless is more in harmony with the actual landscape of the American Soul.
We can then read Steiner to initiate us
into our introspective soul voyages, in the most objective and
scientific fashion; and, read Emerson for that travelogue, which is
more attuned to the unique scenic beauty to be actually found there,
given that the American Soul, like the other soul-gestures of the
Threefold world, is differently oriented in its fundamental nature.
I have tried here to distinguish two
problems that ought not to be confused. This article is not
saying that the American Soul and the Discipleship stream are
identical, only that there is a definite kinship. What is also
being said is that for those in this discipleship stream (of which
there are no doubt many - Americans and otherwise - within the Society
and Movement, and for whom this article also aims to provide greater
self-understanding), they will tend to be less attracted to exercises
aimed at spiritual development, and more called to moral action in
life, which incidental to its true deeds, produces the after effect
called: character
development.
"For every one step in spiritual development, there must be three steps in character development". Rudolf Steiner: "Knowledge of Higher Worlds and How to Attain It".
[Keep in mind, when thinking about
character development, this question: To what aspect of character
development do we relate a good sense of humor, laughter, foolishness
and dance? Please also note that at one time the word silly
meant to be possessed by the sacred.]
This is not to suggest that specific
spiritual developmental exercises are unimportant, but rather just to
point out that if the moral (character) development lags behind, it
more and more becomes a danger that spiritual experience will come
toward us in a one-sided way. Further, we need to understand that
true heart thinking is almost entirely a consequence of the extent to
which the
will to do the Good
(that is to be moral) is the foundation for all feeling and thinking
activities.
To make some of this a little more
concrete, we might notice that it would not be uncommon for those drawn
to the Discipleship stream to find that their biography involves a need
to encounter the 12 Steps of AA, or to have to undertake some similar
deep moral-Trial work. Challenges to character development
are common in biographies with a strong kinship with the discipleship
stream. Which thought then leads us to the essential point.
Moral or character development does not result from spiritual
exercises, but only from inner and outer actions in the biography, and
their related moral dilemmas. The practice of exercises builds capacities in the Soul, while moral actions, both inward and
outward, apply these capacities in life (which then purifies the Soul). Christ puts it this way: Blind Pharisee, wash out the
inside of the cup and saucer first, if you want the outside to end up
clean [for the whole theme, see Matthew 23:
25-28]
Let us review a bit: From a certain
point of view, the Alchemical stream is very European, and thus has a
tendency to put forward the incarnation of an Ideal as a goal, leading
to the emphasis on spiritual exercises, knowledge and initiation.
Americans, on the other hand, tend to face the social as a
problem to be solved through moral action. This is very
pragmatic, for it is not the purity of an ideal that matters as much as
being able to do something to help others. In this sense, the
stream of Discipleship is more natural to Americans because, in harmony
with our engagement with and in the world, as social helpers,
discipleship is rooted in moral action - in doing the Good ("...and
crown thy Good, with Brotherhood...").
[Isn't this Brotherhood also partly related to our ability to help each other experience the katharsis of laughter, especially under dire circumstances. Conversation does have a higher function than light, but then what about a well encouraged giggle? The Shadow cannot abide humor, and runs away when we make fun of it.]
In a sense, the idealism of the European
anthroposophist has blinded the American anthroposophist, first by
suggesting there is only one way to be anthroposophical (a European
soul idealism), and second by failing to appreciate that the American
Soul is considerably different. The result is that instead of
coming to true self knowledge, we (in America) have been pursuing what
is at best a temporary illusion (a goal we really can't achieve),
instead of our developing, more consciously, the earthly (including
humorous and joyous), socially oriented and pragmatic instinct that is
our given nature.
I hope the above has not been too
confusing. Mostly I just wanted to point out certain contextual
themes, and leave to the reader's own thinking precisely what to make
of these ideas. In what comes next, where we get more deeply into
the pragmatic and the concrete, I hope then that these contextual
matters will, as we proceed, begin to make a more practical, and a less
abstract, sense.
*
[a brief biographical note: My
interest in introspection began around 35 years ago, in 1971, as a
result of a kind of spontaneous awakening in my 31st year. I
didn't call it introspection at that time, but I had become quite awake
inwardly, and was only able to orient myself to these experiences using
the Gospels. Seven years later, in 1978, I met the work of Rudolf
Steiner, and gravitated to his writings on philosophy, particularly A Theory
of Knowledge..., and The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I
also became very interested in Goethean Science, projective geometry
and all the Steiner material on the social problem, which was my own
main outer-world interest. It was over 25 years later, in 1997,
that I wrote my first effort at describing what I had learned about the
moral nature of the Soul under these two influences: the Gospels and
Steiner's writings on objective philosophical introspection.
That essay was called "pragmatic
moral psychology" and can be found on my
website . At that time, however, I did not yet know enough about
the Shadow, and only now, almost 10 years later, can I write the
immediately below with some confidence in my appreciation of the
intricacies of these problems in the light of an intimate experience of
the threefold double-complex.]
substance, or better yet,
selling water by the river*
*[The river of the soul lies inward in
everyone. To teach, as it were, about the soul, is to sell water
by the river, to give to someone something that is already right in
front of their own true face. In spite of all that exists, for
example in our home libraries of Steiner texts etc., there are really
only two essential books for the study of the soul: the Book of Life,
and the Book of our Own Soul. Learn to read those, and you'll
know the core of what you need to know. A text, even this text,
can at best be a word-map describing a territory you'll only really
know by direct experience, however many other books you ever read.
The reality
of matters spiritual is, however, not found in reading, but only in
action. We can acquire a lot of
concepts by reading, but we need experience (the consequences
of action) more.]
We should keep in mind as we begin, that
what is described below is essentially very human and very ordinary.
It is one possible descriptive word-map, as it were, of the soul
engaged in the dynamics of inner awakening via the path of
discipleship. As a map, it will be somewhat abstract and defined.
The actual territory is something else altogether - human, messy,
inconstant, prone to emotional ups and downs - that is all the wonders
of ordinary consciousness. All a word-map tries to do is to point out
various significant features. Look out for these mountains,
notice those valleys. Here is a pure spring, there is a hard and
dangerous rock wall. It is my hope that the reader will find
below some guidelines which will help them to chart their own path
through the pristine forests and dark swamplands of the soul.
Keep in mind it takes courage to explore there, but at the same
time there is no other adventure quite like it.
Recall then what Dennis Klocek gave in
his lecture to the 2005 AGM, and then published shortly thereafter in
the News for Members (or if you didn't hear or read it, try
to find a copy as soon as you can): On the blackboard a mandala:
a circle, expressing a series of alchemical relationships: earth
(freedom); water (phenomenology); air (silent practice) and fire
(dialog). The circle form suggests a return to earth (freedom) at
some new or higher kind of level. But before considering that,
first some deep background.
If, from a certain point of view, we
think of the above four elements in Dennis Klocek's lecture as notes in
a rising scale, we could also find that in between each note is an interval. While the note is in itself more of a step
in spiritual development supported by spiritual exercises, the use
in life (the interval) of the acquired spiritual skill/capacity is more of a
moral act - an aspect of the process of character development.
The soul is fallen - it is an out of tune instrument, yet we
hunger to return, to rise up and to experience reintegration, and to
give voice to the joy of coming Home, which the Story of the Return of the
Prodigal Son tells us leads to celebration
and feasting.
Because the spiritual development
exercises are so well known, and so completely covered elsewhere in
Steiner's basic books, as well as Dennis Klocek's books, I will not be
discussing them here. This essay assumes a general knowledge of
that work, and some practice in their use. Here we are looking at the
development of the Soul solely with regard to its struggles with the so
very messy, personal and human moral questions of the
biography.
In case there is some confusion here, in
Steiner's Knowledge of Higher Worlds, the
moral is approached mostly through a series of admonitions, encouraging
the student to orient him or her self in life in certain ideal ways.
Only in The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, with the
discussions of moral
imagination, moral intuition and moral technique, did Steiner confront the moral problem directly and
exactly.
The details that follow I have derived
from my own (naturally messy and human, stupid and silly, and when I
really get serious - pretentious) introspective investigations of the
moral dimensions of the soul, but it should be kept in mind that while
it is prudent to describe these phases and Trials as if separated in
time in the soul, they are much more likely to be layered over each
other - and often simultaneous in a variety of ways. It also
needs to be clear that what is to follow wishes only to add another
dimension - another view from a different direction - to what Dennis
Klocek gave, and not to contradict it in any way whatsoever.
It is particularly crucial to note here
that we are mostly discussing those moral acts that take place in the Soul, not those in the outer biography. There is a
relationship to be sure, but it will help to understand that we are
moral in both worlds: the outer world of our biographies, and the inner
world of Soul practice and art.
I emphasize the word Trial
to add another quality to our understanding. Moral development
takes place in the biography through Trials. These challenges to
the life of soul and spirit are meant to be difficult. We become
deeply engaged in our karma of wounds with others in
these Trials. Moreover, these are called Trials precisely because
there is great pain, suffering and effort (as well as not enough fun)
connected to them, and because the Shadow plays such an important and often decisive role.
Furthermore, various aspects of the Seven Stages of the Passion
of Christ (as described in the John Gospel)
are enacted in the Soul via these biographical Trials: the Washing of the Feet, the
Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, the
Crucifixion, the Entombment, and the Resurrection. There is nothing abstract about these difficult
processes of soul transformation, and this should be kept in mind
as we go forward, namely that: every time I use the word Trial I am
speaking of quite human, difficult and sometimes years long
life-crises.
There is, in this regard, something of a
kind of spiritual law involved. Just as the world of the senses
has its laws of gravity and color, so the soul world has its laws.
The ones to keep in mind here are the karma of wounds in the
outer biography, as well as the outer and inner moral Trials to be
faced there, which bear an exact and direct interrelationship. To
face a challenge in life, to face a Trial, means to engage in just that
personal teaching which belongs specifically to our individually most
needed for the development of our character.
Consider a marriage for example, or the
children to be raised there. These relationships are not trivial
distractions to any spiritual development, but rather are precisely
those riddles and mysteries of life belonging particularly to our own
ego's character developmental needs. One can read all kinds of
spiritual books, practice all manner of spiritual exercises, and still
not advance because the biographical tasks are ignored. To begin
to awaken within, and to appreciate that we are surrounded in our
biography with just those moral tasks and Trials we individually need,
is to recognize just how precisely and miraculously has Christ, as the
Artist of our karma of wounds, woven us into the world of personal
relationships. So when Christ advises that unless we become again
as little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, He is, among
other matters, telling us precisely who our deepest spiritual teachers
in life often are.
This world of personal relationships, and
their corresponding moral Trials, whether of family or work, or even
wider world challenges, is also very elastic in a sense. We are
quite free in it, and it has a quality that can respond rather exactly
to only those tasks which we choose to take up. Part of
true Faith is to accept what comes to us as challenges, yet at the same
time to recognize that our freedom also allows us to choose at every
juncture, which way to turn, what burden to carry and when to laugh at
ourselves.
For example, the interval from earth
(freedom) to water (phenomenology) involves the skill: thinking about.
This skill we receive as a natural aspect of living in this age,
in that we are inwardly free to decide what to think; and, in accord
with the Age of the Consciousness Soul, we are also becoming more and
more able to form individual free moral ideas as well.
The Consciousness Soul really just means
that if we inwardly wish to know the Good, in any particular moment of
moral demand, crisis or need, we can in fact know what the Good is.
Yet, in order to have this knowledge, we first have to ask, seek and knock. We have to inwardly form the question, and
struggle there to let ourselves answer from the higher nature of our
ego. The Good is what we make it to be, and as this essay
proceeds, we will get deeper and deeper into this Mystery. This
is why my book (found for free on line at
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf.html or which can be purchased at
www.lulu.com) "the Way of
the Fool" calls this capacity to know the
Good: Moral Grace.
[As an aside, for those more familiar
with Steiner's terminology, you should keep in mind that by necessity
he was required to cognitively form his research and understanding into
the language of the Intellectual Soul, as that was the condition of his
audiences. In this book we are writing out of the language of the
Consciousness Soul itself (something toward which American's are
instinctively gifted). So, for example, when in the opening
lecture of the book The
Challenge of the Times Steiner speaks of the
need for people to work out of an experience of the threshold, he is
using Intellectual Soul terminology. In the essay above, where I
have elaborated carefully on the Second Ethereal Eucharist experience,
this has been a quite concrete and exact picture of human intercourse
across the threshold in the language of the Consciousness Soul. I
also mean to suggest here that it is quite possible to take many of
Steiner's works and translate them from
Intellectual Soul language into Consciousness Soul language.
The attentive reader of this text, who takes to heart the
suggested practices, will in fact eventually find themselves able to do
this translation process themselves. Once able to do this, the
reader will be able to confirm not only their own experience, but all
that is written here in Steiner themselves, for nothing here is
contrary to what Steiner offered.]
Now in this thinking about
there is the object of our interest, in relationship to which we are
the subject. As subject, we think about
this object. This thinking is also essentially (and initially)
discursive to our inner experience. We appear to inwardly
talk to ourselves. Our spirit seems to inwardly speak that
which our soul then hears.
It is with the skill thinking about
that we first enter on the problem of the Water Trial of phenomenology.
Thinking about naturally contains something of the shadow forces of the
soul, in that our feeling life is, in the beginning, dominated by
antipathies and sympathies. These natural likes and dislikes of
our individualized soul color all that we think about.
Through them what we think about
acquires an individualized (non-objective) meaning for the spirit - the
i-AM, in the soul.
[The use of this form of the term "i-AM",
is meant to lessen the emphasis on the being
nature of the ego - its noun-like aspect, and to place more emphasis on
the action nature - on the verb-like aspect of the ego. The being
nature of the ego tends to be more related to the teachings of the
Buddha, while the action nature of the ego tends
to be more related to the teachings of Christ.]
In the light of Steiner's The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, the
experience (the percept) is, in the beginning, distorted in its meaning
(the thought, the concept) by the shadow elements lingering in the yet
unredeemed antipathies and sympathies. By the way, the reader
should be clear that only their own personal introspective observations
can adequately discern what is going on within ones own soul. We
have little business believing we can make such determinations about,
or for, another.
Noticing these excessive and unredeemed
aspects of antipathy and sympathy will give us our first vague
perceptions of the work of the threefold double-complex, the Shadow in
the Soul. Thought
is a flower rooted in the soul-soil of feeling, and filled from within
by the blossoming life of the will-in-thinking.
Where an excess of unconsciousness infects this soil and this life, the
Shadow is given free play.
In order to
progress properly through the life passages that comprise the Water
Trial, we have to learn to renounce the unredeemed antipathy and
sympathy. This is the central moral act
that makes possible the transformation via the Water Trial from
thinking about to thinking with. We enter the Water
Trial knowing how to think about, and we can leave the
Water Trial knowing how to think with.
The essential moral nature of this Trial is outlined in the
Gospels in the Sermon on the Mount, in the teaching concerning the mote
and the beam. In the biography, when we learn to struggle with
the covering over (or painting in thought via the unconscious Shadow
driven creation of mental pictures) of the persons that we meet with
our individual unredeemed antipathies and sympathies, we are learning
about the beam in our own eye. We see not the person, but our own
soul as that lives in our projected sympathies and antipathies.
To learn to see past the beam, to meet the true phenomena of the
other, to learn to think with them rather than about
them, this is the moral craft to be discovered during
the Water Trial.
The biography gives us just those experiences that challenge this learning. The spouse, the child, the co-worker, the boss, the neighbor, the relative, or the stranger-other, all will evoke the beam, the unredeemed mental pictures. We must learn how not to paint our experience with this already unconsciously given thought-content, and instead learn to let the experience itself speak into the soul, and to become consciously active as a creator of the free thought in relationship to the experience.
Again, one way to banish the Shadow
influence here (when we discover our thinking to be possessed by the
beam) is to laugh at ourselves - to see the essential silliness of our
dark inner depictions of others, as well as those depictions which are
too sympathetic (that is where we raise another up to the level of a
kind of minor deity, such as how too many view Rudolf Steiner - and
others - out of a soul mood of ungrounded and unrealistic admiration).
Sobriety, for all its virtues, must be
balanced with play, otherwise the soul becomes an arid desert.
So, for example, when we look at another
person and recognize that they are, in themselves, not just that which
we observe in the moment, but rather that they are their whole history
- their whole biography (in fact a sequence of biographies), and when
we learn to consciously set aside the reactive feelings of antipathy
and sympathy, only then can we start to think with
who they truly are, and not just about
them. Our folk wisdom calls this learning to walk in another's
shoes.
This thinking with
can of course be applied to anything living, anything that has a life
element to its nature, not just human beings, plants or animals.
This includes the history (the story) of a social form, such as a
family, or even an Anthroposophical Branch. When we recreate in the
imagination, free of antipathy and sympathy, the story-picture of
something, we are then learning to think with the object of our thought.
Goethe taught himself to think with
the plant, and to this organic way of thinking Rudolf Steiner later
gave the name: Goetheanism, which is a thinking that leaves behind the discursive
aspect of thinking about, and replaces that with a
thinking with - a qualitative characterizing picture thinking
(Tomberg's formulation). We do this by learning to make inner
images (mental pictures) consciously. We still retain the ability
to think discursively about these inner images -
thinking about does not disappear, but remains a skill which can be
applied when we choose and where we feel it is appropriate (which is
why I wrote earlier of the layered nature of these soul phenomena).
Two additional aspects of soul phenomena
need to be understood here - the attention and the intention and their
relationship. The moral act of renunciation is more related to
those actions of the will-in-thinking that
determines on which particular object we focus our attention.
When we are lost to the beam in our own eye, part of our
attention is unconsciously focused on our own soul's reactive feelings
of antipathy and sympathy. To the act of renunciation of these
interfering aspects of our attention, we need to join the intention to
love the object of this phenomenological (story-picture) thinking.
After subduing the impulse to live imprisoned and in the thrall
of the beam in our own eye (reactive feelings of antipathy and
sympathy), we use our first stage (necessarily awkward and tentative)
understanding of how to love the other in such a way so as to redeem
them in thought. We
consciously create a new picture to replace the old unconscious and
reactive one.
As part of the Water Trial, we don't just
set aside the reactive feelings, but we learn how to create in the soul
cultivated feelings. We create freely chosen cultivated moods of
soul - that is intended feelings of reverence, wonder and so forth,
which then have a salutary effect on the thought content that is to be
produced according to where we let our attention come to rest.
This is an example of where the exercises bear fruit. If we
have practiced these exercises, this will be a great help when we then
need to apply the newly learned ability to form cultivated moods of
soul, as a prelude and foundation for thinking with
someone in a new way.
With a cultivated feeling we transform the soul-soil from which the thought is born and then flowers (which is also why the ideal is expressed as: thinking with the heart).
In a certain sense, what is renounced,
love replaces. What is given up, becomes transformed. What
is dark, is turned to gold. What is evil - our dark habits rooted
in the unconscious fear and mistrust of the other - the Thou, are
beginning to be transformed into love. And, best of all, what is
too sober, particularly in our Self, can - as is necessary - be made
silly.
The renunciation of unredeemed antipathy
and sympathy does not, however, mean their elimination. The will
acquires the capacity to master this somewhat base song of the soul.
We cease attending to it unconsciously, and turn that attention
(and the related intention) elsewhere. We master the unconscious
soul gesture that leads antipathies and sympathies into the forefront
of the soul, and like a good choir director, silence it so that we can
concentrate on other instruments of soul potential, other voices.
Transformed and conscious feelings of antipathy and sympathy
become a valid means of discernment. But we need to be awake to
the arising and becoming of these feelings, if we wish not to give the
shadow element free play.
The
will-in-thinking (an awake and more and more morally pure intention and
attention) fills the thought with life (which is why I add to the
ideal of thinking with the heart, the ideal also to will the good).
In this way we also refine the gold that
is latent in antipathy and sympathy - their capacities for discernment
and truth are enhanced, because we apply them with more consciousness -
a more awake attention and intention. In the teaching on the beam
and the mote, Christ, in Matthew 7:5, ends it this way: You fake, first get the log
out of your own eye and
then you can see
about getting the splinter out of your brother's eye.
Again, one of the best ways to eliminate
the log is to learn to laugh at it. The log arises from the
Shadow side of soul life, and in the light and warmth of our learning
to laugh at ourselves, the Shadow's hold dissolves.
In Steiner's The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, we are
taught the importance of the moral basis for our actions, whether
outwardly in the sense world, or inwardly in the soul. Only that
action, which is preceded by a self-determined moral reason
(intention), is truly free. Even so, no one should be surprised
to discover that they are already trying to do these activities in some
fashion or another. Emerson said this: In self trust all virtues are
comprehended. The purpose of this essay
- this word-map - is to help us raise out of the realm of instinct,
step by step into full consciousness, our already existing natural
goodness.
[Another brief biographical note: As I
shared previously, I underwent a kind of spontaneous awakening at age
31, and one of the by-products of this inner infusion of light, was
that I became hyper-aware of judging people. I could see myself
putting them into various boxes and categories, and being now awake to
this beam in my own eye, I could also see that this was not right - it
violated conscience, so that I struggled to learn how to not do it.
That said, learning how not to do it, does not mean that we
always apply this newly learned moral craft. On the contrary, I
often fell back into old ways many times over the years, although there
did slowly dawn a kind of sensitivity, that let me see that I had been
again in thrall of the beam. Stepping outside the prison of the
beam does not become automatic - a habit, but must always be applied,
in the moment, consciously, with intention and attention (the
will-in-thinking).]
After we have learned to renounce
(consciously and for specific and individually freely chosen moral
reasons) our soul gestures of yet unredeemed antipathy and sympathy, in
order to learn how to think with that object of thinking
which we are learning to love, do we then move out of the Water Trial,
via more necessity, to the life passages of the Air Trial. This
movement from water (phenomenology) to air (silent practice), which
before (at the entrance to the Water Trial) began with thinking about,
now begins with the newly learned craft of thinking with.
We start with that which we have now discovered as a spiritual
development in the course of the Water Trial, and then apply that new
level of moral craft (capacity of the will) of renunciation and love to
the Air Trial. The will-in thinking, which has
learned to master the unredeemed aspects of feelings of antipathy and
sympathy, and to replace these with thoughts born out of cultivated
moods of soul, is
now strengthened. It is this strength that then lends itself to the life lessons of the Air
Trial.
Dennis Klocek described the Air Trial as
a learning to think backwards - of unraveling, or unrolling, the
thought content produced by thinking with.
The Discipleship stream sees it from a slightly different direction,
one which, however, is not in opposition, but which instead is once
more intended to be complementary.
Via the Water Trial we have learned how
to think with, and that has produced a thought content in the soul.
It is this
content that must now be renounced in the Air Trial. When Steiner wrote of this he called it: sacrifice of thoughts. We learn how, again in meeting people, to not
have a thought content at all. We become inwardly silent.
Strong forces of will are needed in order to subdue the already
achieved thought content, which we have wrapped around another person
(or any other object of thinking), even if this content now lives free
of unredeemed antipathies and sympathies. We can also renounce,
during the life passages of major aspects of the Air Trial, those
thoughts produced only by thinking about.
Further, in the feeling life there live attachments to the thought content. We have, after all,
produced it. It is our creation, and we like it (most of the time
- where the Shadow has unconsciously produced the thought content, we
can learn to relate to this soul phenomena out of a healthy antipathetic
discernment - we can come to not liking it
that we have such a thought). Sometimes, however, we can't even
separate our own sense of self from this thought content.
Nonetheless, to traverse the Air Trial we need to renounce our
collection of mental pictures (thoughts). Remember, the self
development that accompanies the sequence of alchemical Trials is not
just related to spiritual exercises, but also to moral or character
development; the chief features of which are acts of sacrifice - acts
of renunciation, and acts of love (the beginnings of: Not I, but Christ in me).
Steiner also calls this attachment to our
thought content, in certain circumstances: being in bondage to the
concept "One
must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will
fall into its bondage" (The
Philosophy of Freedom, last sentence of the
original Preface). It can be a savage inner struggle - this Air
Trial - to learn to forcefully set aside our favorite pictures of the
world, a seemingly negative artistic act, sometimes taking months to
accomplish. At the same time, their essential nature does not
disappear, for the very same qualitative aspects of our true nature -
our true i-AM - can once again call them forth. Thought does not
disappear, it only becomes latent and goes into a kind of pralaya (the state of being uncreated, unformed). The
will-in-thinking is strengthened by this act of renunciation, and when
we choose to think again concerning this same object of our thought,
the penetrating new powers of the will-in-thinking (attention and
intention) can call forth from this pralaya an ever deeper understanding of the underlying meaning
and truth of that about which we have chosen to think.
[another biographical note: I first
explored this process during my many long years of the Water Trial,
which really began when I discovered that I had become captured by a
psychological paradigm, or world picture. I had come to view
everyone, after a time, through the lens of this psychologically based
world picture. I discovered that the best way to become inwardly
free of this capture, was to undo any relationship to this paradigm, an
activity that took several months. A year or so later, I let
myself be captured by a similar world picture, this one connected to
Tibetan Buddhism. Again, many months were needed to become
inwardly free - to break the chains of the teaching - to be able to
only experience these thoughts when and if I consciously called them
forth. Subsequently, upon encountering Anthroposophy, I gave
myself wholly to it - became intoxicated with it in a way, and spent
three years drinking in all that I could manage, eventually once more
finding myself inwardly lacking the spiritual freedom before the
concept that I knew by then was essential.
Only after many months of work at
sacrifice of thoughts, was I able to stand in relationship to the
massive and marvelous thought content of Spiritual Science, inwardly
free. Through this activity of sacrifice of thoughts, I
eventually stood in relationship to concepts, acquired from Steiner, in
such manner that they only appeared in my consciousness when called
forth. From this free perspective (which I was then able to
survey as a whole), I then could see that Anthroposophy was not a
thought content at all, but rather just the method of awake, and fully
conscious (intended and attended) free thinking I had been
instinctively seeking for many years.]
As the shadow elements (unredeemed
antipathies and sympathies - Water Trial, and emotional attachments to
our self-created thought content - Air Trial) are being let go, we now
begin to have another experience connected to the Gospels. This
is again related to the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the
beatitude: "blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven".
The rolling back, the sacrifice of, the
renouncing of the previously created thought content, makes the soul
inwardly poor in spirit. As we empty out the soul, we begin to learn a new
spiritual activity, which might be called thinking within. The Air Trial passages of life are taking
us from thinking with toward thinking within. This opens us to
the delicate first stages of the conscious experience of the kingdom of heaven as It begins to appear with greater clarity out of the general
background noise of the soul, and on the wings of our natural instinct
for the embryonic New Thinking. The Air Trial is developing
that which is meant to take us upward and onward to the Fire Trial, or
dialog. When we are poor in spirit, empty of the previously given
thought content (and master of silent practice), then we can, to a
degree, experience directly the
inside of the object of our thought. In
personal relationships, this is the capacity for the beginnings of true
empathy.
In a sense, the base elements of
unredeemed antipathy and sympathy are a foundation in the soul. They
are of the earth. In the Water Trial, we rise to a more subtle
and plastic condition in the soul. To think with,
to know the phenomenology of the object of thought, is to bring the
thinking into movement with its object. The
earth aspect is more solid and crystallized, while the water aspect
more fluid and more mobile. The discursively produced thought is
dead (the instinctive living element necessary for any thought remains
in the unconscious), while the consciously created picture-thought is
more living. With the air element, the soul becomes more
expansive. Thought that is renounced in the Air Trial dissipates,
disperses and dissolves into the general spiritual background of the
soul - the previously noted pralaya (uncreated, unformed) condition.
The will-in-thinking does not any longer call it forth, nor does
it let the thought call itself forth. When we are in bondage to
an idea, it calls itself forth, and the Air Trial teaches us to break
the chains by which we have let our unconscious feeling attachment tie
us to the concept/idea. We break these chains of feeling by
dissolving them, and Dennis Klocek's metaphor of rolling back the
thought is quite apt. We untie it from its attachment to the
soul, and without doubt the practice of the spiritual exercise of the
Ruskshau is a great help here.
Only then, when we are truly empty, can
thought, in the sense that it is the true inside of our object of
thinking, come toward us. The true idea of the object moves
toward us, as we learn to open ourselves to it, such that it then thinks in us. As Christ says in Luke 17: 20-21 "Asked by the Pharisees when
the the kingdom of God was coming he answered: "The kingdom of God
doesn't come with the watching like a hawk, and they don't say, Here it
is, or There it is, because, you know what? the kingdom of God is
inside you."
Steiner writes at age 25, in "The Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception", published in 1886, that: What takes place in human
consciousness is the interpretation of Nature to itself. Thought
is the last member in the series of processes whereby Nature is formed.
While Emerson writes at age 33 in the
essay "Nature"", published in 1836, 50
years before Steiner wrote the above: Nature is the incarnation of
a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas.
The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever
escaping again into the state of free thought.
Thus, having mastered (to a degree)
silent practice (learned how to be poor in spirit), we are at the
beginning of the Fire Trial, and similar in kind to our previous
renunciations, the soul now begins to discover how thinking can be in
deepest kinship with its object, by abandoning the Self - by no longer
seeing ourselves as the center of the universe. Instead we begin
to love the object of thinking more than we love ourselves. This
deepening intention to love, in that our own i-AM
learns to stand out of the way, allows the i-AM
of the other more room in the soul - we begin to see them not just from
their inside - true empathy or thinking within, but as them, united with them.
Again, anything living that can be thought empathically, can also
be even more deeply known when we learn to unite with it in thought.
But this requires more than our own action. The art of true
empathy, or thinking within, now, as we let go our
own centrality of being, becomes the chalice in which It can think in us - and the life passage of Fire Trial
begins to unfold.
This is the fruit of the Air Trial now
carried further - the spiritual developmental capacity to have dialog
with the realm of the invisibles, for true empathy free of self
importance and rooted in inner silence, now lets the inner being of the
other - the Thou - speak. Having understood how we become in
bondage to the concept, and emotionally attached to it, we no longer
repeat those actions, with the result that thought tends not to come to
rest in the soul, to coagulate there. Instead, thought now passes
through the soul - flows like a living stream.
[In 1999, seven years ago, I wrote this:
My method
basically now consists (when life circumstances allow it) of sitting at
my desk and writing descriptive passages of social and political
realities. Inwardly the experience is analogous to looking at a
clear stream. The surface of the stream results from my inner
activity in sacrifice of thoughts, fact gathering, picture forming and
artistic expression (more or less done simultaneously). At the
same time as my thinking sees this clear surface, I can perceive that
there arises, on the other side of that surface, activity which does
not belong to my own will, but which appears there spontaneously of its
own accord. The clear surface is then a product of two activities
acting in concert. With my writing I record what appears there.]
With this art (thinking within), which was earlier
merely a skill (thinking about)
and then a craft (thinking with), we now are in the midst
of the Fire Trial. But before discussing this Trial more deeply
from the point of view of Discipleship, we need to look ahead a bit and
understand what lies on the other side of the Fire Trial. We need
to have a picture of what happens in between - in the moral interval
between fire (dialog) and the new earth (new freedom), as the circle gesture spirals
around in a kind of completion, before moving on to a new level of
experience.
[a bit more biography: the material next
to be presented, regarding what can happen after the life passage of
the Fire Trial, is a little bit speculative on my part. While I
have had quite definite experiences of the kind: Imagination,
Inspiration and Intuition (mostly by Grace from Above), I am neither naturally clairvoyant nor an initiate. I
am not even sure most of us need anymore to strongly seek such a goal,
at least certainly not in a single lifetime. When I get deeper
into the Fire Trial material itself (below), especially given the
layered nature of the soul capacities and experiences of all the
Trials, and as well the true mystery nature of ordinary consciousness,
why I encourage a consideration of the more modest goal of a kind of sacramental thinking (as against initiation) especially for Americans, will
be made more plain.]
This culmination of the Fire Trial is
described in Steiner's John Gospel lectures, in lecture twelve, as: The Nature of the Virgin
Sophia and of the Holy Spirit (when reading
this lecture, keep in mind that it was addressed to the Intellectual
Soul, not the Consciousness Soul). The previous spiritual
developmental tasks, interwoven with the moral and character
developmental intervals, or Trials, produces a katharsis, or purification
of the astral body, such that the Rite of
Initiation may now be enacted, and the seed organs of clairvoyance may
now be impressed on the etheric body. I emphasize the term may,
because while a great deal of the development leading to this stage is
rooted in our own actions - our own will-in-thinking, as the Fire Trial
progresses we become more and more interdependent with the will
activity of the invisibles.
We do not, as I understand it, so much
initiate ourselves, but instead are initiated in a cooperative dance
necessarily involving Another.
On the other side of the Fire Trial, if
initiation is to be the result, we have acquired new faculties of
perception. The spiritual world is now there to be experienced
directly, and the soul has fully developed that spiritual freedom,
which The Philosophy of Freedom (or Spiritual Activity) contemplates, for we have renounced unredeemed antipathy
and sympathy, we have renounced our emotional attachments to a given
thought content and we have renounced even the significance of our own i-AM
in relationship to others; all the while learning to love ever more
deeply the objects of our perception (beholding) and thinking.
[From this point onward, I will be often
using the term beholding instead of perception (in certain cases) and for this
nuance I am grateful to Clifford Monks, who provided this in a recent
conversation between the two of us.]
Now before us stand new objects of inward beholding. The world of Imaginations is faced with this new freedom, but it stands inwardly over there, as it were, such that once more we have something which we think about, only this time it is not a sense object but a spiritual object. Moreover, the perceptual element of an Imagination has required our co-participation; and, the thought content produced by our cognitive capacity, during the experience of the supersensible, arises simultaneously with the experience. Contrary to a sense object, which has as an aspect of its nature what Steiner called the necessary given, a spiritual Imagination as an object of clairvoyant beholding does not exist independently of our own will-on-fire in thinking. We have authored and sourced (for this language, grateful thanks to Harvey Bornfield) it in cooperation with spiritual beings.
Our new thinking about has participated in the
creation of the Imagination. We experience the Imagination in
infinite internal space (ethereal and peripheral space) as an object,
whose existence comes about because our own activity is coupled with
the by Grace activity of higher beings. The intention and
attention are involved in a Parsifal question* to which the Imagination
is an answer (producing a kind of wordless knowledge). Subsequent
in time to this wordless knowing experience (which includes a
conceptual element), cognition then produces the word forms, either
written or spoken, in which the living Imagination dies into a
crystallized word-picture, such as what is given to us in many of
Steiner's lectures and writings. When we actively (not passively)
read these word-pictures, recreating them in our own picture-thinking,
the soul harmonizes with the Imaginative aspect of the world of spirit,
creating out of this harmony a rudimentary chalice in which later
spiritual experiences can arise.
[*A Parsifal question is a question that
if we didn't ask it when we could have, we may have to wait a long time
to later receive an answer.]
So we begin then to repeat at a higher
level the previous Trials, but this time facing experiences we have
never before had. We travel once more around the mandala of the
circling spiral of soul metamorphosis, learning in new ways to think about
(Imaginations), then on to new thinking with
(Inspirations) and finally to new thinking within (Intuitions). [There would seem to be here a great
mystery, about which I have not (yet) any experience, but at the same
time a great curiosity: do angels etc. tell jokes or laugh and dance?]
This full new thinking, however, is itself at a higher stage. It is thinking transformed into willed creative and participatory beholding. The normal thought content, which we know as an aspect of our original state of consciousness (earth and freedom, in discursive thinking about), only arises in the soul after the clairvoyant thinking perceiving/beholding. This thought content falls out, as it were, during the period of time the spiritual experience is fading away. The spiritual experience does not continue in earthly memory, but at the same time, the thought content produced (that is, how the experience was initially cognized as it fades away) does remain in earthly memory.
Let us now return to a deeper
appreciation of the life passages we are calling: the Fire Trial.
All the work we do, through the various
Trials and passages of our biography, more and more purifies the soul,
making it ready for clairvoyant spiritual perception. At the same
time, there is constant spiritual music in the soul - the song of the
wind and of the breath - even as far back as when we are only being
newly born out of the first Trial of earth and freedom.
Ordinary consciousness is already full of
spirit. Our problem is how do we pick the gold out of the dark
shadowy and leaden dross of the soul, normal to its given fallen state
of earth and freedom. Two factors are clues. These are
discovered during the early stages of introspection in the idea of
needs and the idea of choices. The wind - the breath - the living
river of thought - blows through the soul constantly, but always in accord with need
and most often in accord with other-need,
that is the needs not of the Self, but of the Thou. To live into
this Grace given always present intuition-like breath, we need to
choose. When we
do choose service to other-need, then true, good and
beautiful intuitions flow on the wind of Grace into the soul, even in
its ordinary and fallen state of consciousness.
How else are we to understand the natural and harmonious state of grace always potential in such relationships as: mother and child, comrades at arms and lovers.
Other-need also helps keep our ambitions in check. One of the
temptations that the Shadow offers to us is to let us believe we can,
for example, out of reading a Steiner text speak with authority about
matters concerning which we have had no other experience than the text.
Absent the real experience - the percept - true thought (the
concept) cannot arise. Only in conjunction with actual
clairvoyant experience can we, in full conscience, speak of such
matters with the same confidence as did our Teacher, Rudolf Steiner.
Yet, in the face of other-need, and our choice to devote
ourselves to this need, spiritual contact (experience) does appear in
the soul. The
spiritual percept (experience) arises within the soul as a response to
the Parsifal question which our intention and attention have created
out of our relationship to other-need; and, the modest nature of our choice to
serve this need makes our soul a suitable chalice to receive that
thought content which then serves this need.
For example, we have no need (besides a
vain curiosity) to know who was the 20th Century Bodhisattva
incarnation of the future Maitreya Buddha. Yet, on the other
hand, there is a deep need to know how to love those intimate others in
our biography, so that we can learn to heal our shared karma of wounds.
With this in mind (and also keep in mind
the layered nature of soul development, as against the one-sided idea
that it is a mere linear progression) let us look at the Fire Trial,
which Dennis Klocek has described also as: dialog; and which he related to meeting with the dead, who come
to us through our encounters with others. From the standpoint of
the Discipleship stream, this is once more perceived a bit differently,
yet again in a complementary fashion.
Having passed through the previous
Trials, our will-in-thinking now possesses certain capacities, certain
inner arts, the essence of which are moral in nature. The self
development spiritual exercises are secondary to, but supportive of,
the character (moral) developments. We have learned in the Water
Trial to renounce unredeemed antipathies and sympathies and to replace
those with a redeemed thought-content produced in a chalice of freely
chosen cultivated feelings - that is we have learned to think with
the object of thought. In the Air Trial we have renounced as well even
this self-produced thought-content, in order to live in the silence,
that is poor in
spirit - thus beginning the experience we
have been calling: thinking within.
In Fire Trial, which begins with its
capacity of thinking within won in the Air Trial, we
now enter into dialog on the wings of a renunciation of self
importance. That which is not-Self is to become more important
than that which is Self. Love of the other fills the
attention and intention, and the work toward Not I, but Christ in me
matures. In this case, the dialog
element for the Discipleship stream is more accurately characterized as
Steiner's "it
thinks in me", albeit this form of expression
is lacking a certain artistry (Intellectual Soul, not Consciousness
Soul). A more beautiful phrase would be: the delicate and subtle
presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence (Holy
Breath).
[another biographical note: I learned,
over many years of hard experience, that the essential matter was the
Parsifal question - the deeply felt question, coupled with the absence
of personal ambition in this question. The knowledge I seek must
be consciously intended to serve others, not to serve my vain
curiosity. In fact, my success in my researches into the social
(see other essays in this book), seems to have been entirely related to
my renunciation of the possibility of initiation in order to more
deeply be led to an understanding of the social, an act which occupied
my prayer life for a number of years in the mid-'80's. As a
consequence, I began to experience this wind, this delicate and subtle
presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence in response to my
Parsifal questions concerning an understanding of the social, which I
had sought in order to serve other-need. My biography led me to
working, from my mid-thirties onward, as a member of the working poor.
I cleaned toilets, washed dishes in restaurants, worked in mental
hospitals, and the last three years of my work life (59-62), I worked
in a factory. This led me to not only a personal, but a shared
experience of the suffering in the world due to the Age of Materialism,
which has led the i-AM not to appreciate itself or the causes of its suffering,
and which gave me such pain of soul that the only way I could think to
alleviate this was to seek, via the New Thinking, the ability to tell a new story of the
world and of human meaning. This was my
Parsifal question in its broadest form, and the wind would come at
anytime It choose as I lived out these experiences, so that I had
to learn to be sensitive to this wind,
and to serve It, even by pulling off the road when driving and taking
notes, or getting up from bed at night and writing when called.
The success of this inner work also made me on more than one
occasion, an obnoxious moral nut case, filled with excessive moments of
grand hubris - my own Shadow intoxicated and inflamed.
Fortunately, the Trials would knock me down whenever I got too
drunk with the seriousness of any luciferic fantasies of having a
mission.]
The moral art of thought not only comes to
the truth of the object of thinking, but also knows its goodness and
its beauty. In intimate relationships, where we learn to love the
will of the other - the Thou, and to see the beauty, not of their
physical appearance, but of their deeds - in this selfless perception
we then start to live in their true Fullness and Presence.
Thinking within, as it traverses the Fire Trial, begins to experience
the spiritual world as a thought world, via a pure thinking, which is a
cooperative art - Grace will be present. This purity is
three-fold. It is pure in the sense that it is only thought -
that is it is sense free. The attention is so focused only on
thought, that the outer sense world recedes far into the background of
consciousness. That is one aspect. The second kind of
purity is moral in nature. The soul is pure in its intention and
attention. The intention and attention are chaste, as it were.
Modest, or moderate. Without ambition of any kind.
Not even seeking initiation or enlightenment. Insight
increases in the soul, but each time as a surprise - as a wonder.
The third kind of purity is as regards
the thought - the concept itself. It is only
pure concept or idea and in this it is thought as Being, as Presence
and Fullness. Our earthy grasping of
the thought, which in the beginning tends to render it into mere mental
pictures or generalized concepts, has been gone beyond. We have
sensed thought unconsciously in this beginning, and caused it to fall
into our earthly and darkened consciousness from out of its original
living environment. When we learn how to return thought to its
true realm and nature, then our sense-free thinking, and the purity of
our intention and attention now lets the pure nature of the Being of
the Thought think
in us (dialog).
At the same time, this conversation has
what seems at first blush an odd quality to it, in the sense of our
freedom. As discussed in the essay above, on The
Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, just as Christ gives his Being to our need for
knowledge of the Good as an act of Grace in such a way that the thought
of the Good is entirely ours to shape, so also that which thinks in us does not answer our knock with any authority whatsoever.
This Holy Spirit (the wind in the soul spends (exhausts) Its will into us in a way. Its participation with our i-AM
in the nature of the thought's form is such that, while the
Holy Spirit elevates our perception of truth, we remain the final
author and source. The Holy Spirit's participation is also a gift
and becomes the wind to the wings of our soul. Borne on this wind we see from
whatever height, depth or breadth that must be there for other-need. We serve the Thou and the Holy Spirit serves us
both.
The soul is now grateful for whatever
wills to dialog with it, and has no need for anything other than the
occasional, but profoundly nourishing, experiences of Grace, all of
which it had already begun to know, even coming in the beginning in the
wonderful mystery of ordinary consciousness, and in accord with other-need and choice.
Yet, in this same beginning, the karma of
wounds, and the unredeemed aspects of the astral or desire body move us
forward in life, and we are guided by the Shadow into and toward our
necessary biographical experiences. In the processes of the Fire
Trial, we learn to let go these drives, to move with and within the
stream of Providence in Life. The soul now tends to want only to
be content and at rest, no longer driven. We love the necessity
that Providence brings us, and devote ourselves to that task,
recognizing that the Great Whole of Life is in Other and far more
competent Hands (Christ's Love).
There can be, by the way, either (or
both) an outer necessity and an inner necessity. Self observation, with an evocation of
conscience applied to the question of whether we are being truthful to
ourselves, will
reveal whether an inner necessity is to have the same weight as an
outer one. This essay, in fact, was
very much produced out of an inner necessity in connection with the
delicate and subtle presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence,
brought into the stream of Time, because of a Parsifal question that
occurred to me regarding the pending conference on Ben Franklin (August
18-19, 2006), where I lived in Fair Oaks, California. Yet, even
in this work, I encountered Fire Trial elements, for latent and
unredeemed ambitions limited and distorted my first versions of this
essay. Only after I had recognized these ambitions and laughed at
myself for them, did matters begin to acquire a satisfactory to
conscience moral clarity.
We need to keep in mind that we remain of
the earth, even when the wind - the kingdom of heaven - is blowing
through the soul. In our earthly dialogs, one with the other, we
need to learn to just listen and not to always impose our own opinions
upon the others freedom of thought (for parents of children and others
in a teaching necessity, this will be different, sometimes). We
can let the soul rest in wonder at what the Thou will say and do.
So also with the invisible other-presence in the soul. In this way the outer biography and
the inner biography more and more consciously harmonize their naturally
interwoven music.
Life itself -
the biography - will demand of ordinary layered consciousness, and in
harmony with the necessities of our karma of wounds, those experiences
to be faced in which other-need and choice appear. If
we think with the heart and will the good, Grace will come in the form
of those other-needed intuitions - the deepening consciousness of what
other-presence wants to say into our inwardness, in concordance with
our slowly growing and developing capacities, as is necessary for
service to the Thou.
This is the essence of the Fire Trial - a
burning away purification of self for other. Just as in the Air
Trial we set aside attachment to a given thought content, so in the
Fire Trial we give away our attachments to our own meaning - we
dissolve the self descriptive concepts with which we previously adorned
our i-AM, as if wearing a costume. Instead, we just are.
In all our actions and choices, we are (if we think on it)
always: "In the
Beginning...".
We no longer are this or that, but just
are (i-AM). Each favorite self-name: father, mother,
anthroposophist, alchemist, lawyer, ditch digger - all these names of
self are let go, using the craft and art acquired in the Air Trial.
We do this in order to get ready for the first part of Not I, but Christ in me - the Not I part. We burn away
the I concepts, which by their very nature are limiting and mark us as
not-free and are a beam in our own eye-inside, directed at ourselves.
We don't have to think of ourselves as a
father or mother, for example, since the necessity of the biography
places those tasks before us already. The inner biography too,
with its ambitions, hopes, dreams and wishes, pulls us forward as well.
There is as yet no traditional clairvoyant spiritual perception - the astral body is still being purified during the Fire Trial. What was the lower ego, or that which begins its path accompanied by the Shadow or threefold double-complex, has more and more merged and identified itself with the higher ego - the self-participated aspect of conscience.
When we live purely in Parsifal questions
(that is, poor
in spirit), in the artistic mastery of our
antipathies and sympathies, having set aside self-importance and
attending to the object of thinking with the intention to love, then
thinking is meet with other-presence, as needed.
This is the quite definite inner experience of the delicate and
subtle presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence, which is
described in the John Gospel as follows: What's born of the flesh is
flesh, and what's born of the breath is breath. Don't be amazed
because I told you you have to be born again. The wind blows
where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it
comes from or where it goes; it's the same with everyone born of the
breath John 3: 6-8
This Fire Trial is all the more painful, because we have become exposed via the previous layers (stages) of spiritual and character development, to a much deeper introspective understanding of our own desire body - our own astral body. We can now not only think within the other - the Thou, but also we can now think much deeper within our own soul - we are naked before our own introspective clarity of perception. That which remains unredeemed, and still yet outside the full and completed Fire Trial of purification, lies inwardly exposed to us. The descending conscience (like the descent of the dove in the Gospels) meets the rising lower ego, both seeking union and marriage; and this light from above, a kind of deep moral Grace, illuminates and warms all that is yet shadow in the soul. Emerson has put the bare bones of it like this in his lecture, The American Scholar: "For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds..."
*
Just as we learned to think about, with and within the other - the Thou, so we learn to think about, with and within ones own soul. Each skill, craft and art of thinking emerges from its corresponding Trial.
The Earth Trial is a given, it is where most of us start.
The Water Trial requires our first struggles with renunciation
and the beginning, and delicate, expressions of love. The Air
Trial takes us even further, to the abandonment of our favorite
thoughts. Then we also renounce our excessive sense of Self, in
the process of facing the Fire Trial. There we are also most
exposed to our own other-Self, - the Shadow - which is now fully
illuminated - no secrets whatsoever.
Let us consider, briefly, some hints on
the encounter with the Shadow, from the point of view of the
Discipleship stream.
When Valentin Tomberg was writing as an anthroposophist, he described in his book "Inner Development", three aspects to the Shadow: a luciferic double, an ahrimanic double and a human double. Later, in his profoundly Christian "Meditations on the Tarot: a Journey into Christian Hermeticism" he wrote of the tempter, the prosecutor and of egregores - that is of self-created psychic parasites in the soul (Steiner called these latter creatures, in Man as Symphony of the Creative Word: cancers or tumors of the soul).
When we think discursively - talk
inwardly to ourselves, the unconscious works into the soul. That
is, both the higher and the lower unconscious are present. No
true thought, for example, can arise in the soul except for its having
come to us via the living stream of thought (see Kuhlewind here).
But, because in ordinary and fallen soul consciousness, we are
bound (intentionally by the Gods so as to give us true freedom on the
earth) into an inner darkness of spirit, we only can know thought as it
falls out and down into the soul from its original living element.
In discursive thought the living element has died.
Conscience, another higher element of the
unconscious, also speaks into the soul via discursive thought, as that
whispering still small voice.
At the same time, the Shadow is active
here as well. When we struggle with our own temptation or
tempt others (the luciferic double), or when we hurt ourselves, or
others (prosecute ourselves) with mean thoughts (the ahrimanic double),
these too come from the unconscious into discursive thinking.
When we fall, over and over again into temptation such as
addiction or alcoholism, part of the soul becomes excessively free of
the ego, for the ego is weak in many ways. This part can be
called an egregore or a tumor of soul.
However, since all manner of bad habits
(an ill temper, an abusive tongue) are also connected to tiny tumors of
soul, I have began to feel that this language lacks what art and a
sense of beauty needs to give to our conceptions, so above I wrote only
of wounds, of our karma of wounds. In the
case of egregores or serious tumors or cancers of the soul, we can call
these self-generated
wounds.
What the life passages of the Trials give
to us is ever greater consciousness. We draw out of the
unconscious, through a more and more awake intention and attention,
not only its lower elements, the Shadow and darkly cold side of
temptations, prosecutions and wounds, but also the Light and heart
warmed side, the stream of living thought and participated conscience.
So, in facing the Water Trial of the mote
and the beam we begin the work of discipleship, the work of seeking
reintegration and reunion with the Divine Mystery Itself. So also
with the Air Trial and the Fire Trial. Bit by bit we perceive and
then let go what is dark in the unconscious, thereby separating and
drawing into the light the gold of our growing will-in-thinking.
The fruit of each Trial remains with us,
and at each passage becomes deeper. The soul becomes a rich
texture of layers of inner song and music in the form of ever unfolding
capacities of will, in the corresponding creative cultivation of
sublime elements in the feeling life, all interwoven with the arising
and passing away of the breath-stream of living thought.
The purified
will (an appropriately moral intention and attention) creates heart
warmth in the soul-soil of feeling, out of which the light and life
filled flower of thought is born. And,
because we are first born into this process out of the Earth Trial of
freedom, our whole passage in these Life Trials goes forward in
freedom. It all evolves out of our choices. Recall Emerson:
In self trust all virtues are comprehended.[emphasis added]
Nothing renounced has disappeared, but
rather the soul becomes an instrument, which the i-AM
in freedom learns to play. The notes and intervals become primal
dynamic expressions of soul forces and capacities, many generated out
of spiritual exercises. Just as we must practice the use of
a material musical instrument, so we must practice the capacities of
the soul. At the same time, many forces and capacities (if not
more) have a quality that comes only from the moral tone of the soul.
We purify the instrument of the soul as much as we learn how to
use it. Both are needed, both are necessary. The spiritual
exercises, that is the how as in technique, has more
kinship with the teachings of the true Alchemists - the stream of the
Kings, while the moral purity of the soul has more kinship with the
teachings of Christ - the stream of the Shepherds.
Steiner's The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is the
modern transformation of the Christ-in-me moral essence of
the John Gospel, while Knowledge
of Higher Worlds is the modern transformation
of the Rosicrucian Ideals of spiritual developmental exercises.
While the latter has more kinship with the soul nature of
Central Europe - the seeking to incarnate the Ideal, the former
has more kinship with the soul nature of the American - the need to act
morally in the world. Both are present everywhere in the world,
it is just the mix and their proportions that vary from one soul
gesture to another, in the wonder and mystery of the Threefold World.
Let us now seek to make a whole.
We become more and more inwardly free as we renounce and transform sympathies and antipathies,
then as well the very thought content itself, until finally we
sacrifice our own importance. Each act of renunciation is
accompanied by a corresponding and deeper capacity to love. Each
act of love, beginning with the most simple appreciation of the other -
the Thou, creates inner purity: inner light and warmth. We are in
the process of learning to make of the soul a temple, and to fill it with created and cultivated feelings of
reverence and wonder at not only the world of nature, but also the
world of social community - the stream of karmic wounds and free
destiny meetings with our companions in life.
Ultimately, this inner and outer moral
work leads us to becoming fully inwardly naked to ourselves in the Fire
Trial (where there is no longer the possibility of escaping the
Shadow), and as well fully and consciously naked to the other-Presence (the kingdom of heaven is within you). But even in
the face of the
other-Presence we are nevertheless completely
free. The nature of the breath (the other-Presence) is to bring
not only a new depth of comprehension, but ever more freedom, for we
never stop being the principle willful agent of the thought-content
that arises in the soul. Overtime we become even freer and more
creative - a true artist in thought.
The creation of a human thought content is the sole province of the 10th Hierarchy. Only in us, and through our love, does the Cosmos know Itself in the beauty of human thought. We were told this as long ago as Genesis 2:19-20, with the symbolic picture that unto Adam is given the power of naming every livin