Readers should realize that unless this is forwarded to others,
it will not receive its maximum distribution.
Which begs the question of whether anyone should bother to read it at all,
given that it is about a prediction made by Rudolf Steiner, and the story
of how what he said has come true ... or not
AKA
The Potential Mission of the Anthroposophical Society in the Early Centuries of the Third Millennium
the understanding of this Potential Mission is intimately connected to first fully understanding:
the Culmination*
Christ's Incarnation: first millennium the School of Chartres: second millennium the Culmination: third millennium
the Symphonic Gestures of the Gradual Embodiment of the Cosmic Christ into Earthly Humanity and Civilization
*“culmination”: the highest or climactic point of something, esp. as attained after a long time.
Caveat: this writing is a work of art, with all the related potential flaws.Rudolf Steiner, the Magical/Sage of Anthroposophy, either saw the future - or, he did not. Being personally involved, I thought I should tell my side of the Tale.
introductory materials
New Revelation: flowers of art&thought, scientifically rigorous&religious ....
The Nature Institute
,,, .......
American Phoenix
a novel
painting by Robert Nuckels
titled: Theurgia
The Truth is that New Revelation is Everywhere, Like a book unfolding flowers in your own mind
& in ~!~!~!~
All minds as well ... nobody owns THE revelation
GIVEN THAT: just being your crazy own self .... dancing ....
reveal that, ... and the world becomes ...
presently being revised, watch out for ganja based pot holes in the below
Plato was a pagan (liked to party and fuck), and
Aristotle was a very serious student, young,
in love with his gift, and his place
in time and space
The Culmination is about how the Platonists from Chartres (and earlier as disciples)
came back and met up with the Aristotelians flocking to Steiner's Spiritual
Scientific - thoughts~poetic -
in order for the Platonists to teach them (the Aristotelians)
Magic&Sex&Dancing-intoxicated
Central Europe - turn of the 19th to the 20th Century
lost to grave unfathomable woes,
germanic modes of conduct
amidst a field of thoughts
stale and dying
Our hero comes with more
help than few of us can fathom
for it is a curse to see&make/create/believers,
where it is blessed to believe and not see
The Gods and Goddesses started playing with Steiner's Soul&Spirit
at a very early age. Those Folks-divine, and their friends,
come calling at all kinds of odd times,
yet fully in love with our need
for freedom and art
In Central Europe,
Steiner took the German Language
- a spirit of remarkable exact-flexibility -
and wove dreams, wild dreams sometimes
(inspired multitudes)
a great showman too,
once - y00u know how folks gather
and stare - hard to bear that,...
so some privacy needed
and the notebooks
~ the sitting still ~
so as to go mind/dancing in the imagination ...
after a bit of prayer
{and dancing on the side? -
pray in private, right?}
the Secrets of Solomon's Temple,
solo~man = one human being is the whole
the microcosm
the akaskic record
human consciousness
layered with senses
and life processes
She Hides Nothing.
We dancing prayerful
always Being/creating/manifesting/dreaming
what/becomes of the next/now
Moon-Earth Nexus Awakening Old-Latent Earth Powers
from the atavistic (the old gods)
and the new
(scientifically inclined to be also religious and art-creating)
Human Mastery of the Creation Slowly Being Handed Over
On every level of life.
billions see films imagining heroes and mighty powers
in battles with evil everywhere
So Platoeans ask:
Is God&Evil your best shot
you name-makers of categories endless?
does evolution/history & the wild stories ...
do they turn inside out and upside down,
on occasion.
Mother Is Watching,
still sending down moon mood-dreams tho'
magic powers and all becoming-commences a common what/wish for ..l? what&@~!~ my own heart dancing ~!~
The Below is a long and carefully crafted discussion of these matters, framed more in the languages of Anthroposophists ... joined together in this slow roasting of humanity in the fires of the Third Millennium. Holy Breath Anyone? Dying and Becoming of Western Civilization. Do you have an Ark for These Tides of Time?
The Culmination does not stand on its own. It has a back-story. It represents an "event", which is occurring near the beginning of the Third Millennium, and as such it has its antecedents - which are large scale rhythmic movements in the course of human history.
West& East
different Ways
West and East: contrasting worlds (Vienna, 1-12 June, 1922).
“The will of the West must give power to the thought of the East;
the thought of the West must release the will of the East.”
Something quite musical/aesthetic and moral is sounding and resounding within and around all of us. Each millennium seems to begin with something unique and I have had to wonder to what degree the original Disciples of Christ later might have become members of the School Chartres and then still later perhaps were part of the Culmination. This is not just idle speculation, for personal experience drives the facing of this riddle.
First, before this preamble continues, a brief comment on "words". They are, individually, all very important, and here I'll just use one as a reference point: "Initiate". Steiner was one, and taught how to become one. He was/is not the only "initiate", some of whom appear to have an interest in far darker Arts. There is also more than one "how" (Way) to become one as well. In the true West, America, we can use the term shaman, which is better because the true development of a shaman concerns their character as it grows as a member of the tribe or group. Mainly this leads to the same result as initiation, namely: the development of a human being who speaks with spirits.
sacredly-wrapped Egyptian Tarot--on left< best book in my study - the window on the forest the bulletin board above my desk/altar
platonistical/pagan/magical: bad habits, mystical seeking universal truths with a deck of cards ?(!)!~~no less,
coupled with a lot of staring into space while intoxicated an a natural medicinal,
crystals and Hopi stones
friends with storms and lightening
I'll be using the term "initiate" below, somewhat aggressively in the sense of putting that Idea in the reader's face, so to speak. I mean by this aggressive use to make us eat the term, to devour it and to recognize its actual limits. For example, if we use the word "initiate" to put someone on a pedestal, or to make them an authority, we've fallen down the Rabbit Hole, following after Alice. Since the Culmination also means the maturation of the Anthroposophical Society, it is far past time to stop resting the whole weight of all that we do on the shoulders of one human being - a human being who was not perfect and did not get everything right. That perfect human being - our Idea of Rudolf Steiner - we invented and it is fully Myth. We need to be doing science, which has no room for Myths at all. That said, let us continue ...
Stephen Usher, an Aristotelian as was Steiner - the "great initiate", wrote an excellent article on the Culmination. Below is a small bit of what Usher tried to illuminate about this Event, first by paraphrasing Steiner. Usher's whole essay should be read, and a link to the full article is in footnote (1).
Usher’s article contained this language, seemingly paraphrasing Steiner: Further, he [Steiner] states that a great Culmination of the Anthroposophical Movement should occur at the end of the Century, and upon this depended the fate of civilization. If the Culmination actually occurred, civilization would receive a new impulse that would lift it to a higher stage, but if it failed then a terrible and inevitable decay would result. The key participants in the Culmination drama are the Aristotelians and the Platonists. The former include Rudolf Steiner and most of the souls who established Anthroposophy at the beginning of the Century. The latter included the great masters of the School of Chartres in France who typically incarnate out of sync with the Aristotelians but who would incarnate in sync with them to achieve the Culmination.
Here is a more literal translation of Steiner’s words in the karma lectures that are relevant to the same set of conceptions. Free translation by Jostein Saether (2):
“Those who had come up to the spiritual world under the leadership of Alanus ab Insulis said to the descending Aristotelians: It is not our time to be present on earth now. We must first work out of the spiritual world. We cannot at all descend in some embodiments of the earth [in the nearest time]. You now have the task of coaching the intellect in the incoming consciousness soul age. The further development continued so by both those who were the leaders of the Chartres School and those who had senior positions in the Dominican Order were the head of those in the powerful transcendental solemn assembly who in the first half of the 19th century were preparing the later anthroposophical stream. First, they had to descend again, who more or less had worked as Aristotelians, because under the influence of intellectualism time was not yet ripe to deepen the spirituality of the first. But there existed an inviolable agreement. And from this it must from what is anthroposophical movement emerge something that must find its completion before the end of the current century. While there hovers a fate over the Anthroposophical Society that many of those who today are members of it must come down to earth before the end of the 20th century, but when united with those who also were either leaders of the Chartres School or students in it. So that before the end of the 20th century the Platonists of Chartres must interact here on earth with the recent Aristotelians, if civilization shall not get into a complete maturity. [...] That this occurs, people in the 1900s must not forfeit! But since everything depends on the free will today, then this that it happens – namely, whether the groups which are allied with each other may go down again to do spiritualisation of culture in the 20th century – is additionally also depending on if the Anthroposophical Society understands nurturing anthroposophy devotedly in the right way.”
I could be called a Platonist (but mostly I’m just a human being like everyone else), who has learned in this lifetime certain skills, crafts, and arts of thinking, which then naturally lead to a further and fuller development of certain details of the Idea of the Culmination, than those Steiner was able to provide many decades ago. This is mostly because I am involved directly, as a contemporary of and a participant in this Culmination event/moment, which means that in whatever seas of perception I sail they are far different from Steiner’s visions from almost a century ago. He could only try to anticipate the broader implications. The details that I provide are born in the aesthetic rules of karma, and were thereby allowed/made to be know to me directly.
initial questions (points of departure)
To begin ... some remarks on various subtle nuances in the content of the two versions of the meaning of the Culmination just quoted above: Usher’s interpretation/paraphrases and Steiner’s actual words (in translation), - i.e. more stuff on "words".
The language: “...great Culmination of the Anthroposophical Movement...” troubles me. When I was first learning about Anthroposophy, I was encouraged (indirectly) to think of the Movement as the daughter movements, such as Waldorf and so forth. Later, I was advised that when Steiner used the term Movement he meant something in the world of Spirit, not the daughter movements. I only point this out to raise this question in the minds of my readers, for while I personally can provide no certainty here, it seems more than likely that the Movement is, in itself, something far less of the earth than is the A. Society. Perhaps a vital touch of the Mystery of Anthroposophia is to be found there - in this Movement, which might also be described as a purely spiritual community.
In contemplating the whole Idea of the Culmination, it also occurred to me to wonder about the use of the terms: “...the fate of civilization.”.
painting by: Franz Theodor Aerni
Fate, to me, is a rather peculiar word/concept because in this context it can mean whether or not civilization would come to an end, or perhaps (again - subjectively to me the more likely meaning:) that what was to be determined was the direction of civilization. Then, of course, we have the follow-on phrase: “...if it {the Culmination} failed then a terrible and inevitable decay would result.”, which can sound very much like an end, or like a downward direction depending on how one wants to read the whole.
Then we have the concept that an aspect of the meaning of the Culmination has something to do with an encounter between Aristotelians and Platonists, - two names/concepts I used to always have a hard time appreciating in any kind of concrete sense. Who are they, and how would we identify them and their works? But again, Steiner apparently was a Aristotelian, so could he really deliver, in advance of the actual event, a full and detailed explanation for our understanding? Whether he knew of them or not, he did not give us the 20th Century names of any Platonist, for that certainly would have been a heavy burden to place on anyone.
[For an important and interesting contribution to the discussion of this article, here is a link to something by E.A. MacKenzie [Liz} (for details on her see the end of this essay): Some Thoughts Arising on Joel Wendt’s Essay on The Culmination. A preview: It is my view, in the mind’s eye, that at the time of Christ’s Incarnation the Aristotelians in the spiritual world functioned as “living concepts” of Christ’s Being, and the “living percepts”, the eye-witnesses around Jesus Christ were predominantly Platonists. So the concepts or conceivers were living human beings just as the eye-witnesses, the perceivers, were living human beings.]
LIZ, A FEW YEARS AGO
As an added contextual aspect from my own research, there seem to be two major soul/spiritual currents or streams at work in history of Ideas in modern civilization in the West. One, which we might call the Copernican Revolution, involved the transition from the Intellectual Soul Epoch to the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul Epoch. From this river of thought and action natural science arose, and in fact almost all of modern materialistic thought. Ahriman was often the inspirer of this current, which led - as indicated by Steiner - to the Ahrimanic Deception, although I prefer (for artistic reasons) the words: the Ahrimanic Enchantment.
The other current of action and thought can be called: the counter-Copernican Revolution, and included such personalities as Goethe, S.T. Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as the social-spiritual movements we call Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and ultimately Anthroposophy. These personalities resisted the march of natural science to confine our understanding of the nature of Reality to only being made of matter and energy, with no spirit at all. That erroneous Idea, which today dominates the minds of so many, is a triumph for the anti-Christ spirit, which wants to deny even the existence of the Father and the Son.
The leader of this counter-Copernican spiritual river was Christ, although inter-mediating surrogates such as Christian Rosenkreutz and Rudolf Steiner apparently played a needed role, up until the early third of the 20th Century. That Event (occurring around 1933, and named by Steiner the Return of Christ in the Ethereal) is when ordinary human consciousness had so developed in individuals, that this evolving self-consciousness could begin to perceive the Christ, personally and directly - whether through inner visioning (some form of the old clairvoyance), or through the new Mystery of clair-thinking, as the active presence (or form) of an Angel in the thought-world (the ethereal world) - the world where true thinking acts and lives.
Modern Science Transcendentalism Anthroposophia
analysis alone imagination&synthesis encountering directly spiritual beings
preliminary remarks on the nature of civilization, and its relationship to the Cosmic Christ
Even the word/concept/idea civilization in the above quotes can misdirect us if we are not more precise as to what it means. The following could be said to be the result of research, which is partially true. I did decades of research into the spiritual nature of the social/political world. Where I ended up was in a relationship with the Cosmic Christ, who I was to discover - something which should not have surprised me - was everywhere embodied in Reality.
That’s right. Look around you. Glance away from the page and actually do this. Notice the sense world in which you exist. In addition, pause for a moment and notice your own mind - thinking. An outer world and an inner world. Yet, this totality of all that which every human being knows and experiences lies within the inwardness of the Cosmic Christ. All the lesser hierarchies live there too - within Him. He is not somewhere outside us, but rather we are inside Him. Yet, we read in Luke that the Kingdom of Heaven is inside you. A seeming paradox, given that in what seems to be the same sense we are inside Him. Perhaps the paradox is resolved within this thought: I will be with you until the culmination of Time. Eternity lies outside of Space and Time, yet touches those two at every point, line and plane of their existence, including the Divine Inside being wedded to our human inside. Christ is no further away from our own ego or "I" than is our guardian angel and/or higher ego or conscience. We just have to learn to pay attention with the right discernment.
Is this what Rudolf Steiner tried to point to when he described Christ’s blood falling to the earth at Calvary, so that from Steiner’s clairvoyant visioning he perceived then the whole aura of the Earth itself changing, as Christ became the Spirit of the Earth Existence? Now such a majestic transformation will not happen fully immediately. It will take time - Ages even.
My experience is that we are inside Love, a glorious middle realm poised in between the Father, who seemingly went on to a well deserved contemplative rest on the other side of the Starry Firmament, and the Mother, who is gracefully continuously creating with Her companions from the most inward and invisible deeps of the whole of the Creation. Father Sky and Mother Earth, say the aboriginal peoples. Two sides of one coin.
disbelievers have valid viewslet's not pretend otherwise
For most ordinary thinkers a civilization is those ordered outer structures and events of social/political existence and history. So for some there can be a “clash of civilizations”, wherein the modern mostly Christian West, grinds up against the seemingly static resistance of the Islamic in the middle and far East. Different values seem to be at odds with each other, although this apparent dissonance arises because we confuse commercial time (time determined by the needs of commerce) with cultural time, which requires we actually appreciate the different developmental stages in which each culture exists.
To judge the Islamic world by comparing it to our level of cultural development, simply because the needs of industry established world-wide time zones, is to make a huge error of thought. We give to our count of years, what is derived from an artificial date connected to our dominant religion. The ancient Chinese culture counts years in such ways that it is currently 4709, 4708 or 4648, according to which system is used. The Islamic cultural year is 1432 (approximately). The Mayans, with their famous so-called prediction about the year 2012, counted days, not years, and in December of 2012 we find just the last day of the end of a great cycle of days numbering in the hundreds of thousands, followed by the first day of the beginning of another great cycle.
What goes unnoticed is that this outer order also involves the inner states of being/consciousness of billions of individual souls. An invisible realm of vast dimensions is simultaneously present everywhere in the Sphere of Earth Existence. There is a thought world (spirit), and an astral world (soul), which is not actually as separate - one from the other, as we fancy. Yet, within these invisible realms every individual needs to be part of a particular cultural milieu, language and people in which to develop, such that the cultures of the world are meant by the Divine Mystery to actually be highly differentiated.
unjustified, and unforgivencupid's quiver is never empty"i sing the body electric", from the movie Fame ...Electricity is of the Creation. The Gods&Goddesses made It, so Deal with it.The Gods&Goddesses Think Otherwise, and the debris of Their Fancies are Us/us/ all in all ..Nothing
in the Creation is unclean, ... []"good&evil" is a "human" conception.[]
Somebody "invented" sex, and platonists are of the view that as interesting as that is that that will go bye bye, wtf are we doing not talking about sex ...
oh, and by the Way, there is no mystery of/to technology, just follow the trail of mental pictures in the imagination of the what was just before, and then the next just before ...
until you get to ~!~!~!~=FIRE
boys like to play with fire ... girls like to be warm and clean, 'cause they got stuck with bearing children inside them no less - still all that makes is the sleeve, the dna thing, the what is not us riding in from our own star ...
time for anthropops to step up and act out their point of view, with some bit of political fierceness ...
electricity is magic power contained, sort of taken out of the whole, roped down for a time, with technology actually being a magical rite, because not one of the inventors knew what it was they believed they were subduing.
sigil = a name for a kind of gesture of the hand when drawn by the hand in the air or on paper - classes of invisible beings have different names/powers/responsibilities, so what ancient's did - with motions drawing in the aethers which they saw, ...
Oogle google-images for "sigil":
https://www.google.com/search?q=sigil&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjAx5WWtbLZAhVHslMKHYndANIQ_AUICigB&biw=1242&bih=643
Oogle google-images for "electrical circuits":
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1242&bih=643&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=iP2KWr34JouyzwLh5JnADg&q=electrical+circuits&oq=electrical+circuits&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.76026.83156.0.86126.32.18.4.8.9.0.175.1521.13j4.18.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..3.28.1495.0..0i67k1j0i24k1j0i10i24k1j0i13k1.75.Fio4eYvRQ1g
While "taming by experiment", ideas arose and a way of thought required the production of "pathways", aided by the fact that materials science grew up with other symbol-setsplease observe the arts involved in the above "names" of very complex streams of raw data at near lIghT speeds, but yet, not seeing us, and we not seeing IT.
human beings, locked into the mystery of good and evil, live in materialism, meaning, ultimately, all SF/Fantasy ... we have hungers for power, and only the sleeves/avatar bodies wear out, and under rules/mysterium - so unpoetic the raw justice of karma and reincarnation ... never meant to be easy ...the source-code of electricity is us ... deal with it ... there isn't anything out there not us, we being ... well us ... so how about we think kindly of what ever is tamed-willingly to dance in our tools, along side our adventures ....
When we come to see the world from the view point of Love, we will realize that the outer order and structure is only secondary - a kind of epiphenomena, while the state of being and consciousness of the individual soul and spirit is primary. Each individual is uniquely the object of Love, and in their personal biography then is found the true meaning of human earth existence. Love, having all of Eternity to act, misses no detail of anything that happens in any individual life. Commercial time, and cultural time, do not determine how Eternity (which is outside of time and space) has to act.
But Love is not all that is involved ... so is Justice. The afterlife and the rules of Karma are about Justice as much as they are about Love. [Special thanks to my friend Harvey Bornfield, whose works I have been rereading. A link to his "thought" can be found in note 12 below. Harvey too will play (later) a very interesting role in this whole tale.]
To take up a concrete contemporary example: Whether Russia wins in any kind of encounter with the West in the Ukraine has little meaning in comparison to what happens in the inner soul-life of those enduring these individual trials. In fact, without the prevalence of the outer conflict, that inner soul-life is not presented with the need to wake up to potential personal moral choices. While the News is fascinated with the vaguely imagined politics of the situation, the existential reality is that each particular local event is the point: For example, two soldiers, facing each other with loaded guns on one or another side of a barrier, are then confronted with a moral dilemma which may demand one of them kill the other. All the same, each such personal crisis event is the result of the finest Arts of Love and Justice (karma). For the miracle is that we remain, in the moment of all such crises, free to choose/create our own course of action, weighting even in an instance all the consequences whose ultimate meaning only we inwardly behold and determine.
The pictures on the News show us bodies, but we must rely on our own thinking/imagination to perceive the differentiated inner nature of the soul/minds inhabiting those bodies; all of which different inner natures arise because of individual need. We are not meant to be alike, and as a consequence our individual moral dilemmas are only superficially similar.
Nor is it then just a simple choice to kill or be killed, for many are the related variables, and complex the totality which each “I” must grasp in resolving these dilemmas out of their own sense of what is right in the total circumstances of any particular existential situation. In fact, if we listen to the tales carried by film these days, from one people and nation to another, we can see there revealed that we live in a Age when absolute moral laws are losing their grip, and each individual more and more must create the responsive choice on their own, out of their own sense of the good and the true and the beautiful. These individualized dilemmas, within billions of souls, are the practical hallmark of the Epoch of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul.
To continue the example: Those dilemmas in the Ukraine, along with the millions of other events faced by individuals all over the world, where freedom-seeking oppressed peoples try throw off their oppression, is the point. The Arab Spring has a spiritual mission within, not just without. Without that inner dilemma there is no possibility of change in the biography of individuals, and thus no transformation of the ego forces that is to be carried on to the next incarnation. The mystery of the will only unfolds presently (our current Age) in moments of creative choice-making; and, outer events, under the guidance of Love and Justice, are all designed to bring about the various kinds of personal and individualized life-crises needed for this alchemical transformation of the “I”. That we participated in the pre-birth world in the creation of these dilemmas ought not to be ignored.
Nor should we conceive that the oppressor is fully wrong, for if we could see into their inner biography, they too face life trials of soul and spirit development. No one is outside the compass of Love and Justice. Although, the life-trials leading to true and free individualism (Steiner's ethical individualism), run into the Christ-determined alchemical social process noted here: Matthew 10: 34-40 "Don't think I came to cause peace across the land. I didn't come to cause peace, I came to wield a sword, because I came to divide a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a bride against her mother-in-law, and to make a man's servants his enemies. Whoever prefers father or mother over me is not worthy of me; and whoever prefers son or daughter over me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever found his life will lose it, and the one who lost his life because of me will find it. Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me, receives my Sender." The Unvarnished Gospels, by Andy Gaus.
Where some seeming stability or peace reigns, the personal and individual life choices are more subtle. In America, for example, the loss of a job and the resulting apparent descent out of a middle class existence, is also a trial by fire in life, which changes the ego’s will forces through direct personal experience. And for another example: while the outer fact is that in the Favelas of Brazil local thugs and drug lords provide what little social order there is, inwardly it remains the core dynamic that each Loved individual biography is provided its needed alchemical trials through these events. The Cosmic Christ is certainly the Lord (Artist) of Karma. He surrounds and interpenetrates every event, often using helpers such as the guardian angel, or even the yet unrecognized wondrous creatures that accept the onerous duties that make up our personal and most intimate soul companions: the threefold Double-complex.
Once more: The core element is choice, which requires freedom, and all aspects of this magnificent symphony of karmic art should amaze us, if we but reflect non-judgmentally on our own remarkable biographies. This is why I named my book on the phenomenology of modern earth existence: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything (3).
thinking as an inner element of civilization, and as a context for the Culmination
In a like fashion, the Culmination has both an outer and an inner aspect, although a significant aspect of the shared locus of these events in individual biographies has the potential to take place in and around the Anthroposophical Society. The study of Steiner’s works has paved the Way, and given us a shared language out which to speak of these matters in a spiritually intimate manner.
My own research, of many years, concerning the nature of thinking, has led me to recognizing that there is a profound inner difference between abstract cause and effect thinking (characteristic of science and modern education), and the more living thinking suggested by Rudolf Steiner in his works on cognition (GA-2, GA-3, and GA-4 - see note 5). In abstract cause and effect thinking, that aspect of the soul we might superficially label the intellect tends to dominate over the forces of the heart. This is the natural and unavoidable result of the ahrimanic Double in the own soul, during the Age of the Ahrimanic Enchantment.
The living thinking moderates these raw tendencies of the intellect, by introducing a self-conscious moral aesthetic, which Steiner appears to have meant with the terms: heart thinking. Heart thinking is warm and other-directed. It serves the Thou rather than the self. (6)
Please keep in mind that we are dealing here with something akin to a wide spectrum of various kinds of thinking, - a spectrum with edges and middles. The thinking of the average person only reflects that abstract cause and effect thinking quality because this quality tends to be taught in our systems of education, and is essentially latent in our languages themselves, as a long term effect of the Enchantment. Our inner-wording (discursive) thinking has to follow the rules of our languages, and those languages today, under the influence of natural science, over-emphasize and prize the intellectual element. We are materialists in our instinctive thinking, because our cultures are presently most likely to be materialistic at their core, which is a natural and necessary product of the Copernican Revolution and the lingering influence of the Intellectual Soul Epoch on the early years of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul Epoch.
All the same, each individual can lend to their thinking a moral aesthetic - the intentions of their own heart. Everywhere then is the inner tension between the temptation to cold and selfish or warm and other-directed thinking. The real battle with the ahrimanic takes place inside us, not in the outer world.
Now during the centuries of scientific/materialistic thinking that is the Ahrimanic Enchantment, something has spread outward from the Culture of the West, enveloping the whole world. This does not mean, however, that there is no counter-part in the Culture of the East. One enlightened Tibetan Lama, Chogyam Trungpa, called it: spiritual materialism. Great currents of soul-life move among the different peoples, languages and cultures of the world, and everything is highly differentiated, for each individual biography needs its individualized world conception - a conception which is a fusion of individual thought and the sometimes embarrassing riches of ones own particular cultural milieu. Iranians, for example, often critically thought of by the West, are via their language rooted in the ancient spirituality of Persia, a cultural treasure of no little significance. The meanings of individual words in all languages contain wonderful tales of the related past-cultural mysteries.
No one is initially personally responsible, as all us must accept and experience the nature of the language, or the system of education, into which we are born. Read the works of Owen Barfield, a 20th Century Platonist, for excellent discussions of this history of meanings [the inner], and the meaning of history [the outer] (7 ). Other factors in the life of the soul determine whether the abstract cause and effect thinking, for example, becomes excessively cold and calculating, a selfish quality evident in many social ills. Barfield, by the way, was not the only 20th Century Platonist involved in the A. Society. We would have to include George Adams Kaufmann and many other earlier Goethean scientists of note.
This abstract cause and effect thinking is also a normal and particular characteristic of the influence of the Aristotelians over the last several centuries in Western Civilization. You may now want to reread the material quoted above from the karma lectures, for what was just written fills in some missing detail. And, as the natural science of the Copernican Revolution has spread all over the world, along with English becoming the international language of money, only the most remote corners of the world are free of this ahrimanic influence/Enchantment.
As a consequence, over the years of my experiences of the works (lectures and writings) of members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society, it is my observation that abstract cause and effect thinking is very present in the A. Society; and, that this is something normal and expect-able. Although Georg Kuhlewind (another 20th Century Platonist), in his From Normal to Healthy tried to redirect those Aristotelian tendencies in the Society onto another course of action.
We may see then that this kind of thinking by the intellect alone is not always there in all aspects of the A. Society and the daughter movements, but certainly it often dominates, because we yet remain only semi-consciously aware of the true pragmatic meaning of the Culmination (again, Steiner was only able to hint, and that in an idealistic fashion). Here is a quote concerning the consequences so far of this “normal” situation, from someone who read one of my recent e-mails: “A friend, mentor of mine and a colleague of Pfeiffer and many other folks well known in Anthroposophical circles - gave me this (I’m paraphrasing for clarity) “Aristotelians unchecked by Platonists will lead us all to the furnaces of Ahriman “
It is my view that this comment aptly frames the prevalence of abstract cause and effect thinking in the A. Society, connected to the Steiner-predicted domination of that Society by the Aristotelians. It will perhaps help to contrast this characterization with what my research has uncovered as regards the thinking of Platonists (a small quote from a larger work - see note 8):
The main distinguishing features of Platonists is their love of the Idea. Not of Steiner’s teachings, or of any system of thought, but what might better be called: the right Idea. A statement that is not true bothers these souls. Steiner was okay if he gave out what to the Platonist sensibility was the right Idea. If he got goofy in some fashion, this made for difficulties. When I write about this soul-feeling I write using the metaphors of music. The wrong Idea is dissonant. It lacks harmony with the rest of the Idea-world as I have come to know that. I experience the dissonance first - the lack, as it were, of a kind of moral aesthetic. After that, I have to search for the why of it.
For abstract cause and effect thinking there is just the need to express a personal understanding, and the nature of the individual Idea, connected to each single word and phase, is secondary. The Aristotelian writes using the conventions of ordinary speech and writing, without thinking much about the deeper inner nature of the acts of listening and reading at all. For the Platonist, the nature of the individual word and phrase is essential. Yet, Aristotelians frequently can’t appreciate Platonists because the Aristotelian recognizes that what he is writing is often just an opinion or point of view, not actual knowledge, and then attributes that same impulse to the Platonist.
In a lot of cases this “opinion” quality is itself not fully self-recognized. Absent serious introspective (inner) work, various qualities of our soul-inwardness remain unobserved. For example, a concept we hold on to can, in general, be a belief, or an understanding, or actual knowledge. A belief is something we hold to be true, but have no direct experience coupled to reasoning to support it (such as the concept related to the “big bang” origin theory of the universe, or its contrary: “intelligent design”). An understanding is something given to us by others, who we trust to be more expert, and can include macro-Darwinian evolution, or its contrary Steiner’s tales of the planetary evolution leading up to earth existence, and the various Ages and post-atlantean Epochs of our civilizations.
Knowledge is something we have to empirically experience ourselves. Although there are variations as to how we do that, whether through scientific experiments, or the contrary, which is the knowing that comes with the experience of thinking as perception, following Steiner’s maps to cognition in GA-2, GA-3, and GA-4 (again, note 5). Our consciousness of the how is crucial. For example, it is possible to take any concept or complex of concepts (an Idea), and inwardly behold it while evoking our conscience (by asking ourselves to judge whether we hold a true thought) to discern whether this inward object is a belief, an understanding, or knowledge. Practice is the best course here, but the result over time is to create a willed inner organ for the truth that can serve us in many ways.
Another way to appreciate this is in terms of Steiner’s “the exceptional state”, from The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Ordinary mind in our Age is directly mostly at the sense world, and hardly at all at itself. When the mind also learns to turn deeply inward, and to notice more and more our inner reality (introspection - or self-observation of the soul), the activity of thinking naturally becomes more and more self-conscious (awake). The Platonist’s love of the Idea is the sign of their often being in one or another variation of this exceptional state.
So an Aristotelian intellectual, such as Prokofieff (no criticism intended here), needs to make many references to Steiner, and lots of footnotes, in order to surround and support the opinions and points of view he is offering. And, the A. Society, having not connected in a practical down to earth way to Steiner’s The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, doesn’t readily perceive the differences or the problems. While the Platonist, who either knows Steiner’s works on thinking, or has to some degree mastered the same disciplines spontaneously in their own soul, - they are recognizing in their own cognition that it is an act of knowledge, not a mere opinion, because they are apprehending (united with) the Idea itself. Cognition (awake thinking) has become direct and empirical perception.
Read Usher's article on the Culmination (note 1) for a good example of this abstract cause and effect thinking in action, noting that he relies for most of his thinking on his non-critical understanding of what Steiner said, and uses many "opinion" words such that everywhere he is guessing, supposing and imagining the possibilities. Again this is not a wrongness, but an understandable and expect-able characteristic of Aristotelians in our time.
In and around the A. Society, the Platonist has an instinctive tendency not to like or trust the thinking of the Aristotelian, first because it reaches different conclusions, and second is lacking the moral (goodness) aesthetic (beauty) truth of its Ideas; and, the Aristotelian can’t understand the Platonist because the former can’t appreciate what the latter is doing in the absence of displays of erudite opinions, often footnoted with references to Steiner. Not to say footnotes are automatically bad in any way, for they are certainly used here in this article. The point to grasp is for what purpose are the footnotes offered, and what that tells about the mind that is authoring what we read.
Is that mind self-aware of its own nature? And, to what degree, for there is a considerable spectrum of possibilities, none of which represent a failure in the life of the mind of any particular individual.
the Anthroposophical Society as a potential temple to thinking
Returning to the A. Society: The whole situation is exacerbated by the lack of a scientific discipline in the dialogues in A. Society publications, a tragic indirect consequence of the attacks on the spiritual life of Central Europe during the 20th Century. There are almost no disputes and anyone gets to write almost anything, as Irina Gordienko (another Platonist) noted in her book on Prokofieff (9), where she places the root cause of the absence of disputes on the semi-conscious materialism prevalent everywhere in the A. Society. In a mental/thought garden full of unrecognized beliefs, sometimes vague understandings and little direct spiritual knowledge, not a few weeds will take hold. The A. Society does not, in the present, “weed out” non-empirical conceptions or opinions, especially if they seem (derivatively) rooted in the fancied authority of Steiner. Aristotelians understandably value getting along with each other, over the dramas of arguing about what is the truth.
This problem is mostly a function of karma (Love and Justice), which is why Steiner spoke about the karma of the Aristotelians and the Platonists in his karma lectures (see again, note 2). Neither side is so much wrong, but rather their minds are out of sync with each other. The Culmination, within the Society among members and friends, is about getting these streams (the Copernican stream of abstract cause and effect thinking and the counter-Copernican stream of living thinking) to meet, fall in love and through mutual intercourse give birth to something new. In this sense, the Culmination (within the Society) is a kind of love story, and as in all love stories we become involved with the life-trials of a rite of passage. It helps if people are conscious of this rite of passage, so that we participate in it intentionally. We are much like those romantic comedies where at the outset the individual members of the fated pair seem to hate each other, and only over time do they learn to perceive the real character virtues hidden in the other person in plain sight.
The actions of this spiritual community / Anthroposophical Movement is like a symphony, with various themes and melodies that go all the way back to even before Goethe, then continue through all of Steiner’s works, until this spiritual Movement draws nearest to earth existence at the end of the 20th Century (the Culmination), on the cusp of the Third Millennium. Anthroposophia then apparently has spiritual intercourse with those Platonists later to be identified when we discuss in more detail below the happenings on the Internet discussion group, originally called Anthroposophy, then Anthroposophia, and finally The Ark - the most intense version which ran from around 1997 to around 2003.
Nor is this Culmination confined to the A. Society. It is, in a certain sense, everywhere. Instinctive heart-thinking can be observed all over the world trying free itself from the natural limits of the intellectual element/prison evidenced by materialism in all realms, not just in science. The archetypal religious materialist, for example, is the fundamentalist. Within the Islamic world, for another more concrete example, the excesses of fundamentalism evoke their counter-pole in the lives of those ordinary Muslim folk who refuse to be so arbitrarily judgmental. Everywhere we look, once our eyes are opened here, the details of the alchemical trials of individual biographies can be observed. As Stephen Clarke (a living modern Platonist) points out in his seminal work of the Inner Spheres of the Earth, the spiritual reality behind what European cultures conceive of erroneously, as the faux dualism of good and evil, is quite differently understood in many places as well as an often more spiritually mature and healthier Way (see ahead to note 14).
People do not need, what the Aristotelians conceive of as Anthroposophy, to have a deep, good, beautiful and true spiritual life. That egotistical intellectual presumption often makes for all kinds of social ills, wherever the Anthroposophical Society intersects with other cultural views.
The diffuse world-wide aspect of the Culmination, while less conscious of certain higher elements, still resounds within itself with the influence of the Anthroposophical Movement (spiritual community) operating on a larger scale.. One can read about it in such books as Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, and Abrams’ World Changing: a users guide for the 21st Century. The Cosmic Christ and the Holy Mother have not concentrated their Arts solely on the A. Society.
If we can appreciate that, we then need to locate the true meaning of this situation/rite of passage more precisely in the A. Society itself. The main reason this is difficult is because if the A. Society remains asleep as to both the Aristotelian and Platonist impulses, we will continue to not properly value Steiner’s works on the New Mystery of Thinking (The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) and the New Mystery of Community (the Reverse Cultus - see note 10). If those New Mysteries are not developed further through a deeper evolution and incarnation of Anthroposophy, Steiner’s true legacy will be lost to the Third Millennium, and the Culmination, in the sense of the Anthroposophical Society giving a special direction/impulse to the ongoing metamorphosis of Civilization, will have failed, leaving the field (as it were) to Ahriman. The next thousand years will be excessively Ahrimanic, and the consequences for humanity potentially quite terrible.
Try to conceive of the coming future as driven by vast invisible storms in an incomprehensibly huge invisible sea. There are many currents, and many Arks travel them seeking to survive these storms of change. Anthroposophy, which should be better named, the the 21st Century: the Rising of the Sun in the Mind, can play a very important role in these dangerous times, by training navigators of the Mind - navigators of the world of Ideas and Spirit.
It is then not a little task, and set of choices, that lies before the members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society. Yet, we have been drawn to Steiner for a reason. We study Steiner for a reason. What happens if we add to the study of the Aristotelian impulse, a study of the Platonist impulse?
Civilization and Ideas - a preview
There is to Ideas a quality often not fully seen (when not consciously examined for their truth, beauty and goodness) - a quality that can be describe by such words as momentum and inertia. A common social Idea, especially dominant in the West, is the Idea that a middle-class existence can be preserved against the tides of change now moving through Civilization. Elsewhere, especially in the East, is the related Idea that social progress can be measured in economic terms. People believing in the truth of these ideas then act them out in the social/political world.
But the drivers for changes in Civilizations arise from the needs of the Evolution of Consciousness. Conflict in individual biographies is required in order for existential dilemmas to exist, thus confronting the soul and spirit with the need to make choices. The Birth of the Third Millennium, via a tsunami of social/political chaos, is not just required, but something individuals desire and bring in from the pre-birth world. One clear dynamic is the already ongoing leveling of economic status, or to put it more dramatically: the transformation of the majority of those living in the First World in the directions of life-styles similar to that of the Third World - a common denominator is being sought out, evidenced by those falling out of the middle-class, into the realm of the working poor, and then perhaps even deeper. Wonder about this Idea: The poor will be with you always.
The main social/political impulses of the Third Millennium are resulting in the creation of a stark division along economic and political power lines, with the vast majority of people living on the trash heaps of what is becoming more and more a feudal-like corporate world order. Nation States are disappearing - their day in the Sun over. Already their power is fading, given the control over local riches now in place world-wide, and owned by multinational corporations. While the middle-class will resist, the 1% of the 1% don’t care. Social Darwinism is their religion - and they intend to survive at all costs. Read the novels of William Gibson, for a prescient artist's observation of this tendency.
At the same time as the traditional ordering elements of Civilization seems to be failing, there is also an ongoing cultural revolution. This is a revolution at the level of Ideas. Some aspects of this were called: the New Age. Everywhere, in many different Ways, scientific materialism is being resisted. If the A. Society members and friends marry in their own souls the Aristotelian and Platonist impulses, something remarkable can be added - something far more self-consciously spiritual, in a scientific and empirical sense. But first we must get a better hold of the social/political dynamics now in play. This potential cultural transformation takes place against that background.
the Idea of a Social Form: an example
It will be helpful here then to appreciate what the living thinking - the Rising of the Sun in the Mind - can make of the social form: the Corporation. That story reveals much, and is an archetype of the whole. To do this we follow Goethe, and simply describe the changes in form (the leaves of the plant for Goethe) over time. What is below, however, has to be mostly conclusions, for the actual details would be far too many.
All social forms are living in one sense or another, their essential parts in all cases being living human beings. These forms are born and then die - perhaps even reproduce or undergo metamorphosis. Many modern social forms are remnants of Third Cultural Epoch hierarchical social forms, where decisions are made at the top, which the bottom carries out. Those forms were “normal” at the time of Ancient Egypt, for example. The knowledge in the Mysteries practiced within the Third Epoch hierarchical social forms enabled a kind of divine order to inhabit ancient cultures from top to bottom.
In the Fourth Epoch these forms matured, and then aged, in such institutions as the Roman Church, and still had a more or less pragmatically useful and good social purpose for a while. But everything after a time outlives its utility, and so with the dawn of the Fifth Cultural Epoch, the needs of the Evolution of Consciousness could no longer be easily satisfied by strictly hierarchical social forms, witness the failure of such efforts to rule the Russian People through Stalinist communism, or to rule the German People through the Third Reich, or even the deterioration of the great Universities and their eventual domination by money and politics in recent times.
The early stages of the Epoch of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul saw the end of the aristocracies of blood, to be replaced, at least outwardly, by Western style democratically ruled Nation States, although behind the scenes the aristocracies of blood were often succeeded by, and incorporated into, aristocracies of wealth. Even the very ancient Third Epoch rooted theocracy of Tibet was not to continue, and was unseated by the Chinese in 1949, scattering that culture all over the world. The needs of the Epoch of the Consciousness Soul were not to be denied. and such events as the Chinese invasion of Tibet merely a tool to pry loose from its mountain vastnesses a well simmered stew pot of wisdom that the world’s cultures needed to be able to imbibe.
Likewise with the business Corporation. It is one "type" of a natural organism in our social ecology, and it serves many purposes, for Christ and His aides multi-task on a level we can hardly imagine. There are other "types", such as institutional religions, educational institutions, political parties and so forth. The general social phenomenology of the business Corporation is repeated elsewhere.
Originally a corporation was a social form for doing business. The needs of the blossoming so-called market forces, as the embryonic Economic Life emerged more strongly in the 17th and 18th Centuries, invented stock companies, which were in the beginning strictly regulated by the instinctive Rights Sphere. But as wealth accumulated in corporations and in the families that sought to rule them (think of the Rothschilds in banking, the Rockefellers in oil and banking and so forth), the influence of wealth on this instinctive Rights Life led to the corporation becoming more and more unregulated.
Corporations (again as a living social form) then became multinational ... that is they became more and more emancipated from any restraints by the Nation States. All this driven from within by the cold and calculating use of the abstract cause and effect thinking of the intellect, led by the influence in the soul of the ahrimanic aspect of the Double. Whereas in the early years, the individual ego forces of the heads of most corporate hierarchies were able to guide the corporation, the inward nature of this social form began to develop an amorphous and ego-less independent of leadership corporate culture. If you entered into this hierarchical form, the inner social forces began to drive the individual toward conformance and obedience to the emerging dominance of particular corporate cultures (Ways). These social forces sought to separate the individual ego from being able to apply the influence of the conscience to all significant business decisions (see the movies: Margin Call and Too Big to Fail).
At the same time, smaller more intimate corporations do not succumb so easily to this loss of an ego presence at the tops of their inner hierarchy. This change in the corporation we are describing comes most often as an effect of scale, or a kind of excess of growth - a kind of inner social cancer as the corporate culture (Way) outgrows its principle leaders' ability to control.
As this tendency develops, the individual members of the upper hierarchies of the large institutional corporate world also become easily replaceable and interchangeable, and the “culture” itself begins to rule free of any human interference. Imagine, for example, a Zen Temple with no living teachers, only the doctrine and the perpetuation of the doctrine starts to matter. This is also true of many institutional religions - as social forms dominated by their Way in the absence of living teachers. Like a cancer, this growing independent coporate culture frees itself of the human forces of warmth - it is a cold social disease. This culture is a social environment which values the cold and calculated intellect above all else, and also becomes a kind of social growth medium in which sociopathic and certain aspergers personality types easily succeed, because of the absence of conscience and empathy in their soul life. This then eventually produces types of corporate cultures (Ways) as lives in and dominates such as Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, and Halliburton. The individual no longer truly decides, ... only the conscienceless ego-less corporate “culture” rules.
We might go so far as to suggest that while these cancerous corporate cultures, individually exclude human ego forces, collectively their ego is to be Ahriman, the Father of Lies, who is presently incarnate (see my book American Anthroposophy for details).
Everywhere we see the dark empty soul of these ego-free spirit-free corporate cultures, which Eisenhower observed in his farewell address in 1960, and called collectively, because of the ease of their cooperation and similar goals: the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower, also in the same speech, noticed the loss of moral sanity in the Universities as well, due to his observations of their succumbing to the influence of money over ideas.
The influence of the Ahrimanic Enchantment on social life is seeking to leave behind a social-form “body” without a heart - a body that can survive the social chaos which is falling upon us even now, during the birth of the Third Millennium. Nation States are simultaneously losing any power and social control, they may previously have held, over these multinational more and more half-dead social forms of distinct corporate cultural entities - purely ahrimanic in outlook and influence, and capable of surviving well into the Third Millennium, by acquiring private armies, and creating their own intelligence networks and individual versions of “foreign policy”.
Simultaneously there emerges socially the NGO, the non-governmental organization. What Ahriman wants to leave behind in the Third Millennium has a counter-pole where the “not I but Christ in me” in the NGO creates an alternative and warmer social order. At the level of the social commons vast changes are also in play.
That this slow moving social-spasm of dynamic historical changes occurs at the same time as what we are calling Climate Change, is not an accident. Weather and moral life are linked, in part because the separation that we fancy exists, between any discrete object of perception and another, is not real. Everything is interconnected - everything.
social forms and social discontents
Keep in mind the long long list of matters we believe to be wrong with the world: a coming water crisis; an already existing crisis in agriculture and nutrition (GMOs etc.); economic disparity; a huge absence of justice in our legal systems; governments routinely spying on their own people, while preparing to jail (or disappear) all dissidents; corporate malfeasance; religious and racial intolerance; increases in joblessness; increases in drug problems; increases in criminal activities; the failure of systems of education; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, especially biological and chemical; global warming and rising sea levels -- a long long list, with no evidence that our political leadership in the instinctive Rights Sphere is actually capable of addressing our real and ordinary needs. In this time of Ahriman’s Incarnation, the Corporation is served by the private wealth that rules the Rights Life, at the expense of the needs of the great majority of ordinary human beings.
Some readers will perhaps take the view that what I seem to be predicting is a kind of hopeless vision of the future. But I have lived on this earth since 1940, and watched year after year as our hopeful wishes almost never came to pass. The problem is again a matter of scale. Large problems don't get fixed, even though we can dream that the world might be a better place if only we had a Department of Peace instead of a Department of Defense. The Obama health-care initiative tried to fix - superficially - something that has been wrong for many decades, and managed only to make matters worse. Politicians are good at band-aid fixes, but not at real world healing solutions. The social processes by which macro-social engineering might fix things don't exist. Education on the needed scale will not get better. Nor farming, or medicine. Those fresh impulses, in such fields as inspired by Steiner, are great seeds, but they are not going to have the social momentum to modify the present tendencies in the social order on the necessary scale.
The root problem is the natural limits to abstract cause and effect thinking as regards social questions. The social, being living, must be met with thinking that is itself living (at least organic in the sense that Steiner and others have used the term - Goetheanism). Most proposed solutions to our difficulties take this abstract form: "If only X would do Y, then Z would be the result." For example, "If only the world's governments would take significant steps to reduce carbon emissions, then Global Warming would be reduced, and the rising level of the seas would slow down." Now the first words "If only" are conditional. First X must act and actually do Y, assuming X actually has the will and the capacity to do Y. The second proposition is that the solution Z would actually arise from the action Y. That usually is a guess, and it is a very abstract guess, because it assumes a steady state for all other causal factors. For example, melting ice from Greenland, which is fresh water, might well change the salinity of the North Atlantic, to such a degree that the warming of those waters by the Gulf Stream current would cease. If the temperature of the North Atlantic drops, we get Winter, not warming. The seas don't rise, and instead a new period of glaciation occurs.
So whenever we see the abstract conditional general statement, as a proposed solution to these very large scale problems mentioned above, we are looking at the failure of abstract cause and effect thinking to generate solutions to social problems. People also like ideological fixes. Any ideology, which even includes the ideal aspects of Steiner's proposed threefolding conceptions, assumes that by enacting the ideological solution we get healing. The empirical evidence for ideological solutions to social problems all goes the other way. The ideological war on poverty failed, as did the war on drugs. The same thing is happening now with the war on terror. And, those were ideologies supported by the government. What chance then the ideal solutions of threefolding without a complete change in the understanding of common people of the true nature of social reality?
The main flaw of the ideological approach is that it overlooks the deeper question, which is: How does the social world actually go about changing? We noted this above when we observed the influence of the needs of the Evolution of Consciousness. The social world adjusts to the changes in consciousness, which themselves do happen on the required scale, and work from the inside out into a civilization, rather than the other way. The main reason Western Civilization is failing is because it was founded at a time when the nature of human consciousness was quite other. The Greeks and the Romans of the Sixth Century before Christ were not like us at all. Today we have an entirely different form of consciousness, and it is one that no longer supports the basic traditions of Western Civilization. We actually applaud a lot of these changes, and called some of them the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, and the beginning transformation of the problem of racism. Yet, during the Vietnam War, the radical protests against the establishment political powers actually brought about greater conservatism, not more liberalism at the level of the actual nature of government (Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II, and even Clinton, whose "centrist" positions left the liberal Left by the side of the road). We keep failing to appreciate Santayana's dictum: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, recently electing Obama, who has kept (or increased) almost all the worst anti-civil rights excesses and abuses of Bush II.
Recall now the images at the top of this essay ... repeated process within each millennium that at the same time moves (through rhythm) something deeper into human beings and our civilizations, slowly and often painfully - Love and Justice at play in in the Fields of the Lord.
Religious conservatives labeled some of these current problems the family values crisis and the culture wars - an apt although not thought-through observation. As individualism increases, under the beginning impulses connected to the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul Epoch, this put the family itself under stress - from the inside. Steiner pointed in this direction when he said that the ties of blood would no longer matter. Civilization, being in part of set of human social connections, under the stress of individualism, can't maintain the previous coherence. As families fail, so do communities, which are dependent on the family for their basic structure. Here, it is worth repeating: Matthew 10: 34-40 "Don't think I came to cause peace across the land. I didn't come to cause peace, I came to wield a sword, because I came to divide a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a bride against her mother-in-law, and to make a man's servants his enemies. Whoever prefers father or mother over me is not worthy of me; and whoever prefers son or daughter over me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever found his life will lose it, and the one who lost his life because of me will find it. Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me, receives my Sender." The Unvarnished Gospels, by Andy Gaus.
At the same time individuals, freed of former family and community ties, are creating new connections. A lot of this appears in the phenomena of social media. But it is wishful thinking to believe that these small new social forms of community, arising in the social commons, contain the social power needed to reform the decay already unfolding at the top structures of social order. The dying of the top structures is a bit like what happens in the Fall, when the plant life in the garden dies on its way to becoming the natural compost for the Spring. But the Winter of a civilization is a rite of passage, and cannot be avoided. The new forms, the NGOs, the Waldorf Schools, etc. - are all seeds that may have to lie dormant for awhile, waiting for the true Spring which is to bring the basic order of the next civilization - the civilization seeking birth in the Third Millennium. I wrote a novel about this: American Phoenix.
All these factors are signs of the coming collapse (metamorphosis) of civilization. The grub is spinning its cocoon, and getting ready to die into chaos. But what is to be next born? The only aspect of the immediate moment not yet fully determined is the speed of this systemic social failure. Historically these changes take more than a few centuries to fully manifest. Isn’t it odd then (or perhaps: special) that the gradual incarnation of Anthroposophy - the Rising of the Sun in the Mind - is to take place simultaneously within this fundamental and dramatic change in the nature of the world’s social order.
where does this take us?
Keep in mind that the Culmination of the Anthroposophical Movement, according to Steiner’s insights, is connected to the fateful direction of civilization.
The underlying message of these events, for the consciousness of the members and friends of the A. Society - both Aristotelians and Platonists, is how and what are we to give to what is destined to be this vastly different Third Millennium culture. What does it need to receive from the Rising of the Sun in the Mind? A culture, by the way, which seems likely to find most people living as did Christ and the Disciples in ancient Palestine - in small groups, on the edges or outside the centers of wealth and power. Who will see to it that the true seeds of the New Mysteries become planted where they most need to grow?
While a created from above near-dead empty shell of Third Epoch hierarchical and rigid top-down form continues (the multi-national Corporation), true Fifth Epoch, non-hierarchical and circle-like new social forms are being created below, in the social commons. To whom does the New Mystery of Thinking and the New Mystery of Community truly belong? Who will bother to use these New Mysteries? What will ordinary people make of them if they become more generally available? Yet, can a Society seemingly in love with an on a pedestal spiritual guru be impressive enough for people to pay attention, or will the excesses of Steiner-said just turn people off? These Times make all of us face difficult questions, and the Aristotelian Anthroposophical Society is not to be able to avoid the wake-up call from the now incarnate and living Platonists.
the actual Culmination, a preview
The next part is somewhat personal, and for me to describe it depended upon a style of thinking that creates inner pictures from phenomena, in an analogous way to how we discern form aspects of magnetism by observing its effects on iron filings. To state this in another way: We have a certain experience of a large array of social phenomena, and cognition has to find/create the Ideas which belong to that experience - the experience and the Idea being two sides of one coin. This is even more peculiar, when we have been a participant in the social phenomena being perceived by thinking and thought, although Steiner faced similar problems in his own relationship to the A. Society.
Recall that Steiner said that the Culmination had to involve a meeting, before the end of the 20th Century, between Aristotelians that had been incarnated with him around 1900 and then returned at the end of the Century, with Platonists that would by then (the end of the 20th Century) also have become incarnated.
Certain preparatory aspects of this meeting involved the intersection of people (Aristotelians) within the A. Society with the works of such earlier appearing Platonists such as Barfield, Kuhlewind, and George Adams Kaufman. People already familiar with the major Platonists of the 20th Century are then perhaps more prepared to receive those who have appeared during the Event of the Culmination. One can only hope. At the exact moment this Culmination then took place, there was a rather unusually concentrated gathering of Platonists and Aristotelians via the electronic aethers. Technological developments also can serve humanity’s spiritual needs.
Speaking of time ... no one on the Ark knew about the Culmination or the Platonists/Aristotelians and the School of Chartres as having anything to do with us. That knowledge, like most knowledge of prior incarnations, is kept out of our consciousness because it would interfere with our in-the-moment freedom. Same with Steiner. His freedom could not be compromised by knowledge that he didn’t need to know or wasn’t otherwise able to handle. The guidance from Eternity - that knows us better than we know ourselves - is remarkable.
In the years 1997 to 2003, five of the below described personalities all met for a time via an Internet discussion group the Ark (formerly called: Anthroposophia - this group form began coalescing prior to 1997, and extended slightly beyond 2003 as it aged and then died). There were dozens of active participants (both Platonists and Aristotelians), daily exchanging views and ideas over multiple topics for over five years. We talked about Steiner, Tomberg, the A. Society, Yoga, Buddhism, Christianity, politics, sex, work, play - everything possible, including a great deal about our personal lives. We were a functioning Internet connected community, and some of us managed at various times to even meet in the flesh. As we proceed I will write briefly of five personalities, including myself, that is: Joel, Stephen, Harvey, Catherine, and Bruno. I will also include Liz, who had a relationship with me during that time, and with whom I shared some of our Ark-work as well as giving the Ark members early links to Liz’s works, such as Aesthetics of Economics and The Scottish Masonic Tradition in the Light of the Folk Spirits, and Conscience Politics.
To better illuminate this community, one archetypal example (what Goethe called: an instance worth a thousand) of our co-working deserves special mention. In the early Fall of 2000, Catherine left the group for a couple of months, explaining she had been spiritually called to go to Morocco, and experience there the celebration of Ramadan. Which she did, eventually spending that month in the womens’ house of a large Muslim family. She went to Morocco specifically, by the way, because she spoke French. On her return she began writing what she called her: Ramadan Diaries. Then, on September 11th, 2001, we learned one of the reasons why our group had someone who had done what Catherine had done. The twin towers fell, and the dialogues on the Ark exploded. But of all of us, one of the most sane and gifted personalities (Catherine) was there to help us realize what truly lived in the social heart of this to us strange and unknown religion, now blamed for such horror.
Here I will paraphrase (from memory) what she reported, not just from her direct in the flesh experience, but also from her spiritual experiences as well: Neither the Hebrews or the Greeks or the early Christians, were able to carry Christ’s true social teachings into life in the way they were meant to be carried. These, explained Catherine, were, as a consequence, carried out into the spiritual cosmos for a time, in a kind of parabolic arc, only to descend into incarnation once more via the Archangel that inspired Mohamed, the founder of Islam. The reader can well imagine how radical such a perception was/is, and what flames then followed as various members of the Ark refused to accept what to their biases was impossible. For a lot of us, at the least, we were forced to really examine what we thought and assumed and just why we thought and assumed it.
There is more. On the early morning of 9/11, we received this prose-poem from Harvey, written before he had heard of that day’s tragedies (his oddly prescient words should be read slowly and aloud for best effect):
(9/11/01) Autumn/Michaelmus “For Earlyfire, mood ever upstages all memory of events. And Michaelmas then becomes a time of reflection, of consenting to let go of the spree of the summer, and the pastel float of its siren-song, and to bring her euphoria and fan of perfume, and all sweet fenceless expanse that let us reach to the meadows of every distant star at will in the long season of floorless song, and kiss and at last, to welcome it back to unwinged, places, politely handcuffed to more anchored beauty, and gone our drunkard’s major chords, lost forever in the mists of Mists of Avalon.
“Let the introspection be medicine, always restoring the quiet, and de-spicing the warm and buoyant revels, guide us one and all back south of the sky, to the Place of Kneeling. This is what the leaves announce, that by catching fire, and descending pungeant to the air’s seabottom, loud in braided harvest hues of peach and orange and cherry, sing before the Angel of Death, all this to remind us of how love comes to tell the last tale whenever the pages of magic, losing their ink, turn white as the coming snow.
“And chill is blessing, for the Day of Atonement, the Day of Hollows and plainsong is at hand, when the dragon and the flames of the dragon within is exiled to clay climates, and made flightless and sober, must drink wine of iron, reckon gravity his friend, and so anchored, made devout, holy by winter, light his own torch and learn to stand again..........
“It is the season when we learn the secret of how to respond to being orphaned, and encounter the opportunity to invite the development of the power of detachment which camphor cools the raging of wild campaigns, of all that’s fair in love and war. And thus what seems, slows, no longer glows and now descends from dreams, and what once round us wove famous parades, now de-charades, and suddenly becomes robust to our touch. And so it comes to pass we discover touch is another word for Thanks.”
The next day, 9/12, Harvey wrote a piece too long for this paper, but which is in the book I later made of his e-mails (see note 12). Its title was: “Cold and Uncaring”, and remains one of the wisest pieces of literature I’ve ever read on the events of 9/11. Sometimes when I read Harvey's works these days, an odd thought touches me: Was Steiner with us, with such rare guile and in such foolish disguise, that we would never notice at all his help and love? Would Eternity even let him know his own most recent past? Who did I commune with those afternoons in Prescott AZ, when Harvey and I sat and contemplated the mysterious local geographic feature in the stone-faced hilly form of a natural Sphinx (the Yavipai Indians called it: "Lion lying down"), where in some moments he could not but speak his poetic visions aloud, blessing the air and my heart, while I sat there completely unable to truly see him at all (again, see the book I later made of his poetry - at note 12)?
From this small taste of what lived on the Ark for at least five years, hopefully the reader will now appreciate why it was only after reading Usher’s fine article on the Culmination a year or so ago (see again note 1), that I began to understand that some of us in that group might well be reincarnated members of the School of Chartres. This is only of incidental importance by the way, for as we all know: Who we are in any present incarnation hardly benefits at all from the knowledge of the prior ones. The Ark e-mail discussion list then was a place, only possible in this Age of technology, where certain Platonists and Aristotelians from all over the world could gather, experiencing one special moment of the larger symphonic event, which moment we are naming: the Culmination, for it involved, in a more concentrated and intensified fashion, a core intermingling of the spiritual community we are calling the Anthroposophical Movement, with and within incarnate individuals.
Most everyone on the Ark was having different levels of direct spiritual experience. We all sought to be available to inspiration from above, a subject we also talked about constantly. Is it any wonder then that the spiritual community we are calling the Anthroposophical Movement, perhaps inhabited/overseen by Anthroposophia Herself as well as Archangel Michael, communed deeply with all our striving conversations? And, while we didn't get to know this, we were if fact engaged in the Culmination, exactly has Steiner had predicted decades before. We met, had spiritual intercourse, and then went on to our individual paths and works. My path eventually led me to being able to perceive with my thinking what is contained in this essay.
Who were the Platonists at the actual Culmination,
as took place in and near the Anthroposophical Society?
(The below is also adapted from the article in note 8)
My view is we are still in the afterglow of lingering notes and melodies of the Culmination even now. Time does not actually follow hard and fast rules. Consider the possibility that one of the Platonists from the School (me) is knocking on the door of the house of the Aristotelians (the A. Society). All the others to be next described, for various reasons have bailed on the A. Society. They can’t yet figure out how to redeem the A. Society members in thought, in large part because they cannot understand the failure of the Aristotelians to love the idea to the same extent that they do. [The early hating each other phase of our “romantic comedy” - which might well become a tragedy if folks remain asleep.]
Now the people I am going to write about, including myself, eat, excrete, make love, and make mistakes - we are fully human, have Doubles, and possess the usual mostly unconscious soul-drivers (mysteries of the will) hidden in the lower chakras. What makes us a little bit different is raw talent. We each have an unusual spiritual talent. We are not better than others, just different at the level of capacities, such that one guy is like a very good surgeon, another is like someone who plays shortstop really well, and a third is like an unusually good actress - would win a lot of Oscars over the years. That is basically it. Take advantage of our art, or not. Your choice. By the way, we are all shamans (or initiates if you insist), after the fashion of the Traditions and Ways they have traveled in this life.
Our art, as pointed toward above, is to love the idea and to live in the moral aesthetic of thought. Our works are meant to be read slowly and carefully. There are not any out of place words or sentences casually dropped on the page by accident, while endeavoring to express a belief or opinion. Among each other there is a major distinction in several cases, where the individual hasn’t developed Steiner’s new thinking mystery as consciously. In those cases (Stephen, Catherine, and Harvey), their natural talent and the fact that they are Americans, led to the Rising of the Sun in the Mind anyway. Bruno and Liz made the Steiner inspired (The Philosophy of Freedom) journey, but they are not Americans, and that makes for a subtle but real difference in approach (a preference for a kind of idealistic esotericism - concentrated on the upper chakras, as against the natural pragmatism of Americans, who by living in the true soul-West have to face the lower chakras as well). Even so, for Bruno and Liz - the Sun there too arose in the Mind.
And, given that none of us are perfect, imperfections can be found in all our works of art. All the same, these are must reads, and belong in every Aristotelian’s library if they wish to include the Platonist wisdom (not just us five by the way, but Barfield, Kuhlewind, et.al.). Assuming, however, that one wants to participate in the lingering and echoing Drama of the Culmination as it unfolds over the next decades.
From me, ... the Aristotelians should read my book: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything. It means to be just that, and is intentionally set out from within the counter-Copernican revolution to be a competing theory to that of macro Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang, and was written for the general public. At the same time, these Ideas were offered specifically as ‘theory”, given that this is a mode of cognition with which abstract cause and effect thinking is familiar. The intention was to resolve the assumed conflict between Religion and Science, by placing the religious question inside the stream of scientific inquiry - for the religious impulse to wash the feet of the scientific impulse, as it were. The book does not ask for faith, just for careful thinking. It can be found for free on my website, or purchased at cost from my bookstore. There is a companion work, a bit more for anthroposophists than for the general public, which includes new research on the threefold Double-complex: The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount (11).
Harvey, the most sensitive soul of all of us, has already crossed over and it was left to me to collect many of his e-mail contributions to the Ark, and publish them as: Silent Passage: the prose-poems of Earlyfire aka Harvey Bornfield - musician with words . His words, like all great poetry, are meant to be read aloud, not in the usual inner silence of the own mind. That he sees beauty and wisdom in the most wondrous places and ways is a delight for any mind that sits at his table. That book too can be read on my website, (12) or purchased at cost from my book store. Keep in mind that reading Harvey in the right way is like entering a Cathedral of Ideas.
[Let me remind the reader here, of my recent intuition* that Harvey might have been Steiner. It is a thought filled with joy at the humor of the Gods, and the related foolishness of us all. Certainly Harvey didn't know, and if he did, would not have cared. And, if this suggestion causes people to pay more attention to his prose-poems, then that is a blessing all in itself. It takes only a little bit of typing to make one's browser go seek out Harvey's wisdom - look for #s 4 and 5 near the top of the page, and be prepared to see into that clouded mirror, to know as we are meant to be known. Then ask yourself this ... could Steiner return and give us anything less than this passionate wisdom, that makes the will cry tears for all that we let happen in spite of always knowing better. Harvey needs to be discovered as the true jester-conscience of the Anthroposophical Society, and if one buys just one book, this should be the one. Has Steiner, the former Aristotelian, returned as the overlooked laughing/sad/dancing Angel of all the Platonists and the Aristotelians? How can there be a Culmination without him, unburdened by our demands he be a guru and free to play with thoughts few of us could imagine into existence in several lifetimes.]
*[Since my so-called initiation (meeting the Lesser and Greater Guardians), pure-thinking or intuitive experiences have acquired an interesting quality. These are different from organic-thinking, which follows out a train of self-created imagines until an intuitive experience results. I had such a pure-thinking intuitive experience while working on revisions to this work, when I perceived during thinking the coalescing of a large number of otherwise discrete facts of experience into a single whole. The parts rushed toward a center, which at the same time involved me "seeing" inward from the 360 degrees of the surrounding sphere this in-gathering that was leading to the single Idea. It was there in an instance, and the knowing contained a feeling of joy. By the way: Whose joy? I then knew that Harvey had been Steiner. Should anyone believe me? No. I simply report the experience and move on. However, try reading out loud and with passion some of Harvey Bornfield's words, and then pretend there is no remarkable genius of spirit inhabiting that art.]
Catherine MacCoun is - how to put it? - tough-love minded. A bright fire, very loving in a passionate sense, yet demanding if she thinks you are too goofy by her own standards. Her book On Becoming an Alchemist: a guide for the modern magician: seeks to combine Tibetan and Christian Alchemy and is based on considerable and amazing direct spiritual experiences. It is a most remarkable telling of the journey through the alchemical life trials all of us are enduring. Nobody I have ever read writes of these life trials with such discernment and beauty, and just about everyone who reads it will identify with parts or all of what she describes. It is for-sale at her website and many other places on the Internet. She now is available for teleconferencing instruction in these arts. (13)
Stephen Clarke still somewhat hides his light under a basket. He has little presence on the Internet ... although some of his material is on my website. [the Ark dialogues are not, as far as I know, archived anywhere - my own saved Ark-files disappeared in the crash and burn of a hard drive a couple of years ago] For the Aristotelians, this particularly important work can be found on the web at the Rudolf Steiner Archive: Some Notes Toward a Resolution of the Dilemma - in reference to Paul V. O’Leary’s The Inner Life of the Earth (14). Stephen regularly visits the golden realm of the Mother that lies on the other-side of the inner spheres of the Earth, working within and around the native aboriginal spiritual traditions of the Southwest of America (Navajo and so forth) He, ever the scholar and the seer, asserts, and makes an excellent case, that a lot of the A. Society Aristotelians are basically and dangerously clueless about the realities of what some call the Underworld. [his version of that early stages of the romantic comedy opposites in tension]
The above four personalities (me, Harvey, Catherine and Stephen) are probably best for Americans. The next two, Liz and Bruno, may be more to the taste of Europeans. All of us should be invited into the minds of any Aristotelian that wants to take seriously Steiner’s indications about the need for the Aristotelians and the Platonists to work together to help unfold the Culmination. In point of fact, that working together really only takes place in the preparatory realm of study, for anyone taking an esoteric path seeking out the mysteries of the will. In your journey, it is helpful to dine on many varieties of spiritual nourishment.
Elizabeth Ancrum MacKensie (Liz) was born and lives in Scotland. Liz was only indirectly on the Ark through me (we having met during that same period of years). She has her own website now: Christian Esotericism at Tibby Fowler’s Bothy. (15) She asserts, and I have no reason to doubt her, that she stands at the gate of the true Esoteric School of Spiritual Science, willing to guide any and all into that reality, which was basically lost to most of the members and friends of the A. Society during the tragedies of the 20th Century. The Esoteric School cannot be known intellectually. Go to her website for details. Liz's must read comments on this essay are found here.
Bruno Abrami, an Italian living in Italy, also has his own website, the Spiritual Science Review. (16) During his sojourn on the Ark I found him very down to earth, and frank in a most unusual fashion. He does not like at all what goes on in Dornach, which automatically made him the friend of many on the Ark. Go to his website for details.
[I will be sending copies of this essay to Catherine, Stephen, Liz and Bruno, suggesting it is time to no longer hold the Aristotelians in the A. Society as spiritually responsible as we sometimes did on the Ark - an antipathetic judgment of which I have also been guilty.]
If the reader of this wants to support the rest of humanity as it enters more deeply into the Third Millennium, especially as regards the Rising of the Sun in the Mind, the above individuals are some of the best helpers you will find, whether they were actually among reincarnated members of the School of Chartres or not.
Recall, if you will, that one of Steiner's ideas about the A. Society was that it was to be a meeting place of many spiritual streams, something that did not really happen in the A. Society in the 20th Century, although this meeting of streams did happen on The Ark during the Culmination.
As regards the term: the Rising of the Sun in the Mind, this is meant to refer to the achievement of the self-generated development of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. For each individual this is different (see my The Art of God, noted above), and for those with certain talents the Rising of the Sun in the Mind can lead to one or another kind of initiation, again depending upon individual Tradition and Way (In my Father’s House are many mansions). Anthroposophy - the Rising of the Sun in the Mind - is not the possession of either Rudolf Steiner, or the A. Society.
the Meaning of the Culmination Idea
We still have to deal with seeking an even deeper understanding of the Culmination itself as regards the A. Society, from a Platonist Initiate/Shaman/human beings's (18) point of view (mine).
During the meetings on the Ark that marked the beginnings of the earthly concentrated manifestation of the long pending symphonic Culmination of the Anthroposophical Movement, from 1997 to 2003, there tended to be a consensus that while Rudolf Steiner was a very talented and wise individual, he was not perfect. Nevertheless, the real problem was actually the A. Society itself. As a consequence, most of the six individuals mentioned above (myself excluded) have not continued any previous relationship to the A. Society (if they had one at all); and, even the relationship I maintain is very difficult and fraught with much confusion. At the same time, none of us (with the exception of Catherine, of course, - see note 17) has had much of a problem with Steiner.
We were all aware that Steiner himself wondered if Anthroposophy would have to make a kind of war upon the A. Society in order to continue to develop its potentials. Now “war” is a fairly harsh concept, and it is my hope that this is not necessary. My view is to trust the ordinary membership, especially in America. What this appears to mean is that the Culmination involves a kind of transitional phase (its lingering effects are to take place over a few decades at the entrance to the Third Millennium), wherein the inner opportunity is clearly and consciously before the mostly Aristotelian members and friends of the A. Society to attend to what is being offered to them by the Platonists, both those already crossed over (such as Barfield and Harvey) and those now still living (such as me, Catherine, Liz, Bruno and Stephen).
One way to see this is to return for a moment to Steiner’s distinction between the A. Society and the Movement - the former more of the earth and the latter more heavenly. The Platonist is naturally/experientially more connected to the esoteric Movement, while the Aristotelian more instinctively/intellectually connected to exoteric earthly streams and currents. Where the Aristotelians in the A. Society serve the deeper processes of the Culmination, it will be through the degree to which they draw from the wisdom well of the Platonists and add that to their own already rich understanding from their studies of the works of Rudolf Steiner.
Please keep in mind that we are dealing with a vast spectrum of talents and experiences, so that each individual, whether Aristotelian or Platonist, has particular and unique characteristics - each entirely justified in their own biography. I am forced by the limits of language to write often in generalizations, which as we all should know break down whenever applied to any specific individual.
The spiritual “force” [will] of the Platonists is often too strong (witness Catherine’s comments on Muslim family life and Harvey’s often other-worldly poetry), and as a consequence out of sync with the thoughts and actions following from the Aristotelian/Scholastics influence on the Copernican Revolution, something in itself quite necessary for humanity to experience. The Aristotelians, more easily finding themselves in the Copernican Revolution current already, in the nature of their instinctive thinking, then are the perfect intermediary between the Platonists and the rest of humanity. The Aristotelians, by taking in and digesting the Platonists, can metabolize those thoughts as it were, tone them down if necessary, and even make bridges between them and the further reaches of humanity over the next couple of Centuries..
We could then say that the Anthroposophical Movement, reaches further into incarnation via the Platonists, and this then is to serve (wash the feet) of the Aristotelians in the Anthroposophical Society and provide further aid to their self-chosen tasks. Rudolf Steiner had died, but the living inspiration he once carried has not ended. At the end of the 20th Century the torch of this living esotericism was passed.
This fact then helps illuminate Steiner’s remarks: that in Anthroposophy [the Rising of the Sun in the Mind] it is the truth that matters, and in the Anthroposophical Society it is the life that matters. Gordienko’s concern (see note 9), that the Aristotelian impulse values interpersonal relations (brotherly and sisterly love) over the love of the truth, while apt, devalues the life of the A. Society. It is precisely that brotherly and sisterly love that makes the life, which is crucial in our Age. Both impulses (truth and life) are necessary.
This aspect of the Culmination, as it evolves within the A. Society, does not (and should not) need to work from the top down, first approved by the Executive in Dornach, or the Councils in America. Ordinary members and friends, in the Branches and Study Groups, can begin to acquaint themselves with the offered materials from the talented individuals referenced above, and these members and friends are fully capable of performing the needed intermediary function.
Or, to return to the beginning: The fate (as in the direction) of Civilization is in our hands, as it is in the hands of all human beings. Everyone contributes. What the Aristotelians and the Platonists, in and around the A. Society can offer, is certain particular higher elements of knowledge (the mysteries of the will-in-thinking). If these higher elements do not become more widely known in the Third Millennium, the Copernican Stream - or the abstract intellect, still mostly led by Ahriman, will triumph and the counter-Copernican stream may well become a footnote, if ever remembered. So please do your part - a part which you get to freely determine.
Keep in mind that Christ as Lord (Artist) of Karma has placed us all precisely where we need to be in our own biographies. We are all the right people, in the right place, at the right time, or as the Hopi Elders are alleged to have said: We are the People we’ve been waiting for.
One last thought ... Rudolf Steiner, bless his talented soul, was not perfect. Further, he was an idealist, which meant he often spoke and wrote about matters as if the best that could happen ought to happen. Any honest observation of how the world actually works reveals that this is seldom the case. So, ... what will be missing from the Third Millennium if the Aristotelians and the Platonists connected to Steiner thought and the A. Society don’t end up marrying?
A kind of high chord in a complicated moral aesthetic song will not be sung as widely as it could. Remember, we are dealing here with: The Potential Mission of the Anthroposophical Society in the Early Centuries of the Third Millennium. Steiner's great gift, still hardly understood even by the Aristotelians in the A. Society, was to take the spiritual (mind) question, and place it inside the stream of natural science, through his works on philosophy. Steiner created a Path to the Rising of the Sun in the Mind that was empirical and scientific. That Practice must come to live in the A. Society members and friends (and institutional leaders) if the Culmination is to move further into incarnation. The Event happened, but it has to be recreated and carried by others - for it is a living experience, not a set of concepts.
Yet, imagine the Waldorf daughter-movement not only having Steiner in the libraries of its teachers, but Catherine and Harvey as well. The spiritual Movement continues even today - through this message - to pour its influence on our works. One way to understand this is to reflect on the fact that Spiritual Science and Anthroposophy are not identical. Otherwise why the frequent use by Steiner of the phrase: anthroposophical Spiritual Science. If these two were an identity, that phrase would be the logical equivalent of saying: grape flavored grape flavor, which is clearly nonsense. Spiritual Science is a what and Anthroposophy is a how, or as Barfield explained it in one of his essays in Romanticism Comes of Age: one is content and the other method. The Aristotelians are better at the what, or the content of Spiritual Science, while the Platonists are better at the how or method of Anthroposophy - the Rising of the Sun in the Mind.
Yes, the spiritual music flowing into Third Millennium civilization might be more perfectly expressed if this harmony is produced, but Time and Space and Eternity will not cease to exist. Christ and the Holy Mother allow for us to fail, and fail and fail again. Do what you can, and above all else love and forgive yourself first, because that odd fact is the key to loving and forgiving others. Why? Because loving and forgiving yourself is way far harder. Figure out that one, and the rest is easy. Matthew 11: 28-30: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
It is to that end that I have sent the e-mail giving the link to this essay, and offered this essay to “being human”. No more than that can I do. To someone who wishes to dispute the conclusions I have drawn as regards the work of these six personalities, I expect them to first become familiar with those works. Rudolf Steiner correctly required that those who wanted to dispute his lectures needed to first make themselves familiar with the fundamentals of Spiritual Science. A similar request, regarding the works of the Platonists, is justified here as well. There also remains an existential question of no little import: Do the Aristotelians want to continue to look only to the past utterances of the "great initiate" Rudolf Steiner, or are they willing to find their Own Way to adding to that wisdom (the Rising of the Sun in their own Minds), perhaps inspired by the living researches of modern shamanistic initiates such as the Platonists now in their midst? The spiritual evolves too. What does Anthroposophia have to say to us today?
Joel A. Wendt, in the Season of Lent, in the Year 2014notes:
(1)See: http://www.anthroposophy.org/uploads/media/SEUsher-Remarks_on_the_Culmination.pdf It would be possible for me to do a point by point analysis of Usher's work here, but that exercise would be useless, for when the reader understands what I have added in this essay to Usher's point of view, both his view and my experience are entirely justified. The work is to figure out how to make them "marry" ... again see the whole essay for the whys and wherefores. Nor is it necessary to produce a doctrine "marrying" these two works, but rather that any individual wanting to apply their own thinking to the questions of the meaning and nature of the Culmination should read both sources - one Aristotelian and the other Platonist. The marriage must arise in the individual soul, not be a product of a committee trying to set in stone the whole jumble of concepts and to reduce them to something easily digestible. This is not to be an easy act/art ... just like any true marriage. By the way, Study Groups and Branches are the best place to take up a communal study of these two works.
(2) (GA 240, page 155ff) Free translation by Jostein Saether http://gamamila.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-platonists-of-12th-century-and.html
(3) The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html
(4) Letters to some Friends: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/lettersfriends.html
(5) GA-2, 1886: A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception; GA-3, 1892: Truth and Knowledge (Steiner’s dissertation); and, GA-4, 1894: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
(6) Living Thinking in Action http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/liveT.html
(7) See Barfield’s Speaker’s Meaning. http://www.amazon.com/Speakers-Meaning-Owen-Barfield/dp/159731112X
(8) solving the right problem, see Letters to Some Friends: document #5 - link in note (3) above.
(9) From the preface to her Sergei O. Prokofieff: myth and reality: “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, 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)”
(10) the reverse cultus: an imagination: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/reversecultus.html
(11) The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/mysteryofevil.html
(12) Silent Passage: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/HarveyBornfield.html
(13) Buy the book: On Becoming an Alchemist: http://www.amazon.com/On-Becoming-Alchemist-Modern-Magician/dp/1590306872 Catherine’s current website: http://hermeticist.com/ My review of this book: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/CatherineMacCoun.html
(14) http://www.rsarchive.org/RelArtic/ClarkeStephen/Dilemma.php
(15) http://www.christianesotericist.talktalk.net/ [link to a more recent release of Liz's insights - Sept. 16/17th 2016]
(16) http://xoomer.virgilio.it/babrami/sp1e.htm
(17) Work On What Has Been Spoiled: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ktmc1.html
(18) Why do I call myself an initiate? I am not special, just talented with the corresponding Fate, such that in late 2009, then on through the Summer of 2010, I was graced with a visit from the Lesser Guardian, the Greater Guardian, and experienced the Second Pentecost in the Ethereal. See this link for details: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/threshold.html My latest book - a collection of my essays on The New Mystery of Thinking: Sacramental Thinking: can be purchased at cost here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/joel-wendt/sacramental-thinking/paperback/product-21550435.html or downloaded there for free as an e-book.
