West and East
or Wendt’s “critique” of Osho’s critique of Rudolf Steiner
<{ "this and that", my
reflections on the four noble truths }>
A lot of confusion exists in the Cultural West due to the
penetration of that culture by the religions and spiritual teachings of
the Cultural East. Rudolf Steiner gave a whole lecture cycle on
some of the related questions: West and
East: contrasting worlds (Vienna, 1-12 June,
1922). Near the front of that book we find this language (which I
assume was meant to be attributed to Steiner, but does not clearly say
so: “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.”
In the material below a small step is hoped to be taken
on such a journey.
A great deal depends upon the point of view we take,
which point of view can and should vary. So, for example, from a
certain (and necessarily limited) point of view the incursion of
Eastern thought into the stream of American Culture could be seen as a
kind of pollution of that Culture. American Culture, from this
same point of view, could also be seen then as a battleground between
the so-called Wisdom of the East and the Scientific Materialism of the
Center.
Already just with this language I have confused two
things that will be better understood as distinct on the one hand, yet
part of a whole on the other.
A careful reading of Steiner reveals that he (from one
point of view) divided the World into East and West (as in the lectures
above), and from another point of view he divided the World into East,
Center and West. Why?
Humanity has a spiritual evolution, which can
be differentiated from its soul evolution. The
spiritual evolution is more concerned with our understanding of the
nature of the I or the ego, and the soul evolution is mostly concerned
with those powers of the soul Steiner pointed to with the ideas of
thinking, feeling and willing. It is the spiritual evolution that
seems to divide the spiritual and religious history of humanity into
the Cultural East and the Cultural West. It is the soul
evolution (of consciousness) which divides the world into East, Center
and true West (the Americas).
It will help to back up a bit. In my book American
Anthroposophy I bring together Steiner’s
teachings on the Fall of Atlantis with some of the content from the
Hopi Prophecy of the Coming of the True White Brother (Recollecting the True Roots
of the American Soul - America’s aboriginal Peoples and the Hopi
Prophecy). The Hopi oral history
remembers this time (the Fall of Atlantis), and discusses this in its
ideas of the younger and the elder brothers, with the younger going to
the West (from a land that was being destroyed), while the elder was to
go to the East, there to wait until a call for help came from the
younger brother, because the younger brother’s way of life was almost
completely destroyed (this is essentially true now for all the
aboriginal peoples of the Americas). In this time of great crisis
according to the Hopi Prophecy (which coincides with the time
period marked by the end of a Great Cycle of the Mayan calender),
the True White Brother may/will come from the geographic East to aid
the younger brother, carrying with him the life
plan for the future.
As Rudolf Steiner tells this same story he mostly
emphasizes the journey East of certain communities from Atlantis to an
area near the Gobi Desert, from which then all the civilizations of the
East are generated, and which grow and develop over those periods
Steiner describes, as the first four post-Atlantean epochs. Then 2000
years ago when the Creator God (or an aspect of the same, depending upon one’s theological point of
view) Incarnates and, in the process of sacrificing its divinity to
become human, goes through the gate of death. This deed
changes a great deal in the fundamental nature of reality, but we still
need more back story before adventuring that understanding.
The mystery developments in the East were not all of a
kind. While the Seven Holy Rishis gave birth earlier to
Vedanta and subsequently then to the Hindu religion, it was some
millennia following that, around the year 3100 B.C., that a certain
change occurs when (according to Steiner) Lucifer incarnates in China
and then is brought into one of their mystery schools. One
later and slowly maturing effect of this incarnation (supposedly
climaxing around 600 B.C.) is the appearance of the Confucian impulse
as well as the inspiration for the work of Lau Tzu.
In Confucianism we find the tendency in the social to fix
the incarnation of the group soul through the ideals of the
spiritual importance of filial and other relationships. The still
evolving ego’s moral choices are starkly and strictly delimited via
Confucianism. At more or less the same time, in the Way of the
Tao (Lau Tzu), we find the idea of the superior man - the sage*.
For the Chinese this degenerates after a while into the Han
religion and the role of the Mandarin (the superior man or sage as the
social leader). If we read current history, as being made in
China today, these degenerate (aging and sclerotic) ideals of the Han
religion and the Mandarin seem to be experiencing a resurgence.
*[The
sage controls without authority, And teaches without words; He lets all
things rise and fall, Nurtures, but does not interfere, Gives without
demanding, And is content. From the Dao de
Jing]
In Tibet, in the Bon religion as it developed there
thousands of years ago, we have the remains of Atlantean magical
knowledge, and the creation of a long lasting theocracy as the primary
means of social order. The Tibetan Lama was/is both a secular and
a religious leader - a spiritual adept who rules society. With
the incarnation of Gautama Buddha, also around 600 B. C., we have the
beginning of a modernization of all those impulses, radiating out
from India, as all of the East over time assimilates these profound
Buddha teachings. Then when the Chinese invade Tibet in 1949,
this pushes out onto the World (and particularly into the spiritual
West) some aspects of these very ancient magical teachings and
traditions, which had been somewhat remodeled through the influence of
Gautama Buddha.
Steiner had already noted the influence on the soul
Center of the world in the arriving in Central Europe of the Bhagavad
Gita in the late 18th Century. While this is somewhat later in
time, it is also a kind of parallel cross-infusion of East and West
that began as far back as when Alexander the Great spread Hellenism to
the East. Even the Christian Gospels note some of this
ongoing and complex intercourse between the two basic world Cultures
when they describe at the Birth: wise men came from the East.
But spirit and soul evolution cannot be inhibited (although they can be missed out on by individuals), and with the Incarnation of Christ (as an aspect of the Creator Being), even Gautama Buddha was changed (though no longer incarnate). As a consequence of the Incarnation of Christ, the Buddha subtly altered the nature of his spiritual influence so that there eventually came to be the Bodhisattva Vow, where instead of the modern Buddhist seeking to get off the Wheel of Life (seek Nirvana), this Buddhistic Impulse now pledges to not seek to leave the Wheel of Life until all sentient beings can be enlightened.
Obviously, in its details, this is all very complicated,
and the above therefore a perhaps dangerous oversimplification ... the
reader should do their own detailed research.
To turn to Osho ...
One of the religious ideas of the Cultural East is the
teaching of self-development as a thing in itself. In this we
find a remnant of the idea of the superior man - the sage. The
guru - the spiritual teacher - has accomplished something we have not,
and now we are to study under him (or her) in order to learn to develop
our own spiritual perfection. Thus we find the Zen Masters, the
Tibetan Lamas, and the Yoga Masters and all the other similar spiritual
teachers, including those Westerners (particularly Americans) who have
anointed themselves as teachers of enlightenment or yoga or Buddhism
after traveling for a time in the East (such as Andrew Cohen).
Now such as Osho have a very peculiar condition, which is
that while they want to speak of their particular Way as overcoming the
limits of mind (and of ego), they cannot teach without using language.
Just in this fact, mostly not noticed in their teachings, they
reveal the presence of a kind of thinking-mind, for there is no
speaking/thinking via modern consciousness without forming cognitive
conceptualizations of that concerning which we desire to speak.
Not only that, most of these teachings are rooted in ancient
systems, and thereby in ancient conceptions buried in the language by
which the tradition is transmitted from one guru to the next.
Owen Barfield in his book Saving the
Appearances: a study in idolatry, describes
the core of this kind of thinking as figuration* and distinguishes it from the far more conscious kind of
thinking we call theorizing and reflection.
*As regards figuration: By the time we
leave the comforts of home for the school (and/or life) we possess
language, and language exists in us most semi-consciously in
figuration, which is our recognition of all the familiar objects in our
lives (both internal and external), without our having to name them.
We just semi-consciously know what these objects are and
what they mean. In its details, figuration varies all over the
world according to cultural and language differences, as well as
individual biographical differences.
If we are of the Cultural East, and we at a certain point
in time enter more deeply into one or another form of religious or
spiritual life there, we find (and are taught) a way of seeing the
world consistent with our early childhood figuration capacities,
particularly those related to religion. We fit into this matrix
of language and meaning, which our cultural influences have already
embedded in our consciousness through the very meaning of most of the
words in our language, our developing religious or spiritual
understanding as that is being transmitted to us by our guru. Of
special import are the words and concepts concerning our interior life.
At the level of this semi-conscious figuration what the
words mind and ego mean in the Cultural East
is completely different from what the words mind
and ego mean in the Cultural West. You could say that the
conceptual-meaning baggage attached to each matrix of meanings in both
West and East are entirely at odds with each other. All languages
are interdependent with their culture, and the complexities of these
interdependencies are significant. Moreover these complicated
interdependences of meaning are seldom noticed in dialogs concerning
the modern intercourse between Eastern and Western cultural thought.
Even the idea of differences of religious traditions hardly
touches the underlying psychological reality. East and West do not see the same sense
world, nor do they see the same interior world, via the underlying
differences in the processes of language acquisition resulting in a
specific cultural figuration.
The reader may now understand why I described above (from
this point of view) the incursion of Eastern thought into American
Culture as a kind of pollution. To accept the ideal of
enlightenment (of the the superior man - the sage/guru) requires of the
real ego-nature of a highly individualized human being in the Americas
(the leading edge of the evolution of individualization) that it
deny its own spiritual heritage/meaning. This means, for example,
that a person raised in America religiously as a Christian or a Jew,
will in adopting and adapting to Eastern thought mostly sleep through
the aggression this does toward that aspect of their soul that is
rooted deeply in our religious feelings, from when we are young.
If we discuss carefully with them the religious thinking
of such individuals, we find that they have Christianized (for example)
their Eastern religious conceptions because of the underly dynamic in
the feeling life left over from their upbringing. The
soul does not tolerate disharmony easily, and will instinctive bring
East and West together in how it views the world.
This same natural religious heritage from our upbringing
is also placed in conflict, via education, within modern individuals in
the Americas through the incursion of the concepts of scientific
materialism, including the idea that the human being is only matter and
never spirit. In America (the USA), and the Americas to a
slightly lesser degree, there is a battle going on between the
spiritual ideas of the human being out of the East, the spiritual ideas
of the latent aboriginal younger-brother spiritual life, and the
underlying materialistic pollution* of Western languages with such
concepts as there is no mind or self, but only a material physical
brain, which conceptions mostly began their rise to dominance during
the late 19th Century in the soul Center of the world.
*[See Barfields’s History in
English Words.]
While some may find this next concept disagreeable, as an
aside we have to consider to what degree the aboriginal spiritual life
of the Americas is still vital (living) enough to confront either the
sage-Wisdom of the East, or the materialism of the Center. The
Hopi Prophecy expected that there would have to come something from the
outside - the True White Brother with the life plan for the future,
otherwise the spiritual life of the younger brother peoples would
succumb. Does this mean there is no value to aboriginal (Earth-
centered) spirituality? No.
With the perception of this battle we can now perhaps
perceive that from another point of view, the ideas of the Cultural
East represent (at this moment in time) a kind of saving grace, for
they are powerful in their opposition to scientific materialism (all is
matter there is no spirit). Here we see this then - Steiner’s
view: The will
of the West must give power to the thought of the East ...
However, like most central Europeans, Steiner overlooks
the significance of the spiritual life of the savages* in the Americas. *[His choice of words on at least
one occasion.]
Americans, in consenting to embrace Eastern thought
(while not noticing that what they mean by the same words - ego and
mind - is not what is meant by the gurus) give power to something that
inhibits scientific materialism - our will takes the spiritual
thoughts of the East as a sword and shield against the further
incursions of materialism. This is part of the reason Steiner
used the language of Theosophy with its strong tendency to Eastern
meanings.
At the same time, in the Americas aboriginal teachings
also have a strong influence, and are not to be discounted. These
too serve to resist scientific materialism.
Osho didn’t understand any of this, or the
significance of Rudolf Steiner in leading us through the difficulties
of this battle. Osho, being imprisoned in the figuration
(semi-conscious thinking) of his own psychology, is not able to realize
that Steiner’s The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is a
solution to a problem most thinkers today don’t even recognize exists.
Mind and ego have evolved since the time of the Holy Rishis, and
are full of potentials that most traditional mind sciences of the
Cultural East do not even imagine lie latent within. Not only
that, most aboriginal teachings in the Americas are similarly limited.
Why?
The central matter is time. Systems of wisdom have a birth, age, and then
die. No tradition is meant to last forever. This the Hopi
Prophecy recognized - their way of life would be on its last legs when
the True White Brother came. Most of the teachings of the East do
not seem to have understood this about themselves - they act as if
their truths are eternal (and this to shall pass is the
real wise stance).
In order, in our time, to discover the real nature of mind and ego in its
present evolved configuration in the modern human being, in whatever
region of the Earth where we choose to explore our own psychological
and spiritual biography, we must become a scientist of the own mind.
This is the path shown by Rudolf Steiner.
Science did not exist at the time of the Holy Rishis, or
even at the time of Gautama Buddha, and certainly not when aboriginal
teachings were first fostered. Scientific objectivity is a brand
new capacity of human nature in terms of the evolution of consciousness
(the onlooker separation). When Steiner placed the quest for
individual freedom inside the scientific enterprise with his book
(originally translated as The
Philosophy of Freedom), he did not even
mention spirit (although in the criticized 1918 revision he changed
this). The original (pre-1918 edition) is all about the
practice of scientific introspection without any linkages to the later
Spiritual Science - and through the inspiration of this book we can
become scientists of our own inner nature, and have no need whatsoever
for Guru’s (superior men/sages/gurus) of any kind (even such as
Steiner).
The Cultural West in its most recent past and on into the
future is instinctively avoiding the teaching of self-development
as a thing in itself (although the Anthroposophical Society seems
confused on this question). With the Creator’s modeling of the
washing of the feet, the superior man disappears and the
self-sacrificing servant of all arrives (the Christ Impulse).
The servant, while engaging in developing his capacities,
does this for self-chosen moral reasons (see The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity). His
freedom is entirely creatively interdependent with his growing and
developing conscious free moral autonomy (three steps in character
development for each step in spiritual development). A by-product
of this freedom is the capacity to create new thought - concepts never
before thought, and therefore there arises through this means not just
the overcoming of all tradition, whether of East or of West, or even
aboriginal, but also the specific overcoming of the limits of
scientific materialism.
Let me elaborate this idea a little bit ...
While we can look at Steiner as a teacher of
self-development, the primary reality of his work was educational - he
added to human knowledge on a scale few individuals ever accomplish.
Teaching about self-development was secondary and necessary in
the sense that people would need to know how to do what Steiner
did, should they wish to do this themselves. In this he modeled
for us the Western Way (we could say).
People follow this, so that Barfield adds greatly to
human knowledge, as did George Adams Kaufmann, Dennis Klocek and many
others inspired by Steiner. Before Steiner, even the
Romantics such as Coleridge, and the Transcendentalists such as
Emerson, basically added to human knowledge.
This, the sage/superior man/guru does not do. They
fundamentally teach their religious ideas of individual self-development and liberation from the mind and the ego,
but nowhere take up the task in this scientific age of adding to
universal human knowledge. As Tomberg points out in the
last article in the book Early
Articles: Indian Yoga and Christian
Occultism: the
choice [is]
between ... “self-liberation”
and “Washing the Feet”
The free man uses his own free* cognition to liberate all
of us by adding to our universal (scientific) knowledge, without
placing his own being (as a teacher) in the center of his life’s work.
Even the evolving News for Members of the Anthporosophical
Society in America, called: Being Human, is noticing the importance of what it calls
spiritual-scientific research. Hopefully in the future certain
needed precise distinctions will be added to that work, so that present
confusions being pointed out by the little book (Manure etc.) can be
overcome.
*[One must be able to confront and idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage. R.S. last sentence, original preface, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity]
The free man dies into his creativity, and into his
individuality, revealing thereby deep aspects of this Mystery from
Christ’s teaching:
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*. Matthew 10: 34-40 The
Unvarnished Gospels, by Andy Gaus.
*[the meaning, hidden here in the last two sentences
above, can be stated in another way: The I is the true seed of the Father. No one gets to the Father except by
me (Christ). I (Christ) and the Father are One. Not I, but
Christ in me, is how the human being takes hold of self-ness and
transforms that seed toward is full potential, following through the
Christ in me to the Father seed hidden in the deep will of the own I.]
At the same time a certain problem remains, and must be
acknowledged.
The pollution via the Guru remains active in the true
West, as well as elsewhere. Even in the East this approach has
begun to outlive its usefulness. The evolution of consciousness
is everywhere on its way to fostering individuality, as a necessary
step for the coming into being of moral freedom (or ethical
individualism). The core problem is hidden in the
figuration - the semi-conscious concepts of inner and outer reality
born in our acclimation to our own languages. Like scientific
materialism in the Cultural West, the Cultural East carries in its
figuration a whole set of “idols” buried in the meaning of most of its
words (its collective
representations - Barfield).
As part of the longer term evolution of the spirit (of
the ego or I) this conceptual prison in which the I finds itself exists
precisely to be overcome. Only through waking up to this
prison born in language (One must be able to confront an idea ...) do we engage in the next steps necessary for our future
development in freedom. Christ’s Incarnation actually changed the
nature of the ego, setting it on the course of its present development
where even external spiritual paths will be lost, and the individual
biography becomes a fully individual Way all in itself. The Lord is my shepherd, I
shall not want ... anything: including
particularly a priest, or sage or guru or initiate or shaman seeking to
telling me how to be me - this sage/guru relationship is to die, so
that only my own i-AM (the verb that lives) determines all.
Yet, the Guru remains seductive as a possible teacher.
Why?
Since the East has yet no true science of the soul* (only
a very ancient tradition), it lacks an appreciation of certain aspects
of the modern nature of this inner territory needed for the present-day
journey toward being fully awake and free, and confusion is present
everywhere, mostly because everything has evolved since these
traditions first formed their teachings. Mostly the East holds
the view that the soul (the astral or desire body) is part of maya, and
one overcomes it (becomes liberated from it) by ignoring or
disregarding it on the way to disregarding even the I. Even
Gautama Buddha taught this.
*[That once ancient territory of the reality of the soul
and spirit is no longer well mapped, except by Steiner via GA 2, 3, and
4. After which, if we succeed at that task, we then
graduate to Anthroposophy - a fragment*,
where the newly born organic and pure thinking capacities of the I are
turned to the study of the gateway to the macrocosm - the
microcosm: in the form of the Ten Senses - plus two boundary
conditions, and the Seven Life Processes) - see
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/afragment.html]
Also present in the Eastern traditions is a strong memory
picture from the farthest ancient times of human spiritual and soul
evolution, which Steiner describes as a time when human beings were
still united directly with the world of spirit, although more in a
state of dreaming than the full intensity of modern I consciousness.
Barfield calls this: original participation.
This memory picture does not contain the idea that the
ego evolves, nor does it contain the idea that the world of pure being
(Steiner’s spiritual
world) evolves either. In writing about
this and the next ideas I am giving examples of: the thought of the West must
release the will of the East.
The East then lies in bondage to these no longer valid
memory pictures. As a consequence the superior man (the
guru) teaches that self-development needs to take the course that the
ego is to be abandoned, as well as the mind - the believed to be
illusory soul forces of thinking, feeling and willing. The
tradition bound beliefs of the East hold that only through these
ancient paths will the being-nature hidden in the human being find its
way back to the original remembered source (seeking an atavistic return
to original participation).
Osho, like many other Gurus, in entering into the
background semi-conscious being nature which Barfield has called
figuration also finds there a connection to Lucifer. In the
West, Steiner tried to bring us awake to the double - to the influence
of Lucifer and Ahriman in the own soul. Unfortunately, the
Anthroposophical Society in the present has so far failed to seriously
take up Steiner’s indications here, with potentially grave consequences
for the next phase of spiritual history for the whole world.
For teachers of Eastern wisdom, when they let go their
ego and seek to rise into the pure essence Being of all Existence, they
have to travel through what in the West is called the Realm of the
False Holy Spirit, or Lucifer’s Realm. Lacking a
scientifically clear map of this territory, and bound up with all kinds
of ancient and atavistic traditional ideas of these realms, teachers of
the East often find themselves caught up in the unearthly wisdom world
of their luciferic double via an identification with this aspect of the
lessor Guardian of the Threshold. The Guru, believing still
in the ideal of a higher knowing (the superior man), stands as regards
his or her students in the same prideful place as does Lucifer.
As a result they give the appearance of a teacher of wisdom, when
in fact they are basically selling the luciferic point of view, which
was already laid deeply into the Eastern cultural part of the world
following Lucifer’s incarnation.
Clearly this is not true of all guru-like teachers - this
identification with the luciferic double. Yet, the fact remains
that in the thought-world, the guru-like teacher has a strong tendency
to draw forth concepts that are themselves atavistic - old and no
longer valid for modern conditions of the ego (spirit) or the mind (the
soul’s thinking, feeling and willing). Chogyam Trungpa, a very
popular Tibetan Lama in America (who fathered the Naropa University in
Boulder, Colorado), speaks in the lectures collected under the title Meditation
in Action: “There is no I, there is no am.”
A similar event is taking place in the Cultural West (and
flowing all over the world), although in this case it involves
Ahriman’s incarnation and the seeming triumph of scientific
materialism. The ahrimanic double influences our Culture in the
West very strongly (and through us the entire culture of the planet).
Ahriman wants to bind us eternally to matter and the earth (such
as by making us believe we will be able in the future to move our
consciousness into a computer in a robot and live forever).
Lucifer wants to bind us in the opposite way - prematurely
to a purely unearthly spiritual existence (the atavistic memory of
original participation labeled by the Buddha: Nirvana).
Both would have us sleep through the influence of Rudolf
Steiner’s teachings as the John the Baptist figure of the true Second
Coming - the voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism,
pointing toward this truth: and
the Word became thought and dwelt within* us.
*[Luke 17: 20-21 “Asked by the Pharisees when
the the kingdom of God was coming he answered: “The kingdom of God
doesn’t come with the watching like a hawk, and they don’t say, Here it
is, or There it is, because, you know what? the kingdom of God is
inside you.”
[emphasis added]
If we appreciate the underlying aspects of the ongoing
evolution of the spirit (the ego or I), and the ongoing aspects
of the evolution of the soul (thinking, feeling and willing), we can
come to an appreciation of what a few students of Steiner call: the onlooker separation. With the birth of natural philosophy (science) in
the Cultural West (and soul Center) in Europe, the I transformed fully
its original connection to the spirit. We stepped out of
the atavism of original participation, and entered into an
intermediary state. This rite of soul passage is available to be
experienced all over the world as we go into the future.
It can be the world-destiny of Anthroposophy to model and
provide (over the next 300 years) that understanding which lets all
religious and spiritual views find their way to this truth, without
abandoning the richest elements of their own traditions. But this
cannot be done by telling this story and relating it to Rudolf Steiner
as an authority. We must live it and demonstrate it through processes that
advance universal knowledge, without making self-development or
religious intolerance* the center of the work. We serve (communion-with). We do not determine (dominion-over).
*[It is subtle and dangerous religious intolerance that
lives among anthroposophists whenever any kind of exclusionary or
exclusive thought or impulse is but forward, as Prokofieff does, for
example, when he suggests that only we have the true path to Michael -
see Appendix Two below.]
The next phase, on whose threshold we now stand, is what
Barfield called; Final
Participation, which is the conscious
reunification of the I with the world of spirit, and without a
surrender of individuality. What was earlier characterized as a
battlefield in America is also an encounter, which carries the
possibility of healing. To appreciate this we need to keep in
mind Steiner’s observation that in many instances the cure for an
excess of the ahrimanic is the luciferic, and the cure for an excess of
the luciferic is the ahrimanic. In the collision of the atavistic
somewhat luciferic wisdoms of the Cultural East, as well as the too
earthly aboriginal wisdoms of the Americas, and the ahrimanic
scientific materialism of the Cultural West in America, even though all
are tending to onesidedness, their meeting can bear great fruit,
although this process may take many centuries to accomplish.
The accomplishment manifests if the individual finds
their way to Anthroposophy, in the sense of Anthroposophy being a path of cognition (a method of spiritualized thinking, and
not a content such as the teachings of Spiritual Science).
Factually, as individualism proceeds on its course, all human
beings can become natural anthroposophists, for Anthroposophy is not a
doctrine but a human potential. When we are on our Path, and
recognize our Way, we can then take hold of the underlying spiritual
power now latent in the ego or I. But we could use the help
provided if some kind of idea or concept of this Path can become
present in newly being created world-wide cultural figuration (the end
of one civilization and the founding of another).
Further, we can realize that since the Path and Way are
individually ours, we are always right where we need to be.
There is no something (such as the superior man etc.) that
we have to become. We, in our own biography, are just fine.
Whether we ourselves want to change something, that is up to us.
Life, in fact, does change us. Life is the great teacher, and
being of and from Christ the Creator (... in it (the Word) was life and the life was the light of the world ...), we (as pointed out above) need never want.
Much is at stake, much is at risk, and as is said: fortune favors the bold. The I itself must understand and then act.
No one will do this to us from our outside, although
perhaps in the future the figuration of yet to be created cultures and
languages will contain just what is needed to support the eventual
possible full spiritual maturation of all individuality (what the
bodhisattva vow presently calls the enlightenment of all sentient
beings).
The ongoing tragedy of the Anthroposophical Society is,
however, that it does not yet fully understand and appreciate this task
and may as a result fail to bring to light the real significance of
Anthroposophy for the Third Millennium. Steiner’s true legacy -
the awakening to our true cognitive potential - may disappear into a
kind of cultural formless and uncreated state and thus be lost for a
thousand years or more. If this happens then scientific
materialism will dominate the Third Millennium, retarding general human
spiritual progress on all levels.
Its not just Osho that doesn’t understand Steiner, but
far too many of the members of the Anthroposophical Society don’t
understand Steiner either.
Joel A. Wendt*
in the Season on the cusp of Easter and St. John’s Tide,
2011
*author of The Art of
God: an actual Theory of Everything