Zen Anthroposophy

A Zen anthroposophist is an artist of thought and thinking, in the sense of Steiner’s teachings.  Thought and thinking precede all action.    What makes this Zen-like is its self-trust of the immediately intuitive perception of the human spirit to any life experience.  We can also be Zen-like by courting simplicity - what Steiner called: distinguishing the essential from the non-essential.

Anthroposophists like to teach meditation, as do all depth spiritual systems. Is our form of meditation in any way particularly better?  Probably not.  Different yes, but not better.  However, only Anthroposophy teaches a new kind of thinking - new skills, new crafts, and new arts.  No other existing spiritual work teaches this aspect of what Steiner taught, and we would have no daughter movements without the inspiration to our individual thinking born from Steiner’s indications. 

Yet, we seem to have forgotten that Steiner created these indications by this new thinking.  They did not come from the whisperings of angels for which he was the passive channel, but from his own individual genius of spirit.

In the Society we study social threefolding as if that was the final word on human social life.  It is not.  When Steiner indicated that Christ became the Spirit of the Earth, with the shedding of His blood on Calvary, Steiner meant to point a finger at the Cosmic Christ in a new way.

Human beings incarnate into Earth Existence - into the birth-home of cosmic human meaning.  This locus of the Logos is Christ.  We incarnate into/within the totality of the Being of Love, which is coextensive with the starry world.  The social order is an extra-earthly structural aspect of the Being of Love as that expresses itself through Time.   This order is not even close to being the whole organism of the Love in which we abide - it is more like a skeleton without any flesh.  

America is birthing the future social life of humanity, via the alchemical crucible of human individuation.  This America is not a geographic place in the ordinary earthly sense.   America is the true name of the state of existence that is the frontier of human becoming.

All thinking and being take place in the Now.  There is no escape.   Why would we want to escape?    Now already is Forever.   Nor does Love need us to change and be different.  It is the human being that has introduced urgent change into existence.   We want to change ourselves and/or the world.   Love does not need to make change - true change (transformation) is organic in the situation itself.   It happens quite naturally.  

But we do not yet possess the skills, crafts, and arts to accept the what-is, so we constantly seek to force the changing of the what-is into the what-it-is-not.   Everywhere human beings unsettle the Now, fracking Forever into pieces of pain and suffering.

My biography is not your business, nor is your biography my business.   For Steiner freedom was a state of mind - of spirit, not a state of being.  If my mind is free, my avatar-like physical body can never be in prison, whatever its apparent circumstances.  Of course, you have to want to have a free mind - and not everyone does.

the Zen Anthroposophical Society

An association of people who strive at something they don’t fully understand ... yet.

Somethings can’t be understood except in the doing.  You can study how to ride a bicycle all you want, but until you get on the bicycle and learn to actually ride it, all your study is for naught.   Same with sex.   Same with the new thinking Steiner pointed to.

Zen is again here used as a slight modifier of the noun Anthroposophy.  What can make the Anthroposophical Society Zen-like is simplicity and the practice and trust of the immediately intuitive mind.

A lecture is not Zen-like.  It can be a self-indulgence.  A book is not Zen-like either.  It can be a huge self-indulgence.  But lectures and books belong to the realm of social expectation - we create them and deliver them because it is tradition.   

These are sort of like cooking and farming in a way.  Someone has to grow food, and someone has to cook it, all of which acts can be done for others.  The Zen saying is: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.  

Lecturing and book writing and farming and cooking still need to be done.  But what changes if we get to the true essence of the new thinking - its Zen-like core?

Precision, exactness and art.  The level of skillfulness changes.

In my work-life, I studied thinking, and America and Social life.  I became overtime an expert in these tasks - knowledgeable at levels many people can’t imaging are even possible.  But for most of that work I was not skilled, but clumsy.  I dropped the water pail often, and when I chopped wood too many splinters flew into the eyes of others.  No precision, exactness or art.

I desired acknowledgement and authority.  I wanted, hungered for and pursued to be seen as special.   I was filled with craving and attachment - I clung to my work and to what I wished would be the payoff.  There was yet no Zen there in my Anthroposophy.  

Why Zen?

America is where East and Center meet.  Zen is of the East and Anthroposophy of the Center.  To be human and American is to be in between, to marry East and Center inside the own soul.  

The precise, exact and skillful state of mind is simple, content and satiated.  There is no going anywhere else.   There is no being anything else.   There is just the what-is.  Chopping wood and carrying water.  Talking and thinking.  Perceiving and acting.

Imagine a Society dedicated to that.