pictures of current work spaces:

Biographical Necessity

the confessions of a social

philosopher and occasional fool

by Joel A. Wendt

dedication

(a bit obscure)

to Hannah, from Hank

in world of many masks and dreams

and dramas, you have always been a

guiding and loving light, with gratitude

Contents

A brief introduction (page 2 - page numbers are approximate)

The original essay meant to be the last one in the book American Anthroposophy (page 4)

Additions to the original essay: (page 51)

a visit from Jahve (page 52)

the Hermit, the Fool and the Magician (page 64)

Epiphany 2008 (page 66)

falling into the arms of the Holy Mother (page 77)

my Christ experiences (page 79)

Initiation and Self-initiation (page 85)

The School of Life, some comments (page 90).

a brief introduction

In September of 2007 (on the 19th to be exact), I died, twice.  I was then 66 years old.  I had come awake around 5 a.m., not feeling at all well, and got a friend to drive me to the ER, where during the intake interview with the nurse, my heart stopped and I fell on my face, dead.   I was shocked back to life, and then after a while I died (heart stopped) again.  To revive me this time took two shocks.

I subsequently (that day) had two stents placed in two different coronary arteries, whose blockages that morning had twice caused my heart to stop completely.    I later thought that it was quite efficient of Divine Providence to block two coronary arteries at more or less the same time, so as to not require that I go through this particular initiation more than once.  I saw no white lights, but was not really awake until two plus days later when I discovered myself in a hospital bed surrounded by three of my five children.

This event had a number of effects on me, the principle one being that in my will I no longer could, with good conscience, put off anything I knew needed doing.   Having had this grace of a second birth then has led to a great deal of activity (the finishing and launching of several written and video initiatives - almost a dozen self-published on-demand books on lulu.com and several dozen videos on YouTube).  Since I cannot act as if my life will go on endlessly (every anniversary of the 19th of September will be a memory of my condition of grace), I am publishing this essay, which was written originally as if it would be part of my book American Anthroposophy. 

To restate this from a slightly different direction.  Knowing, from experience now, that I could die at any moment, I cannot leave things undone, if I am able.  Of course, I could live another twenty years, but I'll not make such an assumption.  Rather, I'll consider myself quite blessed to be alive tomorrow.

A friend advised that to speak about my personal story of joey/joel (a linear sequence of two egos, in one biography, with the change of egos happening in about the 31st year) would detract from that work (American Anthroposophy), and I found myself in agreement.   At the same time, there will be some value to a true rendering of certain highly unusual spiritual aspects of my biography [1) as a historical curiosity; 2) in terms of furthering what anthroposophists call spiritual research; and perhaps, 3) existentially as an effect on the consciousness of some members of the Anthroposophical Society and Movement, for whom this might be useful - the general public will not gain much from reading it, for its main ideas are far too esoteric in the worst sense of that word].  

For example, if certain people where to wonder about the how and why of certain developments described in my various writings and videos, this essay below is an honest rendering of the most salient facts.  It is also necessary to represent in this essay below certain conceptions about human and cosmic thought, and their interrelationship, so that aspects of the practice of living thinking, from a particular point of view, can be better understood.   When the work one creates arises in cooperation with excarnate Beings, through organic and pure thinking, the reader needs to appreciate some of the more unusual nuances, in order not to make false assumptions.

As a consequence of this necessity I am placing this work on lulu.com.  A word to the wise is now called for.  No doubt rumors could arise and the temptation to gossip as well.  If the reader of this takes care, they will realize that no knowledge about this situation can be obtained from what is merely idly said, repeated and heard.  Only that which is seriously studied and pondered can lead to the truth.

The title below is how I framed this at the time I had thought to include it in American Anthroposophy.  It has basically not been greatly changed from that original representation, although certain nuances and details have been given, over time, more or less emphasis.  However, while the main body was not changed in any significant way, considerable additional material was added in the so-called appendix, all of which was written subsequently to the original essay. 

To give a bit of an advance hint as to the conclusion, here is something that can be found near the end of main body of this essay: Consider this essay then a very long shaggy dog story, typical of the American Soul with its imaginations of such exaggerated fanciful characters as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.  That is, after all, the only kind of idea we anthroposophist's presently have of the Future Maitreya Buddha - a fantastic exaggeration.  Anyone who thinks they can speak with final truth of such aspects of human spiritual history, had better come back down to the earth.  Remember, Rudolf Steiner only spoke of this at a certain time and place because he was more or less forced by circumstances to do this.

Further, just so it is clear:  I also mean by this essay to challenge certain assumptions of those who think of themselves as students of Rudolf Steiner.   Many are far too complacent, and to the degree that Providence grants me more years, I expect to walk among my fellow anthroposophists from time to time, urging them with as much force of personality as possible to redirect their energies into more fundamental spiritual practices than is presently the norm.   There is far too much reading of Steiner's works, and far too little practice of the science of introspection.

Some last introductory considerations:

It will seem to some (perhaps all) who read this, that I have climbed up on some kind of high horse in my view of myself.  That I am technically in a kind of way lost in some loose astrality (the Baggage Disclaim area as described in Catherine MacCoun's book: On Becoming An Alchemist).  The problem is that what surrounds and penetrates my biography includes some unusual people (or Beings if you wish to use that term), whose interest in me (or even need of me) becomes an obligation that must be honored.

For example, below you will read of joey, the first ego in this biography.  You will get details about him, and his life and the gifts he gave to me.  I have little purpose and meaning without those gifts, for he was a friend who literally gave me his life - he leaves our shared biography so that I may enter and do what comes to me to do. 

Then there is Rudolf Steiner, who while not perfect by any means, did a work that is so important in so many ways, that if it is lost, humanity will have to face things it otherwise might not have to face.  This treasure, an essential part of which I call the New Thinking, has been of great benefit to me in all my work, and from other practitioners of that Art, come works often far greater than my own.  A main aspect of my work, concerning  trying to understand human political and social life, is not possible without what I learned about the mind from the map provided by Steiner's books on epistemology.

In the appendix, where I describe the meeting with Jahve, we have another actor in this play, who, for whatever were His own reasons, dropped into my life one day and gave me another great gift.

Then there are all the writers of the many books that I have read, which also became a part of my soul.  How can I not honor their gifts?

In this mood of gratefulness (which comes most often when I have been down, and am now returning to a place of balance between above and below), and which includes a kind of feeling of shame as well for all my flaws, I sometimes think of a little boy whose life was portrayed in the movie by Scorsese about the Dali Lama.  How does he manage to move through a life in which he becomes a center of something so much greater than he recognizes in himself, such that to be what seems expected can be a very heavy burden?  Yet, he does and he does so with considerable grace and humor.

These then are aspects of the biographical necessity that rides me in life, and which has little to do with ego and a lot more to do with trying to mold the clay of my own being, at least in some degree, in such a way as to be able to represent in the world some few parts of the reality of these gifts of others.

The best that I can do in response to these events, of which I am not the author, is keep in mind joey's feeling of embarrassment, when during his adolescence he was honored three times for what others saw in him that he did not see in himself: first he was elected as a high school freshman to be the president of his church youth group.  The second was when he was in the Fall of his senior year, and he was elected class president, an office for which he did not run, but for which he was nonetheless nominated by a girl that sat behind him in homeroom.  He felt so undeserving of this unwanted honor, that he didn't tell his parents and they had to find out about it three weeks later through others.

The third was in the Spring of his senior year, when he was called down to the offices of the adult leader of the local Demolay Chapter, and told that while he was someone who hardly attended and seldom participated, he was going to receive their highest honor - the Degree of Chevalier.   When he asked the adult leader what was going on, he was basically told that the adults in the community knew of his religious work in his church youth group, and they were honoring that.

Without these events which came toward him without his asking, he would never have been nominated to go to the United States Air Force Academy, at least not in the normal way (although he did apply and failed at that).  Instead, one day after all the slots for his State were filled, his father received a telegram from the Secretary of the Air Force, whose officers no doubt, upon viewing the above honors in his application, thought he might be someone special.

Well, in a way he was.  He stayed there three years (didn't graduate, but left by inadvertently placing his girl-friend in a family way), during which time he managed to maintain a position near the bottom of his class of 600 hundred (he was in the bottom five).  He also in his Second Class (junior) year, was one of two co-editors of the Dodo, the cadet humor magazine that came out maybe half-a-dozen times of year.

During this same junior year, he and a friend (who also didn't graduate) invented a fake cadet, which they named Nino Baldachi.  Nino was meant to and became over time something of a tradition, appearing and disappearing from classes for which he was registered and receiving announcements over the intercom and other kinds of useful activity as needed.   Twenty  years after joey left the academy, when the first Bush was vice-president under Reagan, Bush the elder read the name of Nino Baldachi at graduation after some cadet had hacked the list of graduates and put his name on it.  No cadet rose to receive that diploma and someone on the review stand had to explain to Bush the joke.

Of all that joey did, I find this was the most enjoyable although in a very subtle way, and the reader of this should keep in mind that action of joey's in considering the reasons for my putting my name in as a possible candidate for a legendary spiritual figure.  I do this in the best of the traditions established by joey all those many years ago.  Not because it is true, or not true with any certainty, but because  it is fun.

In a world where there are a lot of constraints on our freedoms, both inner and outer, and where there is present a great deal of woe in all our lives, fun and jokes is often the best way  to find a healthy relationship to our own and other’s suffering.    At the same time, given the content of what my thinking has produced, it seemed to me that the readers of my work, however small in numbers, were entitled to some knowledge of the soul life of the author of those works.

A few of the oddest aspects of that soul life is as described below, including not only the events, but also the thoughts with which they were accompanied.  Some may see these as strange, even unbelievable.  I have one advantage, whatever judgments readers of this will make: I have only  to tell the truth, and lay naked my soul and most inner thoughts and feelings, for your consideration.   What you make of this true life shaggy dog story is your own responsibility.

-------------------------------------------------

this was originally meant to be the last essay in the

main body of the book American Anthroposophy,

which was to begin as follows:

[for the neophyte:  the following is a bit of a specialty item, and assumes a greater working knowledge of Steiner's terminology than many of the above essays.  The naive reader should perhaps consider this a curiosity, and a kind of in-joke.   Several things happened within the Anthroposophical Society and Movement over the change to the New Millennium of which they took almost no notice, being too obsessed with Rudolf Steiner (apparently assuming Christ would put all His eggs in one basket, to borrow an apt cliche`).  The story below is just one of many where continuing spiritual revelation (beyond what Steiner offered) is pouring over humanity in this time of the true Second Coming, which continuing revelation large numbers of main-stream anthroposophists studiously manage to ignore.  Many of the language conventions used below are made necessary by the work of Rudolf Steiner, whose research into the spiritual worlds led to many descriptions of beings and processes that are here followed in the word-form in which he gave them.  Other seers no doubt would use different kinds of language.]

Anthroposophy in the 21st Century,

and the legend of the current Bodhisattva

incarnation of the future Maitreya Buddha

(written for this book as the most curious,

and odd, piece of the puzzle)

confessions

Let us begin with the problem of knowledge, for it is that problem which has been a major theme of this book.  Knowledge (the union of percept - experience - and concept - thought) has to be distinguished from understanding (perceptless concepts actively worked over, in order to met the offerings of a mostly reliable source).  Reading a Steiner text, if we meet it in the right way, can provide true understanding, but never real  knowledge.   A scientifically trained introspection can easily distinguish in our own minds knowledge and understanding from each other; and, these two as well from mere belief (perceptless concepts often falsely thought to be true, that are passively received instead of actively thought over, and to which too much unredeemed emotional energy is attached).  In the absence of this trained introspection, it is quite difficult for the I to perceive the own soul characteristics with sufficient discernment.

That other approaches to the spiritual lead to a different way of cognition, and to different kinds of expressions of the truth of matters does need to be recognized.   Just keep in mind that in Steiner's case, his biographical necessity included bringing into the stream of scientific materialism a healing gesture in which the rational mind, with its appreciation for concepts, ideas and reason, could find a Way to knowledge of the spirit.  The place and the time of such activities are not without their own meaning and significance, and Rudolf Steiner accomplished something that most of his imagined students (and certainly his many critics) do not yet understand or appreciate.

The material below represents a combination of knowledge and understanding to the author, to which has been added (as one can do in science) a hypothesis (as long as the hypothesis is fully stated).  In this case the hypothesis is a view which seems to be one possible logical conclusion that can be reached based upon what is known and what is understood.  Let me now make this more explicit.

All the material below about the experience of a change of egos, and the various life passages that followed, is based upon my personal direct  experience and knowledge of my own inner life.  At a certain point in time this biographical development intersected the works of Rudolf Steiner, wherein was discovered an explanation (an understanding) of what certain of these biographical experiences could mean.  Having experienced the change of egos described by Steiner, this encounter with Steiner's explanation led to certain difficult questions.

The main difficulty was rather personal and represented a temptation to think highly of myself (severe hubris), for Steiner had given several names of "lofty" (Steiner's typical phrasing) personalities, who might undergo this experience (which I had undergone).  To think of ones self, for example, as a reincarnation of Moses or Ezekiel or Abraham was clearly a problem.  To think of ones self as a legendary Bodhisattva incarnation of the future Maitreya Buddha was an even worse problem.

Fortunately such a difficulty can also become an opportunity, so it became a discipline of mind that whenever the tempter (the luciferic aspect of the double) would cause such a thought as to my so-called spiritual identity to arise (which identity-name-concept actually is a limiting concept), I was offered the opportunity to practice control of thoughts and immediately dismiss that concept as it arose in whatever context this occurred.  However, this problem was made all the worse, by the fact that during a period of time, when I was routinely intoxicated with marijuana, some Thrones (those who contribute to sky phenomena - a long story, I'll leave aside the details) made a magical (imaginative) picture during a moment of atavistic clairvoyance, and by this gesture suggested to me the following as two previous personal incarnations: George Washington and St. Matthew.

Again, I felt these things as a temptation to a kind of egotistic excess and fought those aspects of my soul that might succumb to such confusion.  Those, who have read my essay above: In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship, may have noted that at a certain stage one learns to renounce any kind of self-identity as well as the centrality of the own ego in what is going on in the biography.  Steiner once described a certain aspect of this soul phenomena when he wrote that whereas Descartes said: I think, therefor I am, it might be more true to say: I think, therefor I am not.  A similar activity is found in the teachings of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me.

Such temptations then can serve as a goad to important inner work.

I also on a handful of occasions in the past had nights in which I was unable to sleep at all (this started about 1997 - the most recent was over the Holy Nights 2007-8).  All I could do was think all night, and always the thoughts that were more insistently sought, by my own ego, concerned efforts on my part to resolve this aspect of my biography.  Since the living thinking does not arrive all of a piece at once, and since it represents a kind of cooperative working with the Holy Spirit (from one point of view), then sometimes sleeplessness means that important inner work is going on in cooperation with excarnate beings.  Some of what is below was born in such lengthy periods of thinking-contemplation.

Let me tell one story in connection with this (this came from the 1997 night work).  Making a kind of inward assumption (so as to test the logic of the idea as well as whether all the related phenomena could meet the assumption-hypothesis) that I could possible be the future Maitreya Buddha (a thought that I suspect I never would have had, had Steiner not been forced by outer circumstances to give those lectures on this theme - see below), I inwardly asked the question of what incarnation might be in between my present incarnation and the one suggested by the Thrones as George Washington.  The name Clara Barton was immediately thought in me in response to my forming this question, and when I later investigated her biography I discovered that she too had this pattern of a more innocent youth (see below), and a later gifted outer world personality, broken by a period described as having a kind of mental breakdown (again, see below for what happens when the egos change).

Now I have called this section confessions, because I wanted the reader to have no illusions, just as I demand of myself here: no illusions.  I lay naked certain aspects of my soul in this essay, and leave to the reader whether the hypothesis that is woven into what is knowledge and understanding has any value for our mutual work.  This value, such as I understand it, will also be laid out below.  So it is clear: the phenomena of the change of egos is direct personal experience to me (knowledge).  Aspects of my understanding of it is formed by my encounters with Rudolf Steiner.  I forgo belief, but do make what seems to me to be a justifiable hypothesis - a logical guess as it were. Why?

Because during the Holy Nights of 2007-8 (particularly on Epiphany), I had an initiation experience into the thought world, far deeper than the more ordinary living thinking I had been practicing, and included as a minor part of my processes of later digesting this experience was the idea that such a confession on my part might aid people's understanding of the future directions that are to be taken with Anthroposophy.  At the same time that I took seriously the effort to consider this possibility, I also thought it would be fun to write this essay, and see how it fell out if I followed the whole of the conceptual themes to their essential conclusions.  I also thought it would be fun to tease my fellow anthroposophists with this idea, to tickle and challenge * their imaginations and assumptions. 

[*Always there is the danger of an excess of gravitas, so to approach projects out of a spirit of cultivated joy (combined with reverence for the subject, as well as a degree of silliness), helps to overcome the tendency of the ahrimanic double to make rigid what is living, and far too serious what ought to be a cause for celebration.  I also, by the way, mean with this essay to deliver a friendly  shock to the rigid aspects of the system of thought (Steinerism) that currently possesses many in the Society and Movement.  The ideas about the Maitreya Buddha, and his/her various bodhisattva incarnations, currently at work within the Society and Movement need a good shaking up, to go with all the other matters I have in this book been trying to free from the death grip of the intellectualization of the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence.]

You will see as you read the below that I have tried to model this effort - to create such an understanding - somewhat on something done by Rudolf Steiner.  What is being sought here in this essay is the illumination of certain processes of history, in which my I seems to play an active role (I do volunteer, by the way), but which role is only made possible by that inner work which reduces the tendency to egotism as much as possible.  You also might try to appreciate that this activity is somewhat humorous - I can imagine certain people grinding their teeth, and/or using what is said here in an effort to discredit my work.  Always, however, the question is what is the truth, what is the good, and how may we come to those while walking in beauty.

caveat

In the material below, as well as what was written above, certain names are used (such as future Maitreya Buddha etc.)  To use such names in certain circumstances is to exercise a kind of power.  The mind of others may take such a name and perhaps inflate its meaning - make it more significant than it really is (such as to name Steiner as a great initiate, for example).  Of all the useful inner acts the reader can do in seeking to understand this essay, the best will be in realizing that such names are misleading almost in their entirety.

Names can really limit something, by forcing the mind to attach its own weak conceptualizations to something that is perhaps of a whole other order than any carelessly formed conceptions.  Names can also illuminate, and in that we are users and creators of language, we are required to take these Arts (the Gift of the Word) with some seriousness and responsibility.   Remember, we are not nouns (names), but verbs (actions).  To be true to Steiner's teachings on thinking, we should never give him a name at all (such as great initiate, or alchemist), but try as much as possible to simply describe in a Goetheanistic fashion, the story of his deeds.  By this inner picturing of his deeds - his story (both outward and inward - see my essay on his Path above), we begin to think with him, instead of just about him.

In a like fashion, I will below include considerable facts of my story, encouraging the reader to try to think with me and not just about me.

In the case of this essay, the dangerous limiting matter is to somehow focus on the single personality (as has been done with Rudolf Steiner), as if the personality lay outside the historical/spiritual context in which it acted (the cosmic verbness or deeds in which we as individuals are embedded).  It is really this context that is crucial, not the single personality.  Gifted individuals can be found everywhere, in small places and large (read Catherine MacCoun's book: On Becoming an Alchemist, for example).   Sometimes, the context uses such a personality to achieve its own ends, and the personality itself consciously sacrifices aspects of its freedom to this context.  Steiner, as was pointed out in the dedication to this book, took on such a naming (great initiate etc.) in order to serve the purpose that was possible in the context of that time.  By context, I mean of course both the Earthly Historical and the Heavenly Cosmic context.

A Great Initiate, or a Bodhisattva incarnation of the Future Maitreya Buddha, are really more a product than a producing cause.  Their Art is humility and other moral qualities, which then enables cosmic thought to enter into intercourse with earthly thought.  With this essay I hope to shed light on this process by which human history is influenced in a cooperative dance between excarnate and incarnate beings.  The reader should keep in mind, in accord with the essay above (The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul), that this same dance fills out their own personal biography.  Each of you, in that you discover how to consciously participate in the Second Eucharist also plays an important role in this cooperative dance between excarnate and incarnate beings.

Whatever someone like myself or Rudolf Steiner does (or thousands of others), the crucial actor in the actual sphere of your own biography is you.  It is not my thought, or Steiner's thought that needs to be brought forth, but instead your thought.  You are there - you are the artist of your biography in that place and time, and it is the intercourse* between your earthly thinking (and its moral qualities of will) and cosmic thought that is the significant matter.  I am not there in your biography, nor is Rudolf Steiner, so don't quote us.  Use us to inspire and to confirm learning to trust your own activity, for Emerson had it entirely correct: In self trust all virtues are comprehended. [emphasis added]

[*Anthroposophy is a path of cognition from the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe.  First sentence, first Leading Thought - Rudolf Steiner.  We meet other presence on the Path of Cognition, which pathway is fundamentally a living two-way bridge.]

knowledge, understanding and hypothesis

Almost a century ago, Rudolf Steiner gave some lectures under the title: World History in the Light of Anthroposophy.  Many consider these lectures, which concerned on the surface a sequence of incarnations of an apparently karmically bound pair of individual personalities, to have been a description by Steiner of several of his prior incarnations.  A deeper reading of these lectures suggests an additional (and more important) theme: namely that World History goes through periods where certain individual personalities serve as a means through which particular kinds of spiritual inspiration enter into world affairs.  Further, that this stream of influence not only varies from epoch to epoch, but is in itself a kind of organism.

History then is something living, and how individuals participate in certain aspects of the unfolding of the history of ideas (the spiritual aspect of this living history) can aid our appreciation of the past, the present and the future.  Understanding how this works in relationship to the evolution of consciousness (the soul aspect of this living history) can also shed some light on this book [American Anthroposophy] you are reading and its place in the history of Anthroposophy as well as its place in the world of thought.

These personalities, through which ideas enter history, are not the cause, but rather a kind of medium of transmission.  Thought, as a cosmic activity, needs human personalities in order to manifest in human affairs.  Recall once more what was quoted several times at the beginning of this book: "...the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence."  R.S. Lucifer and Ahriman, lecture II, 2 November 1919 [emphasis added].  What the personalities do in order for a certain quality of thought to arise in their consciousness shows the nature of their deeds of will, but the thought content itself is a cooperative art - the cosmos co-participates (Christ as the Holy Spirit or Breath blows on the latent embers of our own being, encouraging our enlightenment and receptivity to this earthly-cosmic intercourse).

In this, the last essay for the book American Anthroposophy, I will endeavor to approach the same theme (cosmic thought and its influence on human affairs) from another, yet similar, direction as Steiner did above.  The danger will be that people mistake the personality for the message, as if the personality has everything to do with the content (rather than be a small part), which content is sometimes called: the history of ideas (a concept worthy of deeper consideration by the way).  Hopefully the story that I will tell here can bring forward this transmission aspect with greater depth and accuracy, for as many know the set of lectures - World History in the Light of Anthroposophy - is most often referred to in terms of its possible significance as describing Steiner's prior incarnations, and seldom for the light it meant to shed on World History.

The history of ideas is also, to a large degree, the history of words, languages and meaning, something that changes over time.  In the works of Owen Barfield, for example, we can come to not only a deep appreciation of these facts and their meaning for our lives today, but also note that he points to the poet (or we might say the artist of the word, which anyone who writes must exhibit to one degree or another) as the leading edge of cultural developments through their poetic expansion and contraction of the meaning of words.  So while I of necessity have to refer to Steiner and Anthroposophy in its own language to accomplish certain tasks and intentions I have given myself, for Americans I suggest that best (in the poetic sense) expression of many spiritual ideas, questions and problems is contained in a book several times mentioned in this little book: MacCoun's On Becoming an Alchemist.  It is how she represents the spirit in American idioms and language that is most wonderful and practical.  Were anthroposophists to adopt many of her language conventions, all of our conversations would be enriched.

*

Some general observations and questions...

There would seem to be no reason to expect that the development of Anthroposophy, as a possible influence on world affairs, will take a linear course.  Yet, many people in the Society seem to act as if this were the case.  The implied idea goes something like this: in linear time the sequence is: Steiner gave us great gifts and we develop them (Waldorf, biodynamics etc.).  Lets throw this idea away immediately, if the reader doesn't mind, for just a little attention to history shows that such is never the shape taken by any set of ideas or cultural influences.  Aristotle's works, for example, disappear from Western Civilization in the immediate centuries after his death, only to be preserved by Islamic cultural developments, and then from there be returned to western culture more than a thousand years after their original production.

Instead, let us look at the 20th Century development of Anthroposophy as being mostly rooted in Steiner's work, first developed in the late 19th Century (his books on the science of introspection etc.), and that this activity of writing and lecturing inspired many people.  It is kind of like a series of seeds sown in the garden of many souls, as well as within the general ongoing cultural context.  The seeds grow and develop, but is that the ending of planting, sowing and harvesting?  What next?

How about another set of seeds sown into additional gardens of soul and cultural contexts?

First of all we need to separate the personality of Steiner from Anthroposophy itself.  The reader will find it useful to conceive of Anthroposophy as something not from Steiner, but rather as a universal potential capacity of human consciousness that Steiner unfolds and which then stands behind his work, but which is also something in itself (a cosmic Being - Anthroposophia, who appears reflected in the microcosm of the human being as a kind of part - active imaginative (picture forming) cognition, just as the cosmic Being is itself just a part of something much larger - the macrocosm).

This is a very tricky matter in the anthroposophical world, so let me dig a little deeper.  In most translations of the First Leading Thought (Anthroposophy is a path of cognition....), the German word erkenntnis is most frequently translated as knowledge.  So for many people Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge..., and when they add in the ideas in Knowledge of Higher Worlds, and in Occult Science: an outline, about study as a preliminary condition of spiritual development, then Anthroposophy becomes, in the mind of far too many, a path of study of things Steiner wrote and said.

Steiner himself aided the confusion by using Anthroposophy as an adjective: anthroposophical, a term he applied over and over again.  What makes something: anthroposophical?  One of his favorite constructions was: anthroposophical spiritual science.  Many people treat those two terms as meaning the same thing, that is Anthroposophy equals Spiritual Science.   Yet if this was true, for Steiner to use the terminology anthroposophical spiritual science is the same as saying grape flavored grape flavor, which is clearly nonsense.  Obviously he meant something when he modified the term spiritual science by the term anthroposophical.

What did he mean?

To my thinking (which involves the conscious contemplation of the relationship of these various concepts in pure thinking) he meant to imply that there could be more than one kind of spiritual science, but that kind of spiritual science which was anthroposophical was one in which active imaginative - picture forming - cognition played a special role.  First comes the spiritual experience - the work of the spiritual researcher.  Then comes the act (art) of cognition as applied to the subject of experience.  This art of cognition was the first thing he developed during his biography, both as an experience and personal soul development, and then as a subject of three books.  Later in life he referred to these books over and over again, in particular A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception and The Philosophy of Freedom.

Now for many people in the Society and Movement this can all seem like a bit of silliness, except for the fact that since they don't know this art of cognition as an experience, they have no basis for making any judgments concerning its nature and importance.  To go over this once more, here...

The New Thinking Mystery can be lost to humanity for a significant amount of time unless it is understood, sought and then practiced.  The Society and Movement do not appreciate this.  In a way this ignorance is itself a danger to the New Thinking.  To cultivate spiritual science as a prize of the intellect, but not recognize the unique form of willed cognition that led to the becoming of our particular form of spiritual science, is to make a picture that the house (the huge edifice of spiritual scientific concepts) didn't have a carpenter, but rather sort of grew there as a kind of magic act coming from the personality of the great initiate.

Lets avoid this, if possible.

To return to our theme: we could then say that Steiner develops Anthroposophy in himself (evidenced by his books on scientific introspection), and then this capacity has consequences (the sowing and the reaping).  Steiner, being of a kind of esoteric linage (the organic stream or sequence of initiates in the Post-Atlantean Age) as revealed by World History in the Light of Anthroposophy, is already atavistically clairvoyant as a child, and this aspect of his biography then leads to a certain course being taken such that Anthroposophy appears in the world out of a kind of context highly related to his biography.  Anthroposophy appears in the way that it does because Steiner was of a linage (and spiritual community - the communion of saints) that knew about how to bring down from spiritual worlds, through initiation, cosmic truths.

Once we understand this, we can now begin to form a basis for appreciating how the in-the-present Bodhisattva incarnation of the legendary Future Maitreya Buddha will take a completely different course (hereinafter referred to as the HLFMB, i.e. the Hypothetical Legendary Future Maitreya Buddha - and yes I do mean make a bit of a joke of this, for it should be clear by now why this is not only justified but necessary). 

Bodhisattvas are a quite different kind of linage than that of initiates.  The probable biography of this individuality is not at all similar to Steiner's and in these differences we will come to see how Anthroposophy is taken up by this personality, put to use, and then appears in the form of another set of seeds which will be sown in those receptive souls and cultural streams, which will be of a quite different order from those of Steiner's.  Further, humanity has moved on since Steiner's time, and something different is called for as a consequence.  What Steiner needed to do is not what needs to be done now.  The only similarity is Anthroposophy, as a potential human capacity, and the role that capacity plays in the history of ideas and the evolution of consciousness.

To give an oversimplification here: Steiner brings something of the cosmos down into incarnation and the HLFMB develops something of the human and raises it up.  The two are very different kinds of acts, albeit quite related to each other in a certain way, about which the reader ought to be able to discover more details when they think about it.  Individuals may be able to benefit from learning to develop both what Steiner taught and what the HLFMB teaches.  May...obviously, for people called to the Anthroposophical Movement quite easily follow Steiner, and whether they will find something useful in the works of the HLFMB, that is a whole other question.

We could say (albeit again as a bit of an oversimplification) that Steiner humanizes cosmic (universal) thought, and the HLFMB universalizes earthly individual human thought.  In both cases, however, the living thinking (Anthroposophy), that plays a role as a capacity, remains a cooperative art - both incarnate and excarnate beings participate.

Perhaps it will help to think of the influence of the cosmic and human thought that streams through Anthroposophy (the capacity) as itself fluid and living, and not all of a piece (or otherwise fixed in any manner for all time).  So there is to be a succession or sequence (historical organism) of personalities who take up the unfolding of the capacity, and then act out of their own being in an effort to manifest what is there.  Our excessive leaning on Steiner then not only misses the point of Anthroposophy as a means to bringing in cosmic and human thought, it tempts one to not even look in the many places outside the Society and Movement where Anthroposophia chooses to support the manifestation of this cosmic and human thought.

In the case of the HLFMB, Anthroposophy manifests something quite different in quality and character from what Steiner manifested, and this is not only necessary but ought to be welcomed. An anthroposophical product of cosmic thought and human thought is multidimensional and needs to appear in the world from many different aspects of its nature.

Let us now look a little more carefully at the general nature of a HLFMB incarnation (and also the current one in particular) in an effort to more deeply appreciate what is being offered to the furtherance of anthroposophical work in the world from this quite different quarter.  Remember please the somewhat humorous meaning of this term: HLFMB: hypothetical legendary future Maitreya Buddha.

*

Some of what we might decide to understand about this individuality is given to us in a series of lectures by Steiner, done mostly around the year 1911.  Steiner was confronted at that time by an effort within the Theosophical Society to promote a young Indian boy as some kind of weird combination of the Second Coming of Christ and the coming 7th Buddha (and other things as well), and had to explain to those who would then listen that the future Maitreya Buddha  incarnates in a very unusual way (references to Steiner comments on the FMB will be followed by an AS: according to Steiner).  Some of these lectures are collected under the title: From Buddha to Christ.

For example, according to Steiner, this personality does not incarnate at birth, but another individuality does.  Not until around the 30th year, when a change of ego's takes place, does the FMBAS (giggle) take on a body.  The unspoken implication of these lectures then is that the young Indian boy being promoted around 1911 within the Theosophical Society could not be the future Buddha, since the young boy is already quite remarkable.  On the contrary, implies Steiner, there is basically nothing outwardly remarkable at all that would draw our notice to the personality that prepares the bodies for the FMBAS.

After pointing out the absence of outstanding (or noticeable) features of the first personality, Steiner then goes on to say a number of things about the FMBAS - the ego that later takes over from the first personality.  He/she can be called: the Bringer of the Good, or the Flesh becomes Word when the final of a long sequence of incarnations is reached.  This FMBAS incarnates in almost every century for about 5000 years.  Steiner also suggests that this individuality is to be a main teacher of the Christ Impulse.

There are other pictures that can be noted, for in the Luke Gospel lectures Steiner speaks of the Lodge of the Buddhas as something that can be seen Imaginatively circling around Christ as a Sun-center, from whom Wisdom streams as substance into these Twelve Buddha beings.  This concept is worthy of deeper thought as well, for it suggests that the ego of these individualities (the Lodge of the Buddhas) is made (created by Christ) out of the substance of Christ's Love as that can manifest as Wisdom.

Tomberg, in his Meditations on the Tarot - a journey into Christian Hermeticism (in the Arcanum on the Fool or Amor - Love) describes this future Buddha as being both a human and an avatar (the Kalki Avatar), who over the course of the sequence of incarnations draw nearer and nearer to each other, until the last incarnation when they merge.

We can see then that everyone has a point of view it would seem, for not only have Steiner and Tomberg had something to say, a number of anthroposophists have entered into the fray with their own assumptions and thoughts (see Thomas Meyer's The Bodhisattva Question, for example).  Perhaps this should give us pause for a bit of caution.  An acquaintance of mine (of deep insight), described Steiner's presentation as creating a picture of the FMBAS as a kind of Teutonic Superman, by which she clearly meant to suggest that Steiner's picture was neither entirely accurate or particularly useful.

The reader then should imagine that what is to follow here represents the concepts concerning this FMBAS by someone who has a much more intimate understanding and knowledge of how a change of egos unfolds.

Perhaps the matter most obviously overlooked (albeit Steiner and Tomberg should have mentioned something, and others as well might have considered it more carefully) is just who is the individuality that holds down the fort (so to speak) for the first 30 years or so.  Is it just any old soul that inhabits a body for almost half a life and then turns it over to the HLFMB?

Steiner in referring to this incarnation process notes in passing that it very much reflects characteristics of Christ's Incarnation - a perhaps unusual birth, followed by a more ordinary life (to some extent), which then leads to the Baptism at the Jordan (where the Christ-Sun-Spirit enters into a body prepared by the Zarathustra ego).  The HLFMB incarnations appear to be in a kind of harmony with Christ's Incarnation, as might be expected of a personality created by Christ out of the substance of Christ's Wisdom. It is as if a kind of song or sound comes into incarnation, which is in resonant harmony with the Incarnation.

So then, what about the place holder of the biography - the personality that is born into life in order to later sacrifice that biography as a gift to the HLFMB?

[Before going deeper into this question, it should be added that if Tomberg is correct, not only is there a placeholder personality who prepares the bodies for the HLFMB, but in the last of the sequence of incarnations, when the HLFMB becomes the Seventh Buddha, this earthly human development is met by the Kalki Avatar, and a kind of rite of incorporation takes place.  So the bodhisattva incarnations of the Future Maitryea Buddha are preceded by a personality that prepares the bodies, and are, at the same time, overshadowed and guided by the Kalki Avatar, until such time as the final incarnation when the work of the three spirits results in the rite of incorporation that produces what Steiner called: the Flesh becomes Word.  All of which must be done without interfering with the conscious freedom of either of the three essentially different spiritual beings - the preparer, the bodhisattva and the avatar.]

It is possible for the HLFMB to reflect upon its memories in such a way that a kind of style* can be observed in which the memories of the first thirty plus years are quite distinguishable from those of the later years.  At the change of egos, memory does not disappear, for the astral, etheric and physical bodies are left behind by the original ego and thus come into the possession of the HLFMB for his or her use.  A careful inward memory contemplation later in life by the HLFMB will reveal a certain quality in the earlier memories that is different from those subsequent to the change of egos.  The memories are mirror-like in their nature, and in this mirror can be found a reflection of the character and qualities (the style) of the two different ego personalities.

*[for this language usage, see MacCoun's On Becoming an Alchemist]

[As another aside, it should be noted that the HLFMB does not know it is the HLFMB when it takes over the left-behind bodies, for just as in a regular birth the memory of a pre-birth spiritual existence is forgotten, and the HLFMB finds itself integrated within an ongoing biography as well as integrated within the already well-formed astral, etheric and physical sheaths and bodies.  More will be said about this transition later.]

So, for example, in the current HLFMB incarnation it is clear to such inward memory contemplation that the earlier personality, while being someone with no obviously perceivable outstanding characteristics (as predicted by Steiner) he was nevertheless an individuality of unusual inner qualities.  We might want to think of the preparer-being as someone of extraordinary natural innocence - without evil thoughts, without guile, filled instead with a powerful instinct for empathy (is able to hear in the tone of voice of the other - the Thou - the real feeling nature of their state of soul).  Further this is a being who is generally passive in its nature - the world acts on it, it does not act upon the world.

From this we can acquire the idea that the sheaths (and the astral, etheric and physical bodies) prepared by this individual for the HLFMB) are already largely purified, for an essentially pure and innocent soul has occupied them for thirty years.  Now I mean to say here clearly: "largely purified", for the innocent cannot entirely remain innocent during incarnation, especially given their essentially passive-receptive nature.  At the same time this is a being who does not significantly change during incarnation - it is complete in itself to a large degree.  What happens to it is that it takes on in its soul (due to its passive-receptive nature) aspects of the world in the time of its incarnation that become a kind of sacrifice - the acceptance of a burden, thus leading to karma.  The world reacts to the innocent and impresses itself there, such that this personality must (in order to be in harmony with its surroundings) more and more act like that which is around it.  It copies, as it were (as a kind of costume and mask), the fallen characteristics of others, for to remain true to its real nature would be to be out of harmony with life.  What a child does early in life in imitation, this being continues for the entirety of its earthly existence.

As a consequence, when the change of egos occurs the astral, etheric and physical sheaths and bodies have acquired multiple qualities of various kinds, not all of which are positive.  This is a gift to the incarnating HLFMB, as it becomes a kind of puzzle to be solved by an ego that is essentially in its created nature wisdom (not wisdom as content remember, but wisdom as substance of ego being).  The biography left behind by the innocent passive imitator of life becomes a riddle, and in the resolution of this riddle a great deal is learned by the HLFMB that is essential to its own later activities in the continuation of this complicated biography.  Whereas Steiner's incarnations were apparently accompanied by a dance partner (as it were) - a second incarnate individuality, the HLFMB process contains two egos in one biography (plus an overshadowing and guiding avatar), something much more intimate by the way (in fact it would be difficult to imagine something more intimate - in an earthly sense, for the innocent one leaves behind all that it did and felt and thought both as memory and as embedded aspects - consequences - in the three sheaths and bodies, as well as the intricate circumstances of the biography itself to that point in time).

Further, it is crucial to see this wisdom ego being as buried in a kind of way - as imprisoned.  It must work its way to the surface of the sheaths and bodies, each representing different kinds of puzzles, obstacles, opportunities and burdens.  I will discuss this in a little more detail shortly.

What Christ bears during one Incarnation, as a process of receiving an already prepared set of sheaths and bodies, the HLFMB experiences in tiny imitation spread out over multiple incarnations (about 49, or seven sevens, to be more precise) taking about 5000 years to accomplish.  The essential matter for the HLFMB is the weight and direction given to the shared biography by the innocent preparer.  The significance of this gift for the later work of the HLFMB is not to be underestimated.

For example, in this specific case there were already in the biography three children and a wife.  There was a job and a tendency to seek something missing in the soul life through recreational drugs (mostly pot). There was also an already established world view (set of conceptions), and various habits of body, posture and speech.  In addition, there was a specific geographical location, and all manner of past situations (family, friends, experiences as a youth, as a high school student, as a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy for three years, a year at Denver University in a pre-seminary program and then three years in law school, followed by a half a year as a clerk to a Montana Supreme Court Justice.).  There had even been a brief love affair, and already a first divorce and then a remarriage.

Thirty years of lived life and all its consequence now came to be the possession of the HLFMB, who in the beginning fully identified with the past of the previous innocent ego, as if the HLFMB was this same personality.  All the same there was one odd experience that arose right the next morning, for the change of egos occurred during sleep.

Everyone has an idea of themselves.  The astral body, and the etheric and physical bodies, bear a memory impression of the ego as if it saw itself in a kind of mirror, albeit very dimly.  Let us call this self-image: the personality matrix.  When the change of egos occurred, there was no longer the original ego present that was needed in order to maintain the natural living soul organism of this personality matrix, so right from the first morning it began to slowly fall apart - to dissolve.
 

Further, the new ego already comes with capacities the older ego never possessed.  One consequence of this is that a kind of light now shines into the soul life.  The new ego is more awake in the inner world, and as a result of this the falling apart is fully experienced (something the Clara Barton incarnation almost couldn't handle, thus the period of apparent mental disorder).  As there is no conception for this process already present in the world view that was left behind by the previous ego, the new ego is forced to find concepts for this unusual experience among that which already exists - defining its experience for itself.  Oddly enough in this life it was first experienced as great freedom.

If we consider the previous personality matrix as a kind of fixed structure into which the old ego had woven itself over the prior thirty years, we can see how this falling apart of the matrix might induce a feeling of freedom, such that the new ego realizes that it is in a situation were it is now able to redefine its personality.  The HLFMB sees the prior personality matrix dissolve and feels this experience as an opportunity to construct a new personality.

In fact, one of the earliest examinations of the prior ego's memories occurs at this time, for the new ego looks back and observes carefully (remember it is more awake in the depths of soul than is normal - something quite different from Steiner's youthful atavistic clairvoyance) just how the first personality was constructed as adaptations to life experience.  Reviewing the previous personality matrix construction-process of the innocent preparer (which at that point is assumed to belong to himself) enables the second ego to more consciously and slowly create an entirely new personality.

In this way then begins the work of the HLFMB of modifying in small details and large, the whole biography from its most intimate aspects to those choices that lead to significant destiny decisions.  Rather than go into more detail (a great deal could be offered on these themes), let me just relate a few stories that arose because of the change of egos.

Within a few months the new ego, recognizing that previously it had been quite passive in the marriage relationship, speaks to the wife that it has noticed this, and does not wish to continue in a partnership where one party (the wife) was so dominant.   This request for greater participation in family issues is instinctively refused, for the whole marriage rested in a situation dependent upon the first ego's passivity.   The new ego finds itself confronted now with a significant moral question, for how does one continue a marriage with such an imbalance in decision making processes. However, since there had already been one divorce and remarriage, with its attendant unwanted consequences for the children, a kind of moral gridlock arises for the new ego.

A significant state of depression comes with this (more later on the shadow aspect here), such that one Saturday morning the new ego leaves the home and begins to wander, almost unable to think or make decisions at all, even of the smallest nature.  After about a five mile walk (in an urban area) it finds itself at the base of a small hill that is topped with woods.  Upon climbing this hill it finds a large stone on which to sit, and then a prayer (petition) is made for help with this debilitating confusion.  Immediately in an instant the depression is gone, and a great peace replaces it, accompanied with the sure knowledge that any decision (to stay, or not, in the marriage) will be morally alright.

As a consequence the marriage is left (a significant first destiny decision).  Because the culture in which this occurs is full of psychological and spiritual life (Berkeley, California, in the early 1970's), following the marriage dissolution an encounter with a remarkable eclectic soul-healing discipline comes about, which enables the new ego to do a great deal of inner work that would otherwise have been impossible on its own (like Clara Barton, the new ego had to go through some acceptable process of soul healing, as was available at the time).  After three years of this work, coupled with inwardly conscious choices to become someone new, the former wife (who had intimately known the previous ego for more than ten years - and of course assumed a continuation) remarks to the new ego somewhat as follows:  You know, you have become a completely different person.  You walk differently, you talk differently, you stand and sit differently.  Both former husband and former wife mistakenly assume that this is the result of the encounter with the remarkable eclectic soul-healing discipline, a truth which is partially correct for the second ego took hold of this discipline and made of it a great deal (a whole other story).

Several years later, after the new ego has met the work of Rudolf Steiner and come upon his lectures regarding this change of egos phenomena, the new ego has a conversation regarding this with his eldest daughter (someone who shares similar spiritual inclinations, for example they both, independent of and unknown to each other, begin the journey to join the Catholic Church at the same time through what is called: the Rite of Catholic Initiation of Adults).  She relates that at the house where they were living, when the change of egos seems to have occurred, she was awakened one night (she was 5 or 6 years old) by a great wind blowing through the house in the direction of her parents' bedroom, which great wind was followed by an immense dark shadow.  For her this had many consequences, and one consequence was that she was now instinctively awake in the astral world and began many years of lucid dreaming; and, formed a conscious relationship with her angel (she called it her inspiration, and could ask it questions up until the onset of puberty at which time it consciously, through telling her, left her from then on to her own devices) of which experiences she is only now able to speak of to her father.

Around the same time as this conversation with the eldest daughter, the new ego becomes a member of a group around a Christian Community Priest, who tells of the following understanding acquired from Steiner: that certain significant personalities have to carry a retarded* moon Archi as a shadow or double, because something that strong is needed to balance out the potential excesses of this equally strong of character personality.

*[This is a Being who has voluntarily held back its own normal development in order to undertake, as a sacrifice, a specific spiritual task.]

By the means of these stories it has been my intention to show how in the soul depths of the HLFMB certain matters are being played out that are entirely inward, without much outer world effect at all.  This ego is slowly working its way through the riddles and burdens of the innocent's left behind gifts, and at each stage it is not always obvious to those around this personality that these events are occurring.  The family and friends know of the outer personality changes, but as long as this individuality does not yet take up clear outer world work, the inner changes are largely invisible.

In some previous incarnations of the HLFMB, outer world work is more obvious (as we saw in the examples of famous past lives), but in this particular incarnation the work for a very long time has been mostly inward.  Considering that this incarnation began in Berkeley, California, in the early 1970's, a place where inner soul work was for a great many the cultural norm, this concentrated focus on achievements in inner work is quite understandable.   It is after all a natural reaction to the higher aspirations of the time - the seeking for enlightenment or initiation, which of course must necessarily be more of a private act, than a public one.  As a consequence many systems of spiritual and psychological life were encountered and to a degree mastered, before the meeting with Rudolf Steiner took place.

This is not to say that outer world work was never considered, by the way. Many fantastic visions of possibilities were offered to the second ego as temptations by the luciferic double, such that (for example) three times the second ego ran for President of the United States (in a closet and rather badly, but given the George Washington incarnation, to feel responsible for the State of the Republic was naturally deeply felt).  Especially during the years of drug intoxication, inflated luciferic visions - such as becoming a great spiritual teacher - were common (the second ego became clean and sober in September of 1987). In fact, during the initial period of the encounter with Tibetan Buddhism the HLFMB thought he had become enlightened.  This tendency to gross hubris (and its downfalls) was itself an essential lesson from life, for it proved how false such fantasies could be, and helped keep the spiritual activity of the HLFMB focused on the possible instead of the fantastic.

In the first seven years (approximately1971-78) of the present incarnation, Buddhism was nevertheless met with a certain carefulness (not every encounter meant a luciferic intoxication), with the result that the HLFMB's approach was to work only with the Four Noble Truths, and to see if these could be rediscovered out of his own activity.  Nothing of modern Buddhism was adopted as a doctrine, but the Four Noble Truths were turned into questions that the HLFMB put to life in order to confirm, out of his own experience, their reality (see in this regard the essay: this and that at http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thath.html).  Because the innocent had been a natural Christian (and raised in various protestant denominations in his youth), the astral body left behind was also already predisposed to what the innocent preparer had understood as living in the Gospels.

The greatest comfort as regards the riddles and trials of life were thus provided to the HLFMB's developing soul (as the second ego slowly transforms the astral body to accord with its own nature), from this strong relationship of faith by the innocent one to the Gospels.  Many a life riddle found its answer solely within the Gospels, in spite of studies of Buddhism, Ceremonial Magic, Native American Spirituality, and the countless other disciplines that one could encounter in the remarkable world-cultural center that was Berkeley, California, in those years.

Now Berkeley at this time was also a center for political awareness.  The innocent one had been well introduced to the ideals of the American form of government as a youth in school: and, then during adolescence (at the time of the 1956 presidential elections) discovered great distress of soul in realizing that this idealism had been lost, for nothing could he hear (with his remarkable gift of hearing the soul's reality in its tone of voice) that suggested that the competing politicians felt deeply connected at all to the true spiritual nature of America.  Here was a great riddle for the innocent one, that left such an impression on the soul that the second ego was unable to ignore this pain, but had to spend many years in seeking to understand how such remarkable (yet pragmatic) idealism out of which the American Experiment was born, has come to be lost to contemporary America politicians.

[Since these two, the innocent preparer and the bodhisattva, are most intimate partners, it is no wonder that there is a resonance with prior incarnations.]

This was the second of three great riddles left behind by the innocent one.  The first concerned the problem of evil, for in the school yard the innocent one first encountered real cruelty, an experience it did not understand at all.  It was one thing to read of such things in books or newspapers, but quite another thing to experience it directly, yet have no ability to appreciate such human tendencies, for no such impulses existed in the innocent one at all.

The third riddle arose in the soul of the innocent one during the year of pre-seminary training, before deciding instead to go to law school.  A course was taken at Denver University on the New Testament, which course was so arid and academic (theology under the influence of modern materialistic scientific thinking), that all the mystery and magic of the innocent ones youthful faith was near destroyed, and he became out of this experience (which he trusted and felt he had to believe - remember he is essentially a passive receiver of cultural influences) an agnostic.

This preparation via modern education included a full acceptance by the innocent one of the belief systems of natural science.  The innocent was in all respects (except faith and morals) a complete materialist.  So also then, in the beginning, was the HLFMB in his essential world conceptions.

As a consequence of its own new gifts, during the first seven year period the second ego had a number of natural (no doubt atavistic) clairvoyant experiences, but had yet encountered no world view that enabled it to make peace between this direct experience of spiritual reality and the materialism present everywhere.  Thus arose at the end of the first seven year period of the HLFMB's incarnation in the remarkable cultural environment that was Berkeley, California, this question:  If the world is at its roots and origin spiritual in nature, what are the implications of this fact for humanity's social and political existence?

Here again are the three riddles of the innocent, the great questions of life bequeathed to the HLFMB: What is the meaning of evil?   Why is the spirit of America lost to America's leading politicians?  And, why is the current teaching of Christianity so empty of mystery and magic?  Perhaps the reader can now see how it was that the three riddles, of the innocent, are synthesized in the above question posed to himself by the HFMB.  It was then, while in full conscious awareness of this question, that Rudolf Steiner was met through his books.

[With this picture clearly in mind, one who is interested in history, might then reread various biographies of George Washington and Clara Barton, for their illumination of the influence of the innocent preparer on the later ego's biographical circumstances, all of course overshadowed and guided by the genius of the patiently waiting avatar.  See especially the book: The Invention of George Washington, by Dr. Paul K. Longmore.  Dr. Longmore's book develops the thesis that Washington's public persona was consciously created and crafted by him in order to use it as a tool of responsibility, first as a large landowner and member of the Virginia legislature, then as a General in the Continental Army, and finally as a principle aspect of Statecraft in the founding of America.  This matter is made all the more poignant when we realize that Dr. Longmore is disabled and that for a year and a half in the late 1990's the HLFMB was his live-in aide.  Nor should we overlook that the innocent preparer spent three years in the United States Air Force Academy, during a period of life in which in the Washington incarnation he was there on his way to becoming a quite young high officer in the English Army.  There is a great deal of music and harmony in the interrelationships of these various incarnations.]

Already introspective by nature (recall the second ego was deeply aware of its inwardness from the moment of its morning awakening in the three sheaths and bodies), it was natural then to be drawn to Steiner's books on the science of introspection (A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, and The Philosophy of Freedom).  Also profoundly attractive were the books on Goethean Science, on Projective Geometry and much else besides.  Well worth special mention are the writings of Owen Barfield.

Part of the importance of this is to recognize that the HLFMB, containing as he did the characteristics of the innocent one in his astral body, was also receptive (less passively, however).  He soaked up knowledge and experience like a dry sponge.  If one were to trace the world view of the innocent one and watch its progression to what is the world view today of the HLFMB, we would find that this transformation was constantly informed by those outside him.  Everything was a stimulus, although the HLFMB became more and more aware that he was solely responsible for his idea-world.  Knowing through introspection exactly how he created it, it was clear that his world-view was his own personal moral responsibility, regardless of how much others provided guidance and good questions.

At a certain point in the encounter with Steiner (which began without any idea of there being an Anthroposophical Society), a kind of crisis ensued.  The HLFMB discovered that he was reading lecture cycle after lecture cycle trying to scratch an itch that would not be relieved.  Previously on two other occasions, the HLFMB had found himself in bondage to a powerful world view (see Steiner's remarks on this problem at the end of the original  preface in The Philosophy of Freedom).  The first time the capture was by the conceptual frame of reference in the remarkable eclectic psychological system that had provided so much healing, and the second time was with respect to concepts living in Tibetan Buddhism.  Having mastered (out of a necessity to remain instinctively free inwardly) these idea complexes by learning to not think out of them (an inner effort that he later began to call sacrifice of thoughts, and breaking the chains of the teaching), the HLFMB then for a time stopped reading any Steiner at all, until no thought of Steiner's would arise in the soul unless consciously called forth.

Once this soul art had been realized in practice (again invisible to all outward observation of others), a review of Steiner and Anthroposophy was undertaken as a contemplative and imaginative inner picturing process.  Through the formation of these inner pictures it was discovered that Anthroposophy was a method (a how of doing something) not a content (a what produced by the how).  Upon sharing this discovery with a new anthroposophical friend, he was shown a lecture of Owen Barfield's, given in Dornach in 1933 and published in the Barfield collection: Romanticism Comes of Age.  In this lecture Barfield made the exact same commentary: Anthroposophy is a method, not a content.

Confirmed then in this insight, the HLFMB now began a long process to adapt the newly discovered (and being explored) Goetheanistic thinking to the social question above (a work that was to take at least 21 years to reach a kind of climax of maturation in certain insights): If the world is at its roots and origin spiritual in nature, what are the implications of this fact for humanity's social and political existence?

It will help the reader here to recognize that this time of inner work, beginning right from the first morning of the incarnation of the second ego, is seldom (if ever) something done by even the most serious anthroposophist, much less people leading ordinary lives.   It is also inner work that is made necessary by the incarnation process itself (the change of egos), for the new ego has to overcome all the effects of the prior innocent ego (thus the title to this essay Biographical Necessity).  The new ego has to transform the various bodies and sheaths in order to make what he is newly receiving his own.  At the same time, he is (out of his own impulses of will) forming a second marriage, having two more children, succumbing to a serious bout of marijuana addiction, and moving from job to job following faithfully all that Providence puts before him (consciously* living life according to the 23rd Psalm).  In this way this personality is active in the inner world of soul, slowly transforming it according to the tasks set there by the innocent one, as well the tasks set before him in Rudolf Steiner's works on scientific introspection; and in addition, struggling constantly to live life according to the Gospel teachings of Christ Jesus, in full gratitude for the trials being offered by this life. 

*[Almost from the beginning, the HLFMB accepted his lot in life - the biography, and recognized in it, in all its details, the guidance of the Divine Mystery.  He actually, at one point, engaged in a scientific experiment to test this proposition - called in Sufism: the increasing of necessity.]

The work is inward, with little appearing in the outer world where everyone sees this individual according to their own ideas of what is right, never appreciating that where they might be unconscious and living out of habits, he is transforming the soul seeking to develop all that he believes is potential.  All the while, he is managed and limited by a shadow intelligence, who is equal to all the powers the HLFMB might manifest, for even though more awake than others inwardly, he is nonetheless bound, by the nature of the three sheaths and bodies that were inherited, to all the rules of ordinary consciousness.

To be as precise as possible, the reader should understand that this inner work was essentially moral in nature.  While Steiner in The Philosophy of Freedom teaches the application of moral imagination, moral intuition and moral technique in relationship to choices to be made in the outer biography, it was obvious to the instinctive wisdom nature of the HLFMB to apply these same rules to his inner life as well.  One needed to be just as moral inwardly as outwardly, such that inner acts too became the subject of moral imagination, moral intuition and moral technique.

For all this inward activity we are right to ask whether anything has been produced outwardly.  An aspect of the whole situation is that the HLFMB thought for many years that those working in anthroposophical circles understood the nature of the required work - namely the development of the new thinking out of inner moral impulses.  Working on the social question mostly in private and in his spare time (while living a life of children and jobs - working in restaurants, mental hospitals and in a factory for the last three years before retiring on social security, following and in agreement with the biographical imperatives of the innocent one), the HLFMB struggled to give birth to a new social science based upon the Goetheanism recommended by Steiner.

We must see the HLFMB as fully embedded in ordinary life, with all its trials.  There was available to this individuality no academic robes or tenure, no place to simply teach, read and do research (although this was often hungered for).  All that was done on the social question was done as a kind of avocation, or hobby.  Mostly the HLFMB's daily allotment of life energies were given to work and to family, such that the spare amount of life forces that remained, were then given over to these questions regarding human social and political existence.

We also need to see that this personality has totally given itself over to the earthly human world, with all its temptations to our appetites and other unredeemed soul wounds.  There were no doubt, due to karma and other factors, just as many defects as virtues.  In fact, the defects are crucial, for if there is no pain, no suffering, nothing to be overcome, there is no real need to develop.

While there were many days that the HLFMB regretted this condition, and even sought to change it, he learned over time that this path through ordinary life was entirely necessary, for it too was teaching of the most precise and special kind.  Thus we find in his writings such conceptions as: there are only two important books to be read: the Book of Life and the Book of the own Soul.

The product of this modest work (written essays and a few lectures) was often offered to the Anthroposophical Society and its various publications, but was just as often refused.  In a certain sense, since the inner work was itself invisible, so the outer work could not really be recognized for it often presented itself in a form at odds with the assumptions regarding the social world prevalent in the Society (a weakly understood social idealism rooted in Steiner's Threefold Social Organism).  It became necessary eventually to try to understand why this work of over 21 years could not be received by that social form (the Anthroposophical Society) which seemed most suitable for its presentation and support.  Thus began a series of articles (published on the Internet, and sometimes handed out for free at anthroposophical conferences) which took a critical point of view of the Society (see the collection of other essays in the book to be called: Dangerous Anthroposophy).

Eventually it was understood that the Anthroposophical Society had fallen behind the development of Anthroposophy (predicted by Steiner in his lectures on Awakening to Community).  Since Anthroposophy is a naturally evolving capacity of human beings, to the extent that the Society became fixed in its methods and form, this Society was not living (too much tradition, too much reliance on Steiner-said, too much sub-conscious looking to the Center for leadership).  Naturally what has become not living will fall behind the evolution of that which does live (Anthroposophy as a capacity).

During the period that this failure became more and more apparent to the HLFMB, he found himself now capable of the living thinking, the goal Steiner had set for those working out of the scientific introspection.  This led to certain experiences that essentially became (up to that time) the impelling cause of that which could be produced out of the many years of preliminary inner work.  The intercourse between human and cosmic thought had so slowly emerged that for a number of years the HLFMB did not fully appreciate it, nor understand how to give himself fully to it until his retirement from work and family that began in 2002.  The overshadowing and guidance of the avatar aspect of this threefold spirit art was not intrusive - the HLFMB was always free before what was offered by the subtle and delicate fullness of Presence and presence of Fullness (no bondage to the Idea).

For example, he began then in his retirement to write of the social world as the logos speaking.  Whereas Goethe had learned to read the Book of Nature, the HLFMB learned to read the Book of the Social World, and eventually could only conceive of this world as something created by the Word, or: the logos speaking.  The living thinking beheld the intricate manner in which individual biographies and streams of history were woven together, found them to be extraordinary, and that only a truly divine and cosmic power could accomplish the remarkable reality which was the Social World - thus, the logos speaking.

Following this, a book was created that wove together the presently separate streams of the Shepherds and the Kings (exoteric and esoteric Christianity).  This writing (the Way of the Fool) arose out of the living thinking, which is itself in its nature based on inner practices of renunciation and love.  It is these moral soul conditions that makes possible the living thinking (Christ's Breath), which new thinking was carefully described in the appendix to that book (and here in the third essay).  This book also became later understood by the soul of the HLFMB to be a consequence of the fact that this present time is the third sounding of a 1000 year rhythm regarding the Shepherds and Kings (that is, the book was written as it appeared in the processes of the living thinking, and then only later did the HLFMB connect this experience to this 1000 year rhythm). 

The first was (of course) on the occasion of a Birth, while the second was 1000 years ago at Chartres.  It is significant that this bridge should be offered to both the world of esoteric Christianity (especially anthroposophists), and the world of exoteric Christianity, in a time so fraught with materialism, that materialism's negative effects on spiritual life are quite deep (no one really notices most of these effects, not even many anthroposophists).  Again it needs to be noted that the HLFMB did not initiate this activity, but out of his practices of renunciation and love the thoughts arose in the living thinking then being practiced.  Recall now the introduction to this essay, which considered the role of human beings and the appearance of cosmic thought in world history through their freedom.

Another matter to recognize in this book (the Way of the Fool) is that it is a kind of treatise on Cosmogony.  Now Cosmogony is today thought of as a theory of the origin of the Universe, and we are all pretty familiar with the idea of the Big Bang, and its purely material nature.   This idea of the Big Bang as a cosmogony originates out of present day inquiries into the nature of the physical world, the conclusions and understandings of which are extrapolated into the past.  The HLFMB's work in the above book does something similar, except that it recognizes in the speaking of the social world (the logos speaking), as can be thought phenomenologically out of the present (reading the Book of the Social World) is something that can also provide us with a Cosmogony, but this time one in which the spiritual takes center stage.

Now this book wasn't written with that question exactly in mind, since its major thrust was an effort to understand exactly and with precision the present day nature and meaning of human social life, but at the same time once we create this spiritual picture of modern existence, it naturally extrapolates logically backwards to a spiritual creation.  I point out this fact here, in part, to add in an indication of Rudolf Steiner's that the development of Cosmogony is to be a natural product of the activity of the American Soul (see Cosmogony, Freedom and Altruism, R. Steiner)

As a result of the underlying moral practices which support the living thinking, this book (the Way of the Fool) was thought in the HLFMB, as a cooperative art between his own ego being and the world of cosmic beings, no doubt inter-penetrated by the avatar.  As a special nuance here, one needs to conceive of this art as never, ever, overcoming the freedom or the responsibility of the incarnate human ego.  As Steiner wrote in the last sentence of the original preface to The Philosophy of Freedom: "One must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will fall into its bondage."

In addition, to the culmination of the many years of social research, was the discovery (again appearing to the living thinking) that human social existence was actually (in the Age of the Consciousness Soul) a Rite of Baptism, whereby in human souls when they sought the Good, there came to be an experience of the Second Eucharist, an ongoing rite now possible in the souls of humanity since the True Second Coming was inaugurated in the 20th Century.  It became possible to perceive with this living thinking how it is that within social existence, and the relationship between the individual biography and the stage setting we call modern history, the Christ wove together (as Artist - Lord - of Karma) our biographies with such art and precision that within each biography would arise the possibility of this Baptism by Christ with Holy Breath and Fire as told to us by John the Baptist so many years ago (the arising of such ideas in the soul life of the HLFMB, is also no doubt related to the harmony between the present incarnation and that of St. Matthew, as reveal by the Thrones).

With the presentation of this idea, and its significance concerning human social existence (recall the question asked just before the encounter with Rudolf Steiner's writings: If the world is at its roots and origin spiritual in nature, what are the implications of this fact for humanity's social and political existence?), the maturation of the examination of this riddle is now complete (in the sense of present day conceptual thinking).  Here we may be seeing just why Steiner called the HLFMB: the Bringer of the Good, for a foundational part of such a work is certainly the unfolding of the conceptual nature of the human experience of the Good itself (the Good being another name for a principle aspect of the Christ Impulse).

The most recent set of observations to appear before this living thinking (while it continued to work mostly out of the context of Spiritual Science) was the discovery of the identity of Ahriman's in-the-present incarnation, a matter certain to be controversial.  Again this was a result of questions posed not by the ego itself, but by life and the surrounding influences in the biography.  In point of fact, as the question came more to the fore, it was initially refused.  The HLFMB turned away from it, not believing he was capable of such a perception.  Only after it was insisted upon from many outside quarters that the question be faced, did the HLFMB take on this task.

At the same time this work on the identity of Ahriman was being developed, the HLFMB suffered a heart attack (he was then 66 years old).  This event, which took place in the ER (his heart stopped completely twice) was followed by two days spent mostly unconscious (the doctors were uncertain as to whether he would come out of this with any of his faculties intact).  During this two days  sleep, impulses of will matured, such that the HLFMB subsequently finally abandoned completely the Anthroposophical Society as a possible field of activity, and looking to new areas in which to work was invited to go to live in New England and to work there with a Native American seeress, in conjunction with her work with a most unusual protestant Church, the Mormons, or the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (the question then arose in the HLFMB's soul as to whether this might be a Church more open to the needed intercourse between Shepherds and Kings - a matter to be determined in the future) [this project failed for the most part, but was, even so, worth investigating for its potential, ed.].

In addition, the living thinking brought it about that the HLFMB decided to take his activity deeper into the world of the Internet (he'd already had a website for over 10 years, as well as being an active presence on many Steiner related Internet discussion groups).  Conversations with another friend (who was also - but from a different direction - completely involved with Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom) brought about a consideration of where was Anthroposophy (as a capacity) to be demonstrated and put to work (a pragmatic American Soul gesture) if it was not possible to do this within the Anthroposophical Society in its present day conditions.  The understanding was reached (through conversation and inspiration) that one should take Anthroposophy where the future was being born - and to offer it as a service there.  Thus arose the impulse to make digital videos (a truly modern art) for such places as YouTube (where the future - the young - hang out in the presently interwoven global community), which now becomes a main aspect of the coming stages of the HLFMB's work (should health continue to permit, - so far over 200 videos have been created).

Having come this far, we now need to more fully complete the spiral of thought and return to what was written in the beginning, perhaps hoping to achieve a higher level of understanding.  While Anthroposophy was for a time the treasure of the Society, this Society has fallen behind the evolution of Anthroposophy and can no longer serve as a vital and appropriate support.  As a consequence the HLFMB finds that his activity must step away from the Society and seek other fields of endeavor - other places to cultivate and seed, which were described above.

These new seeds must be sown in fertile ground, yet with all the moral and scientific clarity that can be mustered, in accord with Steiner's example.

From this we can perhaps see that while Steiner's sowing was effective for a time in bringing Anthroposophy to the attention of some, the HLFMB's activity will have to place Anthroposophy in other contexts entirely (outside the Anthroposophical Society and Movement), for Anthroposophy belongs to humanity, not to the students of Rudolf Steiner.

The scientifically based living thinking (Anthroposophy), which is a kind of intercourse between the human ego and cosmic thought, serves the world of humanity such that its influence on World History is itself living and evolving.  In Steinerism this life becomes arid, rigid and essentially indigestible to the modern soul.

Now that we have looked more closely at the biography of the HLFMB, let us next reconsider an earlier question as to how the HLFMB and Steiner differ, and what meaning can be found in that difference.

At the start of this essay I characterized this difference as follows: In the case of Steiner it is the bringing something down from cosmic heights, while the HLFMB brings something out of the human depths.  If we compare the quite distinct biographies, we can see how this difference in the application of Anthroposophy is also embedded in their nature.  Steiner's biography is dominated by the necessity of his spiritual clairvoyant experiences, while the HLFMB's biography is dominated by the necessity of rising out of and transforming the depths of the sheaths and bodies (and other biological imperatives) left behind by the innocent one.  Let us consider a few details of the patterns in their different biographies.

Steiner is atavistically clairvoyant as a youth, while the HLFMB is not even incarnate in his youth for his bodies are being prepared by the innocent.  Steiner, a man of considerable intellectual capacities, rises to the heights of his cultural life, such that he is given the task in his twenties of editing Goethe's scientific works - Goethe being the paragon of Central European cultural life.  The innocent in those same biographical years (the early twenties) is first at the USAF Academy, then married and raising children - and the HLFMB is still not incarnate.

By Steiner's early thirties he has produced A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, finishing his revised doctoral book Truth and Knowledge and about to launch his masterpiece: The Philosophy of Freedom.  In his early 30's the HLFMB is just incarnating, and struggling to manifest his own ego through the weight and density of the innocent's left behind sheaths and bodies.  Steiner had to overcome his atavistic clairvoyance in his late teens bringing in then the new thinking initiation, while the HLFMB in that same phase of his physical biography, as when Steiner created The Philosophy of Freedom, is soon to manifest bits and pieces of atavistic clairvoyance, all connected in the beginning to marijuana intoxication and other drug experiences.

I think by now the reader can get the picture.  Steiner's genius of spirit is of an entirely other order than is the HLFMB's genius of spirit.  Steiner is a towering intellect, bearing the fruit of many incarnations where he has manifested over and over again, the ability to represent on the earth the all encompassing view of the cosmic heights.  In this Steiner is of the stream of the Kings.

The HLFMB's incarnations are entirely earthly and human, and if we do not make too much of it (or too little) he is not so much intellectual (in the highest cultural sense as was Steiner), but ordinarily and humanly moral to the bone.  Recall that the innocent is a pure and naturally humble soul through and through, and leaves behind an already much purified astral body - it has only been made earthly by the necessities of life.  In this the HLFMB is of the stream of the Shepherds (thus the Matthew incarnation).

To get a deeper sense of the human aspect of this work, just contrast the subject matter produced by Steiner with the subject matter produced by the HLFMB.  The HLFMB has no clairvoyant vision, no akashic record, no regular intercourse with Cosmic Beings.  His teachers are life, his own soul and other human beings.  What he does with that - that is the clue.

For example, above is a very frank discussion of human sexuality, from the human side of it.   The essay The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul is not based upon a vision from cosmic heights, but a view from the depths of the human inwardness, which in like fashion is the basis for the essay on the Shadow.   The material throughout this book on the Social World of Humanity, is not from outside it, but from inside it - how the social world looks to a fully awake participating thinking still bound to the earthly plane of existence.  We ought not to imagine, for example, the HLFMB becoming able to do this without having the intense life experiences of being an addict, without knowing divorce and marriage and children, without a multitude of jobs in all sectors of human existence; and, certainly not without the foundation of the 30 years of receptive imprinting of the Age on the soul of the innocent.  None of this kind of life experience was in Steiner's biography (nor did it need to be, either).

Yet, as a consequence of these differences, the work of Steiner and the work of the HLFMB are fully complementary - two sides of one coin, and perhaps the future will unfold in such a way that this presentation of Anthroposophy grows in a number of different dimensions - even to accord with the seven-sided platonic solid discovered recently by the American Frank Chester.

The HLFMB is an ego made out of wisdom - wisdom as being.  Receiving the bodies, sheaths and memories of the innocent, the HLFMB is not so much an act of intellect, but one of wise morality. This we know through the two previous incarnations, Washington and Barton.  Neither was a towering intellect, but each was to a considerable degree goodness incarnate and a demonstration of the wisdom such goodness can produce (showing us, by the way, an interesting contrast between male and female wisdom - the male masters the cruel necessities of war and aggression, while the female masters the grace necessities of receptive care-giving that follow as natural consequences of the first).   As Goodness is a core aspect of the Christ, it is then no wonder that one can see that the HLFMB is to become a teacher of the Christ Impulse (recall now how in In Joyous Celebration of the Art and Music of Discipleship, the core gestures of the way to living thinking were acts of renunciation and love.)

Now many others, knowing this individuality in life, will have, out of their own antipathies and sympathies, found the morality of this individual wanting, and are entirely justified in doing so.  Partly this is due to the age in which we live, where there is a confusion everywhere between morality as code, rules and guidance from books and religions, and the free morality Steiner taught in The Philosophy of Freedom.  Most people won't even be able to recognize how frequently the HLFMB acted out of fully conscious and participated conscience, for much that he did (and does) was/is contrary to social norms.  Let me just illustrate this with one story from a meeting of an anthroposophical Branch, where such problems manifested in great detail.

The subject of the Branch meeting was a very poorly thought-out book called: From Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley - Spiritual Forces in the development of computers and the future of technology - written by Paul Emberson.   At the meeting where this book was being uncritically put forward as supposedly revealing much about the nature of America and the Future, the prevailing spirit in the room became quite dark.  The mood of soul of the group was full of fear and hopelessness, for the Beings being evoked by the discussion were not of the higher hierarchies, although everyone acted as if we were all being Michaelic. 

Into this context, the HLFMB (who was experiencing, as he often did at Society meetings, a great deal of soul pain), begin to ask some simple questions, going straight to the point by wondering out loud what of the discussion brought the Christ forces into the shared contemplation.  People basically were too asleep to even understand how their fascination with the dark, and with a representation of the dark that was full of untruths (Emberson's book), could lead them into a group thought-content (kind of an anti-reverse cultus - that is: an undisciplined contemplation of sub-nature) that was essentially destructive and so far away from the redemptive powers of the Christ as to serve neither Michael or Christ, but rather only Ahriman.

After a few questions failed to evoke a reconsideration of the group's luciferic fascination with the dark, the HLFMB made an impassioned short speech trying to lay out the flaws of the book and to redirect the attention of the members toward other approaches to thinking about technology and to other resources than Emberson (look up the American Martha Keltz on Google and her studies of Tesla, Keely and Russel), where a more healthy approach was being made to these questions.  This was, of course, provocative, for people naturally will seek to defend their positions rather than reconsider them, not knowing the value of continuously practicing sacrifice of thoughts.  As a consequence, the HLFMB was attacked for holding false views (a Christian Community priest emotionally proclaimed that he - the HLFMB - had no idea what Anthroposophy was). 

Those familiar with the Christian-Rosicrucian Path of the Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ, will understand how for the HLFMB this was experienced as a crowning with thorns.  Moral activity in such a situation requires being open to receiving what is being said, and taking it in - that is being vulnerable to its impact.  The room full of untruths and then accusations of false views is experienced in the soul as a piercing of the idea aspect of soul life - a crowning with thorns.

Now please do not think the HLFMB is the only person to experience such soul trials.  They are in fact quite common in all kinds of social circumstances where individuals strive to be moral - we just don't know yet the relevant vocabulary required in order to appreciate them.  We live in a materialistic culture, where almost all words are tied to meanings in which the real soul-spiritual experiences of human beings can find no expression.  I only really told this story so the reader can see how easily it is for moral action to be mis-perceived by others and seen instead as moral failure (through their beam - their antipathetic judgment - see Christ's Sermon on the Mount).

Part of our problem comes from having what the HLFMB would call: the comparative mind (see the essay described above: this and that).  It is an instinctive gesture of mind to compare one thing to another.  This is rooted in our natural antipathies and sympathies. So based upon our unconscious likes and dislikes we think: this person is moral, that person is not.  This person knows Anthroposophy, that person does not.  This book is valuable and should be read, that book should be thrown in the trash.

The difficulty comes from the fact that this gesture of thinking is instinctive, not conscious.  The mostly sleeping will element behind the thinking tends to be easily available to the threefold double-complex, and not so easily available to the true I.   Antipathy and sympathy are reactive feelings, not awake and freely chosen cultivated feelings.

As a consequence, we tend to react to each other rather than choose through conscious will how to act toward each other.  The driver for this tendency is the unmastered feeling life (absence of a conscious in-the-moment equanimity).  The stronger the feelings, the harder it is for the I to choose the thought content (control of thoughts).  The result is that in life we all experience moments in which we are trying to act out of conscious conscience (participated conscience), but the reaction of those around us appears negative.  The more we are following a moral path, the more these life situations result in those soul experiences described as (for example) the scourging or the crowning with thorns.  To know and follow the Good, that is to unfold from within the beginnings of the Christ Impulse, is to have a biography in which the experiences of the soul have a tendency to take the form and shape of the Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ (the washing the feet, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the carrying the cross, the crucifixion, the entombment and then the resurrection).

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

*

So, where are we?

We started actually with an hypothesis - an hypothesis about a legend.  I offered the hypothesis as much for the fun of the teasing of my fellow anthroposophists, as for the reality of it.  The change of egos is a fact for me, as is the description of all the various developmental challenges and changes that are connected to following into life a biographical path blazed by a rather remarkably innocent and humble, yet passive-receptive, spirit.

The consequences of this union of two egos in one biography ought to be clear, in terms of the product (inwardly and outwardly) of that work.  The challenge to master the new thinking was met and won.  With this capacity in hand a dialog between my I and the world of spirit (the wind, wherein in some sense or another the avatar also may have dwelt) arose, yet in each instance my freedom and responsibility for what I think and then write is never diminished.  The earthly human element, and all its life experiences, penetrates every bit of the work produced.

I have not brought something down from spiritual heights as did Rudolf Steiner.  Nor do I consider either one of us superior to the other.  Even to form such a question is to engage in the weaknesses of comparative mind (all analysis and beam, no synthesis and mote).  Each human individual is, according to the understanding given to us by Steiner, as different from each other as any three species of animals.  It is more than just apples and oranges, but instead the same kind of difference as between platypuses, porcupines and penguins.  Imagine, six billion plus human beings that different from each other!

The value of this work, especially since it comes out of an American Soul, will depend on whether it is pragmatically useful to others.  Let me finish this last essay with a comment on the American Soul that may explain certain things to those anthroposophists that have known me in life, and also it may shine some light on a matter that is worth considering all on its own.

The American Soul contains as one of its major characteristics what might be called: the egalitarian gesture (a belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic rights and privileges - recall once more, Steiner: English speaking peoples are instinctively in the consciousness soul in their life of rights).  As a consequence Americans are more at home in the horizontal gesture of the Cross, than in the vertical.  We don't like to raise someone up above us in social matters (although we often do - we just don't like doing it).

This is a phenomena of soul very crucial to the underlying brotherhood destiny of the American Soul.  It also connects to our basic soul orientation that seeks to be pragmatic helpers in the social instead of idealists.  We want to solve problems, not make the social conform to some higher principle, as do most Central Europeans (neither soul gesture is better than the other, but they are quite different).

As a consequence of this egalitarian gesture, Americans have a hard time recognizing in another American any achievements in the vertical dimension.  Dennis Klocek, for example, has accomplished a great deal in that realm, but remains under-appreciated and under-utilized by the Society and Movement in America, because we don't yet really know how to make use, in the social, of our wise men and women (some others, such as Catherine MacCoun, Stephen Clarke and Harvey Bornfield, pass by on the edges, but can never draw near the center of our work because that center is too exclusionary in its fundamental social gesture).

We even have a hard time recognizing them.  The egalitarian gesture causes us to assume the other is like us inwardly, and to insist on having a relationship to them more horizontal-social, instead of appreciating that what lives in them (a perhaps much deeper connection with cosmic thought) exists there to be of service to us.

Partially this may be due to what was modeled for us by the excessive deification of Rudolf Steiner.  Our instinct as Americans is to not imitate this excess, but at the same time we don't yet always have modeled for us how to form a right relationship to spiritual talent.

Those familiar with Steiner's thinking, on the threefolding of the social organism, will have encountered the concept that while the cultural life is the realm of freedom, they may not have noticed that he also suggested that there would arise there a natural hierarchy based on the fact of different capacities.  Others will be better than some at certain tasks, being possessed of the relevant gifts.

What ultimately needs to happen, when we finally get around to being willing to move out of the horizontal and recognize the existence of talent in another in the vertical, is to not get confused by believing this means we have to sacrifice our own instincts and thoughts to such a personality.  Not only is this useless, it is not desired by the particular personality who has achieved something in the vertical.  Their very own trials have already taught them not to think highly of themselves, and the last thing they want is for others to think highly of them.

What they do want is to be of service, and the way to make use of their talent is to ask them questions.  Steiner modeled this for us in his own activity, where (especially in his last years) the deepest and most significant lecture courses arose because people came to him and asked him questions.

To ask such questions doesn't mean by the way to bind ones self to an answer - to any kind of authority, but rather it places before the talent the opportunity to apply its ability to engage more consciously in the vertical - in the intercourse between human and cosmic thought, which in our system means to practice: true Anthroposophy.

Nor does a question mean there is going to be an answer.  On the contrary, there might be a response which is just more questions.  Living thinking is not about answers.  Not only that, we can engage each other all the time in this way if we bother to wake up to the possibility.

All of us have talent.  Remember the wind blows where it wills, not where we wish it to blow.  Don't sacrifice your own thought before the pseudo altar of a supposed expert.  Ask, listen and learn (seek, ask and knock), but always keep in mind that your own I is responsible for the thought content of your own mind.

The trick, to the extent there is a trick, is to become conscious of the difference between the vertical and the horizontal, between the spiritual and the social.  When it is a matter of the social we are all equal.  When it is a matter of the spiritual, people are differently talented.

You don't ask your next door neighbor about the cloudiness coming over your eyes, you ask a doctor.  At the same time, if you need help fixing something, or any other neighborly aspect of existence, your neighbor is just the person to ask (your doctor is not going to come over and help you start your car in the winter).

Again,.. everyone has talent of this kind.  If we recognize then the nature of a particular talent, we can ask the talent for something we might need that fits within its already demonstrated capacities.  No reason to go around putting folks with spiritual talents up on a pedestal.  You can treat them socially in the horizontal just fine, but if they have a sphere of knowledge or abilities which you recognize, then ask for the service they can give.  To perform that service is a major reason why they incarnated in the first place.

 *

A couple final words...

At the very least I hope the reader will have some sense of the nature of my biography (a confession offered so that there will be no confusion in the reader about the biographical and spiritual background of the one who has written this book).  I have tried to be as honest as possible (without going into all the details of the many other flaws and missteps you should assume to have gone along with all that was said above.  The innocent one gave me a leg upward (as it were) on the vertical aspect of the Cross, and then I came along and found my own way to many aspects downward, balancing out his more pure  characteristics with dangerous appetites of a more personal nature, for which I have been solely responsible. 

These certainly include whatever egotism that remains in the hypothesis concerning the legend offered in this essay, a temptation both to me and to the reader to make too much of something that is more truly understood in down to earth terms.  Consider this essay then a very long shaggy dog story, typical of the American Soul with its imaginations of such exaggerated fanciful characters as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.  That is, after all, the only kind of idea we anthroposophists presently have of the Future Maitreya Buddha - a fantastic exaggeration.  Anyone who thinks they can speak with final truth of such aspects of human spiritual history, had better come back down to the earth.  Remember, Rudolf Steiner only spoke of this at a certain time and place because he was more or less forced by circumstances to do this.

What is the truth?  If we ask the question of whether Joel Wendt is a Bodhisattva incarnation of the Future Maitreya Buddha, we have missed the point entirely.   Joel Wendt doesn't exist, nor does Rudolf Steiner the great initiate.  These are mere nouns (names) for the immortal spirit (the i-AM), which on occasion manifests rather funny caricatures of itself.  I have no interest in finding a name for myself (although I do call myself sometimes, a: social philosopher...and occasional fool), but certainly i-AM, and I have had this biography above described.  In cooperation with the Breath - the Wind of the Holy Spirit in my soul, I have produced the thought content in this book.  For the reader, this thought content is the matter with which to wrestle, not any name applied to me.  It is the accomplished deeds of a knowing doer, engaged in the intercourse of cosmic and human thought, that exists on these pages  - nothing else. 

There is a connecting nexus, which we call Anthroposophy, at the intersection where the impulse to natural science and introspection meet in the ethereal world of thought in the company of Christ.  Rudolf Steiner, who traveled a path of initiation in the style of an Alchemist (as do many others - Dennis Klocek and Catherine MacCoun for example), and Joel Wendt, who has traveled a path of Discipleship, all meet at this nexus.

And yes, I have played with the naming habits of anthroposophists, and their tendencies to think too highly of certain particular individuals.  I have done this quite on purpose, the way one friend will tease another in order to make light of that which so easily can be too heavy. 

The most important point to remember here is, however, that while human beings gather around this nexus, it is the activity of the cosmic beings that makes it all possible.  The human beings have the choice to serve something, and play a role (the human cognitive act which incarnates into words the spiritual understanding and experience), but none of that happens without the offerings and sacrifices to all of us by the world of spirit.

At the same time, they have given us a great gift of trust - the gift of responsibility.  It is our will that crafts thought into its incarnate form in writing and in speech.  So it is you dear reader who will have to be responsible yourself for your own thoughts and what you make of the gifts of others, who also produce speech and writing.

What becomes meaning in the world of human beings - the logos spoken social world of humanity - flows out of us.  What your life means, what existence means, what others' words mean - each of us stands also in between - in between the object of our thought and how that object is thought about, with, within or as.  If you just look around you at both the ordinary world of your biography, and the strange, terrible and beautiful textures of the stage setting in which it is embedded, there you will also see the ebb and flow of meaning.  This meaning may be crass, ugly and evil, or truthful, beautiful and good.  Which it is, is our choice.

Having brought choice into the foreground once more, I will next paraphrase the writer of the John Gospel* and focus on the powers unfolding in this particular time of the evolution of consciousness - the Age of the Consciousness Soul, keeping in mind that this paraphrase only speaks to a part of a much greater Whole:

In the beginning was the choice.  And the choice was toward God.   And God was what the choice was.  The choice was with God in the beginning.  All things happened through the choice, and not one thing that has happened happened without the choice.  In the choice was Life, and the Life was the meaning of the World.

*This paraphrased text is based on the Unvarnished Gospels by Andy Gaus, a translation straight from the Greek to idiomatic English, with the later reinterpretations, imposed by sectarian dogmas and traditions, removed.  As should be obvious, where the actual text says Word or it, I have substituted the word choice, and where it says Light I have substituted the word meaning.  This is where humanity is today, and will be on into the near future - given the gift of choice.  This gift of choice is a single aspect of the Word, that moral foundational aspect of the Christ Impulse now available to those human beings with the courage to take up this possibility, and to bear also those consequences that come from making free moral choices (reaching for moral grace, by asking, seeking and knocking).

Nor is choice a simple matter.  We can, for example, put ourselves in a box of a kind by conceiving of choice in an either/or sense, as if we are forced by circumstance to choose between two things that already are.  Or, we can go past either/or to both/and, which then causes a synthesis of the apparent polarity of choices, transforming it into becoming something new.  That is we can choose creatively - to invent that which is not yet, becoming thereby moral co-creators of the future.

Nowhere are our choices more profound then in how we use the gift of the word - the ability to write and to speak.  This then is American Anthroposophy - not as a doctrine or set of fixed ideas rooted in Steiner-said, but instead the creative cognitive acts of individuals who take personal responsibility for the meaning they give to the world of experience - the anthroposophist as a teller of stories...as a brother and sister to all, and a wise companion on the journeys of life.

*     *     *

From Rudolf Steiner's Education As A Force For Societal Change:

In the future, social life will depend upon cooperative support between people, something that happens when we exchange our ideas, perceptions, and feelings.  This means that we must base our general education not just upon ideas taken from science or industry but upon concepts that can serve as a foundation for imaginative thoughts.  As improbable as this may seem now, in the future we shall be unable to interact in a properly social way if we do not teach people imaginative concepts.   In the future, we shall have to learn to understand the world in images.

From Valentin Tomberg's Anthroposophical Studies of the Old Testament:

At the present time, the mission is different (the mission being the method correct for the average student of mystery wisdom in a particular epoch).  It consists in a thought knowledge endowed with vision achieved through the development of the forces of the conscience in order then to live powerfully in the creative word.

------------------------------------------------------

"the gift of the word" very much wants to be read aloud, with some passion and the occasional rush of words.  It also likes to have someone read it to us, so that we may concentrate only on "hearing" it.

the gift of the word

Speech, / Words, letters, sounds, / heard by both the inner ear and the outer.

Letters, sounds, words, / linked invisibly to ideas and thoughts.

Ideas, thoughts, letters, sounds, words, / a woven tapestry of meaning,

carried by Speech, / sometimes with grace, / but most often just carelessly.

Meaning, / a weaving of thoughts, sounds, words, letters and ideas,

spoken into the air and left there, / abandoned.

Words, spoken and heard. / Meaning intended. / But what is heard?

That which is heard is also intended. / Two intentions, two purposes, two meanings.

How difficult then communication, / suffering as it does the contrary pulls of multiple intentions, purposes and meanings.

I speak, you listen. / I mean, you grasp. / Somewhere in this delicate dance of words, sounds, letters, thoughts, ideas and purposes; / understanding is sought after.

Perhaps. / Sometimes.

Voice. / Speech reveals the unspoken. / Anger, fear, pride, arrogance, true humility.

The ear of the heart hears what is hidden in voice.

Posture, gesture. / Speech is more than sound. / The eye hears things the ear cannot, just as the ear sees things the eye cannot.

One mind. / Two minds. / Speech a bridge of woven light between two minds, and sometimes, although rarely, / between two hearts.

Speech, rich and full of flavor, / a light bridge, / joining two separate beings.

Speech denatured, / No sound, no gesture, no posture, no voice.

Speech reduced to lines of dark on light. / Written. / A treasure map in code spilled across a page

Words, letters, ideas, thoughts, sounds, / reduced to marks upon a parchment. / Speech dying.

Yet, / even in death, murdered by pen or pencil mark, / some essence of Speech still.

Meaning embalmed. Understanding buried. / Until read.

Reading. / Words, sounds, letters, thoughts, ideas, meaning, purposes, intentions,

Speech resurrected in the silence of another mind.

Speech. / Light bridge dying into print, / reborn when read in the inner quiet of another soul.

Speech, / The Spoken Word. / Writing, / The Word entombed. / Writing read, / The Word resurrected.

That this is so, / that human beings live in such an exalted state having Speech, this is Grace.

The spoken word, the written word. / Things so ordinary, so taken for granted, so pregnant with possibility.

The emptiness between two souls is always / chaste, virgin, pure, / waiting for Grace, for the bridge of light, / for Speech.

The Gift of the Word, originally called Speech, was written on

Epiphany, Jan. 6, 1997, in the evening, in about a third of an hour.

additions to the original essay

This material is written after the original essay, which was constructed with certain ideas in mind, particularly matters belonging to the work of Rudolf Steiner.   As with much of my current work, which is arising while I am on retreat in New Hampshire in 2008 (and has been linked in my soul to the years spent devoted to Anthroposophy), in describing my biography above I mostly wrote concerning that which seem directly related within that biography to those questions relevant to my social research, which as I had mentioned was begun in connection with Steiner's introduction to Goetheanism via the book A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception.

There is another thread running through my biography that in the heights of summer 2008 has called out for a review, such that I find that it wishes to be remembered (spirit recollection), and honored.  What is next then concerns a few of those other experiences, which also have influenced me deeply.  Also, please remember that these are just a few of a larger number of stories I could tell of those crucial formative years in my biography (1971-78).

the meeting with Jahve

It will seem odd to some to speak of having an encounter in the physical sense world with one of the seven Elohim, but as this was the case, and as this was an important background experience for me, I will next take up that story.  It is, in its own way, far more curious and intriguing than a lot of what has been written above.  However, there is a back story to all this that first must be elaborated before this meeting can be described, so we will begin there.

During that period of my life, the first seven years following the change of egos, where the joey personality passed on to me, joel, the three sheaths and bodies, I was then living in Berkeley, California, where I underwent a kind of schooling.  I have previously briefly mentioned Buddhism, which included an encounter with the Tibetan Lama Choygam Trungpa and his students (where I eventually had to "break the chains of the teaching"), and now I want to relate my encounter with the works of Franz Bardon, and the school of Magic Initiation which he fostered through his three books on that discipline.

This story begins with some fun joey's younger brother provided by introducing him to the Tarot.  Following the change of egos, I was one day stoned on weed, and playing with a tarot deck.  I was lying in bed and had laid the cards out, face down, fanned across the bed.   I held my right hand a couple of inches over the deck and passed it back and forth, and felt a tingling sensation in my middle finger as it passed over various cards.  These, of which there were three, I turned over, being led to them by the tingling sensation. 

When our brother had first introduced us* to the Tarot, he had done a reading for joey where we produced from the deck, in a random fashion, three cards.   The first he called my outer self, which was the Nine Card, the Hermit.  The second he called my inner self, which was the Zero Card, the Fool.   The third was what he called my life destiny, which was the One Card, the Magician (these are from the Paul Case deck).  He later told me that he had made the whole thing up in his own mind (this style of tarot reading).

*[I sometimes may use this odd construction - referring to joey/joel as us.  In thinking over this situation, I have assumed that as I drew near the time of my incarnation, even though I was to forget my experiences as a pure spirit, I must have overshadowed joey for years, drawing more and more near, otherwise the transition would have been too abrupt.]

These then were the three cards my finger felt, while I was intoxicated on pot, and which I turned over in the same order: the Hermit, the Fool, and then the Magician.  As all this spiritual stuff was quite new to me, you can imagine that I was puzzled, albeit a bit delighted at the same time.

Other events intervened, but eventually I took once more an interest in such things about three years later when I read the book: The Magic of Findhorn.  On reading this book I came to believe (in connection with other experiences including those described just above) that magic might be real (a considerable advance from my previous materialistic upbringing into which joey, the innocent preparer, had led us).

In fact, a trip to Yosemite Park had produced a wonderful piece of wood which in my lucifericly influenced fantasy life I thought of as a magic staff.  I had decorated it a couple of years before, and reproduced on it drawings of the three tarot cards mentioned above.  A friend had borrowed it to go to an event in Ho Chi Min Park in Berkeley, and it was there stolen (going on its own journey no doubt).   As a consequence, after reading the above book on Findhorn, I decided to go on a magic walk (recall that my understanding of things spiritual was still unfolding in fields far from Anthroposophy) looking for the lost staff.

This I did, doing what I thought of at that time as a spirit-walk, which meant walking the streets of Berkeley without a plan or direction, and at each junction just going by the in the moment intuition of which way to turn, what street to go down and so forth.   On this walk, about three blocks from where I was then living, I passed by a small book store that I had frequently passed but never before entered, for the window showed mostly books of poetry concerning which I had at that time no interest.  I stepped inside on impulse, and right near the front door was a small bookcase, which at the top said: "Occult Books".

I looked at these books for something on magic, and finding nothing called out to the store keeper (who was about 30 feet inside in the back), asking whether he had any books on magic.  He first said no, and then upon reflecting, as I turned to leave, said that I should wait a minute.   He gestured me back to him and showed me a book that had just been sold to him that morning.   It was yellow, cloth bound and a bit careworn.  He wanted $7.50, which was all the money I had at that time.

Since I was at that moment in my biography seeking to objectively test the nature of Divine Providence, through a Sufi discipline called: the increasing of necessity, I was easily able to give away all my cash to the purchase of this book.  Readers ought to keep in mind that while in Berkeley in those years I was in a School, a University of Human Spiritual Disciplines, that only came into existence for a time in that cultural milieu, and then disappeared.  This made it possible for me to study and practice many spiritual ways simultaneously, drawing from each what seemed appropriate and workable, all the while grounded in the moral impulses left behind by joey (the innocent preparer) in the astral body which I was then instinctively beginning to transform.

This book (The Practice of Magical Evocation) was the first of three Franz Bardon books I was eventually to study quite seriously (the other two being: Initiation into Hermetics, and The Key to the True Quabbalah).  On my website can be found articles that I later wrote about the meaning of Bardon's work: [ http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/lzbwe23x.html ].

To save the reader here the trouble of reading those essays, let me say this. While some anthroposophists whom I have told of this work have recoiled in terror (magic frightened them in some fashion or another), the main import of this work is to make it possible to heal themselves, those whose karma from past lives requires that they work through various relationships to powers (and other superficial aspects of the so-called magical arts).  Christ's Love extends to all, even those who dabble in such arcane matters.   These books are a path through those troublesome jungles, and as the reader will see below, this work does lead quite directly to the Christ Mysteries that lie behind Anthroposophy.

In any event, upon receiving this book, which apparently was left just that morning for me to find (by a certain personality, more later), I began to take a deep (albeit spiritually immature) interest in magical arts.

These I studied seriously for three to four years, buying other books as well.  The other two Bardon books all come to me through quite definite fortuitous (providential) circumstances.  For example, when I found in a bookstore the Quabbalah book (after much searching), the owner of that store (The Metaphysical Town Hall in San Francisco) told me that these books always seemed directed at certain individuals, because first this old man would come to the store and sell him two or three copies, after which a few days later individuals would come in and purchase them. 

In fact, my relationship to Providence at that time was quite intimate, and continues to this day.  For example, once I had met the works of Rudolf Steiner I soon found my way to used copies of Lehr's Man or Matter, and Hauschka's The Nature of Substance through events that had little to do with my own initiative and a lot to do with my faith in the co-working of Divine Providence in all the details of ones life, both inner and outer.

To return to the story at hand...

The Bardon books are an initiation system rooted in the Four Elements, or the mysteries of the Yod, He, Vau, He, the sacred name of the God of the Egyptian initiates, and subsequently in some of the Hebrew Schools.   I was progressing in my studies, able to sit still in the asana (meditation posture), for up to an hour and a half, doing exercises.  These exercises were at the stage where I began to work at inhaling and exhaling the elements (enabling the astral body to experience such an element as Pure Fire for a time).

As this practice was beginning, I also became curious about the world of plants, for much lore was implied by the study of the magic arts, but living on the cheap which I did in those days, one could not buy all the books one might otherwise want to buy, so I had, by necessity, to sift through many before purchasing just one.  In search of deeper insights to the world of plants, I was in Shamballah Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, when I looked once more at the shelf of Steiner books, which I usually dismissed.  I noticed among them the Agriculture Course for the first time, glanced through it and bought it.

I took it across the street to the Mediterranean Cafe, a famous Berkeley coffee house, where I had some coffee and read the first lecture.  I was so impressed that I crossed back across the street to Shamballah books, and bought the Luke Gospel lectures, and the John Gospel lectures.

At that time I was one of the managers of a small art film movie house in San Francisco, working for my younger brother, who worked for the notorious Mitchell Brothers (pornographers), who owned the movie house and had invested in my brother's art film enterprise.  I took these three books with me to work, which work left me with a lot of spare time for reading, and it was during this time of reading (which was leading me away from the Moon Wisdoms of Magic and Buddhism - see Steiner's Paths of Experience, which was later renamed: the Metamorphosis of the Soul) that Jahve put in an appearance at my place of work.

My work duties required that I open and close the operation (a 12 hour shift, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and this particular movie house had in addition to the manager, a ticket seller/candy clerk (very beautiful young women) and a union projectionist.   I was to show a presence in the theater itself (walk up and down the aisles) every hour, as well as count the tickets sold and the candy and the cash in the register, recording all this information on a sheet created for that purpose.  At the end of the day, I took the receipts to the main offices of the Mitchell Brothers, which was several blocks away on Polk Street (the theater was on Larkin).

During one hourly count, when I was standing at the cash register and taking my various notes, a man walked up to me to buy a ticket.  I had seen in him in the theater before, during a walk-through on a previous day. He was short, perhaps no more than five and half feet tall.   He wore tan work pants and a tan work shirt, covered over (it was summer in San Francisco after all) with a light blue windbreaker.  In his shirt pocket were two or three cigars.  Under his right arm was what appeared to be a kind of small case for a musical instrument (I could see it end on), and around this case was wrapped some newspaper tied with string.

I began chatting him up, as he had to wait since I was counting money in the open cash register.  I observed to him that I had seen him before, I asked about his age, given that we had a special price for seniors, and other more or less inane matters.  In the beginning, as I glanced at him, his face was tipped down as if he was starring at the ground, such that I could not see his eyes.

The trouble started right away when he spoke in response to my chatting questions.  I have never before or since heard such a voice, for it seemed to resound from his whole body, as if his body was some kind of resonant cathedral.   The tones were deep, and musical, and I felt them penetrate into the depths of my own body.  Their effect was to make my mind disconnect, to a degree - I was unable to fully concentrate or be really awake.

When, for example, I asked him if he wanted the senior discount, he said no, that he always took care of his own responsibilities.  When I looked at him fully for the first time, my limbs already sort of paralyzed by his voice, he raised his face and I saw his eyes.  The irises were a deep penetrating blue, but it was the whites that were the problem.  They were not white!

Instead they were clear, like crystal.   Deep penetrating blue irises, set in orbs as clear as a fresh mountain pool.  Before their gaze I knew my soul and spirit to be naked to the core.  Unable to really think in this commanding presence, he asked me a question.

"Don't you want to do something about that?" he said.

"What?" I said.

"Don't you want to do something about that?" he said once more, the voice a bit more insistent.

Again, I replied, my voice now squeeky: "What?!?!?"

Finally he asked again: "Don't you want to do something about that!?!?!", his left arm and hand rising and pointing outside through the windows to the street, to the world.

I took his money.  He went into the theater.  What the candy clerk thought I don't know, I never spoke to her, or really looked at her.  For all I know she never saw or heard anything.  I walked upstairs to my office and sat down, my mind an unstable vortex.

Over the next days and months and years, it slowly dawned on me what had happened.

On a fundamental level he had reminded me of something in my soul with which I had lost contact.  We were, politically, just emerging from the Nixon crash and burn (the mid to late 1970's).  My youthful (and joey's) belief that society could be healed of its ills was dead.  I felt socially and politically impotent, and wandered in the disciplines of magic because I saw no way to be in the world that had any meaning to which my spirit could identify, or in which my own will could find purchase.

His questions were an enormous gift, for they re-awoke the idea that something could be possible.  It was just a small seed, but it was nonetheless the effect of his words and his deed.  He reminded me of something that I was (which of course included joey's own astral nature, as left behind, although at that time I had no idea of this transformation).  I had lost hope, but now it was rekindled.

Seen from today, this is the meaning I give to this event (a meaning I was able to begin to give to it a couple of decades ago, once I began reading Steiner - which of course at this point was just itself beginning with the Agriculture Course and the Luke and John Gospel lectures).  Recall above in the main text, how I had in my soul a certain question regarding the social clearly before me out of the riddles joey had left behind, which then determined (biographical necessity) the orientation I had as I began to study Steiner and Anthroposophy.

I was in prior incarnations, strongly linked to the Jahve stream.  This no doubt began in those incarnations prior to the Incarnation.  Steiner had written in fact that one of the consequences of the sacrifices of the Jahve Elohim was to become bound to the elements, which is no doubt why I was necessarily drawn to Franz Bardon in the first place (a system of initiation via the elements).

The New Sun Mysteries could not fully arrive in the world immediately after the Incarnation.   The Christ Impulse (the effect of the other Six Elohim) could only manifest slowly, in progressive waves, over time.  For example, America's Founders, including George Washington, were high level Masons, themselves (so the legend is), taught directly by an apparently human being that was called: the Professor.

We need to see the Moon Wisdom of Jahve only slowly over time receding and giving way to the New Sun Mysteries of the other Six Elohim, which in Anthroposophy and the work of Rudolf Steiner, appears in the social for the first time quite strongly (Roman Catholicism no longer has the political power it had originally won in the 4th Century, to punish esoteric Christian impulses as heresies).  At the moment of my own transition from the Moon stream (Bardon and Buddhism) to the Sun stream (Steiner and Anthroposophy), my old Teacher came into my biography, and blessed this event, as well as giving me a gift - the return of hope.

He didn't do this by compromising my freedom, either.   It was done by meeting me face to face (known as known, see I Corinthians 13) and asking me a question.  I was not directed anywhere but into the depths of my own soul, where resided not only my own I, but the astral body prepared by the innocent (joey).

One more nuance remains, which itself was kind of fun.

Just before my meeting with Rudolf Steiner, through his books, I was introduced by a friend to the music of the Moody Blues, an English rock group that began in the 1960's and still tours today (some of them at any rate).  She gave me a half dozen of their albums, saying at the time that she thought I would really like them.

I did.  In fact, they meant and still mean a great deal to me, so I will tell a little of their story next, as a kind of introduction to those who may not know them.

Their first hit album, Days of Future Passed, was the original concept album.  Prior to that time, popular music albums were sets of single records, perhaps organized around a theme (all blues for example), but never before was the whole conceived as an integrated whole before.  Not only that, the Moody Blues here also did another first, which was to produce an album in which a major orchestra (the London Philharmonic) not only did backup on a number of individual songs, but had had composed for them various bridges from one individual song to the next.  Many readers may know only of one song from this album, which is still played on elevators today: Nights in White Satin.

Just to give a hint of what their fans thought about them - this from a concert of theirs I attended in Oakland, California, around the time I was transitioning slowly into the New Sun Mysteries.

We were in a venue filled to the rafters, that held about 14,000 people.   The Blues had finished their main set, and now returned for one final  encore song (always planned that way of course), which was from the newest album Octave (their eighth album under their own label: Threshold Records).  The song was called: Once Step into the Light, and it was basically about the fact that the Second Coming of Christ had happened, but seen from their perspective (more later).

When the song was done, and the fans were on their feet screaming for more (which was not, of course to come, and which everyone expected anyway), but the Band had loved us and we were returning that love.  At this moment of powerfully voiced fan passion, the then flutist (Ray Thomas) stepped to the front of the stage and raise his two flutes in the form of a cross.  Though it had not seemed possible, the outpouring of love in the form of voice and applause from the audience doubled.

The Moody Blues touched something deep in the hearts of their fans, which is why in my own writing (an essay on my website) I describe them as composing Hymns to the Consciousness Soul.  Those familiar with my essay The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, will know (also from their own experience) that we now live in a time of dramatic trials in all our biographies, trials which often lead to deep pain of soul, and difficulties in understanding the world in which we live.   The Moody Blues music speaks to these soul depths for all their many fans.

In the album Octave, noted above, are these verses:

From the first song, Stepping in a Slide Zone:

I took a ride in a limousine

I took a road I'd never been

I met a stranger by the way

His coat was torn but his eyes were clear

Standing in a slide zone

I could be steppin' in a slide zone

He told me where a river flows

He showed me how the apple grows

He told me of a magic stream

His face was worn but his eyes were clear

[emphasis added, ed.]

Clearly I was not the only one to meet this remarkable personality which I have come to understand was an experience of Jahve.

Also in the same album, from the second song Under Moonshine, these lines:

The dawn crept into by room

And stole my dream

Now I'll never know

Just what it means

Or what could have been

Yet still I try to lie

But I'm seen

Under moonshine that's where I've been

Under moonshine I'm clearly seen

Under moonshine that's where I've been

Under moonshine I'm clearly seen

Creator of dreams that melt with the sun

I'll send you the things this man has done

He was a saint and a sinner rolled in one

But I miss him now that he's gone

I sure miss him now that he's gone

This shows their recognition that the spiritual stream to which they have belonged is a Moon Wisdom.  Please recall that not all the good being poured over humanity comes from Steiner, or even clearly from the New Sun Mysteries, which are only now maturing in their ability to appear in the social.

Finally these lines from the last song in the album, Octave, One Step into the Light (their experience of the Second Coming - from the the point of view of a Moon Wisdom stream):

One step into the light

One step away from night

It's the hardest step you're gonna take

The ship to take you there

Is waiting at the head

Of the stairs that lead up through your opening mind

Above the dark despair

Shines a light that we can share

Close your eyes and look up in between your brows

Then slowly breathing in

Feel the LIFE FORCE streaming in

Hold it there, then send it back to him

All the old things are returning

Cosmic circles ever turning

All the truth we've been yearning for

Life is our saviour, saviour, saviour, save your soul

The river of LIVING BREATH

Is flowing through the SUN

He was there before the earth began

The world will drag on you

Use his love to pull you through

Find the mission of YOUR LIFE and start to BE

All the old things are returning

Cosmic circles ever turning

All the truth we've been yearning for

Life is our saviour, saviour, saviour, save your soul

There's one thing I can do

Play my Mellotron for you

Try to blow away your city blues

Your dreams are not unfound

Get your feet back on the ground

The TRUTH will set us FREE, we cannot lose

We cannot lose, we just have to CHOOSE

The world is a far more miraculous place than one might think if they just went to Branch meetings and study groups of the Anthroposophical Society.  The music and lyrics of the Moody Blues, produced now over many many years, is itself a Gospel of deep wisdom, written poetically and in images (true consciousness soul speech), not just to the intellect, but also quite directly to the heart.   They model something all anthroposophists might do well to imitate for a time, in their use of imagery to unveil powerful moral truths.  I consider them important personal teachers and deep spiritual companions.

For my part, following this transition to the New Sun Mysteries, and away from a seeking of initiation through the study of the elements (a Moon Wisdom), I choose in the 1980's to offer to sacrifice both the study of powers and initiation (during prayer life) in order to ask the Mystery for whatever support that could help me obtain to that state of soul which might enable me to see deeply into the social life of humanity (as per the riddles of the innocent preparer) in such a way that I could tell the true spiritual story of the world to modern humanity, thus my research called: Listening  to the World Song.

Lest someone think I am bragging about my moral purity of intention, do not worry.  I remain, as this essay in fact demonstrates, not infrequently shamelessly human and full of myself.  There is here, however, a purpose.

We need to recognize that Steiner was speaking to the Intellectual Soul in Central Europe for the most part, which by its nature needs to have before it a strong sense of the Ideal.   America is a place of soul work that requires other characteristics be emphasized.  Here the practical and the pragmatic is important, which means (among much else) that we appreciate how much of ourselves and our culture is fallen. 

We don't need to think of this fallen nature as evil or wrong, however, which too close an involvement with the Ideal can suggest.  Rather, we think of our real human nature as transformable, not only out of our freedom, but most crucially only in those directions we freely choose.  This fallen culture is part of the process - a process in which we are the central participants.  Should we choose, consciously, an ideal goal, that is one thing.   Should we choose a practical and realizable goal, that is another.  We need not abandon our oh so very human nature, but rather we create out of it.  We see the divine in the creative potential of the human, and this as the whole creative foundation for the future.

It remains to be seen whether I have enough years of life in which to create such tales, in the language of the consciousness soul out of the insights of the New Sun Mysteries, following the beauty and example of my old companions in the Moon Stream, the Moody Blues.

the Hermit, the Fool and the Magician

On my retreat in New Hampshire I sometimes walk around the property, and sometimes into the surrounding woods.   In cities we cannot have this, but it refreshes the soul and to the extent the next years might make cities less inhabitable, that will (in part) be a blessing.

Here I want to address the imagery of the Hermit, the Fool and the Magician.  

The Hermit was my outer self, or in another way my social self.   I have had few true friends, for with such friends we must share the deepest part of ourselves, so you might see that given my biography and its real nature in an inner sense, the principle driving aspects could not often be shared.  Others would not understand them, and so it becomes necessary to create an outer personality that is protective in a kind of way, and which others might think of as standoffish.  Those who get close to me, I cannot hide from, and since there have been many good reasons to maintain a kind of hidden core, I have adopted this persona of the Hermit, the wise old man.

The Fool is my inner self.  This essay is an example of that.  In many uses of this image in different tarot decks, the Fool is seen as appearing to step off a cliff.  In Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot, the Fool Arcanum is the Arcanum of Love.   I have, in my life, done what may appear to others as many foolish or stupid things (they judge me that way), not understanding that Love often requires that one look stupid or socially foolish.  At the same time the Fool and social foolishness are not always the same thing, for how we appear to others (our outer self) is not how we appear to ourselves.  In the language of Carl Jung, these are archetypes, and universal as well.   We all have these characteristics in varying degrees and forms of expression.  For me, in my sense of myself as an actor in the world who had on many occasions to do what would appear socially inept or foolish, the idea of The Fool was quite important.

The Magician is my life destiny.   I had an acquaintance who was a clairvoyant.  Like many such she was for a time seen as mad (put in a mental hospital).   She was (she has crossed over) a major figure in the books called: Messages from Michael.   She invented (transmitted?) a symbol system in which she saw people as one of seven different types according to their role in life.  Within these types there were seven different levels of maturity.  Within these seven different levels and types there were seven different qualities.   I asked her once how she saw me (this was even before meeting Steiner), and she said my type was Priest, my level of maturity was seven (the highest) and my quality was the study of acceptance.   This (acceptance) was the last task, she said, and in this life I would become an initiate or enlightened, depending on which path I walked - East or West.  In Tarot, the One Card - the Magician - is both beginning and end.

my 2008 Epiphany experience

The background to this is important.   The preparation for this initiation experience was brought about by life - by the biography.   The more I devote myself to the teachings in my biography (23rd psalm) and accepted it (surrendered to it), the more the biography was able to give to me.

I am designed for my biography, and my biography is designed for me.   This arises because we live within Christ.   We live within the Creation, in which Christ has embodied His own Being - his own Ego Being.  As Lord (artist) of Karma, from the very highest worlds in between death and a new birth, all i-AMs prepare the just-for-them individual biography, and all biographies are brought into musical harmony with each other.   Whatever we experience as dissonance in life (antipathy) and harmony in life (sympathy), is Love in its most earthly form.  The more we refine the soul, following the personal teachings in our biographies, the more we will find additional dimensions to the Love that surrounds us.

The story that follows is meant then more as an example of Love in the biography, than as a brag.

2007 was a hard year for me.   A very special relationship was in trouble, and I discovered in the Winter that I had atrial fibrillation - my heart was constantly unable to establish a regular rhythm.  This is a common disorder in our time.   As a consequence (the details are not so important) I entered into an drug trial for a new medication, which while it was not meant to "cure" the a-fib, it was intended to avert (most of the time) strokes and heart attacks, because the a-fib would cause blood to linger too long in one of the open spaces in the heart, instead of move through, and without the constant movement, the clotting process would begin.  The drug helped this by "thinning the blood".  If the blood was less thin it was thought that clots were less likely to form and therefore could not move to the brain to cause strokes, or to the heart muscle itself and cause heart attacks.  The statistics were favorable, and all my care givers (including an anthroposophical doctor) recommended it.

To hindsight this created a secondary problem that was not noticed when it first manifested.   This problem was psychological.  We know the heart is an organ of feeling (among other things), and these feelings are a kind of soul-perception faculty.  It we mechanically thin the blood, we disturb some of the normal psychological functioning of the heart and blood.  But the study protocols were not interested in soul health, only in mechanical physical health, so while I reported a sense of increase emotional lability (constant change), the study people were not interested.

Since my basic temperament was phlegmatic,  I was now in a realm of soul experience with which I was unfamiliar.  You could say I "felt" too much.   This stronger feeling life gave the shadow forces more "fuel" as it were, and as a social person I became "different".   This eventually led to stronger than usual disturbances in a personal relationship, and eventually it flew apart.

I was asked to move out in two days.   Very stressful for a 66 year old fat bald man with a-fib, but very necessary for the psychological health of the partner.  I didn't like it, but as you shall see a higher purpose was buried within these events.  Providence is able to mutli-task at levels we cannot imagine.

Being chronically poor, I had to move into a spare room in someone else's house.  A gift to be sure, but stressful as well for we were dis-similar in multiple ways.  Next happened two events.

One was that it became harder for me to endure meetings of the Anthroposophical Society, no doubt in part contributed to by the a-fib and the emotional consequences of the medicine.  I became more passionate in how I expressed myself there, and such passion naturally led to passionate responses.  In a sense I was rejected by those I most admired in the Society - they couldn't understand me (too much antipathy).

Another was that my cardiologist gave me a "stress test".  Already under stress, the idea of the medical profession was to gather more data, so I was put on a treadmill, attached to various measuring apparatus (I should have recognized the danger, because the doctor had to be there in case I had a heart attack).  So we stressed the heart physically even more, in order to get data.   The data by the way was good (from a mechanical point of view), for it revealed the absence of other more troubling problems with my heart.

In my soul life at this time, I was basically being asked to spend a lot of time thinking about Ahriman.   Life had asked me to solve the riddle of whether Ahriman was already incarnated and what that might mean.  A lot of my thinking and meditation was devoted to this question, which process was itself dangerous for it is not exactly psychologically healthy to draw near to such onesidedness. 

Living Thinking involves a thinking movement from thinking about to thinking with to thinking within to thinking as.   To a very real extent, in order to understand Ahriman as an incarnate human being, I had to see from his point of view.   I had to identify with a kind of thinking (for brief moments) that is cold and callous and indifferent to human suffering.  I also had to appreciate this event.   I had to find my way toward that point of view that enabled me to have the title of one of the parts of the essay about him, state: Brother what ails thee.  That is: I not only had to understand this onesidedness from the inside, but to so sympathize with it so that I could love him.

It was during this work that I woke up quite early one morning in great distress, hardly awake at all actually, called my former partner and asked her to drive me to the ER were I then died twice (again that remarkable multi-tasking nature of Providence, that let me block two different coronary arteries within an hour of each other, and thus receive two stents, which hopefully would mechanically maintain these arteries in an open condition).

So to the stress of the a-fib, the rejection from the Society, the leaving of the partner was now added the need to recover from two very bad heart attacks.  Providence saw to it that I had them in the ER, for which I was very grateful from the moment I awoke two days latter.

Then our (joey's and mine) mother entered her final illness and died.  The escalation of the final illness began about five or six weeks after the heart attack, and extended for a few weeks before intensifying in a several day event, which involved all kinds of contact with other family members, including disagreements over her care and how hard we should try to keep her alive (she was 95, and in a long term care facility, although her spirit had gone walk-about many years ago - no memory of her family, etc.  The medical profession kept her body alive, but did not know what to do to help her spirit.).  My younger brother (age 59) knew instinctively, however, and helped her across the threshold, by going to her room with his guitar and singing to her, during which periods of her last couple of days this singing was the only time her face showed an absence of deep pain, and her body would not thrash about.

Not to long after this, the man in whose house I was living, gave me a thirty day notice to quit the room.  He had personal justifiable reasons for his own need to have the room for other uses.  In any event, more stress.  Where would I go?  To my children and add to their stress?  A long time friend made me an offer to rent an efficiency apartment that once had been part of her garage in New Hampshire.   This would involve moving 3000 miles, in mid-Winter, across the country.

She lived in the country on six and a half acres of New England woods, that were next to a nature preserve.  Of course, everyone thought I was foolish, and I even choose to be expressly foolish.  I had died, twice.  I didn't know how much life I had left, and chose to live as fully as possible and take whatever risks seemed most interesting.

My partner had rejected me.   The Society had rejected me.   My body was rejecting me.   My birth family didn't know what to do with me (I briefly thought about moving back to where joey was born).  I had a month to move out, and needed to decide right away, because any move was going to involve a lot of work.  So I leapt off the cliff.

My move out of the partner's house had involved a giving away of many objects to which I was attached.  This move was even more of the same, for I did not have the money to do a formal move.   I packed up books and videos (a film buff, I had 500 movies, most recorded by myself) and shipped them to New England via media mail.   I arranged to rent the largest car I could rent (I choose to exhaust my credit cards and take the consequences) in order to move the other objects of importance (including my own body).

On the day I had planned to leave, a Pacific storm of considerable violence was going to engulf Sacramento (70 plus mile an hour winds did come) and hit Donner pass (two feet of snow, highway closed for almost a day).  So I had at the last minute to move my timetable up a day.  More stress.

When I went with my eldest son to pick up the rental car, I discovered that they were charging me $1200 instead of what the website had said ($765) for the cross country trip, because of taxes (which they didn't tell me about).  There is more, but you get the general idea.  More stress.

When I got the car to my house, we couldn't get all that I wanted to pack in it, into it.   It was noon.   The storm was coming the next day and I had to get out ahead of it.  Fortunately a friend, who was there to help load, took in trade some of my objects, in return agreeing to send by UPS the remainder (two or three boxes of stuff I didn't want to let go of).

My son said I could still choose to fly and find some other way to ship.  I opened a folding chair that I was going to take, and sat down on the sidewalk.  I wanted to cry, I was so emotionally and physically exhausted.  It was January 2nd, 2008, the storm would hit on the third.

I told my son and my friend that I just needed to go.  I needed to leave, to end it, to be on the road, and to have Sacramento in the past.   In four hours I was over Donner pass, and into Nevada.  I was, so it seemed, free of something (as an addict in recovery I also knew there were no geographic cures, so I was also taking with me all my wounds and other emotional baggage).  On the other side of Reno I drove until it was dark and then found a motel.  I had an elaborate trip plan, which I had created using the Internet.  I had looked up in advance all the cheap motels every fifty miles for the whole 3000 mile trip.  I had their addresses and their phone numbers.  I'd get were I got each day, and using the plan, pick the motel.  I had three credit cards and my ATM bank card.

It was also the Holy Nights.  I had been planning for these particular Holy Nights for many months.  My nighttime meditation practice had become quite interesting.  I would lay down, or sit in a chair and take my consciousness into the whole field of sensation encompassed by my consciousness.  This was to me: experience.  As I rested in this field of experience I could move my attention about it, much the way we can survey our room with our eyes.  I knew this field of experience as the astral body, and the will of my attention as my spirit.  I would enter meditation in the astral body, but my I would direct what I looked at.  This was also, this totality of the I, the astral body, the ethereal body and the physical body (for in meditation I did not leave my body) the microcosm.

The totality of my own activity and my experience was the microcosm, and as such it was a mirror image of the macrocosm.  Of course, my knowledge and understanding of the microcosm, much less the macrocosm was weak and incomplete.  I would not be able to go far, but there I came in meditation and studied what was there from which to learn.

With my attention I could move among the various fields of experience, including lower and higher chakras.  I was most awake in the heart, throat, eyebrow and crown chakras.  For example, there is a kind of seeing/beholding that thinking can do if one's attention rests in the eyebrow or crown chakras (best is to do both eyebrow and crown  simultaneously, see Tomberg's picture of the eye above the eye).  One can also rest the attention in the throat chakra itself.  We know this chakra as the place from which we move our inner voice.  If we rest here in the right way, the throat chakra begins to resound with the surrounding tones of spirit.  It may seem odd to some, but if we entirely quiet our mental chatter (no discursive or inner thinking), the throat chakra makes the sound of silence.   Paradoxical, no doubt, that silence is itself a sound, but this is so to experience.  Paul Simon seems to have a glimpse of this:

Hello darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence

My practice then for many nights, and especially more intensely for the Holy Nights, was as follows.

I would cultivate a mood of soul (consciously infuse the astral body with certain qualities of feeling) by reciting out loud, first the Lord's Prayer, then a prayer of gratitude* that I had created (see my book the Way of the Fool), and then finally the prologue to the John Gospel (verses 1-14).  I would speak these out loud and in private, as taught by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).

Then I would experience and think, until I could no longer remain awake (start to nod my head and fall asleep) and I would then cross my self twice (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul) and go to sleep.

*[Holy Mother, Mistress of the True Dark;  Christ-Jesus, my Lord and Savior; all the Hierarchies Above and all the Hierarchies below; the Communion of Saints, and the Communities of Ancestors; our Doubles and our Angels - thank you for this day, and thank you for the fruits of yesterday.]

I was faithful to this practice all through the Holy Nights of 2007 and 2008, regardless of how tired I was.

My trials were not over, although I had left California.  I was driving across the country in the Winter, in a gap in between storms (the storms move from West to East across the country all winter long).  Violent weather was behind me, chasing me, and in front of me was the remains of many snow storms.

The first problem manifested the morning of the 3rd travel day (Jan. 4th).  I was to cross the continental divide in Wyoming.  Highway 80 there is at 7000 feet, and in forty miles it crosses the divide three times.  I got up early (before light), and hit this section of highway intentionally at dawn.  It was open, although it had been earlier in December frequently closed due to storms.

For forty miles it alternated ice pack with ruts, and black ice (so clear you think you're seeing the dark highway) as well as stretches of bare road.   I was in a convoy of 50 or more very large trucks, facing the same road conditions.  We drove at speeds of less then 20 miles an hour, and even then the ruts would make the cars and trucks go sideways.   One always felt that at any given moment during this two hour trip for 40 miles, that we could suddenly spin out of control, and since other vehicles were along side us, it was very dangerous.  I passed a half dozen trucks and passenger cars off the road and in the ditch.  They all had snow on them, which indicated they were accidents from previous weather, but no one had had the time yet to remove them.

Eventually I got to Laramie in eastern Wyoming and then crossed into western Nebraska.  It was mid-afternoon and sunny, at which point a warning light came on in my nice new rental car and so began an adventure of tires.  It turned out that both rear tires were worn down to the steel, and the two in front were nearly so (the outer rubber edge was worn flat as a board).   Many hours spent on the cell phone, and waiting for a tow truck and having to spend my own money to buy two new tires (the truck stop wouldn't take the rental companies credit card over the phone).  I lost time.

The next day (the 5th) I had to drive across Nebraska to Omaha, to the rental agency's main center at the airport there, for there at the airport was the only place they could take my two front tires off and replace those as well (I had 1500 more miles to go and I wasn't going to go with bald tires in the Winter on a front wheel drive car).  But I couldn't go to the airport in the evening (I'd be too tired in any event), so on the evening of the 5th I got a motel and then got up at 5 a.m. to be at the airport at 6 when the mechanics came on duty (in a strange city, driving in the rain storm from the weather that had finally caught up with me).   Finally, by about 8 a.m. I was on the road (on the 6th), with 4 new tires, and was able that day to drive through parts or all of four states (Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana), for a make-up day of over 800 miles.

As I neared the end of this day, I arrived in eastern Indiana in a wonderfully violent thunder storm.  I actually pulled off the highway, drove into a shopping center parking lot (near an edge) and rolled down the window (after parking so the wind blew the rain away from the driver's side of the car) and watched and listened as the Thrones crashed and thundered away (about every 15 seconds for awhile).  One lightening strike hit a condenser on a power pole about 100 yards from me, causing lights to go out for a least a block around.  Sparks everywhere, and I thought for a moment the pole was going to burst into flame and fall.

I bought some food at a nearby major gas station (and filled up the tank), called a motel on my list (it was 30 miles away to the East) and went there to eat, watch some TV to come down from the long drive and then enter meditation on Epiphany, the 6th of January, 2008.

I didn't watch much TV, for I discovered I was very tired.  I had been running on forced adrenaline for four days.  Pushing away from Sacramento and over Donner Pass on the 2nd, I had crossed the great Western deserts of Nevada and Utah on the first full day (the 3rd).   Then I traversed the winter ice passage of the continental divide and eastern Wyoming, only to fall prey to commercial laziness and dangerous tire problems on the 4th.  On the 5th I was only able to do Nebraska in order to complete the trial of tires.  Surviving this, I forced more miles in a rush on the 6th, eventually entering the evening of Epiphany through the gate of a great thunder storm.

I had spent myself.  Going all the way back to the beginning of 2007, where I found out I had a-fib, my biography presented me with multiple qualities of experience.  Rejection after rejection, coupled with deep inner work and writing (see the many essays in American Anthroposophy that were written in their first* drafts in those months, especially the season of Michaelmas 2007).

*[a first draft is often written in one sitting, which can run anywhere from two hours to 6 or more (with an occasional break).  The living thinking finds itself involved with a theme, which grows and develops the more I attend to it.  It is kind of like a piece of music, only formed of a melody of concepts that sing together in the mind (pure thinking).  Often it is full of pictures, but always my own I plays the dominant creative role.  For months after I will polish it, but little, in the sense of major changes, ever arises.  During this "polishing" phase, my I returns to the theme in the world of thought, discovering many a nuance that was too subtle to be noticed at a previous encounter.]

As I prepared to enter meditation on this evening, my soul was exhausted and I knew I was spent.  I had nothing left.  I was in fact ready to die that night.   There was the dream of New England, but that was still far away in time and space, and in the now I was empty.  2007 had taken all, whether it was in trials or creative work.  I begin to speak (to pray) without my usual mood cultivating rituals (the Lord's prayer etc.) out loud my state of being.  I said to the invisibles how I felt, how I was empty, how I had nothing more, and that since I had already been living on grace since my heart attacks in September, I was ready to die, right then, right there.  I surrendered to the Divine Mystery, and made no more claim on life.

This was the true mood.  The prayers, the cultivated mood, that was one thing, but my true state of being was another.  I can't really say what happened next, except that I knew I was someplace I'd never been before.  I was nothing, I had nothing, I wanted nothing, I needed nothing.

Yet, I still was.  I was I without content.

I found then I was also questions.  There was so much I didn't understand.  I lived in a pain of ignorance.   I'd had this last year of life and great pain and wonderful creative insights, and yet could see no future.  I couldn't even see why I should get up the next day and complete my journey.

So, for a moment I turned to my ritual speaking, beginning with the Lord's Prayer, and started to recite it - what else was there to do?  But my state of soul was unusual.  So from the first word "Our" I was ignorant.  What did that really mean I felt?  I spoke my question outwardly, softly almost in a whisper, and then it began - a dialog.  Outwardly I would speak as if unknowing, as if any concept was simultaneously a question.  There was the pure concept of "Our" as I had understood it in the past, but did I really understand it, or was there a great deal more.  Inwardly, in the quiet of my exhausted and spent mind I heard the tones of answers.   Sounding in me were the real ideas behind even such a single spoken word as "Our".

No idea/word was less important or more important.  Every word/concept spoken and thought in this surrendering questioning mood brought forth the gentle ringing of an answer.  I became questions, and other-presence became answers.  This included such abstract ideas/words as: "Father" "who" "art" "in" "Heaven".  Each single thought was full of consciousness and being, yearning itself to be known by me in the same way I was known to "It".

Several thought streams wandered off into deeper dialogs, until I was empty of whatever questions I could sustain in the moment.  In this way I went slowly slowly slowly (one single concept or word at a time) through the whole of the Lord's Prayer, the prayer of gratitude, and the prologue to the John Gospel, the whole meditative contemplative experience lasting about three hours normal time (it seemed full of forever).

Today, when I do my usual mood cultivating work, prior to mediation, I experience all of these (the two prayers and the prologue) in far richer concepts than I used to.   For example, I used to think of "Our" as only human beings, but now I include all of Creation - the organic, the inorganic and much else besides - as aspects of this idea.

As stated previously in various places, it was here that I learned (in my dialogs about the prologue, that the Word had various qualities, and that one of these different qualities manifested in the Christ Impulse in this Age as Choice.   So one can legitimately say, without abusing the central understanding: In the Beginning was the Choice.

Of course we confuse ourselves if we think of choice as a word, or even as a concept.   Better if we recall that moment of action when we made a choice.   Choice then is an act of the will of the I.  In this act of will of the I is an echo of the quality of Choice as that exists as a single aspect of the Word.  This echo in the I is the embryonic birth within the I of the Christ Impulse: as a free human being I choose.

Now I knew from my research into the social, how crucial choice (Moral Grace) was to our present needs as regards the Age of the Consciousness Soul, but I didn't know until Epiphany this year that Choice was such a primary quality of the Word Itself.  Moreover, in continuing to work this way it becomes necessary to reconstruct for our current state of soul many aspects of the prologue, none of which diminish it in anyway, but all of which deepen it and fill it out as it were - make it richer.

For example, where it says: there was a man sent from God and he had the name John, we shouldn't say that anymore, because we don't receive missions anymore, unless you want to include all human beings in your idea of God.  The idea of freedom and choice has to be conceived today as much richer, and that God (if conceived as a separate Being) doesn't send us anywhere we don't choose to go.  If God is an integrated Being, which includes us, then the nuances are a bit different.

moral grace, holy breath, choice....the I slowly unfolding the Christ Impulse in all its glory...

falling into the Arms of the Holy Mother

Sometimes pain is the only place to be...

One morning, I was approaching a time of meditation, but found myself in an odd mood.  I don't remember what brought it on, which itself is interesting.  In any event I was feeling terrible about my own flaws.  It was a kind of remorse and guilt, only 10 to 20 times worse.  I entered into it instead of avoiding it.

I let myself live in all the terrible things I had done in life.  As an addict in recovery you have to know these places in the soul - they're as much a part of you as all the rest.  My thinking then spread out in a kind of way, trying to taste all this evil we human beings did and were doing.  It is very hard to describe this, but my mood of soul became filled with shame.  I had no excuses and we had no excuses.   So much pain was caused everyday by our selfishness and egotism.

I then thought of Christ and the Mother.  I don't know precisely why, but the thought I had next was that they knew us this way.    They felt our shame and guilt and evil deeds.   They not only felt that, but they felt as well what those we harmed experienced.   All that evil and those terrible deeds.  Christ and the Mother surely felt it all, both sides of it.   Those who do evil and those who are its victims.  Their love left them open to this.   A world of pain and terror and horror, endless inhumanity.  And not just the suffering of those who were hurt, but also the suffering of those that caused hurt.

With this thought my soul pain deepened.  Except somehow it wasn't just my pain.  There was an agony now, and a strange void.  I didn't understand.  I knew it had to be true that all that was dark was known by Her and Him and that They felt it all - all of it in as intimate a fashion as possible.  Inwardly then a cry tore loose from my soul - how do you endure it I said to Them, how do you feel all this pain, this suffering, all our terrible crimes against each other, and all that is caused by our errant wills, unjustified ever on, day in day out, for all time.

How do you endure it!

Then She came and caught me falling.  A sound, a tone, a voice of such comfort and such love:

We turn it into love, She said.

We turn it into love - this I was told and felt and knew.  They receive our deeds, all the pain, all the suffering, all the guilt, all the cold heartlessness...

They accept it, and love us still...in an spirit alchemy we can hardly sense or guess or understand...They turn evil into love.

Sometimes it is very important to be ashamed.  The vertical dimension of the Cross has an upward gesture and a downward gesture.  We have to know both.  Everyone needs to "hit bottom", for there is Someone there who is remarkably caring.  Not just the High Ideal we are to know, but the oh so seemingly fallen Real.

Blessings to all who have read this far....

my Christ experiences

After the change of egos as was mentioned in the main body, I became severely depressed and went on a long walk, led unconsciously to a hill top where I prayed.  I was then "comforted" (relieved of my burden).  This was the first by-grace direct experience of Christ.

You will read in Steiner (and my own experience confirms) that this "contact" does more than the mere obvious, for it penetrates the whole being, from the ego, to the astral, and then the ethereal and physical.  We are touched, completely.  This happened I think in the early spring 1972, and may have happened then in the Season of Easter.

A second time was in 1986, when I was living at the foot of Mt. Shasta (a very spiritual place) in an old farm house.  One morning I had a complicated dream/vision.  This is how I described this event in my book the Way of the Fool:

"[a personal aside: In reference to the idea above, that Christ only enters the Catholic Church during the Mass (while always remaining available to individuals, I am here only reflecting on what He does with regards to the organized Church), I want to tell the following story.  Again, it is conscience that requires this, so that the reader may know from where I obtain such thoughts.  In about 1986, while I was first studying Meditations on the Tarot: a Journey into Christian Hermeticism, I had an early morning dream (vision), which came to me by Grace {"And it shall come to pass after this that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions." Joel 2:28.}

The following was like a dream: I was walking in a garden, to one side of which was the house in which I was then living, and on the other side of which was a Catholic Church.  I was walking with a priest of the Church, and explaining to him why I wanted to become a Catholic (I had not yet done this, or thought of doing this, although 5 years later I did do this).  I said to the priest that there were basically two Churches, a pure Heavenly Church, and a fallen Earthly Church, and that during the Mass Christ Descends and brings the two churches into direct contact with each other, and this fact was why I was becoming a Catholic (I did later tell the story of this dream to the priest that oversaw my experience of the Rite of Catholic Initiation of Adults, a 9 month process ending with first communion on Easter - so in every way the dream was prophetic).

While I was saying/speaking in the latter part of the dream, I simultaneously had the by Grace vision aspect.  Christ had taken me into Himself and then taken me with Him, while He performed this act of Descent and by Grace reintegration, in which temporarily He united the two otherwise separated Churches, the pure Heavenly Church and the fallen Earthly Church, during the Mass.

At this point, I opened my eyes and discovered myself fully awake and lying in bed on my back.  I stayed there, without moving, without even thinking, for about a half hour, at rest and completely at peace.  I have never before or after experienced such peace.]"

During the developments in my biography, that contained as a small part my process through the Rite of Initiation of Catholic Adults, above referred to, we were not allowed to take the Host, but had to leave the Mass to go to lessons, just before that part.  During a moment of prayer there during the Mass, Christ touched me in His Aspect as Pure Love.  Again this was fully an act of Grace, but keep in mind that with each contact I am changed in some subtle but fundamental way.

This experience, by the way, shakes you to your roots, because you both open the door to it, and then close it again (it is too overwhelming).  The soul mood of prayer opened the door, and then when He touched me, I ran from the intensity of the direct experience of Spirit Presence.

Now part of my experience of these events was always that afterward I was more free.  Nothing was taken, and what was added to me in no way interfered with my right to choose my own path.

I know of no way to appreciate the details of the intended changes, but I can describe two effects of which I was aware later, that can be attributed to this activity. 

With regard to my the Mt. Shasta experience, I had entered the reading of Tomberg's work carrying a deeply ingrained prejudice, due to certain experiences of joey as he played his role of innocent preparer.  He grew up in a town where there was a sharp social division between Protestants and Catholics.   We had quite separate schools and seldom socially mixed.  Our biological father, Wally Wendt, was a 33rd degree Mason (a Shriner).

In a vulgar way, some called Catholics: mackerel snappers.  This was no doubt in reference to the fish on Friday rules they followed.  One effect of Christ's Touch in 1986 then, was to heal me of this prejudice by showing me that Christ did in fact Love all.

In 1991, when I was directly by Grace touched a third time and Loved, I was beginning to write more (I was at that time working in a mental hospital, very much washing the feet).  I had been working on developing consciously the organic thinking taught in Steiner's A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, and applying this to the social.  In fact my Threshold Problems in Thinking the Threefold Social Organism was written around that time.

It was in relationship to this thinking activity (about the social political), that was being developed in a more or less fully conscious way with respect to the use of the imagination, that I first began to notice the regular very light touch of what many years later I began to call: the subtle and delicate presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence.  I would be thinking about the social political (even when driving a car) and generally be forming a question.   At the expression of the question, thoughts would flow, but that had a subtly noticeable different quality than my usual thoughts.  I began then to trust this subtle presence, and recognize that I was being helped, although at that time my introspective capacities lacked the necessary delicate discrimination to note what might be called: details of the experience. 

Almost always, when this presence responded to a question (meant to serve others) I would stop what else I was doing and take notes, because otherwise I would later forget the thoughts.

This then was the first intimations of Holy Breath.  Many years went by before I was confident enough to either write or speak openly of this aspect of my inner life.   From these first experiences and my trust in that presence, my work more and more matured, although it wasn't until when I was in Prescott, Arizona, and fully free of family and work obligations, that I was able to devote myself more intensely through daily practice to this activity (and its fruits), such that I eventually was able to write of this in all the ways that then followed in my various writings.

Let me quote something from The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul that was thought in me as part of this living thinking, as this is both descriptive of these experiences in detail, and a good way to end this biographical material:

"Invited by the Love and Art of Divine Circumstance to look within and to reach into the depths of our own being in order to source and author that Good which we know to be right, we touch something spiritual and are Touched by something Spiritual.  In this time of the True Second Coming, in the inwardness of our souls and invisible to all outer seeing, a Second Eucharist is being enacted - the Good offers Itself - Its own Being - to us (Moral Grace).  For the Good we know is not just known in the soul as what we tend to think of as a mere thought, but if we attend most carefully, it is true Spirit, just as the John Gospel writer told us that Christ spoke: [John 3:6-8] "What's born of the flesh is flesh, and what's born of the breath is breath.  Don't be amazed because I told you you have to be born again.  The wind blows where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it comes from or where it goes; its the same with everyone born of the breath."

"[The existence of a Second Eucharist, to accompany the True Second Coming, in no way means to diminish or change the Original Eucharist.  On the contrary, we will find that via the Second Eucharist our understanding of the meaning of the Original Eucharist (the transubstantiation of matter) will deepen.  See in this regard, the small pamphlet: Radiant matter: Decay and Consecration, by Georg Blattmann.  From the transubstantiation of matter we are being led onward to learning how to participate also in a transubstantiation of thought.]

"Thus we are being truly and continuously born again today (each act of moral grace is another Second Ethereal Eucharist and birth), from out of our spiritual childhood and into our spiritual adulthood, baptized outwardly by the fires of the times in our biographies, and by holy breath within - a Second Eucharist where Christ gives of His own Substance that biblical knowing of the Good - His own Being.  For us to truly know the Good, requires we join our own soul to the Good.  Our yearning to author the Good out of ourselves is how we participate in the Baptism of being truly born again, and how we participate in the sacrament of the Second Eucharist.  Christ also participates by giving to us, out of Himself, this very Good - this Moral Grace.  When having received within ourselves this sacrament of the Second Eucharist, an act that only arises because we seek it and form its actual application, we remain free - we create moral law - we author the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.  Given to us within by Christ as a capacity, we then author its incarnate nature and pass it on to the world of our biographies, - from out of us thence into the outer world (or into the inner world), do we then ourselves author this Good: love engendered free moral grace.

"But how does Christ do this?  Is this Good offered to us in this Second Sacrament as if it was a thing, passed by hand from one to another?

"No.  Christ as holy breath breathes upon the slumbering burning embers of our own good nature, just as we breath upon a tiny fire in order to increase its power.  He sacrifices His Being into this breath, which gives Life to the tiny ember-like fire of our moral heart.  The holy breath becomes within the soul of each human being who asks, seeks and knocks a gift of Living Warmth that enlivens our own free fire of moral will.

"The Narrow Gate opens both ways, making possible thereby the intimate dialog and conversation of moral deeds and thoughts that is woven between the i-AM, the Thou and the Christ (wherever two or more are gathered...), which intimate conversation leads ultimately to the consecration - the character development - of the soul.

"In this way our thinking can now behold the Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul: A macro-cosmic Rite, a Second Ethereal Eucharist, in which we give birth out of ourselves in the most intimate way possible, knowledge of the Good, not as mere thought, but as Life filled moral will, breathed into greater power by the sacrifice of the true ethereal substance of Christ's Being in the form of holy breath. 

"The outer world is but a seeming, and what is brought by the Culture of Media mere pictures of the Stage Setting for the World Temple that is home to our biographies.  When we think away this outer seeming - this logos formed and maya based sense world, and concentrate only on the Idea of the moral grace (Life filled holy breath) we receive and then enact out of the wind warmed fire of individual moral will - as individual law givers, as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets - we create this Meaning of Earth Existence.  Every act of moral grace, given greater Life within in the deepest intimacy of our life of soul, is an ethereal communion with Christ, even though we may only experience it as what to us is a mere thought of what is the Good at some moment of need in the biography.

"Christ gives us this Gift, by Grace, freely out of Love, and with no need that we see Him as its Author.  We hunger inwardly to know what the right thing to do is, and when this hungering is authentic, we receive Christ's Holy Breath.  This does not come so much as a thought-picture of the Good in response to our questing spirit, but rather as the contentless breathing substance of Christ's Being.  We are touched (inspired) by Love, and at this touch we shape that Breath into the thought that we then know. The nature of its application and form in which we incarnate this thought is entirely our own.  We shape the thought completely out of our own freedom - our own moral fire of will, for only we can apply it accurately in the individual circumstances of our lives.

"As the Age of the Consciousness Soul unfolds accompanied by this Second Eucharist, the Social World of human relationships begins to light and warm from within.  For each free act of moral grace rests upon this Gift of Christ's Being to us - an ethereal substance received in the communion within the Temple of the own Soul, freely given in Love whenever we genuinely: ask, seek and knock during our search for the Good.  Our participation in this Rite, this trial by Fire leavened by Holy Breath, leads us to the co-creation of new light and new warmth - the delicate budding and growing point of co-participated moral deeds out of which the New Jerusalem is slowly being born.

"This co-creation is entirely inward, a slowly dawning Sun within the macro Invisible World of Spirit.  Moreover, we do it collectively (as humanity).  While each of us contributes our part, it is our collective conscious celebration of the Second Ethereal Eucharist (creating the Good) that begins the transubstantiation of the collective (presently materialized and fallen) thought-world of humanity into the New Jerusalem.

"Thought is real, and it is as equally real as is matter.  The Original Eucharist transforms the already divinely given now-dying substance of earthly matter into Life-filled Spirit through our ritual invitation of the active Grace of the Divine Mystery; and, our participation in the Second Ethereal Eucharist transforms dead thought into living ethereal Substance, through the mystery of our individual spirit's active and embryonic grace, that becomes united into the collective co-creation of humanity.

"In the Invisible World of Spirit, we co-participate, out of the own moral fire of will, in the Dawn of the New Sun that is to become the New Jerusalem."

Initiation and Self-initiation

Sometimes things surprise us.  We are not always actors, but on occasion are acted upon.

One evening, while on the phone with a friend, I started to get the chills.  We finished talking, but the chills persisted, and lasted about an hour, even though I added clothes and blankets.  Eventually I slept and woke to a small fever (100.3), and the many aches and pains that one usually associations with the flu.

This condition persisted for the whole day.   That evening I went to bed early, tired and still slightly feverish.  My scalp felt funny - it hurt for example, every time I moved my face in any strong expression of feeling. 

The fever broke about 24 hours after it began (around midnight), and I slept on and off, except that during periods of waking up I became more and more aware of painful conditions of my scalp (it was tender to the touch).   In the morning, when I awoke free of the previous days aches and pains I normally associated with a flu, the skin of most of my head hurt when I moved it, and when I looked in the mirror my head, from the neck up, it was everywhere red like a sun burn and tender to the touch.

I assumed the "fever" had burned me and later that day shared this odd fact with a friend who was also an anthroposophical doctor.  She had no explanation, but did say that during an acute illness (such as flu's etc.) when symptoms appear on the skin, this is a good sign because it is easier for the body to heal them, than if the acute illness leaves its traces more inwardly in the organs.

That night, about 24 hours after the original fever had "broken", I again became feverish, with a temperature of 101.1.   As this continued into the next day (a Saturday, when my regular doctor's office was closed), I became concerned and went to the ER.  The doctor there had no explanation for the "burn", but noted it and took all kinds of blood for later testing.  I was given ointment for the skin and a course of antibiotics and told to see my primary care physician on Monday.

This individual had by that time all the results of the various and many blood tests, which showed no causal element for the acute illness symptoms (the fever, and aches and pains).  No "bugs" as it were, or any other oddities in my blood.  He also had no explanation for the skin "burn", having never seen such a condition before.

As the days went forward, the skin healed itself, although pretty much every where it flaked off a very thin outer layer in quite small pieces, almost like dandruff, with the largest pieces being no more that an eighth of an inch square.

My own thinking was a bit strange, and was as follows.  I had not had an acute illness (no bug).  Rather I had had an experience related to what Steiner describes as the impression of certain embryonic organs of clairvoyance, as developed in the astral body, onto the etheric body (see lecture 12, the John Gospel cycle). 

There is more than one kind of possible explanation.  For example, since this is not something I can apparently do myself, someone else (another being) has to carry out the forced (in a way) act of impression.  This presence was fever-like because it was another ego acting in conjunction with my own, of such power that during its entrance and exit from the upper pole (the nerve-sense pole) of my organism its extra warmth (the warmth body being a vehicle through which the Spirit interacts with our spirit) became so intense in its working that it "burned" the outermost layer of skin (a boundary area where the astral and etheric are co-joined).

The reality might well have been that my upper nerve-sense pole had been sun-burned, by the causal presence of the original Sun-Being, in the night, in the darkness of a room, where no physical sun would ever shine.

I did not make a big deal of this interpretation, but in that I thought it, I have kept it in mind as other developments took place.  I later (during Easter Week) came to an alternative interpretation.

Through various conscious activities of my own, which engendered a kind of moral spiritual development, this made possible the activity of aspects of my own will, which normally lies below the level of my conscious action.  That is (as an alternative explanation), a force residing in my own will was released in such a way that it mimicked the acute illness process in order to produce the impression of the astral body (where the moral development had taken place) upon the ethereal body.

The fundamental question is: Is initiation dependent upon the approval of another ego besides my own?  A related question is: Is initiation any longer necessary?  I have for years understood that there was to no longer be any necessity of an intermediary between the individual and the divine (no need for priests, gurus and mullahs any more).  If this is so on a practical level, is initiation even necessary?  Rather is the human being now complete (fully in possession of all his spiritual faculties because he can think and feel and will), such that his real freedom allows him to stand outside any tradition anymore which would make him dependent upon something other than his own self for his present or future development.

After the "sun" burn event, but in between the  two alternative explanations set forth above, there was another phase, or experience, which was even more strange.

For about a week my thinking became (on occasion) more and more morbid in a kind of way.  It was hard not to think ill of myself, and be a bit depressed inwardly.  This mood came in waves, and my inner reflections more and more focused on various failings.  Things I did, that I wished I did not do.  Or, things I did not do, that I wished I would do.

For example, there were appetites I did not control (or at least thought I should, even though when ever I gave into them, I did so very consciously because the represented so much enjoyment.  There were also spiritual practices or exercises I thought I should undertake, but which I had not.  Problems with regard to my health (extra weight, lack of physical exercise, various healing things I could do to help etc.) also came under periods of more and more intense scrutiny.

One late evening, after going to bed, this self-examination of flaws got extremely intense.  I could not sleep, my mind raced, and I got up and had to pace my room.  I loathed myself, and could not abide myself and wanted more than anything to get away from myself.

Now there was here no thought at all of suicide.  I did not want to kill myself, rather I wanted to not be myself.  I hated this weak person who had no discipline, no will to take proper care of his body, and no will to do potential spiritual exercises of various kinds that were thought possible.

This went on for about two hours, and finally I laid back down and in a kind of desperation began to say the Lord's Prayer out loud, at which point this very intense feeling of self-loathing slowly melted away.  I was then able to sleep.

On waking up, I had these thoughts.  What I had experienced was a meeting with what Steiner called the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold - the double.  This meeting took the form of what Steiner describes as Intuition, where the two beings (my ego and this double-being) mutually inter-penetrate.  We become united, and the loathing and self hate which I experienced was how he felt about me.

He hated being joined to me - such a weak and incomplete human being.  Not only that, it was his nature to feel this way.  This made his role in my life possible, precisely because he was of a spiritual hierarchy that could not tolerate, or even really comprehend, human weakness.

As the days following this experienced passed, I began to feel differently about my lacks and errors and weaknesses.  I started forgiving myself for them.  I could no longer, as before, look at myself as the double did (and which I had incorporated into my own thinking all my life, as a valid point of view).  I had been mistaking his judgments for my own (one of the roles he is apparently meant to play in my psychology). 

Now I was free of this inner judgmental force, to a large extent.  I could look objectively at my lacks, and not prosecute myself for having them - for being human and flawed.   This also effected how I thought about others, and was, in a way, a kind of counter-point to work I had been doing as a writer.

All of this was taking place during the Season of Michaelmas, 2009, while I was writing three sort of concluding pieces of work in connection with my "problems" with the anthroposophical movement and society.  These appear on my websites, under these titles:

A Commentary on Scott E. Hicks remarkable essay: Spiritual Beings Dwell in the Ground of Propositions [ http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Hicks'essay.html ]

Sergei O. Prokofieff's Anthroposophy and The Philosophy of Freedom: a (sort of) book review. [ http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Prokofieffbookreview.html ]

and,

Saving Anthroposophy: from the anthroposophical Society and Movement. [ http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Saving.html ]

The writing of these essays, during Michaelmas Season 2009, involved very careful and intense thinking activity, in order to treat the subjects of the essays (which were to an extent the thoughts and ideas of fellow human beings) with the right objectivity and moral sympathy due the personalities, yet at the same time be rigorously scientific (logical and empirical) about the ideal and conceptual content of their thinking.

This striving in my daily work then had a corresponding interweaving with the citizens of the spiritual world, connected to the fever-sun- burning impression experience and the encounter with the true being of the double.  But life has its demands as well, and certain relationship questions of a personal nature also demanded their due, such that  Michaelmas led onward to the Season of Christmas and the Holy Nights of 2009/2010.

It was during the onset of the Christmas Season 2009, when the above essays seemed the last word I had to say to anthroposophists about Anthroposophy , that my video work finally began to blossom.  By mid-January 2010, I had produced 63 videos: 35 on the theme songs of a true white brother, and 28 on the theme: the Second American Revolution.  During the Holy Nights I learned something new as well (over 200 have now been produced, as of the time of this revision of this essay).

In the light of previous inner work during the Holy Nights I approached the situation as if once more deep meditation was required.  At the same time, I continued to remain awake to the presence of Holy Breath as it offered itself in support of certain choices I might make during the regular course of my thinking. 

Since a lot of my thinking was devoted during that time to video production, it soon became apparent that Holy Breath was more available for that outer world work than for inner world work.  As a result, during this period of the Holy Nights, during the day, I was highly productive in the creation of videos - on several days producing as many as five a day.

As this unfolded, my thinking recalled a remark of Steiner's that went something like this: the stars once spoke to man, and now is the time for man to speak back to the stars.  This was now my task.  To use the developed thinking to speak back to the stars, but the stars in this case were now the human beings of the earth and the beings of the heavens.  Out of the human in me I was to tell my stories, in these videos, however clumsy and inarticulate that might be.  For the point was not perfection of art, but the expression of human nature as it contemplates those spiritual  questions we all share.

The Divine Mystery was more interested in what I might choose to say, than it was in my saying what It might choose to convey.   Here is Steiner, from the preface to his dissertation: Truth and Knowledge: The object of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. Thus man's highest activity, his spiritual creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity. Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.

In a way, it would seem, the more responsibility that I took toward properly representing my own thinking (my own spiritual activity), in relationship to but independent of discarnate invisible beings, the more I performed my role in the totality of the creation.

As the season of Christmas passed, and then arrived Lent in preparation for Easter, I undertook a more careful reading of Catherine MacCoun's book: On Becoming an Alchemist.  Previously I had just skimmed it, not feeling deeply drawn to it, but now I decided to engage it more fully.

My girl friend had pointed out to me certain matters that I have written of in my upcoming review of Catherine's work, but she also said that when she finished it, it put forward a kind of surprise that left her disappointed - as if a kind of trick had been played.  Nonetheless, she also gave several copies of this book to friends during Christmas, an action which meant in spite of this disappointment, she still felt others should engage the book.

I have (at the time of writing this) read it carefully about half way through, and also started writing the review.  I wondered what could this surprise at the end be?

During this Easter week, on Facebook, my first wife posted on our family page a video of the creation by certain Tibetan monks of one of their elaborate sand mandalas.  It was filmed in a kind of stop-motion technique from overhead, so we can see the creation process, the eventual result of which is something extraordinarily beautiful and detailed, and then its (as is usual with this art) destruction.

The lesson there seems to be one of impermanence, a Buddhist (Eastern) concept of no small import.  Reminds me of the story of the wise men whose king demanded that they create a phrase that would be true for all time and that was to be written over the doorway to the king's throne room.  What they later had written there, after much thought, was: And this too shall pass.

Having on occasion myself, completely abandoned (destroyed) something I had written and worked upon for several years, and which including whole thought structures (elaborate points of view and understandings as came to exist in my mind), I understood how temporary is anything we create, which I suppose will have to include the Creation itself.

As Easter Week culminates in a Death, and then a Resurrection, I am in the moment of writing this feeling as if all that I have done, in response to what I have been calling biographical necessity, has to be treated as impermanent, whether or not this is an aspect of the ending of Catherine's book which disappointed my girlfriend.  When I finish her book I may know, but on this day I awoke wanting to craft these words on this page, for that was what was living in me to do.  Tomorrow or in the next five minutes, something else will need to be done or want to be done or just be done.  Are there any fixities in existence?  Even my self?

The Tibetan Lama, Choygam Trungpa, with whom Catherine MacCoun had a many year relationship, writes in his book Meditation in Action that there is no "I" and there is no "am", which is a kind of denial of the point of view in which I have been swimming for sometime - the point of view of the Christian cultural West, which sees the human spirit, the I-am, as the point of the Creation.  In fact, to deny my "self" is to me to engage in a kind of cultivated madness.

Recently a novel (The Name of the Wind) brought to my attention four ways of avoiding pain: forgetting, madness, sleep and death.  As I thought on that observation, I recognized that each was a part of a polarity: remembering and forgetting belong together, just as do madness and sanity, sleep and being awake, and life and death.

Is then impermanence a unavoidable condition or a choice?  If it is unavoidable, then we are never to be free, and the resultant nihilism a spiritual horror not to be wished for at all.  Why would Eastern thought contain such a view: there is no I, there is no am?

In the Beginning was the Choice.  And the Choice was towards God, and God was what the Choice was.  The Choice was with God in the beginning.

There is no Tibetan monk to tell us of impermanence without the Choice that brought about the Creation itself.  Without the Choice (the first aspect of the Christ as will be manifested via each of the seven Elohim as that process unfolds in each individual "I"), there is not even any Now.

It seems to me that there needs to be a balance between remembering and forgetting, between madness and sanity, between sleeping and being awake, and between life and death.  This is the living mandala of the I itself - this balance, or striving for balance.  At the core of this, in the present, is the Choice.

There is no Choice without an I to choose.  There is no Creation without a Creator.  There is no impermanence without something that can endlessly change.  Choice is the first power of the Creation, and is also the power that makes for impermanence.  All that the pursuit of ego-lessness (or liberation as sought for in the cultural East) produces is something that imagines it can be all periphery and without a center.  The striving for the state of pure beingness is a spiritual madness, which seeks through the forgetting of the center (the ego) to live into the pure memory of the before - the before the categories of impermanence and permanence.

That one can Choose a permanent state of madness and call it liberation shows how unviable (how outside of life) is wanting to resurrect that past - the time before.  While the Now is the meeting place of two arrows of time, the very fact that part of the Creation can be inside of time, and another part outside, speaks volumes if one has ears to hear.

For those to whom this does not quite seem as obvious as it should, let me offer the following:

My child-like (least ye become again as little children) ambition, since the beginnings of my weird incarnation, has been to be a wizard.  Not unlike in the movies and books - become a real wizard - do magic and stuff, make lightening crash down to blow up buildings, and change people I didn't like into frogs.  Very childish, I know, but the wish to do magic is not childish - it is child-like.

I have clear memories of joey's youth and in fact his pre-incarnation existence.  I remember what it felt like to him to descend into life on the earth, and the way in which he was totally intent on this act.  No reluctance at all, but a very all encompassing passion to enter physical existence - felt as a kind of all over joy.  Nothing could be more wanted or desired.  Part of his joy was the knowledge that he had that he would be able to do something that was a gift to all mankind, for which he felt a great deal of love.

Another memory I have of his is when he was a toddler.  He walked into and through life within a great sphere of warmth and light, accompanied by another Presence holding his hand.  Later, when he had more of a sense of self, each day was magical to him because it contained endless surprises, and a very strange capacity to grant his wishes.   He would have wishes and they would come true.

All the same, what little wisdom has crawled through my head over the years is that a real wizard is of special use to the Cosmos, because not only is the Cosmos actually an act of magic, it is truly truly funny.  God has an amazing sense of humor.  A wizard gets to be part of the joke, but doesn't have to know the joke.   That's the part that comes after "social philosopher" - the "... and occasional fool" part.   The right amount of  foolishness goes a long way.

Part of that foolishness has involved "naming".  At the beginning of this I made a hypothetical, which is partially justified, and certainly egotistic.   I actually don't care if it is existentially true or not.  It makes no difference.   The real effect on my life was in forcing me to learn about myself, because of the temptation inherent in seeing my true self through such a distorted lens as is contained in the illusion that is this name: the future Maitreya Buddha.

So I say to God, okay, let me in on the joke.  I'll play Falstaff to your Kingship.  I'll drink the wine of initiation and enlightenment and self-development and all that insanity.  I'll drink it deep and long and get drunk on it, and even encourage some other people to think I might be someone famous.  I'll even on occasion believe it myself.   Just as long as in the end its a joke.  As long as for all my foolishness in taking the Paths and the Ways seriously, in the end I get to laugh at myself and at you God and at all of us believers.

So there you are.  I found myself waking up inside of one of God's own shaggy dog stories, and said okay, tried my best to play the part but now its time to sit back and enjoy the joke too.   That said, it will not do however, to fail to treat the seriousness of others, with the seriousness they themselves bring to a situation.   While I may enjoy feeling foolish, there is no reason to suggest that other's are foolish as well. 

the School of Life

the lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want

An acquaintance of mine (the infamous Catherine MacCoun) seems to have acquired the idea that I had fallen for a spiritual con job, such that she used me (with a fake name) as an example of this inner problem in the book she wrote, saying:  One day, Hank [me] astonished us all by announcing his candidacy for President of the United States.  He went on to further reveal that he was the incarnation of the next Buddha and that his destiny was to lead the nation into a new spiritual age.  When another member of the group asked bluntly what in Hank's lackluster career had ever qualified him for such a task, Hank replied that the menial jobs where themselves proof of his exalted identity.  In the spiritual world, according to Hank, working on assembly lines is what bodhisattvas do with themselves until their Moment of Destiny arrives.

Given that this is not what I said (it misses about 90 percent - that is most of the context, and gets several facts wrong), I thought I'd here speak of the School of Life and its importance, in more concrete terms.

Most of us can go through life looking at our troubles as the fault of everyone but ourselves, or as cruel acts of fate, sometimes tempered with remarkable gifts of grace.

It is possible, however, to reflect on our daily existence as a remarkable form of education, much more radical and complete than anything we might get from a book or through intercourse with a spiritual being.  The most relevant fact concerns our personal attitude toward our daily life.  My own experience is that the 23rd Psalm is an excellent poetic expression of how rich life is, should we be willing to accept its treasures.  I made a number of hints at this in the text above, and here I want to speak more intimately of some of these life-teachings.

the thread of attention

Just before the change from joey to joel described above, joey found himself in an unusual situation.  He was out of a job, his then wife had work for which she was quite highly paid, and there was a new baby in the home (our third child).  With the agreement of his wife, joey then became what was being called at that time a househusband.  It was while being a househusband that joey set this next matter in motion, although as I followed up on his efforts in this regard I was able to add other factors.

He began to specifically wonder what childhood was really about, since the care of a growing infant was now his main charge.  After a little thought, and given his nature and disposition, it was not surprising that he came to the idea that the child itself knew more about childhood then he did, and that he might profit by letting the new daughter teach him, rather than books or his parents or whoever felt they were experts in the matter.

So the child taught and the parent followed.  Now this is not to say that anything the child wanted to do was allowed, for the whole thing was more carefully thought about than that.  Joey, as mentioned, was able out of his own gifts to understand other human beings through his empathic capacities.  So you could say that as our daughter matured, a kind of subtle clairvoyant-like dialog arose between the incarnating spirit of the child and he and I.  Matters that needed to be understood arose in intuitive thought, and were followed, unless some other question required their modification.

To make this concrete I'll tell a couple of stories - one through joey's memories and the other through my own.

This child started to crawl and then toddle, and it was joey's concern of course that such experience, whether inside or outside, be done safely.  Prior, in the child raising departments, infants in this family had been mostly confined to a "play pen", so now we have the question of what we are going to if the child is to teach. 

In the apartment building where this took place, we lived on the second floor, from which a set of concrete steps extended downward from the shared outside balcony to the street level below.  Joey took to taking the child outside, letting her explore, well all the while remaining quite close (within easy arms reach).  At a certain point in time, she began to take an interest in these stairs, which were basically free standing (an infant could fall through the back).  When she decided she wanted to climb these stairs, joey's original instinct would have been to say: No!. 

Instead, he sat beside her, moving up with her, ready at any instant to reach out and protect her, should she appear to be in any real danger.  This practice, I followed for the next couple of years (thinking of course at the time that I was he).

By the time she was about 4 years of age, we had developed what I had to call: the thread of attention.  I was aware that she was aware that I held her in my consciousness, even if I did not directly see her physically with my eye.  For example, we might go walking together in Berkeley California, where we lived.  If it was a slow contemplative walk, she would wander, and I would stroll.  For a long time she never did more than get near the edge of that thread.  That was her safe zone, so to speak - she would explore within the zone of the thread of attention, but not outside it.

This led to my exploring my memories which went unbroken into joey's childhood.  I discovered there that it was normal for him at those early ages to also perceive that he was perceived.  This is of course a natural gift of the human being, which most lose early on, but which can be redeveloped later (we mostly know it as adults when we can feel someone looking at us from behind).

There came a time when she broke this bond, quite on purpose, disappearing for about an hour one day in the company of another 4 and 1/2 year old, such that I and his mother were quite besides ourselves with worry.  It ended when we saw them walking up the sidewalk in a light rain, hand in hand, having managed to not only escape (become free from) our "attention", but at the same time find a way to lose their clothes.

the I in everything

I was standing on a street corner, waiting for a bus, about three years after the joey- joel change.  I had a sudden deeply penetrating intuition that not only was I an I-am, but that all existence consisted of Beings with consciousness and self-consciousness, including the Sun.   This revelation might be described as a kind of quick replacement of the conceptions, previously held by joey of the materiality of the world, with the sudden realization that all was spirit.  This was a quite powerful experience, and came in such a way that I had no reason to ever later question it.

the increasing of necessity

I spent a lot of time rethinking everything joey had ever thought (although still in the beginning conceiving of it all as a continuation, which in a technical way it was), such that while I was simply re-examining all past thought, this was based on a rapidly growing new set of experiences and a quite different attitude toward life.

I was reading all kinds of books, including collections of Sufi Tales, which included a tale called: the increasing of necessity.  I'll here tell a very short version:  A man sits by a stream and about mid-afternoon a paper wrapped brick sized package floats by.  He lifts it from the stream, opens it and finds within a substance edible and nourishing.   Curious, he moves up stream the next day wondering, and sure enough earlier than the day before another package floats by.   This goes on for several days, until one early morning as he waits by the stream, across from a Castle Tower, he sees a female arm throw one of these packages into the stream.

He crosses the stream and after talking to a servant is ushered in to see the Lady of the Tower.  He tells his story.   She replies that every morning she baths in milk and honey, to which becomes added the sweat and skin from her body acquired on the previous day.   When the liquid is let out through the bathtub drain, a solid mass clings to the sides of the tub, is scraped off by a servant and the wrapped in paper and thrown out the window and into the stream.

He ponders this for a moment and then says to the Lady: "For you the remains of your toilet, for me manna from heaven."

I came to be in a situation where I was not receiving any income, and did not want to get once more on welfare, if that could be avoided.  I was about 4 years into the change.  I decided to see what reality was made of, in a kind of way, and gave notice to my landlord that I would be moving out at the end of the most recently paid up month.  I had some cash, but it was slowly dwindling.

I gave away all of my books (a couple of hundred) except for seven, and did further acts reducing my possessions.  I traded a number of objects for seven woven baskets belonging to the lady that lived above me, and reduced all that I owned (and needed for the care of my daughter) to what could be contained in these seven baskets and a wooden chest I had rescued (it had been, when discovered, in ruin in an outdoor shed) from where I was living at the time of the change (I still have this chest).

I continued to live and wonder what would happen next.  During this period I found in my back yard a large grocery store cart into which I placed all the no longer needed clothes of my daughter.  As I was moving this out to the side yard, where I had already put our mattresses and other no longer needed things with a sign that said "free stuff", two women walked by, one of whom was 8 months pregnant.  They soon walked happily off with the grocery cart full of children's clothes.

About five days before I had to leave (or overstay) where I was living, I had an idea about how to find a place to live for free.  I made a couple of calls and shortly thereafter my daughter and I moved to a place where we could live for free, that even had a phone (the details are unnecessary).  We lived there for some time, and I did not work, but for a while found money on the street, one time a five dollar bill on my way to the nearby grocery store to buy some food with our steadily diminishing funds.

On morning I woke, and was preparing to take my last 45 cents and go buy a loaf of bread to go with the peanut butter and jelly we still had in the larder, when I looked out the window and saw parked against the curb, right in front of our door, a shopping cart full of food.   I opened the front door, and as I started out of the house, a loud noise nearby attracted my attention, which came from a telephone booth where the man on the phone had just slammed open the door.   Oh, I thought, that's his basket of food and turned around and closed the door.

Three minutes later he knocked on the door, and we shared tea, as he explained to me that he had just rescued that food from the dumpster at the nearby grocery store, and was able to give us 5 loaves of bread, five pounds of moldy (but cleanable) cheese, and five heads of lettuce while having a lot left over for others for whom he routinely collected food on his route investigating various grocery store dumpsters.  He also explained to me that in the 23rd psalm (we had a long discussion over tea), anointing one's head with oil was done as follows:

He pulled from his pocket a small tin container labeled "tiger balm".  He took some and rubbed it with his index finger over the area of my "third eye" on my forehead and gave me a blessing.  The naturally bodily heated oil soon sent a small jolt of warmth right into my pineal gland.  Not only did he live this way, he also spoke in verse, much of it in rhyme.

I continued to live this way for some time, although circumstances often changed, but basically I took no job, and found that whatever was my situation, not only did Divine Providence act from the outside stream of life, but also from the inside - as a part of the ordinary stream of thought.   Whatever thought I needed in order to solve a more or less immediate problem would also become present as necessary.

It was while living in these circumstances that the finding of the first Franz Bardon book took place, as I related above, and which included me spending at that time all the money I had in that moment ($7.50).  In the Bardon books he made the comment, as a kind of aside, that one might not want to always live dependent upon Divine Providence.

animal magnetism

Above I noted that my first wife at one point said that I had changed completely (about three years after the joey-joel change), no longer walking, standing, siting or talking in the same way as when she first knew me.  My changes of posture were consciously done, as were my changes of speech.

For example, I discover that I had habits of posture, connected to inhibited feelings, more or less all relating to childhood experiences.  When I discovered my self holding my body in this kind of stiff old way, I would breath in my muscles in such a way that the tension disappeared, and also strive to become awake to the emotional dynamic that brought about the tendency to live in my body in rigid ways.

I thought of myself as living on the earth, and although even living in the City, I could see no reason to not live in a kind of conscious awareness that I might have had if I was a Native American.  I wore loose clothes, no underwear, and moccasin-like shoes, whose only difference was the rubber sole that was needed to not wear out so quick on concrete streets and sidewalks.  I changed my posture as a walker, from joey's kind of hunched over fear of being dominated by others kind of walk, to feeling the earth beneath my feet, and the energy of life as it rose from the earth and entered my body, enabling me to stand upright.

I watched the sky, and learned to read the signs by which I could easily predict the weather 3 days out.  If I had an opportunity, I slept outside on the ground.

I learned at one point to actually look at the world differently.  I would go to parks, especially where my daughter could play with other children, and sit quietly observing.  I started letting my eyes and my attention just go to what attracted it, in terms of sound or motion.  I began to study this aspect of my eyes, and came through self-observation to knowledge that one eye liked to focus on single objects, while the other eye liked to see wholes.  I did a number of similar experiments with my senses, discovering they contained capacities my "civilized" upbringing had failed to develop.

One of the things I became acutely aware of was that both men and women were reacting to me in unusual ways.  Men either admired me, or found reason to be jealous and then problematic.  Women were easy to seduce as I became more and more aware of what might be called the animal mind, or which some speak of as the body language.  Much of this tempted me, and I am not proud of a number of things I did in those years.

To give an example: I had taken a bus to a restaurant-bar near the water of San Francisco Bay.  I was looking to see if I wanted to score something of a sexual experience in that scene.  It was too noisy and after about a half hour of wandering around (and not wanting to get drunk like everyone else) I left to go outside in the fresh air, and sat down on a low wall enclosing some plants.  A man came out of the bar and walked up to me, and asked me if everything was all right.  When I wondered what he meant, he said he thought maybe that someone had picked a fight with me (which was why I went outside) and maybe I might need some help.  I thanked him for his interest, and said nothing had happened, after which he returned to the bar.

play

My sister-in-law lived in New Orleans, and when traveling there to do a psychological group marathon (how I earned my living before doing the increasing of necessity) I spent some time with her and she gave me strings of plastic beads from Mardi Gras.  I had been learning to make seed beads into art (see my book covers and websites), and during this time I started wearing these Mardi Gras beads on my clothes (around the edges of the bottom of my pants, at the ends of sleeves and so forth.  I decorated myself and wore my hair in a long pony tail.  It was very Berkeley, yet not really so much Hippie.

One day I was walking down College Ave. southeast of the Berkeley campus, wearing a open beaded shirt, and beaded shorts and was barefoot.  I was carrying a tape player in my shoulder, playing a tape of the music of  movie The Harder They Come, with this song running: You Can Get It If You Really Want It.  I was full of myself, and a man came up to me to panhandle me, and I gave him all I had at the time, which was only a quarter.

I had no keys, no car, no insurance and few cares.  No one really knew what to do with me.  I had become a kind of spiritual asshole.  I thought I was enlightened, when all I really was was a manifestation of what anthroposophists call the luciferic.  The social-emotional distance between me and others increased and became slowly more and more uncomfortable. 

I was at an acquaintances house, where they were reading aloud to everyone the book Johnathan Livingston Seagull.  They read a passage about someone who became free of all the entanglements of living life, and this seemed at the time to me to be a good thing.

I began to think that what I should do is travel around the world, forgetting family and friends, and just go where the wind of Providence took me, becoming a preacher of this new freedom which I assumed was due to my clever enlightened insights and that I could teach this to others.  We could all become so wonderfully free.

A kind of cusp of decision presented itself.  At this moment in time, I also took LSD, three times in five days.  It was very good acid - very pure window pane (a tiny square about an eighth of an inch on the side).  A friend had given it to me for free.  The third "trip" had me out of my body throughout a whole night, surrounded by voices, who for hours had their own views on what I should do next. 

I have written the above to show how I had radically changed the life joey had once lived after he had given me the gift of his bodies.  There are easily a hundred more such stories I could tell.  I was ready to leave family and give myself over to a kind of dance with life.

Not all of a sudden, but over several months time, I decided that whatever I did with life, it would be wrong to become so "spiritual" that I abandoned family.  Not only that, but I needed to re-enter ordinary life, to once more hold jobs and conform and take on my share of all the burdens of an ordinary human existence.   Whatever spiritual talents there were that I might have, they belonged rooted in life, and in life I would seek their meaning.

a lesson in judge not less ye be judged

It was through my younger brother that I ended up working for the Mitchell Brothers, San Francisco's most popular pornographers.  I ran a tiny little theater of theirs for a time in the Tenderloin district, on the Market Street edge between 6th and 8th Avenue.  We offered three movies for $1.99.

We had a lot of regular clientèle.  Many gay men in suits would come at the lunch hour.  Three Indians would come every week, one a female who always looked beat up.   A man always dressed in a long coat, open metal buckle galoshes,  and a watch cap came every Friday when the movies where changed to new ones.  He also came every day to drop off the morning newspaper.  This was his thing - surviving by getting the end cuts off the press run for free from the newspaper printing plant about four blocks away, and then distributing these in the neighborhood in exchange for things he wanted or needed.  For a free afternoon of porn, he gave us a paper every day.

I took the money every night by cab to the Mitchel Brothers offices on Polk Street, to be put in the safe there, and generally the night manager had to come to the door of his office zipping up his pants from the favors the girls who danced there no doubt had to give to him.  We made around $800 every weekday, and $1200 every Friday and Saturday.  My shifts were three 12 hour days and one 6 hour day, at the end of which I gave the keys over to the other manager.

Joey had been raised in Montana, and while he had not been particularly judgmental, he did normally put folks in all kinds of boxes which often characterized them as immoral and such (such was the thought paradigm into which he was born).  This work situation gave me an opportunity to rid my mind of these habitual boxes, and to learn to see those who came through the doors of this theater without judgment.  As I did this, I naturally became more friendly with the customers, and bit by bit heard some of their stories (in passing, we would idly chat). 

I interacted on occasion with the Mitchel Brothers, and their collection of "sex workers".  I was at this time give by life an opportunity to study in my soul something Jesus had done, which was be friends with the prostitutes and the tax collectors.  Moreover, as an inner act, the actual practice of not judging brought deeper inner awareness, concerning which I was later to write the essay on my website: pragmatic moral psychology.

periods of unemployment

Once I had fallen out of the middle class (no longer a lawyer etc.) I could only get certain kinds of jobs, because any honest rendering of my work history led to questions I really could not answer.  I was, more often than I liked, out of a job, and given that I ultimately had two marriages and a total of five children, these were painful experiences.  I could no longer relate to such times with the freedom I had had when I was dependent upon Divine Providence.

I began after a time to feel blessed by such experiences.  In part this was because my inner life was growing in ways that my contemporaries could not understand.  Less and less could I speak to others of what was going on there.  How do you say: Oh, by the way, God dropped in at work yesterday and asked me didn't I want to do something about the world.

To suffer the pains of ordinary existence was a nice balance to the temptations to think highly of myself.

addiction

During my Berkeley years I became addicted to pot, and loved certain stronger drugs such as acid, although after a time one really couldn't get good drugs of this type on the street anymore.   For example, some friends and I bought what was supposed to be acid, but which turned out to be speed laced with strychnine.  We were all sick, instead of having a nice trip.   You could find out these things because the Haight Ashbury free medical clinic (born in the Summer of Love in SF) routinely had broadcast on local radio a drug report about what was on the street - we just found out after the fact.

I stole drugs from my brother.  I didn't properly take care of my children.  I coped - it wasn't as bad as heroin or cocaine, but it was bad enough.   At the peak (about a 2 year period), I would get paid at my job $50 cash every day, and then stop at my dealers house for a 1/8th of an ounce for $25 on my way home.  Its a puzzle I made the rent.  I did dumpster dive for some of the food we ate.  I had three children at home during most of this two year period.  I'd come home, start something on the stove, get stoned and burn the pan after checking out in front of the TV.

I had my last joint in September of 1987.  I'd quit several times before, but it hadn't taken.  I don't see any reasons for regrets - that is pointless.  It happened, I was responsible.  Through the 12 Steps I got eventually to making amends, which is a very interesting art.  I also learned a lot more, which can be found in my writings.

two kinds of typical jobs and their virtues

I worked often for restaurants and in the mental health field.  Working in a kitchen requires an odd kind of mental skill.  It all works better if you can be friendly, and in really busy place you have to learn to think about two dozen things at the same time, but in any given moment be very focused just on the one that you are doing.  The mind learns a lot of interesting skills in this kind of environment.

One place I worked in Northern California had two cooks in the winter but three in the summer (when the vehicle traffic on Interstate Five was high).  I worked the breakfast shift as a support for the main "egg flipper".  One morning, before the third summer cook was hired, the two of us served 600 meals (mostly breakfasts) in seven hours.  It would take a book to describe how such a thing could be accomplished.  Its kind of like dancing in a very small place, all the while engaged in juggling things that will burn you if not handled correctly.

Mental health work is like working as a cop or in a prison.  Its just not as nasty dangerous, but it is easily not for everyone.  Mentally ill people often tend to get very much in your face, and being not rational most of the time, they require special skills to keep at peace.

One has to be very observant of quite subtle shifts of mood.  Each person really needs an individual response, unique to their situation.  It is hard to work in such a place and think you have bad troubles in your own life - you meet too many folk with problems you know you couldn't endure.  If you don't know how to be very patient and have your own emotions in check, these places will kill you.

Cooking in a fast kitchen requires physical adroitness and mental alertness.   Working in a mental hospital requires emotional adroitness and acute verbal skills.  In both places you have to think fast and make crucial instant judgments.  Both places can be spoiled by having bad and incompetent bosses or co-workers.

For someone such as me, who in their interior life is engaged in all kinds of disciplines most people don't even know you can try, it becomes a very challenging field of activity.  The mental hospital was the most emotionally trying, not so much because of the patients, but because of the frequent impossibility of helping people with such acute care needs.  The system actually worked against itself (see my essay: Healing the Insanity of Psychiatric Medicines and Practices).  There I worked the graveyard shift (what a name!?!), and made my best effect often mostly by prayer and by careful listening.

The prayer was silent, and often created (emanated) an atmosphere that was helpful in at least reducing the intensity of the problems.  The listening was often quite healing in the right circumstances.  However, the system and the supervision would object as if somehow one was giving too much personal attention, forgetting how inhuman such isolated societies (the inside of a mental hospital) can be.

Since a lot of my inner life was involved in trying to understand human social existence and its meaning, these jobs were rich with experiences I could not otherwise obtain.  One really cannot, through the intellect, appreciate what is going on in these places on a spiritual level.  Only through experience, elevated with moral will-engaged thinking, can the meaning of such structures in human life become understood.

my last job

Some years previously, my older brother had worked in this place for a time and found it somewhat immoral as an operation.  I came to the situation needing not only a job, but an environment that challenged me physically.  I still do not get enough exercise, and at least during this job I was forced to move around more.

The place was what we might call light industrial.   Most employees serviced various machines, whose purpose was to create as an end result (via different stages) mass mailings soliciting charitable contributions.  If you periodically get in the mail something that gives you free personal address stickers and related stuff, hoping you'll make a gift in return - that's the kind of thing we created.

A big job might produce in 6 weeks 15  million pieces of mail.  There were many different kinds of machines.  One kind stuffed envelopes, and took about 6 people to service.  In an eight hour shift we might produce 20,000 pieces of mail.   Another kind stuffed boxes with things, and took about 20 people to service.  The machines ran 24/7, the people 40 hrs a week.

Certain machines took less people and we often were asked to stand while servicing them.  In these situations my back would start to knot up in about an hour and by the end of eight hours would all be knots.  I'd go home, sit down in front of the TV, and the first time I'd try to move my legs I'd get horrible charlie-horses in my calves and thighs.

The supervisors were not very educated in being supervisors.  Most of the people I worked with were like the kids I grew up with and went to high school with, but never had a year of college, if they could even mange to graduate from high school.  Now they were adults with wives and ex-husbands and children and illnesses and addictions and money troubles.

The first year was pretty bad, but the second and third years were a bit better, because a supervisor in a certain section took an interest in me, and asked for me to run some of her machines.  These one person could run, and most of the time sit down while running them.

It was the social environment that was particularly educational.  Besides being filled with less educated people (they would make jokes to me about my education, and when I would ask how they knew, they'd say you just talk that way), it was also a place where aspects of the immigrant experience was in full flower.   50% of the workers were recent immigrants from Brazil, and several got caught at some point for having a fake green card.

It helped that I had my person to person skills honed in the mental hospital, because I was able to get along with just about everyone.  In the mental hospital I'd also been skilled at body language (you'd be surprised how important it is how you stand and hold your arms when working with someone mentally troubled), and these skills were useful here as well.  One didn't have to think a lot about them, as talking with body language comes to be a kind of skill that flows naturally after awhile.

Machines often broke down, and if it was a temporary breakdown, we'd just get to sit and chat.  Picture 50 year old uneducated white women, talking over her love life with a lovely Brazilian woman who can't speak much English but is being romanced by a white truck driver.   Or switch the pairing, say between a tall  black Brazilian, and a local white woman - lots of gossip and often some good advice.  The place with rich with biases and love and truths that can't be found in any book anywhere.

For example, the Brazilians were a mix of races: white, black, mayan etc.  All kinds of colors and combinations and variations.   What was interesting was that none of this "color" stuff meant anything to them.  I liked asking them whether they were from the country or the city, and then finding out more about their life there before they came here.  Mostly they were fleeing economic and social deprivations of various sorts, and had fallen hard for the "dream" that is America.

Some people liked to talk politics, and as it was the early parts of the Bush II years, we had a lot of interesting material.  9/ll happened while I was at work, and while we were not allowed to get much more than rumor that first day, it was again very educational to watch how this social environment dealt with the various issues.

Because of my more esoteric interests, this was a wonderful counterpoint to the temptation to too much intellectualism and a very interesting place to practice the thinking skills I had been learning through Rudolf Steiner's books. 

For example, the job where I was able to run the machine alone, had this very odd quality because the movement elements were so repetitive that I could split my attention (quite consciously) away from the "work" and into thinking questions about the social and political that I was contemplating in my writing at home.  I could also indulge in fantasy as well.  I had some time ago began a routine of carrying always with me a pen and a small set of 3 X 5 cards, on which I could write notes when inspiration came calling.  So I was able to do, in this environment, much thinking work related to my social-spiritual questions, and then make a quick two or three word note that could, later at a more mediative moment at home, allow me to return to the same landscape in the idea-world for further development of the thought-themes.

family - the great teachers

Inspired by joey's idea that the child could teach a great deal about what it meant to be a child, this type of question was liberally applied in all aspects of my family life.  While I had my indulgences, drugs, television, sex etc. I was still surrounded with remarkable companions in life, and over time I got better at learning what they had to teach.

For example, by the time I was working with adolescents as part of my mental health work in the mid-1980's, I had raised two of my own children through this period of life.  Most of the other group home counselors were young people, not so far out of their own adolescence.  My children helped me have a lot of insight into very practical questions that I was facing at work.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to not be a stupid over bearing parent, who ended up so insistent on the child behaving according to their biases, that the child (during adolescence) never was able to find themselves.  People who don't get the privilege of raising children miss out on a lot of life lessons.

Basically they taught me that what they needed was to slowly over time become more and more self-determining.  In order to mature in their judgments, both moral and social, they needed practice.  If as a parent I insisted they think like me or do only what I thought was right, I was laming their own natural potential.  In practice this also had to be adapted to the individual - each child was unique.

As a result, our family life was quite different from the families of my children's peers.  What I did was give out a certain degree of autonomy as a kind of rope (recall the thread of attention), and walk beside them so to speak, as they made their own judgments for which they were then responsible.  If they made an error, it was their error.  I gave a kind of gift of trust, and they (in varying degrees) ran with it, fell down sometimes and other times achieved great success.

The rope would be shorter at the beginning of adolescence, and longer around the time they were ready to leave home.

One of my goals was to maintain communication.  I couldn't really provide any council at all if we weren't talking to each other, and we wouldn't talk to each other if I was determined to be the boss of all the details of their lives.  When issues of judgment came up in conversation, I generally did not so much give advice, but asked questions.  I tried to awaken their own minds and their own consciences for meeting the questions that life put to them.  Knowing from my own experience that life was the Great Teacher, I introduced them to their own lives and tried to help them "think" their way into its meanings that were personal to them.

As I wasn't their only parent, and given that their peers were also a big influence, I can't really say I did more than play a small role in their psychological and spiritual development.  The end result is interesting, however.  To some degree they are today my best friends.  We know each other well, although each has their own way of maintaining their own autonomy.

When we are together we have a lot of fun.   Several of them are quite musical, and we sing and make jokes at each other's expense, and while we are not free of "issues" and "complaints", overall there is a lot of love between them.  I can't tell more intimately their stories, for that is their own business, but they do provide an aspect to life that can't be otherwise replaced.

For another example of how I was taught by them to "raise" them, I made certain they learned how to hold a job.  Not by force of my personality, but by sensing opportunities for life to teach this to them, and then providing the right action and the right support at any critical moment that came within my own grasp.  They still made all the crucial choices.

My own descent into being a member of the working poor, meant I could not provide possibilities of college from my own wealth.   Nor did I insist any go to college, although two have earned degrees while working - often full time.  Others have found their way into life, that fits their nature and temperament - they found their niche so to speak - the one that belongs to them and not any idea I've had to which they ever needed to conform.

Besides my children, I have been blessed with many other companions in life, and I'll start to end here by saying a little about joey's two brothers, who I was lucky enough to inherit - they too taught me lot.

The older has a PhD in micro-biology, and over the many years of our shared lives has provided countless hours of wonderful discussion of the significance and limits of natural science.  The younger is an artist, with special interests in music, and who often has a radio show of one kind or another.  Most of my capacity to understand that aspect of human social existence comes from his own love for music, mostly of special kinds, such as Reggae, World-beat, and Native American.

I can't not mention my wifes, and my girl friends, but must limit that discussion for it is too fraught with personal emotions.   Suffice it to say that in 2003 I undertook a long fast (it lasted 45 days) during which one morning on waking up, I experienced all the women in my life as a sequence of symbols of the teachings of the Feminine Mysteries.  Within each lived unique combinations of the various aspects of the Divine Feminine, and subsequent to this experience I spend a lot of thinking time living into what had been given and taught by all these women.  From this thinking was produced the small book: Seven Dates: or erotica* transcending: love sexuality, sensuality and the New Feminine Mysteries of Eros.  *(adults only).

This then is some hints of the School of Life as I was able to experience it, which no doubt was not the usual way most people experience this school.  I gave myself to this School almost from the beginning of the change from joey to joel, and I am as much a creation of that as I am a creation of my Creator and my own ego.

Keep in mind that it became my habit in my early years in Berkeley (and then beyond) to turn every experience into lessons and teachings.  To give one last example:

I have (and joey did as well) always loved television and movies.  Once I began to realize the wisdom latent in these modern forms of art, I could see that while a great deal was silly and just a waste of time, much was capable of being just as culturally rich as great literature, symphonies and classical art.   America was a quite different place than Europe, and this was not without meaning in the design of the Creation.  In my writings will be found many details, in particular the section in my book American Anthroposophy called: Present Day American Culture - four archetypal personalities.

One of the things this approach taught me was to love my experiences, even if they were difficult.  I was not perfect in this, but over time this developing relationship between experience and thinking and the love of the experience brought about certain inner skills and attributes.  Recall if you will the material above about the riddle joey left me, which I had written down more or less as follows seven years after the change and just before meeting Steiner through his books: If the world is at its roots and origin spiritual in nature, what are the implications of this fact for humanity's social and political existence?

It was in my prayers for many years, that whatever my life experience was to give to me, it would be an aid in thinking about this riddle.  21 years was devoted to this thinking (spiritual) activity, where life experience was again and again turned into teaching for understanding this Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul (see the essay of that name for the details of what ultimately was taught to me by Life itself).

It seems I got my wish.  See: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.