and make an evolved synthesis of the previous thoughts ...

Science is predictive, as well as descriptive.  It is an act of synthesis as well as an act of analysis.  We observe.  We note.   We think about what we observe and note, and draw conclusions (create meaning).  We use as a primary tool in this Art (science in its highest sense) our own mind.

About this tool we know very little, because for the most part conventional scientific practices  examine it from the outside, not the inside.  Only by examining mind from the inside we will discover that we have a great deal more flexibility in the use of this tool than we previously thought.

A science of the mind is observational, descriptive, analytic, synthetic, and experimental.  It is also artistic and religious.  In this we mirror the world we already know.  That mind experiences Nature as beautiful ought to suggest to us that the apprehension of this beauty is one of the goals and wonders of science.  The best writing of natural scientists on their art is filled with this wonder.

What tends not to be noticed is how devotional we are to the tasks of science.  The best scientists are as much in love with the subject matter of their studies as is the nun or the monk in love with the Divine.  Not realizing that Nature is the Word Embodied in a Living Equilibrium, natural scientists don’t yet notice the real object of their affections.  Karl Popper wrote in Realism and the Aim of Science, pp. 8, Rowan and Littlefield, 1956: “...I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and to fall in love with it;...”. 

An authentic science of the mind produces two additional kinds of thinking, to the three observed by Owen Barfield (figuration, reflection and theorizing), or perhaps better said: such a science evolves these kinds of thinking, into an organic form and a pure form.  (c.f. my Living Thinking in Action - the essays in that booklet are included here as the last two essays of this book).  We brush instinctively up against this organic thinking, when in worrying the moral dilemma we make a story of it with our moral imagination.  This imaginative story-picture has life in it, in the same way as does a plant or an animal, which is why we can learn to experience this style of conscious thinking as: organic.

We can think in this organic way about anything living, which includes social forms.  A family is a collection of living human beings, which has its own story, and as such it can’t be anything but living, because all the parts are living.  So also with a community, such as a local church.

Pure thinking we brush up against, when the moral imagination picture-story morphs into the moral intuition-knowing of the right action.  The crux or point or meaning of the moral dilemma emerges in the insight and recognition of what the right action is.  Steiner described those who learn to do this in full consciousness: knowing doers.  He also said that human cognition here plays a completely creative role.  The individual moral pure-thought did not before that time exist.  We create it into existence in order to respond out of our deepest essence to each particular moral dilemma of our life.

The same with the organically produced thought - it is creative (remember Spirit is distributed).  In the section on Proof we will get into the new sciences fostered by Steiner’s work, such as Goethean Science, Anthroposophical Medicine, Bio-dynamic Agriculture and so forth, and find there the creative contributions of this organic style of thinking.

This organic thinking and pure thinking can be applied to all questions of the meaning and significance of human existence.  This we have been doing in this book, with the result that I described for the reader the basic facts of our existence as shared in all our biographies.  Recall: science is observational and descriptive as part of its work.

All possess self-consciousness (spirit) and the field of consciousness in which experience resides (the soul).  We are born and die, and during our earth existence we are raised into a family, community, language and cultural heritage all of which contributes to our nature.  We acquire a very rich thought content, most of which appears as figuration, but a great deal of which appears before us when we reflect upon and when we theorize about our own existence.  The totality of our thought content is unique to us.  Parts we share, but the totality is ours.

In fact, we insist this be so - we don’t want to be told what to think, for that is, to our way of seeing our own existence, the most private territory of all.  Yet, thought is, as we just noted, so intimately present that we swim in the sea of it often without noticing it at all.

Beneath and woven into thought are our feelings.  These too we swim in, for the most part not able to distinguish our selves (our self-conscious spirit) from the feelings.  Yet, in language we reveal that we do, on some instinctive level, know that we are not our feelings.  Our I experiences (has consciousness of) feelings, but is not these feelings.  We say: “you made me feel angry!”

We also say: “you made me angry!”  Leaving out the word “feel”, we skip over the fact that such an expression, in the first instance, makes no sense unless feeling is experienced to the I as an object in consciousness.  The second statement sees the I and the object as identical, and the first one as not identical.  The differences in these statements reveals our confusion, on the one hand, yet on the other our clear perception on occasion that we are not our feelings - that the I remains a subject, and the feelings an object in the field of consciousness - the soul.

The word “feel” means in this sense to experience anger.  In paying attention to these matters we begin to find clear distinctions between the self-consciousness (that which experiences) and the consciousness (the field of the content of the experience which is experienced).  For some people the feelings are hard to connect to, so the psycho-therapist asks us to “own” our feelings.  But “own” here means not so much to identify with, but rather to be responsible for - two very different kinds of inward actions.  They are our feelings, not someone else’s.

The reader is invited to make their own further observations as seems warranted.

Feeling as also related to meaning.  Recall above the sentimental value of the cup - its subjective meaning, as distinct from its sense-observed existence.  In the complexities of adult life, and in our associations via communities of shared meaning/feeling concerning political, religious, scientific and artistic values and situations, we act (will) in the world creating friction due to our differences.  The Creator of the what-is produces, through our developing individuality, not peace but a sword, at this stage (Age) of our shared incarnations (biographies).

This is the Baptism by Fire predicted by John the Baptist 2000 years ago.  This Baptism by Fire causes pain in the life of experience of the one that experiences.  This makes it possible for this I - this self-consciousness - to wake up to itself more deeply.   Were life painless, and without suffering, we would sleep and dream like a plant.  That-which-experiences awakes in the pain of existence (and in its pleasures as well).

Part of these experiences, occurring as aspects of the Now - of the event, concerns the other - the Thou.  The Thou is not I.  The Thou has its own thoughts and feelings and impulses of will.  Anyone married or raising children knows intimately the truth of this, for the Thou insists upon its complete independence from the thinking and feeling and willing of ourselves.

Yet, the pain of experience places our I, via such friction and the conflict arising from these differences, into moral questions regarding how we are to act in relationship to the Thou.  We have an impulse to do the right thing with respect to this Thou.  The life of our biographies submerges us into a sea of moral experiences, trials and challenges.  At the same time, we have to choose - the nature of the choices are not made for us, although having to choose is often a necessity.

Some readers here may think then of folks, like hard criminals in our prisons and also wandering our streets, as too morally defective to face moral dilemmas.  Yet, this is not so.  Life in a prison, or on the dark streets of our cities, is just another unique set of circumstances of life into which a particular and unique individual is placed in order to have those moral trials that belong to them and their personal karma.  No one is untouched by the Trials of Fire in the Biography, although some will, as we might expect, tend to always choose the Self over the Thou during the moral elements of these trials.  But this capacity for the choosing of the interests of the Self over the interests of the Thou is in our freedom, as a gift from the Creator of the what-is.  Just keep in mind that those in high finance and positions of social leadership are just as much facing these trials as those on the street corners and on death row.

We are tempted to judge others during these trials.  Assuming that they should think like we do, we overlook the obvious facts revealing they do not.   Assuming we know what the right thing to do is, we look at their actions, and knowing that we would not act as they do, judge them as lacking something.  What we overlook is something we don’t have to continue to overlook.

One of our possible actions is to learn to walk in the other’s shoes.  We use the imaginative picture-story, naturally organic and living, reflective and theorizing thinking capacity to create less superficial and reactive mental pictures of what the Thou is about.  We notice our judging, and choose no longer to do it.

Christ promises (again a predictive and fully scientific gesture - as well as a moral art) that: Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged; you will be sentenced to the same sentence that you sentence others, and by whatever standard you measure you will be measured. Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye? And how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me get that splinter out of your eye,’ with that log there in your own eye? You fake, first get the log out of your own eye, and then you can see about getting the splinter out of your brother’s eye!  Mathew 5: 3-5. [Emphasis added]

When we get the judging out of the way, our thinking can then see more deeply the nature of the Thou, and from that deeper seeing become actually able to help them with their mote (their seeming flaw, which our egocentric impulse has inflated all out of proportion).  But this sacrifice of our beam - our judgment - is a moral art.   It’s necessity arises because of the Fire in the Biography that itself arises because of the friction and conflict between our I and the Thou.  Without the Fire, we would sleep and dream and not wake up to the original and unique nature of the Thou.  Nor would we, without the Fire, wake up to our own creative capacity to act morally.

Inwardly asleep their meaning to us would be flat and impersonal - unreal.  And we ourselves, in the context of failing to meet them, are also less real to them and to ourselves.  A seeming real element comes from the pain and the pleasure of the encounter in the event with the other (as recognized to some degree by the French post-modernists).  However, the authentically real element only appears in the choice leading to the action - it is the will in the act that is the most real.

To find the moral act, as noted above, requires of our thinking a sequence of actions that, while outlined in Steiner’s The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, are instinctive in many people: moral imagination, moral intuition and moral technique.  The more consciously we do these inner acts, the better will become our skill, craft and art as a moral actor on the Stage and within the Scenery of the World.

The Fire of the Baptism creates the necessity for inner activity, within which the Baptism by Holy Breath appears as a support for our choices.  We choose and Christ the Creator is with us.  Christ is even with us when we fail to do what we know to be the right thing.  In the case where we find the courage to act morally, knowing the consequences for our own existence, Christ is there as Holy Breath blowing His Life on the burning embers of our own will-on-fire.  He adds His Life to our experience.

He is also present when we fail, for we will need to be comforted.  In this instance Holy Breath is experienced as inner forgiveness.  This is subtle, but important to notice.  We see the moral dilemma, and fail.  But we must go on with life.  At the point we “let go” our focus on the failure, we then move on to the rest of life, and to the next opportunity to act in the world according to our sense of what is right.  At this moment of letting go, Christ’s Life-Breath appears there as a comforting sense of inner peace.

Again it is a yoga of breathing in the thinking.  The letting go of the idea of moral failure is an outbreathing.  The self-conscious spirit, or I, leaves behind the thought of failure, and goes on to new thoughts of the next challenge.  Christ - the Creator of the what-is - is with us, however we need to be.

A point to be added here, so as to enrich our understanding of the Creation, is how it is that we meet certain specific Thou’s in the course of the Biography.  In the ideas of fate and destiny and karma we have an abstract and hardly real apprehension of these dynamics.  Only when we let our thinking reflection and theorizing directly come to rest on the mystery of who our companions in life are, will we begin to appreciate the Art expressed here by the Creator, who Rudolf Steiner at various points described as the Lord of Karma, and who I prefer to describe as the Artist of Karma (recall the name of this book: The Art of God).

Our meetings are not accidents, although it is entirely possible to never realize this, because we never let ourselves think properly on the related experiences.  Further, without these challenges, the deeper moral life for the human being is never born.  Baptism concerns Birth.  Our companions in life are there for a purpose.  No meeting is inconsequential, and many relationships contain a hidden power to heal and inspire.

Steiner considered questions of karma to be a special work for him to research, and actually produced many books and lectures on this subject, especially the eight volume Karmic Relationships lectures.

At the same time, such ideas as these are not widely present in the world.  Recall how we have observed that each self-consciousness has its own collection of ideas.  Many of these they need so as to be part of the family, community and culture in which their biography is to unfold.  Other ideas belong to their particular matrix of choices, which they need to make in order for their biography to take the course that lies potential in it.

While we tend to swim in a sea of ideas that are shared, a fact of objective inner observation reveals that we individualize all our thoughts.  We all may have an idea of what makes a family function in a healthy way, for example, and many will serve those ideas in order to make their particular family successful.  At the same time, a careful conversation with different family members would reveal that each individual’s version of the same basic idea is subtly nuanced and different.

For example, one family member will hold  that, while family gatherings are valuable and important, as are family traditions, just how those gatherings and traditions are conceived of in particular will be different.  Observations of families reveals the common arguments over these matters, as well as patterns of dominance exercised by various family members over others.

The shared family religious idea matrix, to continue the example, may not contain the idea that the biographical destiny of the individuals in the family is special to each member.  People often will feel their family relationships as a weight, rather than a gift.  The truth of the special nature of our relationships does not have to be consciously known in order for it to be operationally true.

At the same time, to raise this fact into our personal consciousness will enrich our experience of these relationships.  We can actually have a deep and profound inner sense of the shift of this thinking paradigm, when we consciously choose to see as no longer intrusive the Aunt who always seems to mind our business.  To see her as someone who is loving us as deeply as best she can, and from whose existence our biography is richer, can let us to a degree recognize that we might well want to be very grateful.  But that shift, from antipathetic reactiveness to a more authentic appreciation, requires our conscious intention and choice.

There is profound mystery in all these relationships, in positive and negative ways, which our artists of film dramas often see, ... for example, the film: Rachel Getting Married.

a slight shift of emphasis

From space, with telescopic and time-spanning inner eyes, we can see with our imaginations all manner of human beings, millennia ago crawling all over an area of Egypt, moving great stones and creating three pyramids.  We don’t have to see them exactly to know that they were there and what they did, for we see what they left behind.

The same with New York City.   Millions of lives spent just in constructing the buildings and the slowly ever increasing in height countless towers over the centuries.  Not to mention all that have come and lived and worked there.  Our imagination can view them as if they were ant-like human-looking creatures: crawling, moving, jumping, dying, crying, loving, murdering, screwing, screaming, drinking, drugging, and even praying.

We can, with our imagination, see the physical forms rising and falling, the steel and iron skeletons of buildings going up and coming down.  Taxi’s everywhere, most yellow, moving, flowing, stopping.  Limousines too.  Women in party dresses, men in tuxes.  Hooded scary skin-heads, or black men, with knives and guns, robbing, raping.   Bald white men running porno theaters using 15 year old run-aways from North Dakota as endless fodder.  Men in suits, watching computer screens, stealing money from widows’ bank accounts, all in legal ways.  Russian and east European women, used as sex slaves by their own countrymen.  Nuns, no longer in habits, serving soup to the homeless.

Television and movies tell these and a million other stories every day of the year.

There is something that we don’t see with our senses, but only with our imaginations.  We don’t see terror, or anxiety, or fear, or joy, or happiness, or psychosis, or pride, or careful thought or love - at least in the form it appears within the field of content of consciousness (the soul) created there intentionally or instinctively via the activity of the self-consciousness (spirit).  A good drama can evoke in us at least some sympathy that such is felt by the actors, and we know in ourselves at least some of this.

Waiting outside the office for a job interview, or perhaps to be fired.  Drinking in a bar, trying to cover up the pain of a relationship gone south.   Picking up a child and playing with them in a public park.  Being afraid to walk down certain streets - a different kind of fear if the neighborhood is black and we are white than perhaps if the neighborhood is white and we are black.  Driving while black.   Walking in Tucson, at night, if brown.   Riding a bus or a subway filled with strangers, anyone of which might go postal in a moment.  Falling asleep over the books of our night college courses, then jumping up late having forgotten to set the alarm, skipping the shower and grabbing a coffee on the corner as we rush out to work.

The Tibetan Lama Choygam Trungpa said that spiritual enlightenment could come quicker in the West because of the pace of change, although we needed to spend all day every Saturday in sitting meditation, learning to slow down the rushing mind as a balance to the social speed.  The Hopi Indians of the American Southwest have a word in their language: Koyaanisqatsi, or life out of balance.  Their elders say: we are the people we have been waiting for.  Gandhi said: be the change you want to see in the world.

So much spiritual advice, so little time.

The Creator Loves us.  The folk wisdom is you don’t get more on your plate then you can handle.  If we are going to have an Idea and Theory of God that is explanatory of the rush of life in our boiling crowded cities, in a systematic and scientific fashion, where oh where do we start?

We could start anywhere - let us here start with pace and speed.  Two kinds of speed: the pace of life itself, and the rush of thought in the mind.

Rather than deny the speed and pace of life and thought, we could ask: Does even that serve a purpose in our spiritual evolutionary development?

One effect is that we often don’t like the rushing pace of life.  A few people thrive, but most want to escape.  We dream of simpler times, and there is a kind of cultural movement that pursues simplicity for its own sake (there are even magazines).   Many of us will remember from childhood: Running too fast and falling down and hurting our face.  This happens to us as adults, but when we fall in our rushing life the consequences are often far more disastrous than a bloody nose.  Yet, we often don’t see a way out of the traps - there seems to be a driver of necessity - a lot of different drivers in fact.

The crack whore has to get the next fix.   The stock salesman has to get the next sale.  Our minds reach out to our imagined future and flee the present.  The whole field of advertising is based on well understood psychological facts connect to our desires and our anxieties.  The new car is sexy and powerful, the proscription medicine will take away our pain, the beer will make us happy, the vaginal deodorant will make that most private place smell just right in case the man we pick up in the bar decides to take us home.

Our soul life - our psychology - is prey for the engine of commerce.  Of all our fears in the West, the biggest one seems to concern death.  When we die, we fear we won’t have eaten enough life, in part because we believe we only go around once.  Some scientists think we want to survive above all else, although other scientists pursue (hunger for knowledge of) what they call: the altruism gene.  Why does the soldier fall on the grenade?  Why does the father die of a early heart attack, taking on the stress of work to support his family?  Why does the nun live in poverty in order to serve the poor?

The really disquieting thing is, if we think about, that in any individual biography the mix and total effect of all the pulsating demands of life is unique.  Many we share, but always there is our individual total relationship to all the demands of existence, both external and internal.

This particular crack whore has a brother, who she tries try to take care of sometimes.  That stock salesman has a gay lover, who he deeply cares about, and for whom he works as hard as he can in order for their shared life to have their material wants satisfied.   This primary school teacher fears her charges, but ignores that anxiety because she is the sole care giver of her aging mother.  That military general loves himself, and would commit any moral crime in order to advance and gain more power, to which he is addicted.  This politician lies routinely because she likes the limelight, and has discovered that the public can be fooled and that the lobbyist pays well now, and will pay even better later.  That professor makes his teaching assistants do all the work, seduces those he can, and steals other’s ideas in order to satisfy the demands of publish or perish.

On any given day, all the above can be within ten feet of each other (one on a bus, one on a street corner, two in cabs, one in a limo, and the last falling through the air having jumped out of their office in order to commit suicide).  In spite of being in the same space and time, their biographies are separate, and any intersection of one with another will only happen if there is to be a destiny meeting of mutual necessity.  See the films Crash, 23 Grams and Magnolia for relevant artistic observations of this aspect of existence.

The suiciding stock seller could crash onto the roof of the limo, giving the general riding therein a heart attack.  The limo then runs into one of the cabs which is in front of it, driving that vehicle, with the politician in it onto the sidewalk breaking the leg of the crack whore.  The other cab, with the professor in it, swerves into the bus, knocking down the school teacher who was standing inside and giving her a concussion.  The politician, interviewed later at the scene by the news, makes a gaff which will be forgotten in a week.  The professor misses a date with one of his teaching assistants, who in an emotional outburst calls his wife, angrily telling her of the affair.

A rushing crowded city is full of actors, sharing the Stage, but not necessarily being in the same Play.  When the Towers fell, the Stage changed its scenery radically, and many destiny meetings were had.  Pick up a newspaper, and you can read of all kinds of karma.  Same with the Evening News.  We do share major aspects of the Stage, but it is only in our present day mental conceptions that we believe we live in the same time and space.  The biography individualizes time and space as well.  Keep in mind that the Divine Mystery operates outside of time and space, in Eternity, in support of these processes in the biography.

Is the Zen monk in Japan the true contemporary of the murderer on death row in Texas, simply because both can think the current year is 2012?   While Richard Dawkins can write a book: The God Delusion, can he actually claim there is no God at all?  Or, that every other person in the whole wide world should think like him?  That book is in Dawkins’ biography and to a degree in its readers minds.  It has no effect on the Zen monk or the man on death row, neither of whom will read it, or encounter its ideas, and/or need its ideas in order to successfully live their lives.

The present numbering of years, and the convention of time zones, all comes in order to mostly facilitate the needs of commerce.  The ancient Chinese culture counts years in such ways that it is currently 4709, 4708 or 4648, according to which system is used.   The Islamic cultural year is 1432 (approximately).  The Mayans, with their famous so-called prediction about the year 2012, counted days, not years, and in December of 2012 we find just the last day of the end of a great cycle of days numbering in the hundreds of thousands, followed by first day of the beginning of another great cycle.

Cultural time is not commercial time.

time, space and spiritual causality

Rudolf Steiner began many trains of thought, whether in lectures or in books, by pointing out the simple fact of our regular and rhythmic waking and sleeping throughout the course of our lives.  In continuing to fill out our Idea and Theory of God, what has Steiner’s research into the spiritual discovered for our understanding that is relevant here?

Among his many discussions of the process of sleep, he describes it as involving a separation of the ego and astral body from the ethereal and physical bodies.  One way to notice this ourselves is to pay attention to those moments, when near sleep, we have a small dream, perhaps involving movement, and then there is a physical jerk and we are back fully lying in bed in our body.

For a moment we were separating, but not yet quite ready to become completely unconscious, so we slipped back (our spirit - ego, and soul - astral) in, and this woke us up.  Notice that the quick “dream” occurred in time before the jerk, and that its content often involved movement.  Our awareness (the dream) comes from the ego, coupled with the movement from the astral body, which pre-perceives the jerk inside the dream.  The ego is inside the astral body, and interprets the movement of the astral body back toward the physical body via the image of the movement seen in the dream.  For example, I’ve had such kinds of quick dreams where I am stepping down some stairs or off a curb, and I stumble, following which I am back in my body noticing a jerk in my leg or a pain in my foot.

We apparently leave the body via the head, and return to the body via the lower limbs, principally the feet.  Of course, for the skeptic reading this they will have all the usual purely material and physical “explanations”, ... which is fine.  For our purposes we are here only looking at the rhythm of sleep and waking and trying to understand it from the point of view of the Creation - the point of view of the Art of God.

An important aspect of sleep is unconsciousness.  Above I noted that Steiner considered consciousness to be a kind of death force, wearing out the body when it is occupied by the ego and astral body (the train wearing out the rails - the astral body is where the seven “force” centers or chakras reside).  We sleep (go unconscious, experience what some call the “little death”) in order for higher beings to enter into the whole complex (all four bodies) including the slumbering ethereal and physical bodies and provide renewed life forces for repairing the worn out rails of the physical body and providing fresh impulses of will for the astral body, so that the next day we can wake into our biography and continue our freely chosen tasks.

Keep in mind that we are spiritual children, undergoing an awakening into spiritual maturity, and that we also are loved.  We know sleep and rest heals.  This healing is not entirely physical in nature and for the practitioners of the Arts of Healing (medicine, psychiatry, psychology etc.) this fact is well known, although its true mysteries are not yet appreciated.  Some beginning details of Steiner’s research here can be found for free on-line by looking up this lecture: The Work of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body.

Most important is our freedom, which is why when we awake from sleep, our ego consciousness is completely continuous with what happen during the previous waking period.  We awake to our self, and know this to be our self, and also know what in this new day is to be faced, in terms of pains and joys and challenges and tasks.  A very good film, on the Day part of this, is the movie Groundhog Day, where in a kind of fable the potential of the ego to transform over time is revealed.  Each day we wake to our self, and what our self is to become that day is up to us, although each of us faces entirely unique circumstances.  An interesting film on the Night part of this is: Ink.  Neither is perfect, but both represent the intuitions of our artists of the deeper aspects of our common existence.

While we seem to live in the same year (by our own conventions), a careful look at the various kinds of biographies all over the world reveals that there are far more differences than similarities.   For example, some people have commented that aspects of the Islamic world seem barbaric, but this is a valuation that assumes that what time is to mean for us, is what time is to mean for all.

Slavery still exists in wide parts of the world.  Women are treated in many places is ways no longer tolerated in the apparently more modern world.  Feeling superior, many Westerners look down upon others, who in fact are simply living in what was once, to these same Westerners, their own Past.  The colonists of the Americas held slaves, abused their indentured servants, and committed genocide of the Native populations in their Past.  Who are we to feel superior to those parts of the world cultures that have not yet had the opportunity to grow into their own Future, in the same painful ways we did (our Revolutionary and Civil Wars)?

Because we all live in what we call the same year (e.g. 2012), that has no relationship with the developmental stage of progress of the culture in which any biography unfolds.  It is only a unjustifiable bias which makes Westerners think their own shit doesn’t stink.

Can we say that our example, of taking advantage of their cultural weaknesses (as was done in the middle-East by the French and the English during the 19th Century in order to steal the oil and other natural resources of those regions), is the best way to treat that which has yet to mature into it own style of Future?  What a harsh experience for these latent-in-time cultures, to have that which could be a big and helpful loving older brother turn out to be a liar and thief and a bully.  For details read: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins

Some years ago, during the early years of the Bush II war in Iraq, at a time when the fake reason for the war was being changed from seeking weapons of mass destruction to the providing from the outside the basics of democracy, I listened and watched on C-Span II a wise elder scholar explain that democracy was impossible for Islamic peoples for the simple reason that not having gone through what the Western world called the Enlightenment and similar cultural history, there simply were no words in the Islamic languages for the underlying concepts that are necessary precursors to making a democracy.  Their cultures simply lacked the foundational ideas regarding human nature, the urge for freedom, the relationship of the State to its citizens and so forth.  In essence, making these cultures into functional democracies in the style we imagine is ours, was not possible.

It is important then, in order to appreciate The Art of God, to recognize that the world, while seemingly of the same time due to how we name the Year, is not functionally the same time at all.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the non-Western regions of the world that can be helped by judging their Ways as wanting something.  The wrong is with us in the judging, which disables us from seeing correctly what to do.  “You hypocrite, get the beam out of your own eye first, if you want to help your brother with the mote in his.”

Now to wrap this aspect up, so to speak, let us revisit the problem of causality and chance and randomness, and especially the relationship of all this to human freedom.   Recall our considerations of MacCoun’s ideas of How and Why - How being related to the Past as it influences the Present, and Why being related to the Future, as it influences the Present.

So you get up in the morning, and spill coffee on your new dress.  Maybe some necessary (or unnecessary) yelling results.   The partner or the children over-react to our yelling, and an argument ensues.  We soon storm out of the house, proceed to our car and within a couple of blocks on our way to work run a stop sign, and cause an “accident”, in part because our ego self-consciousness is not paying proper attention to the driving, and is more involved in the after effects of the argument.

Further on the “accident” has big after-effects of its own.  We are late for work, and this is the last straw and we loose our job.  Our insurance had lapsed because of economic woes, and now we are not only being sued (for which we have no insurance company to protect us), but the State considers lack of insurance a just cause for a big fine, and a demand that we go to a driving school.

Since we have only been in recovery from our alcoholism for six months, we are soon drinking again.  The partner takes the children and leaves, and we spiral down once more into the depths and cycles of despair.

Did all of this arise because of the spilled coffee?  What is cause and what is effect?  Again, see the movies Groundhog Day, Ink, Crash, and Magnolia for some interesting observations by our artists on these themes.

In reality, that question itself is a root of the problem of our failure to yet understand.  This question of the causal relationship between the spilled coffee and subsequent events is our way of still immature thinking, which includes ideas of accident, cause and effect, randomness and chance, that fails to grasp the reality.

The biography is Art.  It is Art which is continuous and ongoing - ever creative.  Each biography is also fundamentally elastic - that is it is flexible and can stretch or contract as needs be.  It adjusts constantly, and part of the adjustment comes in the Night Work.  At the same time, the bigger part of the adjustment comes from choices for which we are responsible, and which we make freely during the day.

We didn’t have to yell after the coffee was spilled.  Our partners and children don’t have to over-react.  We don’t have to rush out of the house, egotistically self-focused on our own feelings, such that we don’t pay attention when we drive.   The boss doesn’t have to fire us.  The State doesn’t have to fine us, and the injured party in the “accident” doesn’t have to sue us.  Nor do we have to start drinking again.

From an ego-centric point of view, we can decide to see that all this happened to us, and was unjust or not fair or any other mental category by which we want to claim it shouldn’t have happened.  We can be a victim, and many take such a course in response to the “events” of life.  But that too is a choice.

Rudolf Steiner, in his A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception, used the term: the necessary given.  Events do happen to us, from the stand point of our expectations.  We did not anticipate them, nor did we plan for them, although part of the idea of karma is that to some degree, when with God in Eternity and outside of space and time, we agreed to meet a number of them in life. [There is always the possibility of fresh evil - trains wearing out rails - choices by ourselves or others, which then add new karma to the older karma the biography is already trying to resolve - remember the biography is elastic - it expands and contracts according to our choices and the choices of others.]

Consider another scenario ...

We are young, going to a dance.   There is a girl we really really like, and we ask her to dance.  It is a slow dance and our bodies lean into each other.  Heat rises in our feelings and there are also physical changes.  We get an erection, and she feels this, but neither of us says anything.  It is all too too sweet and enjoyable and painful and crazy all at the same time.  Later we walk her home, and at her door we kiss.  We want this kiss to last forever.

Part of the necessary given of the biography are matters that draw us toward them according to our feelings of liking and sympathy.  Other’s repel us, as we don’t like them.  Life is in fact so rich in each biography that the whole, when seen as whole, has to be viewed as staggering in the beauty of its richness and complexity.

We, today, in the West in particular, hide our elders in homes.  They are too much trouble in relationship to the other “important” and necessary matters of our lives.   Our form of medicine has discovered how to keep the physical body alive, but not how to heal the spirit and soul of the degenerative terrors that come mostly from our ignorance.  An individual in their elder years is a treasure house of wisdom and experience, and today we shut them up in places where they have no possibility of sharing this hard-earned wealth.

This we can know: Our choices are there all the time.  We may deny them, we may play the victim, we may make all manner of excuses, but choice is the Present Day main gift of the Art of God.  At this moment in the evolution of consciousness we can justly say: In the Beginning was the Choice ...

Intellectually we may flirt with various kinds of deterministic ideas concerning our biographies.   Some of these ideas will involve the fixation on the material aspects of existence, in the sense that we are hard-wired or otherwise biologically and chemically forced to behave in certain ways.  We can also feel conceptually bound and choice-less because of the rules of behavior provided by our religion.  Yet, if we are self honest from moment to moment we know we make choices all the time.  Our freedom is intact in spite of all kinds of reasons for assuming that the necessary given includes biological and moral determinisms.  In fact our rebellion against these determinisms is also very visible and apparent.

From the outside we may seem foolish or a Jackass (see the movies), but inwardly we would have to confess we made the relevant choices, well aware of the possibility of unintended consequences.  The moment of choice is there, always.  We may just want to never admit we faced such a choice, and knew the probable or possible consequences, and acted anyway.   Only fools fall in love.

Back to the cityscape, and the rush of existence and multiple yet parallel biographies: Seen from the outside, it all seems chaotic and often meaningless.   Seen from the inside of each individual biography, which is always the object of the Creator’s Love, that biography is filled with personal meaning.  Just as the modern study of the cell shows us the intricate way in which Nature multi-tasks, so the modern city shows us the incredible manner in which the Creator also multi-tasks given our individual needs and biographies.

Recently a friend of mind was involved in a court case, where she had to testify.   The matter was clear: a caregiver had stolen a lot of money from my friend’s aged mother, right in front of the tellers at the mother’s bank, who let the caregiver transfer funds from the mother’s to the caregiver’s private banking account.  The knowledge of the tellers was confused, for once the matter became known, and the bank needed them to cover its ass, they were induced into making written statements suggesting that it appeared to them (the tellers) that the caregiver had had the mother’s permission to move the funds.

Later, in private conversations, the tellers admitted to the mother, my friend and another care-giver, that they knew something was fishy, but caught in between the bank and the mother they spun the written story in a way covering their own ass as regards the bank, their boss.

The prosecutor investigating the matter met the situation expecting the thieving caregiver to at some point accept a plea bargain, such that no trial would be necessary.   At the last moment, that caregiver, afraid for her own future, decided to take the risk of the trial because she did not want to go to jail, and that the written statements of the tellers supported the caregiver’s version of the event, namely that the mother appeared to have given permission for the multiple transfers of the funds.

The prosecutor was then not prepared for trial (expecting a plea), and should have called the tellers in her case in chief, forcing them to admit that they gave one kind of written statement to the bank and another oral kind of statement to the mother, my friend and the other care-giver.  The unprepared prosecutor did not proceed in this way, so that the defense attorney was able to call the tellers and submit the written statements as the only version of what the tellers knew.   Since the core of the case depended upon whether the caregiver had an intent to steal, the only evidence of her intent (she did not testify) was the tellers, who had acted as if the mother had given permission (according to the written statements).

The prosecutor could have challenged the tellers’ evidence but did not, nor did she call my friend or another caregiver as witnesses impeaching the tellers’ statements, both of whom had spoken to the tellers about the real facts (as against the original written statements).

The jury found the caregiver not guilty.

Afterwards my friend had a very sanguine view of what had happened.   The theft had in fact brought it about that her mother moved in with her (due to a loss of income), which actually benefited them both greatly.  The caregiver that had stolen the money had done so for reasons of drugs, and was now clean.    She also had a daughter and a husband.   Not having to do jail time was a kind of grace for the thieving caregiver and her family.  My friend’s view was that, while in an abstract sense the caregiver was guilty, in a practical sense of real biographical justice, everyone got what they needed, and that the caregiver’s months of terror over the consequences of her actions was probably a better form of justice than jail time. 

The tellers had to struggle with their lives caught between their bosses in the bank and the reality of what had happened.   The bank, because of the written statements of the tellers being a little bit ambiguous, settled the lawsuit the mother was getting ready to take against them, for half of the loss.  The move of the mother in with my friend involved the mother selling her condo at a good price just before the financial crisis fell, taking with it a lot of property values.

I could go on, but I think here the point is well made.  Our biographies are a mix of good and bad, and in them, while matters happen to us that viewed from the outside may seem bad, the reality is that we learned something through these events that could be learned in no other way.   In the boiling pot of a major urban area, these biographies cross paths with incredible frequency, causing all kinds of influences to intersect and interact.

Yet, nothing is ultimately out of balance when seen as whole.  From the point of view of the individual biography, the immortal spirit is well loved, in spite of the weirdness of the Stage Setting for their personal Drama.  Some will think here that prisons and torture and poverty in Hati, Darfur, and so forth is terrible, but that is a superficial judgment.  These places would not be good for us, but we don’t really know what it is like for those that actually live through them.

Recent movies and television dramas have explored the hard life, such as the Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy and so forth.  The very interesting playwright, David Mamet, wrote an extraordinary stage play later made into the movie: Edmond, which is very radical in this examination of fate, destiny and place in life in the biography.

This then is our Idea of God, and our Theory of God, which comes to expression as The Art of God.  With these thoughts in mind, we are now ready to go forward toward the matter of Proof, although in a way that may seem a bit surprising.  We will, in these next sections, revisit some older material, but for subtly different purposes.

Keep in mind that the transitions from the Idea of God to the Theory of God to a Proof of God to the Art of God and an actual Theory of Everything is more like a series of metamorphoses than it is like hard and fast analytical starts and stops.

the Theory of Evolution, its limits and biases

Up to now our civilization has been strongly influenced by this idea, and its explanatory power regarding the nature of reality.  Let us once more look a bit at the history of science in order to gain a better perspective on what this idea means in its totality, and what it cannot mean as well.

Modern science begins with the on-looker separation, a fact that is clear to any unbiased observer who becomes acquainted with the facts of the evolution of consciousness as provided by Steiner, Barfield, Lehrs, Richter, and so forth.  This transformation from original participation to the on-looker separation took place around the years 1400 to 1500, and gave birth to what we call the Copernican Revolution.   The point being made here is that the ideas of modern science are all given birth following this change of consciousness, and that they cannot in any fashion represent empirical (sense based) observations of matters that occurred prior in time to the 14th and 15th Century.

The transitions, from the on-looker separation to Barfield’s final participation - that is the omega point of the future of the evolution of consciousness, will become part of the later parts of this book, when we get into more details about future oriented mind sciences.  To return to our theme ...

All the empirical observations are after that time (500 years ago), and it is only via the imagination and the reflective theorizing of the scientific mind that our Age acquires the concepts of the Big Bang and the Theory of Evolution.   Granted the empirical observations of the geological record and all manner of experiments in the fields of chemistry and physics have been accomplished and verified, we are here dealing with the thinking of scientists when we come to what all that data means as regards the deep past of the Planet and of what they call the Universe.  We don’t empirically know, and we only believe, through that thinking, that the pictures we create out of the Age of scientific investigation speaks to the truth nature of what has gone on long long before.

The Big Bang and the Theory of Evolution are complicated ideas and nothing more.  It is as ideas they have to be tested, although certain limited aspects of these ideas can be tested in the present.  But not all of them, for the fact is that we  assume that a test in the present can confirm all the ideas we have of the deep past, and that assumption itself needs to be critically examined.

In any event let us build up a brief exposition of these ideas in terms of their main themes.  While doing so, however, we need to keep in mind three important facts:

1) The ideas arose over time, and not in the sequence in which we conceive the past; that is, for example, the deeper we went in our thinking into the Past, the longer we had been practicing science.   Darwinian evolution arises in the 19th Century, the theory of the Big Bang in the 20th, even though the latter precedes the former in our picture of time.  2) According to Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, ideas have become popular and then were discarded, so that while we may think that the ideas were born out of each other in some kind of natural and logical sequence, the fact is they often arose only after a different idea became a dead end.  And, 3) physics and chemistry developed earlier than biology, such that certain ideas in physics and chemistry drifted unconsciously into biology, strongly influencing its development, in perhaps unjustifiable ways.

Another matter to keep in mind is that the different theories lean on each other, sometimes to a considerable degree.   For example, our understanding of the astronomical phenomena known as red shift is very crucial to the concept of the expansion of the universe that is related to that phenomena, while the expansion of the universe is crucial to the idea of the Big Bang.  In my essay at the end of this book on the Misconception of Cosmic Space in the Ideas of Modern Astronomy, you will come upon a brief examination of the current viability of both red shift and parallax.

In any event ...

Cosmological thinking now considers the most viable theory of the origin of the Universe to be some version of the idea of the Big Bang.  An explosion-like phenomena which seems to create both matter and light and various other kinds of radiations.  I say “seems to create”, because on that score the thinking gets a bit fuzzy.

This is all essentially based on certain ideas in astronomy, and chemistry and then in nuclear physics, coupled with certain geometric principles and the gravity space-time ideas of Einstein.   What is little noticed is the intention of the scientists to create a non-religious creation idea - an intention that emerged slowly over time.

Newton was an alchemist, a fact frequently forgotten in modern histories of these questions.  Kepler, the author the three laws of planetary motion was an astrologer.  Kepler even thought that with his third law he had rediscovered the ancients’ idea of the harmony of the spheres.  He also accused his fellow scientists of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in their efforts to strip the development of science of all the older religious conceptions.

Newton engaged in two significant fights with other scientists, although in the fight with Goethe over color theory, Newton was already dead.   Many modern thinkers are now of the view that Goethe was right (see the Wikipedia entry on this question).

The more salient problem was with Leibniz.  Newton and he argued over who had invented the calculus, and over what was the basic nature of whatever turned out to be the smallest particles.  Newton’s idea was that this “atom” would be purely material (all matter, no spirit), and Leibniz was of the view that his “monads” had both consciousness and will.  Modern particle physics seems to be tending to support Leibniz, although no one really wants to admit the full implications of the now observed fact that two separated particles from the same experiment can still influence each other over great distances, and this instantaneous “action at a distance” confounds a whole lot of historical thinking in physics (Google “Alain Aspect, 1982”).

As for astronomy, we have the picture of the heavens, a starry world observed for thousands of years by human beings, and the cosmological and creation ideas of the ancients basically started to be thrown out during the Copernican Revolution.  All of this comes in part because of the invention of the telescope and then later the microscope.  Through these inventions the ability of our senses was enhanced, and we could then apparently see much better.  Whether we have better thoughts - that is different question.

It would be nice if present day astronomy wasn’t so blatantly inventive.   Those nice pictures we are told come from the Hubble and other long range telescopes are not what these instruments actually “see”.   Photographs (taking 10 to 11 days to acquire) are made through multiple filters and then enhanced and combined according to computer programs.  That program (with its inherent assumptions) as much creates the pictures, which we see in places like National Geographic, as anything else.

This is an example of the pre-thought thought ending up massaging the data.  The assumptions spin the meaning of the points of light in the sky toward what is expected to be their reality.  Now the scientists that do this are not disingenuous.  Rather they are dealing with a very tricky technical problem involving capturing light from what seems to be very distant objects.  Deep space light-capture requires a lot of time.  What they are tying to do is also to say: while this is not what Hubble sees, this is what we believe the eye would see if it was enhanced the way Hubble (a mechanical instrument) is.

Certainly the pictures are beautiful.

Anyway, ... red shift (a measure of the hydrogen line light frequency from a stellar object) concerns the difference between that light frequency in the sky, and the light frequency of hydrogen when burned in the laboratory.  Given that the whole idea of light frequency is due to Newton’s Theory of Color, and there is a shift underway to go instead with Goethe’s Theory of Colors, this whole thing stands poised on a potential tectonic (major paradigm) shift.

Red shift theory is also under attack from within Astronomy (see my near to last essay to this book), but the basic idea of red shift theory is that since the stellar hydrogen frequency line is slightly off what we see in the laboratory, this means that the red shifted object is moving away from us (making an analogy with the well understood Doppler shift problem regarding sound).  From this moving away, and other measurements connected to parallax (how we believe we compute the distances of stellar objects), is born the idea of the Universe of the stars coming into existence through an explosion - the Big Bang.

Following this explosion, stars and planets were formed according to the gravity ideas of conventional Newtonian physics, as applied by Laplace.  Matter coalesced into suns and other objects over billions and millions of years, until, at least on our planet, this dead matter somehow produced something living - that is organic.  Maybe lightening struck something in water is one fantasy.  This whole bridge from dead gravity bound matter to cellular life is wholly speculative, and is called Abiogenesis.  Granted experiments in modern laboratories have produced organic-like molecules, the huge assumption, that what is done in the modern laboratory mirrors earth conditions of billions and millions of years ago, is not well-justified thinking.

This thinking seems to appear so that natural science can build up a non-religious creation picture.  There is no empirical observation of this moment of the shift from inert matter to organic matter, simply because we can’t go back in time and observe it.  But in order for the Big Bang to be joined to the Theory of Evolution, there has to be this bridge at that level.  The whole thing is entirely theoretical, which means that it is solely based on ideas in the human mind.

I point this out to remind the reader that part of what is coming is an examination of the mind itself - a true science of the mind, built up from empirical observations made by the self-consciousness of its own activity.  This will bring us toward the problem of to what degree the thinking in science is itself flawed, and therefore has not yet brought us all the way to the truth for which we hunger.

At the same time, the enterprise of science is an incredible undertaking.  While I pose questions, and assert doubts, no one should feel in any way that what has been done so far in the field of natural science has not been done, by most practitioners of science, with the most honorable of intentions.

Anyway, to return to our theme ...

The Big Bang gives us light and matter and suns and planets, and then the Big Soup (Abiogenesis) gives us organic matter from inert matter.  Then comes Darwinian Evolution with which most of us are familiar - a sequence of blind chance and random events which slowly slowly slowly produce not just small organic forms, but larger and larger and more complex forms until some time in this distant past, completely unobserved empirically, consciousness arises from matter.

Pretty neat if you think about it, and certainly completely free of the intrusive madness of idiotic religions.  But ... he says ...

 

The whole edifice is modern, in that it comes into existence as a point of view in the last 500 years of human history, and presumes to replace thousands of years of previous thought and experience.  Not only that, but the process of reductionism, previously noted, causes natural science to more and more exclude from its considerations that which cannot be reduced to number.  The whole picture is based on thinking immersed in quantities to the exclusion of qualities.  The whole “thinking” ...

If we change that thinking we will get different ideas to be sure.  At the same time, any such thinking, if it is to be part of the Age of Science must conform to scientific principles: empirical experience, observation, and experimentation.   Out of this situation then, on the cusp between the 19th and the 20th Centuries (1894 to be exact) we get Rudolf Steiner’s book: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: some results of introspection following the methods of natural science.

Yet ...

The Theory of Evolution has one considerable empirical fact, that quite justly makes for difficulties - the bones.   One can go into the near past of the Earth and find a sequence of related  bones of primate-like beings and set them up in relationship to each other, such that the human-like bones seem to emerge from the same shared ancestor.  Just bones, however, no flesh.  And, not only no flesh, no consciousness.  Whatever was the interior nature of these beings that left these bones - about that we have no idea whatsoever.

We assume they are like our present day primates and lacked speech, and therefore also lacked  thought.  We assess the shape of the skulls and make judgments about what kind of brain would fit into that cavity.  We search for tools in the neighborhood of the bones, and think that tool making means a sign of intelligence.   The work is detailed and careful and largely empirical.

There are of course arguments, but the bare facts of the discover of these bones and the conclusions which science gave to them (their mind-produced meaning) led to the assertion in the 19th Century that the human being was a descendant of monkeys, and not a divinely created being as is suggested in Genesis.   New Atheists consider someone a fool and an idiot, who denies this essential sense of the Theory of Evolution: That man is the progeny of animals.

Game, Set, Match - or so it seems to many.

All the same, there is a problem.   The problem goes all the way back to the beginning of the scientific quest in the late 1400‘s, where there began to emerge the idea that only through the senses could we come to knowledge, and then only with research into the nature of matter would we understand Nature.   As this underlying theme progressed, it did so in several phases.

One phase was to liken Nature to a clock-work.  Nature’s relationships would turn out to be a kind of complicated mechanism.   So we dove, as noted above, into processes of analysis - into taking things apart, and looked for and at the pieces of the clockwork.  We searched high and low for the primary piece, the smallest bit, the basic thing.  Here then was the weakness, for the very search itself turned more and more into a quest for the underly nature of matter - of stuff.

To do this, especially to do this with logical rigor, mathematics was evoked.  Number relationships became very important.   The fact that the living human being was doing this activity, and was in fact a quite complicated creature at the level of mental and emotional activity, was ignored.    We sought the answers in the smallest, and any difficult or problematic questions were left at the roadside.  Man looked at matter, not at himself.  No wonder that at the end of this quest we end up seeing man as only matter.  [Thus E. Lehrs’ book: Man or Matter]

Assumptions, that were commonly understood, were conveniently forgotten as time passed.  In the 19th Century, as we noted, it was the assumption that we could rely on unchanging constants.   In the 20th, it was that the mind and consciousness would be discovered to be only a cause of the matter in the brain.   We kept to numbers and put all our unanswered questions away in a closet, in a back room, in an outbuilding.    What happened before the Big Bang - don’t know, can only guess and anyone’s guess is just as good as any other.

The scientific mind filled itself with pre-thought thoughts, and following their lead could only end up with a vision of creation based on number relationships and an absence of consciousness.  No possible Divine Creation there.   The Big Bang was to be mathematically perfect, and if the right geometries were invented (string theory etc.) why we would soon have a mathematical and abstract theory of everything, which oddly enough only a very few highly trained mathematicians would ever understand.  In the growing church of Scientism, the priests of the higher and more esoteric mathematics were about to become Popes, whose theological-like pronouncements were meant to be understood as irrefutable.

In a truly rational world, this has to be seen as train-wreck thinking, with its huge assumptions and absences of empirical evidence for most of its grand theories.  These  would better be filed under science fiction, not science fact.   Science fact would be more cautious, and know not to be so grandiose as to imagine we can know the far distant Past with any certainty at all.   People would be more modest in their ambitions.  But Natural Science is the modern religion (scientism), and its technological prowess is worth a lot to those who need new weapons, or who want to make a lot of money.

The Big Bang isn’t likely to be the answer, nor Abogenesis or even the Theory of Evolution - there is too much speculation in them, and what they seek to define too far away in time to simply grasp with a hunger for answers motivated by a fame-seeking imaginative mind (scientists have egos and love to give press conferences when they believe that can announce a great new discovery).

But what about the bones?   What do we do with the bones?

The Creationists tried to go in the back door with intelligent design.   Didn’t work, although it suggested something marvelous.   In effect the Creationists accepted most of the thinking errors of science, and tried to fight a battle between religion and science that can’t really be won.  The true secret for resolving the seeming conflict involves being better at science than the scientist and better at religion than the religious.

Let us start small (as I said I would in the introduction), and just deal with certain aspects of the general theory of evolution according to the work of Ronald Brady in his essay Dogma and Doubt.  He basically dismantles the theory itself, although the bones - the meaning of the actual empirical evidence - are still going to be a problem.  Why?

Because even if we undo the Theory of Evolution, the underlying empirical evidence remains and people will naturally want a better theory.  Can’t just dis the Theory of Evolution without offering a replacement.  But we start here with the Theory of Evolution and not the Big Bang, because at the very least a lot of parts of that theory are nearer at hand in time.

First a little apocryphal story: The original version of Brady’s essay was published in the scientific journal Systematic Zoology around 1977, under the title: Natural Selection and the Criteria by which a Theory should be Judged.  An individual familiar with that essay was visiting a leading evolutionary biologist (head of the department etc.), at a major Canadian university, and as part of their discussion on the current validity of the Theory of Evolution, this individual went to the biology department library to retrieve Brady’s article, only to discover that it had been torn out of the journal, and was thus unavailable for the students in that department.

Dogma and Doubt is an improved update of that original essay, that was published in 1982 in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 1982, vol. 17, pp. 79-96.  Here is the url to that present article, that can be found on the website: The Nature Institute: ( http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/rb/dogma/dogmadoubt.htm ) where can be found other writings of Brady, who has now crossed over.

Here is Brady on the essential matter that is being questioned:  “I mean the belief that random variation can, when subjected to selective pressure for long periods of time, culminate in new forms, and that it therefore provides an explanation for the origins of morphological diversity, adaptation, and when extended as far as Darwin proposed, speciation. The principle of natural selection when understood in this sense may be equated with the Spencerian “survival of the fittest,” as Darwin himself (1876) recognized in his later editions: “I have often called this principle...by the term natural selection. But the expression often used by Mr Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”“ [emphasis added, ed.]

Brady means to use the term “belief”, for this is one of the problems at issue regarding this whole question: the social processes in the field of biology whereby a theory becomes a central belief-like assumption of that particular scientific discipline, such that as a dogma it cannot any  longer be doubted, even if it is no longer ultimately useful as a scientific theory, according to the logical rules of a philosophy of science as to what makes a theory appropriately scientific.

Brady begins his analysis of the discussion, among leading evolutionary biologists, and their critics, concerning the accusation that the theory is a tautology.  He define a tautology in this way:

“The context of statements in empirical science is usually causal explanation: this happens because that happened. Causal statements of this form are sometimes termed synthetic because the second half of the statement, which follows the because, must add something new, something not already contained in the first half. Analytic statements, by contrast, affirm some form of identity, and therefore repeat the first part in the second: i.e. ‘husbands are married men,’ or ‘a deafness is an impairment of the hearing.’ But when this definition strategy is used with causal intent, language breaks down. The statement that ‘your deafness is caused by an impairment of your hearing’ means only that your deafness is caused by deafness—and the intention to add something more than the fact of deafness is not carried through by the formulation. A scientific theory is a causal explanation and brings distinct elements into dependent relation: the thunder is caused by the lightning; your deafness is caused by a torn eardrum. Since cause and effect are not the same, the two sides of a causal proposition cannot be identical, and the repetition inherent in tautological formulation would be pejorative.”

Brady then quotes several writers on this question of tautology, and discovers that in the main the apologists for the Theory of Evolution don’t see the problem, while the critics can’t understand why not.  The basic matter at issue in the tautological formulation of the Theory has to do with what is called: differential reproduction.  The fit survive because they are obviously fit is the usual form in which the tautology is expressed.   Whatever way the apologists dance with that form of expression, they are still stuck with the fact that it fails as a synthetic causal explanation - nothing is added.

Following this more or less easy examination of the flaws with the statement of the Theory (its frequent tautological formulations), Brady next takes up the more crucial question: Is the Theory testable?  This is more tricky, but no less the principle way the Theory fails as a scientific theory.

“Darwin’s original intent was clearly to designate a causal agency behind the differentials of reproduction. Such differentials exist—some organisms have more offspring than others of the same population—but were this effect undirected the differential would never lead to any particular result. On the other hand, if we speculate that some causal agency provides the differential with a direction, we have a hypothesis of the origin of diversity. Darwin provided a causal factor to do just this in his principle of natural selection which, when added to the naturally existing differences in a population, ‘selected’ some for advancement and others for retardation and eventual extinction. The scheme was advanced as an analogy to the selective activity of human breeders.”

Then further:

“The effect to be explained is the hypothesized differentials of the past, which culminated in present organisms. The cause advanced is the selective power of environmental pressure (counting other organisms as part of the environment of any particular individual), which acts in a manner analogous to the hand of man.

“Cause and effect are logically distinct in this formulation, and offered clearly for empirical specification—that is, for research. In actual application the researcher will attempt to observe these relations in nature, and once the requisite sets of observations are identified, to test the relations. But here even Darwin sounded a warning. It may not be a simple thing to specify the observations. After all, nature may be ‘infinitely complex,’ and although it is not difficult to see what the breeder is doing, the observation of natural causes is a more subtle thing.”

Brady then quotes many apologists and critics as to that question, and finds them again not quite talking to each other, but past each other.  To narrow the matter at issue, Brady then discusses the idea of testing itself.

"The research program concerned with the mechanism of adaptation began with Darwin’s warning on the limits of human knowledge already in place. It has been very successful, despite that, in demonstrating that a hypothetical account of adaptation is possible in every case. The target of the critics, however, has not been the possibility of producing such hypothetical scenarios, but of submitting them, and the general theory behind them, to empirical test. The critics imply that we simply do not know enough about the organic realm to understand what would bring our hypotheses into question. Let us examine the ground to see why this might be so.”

Brady then examines the Theory of Gravity, and reveals that while that theory is simply stated, when we get to empirical evidence, we have to take account of other matters (such as the resistance of air to falling objects).  This produces an additional theory to accompany the first, thus: We have then, the application of the basic theory, the ceteris paribus clause, and the assumed theoretical background (all other needed theories)—all contained in predictive statements. [ceteris  paribus clause - all other things being equal; ed.]  An empirical test needing to be predictive sometimes includes many theories, not just the one being tested.

[By the way, all of this in Brady will have to be applied to the Theory of God offered in this book, so this is a sword that cuts both ways (as it were).]

Again, Brady:

"Now, supposing a prediction should fail, what is brought into question? There are three candidates: (1) my prediction is wrong because my theory is wrong; (2) my prediction is wrong because the ceteris paribus assumption is wrong (i.e. there are interfering parameters); and (3) my prediction is wrong because one of the background theories is wrong. When we make predictions for the sake of conducting a test, all three possibilities must be considered when the prediction fails.”

Once more in discussing this Brady quotes many apologists for, and critics of, the Theory in question.

"A test is of no value if it cannot call the theory being tested into question.”

Then, Brady’s basic and most damaging concern:

"This section began with the notion that ‘what experience cannot question it cannot support.’ I have argued within it that until the organism is reduced to a determinate system, we have not the knowledge to mount a good test of optimalization theory—that is, we cannot question it. If that is so, it follows that the theory has no empirical support. Its strength comes from its logical power to generate explanations for every manner of organic adaptation rather than from the evidence, which, as we have seen, contains no potential for falsification. The theory may be true, but whether it is or not, it cannot be said to have shown evidence of this truth, and the widespread acceptance of the theory must rest on some other grounds.” [emphasis added; ed.]

Then:

“The ‘indirect defences’ in the title of this section are all those suggesting that the central hypothesis of Darwinism may be defended by some other means than direct testing. They proceed, in actuality, by an application of the theory, which is already believed by the defender, to the evaluation of the same theory. This ‘by our own bootstraps’ approach is so popular that examples abound in the literature,... “ [again, emphasis added; ed.]

Frequently, industrial melanism (the peppered moth) is offered as a test, but this fails the logical criteria according to Brady in this way:

"Darwin proposed that selective pressure could approximate the regulative control of an intelligent breeder and supply a direction to otherwise random changes in a population. This directed progression of changes would then lead towards optimalization of adaptation within the context of the given environment. There are two parts to this proposal. The first is that selective pressure can approximate the breeder; the second, which I have termed ‘central,’ is that the differential so produced can culminate in new forms. The industrial melanism observations have confirmed prediction with regard to the first part, i.e. a specific change in allele frequency, parallel to that produced by a breeder, may be caused by one-sided predator pressure (one-sided in that the melanistic variant is better camouflaged). Can this confirmation be transferred to part two? “

Then:

"If our aim is empirical investigation, any belief that can set up shop as ‘knowledge’ is always a fatal possession, for it undermines the basic project. The biologist who ‘knows’ that any differential can lead to new types is admitting that no empirical support is sought or needed for that proposition, which thereby becomes an a priori truth. Critics who are not blessed with similar metaphysical insight may gain the distinct impression that they are not viewing the same world, and there is some value in the metaphor. Whatever we actually believe we take to be identical with reality, and therefore not part of hypothesis that stands in need of support. Those who believe the Darwinian theory apply it, or parts of it, to their observations as a known parameter. Their results are artifacts of their belief, but this fact can hardly be visible to them until they are willing to question what they have previously taken for granted.”

The rest of this long and carefully drafted essay discusses this problem from additional directions, quoting many critics and apologists, as well as reviewing for the reader the basic argument from different directions, including a nice purely logical outline.  Once more: The reader of this material here in this book (The Art of God), who wants to actually understand it, needs to go to that source and make its essential substance clear to themselves.  Here I can only suggest and hint.

For our purposes in this book, and in accord with Brady’s standards:  A Theory must be capable of a non-tautological formulation: i.e. take the shape of a causal and synthetic two parted formulation, for example: The macro-social organism, in which human biographies take place, is the causal result of the Artistic activity of God.  (c.f. the 23rd Psalm)

And, a Theory must be testable, that is falsifiable.  Since each of us has a biography, and we can think logically, it remains for each of us to scientifically examine our lives in such a way that we see whether or not the details of the Theory of God proposed here fit our own empirical observations and experiments concerned with the stuff of our own life.  I emphasis our own, because I do not think we can ever know enough about the biography of another person (in all its salient details, inwardly and outwardly) to make such a full scientific judgment about someone else’s life.

We first judge our own life, inwardly and outwardly.  Then on the basis of what we understand from that examination about human existence in general, we then examine whether or not what we have discovered there can be universally applied.  The Theory then gets falsified in two ways, with the primary empirical evidence being our own biography, and the secondary evidence being what we can observe about others.  In doing this last, however, we do need to be clear concerning our capacities to examine the lives of others in the same fashion as we can examine our own.

As seen above (before the Brady article discussion), the problem of subjectivity and objectivity is being dealt with, although we are yet far from done in the examination of the totality of our experience, such that we can come to a genuine Theory of Everything.  We are, at this point in this book, clearly going beyond the needed new and systematic Idea of God fully into a Theory of God, on our way to A Proof of God and the resulting Theory of Everything.

We are also trying to include all that the scientific endeavor has given to us, beginning with a cautionary tale about the Theory of Evolution, which Brady has clearly established cannot in its present form be tested or made falsifiable.  Regardless of how fully believed, the Theory of Evolution at this point in time cannot be formulated in a way that makes it scientifically acceptable.

Let us now take up the problem of the bones ... for that evidence seems undeniable ... there is a sequence of seemingly related bones going from older and different species to our present humanoid forms.  For details on some of the current thinking (meaning-interpretation) see The Upright Ape by Aaron G. Filler (who, as Brady suggests, fully believes in the dogma of Darwinian Evolution and applies it in this books to all his empirical observations).

This work of Filler’s then is a good example of Brady’s perception, that the scientific community has converted the Theory of Evolution into a belief system, and does not, in the present, seek in the empirical evidence an alternative explanation.  The Theory holds many minds hostage, just as Rudolf Steiner warned in the last sentence of the original preface to his book: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: “One must be able to experience an idea and confront it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage.”

As we proceed we will get more deeply into a pragmatic science of the mind; and our relationships to ideas, in the sense of Steiner above, will be made more clear.  For the present, and for fun,

the bones ... an alternative explanation:

Keep in mind that while we are technically more into the Theory of God, we are still necessarily concerned also with the Idea of God - theory and idea being intimately related.

Natural Science has taken the view that there is only matter, but no spirit.  Our view in our idea and theory of God is that there is, in addition to matter, also spirit.  Therefore we are able to offer as an alternative theory to the one presently expressed about the bones, a spiritual component.  We are not in any way denying the existence of the bones, as matter, we are just positing a different causal explanation for their coming into existence.

The Theory and Idea goes like this:

Human beings and animals are intimately related.  The general idea in evolutionary biology is that the human being is the progeny of the developments in the animal kingdom.  Let us reverse this idea (turn it inside out, as it were) and suggest that the animal is the progeny of the human being, and we are, in effect, its ancestor.  How could this come about?

Recall above where we looked at the geological record and composed the view that this record represented a sequence of processes of metamorphosis, arising from a living Earth, that left behind, in the same way a human embryo leaves behind, a solid matter skeleton - that is bones.  The rocks of the geological record are the bones of a living Earth organism, which organism was also at least the womb for the physical evolution leading to the primates.

This living Earth organism does not leave its original organic matter aspects behind, because as we know, the organic decays and disappears, leaving then as remains only of the most solid aspects of its having been there.  Nor does it leave behind any inward or psychological and consciousness manifestations.  We, today, assume there were no such psychological or consciousness manifestations in the deep past - we otherwise having no empirical evidence of the same one way or the other.   As to the present, the nature of Nature (the Earth organism) and any kind of consciousness outside the human being and perhaps inside of Nature - those questions will have to be dealt with later.

To continue our elaboration of an alternative theory of the bones ...

Within this evolving Earth organism (what the most ancient spiritual traditions called the Mother), human beings were embedded as if in a womb.  We were spirit-seeds, as it were, within the living organism of the Earth Being.   As the rhythmic densification of matter proceeded (see far above the discussion of an alternative explanation of radioactivity), the spirit-seeds of the human being needed to throw off aspects of its own universal and cosmic nature that were tending to an excess of density, as well as an excess of functional psychology.  Instead of leaving behind “bones” as such, the then fully spiritual human organism divested itself of psychological-like impulses, that were tending to a kind of one-sidedness.  These hungers and passions for existence then fell to Earth, as it were, taking up a different evolutionary course.

The proto-organic matter of the Mother Earth Being was a kind of thick sea in which life processes were very active; and the debris of that activity (the shedding of the one-sidedness) becomes then the sediment (like the sediment in the bottom of the oceans of the Earth) we find that leads scientists to propose the organic soup thesis of the earliest stages of evolutionary development.  Keep in mind we are not leaving out any empirical fact discovered by natural science - instead we are only offering a different interpretation of the meaning of such facts.

The thick sea then becomes womb and home to a whole host of differentiated living organisms, each with its own type of consciousness inwardness.  We should conceive of this thick sea as denser at its lower regions, and less dense at its higher regions, in the same way that the weight of ocean water makes greater pressure below.

At the higher regions, the human spirit seed does rest within a matter-like pod, as it were.   But this pod over the ages never hardens enough to leave behind traces.   It just dissolves when no longer needed, the same way the present day physical body dissolves after the ego and astral body have left it following the transformation and metamorphosis of consciousness we call: death.

Certain phenomena of the geological record, such as for example the age of the dinosaurs, takes on a much different inner picture when we realize that the thick and dense organic sea of the Mother organism would have supported weight in a far different fashion than our present day atmosphere.

The inwardness we know in ourselves, had earlier less mature versions, but our Theory and Idea needs clearly to include the idea that consciousness, being an aspect of the original nature of Divine Creative Beings, was present everywhere from the very beginning - even from the time we call: the Big Bang, and which Genesis calls: Let there be Light (fiat lux).

The human being, being a special seed in the whole process (the Earth existence is unfolding for them, for the spirit-seeds - remember our Idea of God includes that God loves each of us in particular), finds that it needs to leave aspects of itself behind (a choice that has grave consequences for our relationship to the Beings of Nature), through the rejection of certain more coarse aspects of our inwardness, both physical and psychological.

These rejected aspects of our general spirit-nature fall into the more dense aspects of the thick atmospheric sea, and taking their own course (all guided by communities of various subsidiary spiritual Beings) give rise to what the geological record finds as the sequence of plant and animal creatures in the different Ages of the Earth.  Meanwhile, the in-potential human being, in relieving itself of the most dense and coarse aspects of its total nature, remains above and outside as it were, this course of development we empirically observe in the geological record.

Remaining mostly fully spiritual on the one hand, and participating in the organic developments of the own now becoming more physical material seed-pod in the thick sea, the human being rides this sea above those developments taking place in its more dense regions.  The womb-sea of the Mother Being itself, and our original seed-pods, all dissolve and leave behind no traces that can be observed in the geological record (there is another record, but that is more difficult to observe, being purely spiritual), thus the different phases (Ages, such as the Precambrian) of the total number of metamorphic processes of the Mother Earth Being as It moves forward in linear time.  The human spirit seed-pod does not become dense enough in its processes to produce bones.

Again, no empirical fact is being left behind - only the meaning interpretation by our present day mind is changing.

Surveying the totality, we could say that there are two curves of evolutionary development.  One more material, and the other more spiritual.  The material curve, as our scientists have observed, is one of ascent.  The matter forms remembered in the geological record get more and more complex and differentiated.   The spiritual forms also evolve, but their curve of development is a kind of descent, called in Hebraic religious tradition: the Fall.

Between the rising curve of ascent, and the falling curve of descent, there is an interaction, particularly between the human spirit-seed, and the evolving animal forms, because a part of the intention and need of the spirit-seed is to create a body in which to inhabit the world of dense matter for a period of time.  The story of the development of the cast-off animal forms we see in the bones.

The human spiritual intelligence, seeking incarnation in matter at a certain point in linear time, is able to inhabit the developing animal form for brief moments, thus the first appearance of tool making.  The human seed and the animal are related, since the animal is a cast-off aspect of the human being (thus our growing modern guilt over the treatment of the animal kingdom).  But the animal evolution is only part of the story of evolution.  The other part concerns the spiritual intelligence which more and more finds that it can live for longer periods of time, in the developing material bodies of the lower curve evolutionary process, eventually up to the division/split between the humanoid forms and the great apes.

The coming to the fore of humanoid forms, and their clearly genetic relationship to our relatives the great apes, is simply a natural outgrowth of the interaction between the descending curve of the evolution of the human spirit-seed and the rising curve of the evolution of the more densely material animal bodies.

The falling purely spiritual evolutionary curve eventually meets with and joins the rising animal evolutionary curve, and the modern embodied human being is the result of this marriage of spirit and matter.  Keep in mind what was pointed to above, that in sleep the human spiritual ego-essence and its related astral or desire body, continues to separate every night.  The joining is not fixed - we are not stuck to the material body (we leave it fully at death), but only borrow it for the conscious part of the day as we live out our biographical necessities.

In the future, physical bodies will no longer be necessary, as ego consciousness is now evolving the capacity to be fully awake once more outside a material existence.  Eons ago, during the phase of the evolution of consciousness noted by Barfield and others, we did not know ourselves as separate from the Divine Spirit essence of the universe - Barfield’s original participation.  With the onlooker-separation, our ego consciousness (self-consciousness) is fully separated from the Divine World, except in sleep, when the daytime aspect of the ego is unconscious.  We don’t remember sleep, except as dream, which are moments where the ego is only partially connected to the physical organism.

As the ego or self-consciousness develops further, it will acquire the capacity to remain awake outside the physical body.  This begins what Barfield called: Final Participation.  In the times of the dim evolutionary past, on the path of descent, we did not know ourselves as individual spirit beings.  Our descent into matter, enabled by the sacrifices of the ascent of the animal kingdom to give to us material bodies to inhabit, now makes it possible for the self-conscious ego to have experiences that were not possible before.  The weight and density of material existence causes the spirit of the human being to have to unfold latent potentials it otherwise would not be able to develop unless our self-consciousness is limited and constrained (as it is today) by the physical/material.

When we die, these constraints disappear over time.

While the Borg, in the science fiction world of Star Trek say: “resistance is futile”, the spiritual facts are otherwise.  No pain, no gain is the understanding of the role of exercise in the development of physical capacities.  The same is true, in fact even more true, when it comes to spiritual capacities.  We previously ran into this with the idea of the Baptism by Fire and Holy Breath, but now we are coming at this from another direction, which it is hoped will make that aspect of our biography even more clear.

Human evolution, having reached the stage of cultural development and psychological evolution (aka: history: see Barfield’s amazing: History, Guild and Habit), has complexified to the extent that with our biographies embedded in specific and highly differentiated contexts, our spirit is now able to have equally highly unique and individual psycho-spiritual experiences.  The sequence of Civilizations, which our sciences of history, anthropology, and archeology have uncovered, reveal to us this phase of current development.   The only reason we don’t yet appreciate this “history” is that we, especially in the cultural West, don’t believe in reincarnation.

Once we recognize that our Theory includes this concept, then the meaning of prior civilizations changes, since these involve the same spiritual essences from today, undergoing particular and individual biographical experiences only possible in that more ancient historical context.

Please keep in mind, however, that we must make scientific observations of our own biography first, before we dare to consider others.  The most testable aspects are to be found there, and to ignore these facts any longer is to live in complete denial of our own human nature.   That the modern scientist of consciousness has not investigated his own primary experience has led to tragic and unconscionable consequences for our ideas about the mind and the brain and our evolutionary background.  Such a scientist, with no real self-knowledge, cannot speak with any authority about consciousness or self-consciousness - because the fact is that more than half of what he needs to know is missing due to his having ignored it.

At the same time, the investigation of those realms goes forward in fits and starts, in spite of what the neurophysiologist and/or cognitive scientist does or does not do.  It is just that the primary empirical evidence, as proven by all the traditional and modern mind sciences, is right there before the modern researcher into consciousness.  The original impulse to psychiatry, with its guided reflective self-observations on the couch, was a kind of start.  Now we need to do more, if we want to claim to be scientific.  To ignore the primary inner realm of human experience, simply because our personal subjectivity appears to lack objectivity, is to lock knowledge into a dead end.

Modern attempts at mind sciences, in the sense of materialistic sciences of consciousness, need to grow up. 

These scientists (such as Sam Harris) need to take off the white coat and go to a 12 Step-like self-help group, until you figure out why you fear the study of your own mind.

Having said that, let us more directly consider ...

... some aspects of a real science of the mind

Some of this has come from before: Many black sheep cousins of the major religions have produced mind sciences: Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Indian Yoga systems, Hebrew Kabballah, Islamic Sufism, and in more modern times, from Christianity: Christian Hermeticism, Anthroposophy and even a still lingering version of Alchemy.

Rudolf Steiner, on the cusp of the 19th - 20th Centuries, began his work attempting to create a Spiritual Science, with first tackling the philosophical problem of knowledge (what can we know and how do we know we know it), through three books: A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception; Truth and Knowledge; and, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

The last book had as its subtitle: some results of introspection following the methods of natural science.  In German, according to some acquaintances, the word introspection is more accurately translated as: soul observation.

Steiner near the end of his life produced a work he called: Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, the first sentence of the first leading thought being, appropriately, a definition: Anthroposophy is a path of cognition from the spirit in man to the Spirit in the Universe. [emphasis added, ed.]  Most translations of this sentence from the German, do not use the word cognition, but rather the word knowledge.  The problem seems to be that cognition implies a more active thinking in English, than does knowledge, which to some translators seems more passive.

Barfield, a serious student of Steiner’s, said in a public forum, which I personally attended, that the book of Steiner’s, he most frequently read again and again, was: A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception; which book Barfield characterized as: the least read, most important book, Steiner ever wrote.  That is also true for me, for it is a frequently read book, and in my view the well grounded and nourishing root of all the rest of Steiner’s work that flowered later in time.

I have been practitioner of introspection for almost forty years, and was a student of this inner work for seven years before ever meeting Steiner through his books.  Before Steiner, my practice was somewhat mystical, albeit oriented toward the Gospels, and afterward became more and more disciplined and scientific.   Many of his students seem fascinated with the above three books, and learn to quote them endlessly.  Where possible I remind them that the books are maps, and what we are meant to study, if we wish to follow Steiner here, is the actual territory of our own mind (soul/spirit nexus).

Above, where I wrote of the alternative to the Theory of Evolution’s explanation of the bones, mostly this was based on reading Steiner’s spiritual scientific research.  He treated his results as scientific facts of the spirit, but since I lack his wealth of experience in those matters, I can only learn a kind of understanding of the spiritual world from Steiner.  What was written just above then, was a kind of poetic expression of that understanding, derived mostly from reading Steiner, but also infused with my own capacities for living thinking.

Living thinking is the result of the effort to bring about a complete metamorphosis of thinking itself, from its ordinary (and still often wise) nature, to one where thinking becomes an instrument of perception in the world of thoughts, such that we become capable of organic and pure thinking,  These attributes are far different from the abstract cause and effect thinking taught to us in our schools as a result of the influence on modern culture of natural science.

Organic and pure thinking are also different from discursive thinking, associative thinking, comparative thinking, figuration, theorizing and reflection.  Few readers will be familiar with such terms, but knowledge of them is available to anyone who carefully begins to observe their thinking.

That there is a world of thoughts which can be fully experienced - can be viewed, in the sense of a history of philosophy, as a kind of neo-Platonism - the view that Ideas are Beings who can be directly perceived.  For the true living thinking this situation is more nuanced.  For example, to introspection there is a hierarchy in the conceptual life: the mental picture; the generalized concept; the pure concept; and the idea.

The mental picture or representation is a kind of copy of a sense experience.  I’ve seen a particular book and in my mind I have a mental picture of that particular book.  I can in fact pull this picture out of my capacity for memory.    I can also have a generalized concept of all books, which lets me recognize “books”, as such.  This concept lacks the specificity of a particular book, however, which is why we distinguish it from the individual representation.

I can also have a pure concept of “bookness”, such as Goethe uses when in his scientific works he speaks of reading the “book” of nature.  I’ve taken that term (book) and used it as a similar metaphor (e.g. reading the Book of the Social World), but at the same time this pure concept can be an object of perception to my thinking.  This is to say that living thinking perceives all four (mental pictures, generalized concepts, pure concepts and ideas).

Not only do we perceive, but we create.  Thought, from this experience and point of view, becomes a kind of conceptual sculpture or form of art (thus my essay at the end of this book: In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship).

Steiner describes, in A Theory of Knowledge ..., an idea as a complex of concepts.  This too can be observed by the developing thinking, and an example of a complex of concepts (an Idea) is in fact the Theory of Evolution.  As an idea this theory contains many concepts, of various kinds and different degrees of scientific accuracy.  When someone refers to this particular Theory, we know, more or less, what they mean, because our mind also apprehends ideas.  We just don’t ordinarily study the related mental processes by which various thought-objects are created and then perceived - i.e. no science of the mind is taught in our present culture.

Above, in referring to Steiner’s spiritual research, I said that I understand it.  I don’t know the direct spiritual experiences on which he based his reports.  I could also believe what he said is true.  Belief, understanding and knowledge, as previously noted, are three different kinds of relationships between the thinking I (self-consciousness) and the thought content of the soul (a particular aspect of the field of consciousness).

Scientists have beliefs, as Brady pointed out in Dogma and Doubt.  These beliefs then tend to determine the approach they make toward their work, such that many never question anymore whether or not the complex of concepts that make up the Theory of Evolution is scientifically justified.   The Theory is so completely accepted (even adored) in the field of biology that all new facts are interpreted as supportive of the Theory.

Recall now the idea described above of: the pre-thought thought.  In Saving the Appearances: a study in Idolatry, Barfield describes these kinds of adored theories in the field of natural science as idols in the mind.  He means quite clearly to make an association with the problem of idols noted centuries ago in the monotheisms of the middle-East (Judaism, Islam and Christianity).  These modern idols are so embedded in modern culture that they exist as part of the field of figuration - the latent semi-conscious meaning of all that we see and understand.

For example, physics taught for years that the nature of matter was an association of very small particles called atoms, which in turn were made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.  These atoms then joined together into molecules, such that we have today a field of study called: molecular biology.  Physics has now gone beyond those ideas, into realms of indeterminacy, fields of interacting forces, and a more or less complete lack of any kind of substance at all in what we call the experience of matter or solidity.

Tragically, for ordinary people and for great aspects of biology, the older conceptions of physics regarding protons, neutrons etc. still lingers in most minds as idols.  Having absorbed the religion of scientism, we believe (but don’t at all perceive) this particle-like structure as the basis of matter.  What is worse is that when we see a tree, and try to be scientific (perhaps to vainly display our knowledge - really a belief) to our children, we might be tempted to say something like: well the tree really isn’t there, its just made up of atoms and such, and it is only our subjective mind which sees the tree.  If we really saw what was actually there, we wouldn’t see a tree, but instead we might see a numinous collection of points of radiant light (maybe, because most of us would get confused, since we in part know we are talking a kind of nonsense).

When we tell our children these stories, a home and then later in school, we produce in the field of figuration the idols - the false and misleading meaning of thingness which inhabits our world view.  Spirit surrounds us but we do not see it because we have had an enchantment laid into our thinking/figuration such that we only see the tree as a thing, and not the being of the tree - not its potent awareness of itself as a part of the all-that-is.   We look at nature and can’t conceive that nature is looking back at us.

Barfield’s book, Saving the Appearances, is designed to help us recognize that seeing the tree is in fact what we are meant to see.   The world is so ordered that the tree, as it appears to our senses, is one half of the complete representation of the meaning of that object.  The other half is our concept.  The sense experience and the thoughts of particular trees, trees in general, and tree-ness, including our higher idea of trees in the totality of Nature, go together.  The senses provide one part, and the thinking mind the other part.  Unfortunately, what the mind provides today is not the reality of this invisible part of nature, but rather a meaning denuded of relationship.  There is no I and Thou relationship between my I and the Beings of Nature.

Of course, this is just a taste of the real situation.  Not only are we designed to see the tree, we are also, so to speak, designed to see the “forest”.  That is we are designed to “read” the totality of the appearances, not just the part, for the truth is that this  totality is a kind of very rich and complicated speech.  The Divine Mystery, having embodied itself in everything (the Creation - the all-that-is), has given this Creation, a unique and Divine level of order for the reading (knowing) of which order the mind of human beings is the ordained partner.   Humanity, not being an accident, is fitted into the Creation in multiple ways.

David Bohm sees the implicate and explicit order, but doesn’t quite yet know how to read it.  Einstein wants to know the mind of God, but didn’t quite trust his instinct that it just might be staring him in the face.  A tiny example:

The tree, in its form, is similar in a way to the human lung.  Only in the case of the tree it is matter-filled space, while the lung, in its shape (its form as speech) is an upside down tree-shaped hole in space - being empty of dense substance, it can be filled with air.  Air surrounds the tree/leaf-filled space of the tree, and penetrates  and fills the leaf/tree-shaped empty space of the lung (where the air filled empty space of branching bronchi and bronchioles - trunks and branches - become alveoli - leaves).  At the boundaries of one kind of “leaf" oxygen is exchanged with carbon dioxide, and at the boundaries of another kind of a “leaf" carbon dioxide is exchanged with oxygen.  This mirror image chemical exchange is also expressed (“spoken") in the Nature of how each is related to space.

True thinking is such a kind of similar exchanged-process, albeit of and in the Spirit.  That which is called Goethean Science, following its inspired creation though the influence of Rudolf Steiner, will, as we shall see further on, expand such thinking about the appearances into great detail in a far richer fashion than most people can yet imagine.

Steiner called this integrated natural (assumed away) linkage between the objects of experience, and their related thoughts: monism, in his book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.  The assumed split between mind and world is false.  What science has done, however, is believe that the truth of the tree is only found when we figure out what it is made of - what are its parts (all analysis, and no wise synthesis).  So science, in its natural immaturity as a Way of Knowledge, creates these idols for the mind (whether, atoms, molecules, or indeterminate intersections of fields of force); and, believing that the world itself is not able to teach us what we need to know unless we dismantle it, we doubt our already existing grace given ability to know directly through a properly disciplined thinking.

These idols are inserted in between our desire to understand, and the actual world that the senses were designed [by God, of course :-)] to see.   Goethe said that the eye is made by the light.  He also said that the senses never deceive*, only the judgment.  Further, that if we learn to read the Book of Nature, all Her secrets are right there on the surface - in the appearances.  We just have to have a more disciplined practice of observation and a more disciplined activity of thinking (judgment).

*[Steiner’s earlier works on the real nature of thinking, while not take up by but a small few, nevertheless eventually led to a graduate course, which he wrote great parts of but did not publish (around 1910).  His students then did publish this work, which he had called Anthroposophy, and they then called (because it was incomplete) Anthroposophy - a fragment.  I’ve written an essay on this work, offering this essay as an alternative introduction, for in my view the Society and his students have not even begun to understood this later work at all.  See: an alternative introduction to Anthroposophy - a fragment, on my website Shapes in the Fire.]

This (monism) would, obviously, be an interesting ideal (which is qualitatively different from an idea) some might believe.  But we live in the real world, such will say, and science is doing what it does, and the technologies developed out of the understanding of science have greatly benefited humanity.  The thing is, however, that Rudolf Steiner didn’t just teach and lecture.   People came to him with questions, and he responded to those questions in such a way that very innovative changes in medicine, agriculture, natural science, education and so forth, were introduced into the world.  These have been maturing now for about 100 years, and as we get further into the problem of Proof of God, those changes will come for a time to center stage in this book.

Here we are still dealing with an introduction to a modern science of the mind ...

Owen Barfield wrote a short essay: Rudolf Steiner’s Idea of Mind, from which I want to take a single point.  Barfield pointed out that (as hinted at above) we tend to think of the sense world as public (shared) and the world of the mind as private.   If we look at the facts, however, the situation changes.

If a dozen people circle a tree, they will all see the tree from their specific point of view, which will not be the same.  Clearly they all see the same object, but the details will vary according to the perspective of the viewer.  The more complicated the sense object (the more varied) the more different will be what is seen.  Steiner, says Barfield, means for us to realize that sense perception is in fact private, not public, because of these differences in point of view.

If we add from our discussions far above the concept of the meaning of the sense experience, we will see further that the sense object is perceived in its totality by the consciousness and self-consciousness in a distinct and individual way.  The tree, for one person may be source of an allergy, and thus repels them.  For another, an object of art, for they paint.  For a third something they will shortly bring their dog toward, for obvious reasons.  To someone hungry, its fruit will be important.  For a cabinet maker, something to take apart and to make into a table.  So not only is the perspective different, but so is the meaning/relationship.

Now the pure objects of the mind are concepts (the mental picture is just a copy of the individualized perception of the tree).  Steiner’s view, to which Barfield agrees, is that there is only one concept of triangle (or tree) for example.   Even though we may inwardly visualize different kinds of triangles (or trees), the concept of a triangle or tree, in its pure sense is a single entity, whichever mind is doing perceiving/thinking it.  The tricky part of the question is whether or not it is factually the very same identical concept in each mind, or as the naive point of view would assert: we make the concept ourselves, and it remains private and individual.

Another way to say this is: Is a thought, in the form of an individual concept, an object - that is something distinct from my thinking I (self-consciousness)?

The discoveries of the secrets of the mind, following a modern science of the mind (perhaps using Steiner’s books as maps to this territory), will begin to reveal that thoughts are objects, in the same way there are material objects in the physical world.  This is not particularly news in certain circles, and the history of science is full of such experiences on the part of scientists, including moments when the same idea is perceived by different scientists at more or less the same historical time.

Roger Penrose in his The Emperor’s New Mind relates (as we noted before) how as a mathematician he is beginning to think mathematical truths have their own independent existence. “...I cannot help feeling that, with mathematics the case for believing in some kind of ethereal, eternal existence, at least for the more profound mathematical concepts, is a good deal stronger...” (pp. 97).

In Thomas Taylor’s early 19th Century book: The Theoretic Arithmetic of the Pathagoreans, Taylor finds the tendency in the current methods of education, regarding mathematics, to just teach geometry and arithmetic as practical arts, fails to fully appreciate what lives there.  Mathematics, in its purest forms (its theoretical forms), is to Taylor the creation of the human mind (its objects are not found in nature), but only arise from the activity of the human mind.  In that the mind can produce such perfect objects, as mathematical thought, proves that the mind (the soul in his view) is itself perfect.  Only from the already perfect can the perfect arise.  That Nature conforms to mathematical rules only shows something about the origin of mind itself.

This is similar to a problem in evolutionary biology which tends to take the view that the lesser can produce the greater - that something as rich and complicated as consciousness and self-consciousness can arise from pieces matter.  Over the years, many have had a problem with this.  Above, in my alternative to a purely material evolution this problem is resolved when we realize that the incarnating spirit, born out of super-conscious creator Beings, already possesses that which matter itself cannot create.  Only when the two arcs of evolution (one of descent and the other of ascent) are brought together, does spirit (true mind) begin then to fully inhabit matter.

With these thoughts in mind, let us return to a look at brain studies, which assume all is matter and there is no spirit.  Often what the neuro-scientist believes he sees is limited in his mind to what his instruments perceive - such as the lighting up of sections of the brain during various other operations (medical tests, psychological tests, face recognition tests, verbal acuity tests etc.).  Following this lighting up, the individual may speak, and offer the inner thought results, of the seen by instruments brain activity, via speech.  Expecting thought to arise from matter (the pre-thought thought), the scientist interprets his experiment constantly as confirmation of his theory, a problem we saw in Brady’s article about evolutionary biology that is more like a dogmatic belief than like disciplined empirical science.

Keep in mind that the scientist of consciousness still has no idea how matter produces thinking.  He only assumes it to be the case.  This unquestioned belief determines the interpretation of the experiment, not the actual data.  Moreover, the neuro-scientist excludes from his data-perception a whole range of salient facts.

We also need to note, in passing, that whole fields of related disciplines are now being applied to questions about human consciousness.  Knowledge of the chemical working of cells also contributes to our understanding.  The total realm of inquiry resonates with complicated ideas, theories and hopes.  If we look at the field of cognitive science, for example, we find there an intersection of numerous disciplines, such as: psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology, sociology and biology.   Some more edgy thinkers want to include: social and cultural factors, emotion, consciousness, animal cognition, comparative and evolutionary approaches, and even the observations of what are called qualia (meaning: subjective qualities of conscious experience).

An effort to integrate all this would be impossible, and certainly far beyond the scope of this book.  This fact requires we narrow our review, of the thinking concerning questions of consciousness as is done today in natural science, to a particular example which I hope will identify some of the more important problems.  In this regard then, let us next look at the totality of an actual experimental process as related in some more popular literature.

Following his assumption, and ignoring his own mind as a possible object of investigation, the scientist of consciousness tries to understand mind through an examination of the brains/minds  of others.  Much interesting and important work has been done in the field of brain-mapping, for example.  A typical kind of experiment in this field was recently described in a long article in the New Yorker magazine: The Eureka Hunt: why do good ideas come to us when they do? (by Jonah Lehrer).

In this experiment, the subject was attached to EEG equipment, put in an fMRI machine, shown a puzzle and asked to solve it.  When it was solved he was asked to report that fact verbally to the observing scientists.  Prior to his reporting, areas of the brain were observed to “light up” for the instruments.  The interpretation of this experiment is that this particular area of the brain solved the puzzle and then subsequently, the subject verbally reported the solution.

A causal link is assumed between the observed brain activity and the puzzle solving.  This is not directly observed, however, given the fact that for all the instrumentation applied to the situation, the relevant inward thought activity is itself not observed.  In a way it is a kind of black box experiment.  A black box basically hides from observation the essential aspect of what is going on.

The material brain is, in this case, the black box.  We know from our own experience that thinking and thoughts appear to arise in ourselves, but that process in the experimental subject remains invisible.  Regardless of how carefully the brain mapping and related experiments are undertaken, the thoughts and thinking of the experimental subject are not seen by the scientist - there is no empirical observation of that activity.  Only the subject is capable of seeing them (experiencing the thoughts).  The underlying relationship between conscious inner activity (thoughts and their production) and the material brain is assumed, and this assumption (the pre-thought thought) brings about the conclusions made regarding the meaning of the experiment.

The only place that thinking and thoughts can be empirically observed is by the thinking subject itself, when it undertakes an examination of its own content of consciousness.  Let us look once more at the form of the experiment, but expand our perception of it as I suggested far above as the only way to appreciate its real nature.  Much is overlooked.

First the thinking consciousness of the experimental scientist develops/creates the idea for the experiment.  Nothing happens without that step in thinking.  Skipping over the practical aspects of physically setting up the experiment, the second overlooked matter is that a conversation arises between the scientist and his experimental subject.  We now have two minds operating in a way such that they use language to communicate to each other.  Once the experimental subject is in place (inside the fMRI and wired up for the EEG), something is shown to the subject (a puzzle) that the subject is asked to solve.   The subject then produces the inner thinking effort to solve the puzzle, during which invisible process there appears some kind of light visible to a machine.  The visible light is produced in an instrument observing brain activity, following which the subject then relates to the scientist his solution to the puzzle.

There is no experiment without the concept of the experiment first being formed in the mind of the scientist, after which what is needed from the subject is then communicated to that subject.  The subject then acts within its own inwardness to try to solve the puzzle.  Upon completion of the experiment the subject then reports the solution to the puzzle.  None of this thinking activity of the scientist and the experimental subject is observed in a scientific or empirical fashion.  None!

The first moving cause of the end result of the experiment is in the mind of the scientist creating the experiment.  The second moving cause is the asking of the subject to engage in the puzzle solving.   The third moving cause is when the subject strives to solve the puzzle.  Only after these three causal (from whatever drives thinking) impulses are in play, does the instrument light up suggesting brain activity.  All three moving causes in the thinking of the scientist and the subject are not observed empirically.  Yet, the meaning of the whole experiment is determined by the pre-thought thought - the theory, which is that consciousness is based in matter, and the mind is only a result of the activity of the brain.  If we remove the assumption of the pre-thought thought, that all is matter and there is no spirit, what do we know?

We know that there is no experiment without the creative conceptual thinking of the scientist.  We know that there is no activity by the subject without the two minds connecting via speech, such that the scientist can communicate (all of which involves thinking processes) his request to the subject for the application of its own thought activity in the puzzle solving.  Once this agreement is in place, then we also know that there is no brain activity to be observed without the experimental subject undertaking inner activity in accord with his understanding of what is being asked, and his understanding of how within his own consciousness he solves puzzles.  The subject must inwardly act before there is brain activity to be observed by the instruments, even though that action may only be for a nanosecond.

We also know that his own conceptual process is unclear to scientist.  He, like all naive thinkers, engages in inner actions concerning which most of what goes on there is semi-conscious and not studied.   In a consciousness, rooted in a disciplined science of the mind, all conceptual processes are transparent.  The creative nature of the acts which produce the various concepts and ideas are empirically known.  The same is true of the communication process and its resulting social agreement.  Lastly the puzzle solving process is as well transparent to a self-consciousness trained in scientific self-observation.  Where does this take us?

We could say that when the scientist studies his own mind, and those processes connected to conception-creation,  then the whole nature of the experiment leaves behind its black box riddle nature.  Thinking is then known as spiritual activity (thus Steiner’s The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity).  But for the reader of this book - why should they believe any of what I am saying?

Remember then that we are engaged in developing a specific Idea of God, and then a Theory of God, and then looking for evidence of or a Proof of God, leading to a Theory of Everything.  In accord with our previous efforts I will next describe more characteristics of the yet hidden nature of thinking activity, in such a way as to eventually produce another alternative explanation of what goes on during these kinds of experiments, frequently engaged in by modern scientists of consciousness.  This explanation is to be added to our Idea of God.  It is not meant to be believed, being in its essential nature part of A Theory of God.

Thinking forms concepts.  This is exactly what Darwin did in proposing his Theory of Evolution, and centering it on the idea of Survival of the Fittest.  Everyone does this, we just mostly sleep through it.  Like the fish doesn’t notice the water in which it swims, the self-consciousness doesn’t really appreciate its own conceptual activity.

The young man who went to the party, formed his concepts of the girl he was attracted to on the basis of what his friend told him.   That is, the meaning of what he observed was created inwardly in his own consciousness, yet at the suggestion of another self-conscious mind, which did not in fact know what it was talking about.  People who are playing with what they call the science of memes, believe that concepts and ideas move from mind to mind through social intercourse.  They instinctively want to treat these memes as having a kind of independent existence, given how they seem to travel from one mind to another.

Self observation, however, reveals that a concept is always formed in my own consciousness, even though I may be stimulated by language communications, such as words and terms.  To appreciate this fact we just have to recall how often we misunderstand each other.  This happens in families and in other close relationships all the time.  We frequently don’t mean the same things, even though we often use the same words and terms.  Two people attracted to each other will not mean the same thing when using a highly abstract word such as love, for example.

We individualize meaning all the time, and for a very interesting discourse on the larger significance of this, read Barfield’s Speaker’s Meaning.

For most naive thinkers, concept formation can frequently occur when they meet someone new.  Immediately we tend to like or dislike them, and borne upward on these reactive feelings we will make judgments about them, such as to their character and so forth.  People we already know tend to be enveloped in already (pre-thought thoughts) formed judgments.  Having made those in the past, we usually treat these individuals according to that past understanding.

In many situations, we may have a need for people to do something for us, and this too will involve concept formation about how to get from them what we want.  Life constantly brings it about that we create concepts.

Another example: In certain employment disciplines, the need for concept formation is intensified by the demands of the job.  Our thinking is believed to be owned in a kind of way by the boss, and in highly technical and innovative situations, the boss (whether a computer corporation, or a university) will force us to sign an agreement whereby they own our conceptual creations.

Necessity is the mother of invention is the folk wisdom.  Where does invention and innovation come from?

This is an especially difficult problem for the materialistic mind sciences, given that concept creation means thinking has produced something new.  If mind is just working or worrying with prior concepts, this is less of a problem.  But when something new comes, how did that happen?  How does matter create something never before thought?

We have in our ordinary language the use of the term “grasp”, to signify when our mind has understood something - we grasped someones meaning.  We have this experience of taking hold of a concept or idea.  The experimental subjects in the Eureka Hunt had to solve puzzles.  What is happening in the mind when we try to do something like this - not the brain, the mind.

Roger Penrose said explicitly that certain mathematical ideas seemed to experience to be independent of the mind.  Rebecca Goldstein in her work on Godel: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, considers him (as well as Einstein) to be neo-Platonists (holders of the view that ideas have an independent existence).  Here are a couple of interesting quotes by spiritual teachers I have studied:

The Tibetan Lama Chogyam Trungpa, in his book Meditation in Action, in the Chapter on Transmission, writes about the true spiritual meeting between the guru and the student as follows:  Something just opens, there is a kind of flash, and that’s all.  Although one sees it described in books as “great bliss” or “mahamudra” or “the awakened state of mind”, or “satori” -  all sorts of titles and names are given,.  But somehow the actual moment is very simple, very direct.  There is merely a meeting of two minds.  Two minds become one.

Or the Western spiritual teacher, Franz Bardon, in his book Initiation into Hermetics in the section The Mental Plane: “ ... the mental sphere is the sphere of thoughts which have their origin in  the world of ideas, consequently in the spiritual akasha.  Each thought is preceded by a basic idea which, according to its property, accepts a definite form and arrives to the consciousness of the ego through the etheric principle, consequently the mental matrix, as expression of the thought in the shape of a plastic picture.”

Weird? ... or not?

Recall now Steiner and Emerson: Thought is the last of a series of processes by which Nature is formed (Steiner); and Nature is a thought incarnate and turns to thought again, as ice becomes water and then gas.  The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping into the state of free thought (Emerson).

What happens, according to our Theory of God, in the above experiment?   The spirit (self-consciousness) of the scientist conceives the idea of the experiment.  Via a social (mind to mind) agreement, the spirit of the scientist asks the spirit of the subject that it attempt to solve (by thinking) a puzzle, and then tell the scientist the puzzle is solved.  While the puzzle is being solved, the will of the subject is focused on this task.  We can note in other situations, that the focus of the will in specific regions of the body will increase blood flow to that region, as well as a kind of heat or warmth connected to the increased activity of the ego during its focus or attentiveness to that region.

When the will is focused for puzzle solving, given that we all assume it is the head/brain that is thinking, part of the attention of the subject is focused on the head region of the  body.  This will, in a like fashion to the above, increase blood flow to regions of the brain.  Regions of the brain will light up to the instruments as a result of this activity of the focus of the attention (an aspect of the will in thinking).

Brain scan pictures tend not to be live, that is in movement, but instead are individual shots like a camera can make, but not movie pictures like a cam-corder makes.  We take snap shots of brain activity, but can’t yet take real time constant moving pictures of brain activity.  We also have to use a lot of different kinds of techniques in order grasp with different instruments different aspects.   Given that conventional thinking, with its pre-thought thought assumptions that permeates the point of view of the  whole field of brain studies, we could legitimately say that the accepted dogma rules this discourse, in the same way Brady showed that the accepted dogma in evolutionary biology ruled that discourse.

Now after the puzzle is solved, the spirit of the experimental subject engages the brain in order to speak to the scientist and relate (communicate once more mind to mind) that the puzzle has been solved.  The instruments light up then as well in their observations of the brain, when the thinking subject has to use the body in order to speak to the other mind (or self-conscious spirit).  The brain is not the mind, but the physical organ by which the spirit takes hold of the physical body.  Conceiving, agreeing and solving are spiritual acts connected to the activity of the thinking spirit, and the brain is only needed when actions or intercourse between the spiritual and the physical is required, which is why the brain lights up just prior to speech.

The central difficulty for the naive thinker, and for the practitioner of modern consciousness sciences, is the degree of sleep in which we are embraced as regards what actually happens in our own mind.  Not awake and unfree (captured by the pre-thought thought) in our mind, we don’t see the totality of the experiment which has to include, in the description of its effects and its nature, mature representations (mental pictures, generalized concepts, pure concepts and ideas) of the real nature of our cognitive activity as it effects the experiment.

Once introspection’s empirical observations of the nature of mind are added to the description of the totality of the experiment, the presence of the spiritual will be undeniable.  All the same, let us not be naive here.  Nothing is going to change overnight.   This book will have little immediate effect, if it has any effect at all.  The points of view and dogmas of scientific materialism move forward with a great deal of social and psychological momentum, and will continue for a long time on into the future.

Before returning to a deeper description of what can be discovered on the path of the modern mind science, rooted in Steiner’s books on the problem of knowledge, let us once again consider certain general observations of human social life (its a theory of Everything, remember!), as belong to our coming understanding.

the appearance of the free moral individual
in human social-political life

In an old-world village in Central Europe, over four hundred years ago, the community consisted of many very large families.  Lots of parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins, and brothers and sisters - all related by ties of blood (we moderns would say: similar genetic inheritance).  There was also a strong division according to class distinctions, with the aristocrats holding a certain position of dominance over most of the population, except for the officials of the Roman Catholic Church - the Church having used its powers of denial of the Eucharist and other ways of public condemnation (accusations of heresy, witchcraft and so forth), to protect itself (to some degree) from the overreaching of the aristocratic classes.

The two powers, the aristocrats and the Church authorities, managed a kind of delicate and often only temporary peace.  Beneath these powers, the ordinary people, mostly serfs and peasants, farmed the land providing the food, and provided the servants, soldiers, and the priests and nuns as needed to those who held them in a kind of bondage: one more physical (threat of a sword chopping off your head), and the other more spiritual (denial of the host and other forms of moral condemnation).

At a certain point, various craft guilds had developed systems of apprenticeship, such that the many children (usually over a dozen, with only part of these surviving birth and early childhood) were born into each family, having only certain kinds of limited life choices.   The elder sons might inherit the right to rent lands for farming, and if not that then they could become priests or soldiers and apprentices in craft guilds.  These craft guilds were the precursors of the coming merchant classes, from which the middle class we know of today was to emerge.

Women could become nuns, but mostly they were expected to marry and bear children.  Hardly anyone was taught to read or do numbers.

Each village also had one basic culture - that is one language, and one religion, such that their form of figuration (semi-conscious thinking) was tightly bound up in the local traditions.

Into this more pastoral culture (more people lived in villages in rural areas, than lived in larger cities) was to come the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Copernican revolution, and the industrial revolution (not to leave out the constant wars among the aristocrats).

This caused several changes in our general human existence in this area of the Earth, during this time.  The moral traditions tied to the Church were breaking down - they no longer dominated human thinking.  The family, with the industrial revolution, began to lose the father who now was drawn from the farm and toward the factory.  Cities grew increasingly larger, so that workers could be housed for the new industries.  Concentrations of wealth shifted from the aristocrats, to an emerging financial and economic elite in the growing banking and merchant classes.

If we move forward in time to New York City on the cusp of the 19th to the 20th centuries, we find the former still somewhat large families, previously locked into villages, now living in neighborhoods.   A major difference is the nearby association of other languages and other cultural traditions.  Jews were next to Irish were next to Germans were next to Italians, and so on.  Hardly any public school yet, but lots of ways leading to intermarriage across the previous lines of cultural and language traditions.

Fast forward now to Los Angeles in the latter parts of the 20th Century.  Large ethnic neighborhoods, such as Black and Latino, and even sometimes Asian.  Most individuals, however, going to the same schools, and in public at least, using the same language.  Religion is not nearly as powerful anymore, yet Churches are everywhere - they are just no longer strictly hierarchical.  The whites (the former Jews, and Irish and Germans and Italians) having fled the inner core of the Cities, now live in suburbs, in what are essentially mass produced housing, yet which give their apparent owners, in a weird sense, their own Castle (a man’s home is his castle).

The new aristocrats of wealth are out of sight.  A well paid political and media class has interposed itself between these hidden rulers and the ruled.  Yet, on a functional level dominance still exists, and the sons and the daughters still provide soldiers for wars, and apprentices in the more evolved modern guild crafts (such as lawyers, doctors, accountants, middle managers), as well as homemakers and mothers.  Property ownership is believed to be a fact, but the reality is that the bank is the one that owns the home and a mortgage is just a more complicate way to pay rent.

For all this, however, the most significant change is in our ideas of what this all means.

With the collapse of the old-world village and the gradual shift to an inner core and outer rim in the vastly larger cities, the choices the young have have multiplied.  The son is not so likely to follow in the footsteps of the father, and the daughter not so likely to follow in the footsteps of the mother.  Our sex still makes certain social roles necessary, but even that is being questioned.

Previously the community and the family determined what could be thought.  Mostly we had in the past a deep kind of figuration (all meaning was embedded in our semi-consciousness), with little independent reflection and theorizing.  This somewhat moral power of the social to determine the content of thought finally broke down completely in the 1960‘s in America, first in small numbers when there was a shift about morals, from the more social idea of “do the right thing” - right being defined as what the family and community thought - to “do your own thing”, where instead the individual was to self-determine what the right thing to do was.

Now the breaking of this social tsunami-like wave over and covering and destroying older traditions was not a sundering of something like a knife would do to a piece of fruit, because it happened gradually over time.   The family itself dissolves into smaller and smaller units, leading eventually to the tiny family which was in the 1950‘s being called the nuclear family.  In addition the community, as a tight organism claiming the right to demand social conformance, also waned as people lived less and less in villages and culturally defined neighborhoods. and more and more in places where neighbors were virtual strangers, and the only sameness might be the color of ones skin.

Within this dissolution of the moral conforming power of the community and family, taking several hundred years to accomplish, the individual was more and more free to engage in self-expression.

Barfield, in his remarkable History in English Words, writes of the increasing interiorization of certain aspects of consciousness, such that up until two or three hundred years ago, the word “self” was not used in the way I just used it (self-expression).  Language, writes Barfield, reflects in the changes of the meaning (expansion and contraction) of words, changes in consciousness, because only the change in consciousness can produce the need for new meaning driving these changes in language.  As human beings in Western culture more and more individualized, and became freer for self-expression, and also experienced themselves more dynamically as even having an interior life, language had to acquire new capacities, and in the above book Barfield traces these changes in the most delightful and informative way.

The self-expressive individual now threatens the family, if one clings to a traditional view of family and morals.  We see this fact then reflected in the assertion of the existence of the family values crisis and the so-called culture wars, as constantly proclaimed by the trailing edge of social change - the traditionally religious.

When I grew up, being described as an individualist was a pejorative - a defect.  Todays child would find that not being an individual was a kind of madness.  If you want to see the effects of this explosive and expanding rise of the individual creative nature, just spend some time watching YouTube.

In order to shorten our socially descriptive language needs, let us call this total process from old world village to modern individualism: the self-creative process.  Even the dictator in Africa, or the overbearing protestant preacher, or the cheating movie star, or the greedy banker, are all expressing this self-creative process.  As we noted above, in reflecting on how we today act out of our likes and dislikes thereby creating social friction (the Baptism by Fire), this self-creative process dominates the underlying psycho-spiritual dynamics of current history.

The deepest push for social change comes from the inside of the individual human being.  Its total dynamics are just spread out over centuries, in terms of the social effects, with each next generation contributing something new to the whole simmering social-political stew.

Now this self-creating process acts upon the Stage Setting in different ways.  There are two dominant kinds of generalized social-formative processes worthy of note: a radiating-pushing process (mostly connected to acts of individuals), and a suctional-sculpting process, which results from a kind of undertow of the total macro-social -functioning as a kind of weight.  What early thinking called the masses, actually acts as a massive resistance that effectually forms something in the social.

A typical radiating-pushing process is of the kind that historians mostly notice.  A good example is the life of Alexander the Great.  His activity radiated all manner of effects into the social world of his time, when he conquered much of the former Persian Empire and large parts of the Asian-Indian realms.  In doing this he spread the vibrant creative culture of Hellenism eastward from Macedonia.

By the time the Roman Empire arose, Hellenism as a dominating political force was much weaker than it had been with Alexander, such that the spread of Hellenism (ancient Greek culture) arose among the Romans only by their making slaves of the Greeks.   At the same time, an educated Greek was often a very wise and intelligent person, and many aristocratic Romans had as personal advisors these educated and wise Greeks.  In this way, but through the expanding Roman Empire, whispers of Hellenism spread to the West and elsewhere.  We sometimes forget, for example, that Cleopatra was not an Egyptian, but a Macedonian.  Again, basically a social radiating process.

A classical example of a suctional-sculpting process is found today in modern Africa.  The masses of people share certain characteristic needs and flaws.  Individualism is yet weaker (the individualistic self-creative process is like a wave front in world social processes and does not all arrive everywhere at the same time.), and often the social power of the group is stronger (see the documentary film: The Lost Boys). 

Recall from far above the metaphor of the train and the tracks.  Procreation impulses require sexual intercourse, but these impulses, while necessary for new physical bodies to be created, can also be carried out in less than purely moral ways.  The dominance of the female by the male is still a cultural norm in large parts of Africa.   The mother is still expected to bear children and take care of the hearth and home.   The father either farms, works in the cities or goes to war.   The influence of the over-reaching of the greed-driven free market ideas of the capitalist countries, inhibits in Africa the development of a proper political and cultural life.

In this social matrix a kind of cultural ignorance arises, for even though we can think that we live in the same time (the number of the year we agree to for economic purposes, such as 2012), the so-called third world is not just less advanced (which is a kind of way of falsely seeing it as dysfunctional), but the fact is that the biographies of many of those present requires a less intellectually sophisticated culture, one more driven by primary needs, and redeemed by deeply felt heart forces (again see The Lost Boys).  It is the massive array of primary needs that dominates much of Africa, and becomes a suctional-sculpting force in the structure of the Stage Setting in that place and time.

One of the dominate ways in which culture advances is what happens when something is absent, especially if this absence happens in the presence of the possibility of an alternative.  The kind of individual freedom we prize in the West, and which is on display in our arts of music and film and television, becomes then in the souls of people, who do not have this individual freedom, a necessary hunger.  Again this is a suctional sculpting social force, driving the individuals in those cultures to yearn for what is noticed as being absent, and a particularly good example of this process is the previously noted effect on Russia and Eastern Europe of Rock ‘n Roll (with its ideas of individual freedom).

This suctional force is a kind of drag on the capacity of dominating radiating forces (dictators, Western economic imperialists and the like) to form the social totally to their view of things - drag in this sense being a socially weighted resistance.   Some of us in the cultural West, see this boiling social stew pot that is Africa, and compare it to our own way of life, and wish for the African something better.   We need to ask whether or not those biographies living in these conditions might be getting precisely what they need.

As long as we assume no reincarnation and no afterlife Divine Justice, we will believe something is horribly wrong.  That belief is actually important to our own biographies to the extent that we empathetically identify with the members of the so-called third world (an African, for example) and out of this feeling seek to help.  The Rolling Stones had a very interesting song, with this line: “you don’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you’ll get what you need”.  Remember, wisdom and creativity are distributed.

The divinely created World multi-tasks.  More than one thing is happening at the same linear time, but which from the point of view of Eternity, is both simultaneous and sequential.  At the same time it would be idiotic to assert that the oppressed want to be oppressed.  What an incarnating spirit wants, and needs and will actually have in their biography is far too complicated (and personal/individual), for us to make judgments concerning.  This is why above I urged the reader to concentrate their objective powers of empirical observation on their own biography first, before even beginning to believe we know enough to risk an evaluation the biography of a Thou.

Certain social processes play a larger role than we otherwise assume.  Above I mentioned Rock ‘n Roll and its effect on Russia and Eastern Europe leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall.  If we were to understand the different parts of the Earth, in their essential soul/spiritual nature at a cultural level, we can begin to see that what presently radiates out of America into the wider world are both catabolic (destructive) and anabolic (upbuilding) forces - simultaneously.

Some will decry the materialism spreading out from America, as well as the cruel and insensitive (and deeply irresponsible and selfish) economic policies that ravage and rape the Third World.  America’s consumer culture is falsely imitated, and its banking and corporate elites have stolen too much of what really belongs to others.  At the same time, at the level of Art, American culture has much to give.

Having pioneered film, American culture has precipitated (through imitation) a new generation of filmmakers in the Third World, telling its stories.  World culture needs the transmission and social intercourse this film-dialog creates.  This dialog follows one other that began with the radiating outward  emanation of Rock ‘n Roll, which then led to the Third World responding with World Beat, such that this response then led to American Hip Hop and so forth.   At a cultural creative level, especially now with individual music and videos on YouTube, the whole world engages in Artistic conversation.

This may seem to be disorganized, but it is not.  It is full of order, but that order comes from another place.  It comes from the inside of the developing human being.  It arises from naturally occurring synergistic effects and the rule of 6 degrees of separation.  It is the positive side of “I come not to bring peace, but a sword”.  This order stands outside the older and now dysfunctional hierarchical ways of organizing the world, typified by top down corporate social forms.  The real new world order is to be circle-like, not pyramidal.  It is communion with, not dominion over.

The older order will not go easily away.  The Past clings to its powers and privileges.  Being already dominant, it has the illusion it can continue to dominate.   However, its mode of operation in seeking continued domination involves increasing social control.  The problem with that approach is that the human spirit is irrepressible.  We can make here a useful analogy with the physical laws governing fluid dynamics.

Fluids are incompressible - that is they can’t be crushed.  Because they are fluidic, pressure causes them to leak through any place that is open to them.  Older brake systems on cars work on this principle as well as the flight control systems of most airplanes.  The same with the human spirit.   The more the lingering and dying hierarchical corporate social forms try to control through social pressures, the more the spirit will find its way outside these rigid structures.  The more the older structures become increasingly rigid (that is hardened, as in sclerotic), the sooner will death come to these already dying social forms).

History shows that ultimately oppression (social control) always fails.  For details on what those consciously pursuing communion with can do, from certain points of view, read my Counter-Moves: finding Victory in the War the Rich are making on the Poor (which is included in the appendix of my Uncommon Sense: the Degeneration, and the Redemption, of Political Life in America).

Here is the contents page of Uncommon Sense, as was done above with other books of mine in recognition of the vast total complexity of what we are trying to understand and assess:

the reader can skip this and easily treat it as a footnote, not needing to be read

table of contents

Introduction: anticipating the whole (page 4)

Section One - Degeneration

Part One: The Betrayal of the Left, and of the whole of American Politics, by the Democratic Party

Part Two: The Betrayal of the Republic, the Constitution and the American People, by the Republican Party

Section Two - Redemption

Part One: Rediscovering true Democratic and Republican Virtues within the Idea of Citizen Governance

Part Two: America as Mystery

Part Three: A Pragmatic Solution to the American Dilemma - writing a Second American Constitution. This section includes an updated version of the Declaration of Independence

Section Three - The Real Power of Citizenship, both as an American and as a Citizen of the World

Appendices: elaborations of certain particular themes

Appendix A: Money and Debt: the Company Store in the 21st Century

Appendix B: Citizen Governance

Appendix C: Renewal Groups

Appendix D: Civil Society

Appendix E: The original Declaration revised

Appendix F: Some material about the author, Joel A. Wendt

Appendix G: a wonderful contribution by the author of Babylon Five

Appendix H: Counter-Moves

Appendix I: Jim Garrison’s summation at the Clay Shaw trial concerning the JFK assassination (from the public record).

Appendix J: Dennis Burke’s Eulogy to Granny D. (Doris) Haddock

return to main theme

interlude and recapitulation

Where are we?

The main thrust of this book has been to take a look at the apparent disagreements between Science and Religion, in such a way as to do no violence to either approach to the world.  The mode of accomplishing this was to approach the larger question of the existence of God, in a scientific way, by first laying out a Theory of God, as an alternative explanation of the nature and source of human existence to that provided by the Idea of the Big Bang and the Theory of Evolution.

To create this Theory of God, however, required a complete restatement of the Idea of God, from that with which we are historically familiar.  This is a very complicated task, given all that has to be included, because the logical extension of a valid new Idea of God and a systematic Theory of God, would lead to a quite different Theory of Everything.

Various themes then needed to be explored, many having to begin with a more superficial discussion than would later be the case.  In a way we have spiraled around the various themes, returning to them over and over again, each time trying to deepen our appreciation of what are the fundamental issues being examined.

An important aspect of the Whole concerned the idea that there is not only matter to take account of,  but spirit as well.  In a way the spiraling themes are a bit like the double helix of the DNA strand, one spiral being what is known in materialistic science concerning matter and the other spiral being what is yet unknown about spirit, but apparent once we empirically investigate the true nature of mind.

An important and valid question concerns the problem of evidence and proof.  During most of the course of the above discussion, I have only offered alternative explanations of various phenomena already thought to be understood by science.  I had pointed out that what is known empirically is not the same as our theoretical formulations.   Theories are rooted in empirical facts, but are not the same as such facts.   Theories are in fact creations of the human mind, which is why our studies of the mind are so crucial.

For this reason then the developing Theory and Idea of God was made more complex by the inclusion of alternative explanations of the same empirical facts with which science is already familiar.  These alternative explanations are not meant to be either evidence or proof of anything, as much as they are meant to demonstrate that the same set of facts can be explained in alternative ways.  Our minds are not limited to the explanations of empirical facts so far presented by the theories of natural science.

In particular I tried to inform the reader of the problem of the pre-thought thought.  Once the mind of the scientist is captured by his unchecked assumptions and his fascination with the explanatory power of his theories, all new empirical research is then interpreted in the light of these pre-existing conclusions (for details, see the aforementioned: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn).  All of this work with assumptions, theories and the resulting pre-existing conclusions takes place in the mind of the scientist (and as well the cultural apologists for science, many of whom begin already with an anti-religious bias).  Examples of these attitudes are to be found in the books, by Harris - The End of Faith et al.; Dawkins - The God Delusion; and Hitchens - god is not Great; mentioned far above.

The reader needs also to realize that it is not my intention to defend traditional religious doctrine, either.  In bringing up the matter of the black-sheep cousins of the major religions (Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Yoga, Sufism, Kabballah, Christian Hermeticism, modern Alchemy, and Anthroposophy), I intended to point to the fact that humanity has a long tradition of sciences of the mind, which modern scientists of consciousness seem to want to pretend does not exist.

Earlier I put forward Ronald Brady’s remarkable examination (Dogma and Doubt) of the underlying philosophy of science problems with Darwin’s Natural Selection. There Brady shows conclusively that not only are many formulations of the Theory of Evolution tautological, but also that no scientist has yet formulated that Theory in a way that it can be tested or falsified. This is particularly true as to the major question concerning whether or not random evolutionary pressures can produce speciation - that is just how the dinosaurs become birds, how the fishes become mammals, or the higher apes become huminoids.  The Theory of Evolution can’t presently be tested or falsified as to how evolution actually produces a differentiation of species.  Since it can’t be formulated in such a way that its essential beliefs can be tested, it is not a good Theory - we need a better one, which by the way I am offering in this book.

We have a similar problem in the conventional mind sciences, when it comes to the question of how does the material brain produce consciousness.  No one knows, and so far no one even seems any longer to consider the absence of an explanation a problem.  Most everyone just assumes that the brain produces thought and thinking, consciousness and self-consciousness.  Again I make alternative explanations, but not as evidence or proof, but rather as Idea.  If we start to add the Idea of Spirit to the Idea of Matter, where do we end up?

We end up explaining a lot of what is presently unexplained.  But the explanatory power of the Idea and Theory of God is not enough, if we use Brady’s work as the justifiable philosophical standard that it is.   The Theory of God (or the Theory of Everything) must be able to be stated in a non-tautological fashion, and as well in a fashion that can be tested and/or falsified.  Only then do we have a good theory.

So, for example, near the end of my discussion of Brady’s work, I offered a sample formulation of one of this book’s central themes: The macro-social organism, in which human biographies take place, is the causal result of the Artistic activity of God.

Careful reading of Brady’s essay, however, reveals that most Theories contain other theories, for the world is complicated and our existential reality has to be sought in diverse ways.  The sample above is meant only to be an indication, for when we get fully into the problem of evidence and proof there will have to be multiple formulations of the various aspects of the Idea and Theory of God - the matter is otherwise too complex to try to render it in any kind of simple way.

In this direction we will go next, although for the moment we will continue to examine the nature of mind, given its central importance in the whole work ...

additional aspects of the nature of thought and thinking

Thinking generally has an object, that is it is about something.  The scientist thinks about the stars, the mother about her child, the worker about his back pain.  We, as a self-conscious thinking subject, think about the object of our attention.

In the normal course of a day, the variety of subjects can be enormous.  Our attention wanders all over the place, unless we are worrying a particular question or riddle.  The necessities of life mostly drive and/or determine where the attention is focused.  Get out of bed, take a shower, wake the children, make the breakfast, drive to work, fear the boss, go to the bathroom, day dream at our desk, wonder about the coming weekend.

Naive or ordinary thinking is mostly discursive in nature - we inwardly talk to ourselves.  The mother in the kitchen yells at the rowdy children in the living room: “Stop making so much noise, I can’t hear myself think!”.  Were we to be more carefully observant here, we would notice that the self-consciousness (spirit) speaks, via the inner voice, into the general inner field of consciousness (the soul).  This discursive inner dialog, a kind of background inner silent mumbling and rumination, is not the main focus of our attention.   The focus of our attention is on the object about which we are thinking, not on the thinking itself, although reading, with its sub-vocalization is somewhat more conscious.

The mother in the above example, was not thinking about her thinking, she was, let us assume, thinking about her marriage.  Perhaps in one given moment she is remembering something from the past of the marriage, and in another given moment she is having a fantasy about something better arising in the marriage.  Maybe there was an argument last night, some unkind words were said by her husband, and she is still involved in the related hurt feelings.  The total content of the field of consciousness is huge, and the discursive element only one part of this totality.  Just as the outer world calls to the attention (the rowdy children, the dishes needed doing, the shopping required later), the inner world of memories and feelings can also call to our attention.

Recall once more Barfield’s: figuration, reflection and theorizing as kinds of thinking.  Our mother’s attention here moves from one mode to another semi-consciously, all in accord with her moods and her needs.  Suppose her cell phone rings, and her sister calls.  Depending on why the sister called, her attention will move again to another object of thought.  Sometimes her sister is a needy pill, and other times her love of her sister causes her to forget all her own troubles and to worry over the sister’s troubles instead.

So the mother sits down at the kitchen table, starts to sip her coffee and listen (lend an ear) to her sister’s needs.  This is actually good - this shift of attention - for at helps her forget her own troubles.   They talk, they share.  Something remarkable happens for both, for the talking is a kind of therapy - the sharing a kind of release.

 

Women do something here men normally do not do - emotional sharing, although almost all marriages need this.  For men, with each other, conversation tends to be an extension of the compulsive competition taught to them in childhood.   Stories are told, each meaning to top the other.   There are whole books written on this theme (c.f. Deborah Tannen: You just don’t understand: men and women in conversation).

During this conversation a kind of spiritual communion arises, although neither sister will label it that way.   The two separated self-conscious spirits identify with each other deeply for moments and this identification is the essence of healing spiritual communion.  Classical talk therapy is rooted in this aspect of human reality.  Sub-consciously thinking about something shifts to thinking with someone, carried by the feeling of sympathy.   However briefly and semi-consciously, I and Thou notice (attend to) each other’s existential reality in a deeper way.

In the course of this conversation, thinking discursively will still bounce around, although it will often emerge from the inwardness fully into speech - a kind of thinking aloud.  Moments of reflection (what does it all mean) will alternate with moments of theorizing (gossip, for example).

Two other kinds of thinking activity may appear: comparative discriminating thinking and associative thinking.   In comparative thinking, one object of thought is distinguished from another, generally in some kind of value context: this is better (in some way) than that (for details on the relationship of this to the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, read my this and that, an essay on my website.)

So the sisters discuss the relative value of their individual husbands’ behavior in bed, or as sensitive and otherwise romantic men (see my Seven Dates: erotica transcending for more on this theme).  During the conversation, an associative thought may arise - some bit of recent memory, for example, that leads to a story being told.  The mind (self-conscious spirit) here is not separating, as in noticing different levels of value, but instead joining - noticing a relationship between different objects of thought.  Comparative thinking tends to separate, and associative thinking tends to join together.

Both are results of the latent semi-conscious feelings of antipathy and sympathy that often serve as drivers for the thinking (written about far above as regards the creation of social friction).   Although either antipathy or sympathy may be a cause of separating or joining, the tendency is for comparative thinking to usually be driven by antipathetic feelings (disliking) while the associative thinking is often based on sympathetic feelings (liking).

What’s the point, you might well say?

In a science of the mind, we discover these types of thinking (discursive, comparative and associative as well as figuration, reflection and theorizing).   Their discovery leads us to recognizing the role played by feelings as regards the thinking - our inward empirical studies of our mind can lead to a deeper appreciation for how a feeling may, or may not, drive a thought.

These thought processes (there are more than these), are not usually separate from each other, although their empirical perception then naturally leads to experimentation.  Knowing the existence of these inner processes leads to discovering how to consciously will them - how, as Steiner put it, to learn to control thoughts and thinking.  Am I stuck in discursive thinking?  Can the focus of my attention maintain a state of associative thinking for a long period of time?  What value, if I learn to do it on purpose instead of instinctively, is there in comparative thinking, reflection or theorizing?

In order to control thoughts in all cases, do I need to learn some mastery of my feeling life?  Do my emotions drive me, or can I learn to ride the horse of their powers in my own inwardness?  Does anger, for example, always have to lead to violence, or harsh and terrible words?

Is there an even deeper place within - a place where almost completely unconscious motives live?  Suppose I am jealous of my partner in our shared scientific practices.  He, to my comparative thinking, is better than me at what we do, seemingly together.   Seeking a way forward, I plot to harm his work and elevate my own.  I imagine how to do this (picture thinking, instead of abstract thinking - two more kinds - or modes - of thinking).  My motive is raw, but not angry or hot.  It is base, but cold.  I plot, rather than blindly strike out.  I’ve made a moral choice, not for the good by the way.

What is the relationship between the objects of thought and the moral (good or evil) imperatives that drive them from my deepest willed inwardness?  The at one time student of Rudolf Steiner, Valentin Tomberg, in his remarkable book on Christian Hermeticism, Meditations on the Tarot, speaks of “learning to think on your knees” - of a kind of thinking that is devotional, and whose purpose is to benefit the Thou, not to harm him or her.

Many of us instinctively know how to do this - to think on our knees.   We just don’t do it on purpose, intending it consciously.   What happens is we care about someone, who has become the object of our thought and thinking.  Parent and child.  Teacher and student.  Child and elder parent.  Marriage partners.  Siblings.   Stranger others we serve at the homeless shelter.

Choosing to care guides our thinking about, and may in many instances change it to thinking with (instinctive empathy).  Selfishness and selflessness produce different kinds of thoughts.  Moreover, I can do these intentionally if I learn to awaken inwardly.

Suppose I am at work, and a particular individual vexes me (I have antipathies toward them, and they toward me).  We often have friction with each other.  When I think about them I am unhappy.  If I took hold of my thinking, on purpose, and changed it intentionally from thinking-about to thinking-with, I will have different thoughts concerning how I relate to them.  I can’t change them, but (as Gandhi pointed out) I can change myself.  Thinking-with them will increase my understanding of who they are, and perhaps give intuitive insight as to how to relate to them in a new way.  Remember, Christ ends His discussion of the mote and the beam in the Sermon on the Mount this way: "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye”.

When the new science of the mind (anthroposophy as a path of cognition) matures in the individual, two more evolved kinds of thinking arise (evolved out of the underlying modes discussed above): these are organic thinking and pure thinking.  Figuration, reflection, theorizing, discursive, comparative, associative, hot, cold, about, with, selfish, selfless, abstract, pictorial and so forth become organized into something new.   The self-conscious spirit forms thinking in a new way, which becomes called: living thinking.

The root foundation of a fully willed thinking bases itself on clearly and consciously chosen moral ideas or ideals.  We think for a specific reason - a quite definite why.  Our thinking serves others, not ourselves.

In organic thinking we are thinking about, with, within and as, something living - that is the object of thinking is alive.  Note I have added to thinking-about and thinking-with, something additional: thinking-within and thinking-as.  In my essay near the end of this book, In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship, I write carefully and exactly about how one can transform thinking - bring about its metamorphosis - on purpose, consciously.  Each stage of this process involves a renunciation - a sacrifice, and the addition of an intention with which to guide the attention.  For organic thinking, its object is the living elements of existence, and the full metamorphosis is not essential - organic thinking is a part or stage of a longer Path.

There is more, but before going there, I want first to revisit an earlier theme once more, - this time aided by our deeper appreciation of the nature of thinking and of thought and of the mind.

social life, in the biography, as a creative invention:

- the self-conscious spirit as an artist in life -

Recall above where I wrote that the creative spirit of the what-is is distributed.  We also recognized that the progress of social transformation is driven in large part by interiorization, and individuation, such that we gave the name self-creative process to the inward evolution of consciousness process by which old-world village family life dissolves into the modern nuclear family, and ultimately the modern individual.

We noted in passing that this wave front of change moves through the total sphere of earth existence over time, and does not arise everywhere at once.  Let us examine this in more detail.

Different societies exhibit different phenomena here.  Major cities in the Western democracies will have many people living alone, particularly if they are culturally Western.  In Europe, for example, recent immigrant peoples will tend to live still in family groups, or even just in collectives - many people in the same house or apartment.   In America, similar phenomena can be seen.  Those not yet fully Americanized will associate with family and friends in a more dense living arrangement.  In Eastwood’s film Gran Torino, a single elderly white man, rejecting his own children, lives alone (his wife of many years has passed).   His next door neighbors are Hmong (people from the Asian mountains in China, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam), and they live many people to a house.   Even the Hmong gang members, who bring so much trouble in the film, live together.

There is a relationship between these living arrangements and the inward consciousness of the individuals conforming to them.  We could say that individualism (self-creation), eventually runs into a social limit.  At the same time, this self-creative process, in terms of the macro-Earth social life, is in many different stages of development everywhere.  Eastwood’s film above illustrates that these different stages can exist side by side, and fruitfully interact.

Certain regions of the whole social-Earth sphere have different concentrations of free self-creation present.  America is the most concentrated place for this activity, which results in very specific social-cultural potentials and responsibilities (See Ben-Aharon’s America’s Global Responsibility*).

*[Although, that book is a bit academic, and not much use for more ordinary American thinking - Ben-Aharon, in the future should he wish to speak more to certain basic American sentiments, might first want to watch some movies, perhaps Kevin Costner’s American-spirit trilogy: Field of Dreams;  Dances with Wolves; and, The Postman (in that order).  This can give us a deeper sense of the real heart-nature of the American Character.  For example, a good ”reading” of the character that Eastwood plays in Gran Torino, will find all manner of sentiments, as revealed in an archetypal fashion in those Kevin Costner movies, living in this film’s representation of an iconic American individualist.]

Every region in the world is different, as is even each small locale.  People living out of different stages of consciousness, as regards the appearance of this self-creating impulse, will often have difficulty understanding each other, even if they live next door to each other, or are in the same family.  In America we even once gave a name to one kind of observation of this problem: the generation gap.

Generalized statements about specific regions will break down when we look at the details.  At the same time, social activists world-wide recognize in each other something of this new generative self-creation process.  Above in the section just last on thinking, we discussed how, in our deepest inwardness, moral questions arise, such that eventually our moral motives become socially significant in their impact.  The process of economic globalization, and the stitching together of widely separated people via the Internet, produces macro-social effects - of both the radiating-pushing kind and the suctional-sculpting kind.  A kind of moral global war has broken out between self-interested corporate powers and thou-interested social activists.  (c.f. Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken)

At the same time, while it might be a nice diversion to enter into a discussion of global politics and economic theories (Ben-Aharon’s book  above does an outstanding job there, by the way), in this book on The Art of God, we have different purposes.  The Divine Mystery seems to make a clear distinction between the Stage Setting (global politics) and the drama of the individual biography.  The latter is the essential object of Divine Love, while the former is the incidental Scenery in which the latter takes its course.  As Ben-Aharon notes, however, more and more of the Scenery (political and economic structure) is being re-designed by the thou-interested social activist.

In my book the Way of the Fool, I chart the coming course in Western Culture of the religious development of the self-creating individual from a condition of spiritual childhood, to a condition of spiritual adulthood.  While that is a valid general statement, in individual cases the whole thing is more nuanced.  Let us look then, once more, at the inner biography of individuals, keeping in mind what we have just been learning about thinking.

We are born into a context, yet bearing certain capacities, one of which is that we can think.  Thinking does not emerge all it once, at least in the sense of what it is when we have finished our adolescence.   The toddler seems not to think at all, in that mature way, yet its play is full of purpose.  What it is learning may not involve much thinking.  Perhaps what is being “educated” in toddler play is not self-conscious thinking, but semi-conscious willing.

We roll over, we sit up, we stand, we walk.  Eventually we run.  At the same time we learn to speak, but that seems mostly imitative in the beginning.   Different theories exist about how we do these things, but that we do them cannot be doubted.  One of the oddities with speech is how well we immediately do it.

Take indefinite articles, for example: “an” and “a”.   Children learning to speak seem to use them correctly right from the start.  The same with other not very complex words, such as “this”, “the”, “that”, a bit depending upon the usages that are modeled for them.  Or, the prepositions like “of” or “without”, each of which has a somewhat complicated situational meaning.  Why do children get this stuff more or less immediately correct?

Mere imitation seems not enough of an explanation.  Language acquisition theories follow along variations of evolutionary biology theories.  That tiny children learn to speak their native tongue is obvious.  How they do this very very complicated task remains a mystery.

Anyone want to believe they get some help?   An invisible being called a guardian angel perhaps?   I’m only half joking.

As the child is born into language, it is also born into culture.  The two are inseparable.  The family situation will often include religious observance, and this too is presented to the child via language.   The child does not discriminate or evaluate.  Its soul and spirit is nourished by what is given.  From the point of view of our developing Theory of God, the child, via its own pre-birth intentions, was born to these particular parents, at this particular time and for very specific purposes.  More than anything, the child wants to be there, where it is.  Christ’s teaching: Lest ye become again little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, points to a great mystery.

The culture can be ancient, and paradoxically and simultaneously modern.  All this is in the language.  Just as Barfield gives us an introduction to the riches contained in the English language (History in English Words), so are all languages filled with cultural treasures and riches.  It is precisely this wealth that the child seeks in choosing these parents/family and this time into which to be born.

To be, for example, Persian and modern can be accomplished by choosing to be born in Iran and raised in that version of the Persian language common there to not only many Iranians, but also to about 65 million speakers in that whole region of the world.  Not only so-called Iranians speak Persian, but the very meaning of many of the words carries aspects of this ancient heritage.  Moreover, as we noted above, Alexander the Great brought Hellenism to this region of the world, and a philological study of of modern Iranian Persian would contain many words bearing this influence.

In spite of the antipathetic thinking of many Westerners, revealed by their anti-Islamic political rhetoric, the modern Iranian is highly educated, such that not only do they have many words with ancient Persian roots, and Hellenistic roots, but also Western scientific roots.  At the same time, these language influences do not contain what in Europe was born of the Scholastics, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.  What does this mean?

There is a quite definite relationship between thinking and language.  Again, a lot of theories, but regardless, of the precise nature of the mutual influences, it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that a modern Iranian will not think like either a European or an American.  Recall what we studied above about figuration.

Language not only gives us the names of all the familiar objects in the child’s environment, but also gives us the relationship/meaning.  For the child such simple acts as greeting a visiting relative, or a stranger, not only via touch, or speech, but also how and why we offer water, or coffee or tea - all this is rich with cultural significance.   These are not mere social rules, to be abandoned later on re-examination by some kind of superior intellectual rationality.  We even have some folk wisdom that points us in the right social direction: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

From this ground, which is deep and wise, the child slowly develops all the usual universal capacities of thinking, besides figuration: theorizing, reflection, comparative, abstract, associative, hot, cold, separating, joining, etc. - all that we studied above in our observations of the lives of the woman at home, and the scientist with his jealousy.  Yet, while these capacities are universally human, the root aspect of language is not easily overcome, in part because we never think to overcome it.

In a lot of circumstances, any individual trying to overcome his or her cultural-language heritage would be seen as irrational.  Can an American, or a Frenchman, or an Congolese African, stop being that aspect of their nature?

While, from a certain point of view, we can look at the self-conscious spirit as completely individual, it remains, during it earthly existence between birth and death, joined with its field of consciousness (soul).  Most naive thinkers assume that their “I” and their soul are an identify.  We often believe we are the feelings we have and the ideas we carry.  The ego is attached to its favorite feelings and thoughts (the Tibetan Lama Choygam Trungpa calls these: ego’s collection).

If, for example, we gain something in the social via displays of temper, we will and can like this so much that we can’t conceive of ourself as not this temperamental person.  Our sense of self can become lost in an ideology as well, which can be religious, political, scientific, or irrational.  A madman doesn’t conceive of the world, or himself, as really different from how he regularly sees both.  Yet, keep in mind that the mind science Anthroposophy teaches both how to control thoughts and to master feelings (more later), such that Steiner (as previously reported) in the last sentence of the original preface to his The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity writes: One must become able to confront an idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage.

The stalker is obsessed with his imagined relationship with his victim.  So is the pedophile.  Politicians are often addicted to power, as are the extremely wealthy.  In all such cases the mind has become lost in bondage to an idea, which may only be about the self, much less about the world.  We can have an inflated view of ourselves, for example, thinking we are gurus and teachers of enlightenment (I did this in the late 1970‘s).  We typically love our ideas about what is right or moral, and often believe everyone else should agree with us.

These character-logical states of being seem to arise only a little from the modeling done for us by our social peers and family, and have more to do with something deeper, and which we now must bring forward, although many readers might well wish otherwise: the shadow or the double or the doppleganger.

Many black-sheep cousin religious traditions know of this in a richer way than do the more ordinary religious views (or do modern psychological views).  The idea of “sin” for example is one approach, as is the idea of mental illness.  When we see what appears to us as abnormal behavior, we try to explain it according to our world view.  None of these explanations is totally off the mark, but at the same time, all will be enriched, and made more fully capable of understanding the human dimension wisely, only when knowledge of the double is returned from the obscurity into which it fled some centuries ago.

I have written about this extensively, including a little booklet: the Shadow*.  Here I just want to bring forward the idea of this spiritual companion to the self-consciousness (spirit) in the field of consciousness (the soul) using a couple of metaphors of Native Americans, as these are gentle and wise.

*[I am reworking that booklet and expect to deliver it this summer (2011), under a different title: The Mystery of Evil.]

“Waynaboozoo’s Spirit Father advised him: ‘You have a twin brother whom you have wondered about and whom you would seek. This I tell you: he is your other side in all things and in all ways. He is with you...do not seek him. Do not wish to know him, but understand him. You will walk in the path of peace...he would not. You are kind...he is not. You are humble...he is not. You are generous...he is not. You seek the good in things...he does not. You shall respect others...he will not. You will seek the goodness in others...he will not. You are the light...he is the darkness. Know that he is with you, understand him.'” From the Mishomis Book The voice of the Ojibway by Edw. BentonBanai, 1979.]

And the story of the two wolves (my version): A young man was speaking with his grandfather, and was troubled by impulses he had inside him to be mean, in imitation of some of his friends.  His grandfather taught him as follows:  Inside you are two wolves.  One hungers to do the good, to be kind and to be wise.   The other hungers to do evil, to be selfish and make trouble for others.  This you must understand.  The young man then said: But, grandfather, what do I do, how do I become the good wolf instead of the bad one?  To which his grandfather replied: It all depends on which wolf you feed.

Let me also quote from the Quoran (keeping what I have been writing above about the double in mind): “Qul a’udhu birabbin nas. Malikin nas. Ilahin nas. Min sharril waswasil khannas. Alladhi yuwaswisu fi sudurinnas. Minal jinnati wannas”, or in English: “Say, I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind, from the mischief of the sneaking whisperer, who whispers in the hearts of mankind from among the jinn and mankind.”

In different religious traditions, this problem is dealt with in many different ways.  Aspects of early Christianity taught that the root of evil was in the carnal body, which must be denied.  Right now, in the fields of psychology and psychiatry (with their own tendencies to scientism),  much that previously in our culture was defined as a moral problem is now being defined as an “illness” problem.  People are being made less responsible for their behavior and more the victim of an “illness”, over which they are thought to have no control.  A classic sociological/historical look at this is: Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (Conrad and Schneider).

Recall now far above when I wrote of the ego or warmth body and the astral or desire body.  We have also been calling this the self-consciousness (the spirit) and the field of consciousness experience (the soul).  Not only then is the child born into the rich context of family and culture and language, but it is also born with a shadow companion (the double) and a light companion (the guardian angel), as well as certain pre-birth tendencies in the astral or desire body (various hungers), which become drivers in the soul that then lead the spirit toward very definite experiences during the biography, many having to do with such concepts as: karma, fate and destiny.

In a sense the immortal spirit of the child brings with it a pre-birth personal heritage, which it inserts into a specific cultural heritage, in order to unfold the art of the biography.  All of this we can observe from the outside, if we follow the details of the biography and notice the various swerves and kinks that often are so troubling.   We do far better, of course, if we are willing to be brutally self-honest, and look at our own biography in the same objective way a stranger would.

Part of our problem, especially in the West, is that we have replaced traditional religious ideas about the Divine influence on our existence, with the idea of blind or random chance.  We have, in effect, deified Chance or Accident in our scientism, while dethroning the conventional religious ideas, such as temptations to evil from inside us, and grace of Divine Providence from outside us.

The dominant element in this dethroning is belief.   We don’t know that chance and accident dominate, we don’t even test for it.  We just believe it because if we don’t believe that, then all of a sudden God or something similar has come in the back door (Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World), and the light of reason and rationality will, we fear, go out.

Let us not do that with these ideas I am suggesting of the shadow and the guardian angel and the tendencies in the desire body that lead to addictions and other obsessive behaviors.  Let us remain scientific, although we are now going to look at an alternative Theory, one in which I hope there will be enough specificity and detail that it can be the subject of genuine and authentic empirical investigation.

So, to not loose our thread ...

The child incarnates into language, which has a huge influence on how the world is experienced, not only outwardly, but inwardly as well.  If the culture does not have a name for something, or point toward it with language, it tends not to be seen.  The idea of the double has been lost in the West for centuries  - lost, but not forgotten.  Now knowledge of the double begins to return, and for some details one might read the Fifteenth Arcanum, on the Devil, in Tomberg’s Mediations on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism.

As the child grows, certain character-logical dispositions (which is how Steiner names the totality of this type of soul phenomena in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity), come into play.  These tendencies, include the older idea of the temperaments: choleric; sanguine; phlegmatic, and melancholic, a subject needing a much wider discussion than we can go into here, but if you can find a copy, details can be discovered in this book: Understanding Our Fellow Man: the judgment of character through trained observation (Knud Asbjorn Lund)

Tomberg discussed the double (the Devil) as threefold (in a way): with there being a tempter and a prosecutor and various kinds of egregores.  The bad wolf has a lot of different types of qualities, each of which we can learn to discern in our own inwardness (soul), through self-observation (introspection).  These aspects of our mind (inwardness) are not unknown to conventional psychological disciplines; they are just given different names, and of course placed into an all is matter, there is no spirit paradigm (theory).

An egregore is a kind of psychic parasite, and the classical example is the heroin addict’s: the monkey on my back.  I prefer renaming the egregore (a middle-Ages term): a self-generated wound.  During our self-creative processes we will be wounded by outside forces as well as wound ourselves.  Addictions are self-generated, and generally come from a ritualized (regularly repeated) behavior.  Not all addictions are of the coarse kind - many are more subtle (e.g. giving into frequent destructive gossip; a weak-character boss, lording his power over his employees etc.), and we observe them all the time, and certainly have our own.  Recall Christ about judging lest ye be judged.

It was pretty difficult in the past to overcome various aspects of character-logical dispositions - mostly various cultures treated all individuals as being identical with their character, making no distinction between the character and the “I” itself.  With the recent (last couple of hundred years) arrival of self-creativeness, out of the more general evolution of consciousness, it is clear that today the “I” has much more potential when it comes to these dispositions, such that the details of what comes with the astral or desire body, from the pre-birth existence, is during life becoming amenable to alteration.  The foremost culture-wide example of this capacity for deep self transformation, outside of specific black-sheep cousin spiritual disciplines, is the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Let us look more closely at this as an aid to appreciating the deeper elements of the development of human inner life during the biography.

At the start up to this exploration, let us keep in mind the context.  The 12-Steps appear at a very specific time (beginning around 1933, and are related to certain experiences of Bill W. during his final detox in the hospital), and through a very specific process (his meeting with a couple of friends, one from childhood and the other known in the AA tradition as Doctor Bob.  These friendships then lead to the inclusion of others and over many months, involving somewhere around 50 additional people, the 12-Steps are formulated.  There is no huge agreement, but the social nature of the construction of the formulation of the Steps is a crucial part of their meaning - which meaning is rooted in the wide ranging experience of a community of people sharing similar biographical troubles.

That is: thinking and meaning combine via community social processes in the articulation of certain basic practical rules (very American and pragmatic) - rules based upon the fact that they work.  Also keep in mind the distributed nature of the creative spirit at work here.

From my experience (as an addict in recovery and as a scientist of the social) it is clear that the 12-Steps contain three spiritual processes: Surrender; Confession and Contrition; and, Practice and Service.

In Surrender, the “I” recognizes its present-day limits - the what it cannot do on its own.  Here are the first four Steps: 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable.  2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.  3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

We surrender to the fact of powerlessness; accepted an idea of something greater than ourselves; turned our life over to that higher power; and, surrendered to the truth of our own actions.  There are sound and practical reason why these steps are individual, for each involves a distinctly different inner action.

In the Confession and Contrition part, we face the individual and social meaning of our past actions: 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.  6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.  7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.  8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Again, very specific and individual actions: admitting, readiness, asking and listing.  The order is important, but only experience reveals why this is so.

In the Practice and Service part, we change how we live in the world: 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.  10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.  11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Amends for past actions; continuing to be awake to new failures (we are in recovery, not recovered);  developed further our connection to our higher power (it grows on you, so to speak) and shared through service our gradual awakening.

This is not easy, which is why so many try and fail, and why the idea of  “hitting bottom” is important - we have to really know how weak we are, and how much we need the help of others, both visible and invisible.  Recall far above where I wrote of the Fire in our biographies.

Also keep in mind that as a social phenomena, this practice is brand new - it is only starting to display its wisdom.  That the 12-Steps serve as a means of beginning the overcoming the Shadow, or Double, is not yet widely known.  Rudolf Steiner remarked in 1923, that Americans came to Anthroposophy naturally, and that this was different from the way Central Europeans were coming to it.   Here in the appearance of the 12-Steps we see this natural process unfolding without any big spiritual guru.  I remarked to a friend the other day that in America, in a 12-Step group, you were likely to find more basic Anthroposophy being practiced (as a Path of Cognition), than you would in an Anthroposophical Society branch or study group meeting in America.

In modern civilization, at its leading edges, one major one of which is in America and born of all the individuals here, is this fact: Modern Civilization is acquiring the cultural wisdom to transcend culture itself and to enable individuals to find common ground as human beings facing the difficult life trials of dealing with our weaknesses and flaws.   We are overcoming and setting aside the traditional cultural influences, brought to America during its childhood years of existence.  America is becoming the People of Peoples, and at the ground level of that work, where shared flaws are the great social leveler, brave people are exploring the transformation of character-logical dispositions, for the first time away from the enlightenment (the Cultural East) and initiation (the Cultural Center) schools of the black-sheep cousins of the major religions.

Depth transformation has left the ancient mystery schools and now entered ordinary biographies in the very normal social circumstances in which they unfold.  You don’t have to go to Tibet, or India, or Japan, or even a Catholic monastery, for spiritual awakening.  Its right there in your biography.  Like good news, the 12-Step movement is transcending alcoholism and addictions to gain traction in all kinds of other circumstances.

When we get to A Proof of God, this will be one kind of evidence.  Keep in mind (an interesting phrase all in itself!), that part of what we are trying to do here in this book is point out that the social-political world of humanity is organized as a service to the individual biography - as the Stage Setting for the billions of dramas of the individual “I”s, or self-conscious spirits.  12-Step work is the manifestation of a certain kind of healing process in this living social-political organism - one among many.  The origin of this 12-Step work is both of a inspired and spiritually supported nature, as well as a distributive creative nature.  Invisible Beings support (via Holy Breath) such work, as the Twelve Steps, while at the same time much of the leading and directing intelligence and wisdom comes from human beings (the 10th Hierarchy).

For a moment, let us consider more deeply this idea of structure.

The human organism has soft parts and hard parts.  The bones are necessary for our organism to stand and move.  At the bridge between the softer parts (muscles and organs) and the harder parts (bones) are tissues that we call cartilage, tendons and ligaments, and which are harder in a certain kind of way than the muscle and softer than the bone.

The total social organism of the world has analogous structure - it is highly organized.  We learn part of this structure when we look at the universally human characteristics each of us shares.  Let me list just a few (there are many, and the reader is invited to supply their own):

Birth and death; a similar kind of body organization (top and bottom, left and right, upper and lower); childhood, adolescence and adulthood; families and communities; peers; some kind of process of education; a language and a culture; health and illness; a mind; inwardness; consciousness; self-consciousness.

Aspects of our inwardness are also shared and universal: emotions; thoughts; habits of mind and of feeling; impulses of will (many semi-conscious, few fully conscious); ignorance; knowledge; beliefs.

Our physical organism also is full of shared processes: breathing; blood circulation; taking in food; elimination; sense experiences.

In the course of the individual biography, however much there is that is universal, far more is individual.  We are similar in form (organic and psychological structure), but individual in manifestation.  Far above we looked at many of the individual characteristics of the biography - let us review some of these, as well as add in more recent observations:

During childhood we acquire language, not only as names of things but also in terms of something deeper, which we have been calling meaning (the subjective felt relationship between the “I” and the objects of experience).  A kind of instinctive thinking arises the recognizes the familiar (figuration), and this is enriched over time by all our childhood, adolescent and adulthood experiences.  We simultaneous swim in a sea of culture, which greatly influences (in a determinative fashion) much that we come to think and feel.

Other kinds of thinking also arise over the course of the biography, such as: reflection; theorizing; discursive; associative; comparative; abstract; cause and effect (the influence of modern natural science); organic; pure; thinking-about; thinking-with; and harder but occasional: thinking-within and thinking-as.  These last four point out that thinking can involve a highly willed and specific in nature relationship between the thinking self-consciousness and its objects.   The subject thinks about an object, for example: I think about my boss.

We can assume that concepts we acquire come from the outside, via language (the theory of memes etc), but observation reveals that language in childhood has certain qualities that make us recognize certain aspects of it as innate - as somehow a given.  Careful self-observation (introspection) on the nature of our adult thinking reveals that our conceptual life is created by our own activity.  What comes to us from the outside may stimulate this process, but the actual process of acquiring a concept is through self-creation.

Let us think (reflect) about this concept-creation process more carefully.

To begin with, let us ask once more a question, which we asked far above: Is a concept or a thought a thing?  Does the self-conscious stand in relationship to its concepts?  We know we have a relationship of meaning toward the sense objects which we experience, ... What about the conceptual?

That is certainly what a system of religious beliefs is, is it not?   Also what we call a political ideology.  The Theory of Evolution is a complex of concepts, or an Idea.  So is the America Declaration of Independence.

At the same time, to know what these Ideas are about - to know their definition meaning (as against their personal to us relationship meaning), we need a process of education - we need to be taught.  In different cultures processes of education vary greatly, yet most individuals will know nothing of natural science, or of civics, unless they are provided this understanding in a more or less formal social context.  We need to be stimulated from the outside, and at the same time have within us words and terms to go with our experiences.

It is the difficulty of transmitting much of culture in such more or less formal settings that reveals the intrinsic nature of the individual concept creation process.  The so-called bright students will grasp the concepts immediately, while the so-called dull ones will take far longer (if they get the concept at all).  In that very language (grasp) we instinctively find that the inner will activity of thinking is necessary in order for a concept to be created (grasped).  In fact, the idea of grasp suggests that the concept is out there somewhere, and has to be taken hold of and drawn in toward the “I”, before we know it as an object in our field of thought-consciousness.

Rudolf Steiner, as we previously noted, in his A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception, makes a very radical statement (among others): “there is only one concept of a triangle” [emphasis added, ed.].  To make this radical idea more clear: Concepts have independent existence, and the mind in seeking them out and grasping them, finds that particular concept that it needs.  At the same time, we tend to seek to individualize all concepts, such that in our personal inner-thought aspect of the total field of consciousness available to our self-consciousness, newly grasped concepts then become embedded in the memory and in the figuration.

For the moment, let us return to our lady in the kitchen, who is having a sharing conversation with her sister ...

The sister is describing a movie she has just seen with her boyfriend.  It is a guy movie of sorts, and was one of the Transformer movies.   Our lady in the kitchen has never seen a transformer toy (although her children have some, because of gifts), nor has she ever played with one (quite possibly the essential experience needed to understand).  She never saw the TV show either, or the comic books.   So the sister is trying to explain the idea of a car turning itself into a intelligent mechanical being that shoots at and fights other similar kinds of “transformed” beings. 

Our lady tries to get the concept, but can’t quite do so.  Just then one of the children runs into the room (isn’t the imagination wonderful, just when we need an “accidental” event), carrying a transformer toy.  He wants some food, but she gestures to him to sit down and wait a minute, and while her sister is trying to explain this concept of the transforming car into mechanical-being idea to her, her son demonstrates this process right in front of her (a bit like in school where the teacher gives demonstrations, with scientific experiments or social-political play-acting experiments).

Now she forms (draws to her) in her own mind this new concept - this particular transforming-concept  (which is actually many concepts leading to an idea).  Someone could hold that one can do this with highly abstract thinking, which is a fine but is itself a limited concept (the possibility to teach this concept of transforming through abstractions), because not everyone is going to be a skilled abstract thinker.   Just as we are individual in all manner of ways, so we are individual in our dominant styles or modes of thinking.

Everyone forms concepts, but not everyone forms concepts in the same way.  Our present day schools in America often fail because the how material is taught is too rigidly formed.  Good teachers will find a way to connect to individual students, but will also know that the means of so connecting will have to vary.  If the school system makes too rigid how the teacher carries out his/her activity, both teacher and many students will suffer.

Let us try another example, one perhaps a bit more pointed ...

At the time of my writing these paragraphs, we are two days away from the 2010 by-election in America.  Members of what are called the Tea-Party movement are running for public office in large numbers (over 130 by some counts), and they have much support from people who feel similar political feelings, and also from money-powers who often have their own agenda, which is in general not the same as the agenda of the tea-party movement.

One of their prominent candidates was recently ridiculed for not knowing that the idea of the separation of Church and State was in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Other members of this movement have also been ridiculed for not knowing a lot of what should be common knowledge about our form of government and the actual relationship of the Founders to our polity.

People against the tea-party agenda, not liking them (recall our discussions above of liking and disliking and its influence on the heat of public discourse), use these flaws, noticed through comparative thinking, which perceives that some know more and some less about the fundamental nature of our form of government. 

At the same time, a bit of thorough thinking-through (following out a train of thought to its natural, often logical, conclusion) would reveal that these are symptoms of something much deeper in American culture, which is that the teaching of Civics, in middle school and high school, has all but disappeared.   Instead, we have what is called: Social Studies, which is an amalgamation of several disciplines, that ought to be taught separately, so as not to create confusion and disinterest (social studies in this form is far too abstract for most young minds).

Many tea party people have not been properly taught the true nature of the American form of government (absent a proper teaching of Civics), but have instead been intentionally brain-washed by a relentless fake and false political ideology, that promotes a kind of religious-like love of capitalism and free market economics.  In order to obtain and maintain power, both parties ignore the realities of Civics, and instead hammer, through advertising lies, an oversimplified electoral-theology, which is that one side or the other are idiots, while our side are all angels (all the negative ads).

Neither major political party wants real thinking, so neither supports it.   The Press, which ought to be smart and wise, instead of forcing the candidates to discuss “Civics”, treats the whole thing as a horse race in which the fact that the jockeys are riding facing backwards (worship an ideology) is of no moment whatsoever.

Here, real political concept formation is distorted and disabled by failed education, and political pandering.   Similar disabled process are alive in the political and educational spheres everywhere, which is one of the symptoms of the ending of one civilization on its way to being followed by the creation of another.

To return to what this means as regards the structural elements of the social-political world ...

We are born into a language and a culture.  We overtime create a conceptual inner world of ever greater complexity.  We relate to others according to how this conceptual thinking process perceives them; and, they relate to us in the same fashion.  Both ways are similar, yet different, given that each individual has a different set-like pattern within aspects of their character-logical disposition (a different temperament; a different meaning-figuration; a different style of thinking; a different intellectual and emotional intelligence and so forth).

At a certain point in our inner growth, a kind of stasis may be reached, and the personality becomes essentially fixed (how the I represents - and understands - itself to the world according to its degree of awakeness and character-logical disposition).  This is not true in all case, but often true in many.

If we stay within a community and family, this fixed personality becomes reinforced by the expectations of others.   A kind of comfortable equilibrium arises.

Fate, or karma or destiny, can have other purposes, such that even though we are for a while in a kind of personality stasis, an event or a meeting with another person will evoke changes.  We can be torn out of the field of community reinforcement, or we can tear ourselves out because something is clearly (to our view) amiss.  While general processes are common to all biographies, each biography in its details is unique.

From the point of view of my own I, I stand within a highly complicated social structure that is unique to me.  I look out at this structure according to concepts acquired from culture in its widest sense.  If I awaken to the process of self-development in some form or other, I can also awaken to the existence of this structure - I can see it (one of the purposes of this book).

I may, in the beginning, not notice the personal and individual nature of the structure.  For example, I may have in my conceptual vocabulary the political idea of “the system”.  I may see this “system” as flawed and needing to be corrected.  In this sense I am not seeing the whole actual structure of the world, but only that part concerning which I have antipathy.

The more my thinking is transformed, from thinking-about to thinking-with to thinking-within to thinking-as, the more the ground I stand on, in my view of the total world, shifts.  I start to lose the concept of the “system” and begin to see (draw out of the world of concepts) the concept of divine order.  While my thinking-about the world, can be governed for a time by the Theory of Evolution and the ideas of chance and accident in social existence, the more my thinking strives to enter into the experience of the other - of the Thou - the less this view of random chance, in the creation of the social-what-is, works.

The mind naturally needs to make wholes of our experience.  The wider our experience, the more holistic our conceptions need to become.  The more I study the actual details of my own biography, the harder it is to view my personal past as not having order - I got where I am through causal relationships that more and more seemed to have a direction - that more and more seemed pointed toward something.  My biography is full of cooperating incidents - things clearly work together in order for a certain result to arise.

Obviously, I can cling to my belief system - that all is chance.  Yet, by that very clinging I become more and more blind to the actual world of my experience.

This kind of new thinking concerning the biography often requires brutal honesty - we can’t really notice our biography if we constantly make it a work of fiction.  This is part of what the Twelve Steps teach.  We make a moral inventory, we seek to make amends, we constantly notice our again and again falling into error, we see ourselves grow inwardly with this process.  We experimentally know that the higher power is real, because we have surrendered to its influence.  We cannot be healed of the flaws of our character-logical disposition without the help of others, visible and invisible.

In a very practical and pragmatic down to earth way we learn to love and to forgive.  Hitting bottom is a magical place.  It strips the egotism away, and leaves behind the essential spiritual core of the I.

That the Structure of Earth Existence, at the place where the leading edge of the self-creative (individuation and interiorization) process (in America) arises, there then comes into existence the means to heal what some would call our fallen nature (our character-logical disposition), is a most amazing fact.

That such a structure exists, in all its various forms world-wide, and in its time-bound nature (some parts are in advance of other parts), reveals The Art of God, to any thinking willing to be authentically self-honest.  We can’t just think about the world as if we were not there as the thinking subject.  Nor can we think merely about the world, but must learn to think with it, and within it, and as it.  The world too is Thou, whether we have the courage to acknowledge that or not.

Now someone (looking to quibble) might say: “Well, why didn’t God tell us this years ago”, to which I reply: “You idiot, you weren’t ready yet.  God can only tell you what you are ready for, ... jeez!”

With these ideas in place, I would now like to more formally metamorphose into A Proof of God, from the earlier Idea and Theory of God aspects of this book.   Just keep in mind (ha!) that these are in reality slow transitions (some aspects taking centuries not just decades), and here I am only going to point that we are now more in one stage and less in the other.

evidence and proofs of God,
as well as some proposed experiments and tests...

or, the now we got him section, ‘cause he is

never ever going to be able to do that!

Tests are a curious matter, or perhaps also said: experiments.  Let me tell a story from my own biography.  During the mid-1970s I was reading a lot of Sufi Tales, one of which was called: the increasing of necessity.   A short version it goes like this:

A man decides to go on a spiritual journey.  He leaves his home and his work, and goes to a river and sits down.  He chooses to do nothing else, but sit there, until something suggests he do otherwise.  He falls asleep, night comes and then morning and then mid-afternoon.  At mid-afternoon an object floats nearby in the river and a current draws it near the shore.  He pulls the object out and discovers a paper wrapped brick of some kind of crumbly-like substance.  He tastes a small part of it and discovers that it is quite tasty.  Being hungry he makes a meal of part of it.

The next morning he eats more, and while still sitting by the river until mid-afternoon when another brick of the same kind floats by at about the same time as the day before.  This he also partially eats, during which eating he  becomes curious.  The next morning he decides to walk upstream and as he does so he finds another brick a little earlier in the day than before.

Now he spends each day walking up stream and each day the paper wrapped edible brick floats by earlier.  Finally one morning he awakes sitting across the river from a castle-like tower, and sees a feminine arm reach out from a high window and drop one of these bricks into the stream.

Fully curious, he crosses the river and asks at the door of the tower.  A servant hears his request, invites him in, and has him wait for the mistress of the house.  She comes down some stairs and upon hearing his story and his request to understand what is going on, she replies:

“Every morning I bathe in milk and honey.  When I am done my servant drains the bathing tub, and then scrapes the crumbly residue clinging to the sides, wraps it in paper and throws it away in the river.”

The man thinks on this for a minute and then says: “For you, the remains of your toilet, and for me manna from heaven.”

End of tale.

By the mid-1970s I had begun to have spontaneous clairvoyant experiences, and engaged in a kind of mystical-like introspective life.   I had not met Steiner’s Spiritual Science, nor his works on the new thinking.  I was also much in love with pot and other hallucinogens, which led me to not fully trust the content of certain visionary experiences at that time.  I had also recently lost a job, had some money in the bank and no prospects for more income.

I decide to let necessity increase, and gave my landlord notice that I was going to move, and also told the utility companies that on a certain date I would no longer need their services.  Otherwise I did nothing.

About seven days before my place of living would be officially over, I had an idea (here I was to learn that Divine Providence worked not only in external life but also in the life of thought).  I thought of a place I might live for free, called those who needed to give permission, got their okay and moved into a house that was mostly used for a few hours a week to hold group therapy sessions.  Otherwise it was empty.

This was my first practical experience in discovering that one could live on what is not used and often thrown away.

Following this I had many experiences.  I did not make my life happen, but I did more carefully observe what happened around me.  I found money on the street, for example.  People gave me free things, or offered small bits of work.  I did not tell people, however, I was intentionally increasing necessity.

One day, while I was living at this house, I had only 45 cents, which would let me buy a loaf of bread.   There was peanut butter and jelly in the kitchen, as well as ramen noodles.  As I was straightening up my room, I looked out the second floor window and saw a very full grocery cart parked up against the curb right in front of the sidewalk leading from my front door to the street.

I walked out the front door, to investigate, and heard a loud noise to my right.  A man in a phone both had banged open the door and was talking loudly on the phone.  That’s his, I thought, and went back inside.

A few minutes later he knocked on my door.  He asked if I needed food, and I invited him in for tea.   He explained to me that he had just gathered this food (old cheese, heads of iceberg lettuce and loaves of wonder bread) from the dumpster at the nearby grocery store.  He explained how to clean the mold off the cheese and bread, if there was some.  He also told me he kept to a schedule, visited many grocery stores over his rounds, and distributed the food where necessary.

We discussed the 23rd psalm, which begins: “The Lord is my shephard, I shall not want.”  He reached in a pocket and took out a small tin of tiger balm, and explained to me that to have the “thou annointest my head with oil” experience, meant to have something like this rubbed into our forehead in between the eyebrows where the warmth can spread through the eyebrow chakra to the pineal gland deep inside the brain.

He spoke in all that time in constant rhyme, and left 5 lbs of cheese, five heads of lettuce and five loaves of bread behind.  Later, in studies of the spiritual teacher Franz Bardon, Bardon advised that it was not really wise to become dependent upon Divine Providence.   In 12 Step work we have the story of the man who is shown by God his biographical path as reflected in a trail of steps on a sandy beach.  For much of it there are two pairs of tracks, but at one long point only one pair of tracks.  The man said to God: “That was my worst time, and you left me alone!”  Then God says, “No, that’s when you couldn’t care for yourself so I had to carry you.”

Many people can’t carry themselves and have to be carried.  I don’t advise actually purposely doing a test of the increasing of necessity (that would be foolish), but no doubt as our economic fortunes continue to decay, many people will find, if they are open to it, that Providence provides much not only outwardly and materially, but also in the realm of thought (inspiration) as well.

The best tests and experiments should take place in the own mind, as one becomes a scientist there.  In the last material in this book, details about that will be laid out.

Nonetheless,  our existence is full of similar religious meaning and order, which religious history reports, but which science, with some legitimacy wants to ignore.  Let us return to our considerations of various prophetic materials as examples of predictions that can be tested (if we are willing to think fully and carefully).

Previously we discussed how it was that John the Baptist’s: “He will baptize you in holy breath and fire”; and Christ’s “I come not to bring peace, but a sword” are predictive statements out of religion that an honest appreciation of social reality could hardly ignore (no doubt many will, however).

Not to be swayed by doubters, let us elevate this and go for the big one: The Second Coming of Christ.  Now that’s a prediction, supposedly made by the big Guy himself.  Matthew 24:30 seems to be an end times prediction, while in Matthew 26:64 is something more personal, in reply to a high priest’s statement: “That’s what you say.  But I do tell you this: next time you will see the son of humanity sitting at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of the sky.” The Unvarnished Gospels, Andy Gaus.

Most folks have at least heard of, and many know intimately, end times prophecies made by certain fundamentalist and evangelical Christians.  Supposedly over 30 million people think (as believe) we live in these End Times.  A series of fiction books was written by Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins, in which Christ is described as coming in the flesh (the physical body) and making war and taking vengeance on unbelievers, killing them.  Odd thing to do for a God of Love, don’t you think?

Rudolf Steiner, who at least tried to come to clairvoyant knowledge of such things in a scientific fashion, started around 1910 to speak about the Second Coming on the basis of his research into the spiritual world.  He described the situation from different directions, but in a major shift from typical Christian theology, Steiner said Christ would not come in the physical, but instead in the ethereal realm.   We were not to experience His Return with our physical senses, but with our inner senses.

Steiner went further, and predicted that starting about 1933 more and more people would begin to have experiences of Christ’s Return in the Ethereal - with these numbers increasing steadily over time.  One of Steiner’s students, Valentin Tomberg (1900-1973), put out a book (around 1937-38): The Four Sacrifices of Christ and the Return of Christ in the Etheric, based on Tomberg’s own spiritual scientific researches into the spiritual world.  Of those possibly replicating Steiner’s spiritual research, Tomberg was the most prolific (many books).

In the mid-1990‘s Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, who this book (The Art of God) is partially dedicated to, wrote his book on the true Second Coming (The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century), in which the most important years for the beginning of this human perception of the Second Coming were from 1933 to 1945 (from the burning of the Reichstag to the dropping of the Atomic Bomb).  For those reading these words with at least a little sympathy, an important nuance is to notice that this appearance of Christ in the ethereal is not so much that all of a sudden He is there, but rather that humanity is now inwardly developed enough to begin to perceive Him there.  Ben-Aharon is another individual replicating Steiner’s work.  Owen Barfield, although less obvious about it, is also one replicating Steiner’s spiritual research.

To appreciate the whole - this time-line will be useful:  Steiner begins to predict (around 1910) what he calls the true Second Coming, to take place in the Ethereal, not the physical.  Tomberg, around 1937 (the time of his book), supports Steiner’s research and prediction.  In mid 1990‘s, Ben-Aharon agrees, based upon his own research, and decades after the principle time-beginning of the inauguration of this slowly evolving new human perception, not only confirms it but adds a number of important details.

Another way to look at this (again sympathetically), is to see that Steiner was the John the Baptist figure of the true Second Coming, and the voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism.  Tomberg was an initial author of a Gospel (the good news) of the true Second Coming, as was later, Ben Aharon.  In this book (The Art of God) we have another Gospel (good news story).  Please do not think I am urging here that these are “holy” books, and I certainly hope the future is more kind and less thoughtless than the recent past in this regard.  This is the Age of Science, and not an age were we are re-founding any kind of blind faith or belief.  The Idea and Theory of God proposed here, must turn out to be good science (in the sense of Ron Brady’s standards for a good theory).  If it can’t do that, then throw this book away.

Yes, I know, ... what the hell is the Ethereal?

We did take a look at this far above when we were discussing the germ theory of disease, and then looked at the four body structure of the human organism: the purely material-physical body, the ethereal or life body, the astral or desire body and the ego or warmth body.

Among other related facts, we noted that when the ethereal body is healthy, we feel vital and alive, and when it is not (when we are “sick”) we can’t function well and have to rest.  Like the whole organism, the ethereal body ages, and while in youth our wounds “heal” quickly, in age they “heal” more slowly.

The Solar System, in its nature as both spirit and matter, is most dense and most material in the regions near the Earth.  This is a complicated matter, and I’ll leave to Steiner’s researches the details, but here I just want to suggest that the Ethereal aspect of the Cosmos has it origins in that region of space we see when we observe the starry field.   This is to say, that there is an Ethereal World co-extensive with the solar system and the stars, such that our individual ethereal body is that particular aspect of the life and formative forces that belongs personally to us during our sojourn on the Earth.  Whereas the material or point-centered gravity forces are concentrated in the Center of the Solar System, the non-material ethereal plane-like levity forces are concentrated at the Periphery of the Solar System.

Certain aspects of the Cosmic Ethereal aspects of reality are best understood, in the sense of - but not limited to - a particular type of mathematical physics, from the writings and work of certain students of Steiner, such as:

George Adams Kaufman: read his Physical and Ethereal Spaces, Universal Forces in Mechanics; and Space and the Light of Creation; then with his partner Olive Whicher The Plant between Sun and Earth, and Whicher on her own: Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space and Time.  Also, Fields of Form by Francis Edmonds.

Also Guenther Wachsmuth’s: The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man, Ernst Lehr’s Man or Matter; and more recently: Arthur Zajonc’s Catching the Light: the entwined history of Light and Mind; as well as Nick Thomas’s Space and Counterspace: a new science of gravity, time and light*.

[*Thomas’s book is not really written in common English, but in what we would have to call physics-English, and is therefore not really suitable for the general reader.  Some of the other books above have a similar tendency, but far less the Thomas’s does.]

Some people are not going to like our transition to the Proof and evidence section, because all of a sudden you are going to need to read a bunch of books, but the fact is that part of the evidence (for example) of the true Second Coming, is the existence of New Revelation - yet this is revelation appropriate for the Age of Science.  It is non-authoritative.  It roots itself in the individual’s own free thinking.  In a way, the true Second Coming brings stories, from individuals, and in a variety of forms.   This being still the early years of the Age of Science (a quite valid, yet presently immature Way of Knowing), this fact also means that a lot of stories concerning the true Second Coming are going to be about and out of natural science (a coming surprise for many).

Readers wanting to start with these books (there will be dozens more, in all kinds of fields), might want to first read Zajonc and Lehrs.  As to astronomy, I have offered my amateur work in one of the last essays in this book: The Misconception of Cosmic Space as exists in the ideas of Modern Astronomy.  That was not written for scientists, by the way, but for the religious - to encourage them to realize that science could be religious without damaging either field of interest.

A basic problem (or anomaly) currently wandering the fields of conventional astronomy and astro-physics is the fact that rules of gravity can’t account for what is thought to be the seemingly evident stellar motion.  To save the central ideas of gravity-physics in astronomy, there then came to be the idea of dark matter.  If there was “invisible” matter in very huge amounts (a 9 to 1 ratio as regards visible matter is sometimes proposed as necessary), that would account for the anomalous discrepancies.   It is a bit odd, don’t you think, that modern astronomers needed something “invisible” to make their gravity-material mathematics work?

In the above works, and through a deepening knowledge of the Ethereal formative forces and their Cosmic origin at the Cosmic Periphery, the problem of dark matter will be eventually solved.  It will, of course, require stepping outside the there is only matter and there is no spirit assumption (pre-thought thought) of our materialistic time.  Don’t expect this to happen quickly or to be acceptable to everyone.

Picture this then: The universal field of the ethereal is born at the periphery of the cosmos - what we see at night when we look at the starry world.  Out there lies the suctional plane-like forces of levity, to go with the centric pulling forces of gravity.  This spiritual field of universal cosmic forces is perceptible in many ways (see above books).

The prologue to the John Gospel notes this, as follows: “...In it was life and the life was the light of the world. ...”

A more direct way to knowledge of the ethereal is through the study of the thinking, which is an ethereal act, not a matter-based physical act.  We grasp (form) the thought, with movements by our self-consciousness in the own ethereal body.  As the ethereal or thought world is “spiritual” (invisible to the physical senses, but not to the perception of the awake thinking), it is also a potential abode of spiritual Beings.

In my own writing, I refer poetically to the thoughts or concepts living in this ethereal world as the garments of Beings.  The higher Beings clothe themselves in thoughts and ideas, and we perceive with the thinking-perception these thought-garments.  Even the Theory of Evolution is, in part, the thought-garment of a community of invisible spiritual Beings.

As the Creator of the what-is is present everywhere in the Creation (the Word is embodied in the Creation), so we find Steiner and others reporting from their experience that Christ is present also in the Ethereal.   Given that human thinking is beginning in this age to wake up to its own reality, first as an ethereal act (it is also an astral and an egoic act) with the more and more conscious grasping of  concepts, it is not surprising then that experiences of Christ in the Ethereal begin to be reported.

Given that Christ (the Creator Being) also promised: “I will be with you unto the ends of time”, we are not to be surprised either by the fact that just here we come to direct experience of the Divine Mystery.  He also said in Luke: “the kingdom of heaven is inside you”, and elsewhere: “my kingdom is not of this earth”.  These too point in the direction of what is to be obtained when the self-consciousness wakes up in the thinking, for the thinking could not be more “inside” us.  [Let me remind the reader that references to Christ are not meant to evoke traditional “Christian” theology, but result simply from the fact that the most current name given to the Creator-Being, that is known in the greater part of the Cultural West, is Christ.]

Invisible Beings are not separated the way we are while in a physical body.   Matter-like structures do not exist in the purely spiritual existence, with the result that spiritual Beings inter-penetrate each other in vast communities, owning various tasks in all the ongoing aspects of the Creation.  The higher the nature of the spiritual Being, the more all task-related lesser Beings are “inside” it.  Christ, as creator, has All “inside” Him, although His attention (moving outside of time, and yet simultaneously within time) is presently (in linear time) more focused on us - on our own needs.

Steiner’s researches then report such paradoxical matters as: the communities of higher spirits suffer Christ’s absence (He was more concentrated with them prior to His Incarnation and what resulted from that Event was that He is now more with us); and, that the religion of the Gods is man.

I write of these matters because I want us to keep in mind that while we are endeavoring to be scientific, the subject necessitates that we also remain religious and artistic (poetic, since I am using words).  The Age of Science, as science itself matures, means that human religious impulses and artistic impulses will themselves inter-penetrate future scientific thinking.   Today’s existing divisions between science, religion and art are temporary, and somewhat superficial.

So then, our Proof of God now is taking on evidence of the true Second Coming, in the form of fingerprints in modern life.  Just as a magnet causes iron filings to take up a certain shape, so such a profound event as the true Second Coming and its accompanying new revelation, will lend order to almost all aspects of existence.   We are in this book learning, for example,  to read the Book of the Social.  The organization of the social is the fingerprint of the activity of the Divine.  In the seeming visible, the invisible appears as higher level order.

This is nothing new, it is just that materialistic science has gone too far in seeking for the causal behind the appearances.  We have invented idols - Theories - when all we really needed to do was just clearly and deliberately see.  The core of my observations regarding social existence are really only descriptive.  I describe the social what-is.  With that description, the order appears, and in the order then the Divine cause appears.  We read the Book of the Social - we don’t have to infer it.

At the same time, given the existence of the idols, we have to deal with those pre-thought thoughts which are everywhere in our civilization.  So also I must write about the idols.

I know, some would like it all to be very simple.  Too bad.  If we really understood, for example, the idea of Occam’s Razor (the hypothesis with the least assumptions is the best), that could suggest that Intelligent Design  Creation is better as a Theory than is the Theory of Evolution, because there are apparently fewer assumptions.  All the same: “So it goes”, as Kurt Vonnegut was prone to say.

Where are we?

Well, ... we are wandering more and more into the Proof and evidence material, which has its own peculiarities.  As evidence, I’ve offered certain religious statements (from the Gospels) as predictions, which I suggest have come and are coming true (not peace, but a sword; baptism by fire and holy breath; and a second coming).  Obviously these are significant predictive statements, and please pay attention to the nuances here.

I am not offering these three as statements to be considered true or not in themselves.  They are factually reported in the Gospels, and the question being asked is not that they be accepted as true, but whether or not social events and structures (order) in our present are described by these seemingly religious statements.  We can have the idea that Christ’s statements in the Gospels represent merely religious platitudes, but I am suggesting here that not only are they religions teaching, they are scientifically accurate as well (besides being essentially poetic and representative of The Art of God as that Art informs the totality of the Creation).

When Christ says: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, He is also making a factual testable statement, besides its religious implications.  For example, we have been taking a look, over the course of this book, at the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly: judge not lest ye be judged.   The end of that teaching says that if we want to stop being hypocrites and want to actually help someone with their mote, we first need to get the beam out of our own eye.  In one of the essays that ends this book, I describe the practice by which this is done, and this practice is testable in our own inwardness, should we trouble ourselves to investigate it.

I’ve also begun pointing out new revelation in the form of new kinds of science (see books listed just above - more to follow below).  Now I want to go outside of predictive Christianity for a moment, and take up something nearer at home (to Americans) as it were: The Prophecies of the Hopi Indians.  Again we  are looking at seemingly “religious” predictions about contemporary times.

As everyone can Google the Hopi Prophecy, and as well as I have written material on this on my website ( the songs of a true white brother ), I’m going to skip over the details here.

The Hopi are well known for this prophecy, which many interpret as another version of a kind of end times eschatology.  The Hopi prophecy seems to anticipate huge earth changing events such as wars, violent nature events etc., but like most similar prophetic material, it appears in many different forms, and each form has its popular adherents.

Most, who focus on the end times elements, don’t seem to notice the prediction connected to the appearance of what the Hopi call the elder or true white brother.  The Hopi Prophecy is nonetheless pretty clear here: during this time of great world crisis (particularly when the world will about to be rocked into war for a third time), someone or some group will come to help.

The most interesting part (from my point of view) is this obviously vague and symbolic phrase, about the coming true white brother: "This third event will depend upon the Red Symbol, which will take command, setting the four forces of nature (Meha) in motion for the benefit of the Sun.” [from the pamphlet From the Beginning of Life to the Day of Purification, a talk given in Hopi and by Hopi Sun-clan leader, grandfather Dan Katchongva (1865-1972), in 1971.  Translated by  Danaqyumptewa, Edited by Thomas Francis,  Originally published in 1972 by the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life, Los Angeles, California.]

Here is my interpretation of the meaning of this phrase, which is elaborated more carefully in my other writings on this subject:  The People of the Rose-Cross (the Red Symbol), which are basically those connected to the unfolding of Anthroposophy - the rose-cross meditation being a very specific spiritual practice there - will take command or lead by unfolding a new revelation concerning the ethereal formative forces (setting the four forces of nature in motion).  About these forces there will be a great deal more said as this book in your hand moves forward in its proof and evidence phase.

What does it mean: “for the benefit of the Sun”.  The Hopi are among the survivors of the Atlantean Catastrophe.  This also is complicated and in my book American Anthroposophy, in the essay: Recollecting the True Roots of the American Soul - America’s aboriginal Peoples and the Hopi Prophecy I give details showing how interrelated are these prophetic conceptions with the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner.

At the time of Atlantis (“are we having fun yet?”, said Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead), Christ as the Creator Being had His home in the Spiritual Sun Sphere of the invisible or spiritual world.  He had not yet Incarnated, as He was to do and did 2000 years ago.  The then Hopi Chiefs (certain priests in some of the Atlantean mysteries), had visions of the future, which they reported in the symbolic fashion and language above, which then became a major part of the oral tradition of the Hopi People.  The people of the rose-cross then serve the Sun Being, the Creator.  Once more the Hopi phrase:

"This third event will depend upon the Red Symbol, which will take command, setting the four forces of nature (Meha) in motion for the benefit of the Sun.”  The time of great crisis (our present) will depend upon the spiritual activity of new revelation, supported by both conscious and instinctive anthroposophical activity (new evolving thinking: thinking-about moving to thinking-with moving to thinking-within moving to thinking-as), which recognizes the importance of spiritual understanding in relationship to our shared biological (ethereal formative forces) existence, including the relationship of the Creator Being Himself, as well as His distributed free expression from out of individual human self-conscious spirits.

The more we go into this proof and evidence phase, the more detail.  For example, above I referred to “instinctive anthroposophical activity”.  Grandfather Dan also said of the true white brother: “...they are Sun-clan, they are children of the Sun.”.  In the social form the Bioneers: revolution from the heart of nature, we have an excellent example of this instinctive activity, for the new thinking is arising everywhere, not just among those connected to Steiner and formal Anthroposophy.  Recall above where I described the spiritual roots of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is as well connected in a very healthy way to this instinctive manifestation of the new thinking, which works not only in individuals, but in communities as well.

Human social life is flowering everywhere with this revolutionary change in consciousness and self-consciousness.   But for some readers there still is no reason to attribute that phenomena to anything but ... what - material causes?   Does the reader even see this problem?  See the pre-thought thought that fills our hunger for explanations, whether it is religious or scientific sounding?

Can you let go your resistance - your love of what you already think - in order to be open to something new?  That’s why the cliche is that the truly wise cultivate ignorance.  As long as mind is in love (egotistically attached) with its already existing content, it cannot become open to new thought.  Blessed are the poor in spirit (possessing a mind empty of fixed content), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Keep in mind that I do not seek to convince, but rather to unsettle.  I want to dislodge in the reader’s mind certain fixed ways of thought - not get rid of them, but just perhaps loosen the glue of emotional attachment.  Let me repeat, and this is true everywhere, not just in this book: No new thought arises in the mind that already thinks it knows the answers.  An authentic scientific study of the own mind will reveal that truth.  Want to think outside the box?   Get rid of the box altogether.

Here are some simple rules for real out of the box thinking:

1) If asked if we know everything, everyone will have to confess they do not.

2) If asked whether when something new and different enters our knowledge, this will itself require of us to change or alter something we already believe we know - this too we will have to confess is true.  New knowledge causes the paradigm to change.

3) This is usually demonstrated in a story or shown in a film in this way: the teacher is pouring tea into the student’s cup, and even after the cup is full the teacher continues to pour until the student asks the teacher why is he doing this, for the overflow is covering the surface of the table and is not in the cup.   The teacher then says: the cup is your mind, and unless it is empty nothing new can enter there.

the problem of proof

There is in some kinds of geometry a well recognized formal process of proof.  Also in formal logic.   Certain mathematical centuries-old riddles, such as the Poincaré conjecture, too involve proofs.  Distinctions are made between these kinds of problems and what might be called proofs in empirical science.  As I noted in the introduction, among the new atheists, the concept of a proof of God is a bit misleading, as the vast content of natural science itself is not really derived in either a formal logical, or otherwise exact sense of a proof.

Certain basic facts are established empirically, such as various kinds of formulas in chemistry, or certain simple vector problems in that aspect of physics we label kinematics.   Once we wander into more complicated problems, the idea of proof is more and more discarded and the standard is more rooted in the practice of the replication of experiments.   An empirical fact can become established if the underlying experimental result can be repeated.   The more complex the experiment (the greater the number of variables), the more difficult this is.

A lot of what is taught in schools (below graduate level) is really about naming things.  Science investigates something, and takes it apart and labels all the parts.   So we get taught all these names, and in certain cases various relationships of these parts to each other, or various processes in which the parts are mutually involved.  High School biology teaches this naming as “facts”, for example we learn about such entities and ideas as: the cell, the molecular basis of heredity, biological evolution, the interdependence of organisms, matter, energy and organization in living systems, and the adaptive responses of organisms.

For the last few decades a lot was done because of the discovery of DNA, and its related molecules such as RNA etc.   This discovery was touted as the finding of the building blocks of life (in much the same way various particles in physics have been described as “building blocks” of matter over the years).  A major project was undertaken: the Human Genome Project, with the hope that understanding this complex strand of molecules would lead to great advances in medicine.  Today it is not uncommon to see or hear in the News that the cause of this or that disease has been found, and gene-therapy has been expected to solve many problems.

Hundreds of thousands of scientists work on these projects, and billions of dollars are spent, a lot by government and perhaps even more by corporations seeking patents and profit making ways of intervening in life processes.   Not all motives have been altruistic.   There have been failures, and at the basic research level a kind of retrenchment of scientific expectations.  Most of the public doesn’t know about this retrenchment, but it is clear that DNA and related research, while accomplishing much, has not lived up to the hopes of many.

Above I pointed to the work of The Nature Institute, and particularly Steve Talbott’s work On Making the Genome Whole.  Mr. Talbott does not so much do laboratory research, as read the research and try to understand the cutting edge thinking of those doing this research, through his own new thinking.  His work is to synthesize (make whole) what still is too much in parts.  Here are the titles of a couple of his papers available for free on-line: Part 1: The Twilight of the Double Helix; Part 2: The Chromosome in Nuclear Space; Part 3: The Mediating Dance of the Nucleosome; and Part 4: Getting Over the Code Delusion: Biology's Awakening?

From his preface to Part 4:

Preface: The epigenetic revolution I’ve been writing about for the past year is slowly but surely making its way into the popular media — witness the recent Time magazine cover story, “Why DNA Isn’t Your Destiny”. The shame of it is that most of the significance of the current research is still being missed. Judging from much that is being written, one might think the main thing is simply that we’re gaining new, more complex insights into how to treat the living organism as a manipulable machine.

After my previous, fairly technical surveys of some of the work going on in genetics and epigenetics, I offer here a more readable and widely accessible summary, including a great deal of new material. Part of my aim is to provide some of the perspective that is missing from the mainstream reports.

The central truth arising from genetic research today, I believe, is that the hope of finding an adequate explanation of life in terms of inanimate, molecular-level machinery was misconceived. There are no such mechanisms in the living organism at any level. Just as we witness the distinctive character of life when we observe the organism as a whole, so, too, we encounter that same living character when we analyze the organism down to the level of molecules and genes. One by one every reliable and predictable “molecular mechanism” has been caught deviating from its program and submitting instead to the fluid life of its larger context. And chief among the deviants is that supposed First Cause, the gene itself.

As before, I am not offering the above as proof of anything, for as I have been trying to convey, it is not proof that leads science, but rather the way in which the mind reads the empirical facts and from that creates meaning.  Mr. Talbott’s work is outstanding at that level, and anyone who wants to become familiar with present day research in molecular and cell biology needs to come to terms with his investigations.

This work here then, proceeding from an Idea of God, to a Theory of God, is to go through A Proof of God, in the form of empirical evidence of God, all to ultimately lead to an actual Theory of Everything.

Instead of working with observable facts from physics and so forth, that is from the parts, I am working from the whole: the complicated social-political world as it appears to us via our own thinking.  At the same time, I seek to place no scientist, or artist, or religious personality over and above the readers own ability to perceive and think.  I simply describe carefully the social-political, down into its psychological details.

In a sense, what proof there is the reader provides for himself.  I assemble evidence.  You confirm that the evidence (by itself) exists.  I develop what it all means to me, and choose to leave to you, for yourself, to declare your own meaning.

I do, like Steve Talbott, have a special interest, which interest is how thinking appears to itself, a subject matter that I have been explicitly investigating since the early 1970‘s when I first became involved in practical psychology work in the San Francisco Bay Area.  When I later meet the work of Rudolf Steiner, I learned how to be more and more systematic in these thinking experiments.   I also became not only interested in the universal aspects of my own mind, but also in the structure of the social-political world.  With the aid of Steiner’s books on the science of introspection, I then engaged for about three decades in two mutually supportive kinds of investigation: One on the own mind; and the other on the meaning of the world that an awake and free mind could produce.

This has now become the main subject matter of this book: the nature of thinking, and the relationship between thinking and the meaning of the world.  The matters of science are secondary, although essential in this particular Age.  Science has created a language, and that language becomes useful.

For example, the “Idea” and “Theory” of God are part of the language of Science.   At the same time these are not necessarily the language of Religion or of Art.  The language of Religion is about encounter and relationship - one is to become the lover of the Divine Mystery.   The language of Art is about beauty and about creative expression - words are gone beyond.

Eventually one is left with verse - with poetical expression, in order to combine the logical rigor of Science, with the devotional-relation based goodness of Religion, in the creative expression of the experience of beauty.

So I write:, such as:

I have too much.

If I am not careful, things will possess me.

They demand I carry them when I move.

I suffer if they are broken or destroyed.

If they are lost, so am I.

It makes no difference if these things are objects or ideas.

They can all be stones.

So, oppressed, I seek my freedom.

I will have nothing.

Thus, I become.

The pure mathematician recognizes in his highly abstract symbol sets, what he calls elegance.   Would that in his striving for an actual Theory of Everything, he would recognize that human life too is elegant, but only the poetical sees and expresses this.  Mathematical symbol sets can’t touch what only Art can touch.   To that they are blind.

Nor can the mathematical symbol set have a living encounter with the Source of the what-is - that is have a relationship with the Source of the  Creation.  Scientific materialism (all is matter, there is no spirit) denies to the Creation consciousness, being and intentionality.  Can one love something one destroys in order to try to understand it?

The modern natural scientist seems to look with wonder at the magnificence of the Creation, but refuses to grant it any potential for self-consciousness.  The pre-thought thought dominates and excludes the natural world from any consideration as a possible dance partner.  We can’t imagine that our own self-consciousness had to have been born in a Self-Consciousness that was originally outside us.  Not appreciating wider Nature, we fail to really appreciate our own magnificence.  Whatsoever ye do to the least of these my brethern, ye do so also unto me.  And, Take this, it is my body and my blood.

indirect evidence of God

Song.

That about does it.  If you think you need more you are not paying attention.  Want proof?  Turn on the radio or go to YouTube on you computer ...

For those that have difficulty here - who don’t get Song ... and/or don’t want to change the ideas they already have ... you are probably out of luck and should have stopped reading this book many pages ago.  All the same, there are two kinds of evidence for most “facts”: direct and indirect.  Let us discuss that situation a little bit ...

When you see something yourself (or hear it etc.), you have a direct experience of it.  If you are a scientist working in a laboratory, you may well directly participate in the whole experimental protocol.  Again, then, your evidence is direct.  If, in addition to this direct evidence, you expand its meaning beyond the direct conclusions, you leave behind the empirical element, and go toward the theoretical.  My older brother, who has a PhD in microbiology, used to call this tendency of his fellow scientists: “globalization”.  He meant by this to point out that the experiment really only means what it plainly means, and that when we expand (inflate) that meaning (globalize it), we have left the realm of the empirical for another territory altogether.

Indirect evidence is obviously different.  A typical kind is what we read in a book.  The experience may have been empirical to the author, but to us it is derivative - that is, indirect and secondary.   If the author is quoting someone else, the material is twice secondary - a kind of story.   So when I refer to Rudolf Steiner or Owen Barfield for example, I am not providing direct experience to my readers.  The readers only direct experience is the lines of code (language) on the page.

Now mostly we don’t think about this when we read.  If we read something we like, even though it is an opinion, we may well incorporate it into our own thought life and believe it to be true.  If we don’t like it (such as when I write something here which is against the readers point of view) we will not believe it, even though it might well be true.  The truth (or not) of something we read is not on the page, precisely because it is derivative, indirect and often secondary.

The author can convince us, but of what?   Now when we go to school and are given a textbook, we are  generally taught that what is in the text is true.  The text is written by so-called experts, we might be told, and they can be relied upon.  Yet, if this was so reliable, we’d just read texts and never conduct experiments in science class, for example.  

We can also fool ourselves about whether something is true even if our experience is direct.   Remember our friend above who went to the party?  He had direct experience of the woman who later flirted with him, but his mind was already mislead by the pre-thought thought (assumption) given to him by his friend.

When we are given indirect evidence, we can later on our own pursue getting direct evidence.  We can seek out a situation that proves directly to our own experience what we first learned of indirectly.  All the same, even though we may satisfy ourselves, our satisfaction can’t be transferred to someone else.  What satisfies me about the existence of God, I cannot expect to satisfy you.

We could wander deeper into this territory, but here I only wanted to point out the situation, and to leave to the reader just how they will choose to proceed.  Clearly what follows has to be considered indirect evidence and experience, and should the reader want more, they will have to provide that themselves (particularly the necessary part that belongs to thinking, but also gaining a deeper detail through reading and study).

To continue ... previously ...

We’ve discussed the social world of humanity, or better said: described it in detail.  The arrival of individualism, and what Barfield describes as interiorization, reflects Christ’s (the Creator of the what-is) statement about bringing not peace but a sword.  The human being had to find his self-consciousness, come awake to it, and begin to live out of it.  Because of our universal (all humans share it) inner feeling nature that appears in the phenomena of instinctive likes and dislikes (sympathy and antipathy),  coupled with individualism, we get social friction - that is social heat, which has escalated now into world-wide wars.

This increasing social heat arises directly to experience in the phenomena of the biography, which John the Baptist called: the baptism by fire.  The self-consciousness has to live existence in a kind of alchemical crucible, that burns away the dross and the leaden.   This foments a change in the interior life itself, in that more and more moral dilemmas cannot be resolved simply by leaning on wise sayings in a text.   The “I” must pull out of itself something in order to meet the fires in the biography.

This inward element is the baptism by holy breath.   Few people in our Age notice this, because we are for the most part habitually fascinated with the world of the senses, and not trained by our culture to self-observe (engage in introspection).  The commentary in this book, on the real nature of thinking (a new science of the mind), hopes to help the reader come to the direct knowledge experience of holy breath.

Two further prophecies were brought forward then: that which concerns the true Second Coming of Christ, and that connected to the Hopi anticipation of the arrival of the true white brother during a time of world-wide crisis for all of humanity.

Few will be able to directly experience this, but we can nonetheless look at a kind of fingerprint as it were.  In the same way the presence of a magnet organizes iron filings, so does the Second Coming and the appearance of the true white brother “organize” aspects of social existence.  This we will now go into in greater detail, as part of seeking indirect evidence of God’s activity in modern life.

This is not, by the way, the greater portion of God’s present day activity, for much of that is personal to individuals, and thus anecdotal.  We should not totally dismiss the anecdotal, such as near death experiences, experiences of the dead (ghosts etc.) and other kinds of encounters with the Divine Mystery.   But we have to be honest: the natural scientist legitimately wants more.

When Rudolf Steiner taught in Central Europe, he drew to his writing and lecturing activity, a number of individuals in various fields of interest.  The more widely known he became, the more opposition he also drew.  Near the end of his abruptly ended career, people came to him with questions, and these questions then resulted in various kinds of what are called: lecture cycles.   He would not just give one lecture, but many on the same theme (for example, the lectures published under the title: Spiritual Science and Medicine numbered twenty, and were given from the 21st of March to the 9th of April, in 1920).

As a consequence of his inspiring activity, there has come to be a number of specialized disciplines and social movements: Anthroposophical Medicine; Camphill Villages and Communities; Waldorf Schools; scientific studies collectively known as Goethean Science; Bio-dynamic Farming and Gardening; a new form of dance: Eurythmy; to name but a few.  One can go to Dornach Switzerland, and find there the modern Goetheanum, and get deeper into this work and its many details (or, of course, go to the Internet).

Here I am just going to give an overview sketch of certain aspects - some details of the fingerprint.  As with much else that has been offered in this book, the reader is advised that if they actually want to comment, they need to bother to become acquainted with the actual evidence and not take potshots from the sidelines.  To portray all the work that gives evidence of God would easily fill a whole library.

It is a good question, however: How is this work, about to be described, able to be seen as indirect evidence of God?

The best way to do this is to make an analogy with what scientists already do in their own disciplines: Individuals produce studies and work; this tends to be done within a given scientific community (see once more, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions); the community in various ways (such as peer review) notices and comments on the work; ordinary people become aware of the work and support it or apply it in practice in their own lives.

In the case of Steiner’s inspiration, it was clear from the beginning that he was proposing the existence of spiritual reality (God in His complicated distributed sense - which Steiner often called: the spiritual world) as standing behind all the we experience.  Instead of only matter and no spirit, Steiner was teaching about matter and spirit.

Above we came to recognize what I have been calling the distributed nature of God.  This is a far different idea from that which is normal in many religions, which tend to (to the extent they attribute events in our lives to the causal activity of God) make of the divine a kind of magical supernatural creature who mostly does miracles (violates well understood physical laws).

Part of what Steiner did was to give out a great many details about just how the spirit is integrated into material events which we see through the senses.  Depending upon the subject being examined, Steiner created a whole (mostly) new vocabulary of the causal element behind most physical, biological, psychological and mental processes with which we are familiar.   To call this New Revelation from a religious point of view is to make a gross understatement.

Of special interest for the person new to this will be Steiner’s courses on Light, on Warmth, and on Astronomy.   He goes, in these courses, right to the heart of certain problems in physics, centered on the question of whether we have properly (with our thinking-out the meaning) taken hold of what the empirical evidence actual reveals.  The first two courses are available for free on-line.

We are talking today about thousands and thousands of individuals, working out of the inspiration of Steiner’s researches, in multiple fields of endeavor, over almost a century now.  People apply this material in practice because it works.

At the same time, let us keep in mind that Steiner himself thought that this work might take as much as 400 years to fully impact human culture and knowledge.  This is, in fact, about the same amount of time it took the Copernican Revolution to produce modern scientific materialism.  To now extend our understanding of matter over into an understanding of spirit, equal to our understanding of matter, is not something to be accomplished overnight.

It is also a very human activity.  There is no more perfection here than there is in the practice of present day natural science.

Let us briefly look at some examples ...

In a television drama I recently saw, a lady says to her man friend: here’s a nice California bio-dynamic wine (handing him a bottle, the label of which he shows approval for by nodding).  Now if you Google bio-dynamics you may get something not out of Steiner (the name is used also by others), yet bio-dynamic wines are acquiring an excellent reputation.

If you Google bio-dynamic produce and gourmet cooking, you will find that more and more high-end restaurants have taken an interest in this food for not only its lively and intense taste, but also its shelf-life (it remains vital and tasty longer than other foods, even organic).  Bio-dynamic farms are all over the world, and their number is growing.

What you run into, however, is that when the ordinary press tries to write about these farms they stumble over some of the conceptions at play.  For example, the bio-dynamic farm is described as a organism (a kind of whole in itself).   The methods are more disciplined than organic, and planting and harvesting are guided by knowledge of the rhythms of the moon, the planets and the stars.  This means that there is a recognition of extratelluric (beyond the Earth) forces being involved in plant and animal development. 

The main lecture cycle by Steiner is called: Agriculture and consisted of eight lectures given at Koberwitz, Silesia, 7th to 16th June, 1924 at the request of Central European farmers who were concerned, among other facts of their present existence, with the loss of the vitality of their seed stocks and other changes in their soil.  Hundreds of subsidiary books have been added over the years by workers in this field.   Here are the ones from my own library:

Agriculture of Tomorrow: E. and L. Kolisko (systematic research into the influences of the planets and the moon on plant growth)  Gardening for Health and Nutrition: John and Helen Philbrick Culture and Horticulture: a philosophy of gardening: Wolf D. Storl.  Also could be included are these subsidiary and related books, such as:

Silica, Calcium and Clay (processes in mineral, plant, animal and man) by Benesch and Wilde.  The Food We Eat: herbs in nutrition by Maria Geuter.. .and this two volume set which is also part of fundamentals of Goethean Science: The Plant: Vol I and II by Gerbert Grohmann

Nothing is secret or “occult”.   There is considerable literature, and many many websites.   What bio-dynamics hopes to do is to return a lost vitality to the Earth, which is suffering from the abuses of mono-culture, and the application of too many chemicals (fertilizers and pest sprays).  Modern commercial agricultural processes are killing the living nature of the soil, and that living nature is needed in order for our food to also be filled with vital nutrients.  There is a relationship between our conditions of health and the food we eat that is obvious to anyone with an open mind and no profit-making ax to grind.

How is this indirect evidence of the existence of God?

As with the stories to be told next, the basic idea I have here is that a hundred years ago a man begin to give lectures indicating that there could be a science of the spirit, and that one could practice this science in many ways that would be progressive for humanity.  Since that time people have been testing what he indicated, and we have the advantage today of seeing the earliest successes of those tests.  Just as we admire modern materialistic science for the many technical feats we perform given that knowledge, so we today can begin to admire spiritual science for the many practical results of its ideas.  The co-workers in these endeavors number over the tens of thousands.

Next let us look at Anthroposophical Medicine:

From the beginning it was made clear to doctors that they had to become doctors first, according to the rules of the State in which they were to be licensed.  Anthroposophical Medicine was to be seen as additions to what they otherwise studied and mastered in the usual way.  A woman friend of mine, who became an Anthroposophical doctor, practiced as board-certified in Internal Medicine for 15 years before she ran into this work incidental to her own realization that nutrition played a huge role in health, a role for which her own medical training had failed to give her even the beginning of an adequate understanding.  As she searched for a better understanding of the role of nutrition, she found the best source in Anthroposophical Medicine.

In Europe, where this practice has had many years to gather its forces, their are hundreds of doctors, and many clinics and hospitals.   In America, oddly enough, the discipline has not taken hold - less than 50 doctors practice.   In Brazil, I am told, there are over 300 doctors and one full sized hospital.

Far above I wrote of certain personal and non-medical ideas regarding the germ theory of disease derived from my own thinking (although inspired by Steiner), and also how Anthroposophical Medicine uses an understanding of physical body, ethereal body, astral body and ego or warmth body.  Obviously materialistic medicine will fight against this way of thinking, when it can, and without really looking carefully at the reality of the situation.   Books in the field are many.   Schools for training exist, and many doctors are closely mentored by experience physicians for years.

In my library I have Victor Bott’s book: Anthroposophical Medicine: an extension of the Art of Healing, as well as Thomas Cowan’s The Four-Fold Path to Healing, which is very American and strikes out on its own in certain ways.  Worth special mention: The Dynamics of Nutrition, by Gerhard Schmidt.

As with Bio-dynamic agriculture, there are hundreds of texts, periodicals and medical practices.  There are many useful websites. Opponents of this work describe the Anthroposophical Society as a cult, and the medical work as quackery.  The reader should undertake a serious study of the totality of the work before making up their own mind.

Camphill Communities:  Camphill was founded by others, mostly under the inspiration of Karl Konig, about 70 years ago.  This was based in part  on some lectures Steiner had given on the care of the developmentally disabled, called: Curative Education.  Camphill Communities frequently are connected to a bio-dynamic farm and use an Anthroposophical physician.  They exist all over the world, and websites for most of them can be found easily by googling: Camphill Communities.

Unusual social relations are part of this community.  The disabled are often called Villagers, and the care-givers: co-workers.  One or more co-workers will often live in a house with a half a dozen villagers, and a Camphill community will consist of many such houses.   Some of these are large (hundreds of villagers and co-workers) and as with other impulses born out of the inspiration of Steiner’s teachings, there is a vast literature.  Most of these forms of arrangement involve the villager in a lot of outdoor activity and craft work.  Parents with children and other relatives in Camphill tend to be highly satisfied with the care.  A visit to the websites will provide many details.

Co-workers a not well paid, although economically taken care of.  Many who start with Camphill leave after a time and found small situations which they call: shared living.  For example, I knew a couple, with four of their own children, who ran a kind of business-like co-living arrangement that included four developmentally disabled individuals as part of their own family.   As the State and private individuals provide money for the care of their developmentally disabled relatives, this creates the economic viability of this kind of work.

Perhaps the reader should keep in mind that this work is not a job, that one leaves and then goes home from.  It is a calling, and is 24/7 as we say.

The varieties of this kind of work are many.  Again, the reader is urged to investigate fully this work, which once more is world-wide in scope and includes, out of Steiner’s lectures on Curative Education, much information based on Steiner’s clairvoyant researches into the details of the spiritual facts behind the meaning of those incarnations which produce those individuals, for example, which we describe as having: Down’s Syndrome.

Goethean Science: As pointed out above, the central European individuality named Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), mostly known for his art (poetry, plays etc.), was also a natural scientist.  His approach was unique, and Steiner’s first and second written books concerned this personality.  The first: Goethean Science: Natures Open Secrets, and the second: A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception.  Emerson’s first essay on unique individuals, the Poet, was about this man.

Recall also from our above discussions the significance of the meaning-process of thinking concerning its objects.  Here in Goethean Science this meaning-process is being more highly and consciously developed.

Also as pointed out above, Goethe’s work on color (Theory of Colors) is now being recognized by more and more scientists as superior in its own way to the color theory of Newton.  If one reads Steiner’s books on Goethe it becomes very apparent why this personality has given birth to an extension of natural science beyond its present day limits (as described above).

The writer Valentin Tomberg described what is now being called Goetheanism, as involving a qualitative characterizing picture thinking.  This is a very intentional and consciously activated kind of thinking.   I have been demonstrating it through the describing human of social existence for this book.  Here is a list of books from this field in my own library, which has to be seen as a quite limited collection.

Previously mentioned: The Plant vol. 1 and vol. 2 by Gerbert Grohmann

Also, The Plant between the Sun and Earth, Adams and Whicher; Sensitive Chaos: the creation of flowing forms in water and air, by Theodor Schwenk;  Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe’s Method of Training Observation and Thought;  The Living Earth, Walther Cloos.  The Nature of Substance, Rudolf Hauschka;  Man and Mammal, Wolfgang Schad.

Keep in mind this is but a very small portion of the total work being done at all levels of natural science.  Owen Barfield’s work on language can be called a product of Goetheanism, or as I suggested above: organic thinking.  Now this organic thinking blends into pure thinking (more later), but in all cases the development of Goethean Science is a demonstration of this new method of spiritualized thinking.  Part of what needs to be understood is that organic thinking, which starts out as Goetheanism, easily blends into pure thinking, such that one cannot look at particular works of Goethean Science as only related to organic thinking - the descriptive qualitative characterizing picture thinking as referred to by Tomberg.   The above books demonstrate the process, as well as add rather wonderful aspects to the work already done in natural science.

Once more: the reader will only understand this by getting their own mental feet wet in the relevant disciplines.  I also want to write about one particular book, that has both organic and pure thinking attributes: Weather and Cosmos, by Dennis Klocek.

Klocek is an outstanding American practitioner of the new thinking.  His work takes the reader through the basics of weather phenomena and then adds material mostly not thought before.  Given that we live in a time of climate change, I write this in part to encourage readers to keep a look out for Klocek’s coming book on Climate itself: Climate: Soul of the Earth.

Let me tell a little story* for purposes of background (*as I heard it from others).

Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman, had an interest in astronomy (and was also an alchemist).   On the round tower where he lived he had built a circle of brass, which was engraved very carefully with degrees, minutes and seconds and fractions of seconds of arc.  A line of sight device was made to be able to move around the circle, giving what was called azimuth.   In the center of the circle was a device for sighting both the azimuth of the fixed and moving (planets) stars, that also could measure the ascension (degree of arc from the plane of the observer to the star in the sky).  For years and years Brahe measured stellar objects, in particular the moving stars - the planets.

These records came to be in the possession of Johannes Kepler, when for a year he worked with Brahe, and then succeed him as the local “astronomer”.   Kepler (who was also an astrologer) then examined the records, particularly of the movements of the planets.  From this research Kepler developed his three laws of planetary motion, which are still considered valid today as approximations.  There are many tiny variations according to the mass of the planetary object and other factors, but Kepler’s basic laws are important nonetheless, for all the same the essential ideas (while not its smallest details) are generally descriptive of planetary motion.

Kepler, however, also thought that in his third law that he had rediscovered what the ancients called: the harmony of the spheres.  Here are his three laws: 1: The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.  2: A line joining a planet and the Sun seeks out equal areas during equal intervals of time.  3: The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.?

What struck Kepler was that the relationship ratio of the third law is basically like a whole number, not much different from the whole number relationships involved in music.  The planets, to Kepler’s insight, move according to musical laws.

For a time, the gravity ideas of Newton confirmed and fit in with Kepler’s three laws ... except for the orbit of Mercury.   It was Einstein who with his ideas about the distortion of space caused by the gravity well of the Sun, who computed the correction necessary by which the orbit deviations of Mercury from the three laws were to be explained.

Part of what Dennis Klocek did was to read a lot of what Kepler had written, that had been forgotten (this happened with a lot of early scientists - for as materialistic science marched on its way, it cast aside any ideas that didn’t fit its main conclusions - Faraday is another example - his contributions are only partially noted, for certain of his basic ideas are quite at odds with conventional materialism).   Among Kepler’s ideas, Klocek discovered observations that indicated that lines of influence fell upon the surface of the earth from these rhythmic planetary motions.  These lines were then part of a whole lot of other weather phenomena that followed planetary and zodiacal rhythms.

Without going into all the details, Klocek also discovered that when hurricanes were born in the hurricane generation zones, they would tend to move according to more or less well understood rules as regards ocean temperature and currents and prevailing wind rules.  That is, until they ran into one of these lines of influence, which is when they would make these more or less abrupt changes of direction and follow the line of influence on their way to making landfall.  In this, and other ways, Klocek has re-established weather science on a basis that includes understanding (as in Bio-dynamic agriculture) extratelluric (beyond the Earth) influences, thus the title to his book: Weather and Cosmos.

Finally now to Waldorf Schools, of which many readers may have heard previously.  Keep in mind that with the above and immediately below I have not made any attempt to be comprehensive at all.  These are just hints concerning a much larger work that has entered into world-wide human culture, out of Central Europe, on a small but steadily growing scale.

The basic story is that following WWI, the owner of the Waldorf Cigarette Factory in Germany asked Rudolf Steiner about the possibility of creating a school for the children of the factory’s workers.  This was done, and during the initial processes Steiner gave a number of lecture cycles for teachers and others, providing them the spiritual background to human nature that they would need, from multiple directions.   To state this in a slightly different way: all of this was put forward in a way that his listeners, in understanding these results of his spiritual research, would also develop and deepen their ability to educate children.  Here are some books on my own shelves - Steiner did many more and the Waldorf movement over the years has produced thousands in addition.

Study of Man* (14 lectures, Stuttgart 21st August - 5th of September 1919;  Discussions with Teachers* (fifteen conversations, Stuttgart Germany August 21st to September 6th 1919); Practical Advice to Teachers* (14 conversations, Stuttgart August 21st to September 5th 1919); ; Human Values in Education (ten lectures Arnheim Holland July 17th to 24th 1924) The Kingdom of Childhood (seven lectures and conversations Torquay England 12th - 20th August 1924).

[*Note that three of these lecture cycles were given during the same time period, for it was not uncommon for Steiner to relate various aspects of his research work in a time-concentrated form.  Study of Man was the primary lecture material, and Discussions with Teachers and Practical Advice to Teachers are both called “conversations”, and represent replies he made to questions being asked later by his audience.]

The Internet abounds with websites for almost all of the now existing 900 plus Waldorf Schools worldwide (the largest and fasted growing private education movement in the world).  All Waldorf Schools are basically independent, although associations exist that certify whether or not the basics of Waldorf pedagogy are being taught.  In many European countries the State funds Waldorf Schools.  In America and England many Schools are funded only through tuitions paid for by the parents, although Waldorf style public funded charter schools in America are not uncommon.

The Waldorf pedagogy greatly emphasizes the arts - for example all children are taught in the primary grades to knit and play the recorder, Steiner having said that subtle hand movement skills improve the development of the convolutions of the brain.   Reading is not taught early, being thought to be a natural outgrowth of first developing hand and eye skills in water color painting and in learning to write the letters.  Usually, from grades 1 through 8, the teacher moves with the class, which challenges the teacher to grow as well as the student.

For the most part the teachers run the schools, although an administrator can be hired for the necessary organizational needs.   Teachers hire new teachers, and through their organization (often called the College of Teachers) the pedagogy is managed.  Steiner emphasized the importance of keeping the State out of the education business, and gave elaborate explanations for why this was important.

It is not possible here to do more than hint, and the reader must be willing to encounter Waldorf via the face it presents to the world, not through this all too brief introduction.

Waldorf is also not without its critics, and particularly in America this became highly organized via a group called PLANS (People for Legal and non-sectarian Schools).   This group filed a lawsuit in Northern California in 1998, alleging that Anthroposophy was a religion, and therefore Waldorf pedagogy was based on a religion and as a consequence not entitled to public money in two of the many Charter Schools that began to use Waldorf principles.  After many hours in court and losses, and then appeals, in November 2010 PLANS once more lost its case on the merits - the Court ruling that based on the admissible evidence, Anthroposophy was not a religion.   There is a Wikipedia entry on this question, and this legal challenge continues.

Out of my own social research, I have written on Waldorf: The Social-Spiritual Organism of a Waldorf School Community; and Waldorf Charter Schools in America: some social observations (available for free on my website).

Factually Waldorf is one of the main ways in which various human beings first hear about Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy.  Waldorf teachers, as are all members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society, are human beings, capable of error and confusion.   If one looks for it, it is easy to find much to criticize.  I have written my own books on the subject of Anthroposophy (American Anthroposophy and Dangerous Anthroposophy), which include materials critically examining the Anthroposophical Society.   This book, The Art of God, is about something else, however.

Here we are involved in bringing forward a counter-theory to the Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang, as explanations of material and spiritual human existence and development.   This process began with developing a new Idea of God, that led to A Theory of God and then the problems of A Proof of God, or Evidence of God, all in order to ultimately create a more living and humane Theory of Everything, to compete with the abstract and pure mathematical TOE offered by present day mathematical-physics.

The whole structure of the themes (sort of an argument, but not really) in this book has been to move systematically within the basic methods of already existing natural science, which wants to move forward on the basis of empirically discovered facts, and then through theoretical formulations towards material explaining why we have a deeper understanding if we add to our knowledge of matter, knowledge of the spirit as well.

To do this in any kind of finished way needs to be recognized by the reader as not possible.   The  scope of the underlying question is too wide and too deep.   This book then is only a bare beginning.  To continue with what can be presently done, however, let us now take up this theme:

direct evidence of God

Please recall that direct experience is personal to us.  It is primarily empirical, and mostly we expect to know only through our senses.  I have to see it with my own eyes, we say.  Here we are going once more to consider the nature of mind, of thought and of thinking, as those appear directly to our own experience.

Most people don’t have the least idea of what it means to practice introspection - that is to observe in a somewhat detached and objective fashion our own inner activity and experience.  We are fish swimming in the seas of thought and thinking without really noticing our environment at all.

Let us begin by reviewing some of the different types or modes of thinking with which we have become familiar over the course of this book:

First, from Owen Barfield: figuration, theorizing and reflection.  Figuration lets us almost automatically think the familiar.  Theorizing imagines things, whether grand scientific explanations to just plain old office gossip.  Reflection ponders something.

To this we added discursive thinking - we talk inwardly to ourselves - we have a kind of almost always ongoing constant inner chatter.  From a certain point of view, both theorizing and reflection can be carried out in a discursive fashion.

Thinking is also influenced by feelings, and the most automatic (reactive) are likes and dislikes, or sympathy and antipathy.  Likes tend to produce associative thinking, which joins one concept or object of thought to another, and dislikes tends to produce discriminatory or comparative  thinking, which separates or distinguishes one concept or object of thought from another.

Thought generally has an object.  We think about something (and we can learn and often already instinctively do: thinking-with, thinking-within and thinking-as).  Now not only are feelings hidden behind much of our thinking, but also impulses of will, which are yet deeper mysteries to naive self-observation.  The main impulses of the will-in-thinking are the attention (on which object does our thinking focus) and the intention (why are we thinking this object - what is our purpose).

We also have dreamy kinds of thinking: fantasy and reverie, for example.

Sometimes our thinking moves among all the above kinds or styles of thinking in a kind of automatic fashion (we are not deliberate in choosing which style or mode), and often this happens when we are worrying something.  We can become pensive, perhaps even depressed, and the mind in a way starts to eat itself.  Mind is spirit and soul combined, and in depression we find ourselves (our self-consciousness and consciousness) as the focus of a strong inwardly directed antipathy.

Other styles of thinking can be called abstract, concrete and/or picture thinking (we think in images instead of words and concepts).  Different styles of  thinking are often called forth by the influence of our social and physical environment, as well as our natural talents (if one may use such a term).  People with what we call a high degree of intelligence will often be very good at abstract thinking.

Another kind of thinking is called: pattern recognition.  This involves a kind of combination of picture thinking, with concrete abstractions (which is almost a paradox) during which we are simultaneously trying to see wholes.  See the film, Temple Grandin, and also the novel by William Gibson: Pattern Recognition.

Different people have different skills here.  Our system of education prizes one kind of skill over others, and in this way devalues whole groups of people who are just different (Temple Grandin, again).  Various kinds of what are called mental illnesses have symptoms (from the biased point of view of the physician) that are reflected in unusual kinds of thinking, which can be called paranoid, delusional, narcissistic, and so forth.  People who are radically different inwardly are frequented defined by the social order as ill or criminal.

Whole cultures swim in common seas of thought and thinking, and apply quite varied concepts to the meaning and value of these differences among various human beings.  One way to look at the world is to make a picture of the physical human beings all motionless and standing up in their various places on the total sphere of the globe, with their heads in these seas of thought, in much the same way we all stand inside the sea of the airy mantle - the atmosphere.

We assume that the seas of thought are private, but they are not.  Our doorway into the seas of thought are individual, but the seas themselves are universal and interconnected - what Steiner called: the thought-world (the ethereal world).  The theory of memes partially sees this phenomena.   Language doesn’t work without these seas.  The tendency to universalize the use of English world-wide works in part because these thought-seas are shared.

Recall for a moment our previous discussion about mental pictures, generalized concepts, pure concepts and ideas.  We inwardly mentally picture a specific book.  We have the general concept of books which enables us to recognize through figuration all books.  We have the pure concept of bookness, which enables us to understand such poetic (metaphorical) ideas (complexes of concepts) as the Book of Nature or the Book of the Social World.

If we undertake to have a science of the mind, all of the above can become ways of self-understanding that can also lead to experiments and further observations.  Each path in pursuit of this science will be individual and universal simultaneously, because while many characteristics of mind are shared by all, each individual, having their own unique biography and individual distinctiveness, will have to confront many matters of a quite personal nature.  

The best advice I can give on the details of some of the universal aspects of this Path is in my Living Thinking in Action.  Specific inner actions are advised because they have worked for me, but all are free to choose their own Way as they see fit.

We can then come awake within the sea of thoughts and thinking.  This coming awake is new in the course of the evolution of consciousness.  It is not at all similar (except in the most superficial sense) to the awakening sought in Eastern Culture in such as Tibetan and Zen Buddhism.  This modern scientific mind science is new because the self-creative consciousness itself is new.  

What Eastern Culture carries as the idea of the ego or self is based largely upon tradition - it is very ancient - it is a form of a spiritual pre-thought thought.  But the actual self-conscious spirit of human beings has changed since those ancient traditions came into being.  Thinking and thought now contain a potential not previously observable.  The former utility of the mindfulness yoga of breathing has now to give way to a yoga (attentive and active discipline) of dying and becoming in thought.

With the coming of the on-looker separation, and the arrival of natural science (the most recent effects of the evolution of consciousness), this capacity of thinking and thought developed beyond anything known to the past, whether in Western or Eastern culture.  The ancient Greeks, in the heights of the cultural achievements of Hellenism, did not know this possibility.  Nor was this possibility known at the time of the Buddha.

The whole process achieves a rather unique situation with regard to America, for the American arrives at the modern condition of mind potential in a quite organic or natural way.  The instinct of the American to develop the new potentials of the self-conscious spirit is remarkable, and the Transcendentalists, the creators of AA and the 12 Steps, and the Bioneers are simply forerunners and examples of something that is manifesting today on a much larger scale.

We saw a much wider flowering of this bursting forth of instinctive new thinking in the 1960‘s and 1970‘s out of the cultural developments centered in California (where cultural East and West met and had intercourse).  While we may wish for coherence, or some kind of understandable generally common explainable condition, it is in the very nature of this new development of the self-conscious aspects of spirit that it be entirely individual.  I come not to bring peace but a sword.  The divine creative power is now the essential interior of the human being, and in thinking and thought this power is manifesting on the world stage.

One student of Rudolf Steiner puts forward the idea that we are already in World War III, but that it is taking place in the world of thinking and thought.  Recall the Hopi Prophecy concerning the arrival of the true white brother: This third event will depend upon the Red Symbol, which will take command, setting the four forces of nature (Meha) in motion for the benefit of the Sun.  The People of the Rose-Cross spiritual Way will teach the new revelations of the spirit concerning the cosmic ethereal forces in the whole world and in thinking and thought for the benefit of the now distributed divinity all over the world (such as via this book you hold in your hand).

Conflict is unavoidable until we learn ourselves to tame the underlying creative power of the new “I” or self-conscious self-creative spirit.  Our  first world-wide lesson concerns the mote and the beam.

The direct evidence of God is within, and is staring us in the face.  What bothers us is our frequent inability to be the masters of our own soul life - to be able to manage thinking and thought, and the underlying imperatives born in untamed feelings and impulses of will.

The one certain thing is that we all share these trials.  No one is to be free of them.   No one is going to be able to avoid the troubles connected to the shadow and the choices as to which wolf do we feed.   Yet, we are blessed by our individual biography and its complicated circumstances.  There is enormous beauty and order in the form and shape of human social existence.  What we need is always right in front of us (recall the Rolling Stones: you don’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you’ll get what you need).

Our newly born “I” is right where it needs to be according to our own particular and individual nature.  Life - the individual biography - is the Great Teacher.  In it was Life and the Life was the Light of the World.

Human existence on the Earth, in all its details and richness, is The Art of God - the Creator Being that has sacrificially distributed through Love His own nature among all that exists, particularly the individual human being.  This then is our actual Theory of Everything.

yet, ... we need some details as to how to learn to better perceive what we need to perceive ... for there to be a new science of the mind, its practitioners must also provide methodology.  Real science is not just about what conclusions your investigations produced, but also about expressing precisely how you engaged in those investigations so that they can be properly repeated or replicated.   There is an important distinction between the method and the content that is produced, and as our inner life is where the most direct experience (empirical) knowledge of the Divine Mystery is to be obtained (the kingdom of heaven is inside you), details as to this follows next ...

a new path to the spirit,

elaborated in three parts

There are three essays here, all written for other contexts and earlier in time (a couple of years before this present text was written).  They all bear the same cast of mind in that they were written for people who already had some degree of a spiritual orientation toward existence.  Any new atheists or secular humanists who have read thus far, should keep this in mind:  These materials were not specifically written in the style necessitated by approaching the situation in the way that resulted in the form of this book: a Theory of God, needing a new and more comprehensive and systematic Idea of God, all leading to Evidence and Proof of God, which then ultimately expresses The Art of God in the form of an actual Theory of Everything.

These next essays then were written for less general audiences, and I have provided a kind of introduction, hopefully relating each individual essay to the themes in this book.  I have also placed these essays in a specific order, although the reader can obviously read them in any order they choose.

All the same certain points need to be made, perhaps serving as a bridge from the main text to this more detailed material.

Rudolf Steiner, in his discussions of the Social World came at that situation from multiple directions.   What I have been calling the Stage Setting, he described as the Threefold Social Organism.  He wrote and spoke of this in a way in which mostly what was said concerned a kind of idealistic picture of how this Stage Setting could be organized, for example: it was to consist of three spheres of human activity: a cultural sphere that was based on freedom and included art, religion, science and education; a political-legal sphere that was based on equality, and included the relationship between the State and the People (my own researches have developed this idea further, adding in between the State and the People, an intermediating function: Media); and, the economic sphere that was to be based on brotherhood and included processes of production, distribution and consumption.

Many people who consider themselves Steiner students spend a lot of time with these ideas.  Most of them don’t yet realize how close, to this idealistic expression of these concepts, the actual Stage Setting to the Social World already is.

He also noted, via a slightly different perspective, that the world could be divided in two (the Cultural East and the Cultural West).   We might call this a spiritual division, and find it is related to what in conventional academic circles is sometimes called: the history of ideas (variations in the manifestations of the self-consciousness’s activity of thought-creation over time).   He gave a very important lecture cycle on these questions, which was published under the title: West and East: contrasting worlds (Vienna, 1 - 12 June, 1922).  In any event, the history of ideas can be seen in some ways as having one tendency in the East and another in the West.

Steiner also perceived that the Social World could be divided as well in a threefold way: East (mostly Asia - geographically), Center (Eastern and Central Europe and England to a degree) and West (England sort of, and America).   This division was related more to the soul (generalized variations in the field of consciousness) than the spirit (variations in the self-consciousness).  The field of consciousness inwardness varies according to geographical region - a complicated problem beyond our intentions here.  To give, however, a relevant example of one type of phenomena that reveals this:

The East, in a soul (field of consciousness sense) way, establishes by the time of Gautama Buddha the concept of Enlightenment as the highest self-development spiritual goal.  In the Center, Enlightenment is not the goal or the Way - there the path and its goal is called Initiation.  Steiner was a Great Initiate, not an enlightened human being.  In enlightenment, the path involves learning how to leave the Wheel of Incarnations to go to Nirvana - that is to never have to incarnate again.  The individual spirit (self-consciousness) learns to divorce itself from earthly cravings and attachments (thus the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path), in pursuit of enlightenment.

In initiation, the self-conscious spirit strengthens and purifies itself (especially the supra conscious aspects that are not of the physical body) such that this astral body and ego can pass through the gate (threshold) of the physical body while awake, and enter into intercourse with the Beings of the Spiritual World*.  Through this means Steiner (and a few others) brings down from this world: New Revelation, via his spiritual scientific investigations.

*[Recall from above our discussion of the bones - the curves of ascent and descent that meet in the total human organism, although even during sleep we separate daily from the purely physical to have a purely spiritual - albeit usually unconscious - mode of existence.]

Now it is important not to confuse or to assume that the history of ideas on the one hand and the variations in Ways of self-development on the other, are separate matters.   They are not.  The totality of the world of human inwardness, which these describe, is a layered and integrated reality.  Barfield points out something Coleridge noted (in Barfield’s book: What Coleridge Thought), which is that we can form distinctions, that are not differences.  That is we note variation, but do not conceive that this variation arises because the perceived parts are not in reality aspects of a single whole.  The variation arises because we can note it (think it), in such a way that this helps our understanding of the totality.  In Christian theological thinking this distinction without difference appears in the Idea of the Trinity (see Barfield’s Saving the Appearances for a deep discussion of the Trinity from a certain perspective).

In the true West (the Americas) we have not to do with either enlightenment or initiation, but rather with character development.  Those involved in deep self-development Ways in the Americas are very down to earth (so to speak), and it is not so much their ability to leave behind the Earth to permanently arrive in Heaven (enlightenment), or to mediate between Earth and Heaven by investigating and reporting to incarnate individuals on the details of the nature of Heaven (initiation).  Character development involves the ability to live fully on the Earth, according to its terms - that is as brothers and sisters - companions who help each other.  I don’t transform myself, as much as I work to help transform the world.  That gesture of shared working together is what develops my character.

In a way, character development is about striving to realize Heaven on the Earth.  And this not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of others.  In the East, to continue these examples, the developed personality becomes a guru, a teacher of one or another Way of Development (e.g. a Yoga or Zen master).   In the Center, the intercourse of the initiate between Heaven and Earth results in a transformation of our understanding of Heaven (such as the research of Steiner into the  detailed nature of the Spiritual World).   The further West we go, toward the Americas, self-development becomes a vehicle that is used more and more to fully transform the Earth in some way.  The personality that develops itself, in the sense of Western Culture, no longer  teaches their Way, but rather teaches a different and more evolved understanding and knowledge of the World and of existence.

This arises because there is a kind of integrated relationship between a differentiated history of ideas (a twofold differentiation) and the differentiated fields of consciousness (soul characteristics - a threefold differentiation.   There is a Whole here, and we only see the distinctions, that are not real differences, through asking different questions in the thinking.

Understanding this can help our choices become more clear.   We can seek enlightenment, or initiation, or to transform the Earth.  Neither is more right or more wrong - it is just a choice as to where do I, as an individual, choose to concentrate my efforts.  Further, given that evolution of both the physical, and the field of consciousness (soul) and the self-creative consciousness (spirit) continues, even these strivings change. 

For example, in Buddhism the goal of Nirvana has been abandoned, when there arose what is called: the Bodhisattva Vow.   This happened after the time of the Gautama Buddha, and around the time of the Incarnation of the Creator.  This vow is to not leave the Earth behind until such time as all sentient beings can become enlightened.

Sometimes the goal is called liberation, in the East, and this is meant to be liberation from Earthly attachments (in general).  Steiner used the idea of freedom (freiheit), which in English is better understood as an inner condition where neither thoughts or desires rule us, but we rule them.  Thus Steiner’s: One must be able to confront an idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage.

In the true West (the Americas), self-development is an incidental consequence of seeking to help others - of seeking to make the shared life on the Earth more humane (reduce suffering).  For some, this means helping the poor and the homeless, and for others it means helping the whole culture mature into something it does not yet realize it can, but for which it instinctively yearns.  In the case of the this book (The Art of God) the impelling motive was to try to resolve the seeming collision between Science and Religion that was benefiting no one.  So to ameliorate the situation (via the Mother forces), I placed the religious questions inside the scientific questions - I integrated them.

I also did not do this arbitrarily.   Science is the new Way of Knowledge for humanity, because it bears the capacity to weave us together in spite of our differences.  In science we seek not different kinds of knowledge (as do the various religions and spiritual ways), but a shared universal knowledge.  At the same time, this new Way of Knowledge (science) is quite young, and in its immaturity it has ignored the central question: What is the real nature of the main tool (the mind), which we use in the pursuit of this universal knowledge.

In an aid to this far above I used on occasion the term: shaman.  In the West we produce shamans, not enlightened human beings, or initiates.  Not only did I refer to myself as a shaman, I called the natural scientist in his laboratory a shaman.  This most earthly spiritual way of seeking to know and benefit the shared world is symbolized in the picture on the cover of this book - the cross inside the circle.

The cross is the symbol of individual self-development, with its upper and lower vertical (heavenly and earthly aspects), and its left and right horizontal-social aspects.  The cross is joined to the circle, which is the symbol of community.  “I”, as an individual spirit, only fully realize my true-self when in relationship with “we”, the community.  The four circles in each of the four quarters of the larger circle are the forces of the four directions, each representing earthly powers that must be understood and mastered, otherwise we are in danger of being ruled by them, rather than being able to rule them.

Physics wanders semi-consciously into this territory with its ideas of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak interactive force and the strong interactive force), and the need to seek their unity in a unified fundamental force.  This search is behind the holy grail of physics in its efforts to produce a purely mathematical theory of everything.

These forces of the four directions are also in human communities, and because of the work of integrating the individual into the community, and the accepting by the community of the individual, these forces need also to be understood there.  We have to learn to ameliorate the natural friction of conflict that arises from our being different (for examples of work on this see the various conflict resolution processes).  Understanding the Four Temperaments, and their relationship to the Four Elements is to also work on these problems at the macro-social level.

All of this, whether in physics or psychology, are shamanistic in a modern use of that term.  The shaman is simply someone who has a certain wisdom-seeking role in the community.  In the HBO television series In Treatment, we experience a version of this new social-helping shamanistic impulse, and its difficulties, via the artistic in the form of television drama.

Shamans, by the way, are not limited to external priesthoods, as in the old aboriginal structures.  I’ve dedicated this book to a couple of these, one of whom to outer appearance is simply a wife and a mother.  Some readers here will have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  One of the deepest spiritual investigators of the realm of the Mother (the Underworld) that I know (Stephen Clarke) repairs high end cars for his outer  world work.  Some of his earlier work can be find on my website: Shapes in the Fire.

From a certain limited perspective, the material below then is a modernized version of developmental processes leading to a new shamanism, written for different audiences as each mini-introduction will reveal.  I am more shamanistic than I am an initiate or enlightened human being.  My shamanistic relationships have been more with the emancipated social world, than the natural world,  by itself, as was known more directly by our aboriginal ancestors.  In my biography, as I matured, I came to camp out in cities, not in the wild.

Nor does one become (as is sought today by a few trying to imitate aboriginal ways) a modern shaman by going backwards into past (atavistic) spiritual ways.   Rather one does something fairly simple to state, but sometimes difficult to accomplish: be scientific, religious and artistic all at the same time.  The true mind (spirit/soul nexus) contains all three as potentials, and each needs be developed together in as balanced a way as possible.

Catherine MacCoun, whose work on Alchemy was mentioned far above, speaks of what she calls the upper and lower vertical.  Self-development can occur by shunning the lower vertical (the dark moist paths of earthly existence), which is what Gautama Buddha did.  Self-development can also happen through purifying the manifestations of the lower vertical (the lower chakras), such that their energies do not interfere with the means needed to have intercourse with the Beings of the Higher Worlds (Steiner and initiation).

Or, self-development can embrace the lower vertical, and realize that the mastery of those energies leads one into the realm of the Mother, from whose activities the social future is being born.  This is the spiritual reason behind the fact that the 12 Steps was born in America - they are of the Mother realm, that aspect of the field of consciousness (soul) wherein resides the double - the individual shadow - the wolf we do not necessarily want to feed.

Let us take one final look at the social world before entering more deeply into the problem of method.

All over the world human beings unfold their individual biographies.  For the most part they are not alone when they do this.  But whether we do it individually or in a community, one of the things we do is create Temples.

Religious temples are obvious.  Wall Street banks are another kind of temple, as is the place of business of a thug in Thailand who runs a brothel.  The nature of the temple has to do with what is worshiped there - what the individuals and communities devote themselves to there.

Many worship what we might call the dark God of profit.  This worship has consequences, for the individual and the people who are affected by the quality of that type of worship.  People with social power can also be perceived by others as kinds of Gods.  In certain temples their worshipers are addicts, whether to crack cocaine, or stock and bond sales.  Unruled passions are everywhere.

For a long time, many kinds of temples have had the structural form of a hierarchy.   The functional order was like a pyramid, with some kind of ruler at the top, giving orders to all those below.  Not all Popes live in Rome - some live in Washington D.C., New York, London, Paris and Aspen.

This hierarchical social form is ancient (going all the way back to Egyptian and Babylonian times).  The human being, via his evolution of consciousness, is no longer suitable for hierarchical social forms.  We just don’t fit anymore into that kind of structure - we need too much independence for our individuality (not peace, but a sword).

As a consequence hierarchical social forms (even families), which involve a kind of psychology of dominion over, are dying - they are failing from the inside out.  This underlying change in the nature of the human being is bringing about the collapse of Western Civilization; and, with the end of that civilization, a time of chaos will ensue all over the world because of the interconnections.

Everywhere hierarchically organized temples will fall.

Simultaneously, the Mother forces are returning from their condition of exile.  Paternalism (dominion over) has rotted from within (a good example is the Roman Church - see my essay: Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church).  A new maternal-ism arises, and is on its way to shifting from hierarchical pyramidal forms to circle-like forms of social structure within the social commons - the social below.   Dominion over is giving way to communion with.

Western Civilization is dying into a new becoming.  This social process of metamorphosis is the white water current of existence on which all other community  structures and individuals ride.  These are necessarily turbulent seas, both in the outer Fires of Baptism of the biography, and as well in the inner trials of moral development wherein we have the possibility to come to direct knowledge of God, within and without, via the Second Eucharist in the Ethereal, or Holy Breath.

*   *   *

As we head into the last part of this book, with its particular explorations of a more religious way of seeing, I would like to remind the reader that it has not been my purpose to persuade.   I did want to disturb the reader’s world of concepts a little bit - to shake it loose from its habits if possible.   At the same time I know well that we only really persuade ourselves of what is true and what is good, and that is exactly how it is meant to be.  You decide, I’ll just sit on the sidelines of your biography singing my song, which just may help or inspire you to more consciously find your own.

Remember: the most profound indirect proof of the distributed God is Song.

************************

I had been interested in these questions discussed next for a long time - some of the salient facts in that regard are mentioned within the text below.   The original audience I had in mind for this was basically Christian religious folk and the essay was first published as part of my book New Wine .

Were I to attempt to write this for an astronomer, I’d have to write a whole big book, something regarding which I am not really qualified, nor have the time and inclination to accomplish.  While I think this essay works, after a fashion, I have no expectation most readers of it will fully appreciate its nuances.  Hopefully, however, if the effort of this book (The Art of God) is successful, perhaps this essay will point some thinkers, on questions regarding the starry world, in a useful direction.

Of import in this next essay is the study of projective geometry.  Whatever the reader may think of my “scientific" conclusions, a main reason for this essay was to point to this geometry, and encourage the reader to learn about it.  Above I referred to Tomberg’s definition of Goetheanism as qualitative characterizing picture-thinking.  The best discipline for making this organic thinking scientific is learning the new geometry, which allows the picture thinking to produce inwardly, in an exact fashion, the many different kinds of metamorphosis contained in all the living elements of the world.

One of the things our age presents to us has to do with how we see (as in think) the Natural World and the somewhat emancipated Social World.   Materialistic science (all is matter, there is no spirit) has dis-ensouled those Worlds.  That is a tragedy of enormous proportions, because the reality is that these Worlds have Soul (consciousness and being).  Our situation is something like having some very best Friends, who love us so deeply that they will selflessly sacrifice all that they are to our benefit.  I’d like to reintroduce, in a more intimate fashion, a few of those Friends to the readers of this book (The Art of God).

Think of this as the beginning of a love affair.  We are at the party, and you see someone that is attractive, and you ask me what the possibilities are.  I’m not going to give you an assumption - a mistaken pre-thought thought.  I’m going to tell you the truth about these Friends.  As I already love them, it occurs to me that you might want to love them too.  Below, in In Joyous Celebration ..., I will get more carefully into the role of the intention to love and our capacity to know intimately the object of our thinking activity due to that love.  What we cannot love, we cannot truly know, and this very much involves what we think of as the Natural and the Social Words.

The Misconception of Cosmic Space As

Appears In the Ideas of Modern Astronomy

- and as contained in the understandably limited thinking embodied

in the conceptions of the nature of parallax and redshift -

- introduction -

Before entering on to the main body of this essay, we should consider briefly the nature of thinking and of the imagination.   In this little book (New Wine) there are a number of different comments on thinking and on the imagination, coming from different directions, but here I want to point out some basic facts as a foundation for the coming work.

The first is that human beings think, and that there is no science without the activity of human thinking.   Thinking determines which questions the scientist asks, what experiments he conducts, and then ultimately how the data provided by the experiments is interpreted - that is what does this scientific activity mean.  For this essay we are confronted with the scientific meaning created by human thinking in relationship to some considerable portions of the data accumulated by scientific work centered on questions concerning the stellar world.  We are asking here in this essay whether what science thinks today of the meaning and significance of the stars is what we ought to continue to think, in the future, or even today to assume is still a reasonable understanding.

As part of the process of examining the underlying questions, we will be using a particular capacity of the mind, which might be called the imagination, or picture-forming  capacity.   We make all manner of mental pictures in the normal course of ordinary thinking, and in scientific thinking we carry out this activity in quite specific directions.  Certain astronomical ideas, for example the idea of parallax, are specifically grounded in the picture-thinking connected to Euclidean geometry.   While we sometimes use a pencil and paper to work out the details of this geometric picture thinking, the fact that should not be ignored (but often is) is that it is the mind of the human being that contributes the fundamental activity from which our modern astronomical conceptions arise.  In fact, our interpretation of the meaning of astronomical data is entirely a result of mental processes, a number of which are expressly born in the imagination.

Yes, we carefully observe the stellar world with all kinds of remarkable instruments.   We also use a great deal of mathematics in how this material is interpreted, but we must never, in the process of unfolding this scientific investigation of the world of the stars, forget the centrality of thinking and of the imagination to the whole process.   If we take thinking and the imagination away, there is no science of astronomy.   Why this is so important will hopefully become more clear as this essay unfolds.

- main body -

*"Our Father in the skies..."  are the first words of the Lord's Prayer, as translated by Andy Gaus in his book The Unvarnished Gospels.  I start here to point out the fact that the people living in ancient Palestine, at the time of the Incarnation, had a different kind of consciousness than we do today.   When they looked at the heavens, they understood (and were taught by their wise elders) that the sky was the abode of the Divine Mystery.  In fact, they understood the whole of Creation to be en-souled with Being and Consciousness.   Since that time a different conception of the heavens and of the earth has come into existence for large portions of humanity.  How did that original conception change and what can we learn by observing carefully the nature of that change?  In this near to last essay in the main body of New Wine, we'll look primarily at a crucial set of ideas related to the field of astronomy that were a significant part of these changes.

Everyone understands that if we make even the slightest error in the aim of the bow and arrow, by the time the arrow reaches the end of its journey, it doesn't take much of an original error to cause the arrow to have completely missed the target.  Human beings are flawed, and science is the activity of human beings.  In the following essay I am going to concern myself with clearly amateur* researches and thinking into the problems of parallax and red shift, as these ideas are used to create for us a conception of the world of the Stars.

*[While I am not a member of the priesthood of the religion of Natural Science, I do know how to observe carefully and how to think objectively, so just because astronomy isn't my profession, the reader should not automatically anticipate they will be misled.  The reader should, however,  themselves test the themes outlined below in their own careful picture-thinking.  The tendency of scientific thinking has been toward too much  analysis, and not enough synthesis, while the return of a focus on the imagination will help us move forward in the future toward a needed  balance between these two basic gestures in thinking.]

The fundamental question is this: the current generally understood idea of cosmic space is that it is essentially a three dimensional endlessness - a very big box, which while it must have some unusual properties as a container, it is nevertheless organized such that everywhere inside it one can expect that the same rules of physics, we observe in the laboratory on the Earth, will be true all that way out there...once upon a time in a galaxy far far away.   Is this conception of endless three-dimensional space true?

To work more deeply with this question of the assumed nature of space itself, let us consider a rather simple geometric thought experiment, which everyone (trained mathematician or otherwise) can do.

Make a picture of a small perfect sphere in your mind.  It has a center and a periphery.   One can use the terms radius, circumference and diameter with respect to this sphere, but they really don't have any precise meaning unless we define one of these characteristics by giving it first an exact measure.  For example, if we said the radius of our mental sphere was one meter, well understood rules of the geometry of a perfect sphere would give us diameter and circumference (as well as other related characteristics, such as the degree of arc of the curvature of the surface, the area of the surface, etc.).

Now keep in mind that we don't have to conceive of this sphere in terms of measure.  It can just exist in our mind as a measureless perfect geometric form.

Next, we imagine the radius line, from the center of the sphere to the periphery, increasing.   We again don't have to measure it, we just make the picture in our thinking of this imaginary sphere as something that is slowly growing through an elongating radius line.   The radius line grows.  As that line grows all the other characteristics of the sphere grow as well.

We could also mentally cause the same effect by changing any other  properties.  For example, if we cause with our picture-thinking the area of the surface to increase, we change at the same time all the other relationships.

Now lets return to the increasing of the radius line.   In your imagination now picture that intersection between the radius line and the periphery of the sphere.  At this intersection there is a degree of curvature of the arc of the sphere.   We can notice as we do this thought experiment that as the radius line grows, the tightness of the curvature of the surface lessens.

To help this thought develop, let us imagine the radius line decreasing.   We shrink it, and as we do this the curvature of the periphery of the sphere gets tighter and tighter, until we make the radius line zero.   When we make the radius line zero we have lost the sphere, and it has disappeared into a dimensionless point.

Yet, since we are working without any need for measure, a zero radius sphere is simply a point.  Once we give measure of any amount to the radius line of a zero radius line sphere (a point), the sphere returns.   A radius line of a nanometer takes a point and makes it a sphere.

Seeing this clearly with our geometrical imagination (which is quite exact and precise, by the way), we now do the opposite and complete the earlier exercise by increasing the radius line to infinite length.  Instead of a radius line of zero, it is now infinite.  What then happens to the curvature of the sphere when the radius becomes infinitely elongated?

Well, if we carefully follow out our precise and exact geometrical imagination, we will be able to observe this process unfold.  As the radius line increases in length the original tightness of the curvature of the surface of the sphere lessens, until at the moment the radius line is infinite there will be no curvature at all.  The sphere has disappeared, and undergone a metamorphosis into a plane.   If we think carefully about what we have learned here, we will see then that any sphere of any measure of radius line is always an intermediate geometric form arising in between a dimensionless point and a plane at infinity.

This fact is already well known in the profound mathematical science of projective geometry, and we have now ourselves discovered what is called there: the Plane at Infinity.  The sphere then is geometrically in between the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small, or in between the plane at infinity and a geometric point (which has no measure at all, unless we put it into relationship with something else).  A point by itself is just that - nothing else.  It occupies no space at all.

Well then, what is the point of this exercise?

There are several.  First it is crucial to realize that we can think geometrically without using any measure at all.  If one is lucky enough to come upon a copy of Olive Whicher's Projective Geometry: creative polarities in space and time*, one has the possibility to study this wonderful geometry using only a pencil, a straight edge and some paper (large sheets are easier for some constructions).   Measure has been done away with, and the creators (or discoverers) of this mathematics describe it is all geometry - meaning by this that every single other geometry is a special case of projective geometry (which is sometimes, for this reason, also called synthetic geometry).

*[check Waldorf Schools or other Rudolf Steiner institutions for copies of this book.  At present it is tragically out of print.]

The difficulty for Natural Scientists has been how to apply this beautifully symmetric, measure free geometry, to the natural world.  Science is rooted in measure, and while the ideas of this geometry are recognized as significant, what could they mean in a world that is already hopelessly entangled in a science which has to use measure for everything?

With this riddle in the background, let us now examine the history of ideas by which the old view of the heavens as an abode of the Divine Mystery came to be supplanted by a view in which space is conceived as a near endless three dimensional container, punctuated with mass caused curvatures (the space-time gravity ideas following after Einstein, using the Reinmann geometry - again a special case of the more general projective geometry).

Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600, is credited with having first suggested the idea that a star might be like the sun.  Would that our histories were more accurate, because what we think of as the sun today, and how he thought about such matters (he was, among other disciplines, a deeply thoughtful meta-physician*) is not quite grasped by believing his idea, that a star and our sun were relatives, in fact mirrors in any way our modern conceptions.  For Bruno, the idea that a star and our sun were related, was a completely different idea than we hold today. The details of that, however, is a whole other matter.

*[Meta-physics, contrary to modern views that it is not a science at all, was really always seen as a product of a synthesis of ones total understanding.  Modern physics comes from taking things apart, from analysis.   Meta-physics always had the task of make the parts of all human knowledge into a single whole.]

Bruno did agree to a degree with Copernicus, and so in those years the ideas being produced by natural philosophers (the grandfathers of natural science) came to be at odds with the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.  While the previous age of careful thinkers (the Scholastics), would have understood (keeping to Aristotle) that there was a difference between quantities and qualities, the scientific impulse coming to the fore in those years more and more felt it could only deal with that which could be counted or measured - that is quantities.   The various categorical qualities of Aristotelian meta-physics more and more dropped away from consideration (although this was a long term process and many thinkers (Kepler and Faraday for example, thought this was an error of thought to do so).

In any event, pure modern astronomy slowly freed itself from the meta-physics connected to astrology and related disciplines, by a process in which the qualitative problems were left aside and everything was more and more rooted in only what could be counted (and measured).  Kepler, it has been forgotten, was an astrologer as well as the discoverer of the three fundamental laws of planetary motion*.  Not only that, but Newton was an alchemist.  The tendency has been to frame the history of these thinkers as if they thought as we do today, when anyone who actually reads what they wrote discovers they did not. (For a comprehensive examination of this overlooked history of science, read Ernst Lehrs' Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought.  Also read Arthur Zajonc's Catching the Light: the entwined history of Light and Mind.

*[Kepler believed, for example, that his formula and ideas regarding the Third Law of Planetary Motion was a rediscovery of the ancients’ idea of the Harmony of the Spheres]

As this process matures, it reaches a kind of high point in the 19th Century, and two important ideas are given birth out of the context of this leaving aside of the problem of qualities, and resting all theories of the starry world only on what can be counted and measured.  These ideas are  parallax and redshift.  Such concepts don't emerge on their own, so we have to work carefully with them, still keeping in mind how dependent they are upon measure alone.

The idea of redshift doesn't come by itself, for example, for it is really based upon spectroscopy.  This science is itself not based initially on stellar observation, but on work in the laboratory where various fundamental elements are combusted (burned) in such a way that they produce "light".  This "light" is measured according to the quantitative ideas of Newtonian Optics, and so we get the "spectral" lines for such basic elements as hydrogen.

As a result stellar light phenomena, including light phenomena from our sun, are used in such a way that it is assumed that this light from the stars and our sun is produced in those places by a burning process similar in kind (but not degree) to what was done in the laboratory.  If the light from a star, or our sun, has a certain mathematically accurate vibration (frequency), that is like or essentially similar to the hydrogen line obtained in the laboratory, this light frequency is then seen as showing us that in that star, or our sun, hydrogen is being burned up, which combustion process gives off that particular light frequency.

This is so important a fact (actually assumed to be universal) that in the movie Contact, the frequency used to send the message to Earth from the fictional stellar civilization is the hydrogen light frequency times pi.  That is, it is a material constant multiplied by a geometric constant.

All the same, there was a problem with the hydrogen light frequency, for example, from the stars.   The observed light frequency in the normal range for hydrogen (assumed to be an exact universal constant) isn't actually quite so exact to observation.  Various stars' hydrogen lines are discovered to be a bit off center, so to speak, such that they can be described (in the assumptions of physical astronomy) to be either red shifted or blue shifted.  The greatest number of stellar objects are red shifted (only a very very few are blue shifted).

Following Newton, color is a spectrum of light frequencies, with a red end point, where beyond which it becomes invisible to the eye, or a blue end point (actually violet, but convention names that end of the spectrum the blue end) where beyond this end it also becomes invisible to the eye.  We see with our eyes a normal color Newtonian spectrum (so it is assumed) and at the edges of this visible spectrum the light is no longer visible, although it still can be observed and measured with instruments (the red end becomes infrared or heat, and the blue end becomes ultraviolet, leading then to such as x-rays).  The wavelength of the frequency at the red end is longer and longer (elongation), and the wavelength of the frequency at the blue end is shorter and shorter (compaction).

These questions arise: what does it mean that light from the stars is not exactly showing us the precise hydrogen line we came to know in the laboratory, and what do we make of the fact that this shift toward the red (the dominant types of shift) itself varies?   Some stellar objects show small redshift and other's quite large redshift.

The original dominating idea for the meaning of the phenomena of the redshift (elongation) of such as the hydrogen line frequency was arrived at by creating an analogy between light waves and sound waves, in 1842.  We all know (or experience at least) the so-called Doppler effect - the shift in sound of a train horn as it comes toward us or away from us.  This movement toward or away produces a change in the pitch (auditory frequency), even though we know that the actual pitch the horn is making never changes.  The change in pitch is heard because of the movement of the source of the sound (which compacts or elongates the frequency, as perceived by the ear, which is relatively stationary).

By analogy then, redshift was thought to give evidence of the movement of the object away from the observer on the Earth.  Whatever was going on, most of the stellar objects had this redshift phenomena (in varying degrees) and from this analogy was born the idea that the Universe is expanding (which then later is supposed to logically give us the Big Bang - an explosion which creates an expanding Universe).   I point out this last to urge the reader to notice how interwoven are all the ideas we have today about the physical universe, such that if, for example, redshift doesn't really mean what we think it means, then this idea of the expansion of the Universe loses one of its main supports.

The first problem to arise after the more or less universal acceptance of this theory, was the recognition that while light was superficially a wave  phenomena (a movement propagating in a medium), similar to sound, the analogy didn't really hold, so a lot of thought went into how to revisit the redshift phenomena and appreciate it better.   Unfortunately, while many scientists feel certain older kinds of ideas ought to get dropped away from any current point of view, some ideas seem quite unwilling to be abandoned, so the Doppler analogy remains, even though contemporary physics sometimes sees light as both particle and wave simultaneously (depending on what questions you ask, and which experiments you do).

One of the newer theories as regards redshift (moving away from the Doppler analogy) is that it is partially a consequence of the temperature in the star.  Another sees some redshift phenomena as reflecting the influence of gravity wells.

I point this out only to suggest that theories themselves are in constant motion (a kind of social Brownian motion among different minds).  I am not so much interested in the current theory here, because it is my view that the resolution to the fundamental question lies in a quite different direction.

Let us now leave redshift behind, and go on to the idea parallax, which arose a few years before redshift historically (1838, so it says on-line).

The basic idea of parallax is that it enables us to measure (remember what was said above about measure) how far a star (or other stellar phenomena) is from the Earth.  Basically this is done by coming up with an observational angle, that can be measured on the Earth, and is made possible in large part by the orbit of the Earth around the sun.  Since I can't put in a drawing here (the reader can go on-line if they desire) I'll try to do this with words.

Place on the grass of a football field, in your imagination, two poles.  One pole is at the center of the goal line, and the next at the center of the 10 yard line nearest that goal line.   Now go down to the goal line at the other end of the field, and set up a transit (a device for taking the measure of an  angle of changes in a sight line).   Move the transit from one side of the field to the other, stopping every yard, and make observations of the angle of observation between the two poles obtained by viewing them from the moving transit.

As we do this the angle we are measuring changes.  This angle is widest at one side of the field, and then contracts, until we are right opposite the two poles (at which occurrence the near pole occults the other, or stands in front of it), and then the angle expands again as we move toward the opposite side of the field.

Now imagine such an activity taking place with respect to the light phenomena of stellar objects.  The transit is actually the earth, which moves constantly, changing the observational "angle" with respect to distant objects.  As this earth-transit moves, some of the distant objects seem to occult each other, as if one was in front, and the other behind.

However, since these objects are so far away (apparently), the angles that are measured are very very very small (small fractions of seconds of degree of arc).  One writer suggested that if you took a quarter, and looked at it from a distance of three miles, measuring the angle between a transit observation of one side of the quarter, and then the other side - this picture suggests how small an angle is actually being measured by this method (parallax) with regard to the nearest star to the earth (for stars believed to be further away, the "angle" is progressively smaller).

Using this data (the angle measurements coupled with our knowledge of the diameter of the Earth's orbit) we can use the basic rules of Euclidean geometry to determine the length of the sides of the resultant triangle.  This information (with a couple of other geometric ideas rooted in measure) then gives what we think to be the distance of the stellar object from the Earth.

Now since redshift is believed to tell us that most stellar objects are moving away from us, these distances change over time, which then appears to give us a kind of confirmation of the parallax.  The problem is that some of these observations came in conflict (an inconsistency between redshift and parallax).   One of the most obvious of these was discovered by the astronomer Hal Arp, who as a result for a time found himself to be seen as a heretic by his fellows, and was temporarily shunned (couldn't get telescope time to continue his research (see his book,  Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies).

Basically what he observed (using conventional astronomical ideas and methods), was that Quasars (quasi-stellar objects), while they had a very high redshift (suggesting they were traveling very fast away from us, and since they were thought to have been doing this for some time - no changes in rate of velocity and/or acceleration were assumed, they were also thought to be quite far away) the parallax measurement seemed to imply they were much nearer.  Quasars seemed to occult (get in front of) much slower (less redshifted) stellar objects).  The two phenomena could not be reconciled.  Were Quasars near or far?

I'll not go into what were the conventional adjustments made (its all very complicated, and unnecessarily so in my view) in order to preserve the basic set of ideas of modern astronomy, but we can (with justification) simply step past these ideas.  Why?

Because fundamentally the problem is due to the fact that phenomena of redshift and parallax is organized in accord with Euclidean geometry and the need in science to measure.   In effect, at every point in the development of these ideas (though scientific thinking and imagination), we exported to Cosmic Space those conceptions that were true here in the center (the Earth), and further, we assumed that these conditions were an invariable constant.

For example, the distance we measure using the idea of parallax can't actually be tested empirically.  In essence, we export from our Earth reality the concept of Euclidean three-dimensional space to the apparently farthest reaches of the starry world, but at the same time have no way of testing the set of assumptions behind the activity of exportation of such an idea.  We can't go off to the side of the container in which all stars are held, and measure from another quarter whether in fact the distance the parallax formulation gives us is correct.

For another example ..., we find the hydrogen frequency line by a laboratory experiment here on the surface of the Earth, and then assume that nothing of physics changes at cosmic distances, and that the universe will obey the same laws way out there that it obeys here.  Under the influence of these assumptions we export our earthly picture to cosmic spaces, something that really isn't justified if science wishes to remain properly empirical.

All our observations are made on the Earth or from near-earth space.  It is really only in our mind that we go outward toward cosmic space.   If that is the case, then we must be very very careful in how we let one thought grow from the other.   Clearly if there is an error in thought (remember our arrow to the target analogy at the beginning of this essay), then the further out in space our imagination, of the picture of the meaning of the data we collect here goes, the more a small error in our thought will produce a quite large miss in our understanding of the truth.

While there were many small mistakes made (such as the assumptions observed regarding the hydrogen line), there is one single idea that saves the situation as it were.  We set aside Euclidean geometry and substitute for it Projective Geometry - the fundamental geometry of which all other geometries (including Euclidean) are a special case.  Let us next then try to apply this geometry to the image creation aspect of our thinking, because after all it is the image we are making of cosmic space that is important.  It is the mind that travels to cosmic space, riding the ideas we have created from the data only empirically observed here.  We, who live today, have traveled far down the historical path of one kind of mind-created image, and now it is time to perhaps deconstruct it and create something new.

Lets recall the older (or current) image first, namely of a three dimensional emptiness, filled with stars which are like our sun, some surrounded by  planets like our planet.  It is a powerful image.  Science fiction, books and films, tell all kinds of tales.  If one were to suggest that this might not be correct, most people would think you were crazy.

Return now to our earlier work in which we expanded the radius line of the sphere to infinity and observed how the sphere became a plane at infinity (or the reverse, where if we contract the radius line the sphere disappears into a dimensionless point).  Also keep in mind that the geometric form never changes its basic nature - it just transforms at the different extremes (the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small radius aspect).

A lot of people should have some trouble here, because they conceive of infinity as something much larger than say the multiple light years of measure we have applied to the distance between the Earth and the stellar objects.  In this regard, lets look at some apparent facts so far developed under the old methodology.

For example, the so-called nearest star, Proxima Centuri is thought to be 4.2 light years away (its degree of arc in parallax is .77233 seconds of arc - which is by the way the largest degree of arc using parallax measures, as every more distant object will have a smaller degree of arc).  4.2 light years (this next is an amateur calculation) is 24 billion miles (that's 24,000,000,000, or 24 thousand million).   The farthest distance objects are high multiples of that.  We'll return to this a bit later.

Remember, we have exported an idea to cosmic space which we can't empirically test.  Science, tied to the idea of counting and measure, has exported to cosmic space a measure (huge light year distances), which idea can't be checked by any other means.  As a result, we are quite right to challenge this exportation of measure to test whether it is a thought that is properly rigorous.  Since we cannot empirically test the assumed measure, we are left with the quite definite necessity to even more carefully and rigorously subject that idea to the tests of logic.

Here is a very important question.  If at the center of our infinitesimally small sphere, the point, there is no actual space, once we have created any measure of radius distance (a nanometer, for example), we now have three dimensional space, then what happens at the infinite radius, when the sphere disappears and becomes the plane at infinity?  Is this transition as apparently sudden as the one from the point to the very very small sphere?

If we actually think very carefully about this we will notice (using our geometric imagination) that even the transition to the very very small is not sudden.  There is a lot of work on theses themes in mathematics, and you can Google it by starting with Zeno's paradoxes.   In any event, at the infinitesimally small end of the transition, from the sphere to the point, the process itself is likewise smaller and smaller in nature, while the transition from the very large sphere to the plane at infinity must be, by virtue of laws of symmetry essential to projective geometry, larger and larger in nature.  Keep in mind we are thinking here of the transformational process, from one geometric state or form to another state or form.

The plane at infinity doesn't appear suddenly out of nowhere, but as we approach it the nature of three-dimensional space is slowly undergoing a metamorphosis.   Three-dimensional space is becoming plane-like in its fundamental nature, but not all of a sudden.   Space itself is changing, and the rules of physics applicable to a purely three-dimensional sphere (Earth conditions) will no longer, at these extremely large distances, apply.

What are huge light year imagined measures then (such as the 78 billion light years assumed for diameter the visible universe - there being thought to exist a greater universe we cannot yet see even with our instruments)?  They are simply a fantasy or myth, born in the assumptions of the scientific imagination.  Since we cannot conceive of anything as knowable scientifically, without measure and counting, we presently are unable to conceive of the universe without measure either.  Again, an assumption that causes the arrow to miss the mark.  The question right here then is whether the current limits of our imagination and thinking reflect the actual limits of reality.  Confined for a time in the limited box of Euclidean Geometry, we stand on the cusp of transcending those limits by applying the more universal Projective Geometry.

This should not surprise anyone, for we already know that in particle physics, where the transition of matter endowed space becomes infinitesimally small (remember the sphere collapsing into the point - which has led us into all the paradoxes of quantum physics) the conditions there are suggestive of all kinds of alterations of the rules observed at a more (relatively) macro scale of matter.  At very small dimensions, the rules of physics appear to change, so why would we be surprised that at very large dimensions, the rules of physics will also change.

In fact, in the wonderful movie Mind Walk, the character of the physicist describes matter as a huge emptiness, punctuated with geometric points, where fields of force intersect.  In effect, there is nothing there at all in terms of substance (or what we ordinarily call matter) but this organism of intersections of fields of force in various kinds of pure geometric points (no space).  No space at the infinite periphery, and no space in the infinitesimal point.  In between, the perfect geometric sphere mediates between the greatest and the smallest.  "Think on it: how the point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself.  Hast thou understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite."  Rudolf Steiner.

Now if this is true, then as macro cosmic space becomes more plane-like and less like the normal physical conditions of the Earth, we ought to be able to observe phenomena (just as we do in the very smallest dimensions revealed by quantum experiments) that reveal to us that this condition of space itself has altered.  Space, being no longer three dimensional at the plane at infinity, must become something else.

Before we believe this is a poor idea, recall that already we have been taught about the so-called gravity wells (especially near such objects as our Sun).  Many of us have seen images, either on TV or in a page in a magazine, which suggests that near a massive object, space itself is distorted.  Light, we are told, traveling near this imagined state of a gravity well, can't travel in a straight line.  This is thought to have been proved by Einstein's predictions regarding light from Mercury as it passes toward us from the other side of the sun (when Mercury's orbit causes it to hide (be occulted) behind the Sun.  Using the Reinmann geometry (a special case of projective geometry) Einstein was able to calculate exactly the amount of the bending of light by the gravity well of our Sun.

Since we already know how to imagine a distorted near space around a massive object like our Sun (recall that Bruno thought our Sun and stars were of a similar nature) it is not too great a leap to imagine a fully  transformed space at the transition from the very large sphere to the Plane  at Infinity.  In a sense, the image of gravity wells is already a transformation of our ideas of space itself, although not going so far as to free itself fully of the need to measure.  What I am suggesting is that we take our spacial imagination faculty all the way, and also bring projective geometry itself all the way into play as descriptive of the natural world.

Which is of course exactly what our observations of light, and other phenomena of the stellar world, can tells us, if we let them.  Once we overcome the one-sided Euclidean geometry previously applied in parallax, and substitute Projective Geometry principles, then all the anomalous problems of redshift are resolved. 

The reason the hydrogen line is different is because it (the light) originates in a kind of space which itself is qualitatively different).  A star isn't a sun (unless we change our ideas of our near sun-space - going back to Bruno, which is entirely justified but a whole other problem).  Those stellar objects with large redshift characteristics (such as Quasars) are deeper (a presently necessary poor choice of words, for it implies a continuation of three dimensions) within the transformed plane-like space.  In fact, if we make a picture only of the redshift (disregarding Euclidean parallax) phenomena by itself (and related other astronomical facts of stellar radiation phenomena), a new kind of picture emerges.

Think for a moment on all the pictures we have been graced with of the starry world from the Hubble telescope.   Everyone has seen these.  Rich colors (actually computer enhanced far too often, but that is a whole other problem).  Marvelous shapes and forms.  Just looking at the redshift characteristics we can make a picture of an object that is remarkably active.  It is not static or at rest in relationship to the Earth, but dynamic.  Its relationship to other stellar objects is more fixed (perhaps musically harmonious, because there is a dance of such objects - including our solar system - all based on the projected geometric form of the vortex*), but the light phenomena, which our instruments observe, suggests (since we observe this variation of redshifts, x-ray stars etc) that stellar objects have dynamic properties.  The various kinds of radiation, pouring toward the earth from the cosmic periphery, are not constant, but rather always changing and dynamic.

*[A vortex is, in terms of projective geometry, a dynamic form.  That is, it is, in its actual nature, in movement.  A tornado funnel cloud is a vortex, and we see a vortex almost every time we flush a toilet.  A vortex is also a relative of the cone of light, which is how we think of what light does when it enters the eye through the lens.  These cones of light are well described in all their geometric properties by the rules of projective geometry; and, a vortex is simply a dynamic (moving) cone-like form in nature.]

Many stellar objects are extremely dramatic (x-ray and neutron stars, for example).  Keep in mind that these pictures are created by a thinking which has removed all qualities, remaining only in quantities.  To better appreciate this let us make a little analogy.

Consider a flower garden in full late-summer bloom.  Vivid colors, lots of insect life and birds dancing and playing.  For some almost violent growth (how fast does a sunflower grow, on its way to a height of 12 to 14 feet in three months time).  Of course, to the gardener it makes no sense to disregard the way such a garden makes us feel (its qualities), but if astronomical thinking were applied to a flower garden, all that would disappear.  We'd end up with a bunch of numbers (how many, of which kinds, what frequency of light were the colors, what was the speed of growth etc. etc. etc.).  Our actual experience of the garden is washed away by the process of limiting our thinking only to the quantitative.

Now think (if you can remember) of a time when you were deep in Nature, away from city lights, and lay on your back in a meadow looking up at midnight at the night sky.   Thousands upon thousands of stars, and your mind naturally saw everywhere patterns.   Moreover, we feel awe.  The starry night touches something deep inside us, that can only respond with marvel and wonder.  We forget this living in our cities, and we have also forgotten (and are losing) even the ability to have such a view because the atmosphere itself is becoming so polluted that less and less of the stellar light passes through it to our eye.

This is what we observe - what we experience.  What we think - what is our mental image or picture - having been formed by modern astronomical ideas, is that this endless emptiness is filled with objects like our own planet and solar system.  But now we are discovering in this essay the possibility that deep space is not three dimensional at all.  Cosmic space is a peripheral plane of light, alive with dynamic processes creating what?  What is this new kind of space, the plane at infinity, from which stellar light pours down upon the Earth?

Lets take a small side trip here, to consider light itself.  The book mentioned above, Catching the Light: the entwined history of light and mind, goes into remarkable detail and history.  Keeping our projective geometry idea in mind, we might then make a relationship between the sphere that has collapsed into a point, and what is now called light quanta or photons.  As mentioned above, these quanta exhibit all kinds of properties that normally spacial (in a three dimensional sense) objects do not.

For example, the world we see of trees and clouds does not reveal the micro world of light quanta and the other many strange particles known to modern high energy physics.  The scientist doesn't see much of this either, except with his instruments and the image making powers of his mind.

We could say (from our more naive point of view - which has a special validity) that it is as if light quanta have stepped outside of time and space (this is one way of viewing what the experiments with light show to us today through quantum physics).  To help here, let me add another idea from projective geometry.

We know in Euclidean geometry this general rule: parallel lines never meet.  In projective geometry (of which, remember, Euclidean geometry is a special case) parallel lines meet at infinity.  To appreciate this better we need to practice another imagination, for we can with our picture thinking follow quite easily in thought the wonderful paradox expressed here.

Picture two parallel lines (I can do this here):

_______________.________________

________________________________

Now imagine the top line, in the center of which is a point, rotating around that point.  Picture, for example, the top line crossing the bottom line at about a 45 degree angle toward the left side of the page.  As we rotate this line further to the left, the angle of crossing gets smaller and smaller, until at infinity it no longer crosses the line.  Yet, if we keep rotating the line in the same direction of rotation, as soon as it goes the smallest possible distance further, the top line starts to cross the bottom line at the farthest distance to the right.

When we couple this idea with our appreciation of the plane at infinity, we can with our geometric imagination feel (picturing it is hard, but logically we can feel this is right - and all these ideas have been proved by those working with the rules of projective geometry using algebraic-like formulas and calculations) that these two lines, which could be seen as parallel lines contained in a sphere, will at infinity arrive at the same point on the plane at infinity, because as we saw before, when the radius line of the sphere is infinite it is no longer a three-dimensional space.  The rounded sphere has become a plane, an all encompassing plane to be sure, surrounding from the infinite periphery (the unseen universe imagined by cosmologists) all that was at one time interior.  The surrounding geometric quality remains, but since space itself is transformed, it accomplishes a kind of paradoxical miracle.

To travel to infinity in one direction (in terms of the spherical three-dimensional nature of ordinary space) means to return from the opposite direction, for once within the plane at infinity, the line that intersected the ever flattening arc of the sphere is now simultaneously a point that is everywhere.  The point, in the center dimensionless, expands, first  becoming a growing measureless sphere until it ultimately becomes a plane.  Our geometric imagination never has to leave the proper and logical train of geometrical thought.  Once more: "Think on it: how the point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself.  Hast thou understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite."  Rudolf Steiner.

If we then appreciate that the night sky is the plane at infinity, and that the measure we exported from our earthly perspective is not valid out there in cosmic space, then the light quanta, existing there outside of time and space, radiates toward us from this cosmic periphery, only becoming space-bound when within three-dimensional space.  At the periphery, light quanta are not limited by the so-called speed of light*, but are everywhere at the same time, yet somehow differentiated, for that is what we see, not just with the eye but with all our instruments as well.

*[Google “Alain Aspect 1982“, with reference to the question of the limiting (or not) aspects of the speed of light.]

Light comes towards us from the stellar reality.  If that reality is not spacial in the sense that we previously assumed (rooted in three-dimensionally matter based bodies like suns and planets), then what is it?   What can exist in the transitional space in between a true three-dimensional sphere, and the pure plane at infinity?  If out there is not an  empty space in which three dimensional matter arises, what does arise there in that space that, like the infinitesimally small, will not allow itself to conform to Earth-like physical laws?

These are the questions that have to be faced if we apply projective geometry to the relationship between our Earth center, and the peripheral plane at infinity.  If we look at the stellar phenomena, such as redshift, then what meaning can be attributed to that kind of existence which creates light that violates the rules we know at the Earth center?

Perhaps it would be better (disregarding the word "deeper" above) to think of these objects as more filled with Life.  The plane at infinity, as transformed space, reveals a high level of dynamic properties in all its light radiations.   Could that dynamism be Life? Why could we think that and remain within reason?

Something is happening out there that comes here.  Light is created out there and comes here.  Our science has made all kinds of pictures for us of what is happening out there, yet these pictures are not empirical, but entirely theoretical.  Moreover, they are entirely material and assume that the laws of physics at cosmic distances will be the same as they are on the Earth, which already we have noticed is not justified for the very very small.

If we work from the idea of the plane at infinity first (for which projective geometry grants us every right), then we might ask whether or not space itself is created out there.  We see the light coming toward us from the cosmos, and we notice its dynamic properties (all the various intensities of redshift, among others - Quasars, neutron stars etc).  If we discard measure (which projective geometry doesn't need), then the plane at infinity, with its inward radiating light is perhaps creating space itself, not from a point center (such as the Big Bang), but from the cosmic periphery.

The plane at infinity (transcendent of matter oriented three dimensionality) creates three dimensional space and time, by radiating light inwardly from the cosmic periphery.  Redshift is not old light receding, but its opposite - new light becoming space and time.  This is exactly the idea of a student of Rudolf Steiner's, George Adams Kaufmann, in his 1933 essay on cosmic theory (rooted in projective geometry): Space and the Light of Creation, which essay's first chapter is Radiation of Space (the second chapter is The Music of Number, and the third and last chapter is The Burden of Earth and the Sacrifice of Warmth).

What kind of power could create Space itself?  Our point centered assumptions, working from only quantities, have only been able to think of a spiritless matter filled Universe, born in a Big Bang.  Certainly, working inwardly from the cosmic periphery (the plane at infinity) which the new geometry gives us every right to do, what is that which can be out there that rays inwardly the creation of Space itself?

Conventional astronomy has invented dark matter to maintain the usual assumptions, for without 9 times more mass in the universe, stellar movement cannot be explained.  If we go in another more qualitative direction entirely ....

"...and in it was life and the life was the light of the world..."  The power* (fiat lux - let there be light) surrounding the Universe, is Life, and the Life creates the Light, and the Light rays inwardly creating Space and Time, in the center of which the Earth of living matter and substance arises, itself a narrow spherical band, for Earth life is only on the surface - go too deep and it is fire and there is no life, go too high and it is airless and again no life.

*[If you research the modern idea of “force” back far enough you will find that only in recent times has this idea of force been divorced (abstracted) from the usual perception that all actions proceed from the activity of the will of beings.]

From the plane at infinity, through the inward plane-ward sculpted spheres of light, resting for a moment at the Earth periphery, where humanity unfolds its evolution, then eventually still collapsing to smaller and smaller spheres, ultimately disappearing into pure point centered geometric intersections of fields of force and the mysterious light quanta we discover in our laboratory experiments in quantum physics.   But is it light quanta that is born first in the cosmic periphery, and then flies inward ultimately dying into very very tiny points from out which are built living matter and substance?

Should not, according to the laws of symmetry so essential to projective geometry, there be both a similarity and a difference between the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small?  If life is created at the cosmic periphery, does it die into the very very small, only to be reborn instantaneously once more in the cosmic periphery?   Recall our imaginative experiment with the parallel lines.  If time and space rules don't apply to light quanta (photons), this will be true both at their point of first appearance and then again at their point of disappearance.

Yet, something is not quite right here.  The measureless sphere exists in between the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small.  Appearance and disappearance are the same process in a way.  Here again is Rudolf Steiner: "Think on it: how the point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself.  Hast thou understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite."

Created out of the uncreated and formless, generating space and time, falling then inward toward the center from the periphery until collapsing into the nothingness once more of timeless and space-less point centers, before returning instantaneously again to the cosmic infinite plane of life.

And, the simultaneously opposite:  Arising out of the uncreated and formless nature of the mysterious light quanta, radiating outward from an infinite number of point centers, spreading out toward the cosmic periphery, there to disappear into the remarkable spaceless and timeless plane at infinity.

A mystery aptly caught in the image of a mobile imagination of the gesture in space that creates the form we know as the lemniscate.

Moreover, of all the mysterious facts quantum mechanics has discovered, it seems that it is the mind itself that determines the nature of the collapse from potential becoming (probability) into manifestation.  Consciousness is crucial.   Without consciousness there is no manifestation, only probability.   Could not a Larger more Infinite Consciousness exist at the Periphery, where time and space themselves are first manifested?  Then too, if the Great Mind can do that, what then is involved in the small mind, when it thinks and acts so as to unfold its own creative imagination and exact picture formation in learning of and practicing the measureless beauty of projective geometry?

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God, and God was what the Word was.  It was with God in the Beginning.  All things happened through it, and not one thing that happened happened without out it.  In it was life, and the life was the light of the world....*

So Christ advises us to pray: "Our Father in the skies..."

*translation from the Greek of a part of the prologue to the John Gospel, from the book, The Unvarnished Gospels by Andy Gaus.

Of course, currently Natural Science hasn't the capacity to appreciate such a change in their understanding of the Cosmos.  But this book (New Wine in which this essay first appeared) isn't written for scientists, its written for those Christians, who might like to have a sense that one can still be deeply religious and not abandon the rational.

What we have done, by the way, is look at the image building processes of the fine minds at work in natural science, which have created a kind of myth regarding the stellar world - a myth quite different from that held by more ancient minds in ages long ago.  We have not returned to those ancient myths so much, as taken up, out of the advancing progress of natural science itself, a particular discipline (projective geometry, or all geometry), and applied it to move past the current astronomical myth to what perhaps might well be the kind of truth the physicist pursues when he chases his holy grail of the so-called: Theory of Everything.

Most versions of the Theory of Everything rely on highly abstract mathematical complexities - a kind of near-secret symbolic language only useful to the priests of Natural Science.  Would it be possible to construct a Theory of Everything using ordinary language?  Can the symbols of words on a page and simple concepts, understandable by ordinary consciousness, produce a better Theory of Everything?  May it not be necessary in fact to reintroduce qualities and mix those with quantities, if we are actually going to have a true Theory of Everything?  Doesn't such a Theory not only have to explain consciousness, but our form of consciousness - why we live in the world in between the very very large and the very very small?

We have constructed this essay in a way that makes it possible for the naive consciousness to behold in their own minds something that so far has been presented to the world as a secret mystery only knowable to the mathematical adepts of the religion of natural science.

We live in a time when there are to be no more priests, of the religious or the scientific kind.  No more claims that the ordinary and naive mind has to be dependent on another for their understanding of the world and of the universe.

The Universe wants to be known, just as we want to be known.  "You see, for now we look as if in a mirror, shrouded in mystery; but then we will see face to face.  Now I partly discern; but then I will perceive the same way that I was perceived all along.  And so we will have faith, hope and love, these three: but the greatest of these is love."*

*[Andy Gaus, Unvarnished New Testament - end of chapter 13, of St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians.]

addendum

- many questions remain -

No reader should consider that the above has exhausted all the remarkable possibilities of projective geometry in advancing our understanding of the Natural World as it appears to both our senses and our scientific instruments.   All I have really done is try bring to light aspects of thinking and the imagination that many don't yet appreciate.

Nor is the above perfect by any means, for it is clearly the work of an amateur.  That fact, however, should not stop us from going onward and asking all the many questions that still need to be asked.

For example, does the plane at infinity collapse into one point, or into all points?  We can think of the very smallest, as we observe them in the local conditions of the earth in our laboratory experiments, as a very huge number of such point centers.  All matter and substance seems to be built up out of light quanta, and other oddly named particles.

Now a plane, which has no measure, is infinite in all directions.   It can also be constructed, under the well known rules of projective geometry, of points.   There is, in this geometry, a plane of points, a plane of lines, a point of lines, a point of planes, and a line of points and a line of planes.  If we recognize that the Plane at Infinity is made up of all possible points, then what keeps it from radiating toward our Earth-Center that which becomes all the many point centers from which matter and substance arise.  Once there, in this infinite number of point centers, that which has first radiated inward, returns once more to the periphery.  This our geometric imagination can experience.

A deep study of projective geometry reveals several kinds of processes which arise according to the basic relationships of plane, line and point; or, the source or origin of light (the plane at infinity), light becoming space and time (radiation of space) and light dying into the source once more through its collapse into the infinite number of point centers quantum physics discovers.  To this we add the process of that which radiates out from point centers towards the periphery.  In the light of understanding this, we can come to quite new conceptions of how crystals grow, and what is happening at the growing point of a plant.  Such work has been done, in fact, by the Goethean Scientists pointed out in the above essays.

In addition to these questions then we are right to ask another: what is the nature of the space occupied by the imagination itself?  We know this exists, and not only that it exists, but that we create it.  We consciously create imaginative space ourselves.  What are we that we can do something that has such kinship with the space and time creating activity of the Mystery at the Plane at Infinity?

"Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." Albert Einstein [emphasis added, ed.]

- healing materialism -

The human being possesses a remarkable power in that he (or she) is able to make images and share them with others.  Meaning streams from one to another upon this product of the picture-thinking imagination.  We are taught science out of this image creation capacity.  We tell the wonderful stories of our ancestors out of this same image creation capacity.  What we frequently don't do well, is find a way to be scientific about this image creating capacity itself.

Of all the scientific disciplines that will enhance this image building capacity, in a logically rigorous fashion, it is the discipline of projective geometry (as taught by such as Whicher above) that will be the most fruitful.   At the same time, the human being is more than rationality - much more.

That human culture produces art and religion, as well as science, ought to give us a significant clue.   Whicher's book takes account of this, to a degree, by including a number of pictures of art, including religious art.  What is less appreciated is the role of human intention, of human will, in all this (the will is the point center of the same consciousness which the quantum physicist recognizes is needed for the potential to collapse into the real).

At the end of the main body of the essay above, I tried to remind the reader that we are part of reality.  Quantum mechanics has seen this, for the potential of quantum events only collapses into actual space and time when our consciousness participates.  The genius of Owen Barfield discusses participation in detail, in his book Saving the Appearances: a study in idolatry.

In this book, through a wonderful examination of what the deeper study of human languages can reveal, Barfield shows us how there is an evolution of consciousness, to go along side the physical evolution so far discovered.  For Barfield, the quite ancient times could be called: original participation.  This was a time when the human consciousness was instinctively one with reality, thus giving birth to all the ancient myths.

This original participation eventually faded away, giving us an intermediate state, called by Barfield (and others): the on-looker separation.   Humanity is pushed out of the condition of original participation by the Gods themselves, so that we can by this independence learn to experience our freedom and our ego (self) consciousness.   The on-looker separation is itself marked by special changes in language, in art and also gives rise to natural science.   It is as on-lookers (forgetting our role as thinking observers) that we build the images of the natural world, both earthly and cosmic, as only matter and never spirit.

But the natural world will not submit for long to that false view, and so quantum mechanics finds that it must reinsert human consciousness into its concepts of the basic physics of the world.  With this now well established basic scientific knowledge, to which we can add the discipline of projective geometry (especially with its understanding of visual cones of light), the path is laid out of science itself toward what Barfield called then: final participation.

Quantum mechanics tells us that our consciousness is needed for the potential to be able to collapse into the real.  Projective Geometry tells us not just rules about the light cone of physical space, but as well the light cone of internal imaginative space.  Rudolf Steiner's introspective science (outlined in A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception and The Philosophy of Freedom) shows us how to experience the world of image building (organic form) and concept creation (pure thinking) in a fully mature participatory way.

At the same time, I don't participate solely as a rational being, but as a being to whom art and the sacred have meaning.  If I add these dimensions of my being to my imaging building and conceptual formulations, what kind of picture of the world will I paint?  Given this question, I will end with a couple of stories as a kind of demonstration.

In the mid-seventies I was traveling with some friends in Northern California.  We were a group of adults and children, and during the day a few of the adults were designated camp-parents, while the others were free to wander farther.   Thus I found myself, on the evening of the Summer Solstice, sitting on a beach in Northern California watching the Sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

As the Sun set, the sky slowly grew darker and stars slowly appeared.   This is what I observed as I continued to watch the horizon point where the Sun had set.   Together, as a group, at the precisely same arc of the edge of the ocean, there appeared three stars in a somewhat vertical line.   The Sun goes down, and soon thereafter right where it went down a near vertical line of three stars appears.

Now the reader should realize that I was at that time quite convinced of the spiritual reality of things, out of my own direct experience.   As a consequence, when I observed our natural world I perceived it as a teaching.  For example, we can observe that of all the many inorganic and organic beings that appear in visual space, there are a variety of forms.   Of this variety of forms, only one form, one shape, has hands that have been so creatively freed by our ability to be able to stand upright.

Moreover, this human being changes his living environment in profound ways.  We act upon the creation, as if it was within us that the creative power itself was slowly incarnating.  To my thinking then, there existed a kind of dialog between the world of the senses and my own inner being (the teaching).   Here I was on a beach watching the Sun, itself a very special form (we receive light and heat from it that are necessary for life - without the Sun we do not live).  As this form set on the Summer Solstice, the first stars to appear (the night teachers), were three.

This then is what the teaching sang to me on that beach: one becomes three.  So the Mystery of the Trinity was written right there in the most simple events of the world of the senses.  One becomes Three.

The ambient light became slightly dimmer, and not too soon thereafter, above the three was four, in the shape of a kind of box, standing on one of its corners above the last star of the three.  The One becomes Three and then Four is added to become Seven.  Those who know what is sometimes called the occult significance of Numbers will recognize here all manner of analogies, about which nothing more need be said. (for the more traditionally fixed of mind, the Sun set and in the order described, the constellation of the Great Bear emerged, standing on its tail above the same place on the horizon the Sun had set on the night of that particular  Summer Solstice - yet this constellation did not appear all at once, but in a very definite sequence as the day light faded and the night lights manifested themselves).

In this way I was initiated more deeply into the Mystery of the Night Teachers, and while I wished my life would have allowed me to study over many decades this teaching by which we noted not just the starry sky, but when and in what order the stars emerged, I did then realize that those who observed from such as Stonehenge saw a world of wonder we have still yet to fully appreciate.

One more similar picture:  If the shape of the sense world is from a Creator, and this Creator is such profound Mystery that we have hardly yet begun to appreciate all the He has done and is doing, should we be surprised by the manner and depth of the teaching that awaits us both within and without?   Consider, sunrise and sunset.   Something that happens all over the world everyday, and has done so for eons.

If we, as an aspect of final participation, re-ensoul the world of the senses with being and consciousness, might we not then begin to see that when the Sun sets, when the shape representing (in its speaking-teaching) the Highest of the Mystery, recedes from our sight, at that moment the stars, one by one and then in groups, slowly emerge, slowly appear in the dark and by their order of appearing and by the shapes and forms they thereby render, they can be seen as singing praises to this Highest.   He sets, and they rise and sing.

Then the night ends, the regular night-singing has passed, and as the Sun begins to once more return to shed Its light and warmth and life on humankind, the stars recede, and kneeling down, in groups and then one by one, they give way to that which they honor above all else.  Yet, this is not all.

For the shape of time and space, of stars and suns and the world of humankind, is also teaching.  We are there too, and what are we, we human beings, that the Highest and all the Angels look down upon us - surround us and gift us with such Love we hardly appreciate it.  Not just that but more, for we are not only looked down upon from Above, but we are also carried through cosmic space by the Earth - Father Sky and Mother Earth - as the world's oldest peoples and cultures well know.

The dark moist earth is the Mother, from which all that grows and nourishes flows.  The waters that give life, the very air we need to breath.   There in the center of all, looked down upon by Father Sky, upheld and nourished in the Womb of Mother Earth, sits the human being, the upright shape with the hands and the creative and curious mind.  That is the real question of final participation: Who are we?

********************************

recent news concerning Red Shift questions

Sept. 12, 2008

Port Angeles, Wa. This week, dozens of leading astronomers, researchers and other scientists from around the globe met for a Cosmology conference.[1] The conference provided eight panels composed of experts in every facet of cosmology including the reality of expansion, quasars, dark matter, dark energy, “black holes”, and the true nature of the microwave radiation from space. One astronomer made his presentation live from Germany using video-link technology.

Organizer Tom Van Flandern said “This was a thrilling success. We heard and discussed three new mechanisms explaining redshift and a new equation modifying our understanding of gravity. If any of the redshift proposals passes experimental tests that would mean we do not have an expanding Universe; that the Big Bang theory would be without its strongest foundation.

Physicist John Hartnett from the University of Western Australia said “it’s amusing that our conference occurred just as they fire up the Hadron Collider in Europe. Most of our presenters showed the deep problems with the Big Bang while a 40 billion dollar project starts up to trying to find an elusive particle to keep the Big Bang story from collapsing.”

Redshift in the light from galaxies led to the belief that the universe is expanding, and this belief has persisted for 80 years. But modern observational evidence, especially from NASA European Space Agency space telescopes and satellites, has clouded the picture and raised many doubts. In 2004, an open letter was published in New Scientist magazine, and has since been signed by over 500 endorsers. It begins: “The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.” http://cosmologystatement.org

From the many lines of evidence presented at the conference, It now appears that those concerns were justified. Presenters also outlined the principles that a good cosmology should be based on. Chief among them is that it should not require a series of miracles to remain viable.

***********************

This next essay was written as part of the Book: the Way of the Fool.  That book was written to introduce to each other ordinary exoteric (traditional) Christianity, and heretical (modern - black sheep cousin) esoteric Christianity.  This next essay then  takes the course of coming at the situation from the outside, following a kind of shorter version of the material above in the main text on the spiritual nature of the social world of humanity - from the outside in, as it were - from the phenomena of the social world to the phenomena of our deepest moral inwardness

We started above with the Stellar World (as an aspect of the Natural World), and I hoped there to suggest a Mystery of I and Thou in our relationships with the world perceived by the senses.  Now we will look at the Social World, which has emancipated itself somewhat from the Natural World.  The human being is the center of the Social World, and the order of the Social World can be seen, as described above from many different directions, as an Embodiment of the Word.

This next essay then culminates in a very special set of ideas concerning the Baptism by Fire and Holy Breath, including the idea that with the true Second Coming of Christ in the Ethereal, there has arisen a Second Eucharist. - a communion in thought.

This communion in thought is the most direct way the individual can come to a conscious experience of the true Second Coming as an aspect of their own struggle and strivings to be moral in this Age.  The language used was developed over the course of that whole book (the Way of the Fool) such that not all of it will be familiar to the reader of this book.  Again, however, it is to be understood as entirely rooted in my own personal experience.

There is an important difference between this next essay and the one to follow.   “In Joyous Celebration...” develops the concept of character development all the way out to its more fully realized states.  In this present essay, we work with the beginning stages more intimately - learning to recognize how in the biography moral questions and trials are right there in front of us, and that by learning to be social helpers we do the most important work.  Christ hasn’t asked us to become enlightened, or an initiate, but only to begin to work consciously on our own character development (“Wash out the inside of the cup, if you want the outside to be clean”).   And, those tasks are right in front of us in our individual  biography, not off someplace in an ashram in India or at a mountain top mystery school in Europe.  “Love your neighbor as yourself”, Christ the Creator says.  That’s not always easy, but we don’t have to go away somewhere outside the normal course of the biography to learn to do it.