The Anthroposophical Society:
Betrayer of the Legacy of Rudolf Steiner

Harsh word: “betrayer”; but unfortunately quite necessary.  People can meet the Society members, and enjoy their works.  Just keep in mind that most of them didn’t get what Steiner actually taught, and they use his words (endlessly quoted), as a cover for their own weak thinking.  Don’t buy the Steiner they are selling.  They don’t know him, and have basically forged their ideas of him into a grandiose myth.  He was neither a minor deity, or a saint.  Just a remarkable human being with a lot of amazing gifts.  He should have won Noble Prizes in multiple fields, but because he spoke of the spirit, and of personal spiritual experiences, he was far too fringe to be adequately judged. 

For Americans he is too idealistic. 

None of this is to say that members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society are not smart.  Some are very smart and some are wise, and some are smart and wise.  They just tend to share a really bad habit.   They treat Steiner as an authority.  If he said it, it must be true.  He, on the other hand, was very clear that he did not want that. 

As a consequence of some of the flaws noted below, the Society teaches "meditation".   Everyone teaches "meditation".  What Steiner taught that was totally new was how to "think" in a spiritual Way.  One good student of Steiner's called the result of those teachings on thinking as leading to clair-thinking, a new kind of clairvoyance.  But in the case of the New Mystery of Thinking, it is the act of cognition which is a kind of "sacrament", and this "sacramental" activity produces the connection between thinking and the spiritual.

His principle work: The Philosophy of Freedom, had as its goal enabling the reader to discover how to be inwardly free.  How to be free before appetites, and how to be free before ideas.  How to be free in the face of social pressures to be moral in a certain way.  At every level of the human spirit and soul, Steiner wished to lead us to this precious inner freedom. To go so far, in fact, as to make an Art of this kind of freedom.

The last line of the original preface to The Philosophy of Freedom is this: “One must be able to confront an idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage.”

Steiner tried introduce his students into appreciating that when we awake in our inwardness, we find there Beings - spiritual, otherwise invisible, Beings.  Some of these Beings were more dangerous to our freedom, others less so.  The mind/soul is the Narrow Gate as spoken of by Christ: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” Matthew 7:13

Now in Steiner’s book mentioned above, he did not describe Christ or any other aspect of the spiritual realities his many books and hundreds of lectures described.  The Philosophy of Freedom was to be free of doctrine.  Yet, almost all of his students turned his books and lectures into doctrine.  Unquestioned doctrine.

I’ve written for years to members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society, the principle social organization dedicated to the study of Steiner’s works, and in great detail, about all the different ways they fail Steiner.  I’m leaving all that aside here, for here too - in this App - I seek for the user of the App to be completely free.  That individual freedom is the most important aspect of ourselves any of us can seek and acquire.  It is not easy.

Freedom before our appetites is not easy.  Choosing our own moral course outside of social pressures and religious doctrines is not easy.  The experience of profound ideas, and being able to stand before them, in command of them, is not easy.

There is a how, or method, to how we think.  That is ours to design and create.  That free artistic new thinking (it is only in the current stage of the evolution of consciousness that this is widely possible) will create a what, or a content.  Americans do this instinctively, and oddly enough, their confrontation with the terrible questions living in public life - in the life of our Social Rights and Duties - in that arena of the social-political is  the alchemical crucible in which the deepest capacities of the mind/soul are awakened.

Inwardly we seek to have ideas and not become in bondage to them.  Outwardly we seek to be social - to be members of the community of humanity in a way that feels right to us.  Not right to others, but right to us.  Trust that “feeling”, for that personal “what is right” is why the Universe puts us in the middle of social affairs in our biographies.  As Emerson pointed out: “In self trust all virtues are comprehended”.

One of the main reasons that members of the Society can't teach the New Mystery of Thinking is they don't know it.  Not knowing it, they assume what Steiner did was based upon "meditation" as the basic practice.  What Steiner actually did was based upon awake cognition/thinking, and his second, third, and fourth books were devoted to illuminating this Path to the New Thinking/Cognition.  Proof of this is found in Steiner's "Anthroposophy - a fragment" and in his obscure and mostly unexamined: "notebooks".