There is an irony to conferences, to
any kind of gathering of individuals who only see each
other on occasion. We find each other interesting,
but we also have a need to be interesting, and sometimes
the conference even requires us to be interesting.
We have to expose ourselves, and hope that some of this
exposed truth will work for the best - at least for
ourselves. The “other” has to endure
us being us. Oddly, for all the idealism of a
perfectly humble human being, Christ very much likes us
to be us, flaws and all. This next, then, is me
being me.
Near the end of the June Section meeting in Shelburne
VT, I stood up at a gathering of all those remaining,
and explained that I was leaving the Section, and the
Society. I didn’t have anything against the people
there, but rather I had to face the fact that
anthroposophical Society meetings caused me a great deal
of pain of soul, and I was letting go of continuing to
endure those kinds of experiences. I would do
then, in a few days after the weekend, tear into tiny
pieces my blue card and my pink card, and burn
them. This burning was to be symbolic celebration
of the dying of a long term relationship, between my
soul and a social form to which I had failed to find
healthy relationship. For example, the last two
times I attending Society gatherings, the meeting last
year in Keene, and this one, had actually made me
physically ill.
I spoke that way in part to shock those who were
listening. I wanted them to be awake and listening
carefully. I went on to explain that the Society
in America was in a lot of trouble, because of too much
Steiner-said, and not enough listening to the reality of
American Culture. I spoke briefly of my written
books, and mentioned particularly American
Anthroposophy. I reminded them William Bento had
given a positive review of the book (in the Evolving
News for Members), and even though he called it “bitter
medicine”, he thought people should read it. All
the same, very few have.
I didn’t so much care if they read my book (although it
was written specifically for anthroposophists), but the
Society in American needed to put down Steiner books,
and read something else - read something American, such
as David Foster Wallace, in the study groups, and stop
polluting their minds with an excess of far too much
Steiner. It is not Steiner per se - he’s fine, it
is the excess - the almost addict-like dependence on the
thoughts from a particular mind. Emerson warned
against the tyranny of such books, where we are made
into a satellite in orbit around another ‘s mind.
A book’s only value, to Emerson, is to inspire. To
Emerson then, the real thing of value was the individual
“active soul”:
“This every man is entitled to; this every man contains
within him, although in almost all men obstructed and as
yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth
and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is
genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite,
but the sound estate of every man. In its essence
it is progressive. The book, the college, the
school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
some past utterance of genius. This is good, say
they - let us hold by this. They pin me
down.” The American Scholar: a speech given to
Harvard in 1837
After I had spoken, Kristin Puckett had asked me to
consider writing something for the Section newsletter,
about the pain - what was it, and what had I
meant. The reader of this might do well to
appreciate that when I hear speech, or the written word,
I experience the ideas lurking in the thinking behind
the manifestation. It is analogous to that
situation of the magnet and the iron filings. The
words, spoken and written, descend from a place, and the
activity of thought in them reveals the nature of the
place from which they originated. When I listen,
or read, I follow the path back to that place or
origin. Since I am deeply familiar with the
experience of the world of ideas and concepts, and its
moral aesthetic, if what I have heard and read is
disharmonious with that world, I will experience this
dissonance as pain of soul. The more
disharmonious, the worse the pain.
There are a lot of people who are sensitives, seers,
clairvoyants, whatever. The mind in the soul can
naturally become a kind of musical-like
instrument. To do so, however, often requires a
kind of cultivated vulnerability. The
invisible world is very subtle, yet at the same time
very powerful. These spiritual folks (who often
adore us) have little desire to harm us or rule us, but
at the same time to find a means of communion with them
is not easy. It is a very real kind of love
affair.
For someone with my own biography, which is weird but
not particularly special, there came, from the beginning
instinctively, something I now describe more maturely
and poetically, as the Rising of the Sun in the
Mind. A relationship arises with the
true and the good. It is a kind of moral aesthetic
- a music of the mind: Or as Steiner spoke of it: It
thinks in me. But what is that kind of thinking,
and what is the subtle romance in the intimacy of It
thinks in me?
For example, I love Anthroposophy, especially its
mysterious seeming deeper aspects. The same with
America. Those are not abstract feelings, but
intuitive perceptions - a merging as it were. I
know and I am known, as St. Paul would have put
it. In point of fact, there is no real knowledge
of anything we do not love.
Then, I get in some rooms with anthroposophists, many
American, some European. They are, mostly, what
Steiner would have called: Aristotelians. I am a
Platonist. I don’t have opinions about what is
true, but rather have an intimate spiritual relationship
with the truth. In these conferences I hear my
fellow members speak, and inside my soul I listen to the
music of thought expressed via the instrument of their
speech. The moral aesthetic music of it.
Imagine if you could play Steiner, as a kind of Mozart
of true Philosophy, in your own mind, and the voices you
heard outside you were honestly trying to do that, but
could not. They mostly slept, and/or were blind to
their own thinking, and did not appreciate the beautiful
instrument that an awake mind could truly be. Even
in the tone of voice, their pain of the dissonance with
the truth was there.
All the same, a whole weekend listening to the raw and
sour notes of Steiner-said wears me out. The
boundaries of my soul/mind become sandpapered into an
invisible oozing open wound. The delicate inner
senses of soul, from which I have learned to see, are
rubbed raw.
Now someone might say: well, Rudolf Steiner bore our
excessive adoration, or didn’t suffer from it. To
that I would say: You don’t know what he felt at
all. You have a fantasy - a myth - of Steiner, but
nothing of his reality, as a vulnerable suffering human
being.
Consider Steiner’s first four books. First he
points toward Goethe and away from himself. Goethe
is the highest expression of something latent in human
nature. Not Steiner, Goethe. In his second
book Steiner tries to illuminate the Way of Knowledge
that Goethe practiced and lived, but never
articulated. Goethe never thought about thinking,
either in an organic or pure fashion - he just did
it. In his third book, Steiner’s dissertation plus
an additional chapter, he tries to connect the living
cognitive potential of thinking to the field of German
Idealism and the ongoing Way of Knowledge in natural
science. In the fourth book, Steiner lays out his
own path, through thinking, to the good and the
true.
This last, The Philosophy of Freedom, is a map to the
study of the mind, but most anthroposophists study the
book, not the territory of their own mind. The
last sentence of the original preface reads: “One
must be able to confront an idea and experience it;
otherwise one will fall into its bondage”. This
bondage is what lives in the Society, with its excessive
reliance on Steiner-said. Minds, not free, but in
bondage. It is painful to experience.
Impossible to heal from the outside. Only the
addict can cure himself.
What happens to a soul that loves a dead
philosopher/seer more than it loves and trusts either
its own potential, or the world of spirit to which that
potential leads? The worst is not the
Steiner-said, however. The worst is the absence of
a seeking for Christ. Especially given that He
could not be closer to us - closer than even Steiner.
Forty-four years ago, a young man left his physical
body, his astral body, and his ethereal body, and gave
it to me. He was in his 31st year. He also
gave me his biography - a wife, three children, a job,
and many habits. It was seven years before I even
began to understand the source of all the changes that
ensued, because when he walked out, and I walked in, I
had no direct memory of the change. I only knew
that on a particular morning, upon leaving sleep, I was
awake inside my own mind. I was different from
before, but had no concepts whatsoever to explain this
deeply subtle, yet profound experience, for this
awakeness was buried under all the confusion of the
Time, in which my benefactor (who gave me his life) had
been raised.
My own birth into this world required I awake to what
lived in his ethereal and astral bodies, and raise them
out of this confusion - to transform them. That
took decades to evolve.
At my last Section conference, mentioned above, I
was in a poetry workshop. The teacher coaxed this
poem from me, in which “he" and “his” refers to “Joey”*,
my body brother - the first personality, who was/is a
most remarkable human being:
he gifts me with secrets
cursed beautiful agony
his loss, my confusion
our pain becomes responsibility
birthing woken light
thought radiant
a lost world revealed
*
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Joey.html
Since this is a kind of last word, from me to the
Section, let me go a bit further toward the
future. The Section could invite me to speak, and
pay my costs, even though I am no longer officially a
member. To speak to them, to the next AGM, and so
forth. Why? Because I really am better at a
spiritual social science than anyone else in the
Society.
Why don’t people know this? Because Ahriman’s
minions, via the threefold double-complex, make it
hard. No one reads my works. No one.
My book: “The Art of God: an actual theory of
Everything” is basically a social science text [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html
]. I recently wrote on Facebook this, over a 12
week period: “Introduction to a Spiritual Social
Science” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/introductionsss.html
]
Part of the problem, for the Section and the Society, is
to assume knowledge here begins and ends with Rudolf
Steiner and Threefolding of the Social Organism.
That’s poppycock. Demonstrate-able
poppycock. As a Platonist, well versed in the
Socratic approach, all that needs to be done is ask a
few good leading questions, and the weakness of that
assumption is made to appear right in the mind of the
doubter, through their own thinking activity.
People are just too mentally lazy, and can’t grasp that
the spiritual world, especially that Community of Beings
Steiner called: the Anthroposophical Movement, would
find any other geniuses with which to gift and help the
world find its way to Anthroposophy. Such as me,
for instance. Old, bald, fat guy, who seems mean
and opinionated. Better we love our dead and
deified Herr Doctor, then lift up our heads and look
around for the next spiritual-geek the Anthroposophical
Movement trains for the Third Millennium phase of the
incarnation of Anthroposophy. Easier to read
Steiner all the time Steiner, than even imagine anyone
else could ever be better (although Steiner himself said
who would be, and where to look for them). As Kurt
Vonnegut was want to say: “So It Goes”. Or Zippy:
“Are we having fun yet?”
What’s the real question and the real problem? Few
anthroposophists know how to do science. In the
Age of science, we end up teaching Steiner as a belief
system. Very few will buy this.
Ever. Maybe if we don’t just teach Steiner, and
broadened what we do teach, to the Goetheanists for
example, our product might look better. Far
better, and more justifiable, to those who admire
science. Science is not just ahrimanic. Real
Science is filled with the Christ Impulse, especially
when it isn’t just numbers. Go figure.
<more irony>
Joel A. Wendt, a friend to Steiner
and to anthroposophists everywhere.