the School of Chartres, and the
Culmination.
for a much more elaborate essay
on the Culmination, written more than a year after
this shorter piece below, go here:
The
Potential Mission of
the Anthroposophical Society in the Early Centuries
of the Third Millennium
[the original
version of this article was written in the Summer of 2012,
in preparation for the AGM that August in Ann Arbor.
Revisions have been added in preparation for the AGM in
October of 2013, in Keene, NH. Such revisions
will be placed within the text in brackets.]
Stephen Usher recently wrote on article on The Culmination,
containing this language: Further, he [Steiner]
states
that a great Culmination of the Anthroposophical Movement
should occur at the end of the Century, and upon this
depended the fate of civilization. If the Culmination
actually occurred, civilization would receive a new impulse
that would lift it to a higher stage, but if it failed then
a terrible and inevitable decay would result. The key
participants in the Culmination drama are the Aristotelians
and the Platonists. The former include Rudolf Steiner and
most of the souls who established Anthroposophy at the
beginning of the Century. The latter included the great
masters of the School of Chartres in France who typically
incarnate out of sync with the Aristotelians but who would
incarnate in sync with them to achieve the Culmination.
See:http://www.anthroposophy.org/uploads/media/SEUsher-Remarks_on_the_Culmination.pdf
[I could write a long article disagreeing with many details
of Usher's presentation, but prefer to simply put forward
the following with some additional comments as seems needed
today - September 19th, 2013 - on the occasion of the full
moon nearest Michaelmas. All the same this should be
noted. Usher seems to hold to the idea (not really
justified) in anthroposophical circles that the
Anthroposophical Society manages to carry
Anthroposophy. This conception can be contrasted with
this remark of Steiner's concerning the reading of his The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, made after the burning of
the original Goetheanum, and published in lecture three of
Awakening to Community: "The way it should be read is with attention to
the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of
thinking and willing and looking at things....The trouble
is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the
different way I have been describing. That is the
point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the
development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall
far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does
fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the
Society will result in its being completely misunderstood,
and its only fruit will be endless conflict!"]
Because something I participated in over the turn from the
20th to the 21st Century may be further evidence of Usher’s
research on this question, I offer below the tale of that
work here. Those with whom I gathered in those years,
mostly over the Internet, but a couple in the flesh, are
unknown to most anthroposophists. This should not be
surprising given that the Anthroposophical Society had
fallen on difficult times in a number of ways (of which I
have written elsewhere). I make no assertions or
claims, which is why I characterized it as a tale. The
reader should feel completely free to interpret it however
they wish.
In a
way, to appreciate this, we have to see my own individuality
as a kind of axis of the wheel of several intersecting
biographies. It cannot be otherwise, for I only know
[the details of] my own experience. All the
personalities I mention will have their own point of view as
to what happened and what it all means. Nevertheless,
on reading Usher’s article in the articles section of the
website for the Anthroposophical Society in America, my
thinking drew relationships between Usher’s efforts to
understand something and my own experiences.
Let
us begin with asking whether a gathering of some of the
personalities of the School of Chartres would have to know
they had been part of this group in the past. I see no
reason that they should. In the same vein I see no
reason that they should believe they are participating in
The Culmination, or in the fate of civilization. My
view is that those spiritual beings who this group of people
were connected to, consciously and otherwise, may well have
known all that, but for the members of the group (in its
widest sense), this knowledge of culminations and fates of
civilizations would have in fact interfered with their
freedom by creating a meaning at odds with that meaning they
already had produced for themselves. To begin
the tale ...
In
1997 I wrote an article (a couple in fact), which I sent to
an anthroposophical conference in August of that
year at Ann Arbor, via a friend, for I was too poor to
afford to go myself. I only sent 23 copies,
again having few funds. I later published this article
on my first website. The main article was called: The
Study of Rudolf Steiner’s Lecture Cycles, and the Problem of
Cognition - musings on the epistemological swampland of
the Anthroposophical Movement, and
I published it as part of a journal called: Outlaw Anthroposophy.
This
attracted some curious inattention: That’s right.
There was basically no reaction. It was ignored! That
is, in the immediate moment, no one sent me any responses.
Over the years that this has been on my website many
people have found it of value. One person translated
the two essays [the second essay was called: "The
Anthroposphical Society - is it a living social form?"]
into German and published them in the “Jarhbuch fur
anthroposophische Kritik 1998“. Bob and Nancy’s
extensive Waldorf Website has copied the two essays with
favorable comments. Four years after the conference,
someone who had been there found this material on my website
and sent me an e-mail. They described having heard
that “subversive” material was being circulated at that
conference, and that this must have been it. Now, that
is a very interesting term (subversive), if you think about
it. In a Society, which is dedicated to the Ideal of
Spiritual Freedom, people were reacting, to the above
efforts at seeking the truth, in a political way.
[Recent thinking of mine, on the true nature of the modern
Anthroposophical Society, has felt it necessary to describe
that Society as less of a spiritual
social form, but rather something with more kinship
to an academic department at a modern University.: There are
in-groups and out-groups. Differing "schools of
thought". Behind the scenes struggles over who is rise
to dominant positions in the hierarchy of
"authorities". The field of study of this "university
department" is the works of Rudolf Steiner, who is basically
seen as incapable of being mistaken about anything.
People who can't agree with the dominant paradigm of the
"meaning" of Steiner's works are shoved to the periphery,
and the center is guarded somewhat visciously with gossip
and inuendo concerning those personalities not felt to be
"appropriate" - e.g. the comment that my contribution in
1997 was "subversive". There are many stories that can
be told in this fashion.]
Shortly after it [Outlaw Anthroposophy] was published
on-line, I was contacted and invited to join an Internet
Steiner discussion list-serve, named: Anthroposophy.
About the time I joined, the discussion list name was
changed to: Anthroposophia. Because certain individual
members were undisciplined and often acted as agents of
chaos (trolls), those wanting serious discussion created
even another list-serve, which was intuitively named: The
Ark. The Ark was moderated. This did not
stop various agents of chaos from trying to sneak in, which
eventually killed the Ark after about five years. But
from about 1997 to 2003 some rather unusual people engaged
each other, sometimes meeting in the flesh, but mostly
through e-mail dialog and the sharing of papers.
Factually, without the Internet, most of us would not have
been able to have contact, for we were somewhat
international in scope, although most were Americans,
residents in a country 3000 miles wide and all of us located
spread out all over the place and often in movement.
For example, during that time (1997-2003) I lived in
San Francisco, Greenville NH, and Prescott AZ.
I’ll
only tell the story of some of the major personalities that
were present, what they did, and what they are doing now (as
far as I know). You’ll have to decide for yourself
whether we represented enough of an unusual
constellation of personalities to fit into the idea of the
Culmination and the School of Chartres in some
fashion. [My thesis is that the following members of
the Ark were platonists, and that many on-lookers were
aristotelians. We have to keep in mind that the
distinction between the two involves the "how" of the way
they thought, with the platonists more interested in the
"true idea", while the aristotelians were more interested
follwing the correct Steiner doctrine.]
My own work is, in a way, an open book. Those who read it tend not be institutional leaders of the Anthroposophical Society, although I was told at one point that early in the first decade of the 21st Century, [that] the Central Regional Council in America used my Waking the Sleeping Giant as group study material. During the year 2010 I wrote The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything, and [as well] turned most of my written work into oral form, creating over 230 [272] videos for YouTube, which has generated over 70,000 [120,000] visits to individual videos. This is a bit odd because there are no cute cats, and mostly it is me just sitting in front of a camcorder waxing philosophical.
[Recent
works of note: Electricity
and
the
Spirit
in Nature; Cowboy
Bebop - and the physics* of thought as moral art; and,
Sex,
Porn, and the Return of the Divine Feminine.]
The
Ark also included Bruno Abrami, an Italian initiate whose path is rooted in The Philosophy of
Freedom. He finds Dornach
disgusting and a failure (he is refreshingly blunt).
He once likened spiritual experience as being the
difference between mental masturbation, and actually making
mutual love to someone. On another occasion he said he
would have had no trouble killing someone if he had been
standing on a pass in the Italian Alps, when Moors where
trying to invade Christendom. Very down to earth
fellow, and simultaneously wise. He asked me once what
I looked like and I said I was over 300 lbs and bald.
His reply was that was how he saw me in his “dreams".
Here’s the link to his website (which is in English
and Italian): http://xoomer.virgilio.it/babrami/sp1e.htm
Next,
Harvey Bornfield.
Harvey was hard to read - his prose had flights of
language that seemed to be difficult to follow. His
genetic background was Jewish, his dominant religion Baha’i.
He came to the Ark already very familiar with Steiner.
He died in 2006, having entered this world around the
time of the creation and use of the Atomic Bomb (May, 1945).
At the time of his death I had on my hard drive a
number of his offerings to the Ark, which I then collected
(and organized a bit), in a book I called: Silent
Passage, because no one noticed
him during his life except for a few friends and family.
He was almost too sensitive for our time. At the
end of the introduction to his writings, I wrote: - imagine what might
happen if the Sufi poet-mystic Rumi, and the deaf composer
Beethoven, decided to write together (as dance
partners) some seeming prose as an organic (spontaneously
alive and evolving) sequence of jazz riffs -
When I
was putting together my collection of his e-mails, I
happened to read one of the early ones out loud, and made
the most astounding discovery. What he wrote was not
meant to be read in the inner silence of our own mind, but
to be read aloud and with passion! When I did that
everything changed and I felt even more deeply what a loss
it was for us to have had him for a while before he slipped
away. Here is the link to his works: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/HarveyBornfield.html
As
soon as possible go there and read aloud #3 and #4, for the
first is a beautiful prose-poem written to Fall and the
Season of Michaelmas, then shared with us early on the
morning of 9/11/2001, before Harvey even knew about
the events in New York. #4 was written the next day
(the 12th) and is one of the wisest observations of the
meaning of those tragic events I have ever read.
Stephen Clarke: After I had known Stephen for a while, he
sent me a copy of his unpublished autobiographical work: Close
Encounters of the Fifth Kind. In the beginning it seemed to him he was having
visitor (alien) experiences, but eventually worked out that
he was meeting the spiritual beings of the hierarchies of
the inner spheres of the earth. Their fearful
appearances gave way when he started to try to love these
beings. His path then was, through what he calls belly clairvoyance, to descend into these underworld vistas on
his way to the Golden Realm of the Mother, which Steiner
describes as being on the “other-side” of these inner
spheres.
Eventually it became routine (in a way) for Stephen to meet
with the Feminine Mysteries of the Earth, which he
once described to me as kind of like having tea and
conversation (a version of what Steiner called:
Inspiration). For Stephen, he felt as if he was
following where Christ went on Saturday, following his
Crucification: through Hell and into the arms of the Holy
Mother as depicted on the Pieta. An amazing act of surrender.
Stephen wanders in the southwest, living mostly in Santa Fe,
New Mexico (50 miles north of Albuquerque). He runs
there an auto repair shop, called Mozart’s Garage,
specializing in the repair of high end European cars like
Mercedes Benz. His office in lined with hundreds of
books, and he told me once he on occasion spent $800 a month
on phone calls talking to people who interested him.
He is
an excellent writer and a very clear thinker. He has
studied Steiner seriously, especially the material on the
Mexican Mysteries, because that is what Stephen studies:
meso-America, its history and personalities. I keep
trying to get him to put all his writing on the Internet,
but there is so much Art (of the Americas) that this
represents a huge technical problem (for me), so that we
have to (at this point in time) content ourselves with what
I got of his work on my own website: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/clarke4.html
Disgusted
with the Society, he left it a few years ago, and mostly
spends his time connecting to various Native America elders
in the Southwest (Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo and so forth.)
Also, more modern, a special treat: Some
Notes
Toward
a Resolution of the Dilemma - in reference to Paul V.
O’Leary’s The Inner Life of the Earth, which is a
discussion of certain erroneous thinking, common in the
Anthroposophical Society, on the nature of Evil.
Catherine MacCoun: Powerful and intimidating ... that
about sums her up. Her use of Reason can be
devastating if you’ve made a goofy argument and she decides
to take you up on it. Born and raised Catholic, she first
crossed the threshold into the world of the dead when her
mother committed suicide when Catherine was 17 or 18.
Later she gravitated to Tibetan Buddhism - Chogyam
Trungpa, creator of the Naropa Institute of Boulder
Colorado, with whom she spent over 15 years. She ended
up on the Ark, I know not how, but was the only [first
- others have followed] , writer and thinker I’ve ever
read who could stand toe to toe with Steiner and argue with
good cause that he’d gotten something wrong.
I’ve
an essay of hers on my website: Work on What has
been Spoiled, which is about the
“Dornach Scandal of 1915“: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ktmc1.html
Her
anthroposophical knowledge is sometimes weak ... she once
didn’t know the term Goetheanism, when I used it in a post
to the list. But she was very scientific in a way,
such that when we were investigating Steiner’s views of the
Jesuits, she dropped out for about 4 months to actually
practice the Loyola Meditation exercises to see for herself
what they were about. Eventually the list worked it
out that what Steiner spoke of critically was not the
original exercises, but how they were being applied at the
time he was alive.
Around August of the year 2000, she reported to us that
Christ had hinted or directed her to go to Morocco (she
speaks French) to experience Ramadan that Fall, which she
did. Upon her return she began writing to us what she
called her: Ramadan Diaries. Described by others as
tall, blond and statuesque, she began her trip by sitting in
cafes drinking tea and coffee. Men approached her, and
she spoke to them of her wish to experience Ramadan exactly
as did their people. Confidence in her sincerity arose
after a time and she was then invited to spend the month of
Ramadan in the women’s compound of a local family, which she
did.
The
Ramadan Diaries, as given to the Ark, were episodic, she had
after all another life (besides the Ark) as a literary
collaborator: (her own business - link here: http://www.catherinemaccoun.com/
). But when 9/11 happened it was very clear why
Catherine was the member of our “group” sent the year before
to an Islamic Country in order to have direct experience of
that culture’s reality. She described Islam thusly
(I’ll be brief): Neither the Greeks or the Romans or the
Jews could take up fully Christ’s social teachings.
These teachings then rose in a kind of hyperbolic
curve into the spiritual world, until they were able to
re-descend via the archangel responsible for the visions of
Muhammad. Catherine met these social teachings, in
their modern form, in her experiences of Ramadan within the
women’s house in Morocco.
For
some on the Ark 9/11 led to furious arguments. Yet
Catherine, who had frequently demonstrated her clairvoyance
(of the old kind - absent the new cognition), was able to
help us stay spiritually sane. When the Ark fell apart
a couple of years later she went on to other things,
eventually producing her own spiritual masterwork: On
Becoming an Alchemist: http://www.catherinemaccoun.com/about.html
, which she characterizes as a combination of Tibetan and
Christan Alchemy. I’ve read the book and highly
recommend it, although I published my own review, with a few
critical remarks, here:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/CatherineMacCoun.html
Elizabeth
Ancrum
Mackenzie: Elizabeth, who
was born and lives in Scotland and is a former Waldorf
teacher, was not on the Ark, although it was during those
same five years of the possible Culmination (1997-2003) that
she first contacted me, and along with our dialogs on things
anthroposopohical and humorous she sent me Irina Gordienko’s
remarkable book: Sergei O. Prokofieff: Myth
and Reality. These dialogs
with Elizabeth were sometimes reported on the Art - such
that she was there indirectly through me. I also
published some of her work on my website, which then made
that material available during that time to others on the
Ark. This Gordienko work is, by the way, a very
important and very much suppressed and needed critical
study of a leading member of the Executive of the
Society.
We
fell out of touch for a time and then a couple of years ago
she resurfaced, enabling me to put together a first
iteration of a website for her, which she later replaced
with her own: Christian
Esotericism
at Tibby Fowler's Bothy. These works represent
to my thinking [some of] the very highest presentations of
Anthroposophy by someone currently incarnate. There is
nothing like them being produced elsewhere, and it would be
a great tragedy if the Society were not to take her work
very seriously.
Was
this co-working on and around the Ark of these six
personalities (Joel, Bruno, Harvey, Stephen, Catherine and
Elizabeth), with me as the ostensible axis, part of The
Culmination? Had we been together in the School of
Chartres? Did we save modern civilization? Or
was our working together more a by-product of the activity
of higher beings? However you want to answer those
questions, these meetings did factually happen. The
personalities are as described. We were not just
connected to each other, but many more remarkable
individuals participated in the Ark or have been otherwise
touched by each of us as aspects of our biographies.
If you read Catherine’s book, especially the last
section on Radiation, you will encounter the idea (true also
for Steiner) that those who are truly creative with Ideas
radiate them into the world of Ideas, where they then become
able to be “downloaded” and used by others. Think
about it.
The
reality of this group is more complex than presented, for
the true common axis was not me, but Rudolf Steiner.
All of us shared that as an essential and important
interest, however varied were our reactions to him and to
the Society. We were also all deeply parts of
different spiritual streams and all us had direct
perceptions of various kinds of the world of spirit and its
Beings. I’d wager you would not have found a
constellation of individuals of such spiritual depth
anywhere else on the Planet during those five years of the
so-called: Culmination.
[Bruno continues refuse to have intercourse with the
Society, althougth he gives evidence of having worked
through Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom
successfully. Elizabeth, although she maintains
a strong belief in Steiner., also holds to her
version/understanding of the meaning of The Philosophy
of Freedom. Keep in mind here, that there seems to be
latent in European thinkers (Bruno and Elizabeth) a kind of
idealism that is different from American pragmatism.
Harvey has crossed over and may be helping all of us from
that corner of reality. Catherine today (see hints in
her Alchemy book) believes that Steiner's work was excessive
(just way too much of it asserted with to much certainty)
and thus is confused on many levels (she doesn't name him,
but the reference could not be more obvious). Stephen,
in a recent conversation, seems tending a bit in that
direction, but clearly wants nothing to do with the Society,
having found a home in the aboriginal Earth-spirituality of
Native Americans.
Of the six of us, I seem to be the only American who made it
through the
mine-field of the soul to the New Mystery of Thinking,
and even now I am getting ready to go to the coming AGM in
Keene, NH (Oct. 2013) and see if there is the
possibility of helping redirect the remaining energies in a
wiser fashion. That AGM is actually to be followed by
a two day conference of the Youth Section, which I will also
be attending in the hope that young people may have some
healthy instincts that can be supported - after all it is
they who will live in the trials of the 21st Century, not us
elders. In essence I have not yet given up on the
Society, conceiving of it's present state as simply a
natural and necessary condition, mostly derived from the
needs of karma, that has to be gone through in order to
incarnate Anthroposophy into human civilization (a matter
Steiner seemed to believe might take four centuries to
achieve). The main question I seek to bring to the
Society, and the Youth Section, is from the American
cartoonist Bill Griffith, through his character Zippy the
Pinhead: "Are we having
fun yet?"] [ http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/AllIn.html
is a link to my report on this AGM and following Youth
Section meeting in the Fall of 2013]