subversive pamphlet

- by Joel A. Wendt -

table of contents:

capsule summary in bullet point format

1) anthroposophical geeks bearing gifts

2) a love letter to the members and friends of the anthroposophical society in America; 

3) the “Children of the Sun"* - the Future Heart of Anthroposophy;

4) Concerning the Essay: Waking the Sleeping Giant: the Mission of Anthroposophy in America;

5) The Mystery of the Americas: the true West;

6) the New Clair-Thinking in Practice;

7) the School of Chartres, and the Culmination;

8) a brief description of meeting the Lessor and Greater Guardians, in the new way, and as well a description of the meaning of, and new manner of, the Second Pentecost in the Ethereal;

9) A Challenging Open Letter to the Powers that Be in the Anthroposophical Society

 

Capsule summary in bullet point format:

1) Everything is fine, but there is always more to do if we want real changes.

2) Anthroposophy in America is not the same as Anthroposophy in Europe (even Steiner said so).

3) The Spiritual Worlds cares, but one of the main ways it cares is by preparing individuals to help guide the next steps for the Society.  These guides need special training and often harsh life experience in order to know what is needed to be known.

4) The current leaders and members of the AS don’t know a lot of stuff, and the absence of knowledge is more part of the problem than it is part of the solution - Details follow ...

5) As a consequence you have to make choices as to which voices you are going to listen - if what you want  is the right inspiration to help the Society embrace the Third Millennium and serve the needs of humanity to deal with Ahriman and as well to connect to the Cosmic Christ.

anthroposophical geeks*, bearing gifts

*an anthroposophical geek is an adept at the arcane arts of anthroposophical thinking

It may seem odd to describe anthroposophical thinking as an arcane art, but this is the case.  Many in the Anthroposophical Society believe they are being anthroposophical by learning the concepts given in Steiner’s lectures and books on Spiritual Science.  But Spiritual Science and Anthroposophy are not the same - although two sides of one coin.  Thinking/method (Anthroposophy) produces thought/content (Spiritul Science).

The Incarnation of Anthroposophy cannot happen fast, being as it is a state of consciousness - an attentive and intentive willed thinking.  We do it.   We don’t read about it.

The Society Steiner tried to foster fell from grace when he died.  Such a Society only really works when at its core are anthroposophical connections between the human and the spiritual worlds. Right now this Society is mostly disconnected.

Anthroposophical geeks bearing gifts are two individuals: myself (Joel A. Wendt) and Elizabeth Ancrum .  In us lives examples of this missing process of connection in a finely attuned way, mostly supported by the interest of the higher worlds.  Not even Steiner could do what he did without the cooperation of the higher worlds.  His so-called “great deed” is in reality far overshadowed by an even far greater sacrifice coming from cosmic Beings.

Humanity needs what the Society bears within it as a seed.  The nature of this seed is an awareness that there is more to  thinking than what ordinary consciousness possesses.  This does not make ordinary consciousness any less special.  The relationship is more like how water is distributed in the world.  In some places there is more than enough, and sometimes that excess can also be far more pure.  At the same time, where there is little, and the streams seem polluted, that is exactly where Christ lives most strongly - where He is needed.

When you have pure water you also have a choice.  Do you share it, or not, for it is after all life-giving.

This is the problem that faces Elizabeth and I.  We sit aside a stream of pure water, meant for the Anthroposophical Society, not for us.  The really funny aspect of all this is that there is little or no evidence the Society members want this life-giving water of the spirit (true new spiritual research out of the new Mystery of Thinking).  The Society, as a collective culture, often seems to believe that (and to act as if) Steiner gave all we will ever want and that we need only live on the remains of what he gave in the Past.

That is very foolish.  The Water of the Living Spirit is only Living in the Present.  In point of fact what is most harmful to the Society is its constant drinking of the dead thoughts of the Past, simply because they originated with Steiner.   Not to say we do not all have access to living thought, but rather that when we pollute it with dead thought, or prefer the dead thought to our own intuitions, we then interfere with what otherwise wants to flow toward us from the pure waters of inspiration.

The purest water (spiritual research) is timely.  What Steiner gave he gave to the moment.  What Elizabeth and I have to give is for the moment.  Steiner’s moment and our moment are not the same.  The modern Society does not live in the monuments of its infamous Past, nor can it recreate the fantasy magic of the Christmas Conference that failed. 

Nor need the Society become dependent upon us the way it became dependent upon Steiner.  This is not the Europe of the intellectual soul, and in America the consciousness soul is much stronger.  Elizabeth and I are like a tiny flame meant to ignite other flames.  It is not how we burn that counts ... it is how you burn.

Our writings are free, just as water should be free.  To have to purchase the water of the spirit is wrong.  Yet, in the time of Ahriman’s Incarnation that is exactly how we think about spirit - that it comes in books or courses or lectures and we have to buy it.  Strange that within us lives this same water, were we just to recognize that it is there.

Everyone thinks and has thoughts.   Everyone.  Elizabeth’s The Shepherds’ Fire can be read for free on my website, as can my The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.  Go to Shapes in the Fire, at http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ and enjoy!

 Why anthroposophical geeks bearing gifts?  Seems like a warning.   For the institutional Society, sure, Elizabeth and I are dangerous.   We mean to be.   We mean to get inside the walled City of the Society and tear down the barriers to individual thinking and thought - barriers built every time someone writes or speaks: Steiner said.  Barriers built every time a hierarchical organization believes it’s Executive, or Councils and Section leaders have the right to lead the thinking of the individual human spirit.

Steiner’s book: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is a book promoting spiritual anarchy.  Make no mistake - that’s what it is meant to do.  The thought-error folks can make is to believe anarchy (spiritual freedom) must lead to social disorder, and so they prefer social order (some kind of assumed diplomatic brotherhood) over individual spiritual freedom.  Can’t have someone rocking the boat.  Got to be all on the same page - too much individualism is dangerous.

The social culture of the Society does tend to deny freedom and urge conformance.  Just hear the stories of how hard Elizabeth and I (and others) have tried to be published only to run into walls and to be rejected.  Better we should all think alike, which is why we have “themes of the year”.  Better we should all worship the same guru, the great initiate Rudolf Steiner.  Granted there is resistance, and some sensible people, but here we are in 2012 still listening to Europeans tell us Americans how to be spiritual.  That’s not right, and never was right.  Its true name is spiritual imperialism.  Ahriman likes it - he likes rigid order and the repression of free intuitive thought.

Elizabeth and I say: burn it down to the ground.  The English alternative rock band Muse, has this refrain from their song Uprising: They will not force us; They will stop degrading us; They will not control us; We will be victorious.

Is the collective - the so-called Society, with us, or against us?  Don’t like us and them, then get rid of hierarchical social order and the intrinsic nature of endless lectures which are social/thought dominion over; and then replace that with circle-like conversation or communion with - what Steiner called: the Reverse Cultus.  We only need each other.  There are no special or leading “anthroposophists”, and Elizabeth and I have no interest in joining that club.  We believe in rock ‘n roll - that is we believe in no clubs at all.

About “spiritual research”:  The problem isn’t that individuals can’t, with a subtly more conscious ordinary thinking, have contact with the spirit.  No, the problem in the Society is the lack of scientific discipline in the thinking.  Just to have thinking in the will and will in the thinking is not enough.  Our self-knowledge, and our research, must be empirical and reproducible.  It must also be open to critical examination by others in our communities.  Where are the arguments common to the scientific enterprise?  Not in our Society, which wants comfortable (ahrimanic) social relations, and to hide disagreeable behaviors under the rug.  Those were the sins of Elizabeth and I.  We wanted science and vigorous  challenging discussion.  Too many Society leaders wanted social power and egoistic recognition - to be free to lecture and publish whatever they wanted, without any critical review of their thought at all.  All that was needed were the magic words: Steiner said.  No wonder many see us as just another cult.

a love letter to the members and friends

of the Anthroposophical Society in America

This is in part a report on some spiritual research, but also an appeal for help.  First a little story - some details from my memory of the research of my friend Steve Burman:

There was in Concord Massachusetts, between approximately 1879 and 1888, a School - the Concord School of Philosophy, which attracted many, and seemed to influence much of American Arts and Letters, for the members of the School traveled widely, and among its  founders were Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, Fuller and company.

One day the School received (around 1886) a report from one of their number, who had just returned from two years in Europe.  He told them that  he felt that the stream of philosophy, known to them as German Idealism, was on the verge of solving the problem of knowledge, which had trapped the minds of several of the English Empiricists, and such as Kant, in the belief that human knowledge was limited.

What Steve Burman next pointed out in his report on his research was that at the same time as the School here in America lived for a time and then faded away, even while knowing this question lurked in the background (what are the limits, or not, of human knowledge?), unknown to the School in Concord, and as well to most of those familiar in Europe with the stream of German idealism, the young genius of Rudolf Steiner solved the problem of knowledge, eventually able to show through three books (A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception; Truth and Knowledge; and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) that there were no limits to an awake thinker.  In point of fact thinking was given to us by the Divine Mystery precisely to enable human beings to participate in knowledge creation, although we had to, through our own efforts of will, draw forth this potential.

While it was a gift, we had to participate in its flowering.  Our will would arrive at its goal and its self-knowledge, only through struggle and work.  However (according to  my research), this will in America flowers in a quite different way than how it flowers in Europe.  In Europe one has to be educated to it, while in America we arrive at it naturally out of a kind of instinct.

The tragedy of the Anthroposophical Society, and the cause of most of our confusion and instinctive worries about our future, is that this question (what are the limits, or not, of human knowledge?) has for us been essentially lost over time.  We know something is not quite right in the Society (each of us individually grasps a different segment of these questions), but not precisely why.

As a consequence in our confusion we have turned to Rudolf Steiner as an authority, rather than to our own thinking.  We look to books rather than to our own intuition.  Our lecturers and writers seldom can speak or write without constant references to Steiner.  This is not something wrong, by the way.  This state of consciousness is born in matters of karma and the necessary and ordained work of the opponents.  There must be resistance to our wills before those same wills strengthen in the needed ways for this new capacity for knowledge to emerge from its chrysalis.  Only our own “I” can give birth to the New Mystery of Thinking.

At the same time, each of us is on an individual path to this birth.  There is no one way.  Nor is it an accident that we meet in Ann Arbor in 2012, on the cusp of the Third Millennium, while the social-political world seems about to implode.  The war once in Heaven now arises on the Earth, inside our own souls.

Ahriman has incarnated.  The spiritual research seeing this has been done, and anyone willing to struggle with their own thinking-intuition can learn to see this as well.  Seemingly in opposition to Ahriman live the Michaelic hosts, of which we are members.  In us the seed of the Christ Impulse struggles to burst its shell, via the effort of our own “I” to become its own sovereign moral authority.

To do this, however, each of us must ask the question: what is thinking and what is thought?  This cannot be answered in an intellectual way, because thought is the product of thinking; and, thinking is willed activity.  We only learn of it by doing it.

Yes, we do have thoughts seemingly without effort, but it is precisely those thoughts that cannot always be moral.  Now there is a paradox here, because each of us believes we are essentially moral.  Why would we not feel that way?  At the same time, upon reflection (one of several modes of thinking), we know we are not always moral and in fact we everyday make compromises and adjustments in order to live our lives in what to us is a sane way.  These compromises are often necessary, and in many cases that necessity means making a choice.  In the process of choosing, we can have a mental picture of being a perfect human being, and from that picture, using comparative thinking (another thinking mode), judge ourselves or others as not perfect.

This judgment is often not moral thinking, as was so patiently explained by Christ in The Sermon on the Mount.  This means that part of being human involves being flawed.  We have been graced by becoming fallen.  If there was nothing to overcome in ourselves, this needed will for the New Thinking Mystery could never develop.

Today the existential question for this 2012 AGM is whether or not the Society (as a collection of flawed and striving human beings) will rediscover the understanding that Steiner once showed us how to solve the problem of knowledge, both in its moral sense (what is the good?) and its scientific sense (what is the true?).  The former question (what is the good?) can only be answered by the “I” alone.  The latter question (what is the true?) is a “we” question - science is a community activity.  While Steiner gave us the means to answer the “I” or moral question in his early books, it is only later, after the Burning of the Goetheanum, that he shows in lecture 6 of Awakening to Community, how to be collectively doomed* to spiritual science via the Reverse Cultus.

The World of Mystery is not unmindful of our loss of this central question (what are the limits, or not, of human knowledge?).  This World has helped two individuals become prepared to guide others in the Michael Stream to think their individual way into contemporary life on the Cusp of the Third Millennium and during the time of Ahriman’s Incarnation.  These two are: myself, who has been aided to understand much, especially the Soul and Spirit of the American; and, Elizabeth A. MacKenzie whose language above (*doomed) I have just used.

The two of us have successfully learned to practice the New Mystery of Thinking.  Many do it instinctively, and others try to do it consciously.  It is not easy, and no less all the more important for not being easy.  What is easy and unearned is generally not of real value.  Any woman and man can make a baby, but not any human being can be a real parent.

In a similar fashion, an institution cannot write a poem or paint a picture.  The institution, named the Anthroposophical Society, can facilitate its individual members, but only its individual members can give birth to and raise the New Mystery of Thinking. 

There is help everywhere.  For example, one of the wise women in America, Ursula K. LeGuin, has written a book in which a culture based on the core truths expressed in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is imagined: The Dispossessed.   She gives us a living picture of individuals struggling to be genuinely free thinkers.  American culture is rich in ways Europe could never be, and one of the tasks for Americans is to learn to recognize the life already existing here.  This is what it means to meet our destinies in America.  Elizabeth and I too can help.  Ask us questions.  You may find out in this way that you know more than you believe.

the “Children of the Sun"*

- the Future Heart of Anthroposophy -

*the Anthroposophical Movement, as described in the Hopi Oral History and Prophecy

of the True White Brother, which Oral History remembers Atlantis

Anthroposophy is not yet incarnate - Steiner thought it would take about 400 years for this work to actually impact human culture.  At this quarter-way mark in 2012, we have finished only one century of this process, and are also on the Cusp of the Third Millennium. 

During the 20th Century, following Steiner’s death, this spiritual work experienced a Fall from Grace.  This was unavoidable and was described by Steiner in this way: if certain matters were not accomplished,  then karma would hold sway.  When Steiner died the Executive fell to internal squabbles, the exalted mood of the Christmas Conference faded away, the National Societies took sides on these issues, and the International Anthroposophical Society split apart, all of which happened between 1925 and 1935.  Ahriman was essentially victorious on the social plane of existence.

Following WWII, this was healed on this social (horizontal) plane, but not on the spiritual (vertical) plane.  The Anthroposophical Society, in which we are membered, is not at all connected to the Spiritual World in the same fashion as when Steiner lived.  How could it be?

The essential foundation of what Steiner gave has been mostly forgotten, except for a very few.  Hardly anyone, including members and leaders of various kinds, have penetrated in practice to the heart of the New Mystery of Thinking, concerning which Steiner wrote about in A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception; Truth and Knowledge; and, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.  What is perhaps even worse, is that the New Mysteries of Community (described in Lecture Six of Awakening to Community as the “Reverse Cultus”) are hardly known at all, much less anywhere seriously practiced.

What Steiner predicted, namely the intellectualization of the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence, has come to pass.  People have confused Anthroposophy with Spiritual Science (they are not the same).   We also have not understood that the reason Steiner spoke of Michaelic Courage was because the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence was an act of the will, not a collection of concepts or thoughts.  Our I fully manifests only in the will.

All the same, nothing is wrong in the Anthroposophical Society or among the members.  This condition is simply an effect produced by karma, and the opponents whose duty it is to resist our wills in order that these wills may be strengthened by having something to overcome.

What is noted above then, as not yet present, is simply the work that we need to take up next so as to continue to go toward “the Children of the Sun” Heart of the Future of Anthroposophy, by: developing the will to bring alive in our Society, and in human culture, the New Mystery of Thinking and the New Mystery of Community (the New Feminine Mysteries).  If we fail to do this the culture of the Third Millennium will be lost to Ahriman, and humanity will experience a great tragedy, losing for too long a time any real knowledge of the Cosmic Christ.

There are new spiritual matters that can be learned, such as: how to experience the Second Coming by experiencing the Second Eucharist in the Ethereal - that is how to become a modern disciple of Christ by accepting the freely given  grace of Holy Breath; and, how to learn of the facts of Ahriman’s present incarnation and its meaning for the present and future.


For special insights, see Elizabeth Ancrum MacKensie's website
Christian Esotericism at Tibby Fowler's Bothy

 

 From my thinking and experience:

The New Mystery of Thinking (living or clair-thinking)

 My experience is that besides the attention (which determines what objects of thought my thinking approaches) there is also the intention - the self-chosen moral reason I think … two acts of will at the creative seed-roots of thinking. What happens after their mutual application is that we pass through the naive state of thinking-about to thinking-with, then to thinking-within and finally to thinking-as. These transformations are led by the intention, which learns through practice to sacrifice. If I am thinking-about another human being, for example, my instinctive and reactive feelings (sympathy and antipathy) will guide this thinking-about. If I surrender and master these instinctive uncultivated feelings (beam and mote), thinking-about becomes thinking-with (what Steiner called Goetheanism, or organic thinking).   Much of this is already the natural possession of ordinary consciousness within the American Soul as it instinctively strives to will the good and think with the heart.  It is just not noticed because we don’t look (looking, or introspection, being what Steiner called in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: the exceptional state).

If I add a complete sacrifice of my total world view (become poor in spirit), I now stand with my intention leading my attention to a more pure perception of the object of thought, such that thinking-with becomes thinking-within. I then start to know the Other with greater intimacy. In the final surrender/sacrifice, I let go the centrality of my own I – I am not there anymore, and the metamorphosis is complete: thinking-within becomes thinking-as. I have transcended my self and fully identified with the Other. Steiner called this “pure” thinking. This whole process then leads to a kind of collapse of the assumed gap between I and Thou, such that we arrive at what Steiner called: “it thinks in me”. The role of the attention determines which objects my thinking approaches, but it is the intention which shapes the growing intimacy between my “self” and the object of thought.  The Thou is not only other human beings, but spiritual beings as well.

A crucial aspect, of the intention towards the objects of the attention, is the will to love.  If we cannot love the objects of thinking, there can be no true spiritual intimacy between their essence and our essence.

The New Mystery of Community

While it is the mystery of thinking that provides us with our moral orientation in life - i.e. with the good, it is the mystery of community which provides us with the true.  Moral life is individual (I not we), and the seeking for the true is universal (we not I).  Through the practice of the Reverse Cultus we engage each other in a shared search for the truth, and via that dialogue then rise together into the world of the spirit, where within that communion we co-create new conceptual knowledge (the true).

 This seeking of the I for unity with the true and the good is what Steiner called the Consciousness Soul, or the joining of the Soul to Eternity via intercourse with the Holy Breath of the Cosmic Christ.

Through these means of practice then, the will element of the true nature of the Cosmic Michaelic Intelligence is returned to its proper role in the future of Anthroposophy.  The Children of the New Sun Mysteries take up their role as the washing the feet forerunners of humanity’s scientific exploration of the inner world of spirit, which then unites with our exploration of the true scientific nature of the outer world of matter on the path to the creation of the New Jerusalem.   By service, sacrifice and love, the Anthroposophical Society then rediscovers its heart, and Rudolf Steiner’s true legacy is moved forward in support of the highest social Arts of the Third Millennium, carried on the soul-wings of the knowing doer.

Concerning the Essay: Waking the Sleeping Giant: the Mission of Anthroposophy in America


That essay (from 1995) can’t be separated from the being of its author.  Above I suggested that I am one of two needed guides for the further incarnation of Anthroposophy, - in my case particularly in America.  Such an assertion requires explication and justification. 

Around 1970 (about 42 years ago) I was born into a body prepared for me by another - this preparer individual was 30 or so, and had no idea (in his day-consciousness) on going to sleep that night that such a exchange of egos (spirits) would happen.  When I came in I had already so identified with the original inhabitant, of the relevant physical, astral and ethereal bodies for which I now am responsible, that I had no idea there was any difference between myself and the prior individual.  I only knew on the next morning on awakening that my “prior personality” (in the sense of a self-picture) was dissolving (leading to greater creative inner freedom), and that my interior life was light-filled in a way that had not been true the day before.  Details can be found in my book, Biographical Necessity, which is also available in free ebook form at my bookstore.

It was seven years before I meet Rudolf Steiner through his books, at which time I was to discover a more or less adequate spiritual explanation for the radical change in my “self” that had been so painfully obvious (to me and certain members of my family) for many years.  Having already asked myself this question in the first half-year of my (walk-in style) incarnation: what is the relationship between my experience and my thoughts, and how does that arise in the light of my conscience, my own thinking about thinking was then well prepared to enter immediately into Steiner’s works on the problem of knowledge (GA 2, GA 3, and GA 4). 

My meeting with Steiner was also directly preceded in time by my asking (actually written in a diary) this question, a few weeks before that meeting took place: given that my personal experience reveals that the world is actually spiritual in its fundamental nature, what is the meaning of this fact for our mutual understanding of the social and political life of humanity?  This somewhat complicated riddle was a gift to me from the preparer personality - again see Biographical Necessity.

My integration with the Anthroposophical Society was problematic from the very beginning.  I did not understand what I was experiencing, in California - i.e. San Francisco, Berkeley and Fair Oaks, when I attended Society sponsored events.  Many of my essays trying to work out that problem are in my books Dangerous Anthroposophy, American Anthroposophy, and Manure for the Garden of Anthroposophy (again all available for free on my website or in ebook form at my bookstore.

My main anthroposophical work (besides ongoing work on the problem of knowledge) was to try to develop a Goetheanistic Social Science, because it was clear from reading Steiner that the answer to the riddle above was to be found on that path.  This took about 28 years (from 1982 until 2010).  My initial offerings to the Society, marking out stations on the path I was following, were rejected or just ignored, beginning with Threshold Problems in Thinking the Threefold Social Order (submitted to the Threefold Review around 1991) and then Waking the Sleeping Giant, submitted to the Newsletter in 1995.  Neither were published.

As to Waking the Sleeping Giant, I was in that long essay reporting the results of about 14 years of research seeking to develop a Goetheanistic Social Science.  I divided the essay into five parts, so that the Newsletter would only have to publish it in pieces.  The first part discussed Christ’s statement about rendering unto Caesar and unto God what is theirs.  From that principle it is possible to see the relationship between the Life of Rights (Caesar) and our individual moral activity, which relationship has powerful causal influences on humanity’s social-political existence. In the second part I discuss the threefold social order, not in its idealistic sense, but rather by describing how it has emerged into its present day form over time - eventually giving birth to an inner threefolding in the Life of Rights, of State, Media and People.  In the third part I discussed how it is that civilization in general, under the influence of the evolution of consciousness is undergoing a metamorphosis - a dying and becoming.  In the fourth part I bring in details on the Mystery nature of America, principally as regards the yet unknown relationship of the aboriginal peoples here to our modern life of soul.  In the final and fifth part I bring all these pictures together, to lay out and establish specific kinds of actions the Anthroposophical Society can take in order to help America become what is latent within its soul forces to become.

As noted above it was not published and in a certain sense nothing has yet come of that effort.

Eventually I was able to work out that it was the Ahrimanic hierarchies, working through the doubles of the members, that sought to disable Anthroposophy in America, by encouraging the specific rejection of my work, and as well making all research on the Spiritual America  be strenuously opposed.  Again, this is mostly about karma and our own development.  Details of when and how are in my books above, as well as near the end of this essay.  All of this was connected to the need for these ahrimanic hierarchies to be able to hide from the Anthroposophical Society the fact of Ahriman’s Incarnation, which in the form of a mockery took place on Christmas Day 1950, having been preceded by his Star, which first appeared over the Trinity Site, New Mexico, near Alamogordo, and then brought fully into the Sphere of the Earth in the horrors in Japan at Nagasaki and Hiroshima [this is from the original spiritual research of Elizabeth Mackenzie].  We are presently living in a Nation and World strongly Influenced by this Incarnation, which has centered its activity in the Life of Rights in America.  Because of these facts, what we do at this Conference is not to be taken lightly.

The Mystery of the Americas: the true West

It is possible to become quite confused concerning the underlying spiritual reality of the World, especially if one’s thinking excludes the inclusion of the Americas.  This is especially the case in anthroposophical circles, that is in circles of human beings already strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner and perhaps dominated by members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society.  Yet, an honest look at what is done and what is talked about in these circles is that they hardly contain at all a recognition of the Americas, and particularly of the People of Peoples - the Americans living in the United States of America.

For example, Stephen Clarke, one of the leading spiritual researchers on the Americas, was so disheartened when he learned of the holding of a conference in Dornach, focused on spiritual leaders from different disciplines from all over the world (which yet invited no living personality from the Americas at all!) that he left the Society in disgust.  The Center and the East don’t really know what to do with the Americas and Americans.

Both, in their relations to the United States of America, enact what has to be called  spiritual imperialism.  The Center and the East, in the sense of the conduct of those who consider themselves spiritual teachers, is to treat Americans and especially North America as a fertile ground into which to plant their views of the world.  This spiritual imperialism of both Center and East cannot imagine that Americans desire anything more than to be initiated or to become enlightened and worship at the feet of Great Initiates and Gurus.

More than a few of the many  European anthroposophists, that had come to North America in the 20th Century, have had no doubt that Americans are spiritually backward and must be introduced to the higher cultural achievements of  Europe.  I can remember sitting in a Conference on Conversation in America, that took place in Concord, Massachusetts in the early ‘90s, after having made a reference to American Culture, hearing the European sitting next to me remark: “what culture?”

The truth is the both East and Center would learn a lot about the spirit if they came to America to learn, and not to teach.  Something is happening among the People of Peoples that is transcendent of all traditional spiritual life which had been born before and often linked most significantly to a specific Folk Spirit.  Even Rudolf Steiner recognized that the version of Anthroposophy he taught was very much a creature of the German Folk Spirit and the Spirit of the German language.

For example, within the Stream of Anthroposophy, there is a recognition of what is called the Platonists and the Aristotelians, who have (according to Steiner) a shared karmic destiny.  Trapped in this pre-conception, anthroposophists are often blind to anything else.  For some, Tomberg is the archetype of the Platonists, and Steiner the archetype of the Aristotelians.  From the view of the spirituality of the true West, both men have serious limitations.

Tomberg is a kind of esoteric elitist - in his so-called masterpiece: Meditations on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism, only the most special and unique individuals are to be counted among the true teachers of Christian esotercism: the Desert Fathers, Papus, various saints and so forth.  Steiner is an esoteric idealist - basically selling the concept that to be deeply spiritual one must learn all about the great details of the spiritual world, in addition to which there is meditation to be practiced and other arts to master.  Both teach a massive set of spiritual exercises and as well the image of the self-transformed human being as the highest spiritual attainment.

Both streams in Anthroposophy (the Plantonist and the Aristotelian), and as well the Gurus from the East, take the same basic view: Ordinary consciousness is missing something.  Whatever our basic human nature, it must undergo transformation if any kind of spiritual striving is to be in evidence.  The message of the Initiates and the Gurus is that: What we are is not enough.  We must become something more

Christ does not teach this.  Christ loves us as we are, and makes no demands of any kind that we become something different.  He does, however, teach of consequences.  In the Sermon on the Mount He patiently explains what happens as a result of what we do with ourselves.  If we judge, we will be judged.  If we become poor in spirit, we will experience the Kingdom of Heaven. If we build the home of our soul on sand (no practice) that edifice will fail when stressed; and, if we build the home of our soul on rock (we do practice), then when troubles come we will survive.

We are then free to be who we want to be, and how we want to be, but we are not required to be anything else.  He is with us, as we are, until the Ends of Time itself.

What has this to do with the  Americas and Americans?

The Americas - the true West - are the most earthy place in the world.  The East is so far out there in its remarkable world conceptions, that it is hardly on the Earth at all.  The Center is closer to the Earth and able to be remarkably artistic, but accomplishes that through still not knowing how to be fully human on the Earth.  Who did Steiner celebrate?  Goethe, who was so not like the rest of us as to seem to be from another planet.  That’s esoteric idealism - to so praise and raise another up, it automatically puts the rest of us down.

What people in the true West are struggling to do is to be themselves.  They are not interested in being someone else’s idea of who they should be.  Just being what they want to make of themselves, that’s hard enough (Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, etc).  Again, why?

There’s been a fundamental transformation in the nature of human existence.  What before had to be sought outside the biography - inner transformation through initiation or enlightenment - is now built into the biography itself.  This is built in partly by us during our sojourn between death and a new birth.  Even if we include within our biography encounters with spiritual development disciplines, the central processes of transformation occur within the biography - not somewhere outside it.

Rudolf Steiner recognized this when in Knowledge of Higher Worlds he said that for each step in spiritual development, one must take three steps in character development.  We can exercise ourselves silly, but if we don’t live our biography in a moral way, there is no transformation - no purification, no catharsis.  Where is Christ in this?

Off on some mountain top?  Only available to you if you development Imaginative consciousness?  This is what Steiner and Tomberg seem to teach when they speak of the Return of Christ in the Ethereal.  Part of our problem is that both Steiner and Tomberg found in the spiritual world a reflective image of their own attitude, one the idealist and the other the elitist.  Neither anymore had ordinary consciousness, and did not know really what was going on with the rest of us.  Spiritual reality can only give us a reflection of what we bring - it has no desire to overwhelm our freedom.  As a consequence what Steiner and Tomberg met in their journeys to higher worlds was in large part determined by what they brought with them.

In a certain sense the following is very true: Steiner was the last great Initiate.  In a way he was a kind of living bridge between an old clairvoyance and a new clairvoyance.  Tomberg clung to the old clairvoyance, out of his elitist impulse.  Steiner tried to step past it with his work on the real nature of thinking.  This thinking activity is relatively new (in its present form), coming to the fore only in the last 250 years, as Barfield noted when he pointed out that in the English language it was just a couple of centuries ago that the term: self-consciousness became present in ordinary discourse.  Before that time we were inwardly not yet fully self-conscious.

As self-conscious thinkers we now do something in ordinary consciousness that was not possible before.  This is what I researched for almost 40 years, for with my incarnation into a body prepared by another, at its age of 30, that is where my I shined its light - into the field of ordinary consciousness (thus, part of the appendix in my book the Way of the Fool: the virtues of ordinary consciousness).  Eventually I discovered that for ordinary consciousness, when seeking to be moral, there arose a Second Eucharist in the Ethereal, as an aspect of Christ’s Return in the Ethereal.  For details see my Living Thinking in Action and other writings.

From this basis (understanding ordinary consciousness) I then developed my Goetheanistic Social Science, culminating in the book: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.  That book was not possible, or even conceived, until into my ordinary consciousness stepped the Lesser Guardian and the Greater Guardian of the Threshold out of their own forces of Will and Grace (in 2009).  It wasn’t until I had ripened my ordinary consciousness via facing the trials of my own biography, that the final patterns in the puzzle of the new clairvoyance (living thinking becoming clair/clear-thinking) entered into my ordinary consciousness.  I had been anticipating the old clairvoyance (imagining that Steiner and Tomberg’s views applied everywhere in the world).  As the new developed within my soul I was surprised and had a hard time recognizing the difference (which on my part was an error of perception warped by my assumptions).  But eventually I did come to understand what had really happened.  My biography had produced living thinking and then clair/clear-thinking in an instinctive way out of ordinary consciousness, confirming Steiner’s observation, made to the workmen on 3 March 1923, that the American was destined to come to Anthroposophy in a natural way. 

This then is what the Americas teach - how to be merely and gloriously human.  The significant matter is that when this is properly understood it is enough of a task.  At the same time, it is also an individually defined task.  No one gets to tell us what being human means.

All of culture in the Americas (most obvious, presently, in the United States) is about the trials of life leading one to becoming ordinarily human - discovering there their highest and deepest potential.  Even among the aboriginal peoples in the Americas this was their Way.  There is no system, no goal - no standard we must become.  We just live our life among our fellows, and as we grow into our maturity, our fellows may then recognize us.  In many Native Cultures this appears at a time when the community begins to label this state of human maturity, by the honorific: Grandfather or Grandmother.  This comes as just a simple recognition of the development of character that means that the individual designated and honored in this fashion is being noticed as a living  example of what it means to be a human being.  No initiation, no enlightenment.

In this way one is looked up to by the community, naturally, for having unfolded the grace-filled elements of being human.  No one can teach us how to be ourselves, except ourselves.  Viewed this way, one can come to see everywhere in the true West this development being born in the individuality; and, the tragedy is that the Anthroposophical Society misdirects us, because no one studies what it means to be an American in the Americas.  It is assumed that our spiritual development ought to imitate either the Center or the East.  The soul of the true West is assumed to be empty - needing to be filled from the outside.

Years ago I was graced with what some would call an Imagination.  While thinking in pictures on the history of the Faust Branch of Fair Oaks California, I was presented with a symbolic picture.  I have continued to work with this gift ever since, and details can be found in my book Manure for the Garden of Anthroposophy.  The central fact revealed goes like this ...

In the Americas, where the mountains run north-south instead of east-west, certain forces rise from the deep spiritual inside of the Earth, which have the effect of pushing up off the Earth - ungrounding - those souls born elsewhere (Center and East).  The soul of Americans is organized to be able to live within the materialism, and the hardening forces here.  To be grounded, within this field of willing, feeling and thinking, is natural to us.  To those who come from elsewhere, they are pushed up, off the dense moist Earth of the Holy Mother, and if we imitate their spiritual teachings we too will lose our natural connection to the Earth.  To seek initiation or enlightenment is for an American to sacrifice an essential aspect of our soul.

Here we come to the cause of so few Americans being interested in joining the Society or becoming followers of Steiner.  Here we come to the cause of the social problems in Waldorf Education.  As with the lawsuit filed in California against Waldorf by the PLANS group, the social body of the Americans tries to reject what is foreign to it, in the same way the physical body seeks to reject what our I cannot make our own.

This is why there is no research on the three-fold double complex in the Society.  Ungrounded self-knowledge wants to deny the existence of the double.  Just about every natural and amazing spiritual and cultural fact of America is rejected by the Society.  Granted there is an interest in what developed here in the first years, witness the anthroposophists working on Emerson and Franklin.  But at the same time, the Society completely fails to celebrate our arts (television and movies and jazz and rock and country and salsa and rap), or our mechanical inventiveness in the fields of electronics and computers.

You cannot know or understand what you do not love and honor.

Can the Anthroposophical Society in America fix itself?  There’s a joke, which is worth noting:  How many anthroposophists does it take to change a light bulb?  Nobody knows, because Steiner never said.  Did Steiner say stuff to us to help us with this problem of the Society fixing itself?  Well ... from one point of view that’s all he ever talked about - read the lectures: Awakening to Community.  Next, a personal story:

In the late ‘90‘s I was part of a Internet political discussion group run out of Stanford University - about 300 members.  I made there the comment that unless we developed a phenomenological view of the political and social, we’d never figure out how to heal our social wounds.  As a consequence I was invited to join a much smaller group of academic philosophers (about a dozen, American and European), that were into the study of such as Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault and so forth.

Things did not go well because I was totally unfamiliar with the works of these kinds of minds.  I did believe it was possible to still discuss their ideas, but whenever I asked a question on the discussion list, wanting for these “academics” to illuminate the details of a specific point, I was told to go read a bunch of books. It was like they lived in a world all of their own, whose vocabulary and principles were too obtuse for “ordinary consciousness”.   Sound familiar?

Anyway, at one point one of them made the rather bald statement that America had never produced any philosophers on the level as these men and others (celebrated now by a personality of the Center: Y. Ben-Aharon in his latest book: The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art).  I wrote a lengthly reply, in which my main point was that in the world of the mid to late 20th Century those American minds of similar caliber as to the French post-modernists et. al., finding the world lost into a level of absurdity, realized it could only be reached at its true depth through humor, and they became stand-up comics and cartoonists.   For them, philosophical intellectualism had no more weapons in its arsenal, having become inbred and self-reflective (philosophers only read other philosophers, and not one of them writes something to which ordinary consciousness can make a connection).

I then gave multiple examples, limiting myself here now to just a few: Walt Kelly has his character Pogo say: We have met the enemy and he is us.  Bill Gaines of Mad Magazine has Alfred E. Neuman say: What, me worry?  Bill Griffith has his character Zippy the Pinhead say: Are we having fun yet? Bill Watterson: Hobbes: How come we play war and not peace?  Calvin: Too few role models.  Then there is George Carlin, and his references to our “owners”.  Deep wisdom distilled to its most earthly essences lives in America’s humorists.

the New Clair-Thinking in Practice

It is common among many anthroposophists (those who find themselves to be students of Rudolf Steiner) to conceive of one supposed product of initiation: Imaginative Consciousness, as involving a kind of inner supersensible picture-like symbolic intercourse with the spiritual world.  Between ourselves - our own I - and the world of spirit there comes to be a kind of dialog taking the form of pictures or images.  For the old clairvoyance this was true.  For the new thinking clairvoyance this is not exactly true.

The place to start, in terms of understanding this, is with Steiner’s observation that the insertion of the human being into earthly reality, splits that reality into two components.  This is why he calls The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (GA 4) a monism.  The point of this particular kind of study of the our mind (and/or soul) is to learn how to reunite what appears to us naively in the first instance in the form of two kinds of experience. 

In A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception (GA 2), Steiner expressed this division as experience on the one hand and thought on the other.  In The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity he called these two components: percept and concept.  So percept and experience are essentially similar, as are concept and thought.

These facts are part of the background to there arising, in the systems of anthroposophical thought, two Paths or Ways.  The Path of Knowledge of Higher Worlds (GA 10) works through the study of the nature of our activity related to sense experience.   The Way of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (GA 4) works through the study of the nature of our activity as a producer of thought.  These Ways are distinguished in Steiner’s Occult Science: an Outline (GA 13), by his saying that while the former Path will lead to its goals of supersensible knowledge, the latter Way is not only more sure (as a Path), it is as well more exact.

In GA 10, the exercises are sense-based exercises.  We use the imagination in order to deepen our ability to appreciate what underlies sense experience.  GA 10 also contains many admonitions as regards moral or character development.  It is a Path through the sense world.  In GA 4, we are to face the question of thought experience.  As to the moral or character development matters, we are given in GA 4 specific instructions for our introspective observations and disciplines regarding: moral imagination; moral intuition; and, moral technique.   In GA 13, Steiner has pointed out that the Way through the thought world, the world of concepts, is a path which begins already in the world of spirit.  When my total organism underwent the change of egos around 1970, I woke up in this spirit/thought-world, but had no concepts from the prior ego’s experience in which to note what had happened.  I was awake enough to know soon thereafter that as a materialist I had somehow to justify to my conscience the use of my intuition (thought) as it related to my experience. 

Beyond that I was as lost as are the rest of the folks experiencing ordinary consciousness.  My world view, in the Age of Science, took no proper account of the meaning of thoughts and concepts at all.  If I was to learn something, I assumed and was taught that those experiences and concepts would be poured into my mind from the outside via teachers and books, but my own intuition simply lacked the right basis as a vehicle of knowledge.  We have the same problem in the Society when people are encouraged to surrender their own intuition to the Great Initiate.  We do this because we have not yet understood the reality of monism, or just what a gift to the future is hidden in GA 2, GA 3 (Truth and Knowledge) and GA 4.

Let us shift our discussion now, to the sense world itself, yet as seen from the point of view of the world of thought.

It is frequently stated that the sense world is a world of maya - of illusion.  This is a half-truth, maintained in large part because of its connection to ancient Eastern spiritual traditions.  The reality in the Age following Christ’s Incarnation is that the sense world is part (one half) of the Embodiment of the Word.  Now with the change of consciousness to modern times  the real nature of monism, when fully practiced, is to find that the thoughts and concepts (the other half) correctly belonging to the sense world are a kind of Speech.  There is divine order in the sense world, and it is the task of the human being to find the correct thoughts belonging to this world.  It may be maya in one sense, but it is not at all empty of Meaning.

The means for appreciating this was given to us by Steiner in GA 2, and its development over time of the idea and practice of Goetheanism.  In Goetheanism we no longer just think about the Natural World, or the Social and Political World (which has emancipated itself from Nature to a degree), but we learn to think with what comes to us through not only our senses and the results of our conceptual thinking as well.  Goethe learned to read the Book of Nature, and I have learned to read the Book of the Social-Political World.  To think with requires that we surrender antipathy and sympathy and just accept the what-is, for that what-is is the distributed* Christ Embodied speaking to us His truth via our very own mind (as the creator of concepts).  The human being is to overcome the split in the world between thought and experience by reuniting them out of our own free cognitive activity.

[For details on the *distributed nature of the Creator forces - or the Christ Impulse - see my book: The Art of God]

One of the difficulties is that for Goethe he only had to recreate in his imagination the exact nature of what the world of Nature did - to think with Nature’s activity.  For us to read the Christ’s (the Creators) speech in the Social-Political World requires that we do more, for our concepts of this latter world are not part of what Steiner called in GA 2, the necessary given.  Our understanding of the social-political comes not so obviously as a necessary given as does the shape of a leaf, which we see with our eyes.  We don’t see with the eyes a family or a community or the evolution of consciousness.  We only behold it with the thinking activity.

In order then to think with the social-political world we have to take full responsibility for the very concepts themselves, which we create.  This picture-like concept-creative activity is discussed in GA 3, Truth and Knowledge (or sometimes Truth and Science)

The disciplining of thought on the Way of GA 4 is the key to much.  This sure and above all more exact (GA 10) thought-creative activity is central to the healing (monism) of the split between experience and thought into which we are thrust while incarnated on the Earth.  Perhaps now we can appreciate what Steiner pointed toward in Awakening to Community, lecture three, in speaking of the consequences of failing to read GA 4 in the right way:  “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!”

 If the Anthroposophical Society does not renew deeply its relationship to the problem of knowledge, as expressed in GA 2, GA 3 and GA 4 - Rudolf Steiner’s true legacy, namely how to heal the split between experience and thought, will be lost to the whole of the Third Millennium.  Learning to think in the new Ways - to clair/clear-think with rather than merely about - is the first step that leads to understanding the World.  To see (as in think) our experience, our percepts, as the Embodiment of the Word, is itself a Living Imagination appearing directly to the senses and the awake thinking when coupled together in ordinary consciousness in the right way.  Keep in mind that Americans do this in a natural way - it is embedded in our ordinary consciousness, and the biography is meant to lead us into an awakening as to this form of new cognition.  It is not about learning to do something new.  Its about learning to see what you already actually do; that is,  to take something out of instinct, and by seeing that, then raise it into full consciousness.

the School of Chartres, and the Culmination.

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

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 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 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.

Shortly after it 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 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, 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 turned most of my written work into oral form, creating over 230 videos for YouTube, which has generated over 70,000 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.

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.)

 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 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 changed to her own website:  Christian Esotericism at Tibby Fowler's Bothy These works represent to my thinking 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.

a brief description of meeting the Lessor and Greater Guardians in the new way,
and as well a description of the meaning of, and new manner of, the Second Pentecost in the Ethereal.


For a discussion of the Second Eucharist in the Ethereal, to go with the Return of Christ in the Ethereal, read my Living Thinking in Action, or the Way of the Fool, or American Anthroposophy, or The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.

Nothing stays the same, not even Spiritual Science and Anthroposophy.  Time passes, the spiritual itself evolves as do human beings.  Certain matters of significance will have to be updated, and students of Rudolf Steiner will find that they have to reconfigure their paradigm if they are not to lose the connection with these natural changes.

For Americans these are very special facts of which to take account.  Our souls are not like the souls of either the Center or the East, and it is well past time for us to continue to assume that we need to imitate those selling either enlightenment or initiation.  The following material is meant to be a guide for those with an American Soul, and as well a Teaching for those who do not have an American Soul.  In the American is the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness, and the most earthly and natural expression of Anthroposophy. 

Part of the difficulty is that while I was learning about Steiner’s version of Anthroposophy, I assumed, like all those I was meeting in the Society, that this knowledge was nailed down and fixed.  I took in then imagines of what was to be expected and as I progressed naturally, in the American Way, nothing happened as I had been led to expect.  I was saved in a kind of way, by Christ, who on occasion touched me, and from those touches I eventually learned that matters were to have a quite different flavor than what Steiner had to teach to those without an American Soul, and also mostly still living in the Intellectual Soul.

It was not that Steiner was wrong, it was just that Reality is highly differentiated, and the American Way had to take a different course, with which his own comments on America agree.

Let me now lay out some examples:

 The Double: Based on Steiners descriptions of the double-complex in both the early Class Lessons, and the first lectures collected under the title: The Challenge of the Times, I anticipated that my experience of the double-complex, and its effects, would be visionary - i.e. supersensible images consistent with what Steiner had described - we were, after all, practicing science, which seems to seek a universal knowledge.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my inner voice, which I used when discursively thinking, could be captured by aspects of the double-complex if I was not using that voice myself, consciously.  The double-complex lived right next to my I, and from there was able to do its work, which is by the way both positive and negative.  For details the reader of this is referred to my work: The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount.  At the same time it is important to understand that the voice of conscience (the higher ego) and the guardian angel also sound in us in a like fashion.  Distinguishing them is part of scientific self-observation.  Each (double complex, higher ego - conscience, and guardian angel) has a characteristic quality that can be inwardly noticed.

 The Lessor Guardian of the Threshold:  As my experience of the luciferic/ahrimanic aspects of the double-complex grew in its details, and as well in my ability to somewhat master these creatures, part of the relevant lessons came during a mood of soul which we call: depression.  In the state of encouraged by the double depression (not always, sometimes it is caused by brain defects, again see The Mystery of Evil) our inner voice becomes captured by these beings, which regale us with details and images of how bad we are, how stupid, etc., such that it is very significant that Tomberg’s characterization of the ahrimanic aspect of these beings is as a prosecutor.  What to do to recover from this state is also discussed in The Mystery of Evil.

 The co-working of these beings creeps up on us, it is not overt, and we often don’t notice the effects until they get acute.  Besides the negative (prosecutorial) thoughts, there is also a related paralysis of the will.  It was then in the Fall of 2009 that I found myself experiencing a very profound apparent depression that had slowly advanced upon on me over the course of a week.

On one particular evening came the most intense activity in this regard I had ever experienced, and I began to pace around my room becoming more and more convinced of how useless and ignorant and weak I was.  I began to intensely loath myself.  I was not suicidal, by the way.  I just did not doubt for a moment that I had failed at everything, and had not completed any spiritual task in the right way, regardless of how hard I believed I had tried.

The situation became intolerable (I paced for almost two hours), and I finally woke up to the “depressive state of being”, its song of my flaws and its related paralysis of my own will.  Exhausted I collapsed on my bed, and started to recite out loud the Lord’s Prayer.  The depression and negativity then fled and I fell into an emotionally drained sleep.

In the morning the night work had embraced me and as I awoke I realized that a profound Being/s had revealed itself to me, and that it was of a hierarchy in which human failure and weakness was intolerable.  I was not really feeling myself as much as feeling how this Being felt about human beings, and our human weakness.  In itself it believed it had none, which is why it so intensely loathed me.  [Even today, my reflections on this experience grow, for we do not always fully know the meaning of such experiences immediately.]

Moreover that is precisely why such related communties of Beings were ordained to be part  of the double-complex, although generally quite restrained by certain rules.  In this case, my experience of this Being was an Intuition - it drew me into itself and revealed itself to me in all its remarkable power.  It had given me by grace insights into the workings of our lives that can be obtained in no other way.

Once free of the burdens of its gift, and back to my ordinary self-consciousness and thinking (in the following days), I began to truly see how to forgive myself for all my weakness, something this Being was incapable of doing.  It was as if there was a marriage being commenced, between my lower and my higher ego, at which this Being/s played an offertory.  From learning to forgive myself even of this profound loathing by another, I then became able to forgive others in a much more real fashion than ever before.

 The Greater Guardian of the Threshold:  This was a very strange event as it unfolded.  It wasn’t until later, when I was able to put it together with a number of other experiences that I came to the conclusions I now hold.  Again, I was not prepared for this experience by my readings of Steiner’s works.  How could he prepare me?  Great aspects of the Americas and Americans were invisible to him.  It is only our self-serving vain belief that he knows everything that leads us to confusion.  When we start to recognize that he was also a human being, then we can move forward free of the ideas we have built up from our too often unconscious reading.

This event happened about two months after the meeting with the Lessor Guardian.

On a certain afternoon I became feverish.  It was not a high fever, but I went to bed early, and the fever continued for about a total of 24 hours.  The next afternoon I started feeling better.  After a day free of fever, I became feverish once more.  This was a bit more intense, but when I took my temperature I was barely over 100 degrees.  During the night, every time I woke up and turned over, my scalp hurt everywhere.  When I got up the next morning and looked in the mirror my neck and head were everywhere red, like a sun-burn.  My scalp hurt, the fever was still there a little, and I was red from the neck up.

I called an old friend in California, who is also an anthroposophical doctor, and she had never heard of or seen a fever produce a sun-like burn on the face and neck.  I went to the ER, and the doctor there ran some tests, which gave no evidence of any kind of “bug”, but nevertheless gave me some antibiotics and had me pick up some anti-itch cream at the local pharmacy, with which to treat the skin.  He too had never seen a fever give an effect like this.

The anthroposophical doctor had said that it was a good sign the effect of the fever was on the outer edges of my organism (the skin), because fevers causing effects deeper in the interior organs often led later to worse conditions.

By the end of the third day the fever was gone and all that remained was the “burn”.  I treated it a little with the anti-itch cream, but during the next few days a very thin layer of skin flaked off in quite tiny pieces, and the surface of the skin all over my head and neck, after a period of being pink and new-like, healed and the itch disappeared. 

I had been consciously practicing intuitive thinking, after the sense of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for over a decade.  The only thought that was making sense of the event was that a/the Sun Being had touched me, so strongly that not only did I have a fever, I also had, in early winter and indoors, a “sun” burn, even though I had never left the room for several days.  This thought was coordinated with the recollection of something Steiner had written in the 12th Lecture of the John Gospel cycle, where he described that when a student of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has achieved a catharsis (purification) of the astral body, a higher being then takes the seed organs of clairvoyance born into the astral body that have arisen from this purification, and then impresses them on the ethereal body to lay a basis for clairvoyance.

Experience has taught me to cultivate a bit of doubt in the face of such intuitions.  I don’t necessarily throw them out, I just lay them off to the side and try to learn more.  I am particularly leery of thoughts that could so easily be self-serving.

After a time I began to notice that on going to sleep, the closer I got to the “threshold” of sleep, the more my spontaneous inner picturing (not directed at the sense world, but rather at the inner world), had become alive with all kinds of activity.  I would see faces, and sometimes the faces were looking back at me.  I did not work with this experience, although again my intuition was that this was the world of the dead.

My main path of knowledge previously had clearly been with regard to thinking and thoughts, not to inner visioning.  So the practical question to me was whether there was any change to the consequences my thinking activity.  This took a while to manifest, but in 2010, as mentioned previously, I created over 230 spontaneously given oral versions of my written works for YouTube (this has so far resulted in over 70,000 visits to individual videos - visits quite international in scope) and wrote a book I had not even previously imagined I was going to write: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.  As we say in America (at least): the proof is in the pudding.

 The Second Pentecost in the Ethereal: Again, I was not expecting anything to happen. Yet, on Pentecost 2011 I was sitting in my reading chair, had folded my open book on my chest, closed my eyes and began to drift into nap-like rest.  Mostly when I do this I don’t sleep, but I do very often think in the form we call reverie.  I am also aware that in this state I have a more conscious awareness of both my ethereal body and my astral body, although I do not study these - I just let myself wander among their fields as it were.

Something unusual was present once I had shifted my attention from the sense world to my inner world.  This will be difficult to describe, so bear with me please.

Take you right hand and place it centered over your right eye, covering your face from the mid-forehead down to about half way down your cheek.  Make, in your imagination, the upper pole of this hand-form wider, and the lower a bit narrower.  Also give it a kind of slight waist, in the middle - a narrowing.  The outer edges are basically rounded - they are not straight lines.  The upper aspect of the form leans in a kind of way toward the left.  It is not in anyway precisely symmetrical.

Now in reality there is no outer edge, for the form is built up of many dozens of smaller forms, which are basically identical in general, but also conform themselves inside the general overall shape.

Each of these smaller forms is like a two ended flame.  The end toward the outside is tipped to the left, and the end toward the inside is tipped to the right.  There is a slightly wider middle, which is of a somewhat darker color like the nucleus of a cell, and the outer flames (in both directions) are lighter.  The colors did not seem very important, as if the shape was everything, but blue and white seemed dominant.

All of these two-ended flames were nested next to each other, kind of like when people sleeping together “spoon”.  They nested in such a way as if from the center of the form ran a line-like ordering impulse, such that these “spooning” flames made a form and structure that circled around what was essentially the larger oblong form with a kind of waist, with the upper pole wider and the lower pole relatively narrower than the upper pole.  Each flame then was of a slightly different length and width so that their nested spooning filled out the whole form, without any gaps, except at the outer “edges”.  The total organism pulsed in a kind of way - that is, it was not static but in movement.

Most of the day, whenever I shut my eyes and let my attention wander in the right way, the two-ended multi-flame form was there, spacially occupying most of the right side of my “face” as that is recognized inwardly as a felt aspect of my head region when our eyes are shut.

Some conclusions arrived at over time:

My head region was being reconfigured, such that the interface between my individual spirit and my physical nervous system (in the region of the head) was altered.  The interface is the crucial aspect, and whether one wants to speak of the physical body, the ethereal body or the astral body (or all three), the change was being done by an outside source.  I wasn’t doing it, nor was I resisting it.  On the contrary, I surrendered to it.

Subsequently in speaking to others (I was giving some courses in my home that Spring and early Summer), I noticed a change in the sense that all that I had to do, after first asking a few questions to orient myself to my listeners, was begin to speak.  I did not need a goal, and my first utterance was mine to choose.  The difference was that I could, with full confidence, let myself go into the stream of thought being unfolded and trust that it would lead me in the right way to exactly what my listeners could best benefit from hearing from me. 

I seldom paused, or lost the train of thought.  I spoke with ease, often creating new imagines I’d never thought of before.  Nor was I unconscious in any way, or channeling.  I was actually more awake and more artistically free.  This same effect began to appear in my writing as well.

I have since studied this phenomena in other ways.  In certain sense I became more aware that America was a kind of micro-Babylon, such that even though we all used the same language (English), our individual and group understandings of the world were often radically different.  I found that if I needed to talk to someone concerning spiritual matters, with a few leading questions I could understand their paradigm’s language, and speak to it. 

Further, there was no point of view I need “sell”.  My task was to be more socratic, although in a very modern way.  I was to bring out of their already existing point of view what could in that moment be born.  I was to wash the feet of their way of seeing/thinking/beholding the world, not to induce them to believe in my paradigm.

a Challenging Open Letter to

the Powers that Be in the Anthroposophical Society

Friends often have advised me against such excursions - where I go pointing angry fingers at various people, knowing (as friends do instinctively), that many will overreact, others will defend without thought, feelings will be hurt and ones message will probably get completely lost in the resulting noise. 

I’m not in this to be liked.  At age 71 (physically), although only 40 plus years into my incarnation, I basically have lately consciously cultivated a curmudgeonly demeanor, which comes out, as was said by Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind: frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn, or by Peter Finch in the movie Network: I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!, or by President Harry Truman, when he was a Senator: If you don’t like the the heat, get out of the kitchen.

People who say yes when someone comes to them and encourages them to be on the Executive or the Councils in America, or the heads of the Sections of the School of Spiritual Science, have agreed to stand out, get their egos massaged, and once in a while will have to pay a price.  The positions I’m taking here, in sharing this material at this Conference, is just me joining your club.  Very American of me - not being willing to be excluded. 

Some people believe, naively, that being spiritual is all about playing nice nice.  Check out the money changers Christ threw out of the temple, or this quote from the Gospels by Christ about hypocrites: “Woe to you canon-lawyers and Pharisees, you fakes, for being like dusty monuments that look pretty on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of corpses and all kinds of rot.”.  For the whole bit, read Matthew 23: 25-28

Of course, everyone is basically human and flawed.  Prokofieff said to me: None of us are perfect, when I challenged him, at the 2005 Ann Arbor Conference, in accord with my own reading of his works and with Gordienko’s book.  Guess that would have to include Rudolf Steiner too. And me.

So what’s the point here?

In January of 1923, after the burning of the original Goetheanum, Steiner began a series of lectures later published under the title: Awakening to Community.  He didn’t mince words, and was clear that understanding that fire included understanding that anthroposophists need to do better.  Its quite possible to take the view that we haven’t.  Many are in denial  and some of the convenient fibs we tell ourselves are clearly not justifiable.  But the ahrimanic double likes for us to be comfortable in our belief systems (such as what I label elsewhere: Steinerism).  Take a nap says Ahriman, anybody seems to rock the boat threw them in the ocean.  Better we feel good about ourselves than stop hiding from certain truths.

That’s the key you see ... placing knowledge of the truth over and above brotherly nice nice diplomatic feelings.

Seven years ago I was here in Ann Arbor and made known at the final plenum three wishes: 1) that the Vorstand give us an honest history of the Society during the 20th Century [didn’t happen]; 2) that the Councils in America give us real access to those doing research on the soul of Americans and the spirit in America [also didn’t happen]; and, 3) that regular people would they please stop saying: Steiner said [again, didn’t happen].  Nothing puts him in a prison more, and our own souls in even a worse condition, than constantly relying on Rudolf Steiner as an authority rather than our own capacities for the New Mysteries of Thinking and the New Mysteries of Community.  There is a reason we have our own thoughts - they matter!

Well, as Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly says in the later Terminator movies, when he comes through time to save the future leaders of the rebellion against the terrors of the machine intelligence seeking to rub out the human race and take over the planet: Its seven years later and I’m back!

I’m not here to lead.  Don’t want to take anyone’s job ... be on the Vorstand, a Section leader or a Council member.  Not interested.  I’m basically retired, and here on vacation doing a little fishing for men like Christ taught me.  Now a disciple of the Second Coming.  You know that one, right?

The one we don’t talk about much because we seem too scared to face down the fundamentalist Christians as if they might attack us for wandering into the territory of the Great Lie Ahriman helped them use to conquer and still moderate Christian voices.  The one where Christ comes back in the flesh, takes true believers up in  the rapture, and shoots bolts of lightening out of his eyes killing the ungodly.  If we had half a brain, and maybe an ounce of real Michaelic Courage, we’d be describing the Reality, which is  that Steiner is the John the Baptist figure of the true Second Coming of Christ - the voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism.  Yet, ... the fact is we are not doing that.

Face it folks.  In this Time if you want to be spiritual in a Christ Impulse Way, if you are not taking risks of some kind, you’re hiding under the Bed, afraid of the Bogeyman lurking in the dark of the Closet; or the reverse, hiding in the Closet afraid of the bogeyman lurking under the Bed.  Try to remember that Christ died (as did Rudolf Steiner) for standing out for spiritual truth in a social situation where people who spoke the truth often get killed.

Now I don’t mean we should be standing on a street corner making a nuisance of ourselves.  We can trust to karma and our own intuitions to lead us to those conversations where the choice will arise in our souls to speak the true and do the good, or not.  We don’t need an aggressive program, although we do need very much to let the winds of an entirely different conversation among ourselves come forth.  The AS has plenty of work to do within itself first, if it truly believes it has something spiritual (besides our adoration of Steiner) to offer the world.

Starting a little over 40 years ago, I came in, found a world filled with many riddles I couldn’t answer, and begin a long long path trying to answer them.  Meet Rudolf Steiner, Goethean scientists, Owen Barfield et.al. and began the best self-education money can’t buy.  Trusted life and it trained me to be me, and graced me with a gift for thinking and speaking not seen very often.

I don’t want to be famous, by the way.  But I do want to serve the truth, you know the one connected to this I-am statement: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.  I’ve been hanging out with that Guy, and He’s given me some skills that can serve the truth and the Anthroposophical Society as well.

 I actually know where to find the money all our institutions need.  I know a course that people can travel to survive the Third Millennium.  I know the secrets of the Consciousness Soul Age, because when I incarnated I turned my life over to the Big Guy and said, okay Lord, take me where to go to do good stuff.  He said yup, but don’t expect to like it.  By the way, I’m not better than anyone, just a bit different and perhaps even weirder than most.  Who wouldn’t be if they had my biography?

 Who teaches the teachers?

 In America there is a profound Rights question being played out, due to the aggressive use of domestic spying by our intelligence apparatus.  The National Security Agency monitors more and more of our electronic intercourse, which in the age of the Internet is now considerable and more or less ubiquitous.  Those who seek to protect our Civil Rights often asks the question: Who watches the watchers?  We justifiably have a related question in the Anthroposophical Society.  On what basis are certain individuals put forward as capable of lecturing and teaching others?  And, more precisely, just who is it that makes the relevant judgments putting these people forward? 

We generally know who is taking on “teaching” roles.  What we don’t really know is precisely how they are selected.  We are often told “stories” and an effort is made to explain to us these processes, but an even deeper question remains, and can here take the form: Who selects the selectors?

As a student of the social, observing the outer details of the AS for decades, but also well aware of common human approaches to such questions, it appears to me that what we do in the AS is not unlike what goes on in academia.  A fact to take account of is that many individuals who rise to “teaching” positions in the AS are themselves holders of degrees from various institutions of higher education.  We would be surprised if a janitor in a Waldorf School was to become the head of the Section on pedagogical matters, although we ought to recall that one teacher of Steiner was an apparently simple man from the countryside, who came to town to sell herbs.

Who the spiritual world favors is frequently not a function of human values.  We have the cliche’: What is wisdom in the eyes of God is often foolish in the eyes of men.  Yes, Steiner was a Ph.D., and I have a J.D. and a B.A. and Elizabeth has an M.A. and a B.S.  But none of that reveals our relationship to the world of spirit.  If someone wants to know that, they have to inquire after other matters, and often dig deeper.  Keep in mind that while we adore Steiner, most of the rest of the world does not easily take that point of view.  Against conventional “wisdom” a lot of our ideas really appear goofy (two Jesus children etc.).

At one point, after Steiner crossed over, Valentin Tomberg was put forward by some as Steiner’s successor, a question concerning which Steiner had himself not offered an “indication”.  During the recent years of the Constitutional Question (part of the hidden history of the AS) it became apparent that Steiner in his last days actually changed the members of the Executive, who after his death were not allowed by others to carry those offices, and the old Executive, in a kind of coup, prevailed through not exactly legal shenanigans that took the Building Corporation, and turned it into the General Anthroposophical Society.  Our present Executive has actually lost, in the Swiss courts, all cases on these very old questions; and, narrowly,  through recent processes of infighting among groups loyal to Prokofieff, and groups loyal to von Halle, survived an effort to run them out of office.

This is so much like the infighting among academics at universities over the control of various departments to be not only amusing, but very very human.  Keep in mind, however, what is at stake.  Not only do we grant to some of our “teachers” a kind of tenure and salary, but we also adorn them with the garment of spiritual insight.  When you read the obituaries of members who have recently died, no one is ever spoken of in a negative (and honest) fashion.  If a person seeking spiritual development fell into the habit of rewriting his own history all the time like we do, he’d make no progress on his character at all.

Consider now some questions on the development of spiritual research on America.  I’ll have to necessarily be very brief ...

Around 1977, at a meeting of the Faust Branch in Fair Oaks California, Carl Steggman, the author of The Other America: the West in the Light of Spiritual Science,  stood up and proposed the creation of an institution, which would have two parts.  One part would be dedicated to furthering spiritual research on America, hoping to draw Americans to that work, and the other part would be a foundational year for introducing people to Anthroposophy.  People were inspired by Carl, and went to work in various ways, some with the practical matters of finding land and building buildings, and others getting prepared to take part in the two different kinds of work.

After about a year Rene Querido and his wife were hired to run the foundational program, and soon thereafter, the research program on America was dropped away, and Rudolf Steiner College was born as a Waldorf teacher training center - Rene’s specialty.  There were, among some, very hard feelings.  To me it is an excellent example of the European spiritual imperialism, that is promoted by the ahrimanic hierarchies in their efforts to lame the Society’s ability to lead the coming confrontation with Ahriman during the Third Millennium.

In a later example of the same battle, in which human beings played roles somewhat caught between such spiritual Titans such as Ahriman and Michael, the Central Regional Council was given the task of setting up speakers for the conference and lectures in which the 2004 AGM in Detroit was to take place.  They choose to make the theme the Spiritual America, and put together a list of dynamic and even controversial speakers.  Material was sent out, people made plans, such as motel reservations and plane reservations, only to find out just 30 days before the event that the whole America program was canceled.  Keep in mind I am leaving out a lot of details, for I was myself planning to attend, and knew many of the speakers.

The reason given for the change of the program was (allegedly) a misjudgment on the part of the Central Regional Council in the selection of a particular speaker {why that speaker wasn’t dropped by himself, and the rest of the program retained, remains a significant curiosity}.  All the speakers were replaced, the emphasis on America fell to the side, a leading European living in America gave the opening lecture and during the course of the conference three leading American women give talks reminiscing about Rene Querido, who had in the last year crossed over.

What makes this all so inexplicable was that this AGM came the precise weekend after George W. Bush won re-election, once more via processes of political theft.  The speaker, who had been the excuse for the cancellation, was prepared to lecture on the relationship between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic hierarchies and the Republican and Democrat parties.

What broke my heart came in the final plenum, when a young woman (around 30, perhaps a Waldorf teacher or parent) asked plaintively, yet powerfully: What about America?  Aren’t we supposed to know something about America?  But America never came up at that AGM.

That is still true, sort of.  It is the Anthroposophical Society in America, and in the World, that ignores the deeper questions of America and the Americas.  This happens not because the research work has not been done, by the way, but it is because the processes, by which speakers and institutional leaders are determined, systematically excludes those personalities gifted with the relevant skills, crafts and arts.  People who won’t make waves, and who more or less conform to and agree with conventional Society culture, are the only ones selecting and selected.

 Choices now come to the fore:  In the run up to this Conference, I have been trying to arrange meetings between myself and the members of the Executive and the Councils in America that will be attending.  I’ve written to John Beck, and as well to Torin Finser, concerning the seeking of their help in the arranging of these meetings.  I’ve also, as a good social tactician  should , made alternative plans, not leaving what is to happen to the “permission” of so-called leading personalities.

What I am trying to do is avoid a war.  There is an apocryphal story that has Steiner, and George Unger (the elder), standing on a hill overlooking Dornach, with Steiner supposedly saying: We may have to come back at the end of the Century and destroy all this.

I do not want to oppose the Society, but if it does not turn itself toward the truth and spend less time playing nice nice diplomatic games with each other, there will be for me no choice at all.  At the same time, I am not an agitator, regardless of how others might want to perceive me.  I am simply for honest conversation, which evades the boxes and constraints of safe non-controversial anthroposophical traditions, seeking instead the Living Reality of the Time. 

The essence of that seeking really belongs to those attending this Conference.  I’ve offered here what help I could through trying to deepen our understanding of America and its relationship to the real world, the world of spirit.  If the conversation is to be moved significantly more toward the so far missing truth, that will depend upon those who bring their wills into the guidance of that conversation, which is not the official speakers, but those who listen and have yet not had their say.

The reality, especially in America, is that true leadership comes for the social below, what in my writings I describe as the social commons.  There the community of individuals speaks to each other of the true, out of their individual sense of the good.   From this Rite, not yet fully practiced consciously, but for which Americans have a wonderful instinct (witness the social processes of Occupy Wall Street), is to be born the true social future.  The Anthroposophical Society is meant to be led from the periphery, from the Branches and Groups, not from Centers, by Vorstands, Schools and Councils.

Here is what I wrote to a friend, who was to attend the colloquium for Branch leaders, prior  to this Conference: 

 I believe (I hope) you know instinctively that this is not Fifth Cultural Age to have a hierarchy of “leadership”.  Our tendency (not just in the AS but in Civilization in general) is to hold to pyramid-like structures, that were born in the 3rd Cultural Age, clinging to them now mostly out of habit.  Steiner had to present his work in Central Europe to people still mostly in the Intellectual Soul, and whose orientation to “knowledge” copied the University, which again is a last remnant of those social structures that involve some form of “dominion over”.

In creating the College of Teachers to run Waldorf Schools, and trying to make the schools independent of each other, and as well in trying to evoke the Reverse Cultus, Steiner was seeking to inaugurate true Consciousness Soul social forms (Fifth Cultural Age), which are meant to replace “dominion over” with “communion with”.

Also in creating the Branches and the Study groups he again tried to set the course for true Fifth Age cultural social forms, which is partly why he tried to stay outside the Society as its Teacher, and not (until as a last gasp) to enter into it structurally, because this would once more give pyramidal order that was no longer appropriate.

The very idea of “leadership” contains 3rd Cultural Age overtones of “dominion over”, because it seems to place decision making power at the top of something hierarchical. 

Now I know you actually don’t want to “lead” that way, but as long as the above “understanding” is not present in the Society consciously we will continue to behave toward each other as if the “institutional hierarchies” (the Executive, the “leaders” of the School, and the Councils in America) have real spiritual and social meaning.  That these institutional groups perpetuate their unconscious “dominion over” modes of thought by being allowed to choose their successors is again a major social imbalance.  Also, Dornach should not be giving the free and independent spirits of  the thinking of the membership “themes of the years”.  Having a “Center” is no longer socially viable.

If the “facilitators” (not leaders) in the Branches were to consciously resist the very idea of leadership among themselves and among the Councils and Executives etc. a great step forward could be made.  The Branches are meant to be fully free and independent, as are the local members.  Institutional structures are necessary to do “work”, i.e. facilitate (which is how I sense you see your role), but not to “lead”.  As noted above, Michaelic inspiration is actually concentrated in the Periphery now, not in the Center.

The Conference, in point of fact, fails utterly at the social level because it once more perpetuates the hierarchical structures by having “leading personalities” dominate our thinking by giving lectures all over the place. 

Now there is a place for “expertise”.  A committee doesn’t write poems or paint pictures or do heart surgery.  Experts should, however, also not be “leaders”, but perhaps “guides”.  They may have penetrated an area of knowledge yet unknown to others, and can then guide those who would also go into those territories. 

I realize these are somewhat subtle distinctions (leaders, guides and facilitators), but I also think they are descriptive (goetheanism) of modern social developments.  Occupy Wall Street, for example, strove very hard not to have leaders, but rather to practice as best they knew how: “communion with”.

 Welcome to the Age of the Consciousness Soul, where if people were perfect and got everything right the first time around, we’d always just party.  All the same, we are not perfect and we don’t get it right all the time, and maybe we should just celebrate a lot anyway.  So many choices, so little time.

Let me end this by giving the final word to Elizabeth.  We are in fact, socially, in the Age of the Consciousness Soul very much in need of being guided by women.  The divine feminine forces are returning, and while not exclusively only available to one sex (men can know them as well), it is very important to consciously seek out and cultivate a relationship to this style of inspiration.

From her book: The Shepherds’ Fire - a meditative study:

“...

“The Holy Spirit, whenever It draws near, speaks Its name to me and Its name is Christ Mass.   This speaking is like no other speaking.   The Holy Breath is very gentle in the soul, like an infant reaching for a mother; if the soul can welcome it likewise then the following experience can happen.

“The Holy Breath, when it moves the soul produces the sound of the Angelic Choirs singing Gloria and simultaneously a deep dark night descends on the soul.   If one ponders the night and allows the angelic singing to fill the soul then a third experience dawns.   The heart suddenly becomes warm and is, as it were, on fire.   This mystical fire lights up in the deep dark night with great gentleness.   It is not a blaze.  The heavens are ablaze, not with fire, but with the singing of the angelic choirs singing both Gloria and Hosanna to God in the Highest as if the myriad stars themselves were saying Gloria, Hosanna in the Highest, for the stars spoke once to man.


“In the warmth of this fire that fills the soul is the realization of the truth that the stars are speaking; the truth is that this very night, as every night, and the night of the soul is a Holy Night.   The warmth and light of this Truth kindles the Shepherds’ Fire that keeps the sheep safe from the wolves- one’s own sheep and one’s own wolves and others’ wolves.   In this safety of the heart on fire one can ask the Breath of Holiness, what are the sticks? What is the flame and how is it lit?   For one must learn to discern very clearly if one is doomed to spiritual science, and one must learn the art of questioning as a white dove.   That is to say, one’s question must arise as a white dove just as Noah’s question arose; or as a stock dove, a blue dove, a columba, calman gorm.  ... “

Dona Nobis Pacem

grant us peace