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.
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.
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