handout given by me to the Social Science Section
meeting, in late June, 2015
, in Shelburne VT.


HELP! - a Platonist’s Lament:  (Free - Limited Edition - only 33 copies!!!):
“I have much more to say to you, but you can’t bear it just yet. But when the other comes, the breath of truth, ...” read: John 16:12-15.  The following is Gifts for all, in cooperation with the presence of Fullness and the fullness of Presence (the breath of truth - the Holy Spirit)

    There is a joke, and that  joke is on me.  I devoted a great portion of my spiritual/thinking life to Anthroposophy and the Anthroposophical Society, assuming it would be valued there, only to be completely ignored by the Institutional Society.  I want to thank all the people that ignored my work, for - as is said - what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

    Why was I ignored? One aspect was that I didn’t align my thinking with some of the basic premises of the Society, particularly anything that wants to lean on Steiner’s threefold ideology.   Decades ago I diverged from main-stream social thinking in the Society, and instead of asking the question (which is based on Steiner-said): What is the most ideal form a social order needs to take?, ... I asked the question: How does the social organism actually work?   I also asked: Can Goethean thinking, with its discipline of letting the phenomena itself speak, discover what is living in the social organism?     

    I spent more than three decades on this work.  But most of my attempts  to share this work were routinely rejected by the Society in general, and often the Section as well.  Why?  Besides my own failures - often rooted in a judgmental habit of complaining, the answer is that the ahrimanic hierarchies, via the threefold double complex, want to cripple the Section and the Society, so that both become ineffective in contributing to a true understanding of the social crises arising in the modern world.  The dominant spiritual/soul feature of this modern world is a seeming conflict between the raw intellect (ahriman within us), and the Christ Impulse.  They are not in conflict, but need to learn to work together in the human soul.  What has my spiritual research uncovered?  
 
    Ahriman is presently incarnate in America.  At the same time, the whole social organism of humanity is filled from within, and surrounded from without, by the Cosmic Christ.  Ahriman may be here, but as a bit player, for the Word has embodied Itself in the social order - in a “distributed” fashion, including the human being.  The social world is already perfect, even allowing for our common belief that the world is a mess.  It can’t be made better, ... it can only be understood and helped along its own course of development.  Threefolding principles are a tool to help that, but not the most important tool.

    The core matter to appreciate is that during this Age, in which the true Second Coming of Christ is unfolding, the spirit and soul nexus of the human being is beginning to experience a Second Eucharist in the Ethereal. This is rooted in our grace given capacity for love engendered free moral choice.  Rudolf Steiner was the John the Baptist figure of the Second Coming - the voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism.   While Steiner’s teachings baptize the intellect, Christ has additional plans.
  
    The struggle between the untamed intellect (ahriman within), and love (the Christ Impulse), is the dominant feature of the modern world, and only incidentally produces all the social chaos we observe.  We can’t understand the world’s social-political organism unless we realize that historical social-political events are a secondary phenomena, not the primary.  World events are the Stage Setting, and the Dramas of individual biographies are the core focus of the attention of Christ, the Holy Mother, and all the relevant hierarchies They, in concert, influence.

    Social Chaos is the way the Divine Mystery makes possible individual development on the necessary global scale.  Conflict is required, and cannot be avoided.  Partially because of karma, but primarily because free moral life can only be called forth, in the biography, by real existential personal  crises, for which no tradition or book offers a real answer.  We are to be forced to decide by ourselves.  
 
    It is these inner transformations in the individual spirit-soul nexus that are the primary meaning of Earth Existence, beginning in the Epoch of the Consciousness Soul, and then extending on into the future.  Our individual moral creativeness is warming the whole spiritual core of reality from within, and thereby creating the New Jerusalem existence, otherwise known as the ethereal planet which we will next inhabit, when the physical earth is only a burnt out husk.  This ethereal planet is the result of human beings, via the Second Eucharist, co-manifesting the transubstantiation of thought.  As a consequence, the personal biography is the true Holy Grail, as generated by Christ and the Holy Mother out of Love and Justice, precisely and exactly adapted to the needs of each single individual.

    A secondary effect, following from this primary evolution of consciousness causality, is the end - the dying into a new becoming, of Western Civilization.  A great deal of macro human difficulties comes from the fact that modern consciousness is incompatible with the present day social rules and norms, which have become too rigid, excessively traditional, and often intolerant of individuality.   

    All the same, the most important work facing the Section and the Society, can only come about through the gate of an encounter between the Aristotelians and the Platonists, called the Culmination.  Right now the Aristotelians, who dominate the Society, keep at bay the Platonists.  The door to a true and needed alternative thinking is not open.  The Society is filled with, and dominated by, one Way of thought - which is an intellectual dependence on what Steiner said.  Ahriman within has captured our “flag”.   

    Go here for supportive reading: “the Way of the Fool”; “New Wine”; “American Anthroposophy”; “The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything”;  “The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount”; “I am not my brain - the map is not the territory”; “Sacramental Thinking” (the Rising of the Sun in the Mind); “Dangerous Anthroposophy”; “Sex, Porn, and the Return of the Divine Feminine”; “Dragon-Riders: the human being in maturity”; “waltzing and weeping by the rivers of the holy grail”; “the Culmination”; “Electricity and the Spirit in Nature”; “On the Nature of Public Life”; “Uncommon Sense: the degeneration, and the redemption, of political life in America”; and, “Social and Economic Rebellion”.  Links to these are here: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thetree.html

    By the Way, there is little possibility of helping the social order evolve via the right processes, without direct participation in the Political-Legal Sphere - the middle sphere of the Threefold Social Organism.  That is where the incarnation of Ahriman is at work.  That is where the Christ Impulse is most richly manifesting - not in the Cultural or Economic Spheres.  Recall what He said (if you want to find something to lean on): Render therefore, unto Caesar (the State), what is Caesar’s; and, unto God what is God’s (religious practices - see the Sermon on the Mount).

    It is really kind of simple in a way.  For example, if you read Steiner in all his medical indications it is clear that the middle realm of threefold processes - the heart of them as it were, is where the strongest effects are produced.  This then is the needed model, from the Steiner-said side of things, if we wish to aid the social organism do what it is already capable of doing.   We need to heal the middle.

        From the Christ and the Holy Mother side of things, comes the wider context: Baptism by Holy Breath and Fire.    Or, ... Love and Justice.   The original John the Baptist predicted it.  Matthew 3:11  “Now I bathe you in the water to change hearts, but the one coming after me is stronger than me: I’m not big enough to carry his shoes. He will bathe you in holy breath and fire.”

    A lot of this Fire comes from karma.  Choice produces consequences, and when the whole world burns in a kind of social conflagration of karma, we get modern social-political existence.  This is leavened by Love, which makes the Stage Setting secondary to the primary individual biography - the individual Holy Grail.  Inside us, now and into the future, we determine what is moral - we enact what in the Gospels is called by Christ: the Law and the Prophets.  In the Second Eucharist our actions are aided, such that after we choose - in each moment of moral  crisis, then comes Christ’s Will - Holy Breath - where He blows on the tiny embers of our moral will, helping it become.  Baptized by the Fire of the times without, and Holy Breath within, in the heart of the social organism, human beings struggle to manifest the good and the true called forth by their political-social lives.

    How can we help them?  How can we serve that?  In my experience the institutional Society is not ready.  It is too insular and often self-righteous.  On the other hand, the Branches and the Study Groups, to the degree they act independently, forming their own thinking about such questions, will do the best.  Trying to form a coherent social program, from the top-down, will fail.  Only from the bottom up, in collaboration with all the rest of humanity - all of us residing in the social commons - will we, who join forces with others who need know absolutely nothing about Steiner or Anthroposophy, find/invent a Way to help and to serve.  Selling Rudolf Steiner is a complete waste of time.  All politics is local.  All politics goes to those who show up.  The Society can be a training ground.  But if we are to open up to the Christ Impulse, we follow and serve (wash the feet), we do not lead.  We learn to think with and within others.  The Members are ready for a more potent role in the social organism, even if the institutional Society is not.  This will be even more so, if many trouble learn to manifest the Rising of the Sun in the Mind.  By the way, if the Society genuinely wants money, I know how to get it.

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Additional materials, for the 2012 AGM: Radical Anthroposophy - aka, take no prisoners: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/radicalanthroposophy.html
Also: All In (about a very personal journey to the 2013 AGM and Youth Section meetings of the Anthroposophical Society and School of Spiritual Science, in and near Keene NH) http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/AllIn.html