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.
*
* *
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