some thoughts on the nature of human becoming (the evolution of consciousness),
and the wise relationship of moral grace, freedom and love

by Joel A. Wendt

By the Way of the Fool, I mean to use the term Fool in the same manner as has the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, wherein the Arcanum The Fool is also called Amor, or Love.  This is what then gives this Way its Christian texture, being an act of Love.  By using the term Christian Enlightenment, I mean to suggest that this Way has kinship with Buddhist Enlightenment, yet is different - the Path of Love being a further evolution of the Path of Compassion [Christ being a different sort of Being than the Buddha.  The former a facet of God becoming human, and the latter a facet of the human becoming God, which activity - the Teaching of the Way of Love - in human evolution (or becoming) appears in human history progressively subsequent to the Teaching of the Way of Compassion.] .  This being the case, we should also notice there is a difference (as well as a relationship) between Compassion and Love which is why I have appended the term initiation following on the term enlightenment, pointing out then something of the nature of the difference.  It is this difference then which is the subject of this book.

The image above, which is to adorn the cover of the book, is called the Rainbow Warrior.  It is a weaving of seed beads (an artistic effort aimed at the imitation of the use of such beads by Native America Peoples), which I created in the early 1980's.  The central figure, which is only subtly represented, is formed of the Greek Letters Alpha and Omega in an arrangement with the latter above the former, according to a suggestion of Rudolf Steiner.  This figure is embedded in the Center of a Cosmos of Stars and Planets, pointing to the divine origin of the human being, and the centrality in Cosmic and Earthly existence of the Eternal Nature of our spirit or I-am.  How and why that is so is outline below in the whole of this book.


The words that follow in this small book, and the thoughts which seek to live in them, are derived from the whole of my life.  This means that in certain respects I am a very lucky human being - I have been graced with a rather remarkable series of teachings.  But of my own story, my biography, I will write little here except the following.

Who I am, and what of the human I have become, is mostly due to all the people I have met in life.  I have had the great fortune to encounter at almost every turn wise and loving people.  Yes, there have been all the usual personal struggles, even including addiction, but all ordinary human suffering that I have experienced has been far out weighed by the Grace of a very wise Providence, who placed in my life's path a sequence of teachers and teachings for which I am not only very grateful, but upon whom I am completely dependent.  The best in what I write is from them, while the worst will be due to my own failings.

All the same, to receive such treasures into one's soul and spirit, is clearly not meant to be for me alone.  It is, in fact, an aspect of age (I am just beginning my 63rd year) that creates a need to pass on what has been learned, knowing that it was by such a sharing from others that one's own life was greatly enriched.  Thus, this small book.  

At a certain point in my life, while reflecting on the nature of these riches entrusted to me, I wrote of what it was like to receive them using the following words: "Listening to the World Song".  Here then, in this little book, is what I heard - the Story Sung to me by the World Itself, concerning the human adventure that is each individual's biography, as that biography is held within a most wise and loving embrace, which was once called Divine Providence, and which today we call: Earthly human existence.


Attending the birth of the Christ Child there was a grouping of human beings.  This Event, which is still by many celebrated at Christmas (Christ Mass), a time of year that was also known in terms of the more ancient wisdoms as some kind of celebration of the Sun near the Winter Solstice - this Event is always worthy of deeper study   However, modern thinkers, both of an academic as well as religious nature (Christian, Goddess etc.) argue about these things, as if somehow we could penetrate to the true Mysteries here through some war of words.  It is far easier to understand this Event by remembering one small, but yet important, reality.

These were times of oral culture, and the Gospels, in spite of all our other uses for them, were originally stories.  This is how wisdom was shared among the common people in that time, and in fact for most of history.  We moderns with our written literature, and television and videos, have lost sight of the more essential, more human element.  It is really the stories that we share among us as human beings that brings forward wisdom and knowledge.  Yes, we have all kinds of modern ways, including the internet, but the wise reality of life always comes down to stories, shared from one to another. With this in mind then, let us recall the Gospels in the more true way - as stories.

All we have to do is read the opening lines, and the story nature of the Gospels is clear.  For example, Mark 1:1 says: "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God".   Or, Matthew, after laying out the line of genealogy peculiar to his Gospel, says in 1:18: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way.".

These are classical forms of beginning a story.  I am by the way, not suggesting anything about the truth or not of these stories, but rather pointing to something else.  These stories are not meant to be the dry recitation of facts, but have behind them the intention to render into words what for the authors was a most sublime mystery.

What this means for us is that there is nothing superfluous in these stories.  Every detail was placed there for a purpose, and nothing was intended to be simple filler, or any excess of exaggeration.  And, given that what is being rendered in the Gospels concerned what the authors conceived as the greatest of Holy Mysteries, we cannot pass by any element of the story without considering its possible wider meaning.

With the picture of the shepherds and the kings attending the birth of the Christ Child, we come upon a much overlooked aspect of these Gospel stories - an aspect that can tell us a great deal about our time, and the future.  Those who know the nature of humanity's deep and wise stories, know that just such little details often reflect Archetypes, which when appreciated lead us to what are otherwise hidden meanings.

Christ Himself taught frequently using the image of the shepherd and his flock, which fact ought to suggest that it is of no little moment that the birth of Jesus was known to two quite different classes of human beings.  Yet, about kings Christ tells no parables.  Moreover, the shepherds who attended the Birth in this story knew of the Birth in one way, and the kings who attended knew in another.  This difference is itself important.

The kings are described as following a star (Matthew 2: 7-12), which led them to Bethlehem and the birth, to actually seeing the Christ Child.  The shepherds experienced an announcement from an Angel, and from this they then traveled to the place of birth (Luke: 2:8-20).

We have here two ways of coming to knowledge of the birth, and these two ways effected two quite different groups of human being.  The kings were mighty and powerful, and the shepherds lowly and ordinary.  The kings knew something on their own, and the shepherds had to be told by an Angel in order to know.

Who were the kings?

Part of our history of those days has been forgotten, and it certainly was true that as the early Church grew into prominence, it went on the attack against the various Mysteries that had preceded Christianity.  Today we call these prior Mysteries: paganism; and some treat them as if they were the superstitious ravings of lunatics.  But this is a false revision of the true history of those days.

In point of fact the kings where priest-kings, for in those times the rulership of nations and principalities was often in the hands of the Mysteries.  Moreover, these Mysteries practiced disciplines by which individuals were brought to what is called a state of initiation.  A priest-king, who was an initiate, experienced directly the sublimity of the Divine.  These Mysteries practiced forms of gnosis - or the direct experiential knowledge of God.

The kings that attended the birth of the Christ Child knew through initiation (direct gnosis) about the Event in Bethlehem.  Their knowledge was based upon their own efforts.  This supersensible (above the senses) knowledge is reflected in the story by the picture of the star.  The kings followed their direct knowledge - their star - which then lead them to the Birth.

The shepherds, on the other hand, were simple and ordinary.  Their relationship to the Divine was based not upon knowledge but upon faith.  This then required that they be told through the office of an Angel about this Event.

In this way the Birth was attended by what is essentially a small class of individuals - namely initiates (priest-kings); and it was attended by representatives of a much larger class, namely the ordinary and the lowly - the meek (shepherds).  Please remember: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth.

In this way the Gospels tell us the story that there are two ways of knowing about God.  One direct, personal and immediate, and the other indirect and mediated by another Being, in this case the Angel.  These two Ways are gnosis and faith.

As most everyone knows the Way of gnosis disappeared, and during the Middle Ages, to speak of such things was considered by the Church to be heresy.  The Church, founded on the rock of Peter and elaborated by the genius of Paul, became a Church rooted in faith.  Knowledge of the true meaning in the Gospel stories of the kings was deliberately forgotten and then lost.  Only the Way of faith seems to have remained historically visible.

But not really.

For a certain other fact was written into the story of the Gospels.  Most everyone knows that the Matthew, Mark and Luke Gospels were significantly different from the John Gospel.  Biblical scholarship has long recognized these differences, and actually creates a separate category for the first three Gospels, calling them the Synoptic Gospels.

The reason for this is plain, once we understand the meaning in the story of the two groups who attended the Birth.  The kings were allied with the old Mysteries, and for Christianity to develop as a new Mystery, the old had to pass into the mists of time.

The result is that we have in Christianity two Ways.  The Way of Faith, or Pauline Christianity and the Way of Gnosis of Johnine Christianity.  The Gospel of John has contained, since the beginning, knowledge of the Way of Gnosis. Most of Chrisian history has involved the coming into being of the assumption that the John Gospel was just a variation of the other three, with the result that a true apprecation of what is described in John has been lost.

Today, what has been forgotten for two thousand years is returning (with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Gospels of Mary and Thomas).  The true meaning of the Gospel story of John has begun to emerge from its hiding place.  Once again there exists knowledge of how to know God in a personal and direct Way.  In reality, this Way was never truly lost, but mostly had to sacrifice its former pre-eminence in order that the Way of Faith could bring forward its gifts, which were new.

The Way of Gnosis, the form of the old Mysteries (with an active and dominant priesthood), had to go into the background for a time, as part of a long term process which was to make it possible for the human being to no longer need any kind of intermediary between themselves and God.  All the same, in the beginning of the history of the Church, a priesthood remained necessary.  But in order to understand in a deeper way why it was necessary for the Way of Faith to dominate early Christianity, other considerations must be added.


Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is a modern representative of the stream of mystery wisdom belonging to the kings in the Gospel stories.  He was an initiate, and had direct personal experience of the Divine.  While it is not necessary to take my word here on this, it would be wrong for me to pretend that I know otherwise.  What we are going to do here is the same that we did before with the Gospels.  We are going to look at some of the stories that Rudolf Steiner told.  No one is required to believe Steiner was an initiate - I only tell that part of his story so the reader will know what are my views as regards his status.

Let us now look at some of what Steiner taught, not as knowledge to be believed on his authority as an initiate, but rather as a story, from which we are free to draw our own conclusions.  In our Age, the kings are no longer meant to dominate, but rather have joined the rest of us at the shared common ground of our humanity.  Initiation is our Age is frequently more of a curse than a blessing.

In addition, if one chooses, there are others that can be looked to for conformation about the truth regarding the evolution of consciousness that is in Steiner's stories.  Here are three books and authors: Ernst Lehrs' book, Man or Matter; Gottfried Richter's book, Art and Human Consciousness; and, Owen Barfield's book, Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry.

The story that Steiner tells is long and complicated, being an attempt to tell a broad history of the whole of human and spiritual evolution, from the very beginning of creation to modern times, and then beyond into the future.  Here we are only going to look at a very narrow aspect of this much greater story.

In the vocabulary that Steiner creates for telling this long story, he speaks of what he calls "cultural epochs".  Our present time is one cultural epoch among seven others, which seven is again embedded in larger periods that might be called Ages.  We are only going to examine the middle three cultural epochs of the current Age.

The time of the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians was in Steiner's words the time of the third cultural epoch of our modern historical era (Age).  This epoch extended up until about 700BC (this roughly corresponds to the founding of Western Civilization), at which point begins the fourth cultural epoch that goes until around 1400, after which begins the fifth cultural epoch of the modern era - or our time.

Each cultural epoch also corresponds to the development of some particular inner characteristic of human consciousness.  For the third cultural epoch, humanity developed the sentient soul; for the fourth, the intellectual soul; and in our time (a period that will last until about 3500 AD), we are developing the consciousness soul.  Now these different consciousness (or soul) developments are just the names that Steiner gives to aspects of human nature in his stories.  They could be called anything, for it is not the name so much, but the inner quality of human nature that is important.

Now what makes the story even deeper is that each form of soul development has a corresponding social form.  That is, for the sentient soul development, there is a characteristic set of social relationships, for the intellectual soul development another set of social arrangements, and for the consciousness soul a third characteristic social structure.

The reason this is important is that one can see in history, as we know it, the proof of Steiner's observations.  Our knowledge of the time of the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians shows us both the outer social forms, and by implication the inner nature of human consciousness that went with that period of human evolution.  So also with the fourth and fifth cultural epochs.  Steiner's stories in this regard are not inventions, but rather much deeper and wiser descriptions of the meaning of these periods of human history, than those ideas we are taught by our current professors and teachers.

For, once we realize this evolution of consciousness, we also realize that modern humanity tends to mistakenly imagine that consciousness is the same in the past as in the present, and so our modern teachers describe events in ancient times in such terms as if those peoples thought, saw, and felt in the same way we do today, when the real historical facts everywhere suggest the opposite.  The ancients were inwardly different, and those differences are precisely why they believed and thought differently.   They were not any more stupid  or superstitious, but rather had different beliefs and understandings exactly because they had a different form of consciousness.

I am also not going to go into the details of the sentient soul, and the intellectual soul, or any of the greater aspects of the stories that Steiner tells, because the reader of this book, who wants to, can go to the source and get it all in a much better way (see Steiner's Theosophy, and Occult Science: an outline).  Rather I want us here to have a very narrow focus, and to concentrate on what we all see right in front of us - outwardly in social life  and inwardly in our own soul life.

The purpose of bringing forward the idea of the evolution of consciousness is to get us to wake up to these types of changes, and to see that what we experience today is part of a much larger pattern that can be discovered if we wish to devote the time to learning about it.

These three cultural epochs, being also part of a much larger set of changes that encompass seven periods in all, each period lasting about 2100 years, have a special relationship with each other.  The fourth epoch, in which the Christ Events appear at the end of the first third, is a middle or transitional epoch.  While the third (the time of the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians) epoch and the fifth epoch (our time) are somewhat mirror images of each other - images that turned over and inside out in a kind of way during the fourth period.  So we have the third epoch with its social and inner nature, then a transitional period (the fourth epoch), and then the fifth epoch with its social and inner nature, that is something of an inversion of the third epoch.

For example, in terms of social structure, the third epoch was characterized by top down hierarchical social organizations (priest castes being in charge, whether it was the Pharaohs of the Egyptians, or the Patriarchs and Kings of the Hebrews).  While the modern epoch is characterized by the end of hierarchical structures, and the development of bottom up individualized social forms.  In the third epoch, individualism was not the point, and general soul development the essence, with the moral order being in the form of laws and rules handed down by the priests (e.g. Moses and the Ten Commandments), whereas in our time, it is our individual moral sense of what is right that wants to dominate and more and more rejects being told what to do by the last remnants of priest classes.

[In Matthew, Christ explains at one point that he came not to destroy the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them, and then later explains further this fulfillment, by rendering them (the Law and the Prophets) into their essence in the admonition to Love God Completely and Thy Neighbor as Thyself, which when carried out as acts of individual moral intuition (see later the section in this book more explicitly on moral grace) brings the Law no longer from the outside inward (from the social into the human being), but instead from the inside outward (from the human being out into the social).  The Law does not act upon us, but we become the Law and act upon each other.]

This change, the Kings of the Gospel stories understood, for its coming could be seen in the Christ Event itself.  So they followed their in-sight, their star, and offered up their gifts (their Way of Gnosis) in sacrifice, as symbolized in the story in the images of the offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

But such gifts could not be completely sacrificed - gnosis did not disappear as a human capacity.  (although Christ recognized its inherent problem "Blessed is he who has not seen and yet believes", a statement which appreciates that there are still those who do "see", which in modern times, as I said, can be a kind of curse.)  Only its (gnosis's) social influence had to wane.  For in the age of the consciousness soul, in the age of the time when individuals were to think for themselves and make their own individual moral judgments, no priests as authorities would any longer be needed.  Yet, gnosis itself did not lose entirely its meaning, for what the Kings had once been still had a role to play for a time, and this we have to understand next.

As the fourth epoch moved into becoming the fifth, a certain new Way of Seeing the world came into being - natural science.  In the 1400's human beings began to see the natural world for the first time as an object (the on-looker separation, see Lehrs and Barfield above).  This paradigm, which could be called scientific materialism (only matter, no spirit) played a role in helping us further individualize and find within ourselves that necessary place out of which to begin to stand as free human beings - free even from the influence of the Divine.

At the same time, materialism is a heavy burden for modern consciousness.  In social Darwinism (a kind of social justification for many clearly immoral acts), scientific materialism turns human being against human being, and fosters the idea that there are those who are more fit, and therefore more entitled to survive.  But as the Law become something inside us, resting not on moral rules, but rather living in our own impulses of the heart, opposition to a spiritless world view (and its terrible social consequences) has appeared everywhere.   What Steiner named the consciousness soul, has began (especially in the 20th Century) to unfold its forces into the our social existence, in Civil Society, in the opposition to elite globalization and many other social and personal phenomena  (see Jesaiah Ben-Aharon's remarkable: America's Global Responsibility: individuation, initiation and threefolding).

Yet, this change taking place has yet to fully become self aware, to really see itself, or to discover how to overcome scientific and social materialism as completely as ordinary people need to be able to overcome it.  So, the Kings return for a time, to show that gnosis still exists, and that faith has a partner and a companion in the dance that is the story of human becoming (the evolution of consciousness).


No single Christian Church or sect possess, even to a degree, the whole truth of the Nature of Christianity.  Each has bits and pieces, but we only begin to see that Reality when we start to integrate into one whole, not only the various versions of the Ways of Faith (the Ways of the Shepherds), but also the Ways of Gnosis (the Ways of the Kings).  For example, the Catholic Church in its conception of the Church and the Body of Christ sees one aspect of a mighty whole, while the Jehovah's Witnesses, in their peculiar and unique way of practicing the Eucharist, have knowledge of something of remarkable depth (the Witnesses only practice Communion one day a year, at Easter, and then one only eats the wafer if one believes that one has so far progressed in one's development as to be a member of the Elect as prophesied in Revelations.  This challenge to the soul to examine itself with such savage clarity is very good for us.  I make no comment here on whether this is what Christ wanted, only meaning to point out the quite personal test that such an act makes us face.)

To give another example, the Mormons, with their social and community practices have an excellent grasp of Christ's social teachings as regards the practical application of Charity, while those rites in many Black and gospel singing Churches better understand the nature of Joy in Christianity.

One way to appreciate this is to understand that what was originally created following Christ's Resurrection, as a single Church, soon became, under the influence of humanity's developing individualism, a multiplicity.  Splitting into more and more sects and divisions, until today we almost have as many versions of Christianity as we have individuals who practice it.  This has even gone so far as to divide into such a fine set of distinctions, that many individuals, in whom the fulfillment of the Essence of the Law and the Prophets lives as an impulse of the heart, no longer consider themselves Christian at all, although their every act is Christian through and through (What St. Paul so beautifully describes in I Corinthians 13 has become the essential nature of the human heart, when it finds its way to its full expression in human becoming).

Now at the beginning of the Christian Era, what is today's Catholic Church was Christ's Church on the Earth.  But as time passed, more and more this Earthly Church became Fallen.  Only during the Mass anymore does Christ enter into the Rites of the Catholic Church.  The hierarchies and bureaucracy of the Church have become too Earthly, and with the exception of some individuals, this institutional Church has lost its spiritual connection, and become just another earthly power among other earthly political and social powers.

This original hierarchical structure (Popes, and priests) was a remnant of the hierarchical social order that once was dominant in the third cultural epoch.  The Body of Christ, the faithful, were still too child-like within, and needed guidance.  But as the fourth epoch gave way to the fifth, humanity began to leave behind its spiritual childhood, and the need for an intercessor (a priest) became superfluous.  This is so elsewhere, not just in Christianity, but also in Buddhism and Islam - the age of priests is falling aside, and in the time of the consciousness soul, moral truth and goodness belongs to the individual to determine.

We can see this quite clearly in today's sexual crisis in American Catholicism, where it was not the priesthood (the Bishops and the Cardinals) that understood the true nature of the moral dilemma, but the Body of Christ, the People of the Church who knew what was right and what was wrong.

The Catholics have a doctrine, which recognizes that the Holy Spirit moves among the Body of Christ (the laity).  But this doctrine is not so much practiced by the hierarchical structures, rather it is just given lip service.  They (the priests and bishops) thought to preserve their prestige and power at great cost to hundreds, if not thousands, of children.  Surely the Mother of God weeps, and the not often seen wrath of Christ is soon to descend upon the hierarchy of the Church for this intolerable crime.

Yet, this Idea, of the Church and the Body of Christ, has preserved for us something we will do well to understand.

The situation that existed at the founding roots of Christianity is now reversed, and Christianity is becoming (now and into the future) something new.  It is the Body of Christ (the Essence of Law and the Prophets as living in individual hearts) that is to structure the future nature of any true order in a social form, such as a Church.  The questions of application of moral absolutism in the ideas regarding abortion and the like, and the need for priests to remain celibate and for women not to take up the Celebration of the Mass - all these are fundamentally moral questions, not questions of doctrine or dogma, which now belong to the laity - the Body of Christ - to determine as the Holy Spirit moves in and through their hearts.

The hierarchically dominated Church is dying.  And, with its much needed Death, something new can be resurrected.  Out of the Body of Christ can arise a new and true ecumenism - no need for the divisions into Catholic, or Protestant, or Orthodox or whatever.  All those old social forms in which Christianity first lived are now to be cast aside.  A Christianity of the Heart (see Covenent of the Heart, by Valentin Tomberg) seeks to express itself, and the only matter of import is the Charitable recognition of each by each and their mutual companionship as believers (Shepherds) and knowers (Kings).  What was once divided into two pieces, as a kind of division of social class, can now be remade whole in individual human becoming.

For, as we learn more and more to understand and practice the Moral Grace being describe in this section, we will begin to see that we all possess now, both faith and gnosis, which in the age of the consciousness soul are ours alone to understand and apply.  The fulfillment of the Essence of the Law and the Prophets now resides within, and the gifts once long ago sacrificed by the Kings, are now treasures to be found in each human heart.


As spiritual children, it was our need for moral guidance.  Thus, in the early stages of the evolution of consciousness, moral rules and laws predominated.  In Buddhism this took the form of the Eight Fold Path (right views etc.), in Judaism, the Ten Commandments, the Torah,  and so forth, while in Christianity, the Parables, and in Islam, all manner of rules in the Koran coupled with the Idea that all is the Will of Allah.  Yet, in spite of all the rules, human beings have begun to more and more insist upon their own right to choose.  Everywhere the rules are being cast aside, and this rejection of tradition (while frequently blamed upon the West) is really a consequence of a change within humanity due to the current phase of the evolution of consciousness.  Humanity is stepping out of its spiritual childhood and individuals are claiming more and more personal responsibility.

This raises a rather perplexing philosophical and social question.  If we are no longer spiritual children, how are we to be moral beings without descending into some kind of chaos of moral relativism, where there are no rules anymore at all, just raw animal impulses.  This is, by the way, an excellent question.

Yet, if we are to trust the Divine, and have true Faith, then we have been assured that such a question must have an answer.  The very idea that God would leave humanity abandoned in some kind of anarchy of a moral-less evil and ungodly (what a term!) jungle is to mock the Divine Itself.  Surely there is a Plan.

Well duh!, as the young people say today.

The evolution of consciousness is the unfolding of human becoming from within outward.  Something inside us, as we unfold our humanity, contains within it just what is needed.  This is why I give it the term: Grace.  We possess something as a Gift.  If there is a caveat, it is that we only can unfold it by our own will.  It is latent and can only come to the fore by our practice and our intention.  We have to will to be moral.  We have to choose.

The first stage of this is self trust.  We have to have faith in the divine within (something appearing everywhere).  Emerson puts in most succinctly, in his lecture The American Scholar: "In self trust all virtues are comprehended."

This is, of course, one of the hallmarks of the epoch of the consciousness soul - more and more people are trusting their own spiritual intuitions over any outside agency or institution.  No longer do we buy what the hierarchical forms tell us to believe.  We only have confidence in our own judgment - we know something trust worthy is living inside of us.

In addition, something is going on in our biographies in this Age.  We are being more and more placed in situations where there is no choice to drop back into a dependent child-like moral path.  Instead the only choice is to rely on ourselves.  Each biography lurches from moral crisis to moral crisis, where not to choose is not to be allowed.  Life itself insists: Choose!  Choose!  Choose!

To appreciate this in its fullness all we have to do is look at what the artists tell us, with their dramas on stage, in film and on television, or in the songs the singers sing.  This development is seen everywhere.

One of my favorite television writers, David E. Kelley (whom I call America's Shakespeare), he who has penned much of L. A. Law, Chicago Hope, Picket Fences, The Practice, Ally McBeal and Boston Public, has one of his characters (the Sheriff) in Picket Fences, say at the end of a particularly difficult day, something on the order of: "there are no moral rules any more, we are all on our own".

Our very language speaks of this, for what in the fifties was meant by "do the right thing", became in the sixties "do your own thing".  And, of course, there is that very difficult decision that women face today, that seems to divide people everywhere into seemingly war-making camps - the right to life, versus the right to choose.

What this conflict asks is: Can an individual know what is moral, without outside guidance in the form of some religious authority's given rules of conduct?

If, as I have been suggesting, that the fulfillment of the Essence of the Law and the Prophets is now emerging from human hearts, how is that going on within the inner forum of individual consciousness?

I will put the essential matter this way...

The human being has an inner organization of which we have lost (in the age of a spiritless science) a clear knowledge.  We simply do not posses a proper language by which to describe this inner landscape, so as to be able to answer the above question in a concrete and realistic fashion.

What concrete reference can there be, in the age of science, to such terms as soul and spirit?

It is to help us answer this question that the Kings have, for a brief time, returned.

The spiritual essence of the human being is properly called the "I-am".  We can also call this the ego, but there is a dangerous confusion that can arise when we consider the differences between Christian gnostic practice in this regard, and the deeper teachings of Buddhism, such as that in Zen regarding ego.  It would be going too far to fully resolve this confusion, yet something needs be said.

At best I can suggest something from another book it has been my fortune to encounter - the anonymously written Meditations on the Tarot: a journey in to Christian Hermeticism.  In this book one will find the following idea, which I will paraphrase.

Eastern wisdoms consider that the core of the human being is being, and that the goal of human development is reached when this core of being re-integrates itself with the Original Source, or Being.  This is frequently described as a voluntary giving up of ego, or self identity.

According to the author of Meditations, the Christian idea regarding the ego, or the I-am, is different.  This I-am is an individual essence (the human being is created in the image and likeness of God), and the goal of Christian practice is the meeting of our individual essence with the Individual Essence that is Love.  A separate identity remains (for both), while we still become enveloped  within Love (described in the Gospels in the Parable of the Return of the Prodigal Son) - essence within Essence.  The crucial question is put this way: How can there be Love if there is not a Lover, a Beloved, and the Love itself that is to be shared between them?  If being simply merges with Being, there can be no such Love.

By the way, I do not believe this apparent conflict (between Buddhism and Christianity regarding the nature of the ego or I-am) is un-resolvable.  The Idea of the nature of the resolution simply lies far outside the intended scope of this small book, although certain aspects of this book are intended to contribute to that resolution an a practical level.

Now within the inner forum of our consciousness, the I-am sits as the essential center, while the rest of consciousness (the unconscious and so forth - all that is invisible to others, but each of us knows - at least in part - with great personal intimacy) could be called the soul.  So when we see another person, we recognize another ego being (another I-am), who also has a rich inner (soul) life (see all the books being written today on soul life, from Gary Zukav;s The Seat of the Soul,  to Thomas Merton's Entering the Silence).

This inner life is very complicated, and materialistic science is only beginning to scratch the surface of its realities.  However, with regard to the moral question we have been trying to understand and appreciate, the following can be said (at least at this point in this work):

When the human being poses a moral question to themselves ("is this act I contemplate right or wrong in a moral sense"), we have by Grace the capacity to receive an answer.  In this receiving of an answer we are in that moment (again by Grace) inwardly Kings.  We are Shepherds in that we have faith that we can know the answers to moral questions, and Kings when we ask and inwardly listen and receive.  Faith and Gnosis in the Age of the consciousness soul are no longer apart, but are rather united in the human being that follows the moral sensibilities of their own heart.

In the next section, we mostly focuses on Freedom, but we will begin by examining three specific forms in which knowledge of this union of Faith and Gnosis, via Moral Grace, has appeared in modern Western Culture.  In this way we will also come to a deeper and more practical appreciation of what has been, and still is, going on in our Civilization.



Not everyone is the same.  This obvious fact is often overlooked, especially when people want to think that their personal Way is the very best Way, and all the rest somehow lesser means or beliefs.  Fortunately, in the epoch of the consciousness soul, this tendency is becoming extinct to a great degree.  This is because one of the items we all first have to learn on our own Path is humility (what in the John Gospel is called "the washing of the feet"), and the journey through humility, as lived in our biography, soon forces us to the clear realization that the Thou is to be entirely free to choose their own Way, just as we need to be free to choose our own.

Even so, much is accomplished in communities, and there are three communities that I have come to some personal knowledge concerning, that can serve as excellent examples of not only Moral Grace in practice, but of the relationship of Freedom to that very activity.  All the same, we do need to keep in mind the very legitimate question: Whether it is possible for an individual to have real moral knowledge, independent of seemingly authoritative and traditionally acceptable sources, such as religious texts?  And, as a necessary corollary question: What does it mean if one's moral intuitions of the heart conflict with these traditional authorities?

In modern American Culture, Christian Faith is the foremost religious practice.  Surely, if God were to offer something new, something beyond moral rules, He would not leave out ordinary  Christians.  This is so.  At the about the same time, that Rudolf Steiner was publishing his book The Philosophy of Freedom in Germany (1894), in the United States was being written and published In His Steps, written by Charles M. Sheldon, a young minister who was then living in Kansas (1897).


This book (In His Steps) is a fictional (or imaginative) account (a story) of what happens in a certain church community when a particular question is faced.  This question is: What does it mean to practice being a Christian, such as is described in the New Testament (I Peter 2:21) as follows: "For hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow in his steps." [This being the first lines of Chapter I of Sheldon's book, and of course the basis for its title.]

The rest of the book is an effort to work out this question of Christian practice in quite pragmatic ways.  At the same time, at the very beginning, certain aspects of the book's Idea and its method are laid out very carefully.  One of the central characters, for example, asks this question from the pulpit in the second Chapter: "I want volunteers from the First Church who will pledge themselves, earnestly and honestly for an entire year, not to do anything without first asking the question, "What would Jesus do?"  And after asking that question, each one will follow Jesus as exactly as he knows how, no matter what the result may be."

This asking (faith) and knowing (gnosis) is then elaborated a few pages later, as follows:  (a question is being asked of the minister who made the above challenge, by a parishioner...)

"I am a little in doubt as to the source of our knowledge concerning what Jesus would do.  Who is to decide for me just what He would do in my case?  It is a different age.  There are many perplexing questions in our civilization that are not mentioned in the teachings of Jesus.  How am I going to tell what he would do?"

"There is no way that I know of," replied the pastor, "except as we study Jesus through the medium of the Holy Spirit.  You remember what Christ said speaking to His disciples about the Holy Spirit: 'Howbeit when He the spirit of truth is come, He shall guide you into all the truth; for He shall not speak for Himself but what things soever He shall hear, then shall He speak; and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come.  He shall glorify me; for He shall take of mine and declare it unto you.  All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine; therefore said I, that He taketh of mine and shall declare it unto to you.'  There is no other test that I know of.  We shall all have to decide what Jesus would do after going to that source of knowledge."

[my interjection - the quote above appears to be from John 16:13-15.  Here is a different translation than the one that Sheldon used of the same passage, but which includes the sentence before verse 13, that is John `16:12-15: "I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.  He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you."  Since this quote that Sheldon uses here concerns the process of gnosis ("going to that source of knowledge"), are we to be surprised that he has chosen to quote from the Gospel of John (the Gospel of Gnosis)?]

"What if others say of us, when we do certain things, that Jesus would not do so?" asked the superintendent of railroads.

"We cannot prevent that.  But we must be absolutely honest with ourselves.  The standard of Christian action cannot vary in most of our acts."

"And yet what one church member thinks Jesus would do, another refuses to accept as His probable course of action.  What is to render our conduct uniformly Christ-like?  Will it be possible to reach the same conclusions always in all cases?" asked President Marsh.

Mr. Maxwell was silent some time.  Then he answered, "No; I don't know that we can expect that.  But when it comes to a genuine, honest, enlightened following of Jesus' steps, I cannot believe there will be any confusion either in our own minds or in the judgment of others.  We must be free from fanaticism on one hand and too much caution on the other.  If Jesus' example is the example for the world to follow, it certainly must be feasible to follow it.  But we need to remember this great fact.  After we have asked the Spirit to tell us what Jesus would do and have received an answer to it, we are to act regardless of the results to ourselves.  Is that understood?"

The process Sheldon seems to understand is very clear.  We are to inwardly ask, and then listen for the Holy Spirit to tell us what Jesus would do.  In this way living out Christ's admonition: "Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you."

Now the curious thing is that at the same time a Shepherd (a pastor in Kansas) was coming to this understanding, a King was drawing the same conclusions, albeit in a quite different context and by a quite different means.  Where Sheldon created an imaginative picture (a story), Steiner wrote a book squarely in the German philosophical tradition, in which its remarks on moral life fully paralleled what Sheldon outlined above.

There is also, due to the differing nature of their approaches (Sheldon the Shepherd, traveling the Path of Faith, and Steiner the King, traveling the Path of Gnosis), a considerable difference in how they framed their understanding of what I have called here, Moral Grace.
For Sheldon the matter was handled in a very pragmatic (and typically American) fashion.  It was what worked that concerned him, and his question was: How do we best follow Christ Jesus in practice?  For Steiner, a middle European, the need was to express the philosophic Ideal in a form consistent with the dominant paradigm of the 19th Century, Natural Science.  Thus, his question was: On what basis can questions, regarding the freedom and moral nature of our inner life, be understood in the Age of Science?

At the same time, in both cases, each was faced with the reality of human nature, and our actual relationship to Spirit.  They just came at that reality from different directions, with the result that the same reality ends up being described in considerably different ways.


With Steiner, however, we have to take a somewhat different course than we took with Sheldon.  What was a novel, and an act of the imagination for Sheldon, was for Steiner an attempt to take an introspective look of the problem of knowledge in the field of formal philosophy (what is called there epistemology), following logical and observational principles modeled on natural science.

Did you understand that last sentence?  Possible not, and that is a good example of what will be faced by most people trying to read Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom, written in German and then translated into English.   Because of this I am going to approach the content in Steiner's book also as a story.

Now keep in mind that this story is coming from a King, not a Shepherd, that is from someone with direct experience of the Divine (Gnosis), not a relationshp based upon Faith.  According to his autobiography, Steiner began have such experiences from the time he was eight years old, and these continued throughout his life.  Here we a looking at a book written in his early 30's, after he had acqured his doctorate degree in philosophy.  His problem was to take his spiritual experience and then root it in the soundness of the German philosophical tradition, and in the methods of thinking and observation which was at the basis of natural science.  He looked not for the vague and beautiful mysticism of a St. John of the Cross, or a St. Teresa of Avila, but for the precision and exactitude of pure mathematics and theoretical physics.

He looked inward, and began to describe, albeit using the language of philosophy, what exact observation (introspection) might find within the human being.  In a sense, his description is a map of an invisible territory, that is only knowable if we ourselves look at the same invisible place within ourselves.  The book then consists of a series of questions one can place before ones self (the map), that can only be answered when we observe ourselves.  The book also seeks to draw this map in as an exact a way as possible, because the goal was to bring to spiritual inquiry the precision of the adventure of science.

Having followed this map, I will next relate not so much what Steiner describes, but rather my own explorations, using the same language conventions which Steiner used - my own version of the story as seen under the guidance of his map, The Philosophy of Freedom (or what I sometimes want to call: The Philosophy of Free Becoming).

Deep in our soul, our spirit asks several fundamental questions.  Here are just a few: What am I?  What is the purpose of existence?  What is the truth?  How do I know the truth?  Am I a free human being?  What does it mean to be a free human being?  Am I a moral human being?  How do I know what is moral?

As a human being, I have desires, hungers, needs and wants.  Am I free when I live out these hungers and wants?  Can I choose what I want?  Is my will free, or am I just a creature of appetite and habit?

On the journey to answering these questions, Steiner points in the direction of first and foremost examining the nature of thinking itself, for it is in thinking that we first pose these questions.  Yet, thinking does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is influenced by our emotional life and by our life of apparent instincts and hungers.  With regard to thinking, his map suggests that we notice the difference between thinking and experience, or what he sometimes calls: concept and percept.  We have experiences, outward in the sense world, and inward in the soul world - these are percepts (perceptions).  To these experiences (percepts) we attach ideas or concepts - that is we think at the same time we experience, and the meaning of the experiences is provided by the thinking.

For example, in the simpliest way, we know the names of all manner of objects.  This is a tree, that is a car.  As we grow, the concepts and ideas we have about something that arises either in the sense world, or inwardly in the soul (such as an emotion like fear) becomes more complicated.  We learn, and in this way our conceptual life deepens, so that someone who is a good cook, or a good car mechanic, will know (think) all manner of things, that someone less experienced will not know (think).

And, just as we can know about outer world objects, we also can think about inner world objects.  A Tibetan Buddhist, or a contemplative Nun, will have then considerable knowledge from thinking about the life of meditation and prayer.

Steiner's map suggests that there is a hierarchy of objects in the soul (mind) as regards our concepts: mental representations, concepts and ideas.  We just need to remember that the crucial matter is to look at our own thinking and see how, and if, such names (mental representation, concepts and ideas) can be related to what we actually experience when we look within.

In this way, and using Steiner's map (the King's Tale), we begin a journey of detailed examination of our inner life that can be as  exact and precise as that which a scientist comes  to when he examines  an unknown compound to determine  from which  elements and molecules has it been created.   All manner of objects can be found there, such as (no need for the reader to know these, I just here give a few of the names to lay out some of the more general features of this inner landscape): cultivated feelings, raw emotions, antipathies, sympathies, likes and dislikes, conscious and unconsious acts of will, mental representations, concepts, ideas, intuitions, and moral imaginations.

As it is that Steiner is a King, it is necessarily part of his intention to make this map capable of leading the reader to the same state of being (Gnosis, or what  is sometimes called initiation in the cultural West, and enlightenment in the cultural East).  The Philosophy of Freedom is a map to the inner world created by a King in order that those who follow it can come, through their own effort at thinking, to authentic spiritual experience.

The freedom Steiner wants for us, in working through his book The Philosophy of Freedom, is not political freedom, but what might be called inner freedom or spiritual freedom.  He lays out his map so that we can, by the growing development of intended and attentive thinking, find our way through the labyrinth of the conscious and unconscious elements of our mind to the gateway that lies in the depths of our mind, and which leads from our own essence (spirit) and inwardness (soul) to the Essence and Inwardness of the Universe.

Now what I have been calling Moral Grace, and what Sheldon describes from his view as a Shepherd (asking ourselves What Would Jesus Do, and then trusting that the Holy Spirit will bring inwardly to us the answer), is in the King's Tale a significant feature of the landscape of this inner world of soul, but not the totality.  So we have here from Sheldon, the Shepherd, how Moral Grace is seen from the point of view of Faith, and from Steiner, how Moral Grace is seen from the point of view of Gnosis.  This feature of the inner landscape Steiner has called moral imagination, which he speaks of in the text in the following ways:

"To be free means to be able of one's own accord to determine by moral imagination those mental pictures (motives) which underlie the action."

"...as a moral being, I am an individual and have laws of my very own."

"Moral action, then, presupposes, in addition to the facutly of having moral ideas (moral intuition) and moral imagination, the ability to transform the world of percepts without violating the natural laws by which these are connected.  This ability is called moral technique."

"Moral laws, on the other hand, are first created by us.  We cannot apply them until we have created them."

"He has purely ideal reasons which lead him to select from the sum of his concepts just one in particular, and then to translate it into action.  but his action will belong to perceptible reality.   What he achieves will thus be identical with a quite definite content of perception."

Now in the above quotations, Steiner has used certain terms which are in other places elaborated, and which here are meant to have a specific and exact meaning - that is to describe and point out something in the inner landscape that all can observe and know, such as mental picture, moral intuition, ideal reasons and so forth.  However, rather than get into a long explanatory elaboration of what Steiner meant, I will simple now reduce this all to what I have learned through my own experience of following this map to the inner landscape of the soul.

When I am confonted in a life by a specfic moral dilemma, a dilemma that demands of me that I make a moral choice, there are basically two ways I can go in how in my mind I consider the problem.  One way is to draw from memory some learned moral ideal, given perhaps by admonitions or rules  from a religious text, or perhaps from a learned relative or teacher.  Another way, is to ask myself what I think is the right thing to do.

More and more in our Age, people have been chosing to do the latter, and leave aside the former.  Our current state of consciousness is such that we more trust our own intuitions of what the good is in any specific situation, than we do a rule.  The reason this is so has nothing to do with what critics of this call moral relativism, and everything to do with an emerging intelligence in our own being.  This personal intelligence (our own moral genius)  actually sees the particular dilemma with creater clarity, including our own relationship to the question.  The rule, on the other hand, being of an abstract and ideal nature, does not take account of the individual characteristics of the situation we are facing.

The reality is that when a moral dilemma approaches us, it calls forth to our individual moral intelligence to respond.  The dilemma doesn't say: go the library of the mind and look in a book for the right thing to do.  On the contrary, the dilemma demands a personal response.  We have to act.  Yet, the conflict naturally arises, as both the Shepherd and the King saw at the end of the 19th Century - how do we know the good in such times of moral crisis.

Sheldon's answer was that we have been given, in the Gospels, the clear teaching to follow in His steps, and that in asking What Would Jesus Do, we frame in ourselves the question.  After which, we trust (have faith in) the Holy Spirit to bring to us (gnosis - knowledge of) the answer.  Steiner's answer is that we create a inner picture of the dilemma (a moral imagination), and trust ourselves to experience a corresponding moral intution of the good as that is needed in the moment as regards that particular moral question.

In practice, although the words used to describe the process are different, it is the same very human inner gesture in each case.  We frame a question, and we seek the highest answer in response.  And, at the same time, it is an inner act of spirit on our part to do this.  We have  framed the question inwardly, and looked inwardly for the answer.  Where Sheldon refers to the activity of the Holy Spirit in the response, Steiner speaks of moral intuition, and by the term intuition he means the exact same thing - namely that such intuitions are not merely a isolated inner act, but given that the human inwardness is a gateway to the Spirit, when we experience a moral intuition we have a like encounter with Spirit as that refered to by Sheldon.

This then is the main characteristic of our Age, which Steiner calls the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, and which in his book Theosophy he describes as follows:

"By causing the self-existent true and good to come to life in his inner being, the human being raises himself above the mere sentient-soul.  A light is kindled in her [the soul] which is imperishable.  In so far as the soul lives in this light, she is a participant in the eternal.  With the eternal she unites own existence.  What the soul carries within herself of the true and the good is immortal in her.  Let us call that which shines forth in the soul as eternal, the consciousness soul."

What Sheldon expresses in the question What Would Jesus Do, is the seeking by the Faithful after the highest good as they might be able to come to know it.  What Steiner expresses in the question framed by the moral imagination (the creation of the picture question of the moral dilemma) is the same inner gesture of seeking knowledge (Gnosis) of the highest good.  Both Sheldon and Steiner expect the Divine to answer, and what the one calls the Holy Spirit, the other calls moral intution, and again each means the same thing, for the mind (soul and spirit) of the human being in reaching inwardly for an answer to the particular moral dilemma faced by them as an individual, through this reaching does in fact come in contact with the Eternal.

This then is the situation of modern humanity - this possibility to know individually what is moral in any given particular and personal moral dilemma, and which I have called here, precisely because the Divine participates in the creation of this potential and its activation, Moral Grace.

It is though an act of Divine Grace that we possess the capacity to know the Good (the Moral), and the True as an act of individual question and answering.  Moreover it is an act, which is clearly meant to enable us to be inwardly free of any confining and limited religious dogma.  The days of the authority of priests to define individual moral human activity are over, and it is the Divine itself that has created in us this capacity to to seek, to ask and to find.

Naturally there are many questions, and I will try to answer a few of them next.

We can distinguish the act of knowing what the good (the moral) is in a given situation, from our acting upon that knowledge.  That is we remain inwardly free to follow, or not, what we know to be right to do.  This has always been the case, and will always be the case.  Knowledge of the good and the true (What Would Jesus Do) does not compell.  We still must choose to follow this knowledge.

People will disagree of what is moral in a given situation, in particular if they approach the situation as if there was a rule that covered all possible realities.   So some will think that all killing or all abortions are morally wrong, and will judge others who act contrary to their rules as regards such actions, as morally incorrect.  But this is not the question really being faced by Sheldon or Steiner.

Nowhere in either work is the question put in such a way that we judge what the other person is doing.  We don't ask What Would Jesus Do, or seek a moral intution, about someone else's moral dilemma.  We only ask these questions about our own moral dilemmas, and the operation of Moral Grace is such that we can only receive an answer to a question which is ours alone to ask.  The Divine has not said to us - look within and I will tell you what other people should morally do.  There are quite clear reasons why this is so.

Each human biography is unique.  Yes, there are many similarities, but each of us is a completely different individual and our biographies are just as individual.  Simple observation shows us this.  This means that a moral dilemma in my biography, regardless of any superficial comparisons, is in no way the same as a similar moral dilemma in yours.  We are very much facing our own trials, and because abstract ideal rules can't really comprehend the nuances of the distinctions and differences, we have by Moral Grace the means to know what is right to do in our particular and unique situation.  The Divine has created us individuals, and Loves us as individuals and knows that our needs are also individual.

The broader social implications of this we will face later, but for now we need to appreciate that Moral Grace only operates as individual knowledge of the good and the true (What Would Jesus Do), and in no way provides us any abstract rule or code by which to judge the morality of the other, the Thou.

We can also do a poor job of asking.  We can be quite inauthentic and dishonest in how we frame the question, and we can also let ourselves believe we have an answer which is quite self serving and in error.   We are, after all, quite human, and there is good reason the Lord's Prayer contains the plea: "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil".  The act of asking the question in an authentic and honest way, and the act of listening inwardly in a selfless and open fashion, is not an easy act.  Much darkness in us will turn us away from the truth.  One way we can know that the answer is the correct one, will be that it asks of us something we might well not like doing.  True moral activity is often difficult, and frequently comes with a cost.

In many ways, however, it all really comes down to practice.  We have to awaken inwardly and become active there.  Without our willing it, nothing happens.  Moral Grace needs our activity to manifest.  We have to sincerely ask, and be willing to accept the consequences of knowing what the right thing to do is.  We should expect to get it wrong, as often as not, for we are here speaking of a very subtle and real inner experience, that requires a certain discipline and silence in the soul in order to have the right space in which to appear.  The activity of the Holy Spirit (moral intuition) does not beat us over the head inwardly, but is more like a whisper, that well known small, still and quiet voice.

So far then we have considered the Shepherd's Tale and the King's Tale, and seen their inner correspondence.  But life is often lived in many kinds of harsh circumstances, and some moral problems run deep, such that we seem almost possessed by evil and demonic forces.  As alcoholics and their families know, for example, demon rum is terribly destructive, as are all kinds of what we call addictions and other seemingly unchangable habits of behavior.  But just as we have had the wisdom filled experience of a Shepherd and a King, so now we come to the wisdom filled experience of a Healer, and the founding and development of what are called: The Twelve Steps, applied in myriad places now, but originally created as the founding practice of Alcoholics Anonymous.

As an addict in recovery, I can speak from experience about these kinds of moral dilemmas, which involve deep and seemingly permanent behavior patterns, whose origin is not easy to understand, and for which, in a way, there seems to be no cure.  Something exists within the inwardness, that has to be learned about and lived with.  That's why we say "in recovery", not "recovered".  You don't get over it, like one might cure the symptoms for the common cold.  You only find a means to master it (instead of it mastering you).  In my own thinking I call this process (the 12 Steps seen as a whole): the elevation of the spirit for the mastery of the soul.

What I mean by this, and what the 12 Steps accomplish, is not a direct attack on the root of the problem of habitual out of control behavior, but rather a kind of process of education, by which the individual, in the company of others, learns to live life on a different basis than before.  Through this learning (the 12 Steps), and the social influence of the companionship of others with similar problems, the individuality (the spirit) learns to hold in check the demon (my disease) which seems to live permanently within the depths of our inwardness (the soul).  This process involves, among many other actions, a kind of constant moment to moment, day to day, brutally honest self reflection.

The 12 Steps came into existence through the meeting, in the early 1930's, of Bill W. and Doctor Bill, two men whose own struggles with alcoholism had resisted all their efforts to pass beyond.  I'll leave aside the stories of this meeting, and its contextual background, which anyone can read about in what is called: the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous (at the same time suggesting that this is a story that everyone would gain from understanding).  Instead, let us just go to the Steps as they are understood today.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Now, if the reader will look carefully at these 12 Steps, it should be obvious how it is that they too are inwardly related to the understanding of Moral Grace offered to us by the Shepherd and the King.   At the same time, the 12 Step appeal to Moral Grace goes much deeper, for it undertakes to transform the basic nature of the individual, not just seek after an answer to a particular moral question.

In a very real sense, the 12 Steps (the Healer's Tale) are a middle realm in between the work of Faith and the work of Gnosis.  Sheldon's version of Moral Grace is the simplest as goes with his vocation, a shepherd to the faithful.  Steiners version is the most complicated, not only being philosophical and scientific, but the moral question is only part of a much richer map of the landscape he would have us visit.  With the 12 Steps, we get something in between.  On the one hand it is clearly not as simply as Sheldon's imagination, and on the other not nearly as complicated as Steiner's map.  The 12 Steps also partake of that remarkable American quality we know as pragmatism.  They are not theoritical at all, but are worked out entirely from practice - that is the question is: what works.

As everyone knows, however, the 12 Steps are not a panacea.  This as well has become understood pragmatically, for it is out of the 12 Step work that we get the idea of the difference between merely talking the talk, and actually walking the walk.  Anyone can learn the vocabulary of What Would Jesus Do, of the Philosophy of Freedom, or of the 12 Steps.  But being able to use the language (talk the talk) is quite different from the pragmatic and intimate personal knowledge of our own inner life that comes from the practical application in life of these ideas (walking the walk).

Before we go on to the next aspect of our considerations of Freedom, let us weave together the various elements of our story thus far.

At the beginning of Christianity, there were two Ways of meeting the Divine, with the older one receding, while the newer one comes to the fore.   The newer one, mediated by a priesthood, was the Way of the Shepherd, a Way of Faith, while the older, direct and personal, was the Way of the King, a Way of Gnosis.  At the same time, Christ entered the world in between two quite different epochs in the evolution of human consciousness - the third epoch, characterized by ancient mysteries and hierarchical social structures, and the fifth epoch, characterized by individuality and free moral choice.

Christ, in mediating between these two epochs, during the fourth epoch, took the Way of the Ancient Hebrews, what the Gospel stories called the Law and the Prophets, and promised their fulfillment - a New Way, and taught us, as individuals, how to accomplish this.  But a task such as this is not easy, and does not take place all at once.  The Old Way, with its outside rules of moral behavior, had to slowly move aside for the New.  This direction is pointed out in Christ's saying that the highest commandment was to Love God with all our heart, and all our mind, and all our soul, with the second like unto it, namely to Love our Neighbor as Ourselves.

Christ, as creator, also added something to human nature, which we have here been calling Moral Grace.  Rather than morality coming from the outside inward (the third epoch, the Law and the Prophets), in the future it was to come from the inside outward (the fifth epoch, the Law and the Prophets fulfilled, through human freedom).  This fact has been captured for us in three profound Ways, namely through the work of Sheldon (the Shepherd), brought to life in In His Steps, through the work of Steiner (the King), brought to life in The Philosophy of Freedom, and finally through the community work in which the 12 Steps live,  in which healing arises out of practices supported by the brotherhood and sisterhood on which are shared the agonizing trials in life.

No one needs more proof of the existence of Moral Grace, than what lives in the following of these three paths, all of which have the same inner gesture, characterized by Christ Himself in the promise: Seek and ye shall find, ask and ye shall receive, knock an it shall be opened up to you.

All of these Ways recognize that what is urged is not easy, and this leads to certain yet unraised questions, that have lurked in the background from the very beginning:  What is the meaning of Evil in human life?  And, what is the significance of the individual biography, as against the vast scope of history?  This brings us to the:

second stanza
the Seventh Day of Creation
the problem of freedom seen in the light  of the nature of evil,
and its relationship to the course of individual human lives (the biography)