Three decades ago, around 1984, I wrote my first attempt
to express the basics of the work I was trying then to
do. I called that little essay: Listening to the
World Song. That’s what I have done for a long time
now. The World is what it is, and through that It
speaks. And I ... I listen. The world even
includes the books I read ...
I was recently re-reading my favorite book: Ursula K. Le
Guin’s The Dispossessed. While doing so I realized
part of why I so identified with the main character:
Shevek. His lament, expressed to himself
inwardly at one point, was his sadness and grief at having
gone so far beyond his contemporaries in thinking about
physics, that he had no one to talk to. He actually
had to travel to, what to him, was an alien planet, in
order to find minds with which he could converse about his
passions.
I feel that way about my decades of research developing a
Spiritual Social Science. I have no peers, and feel
in this regard the soul-pain of being quite alone.
Shevek, in the novel, did find some on the alien planet
that were able to converse, but still he was beyond them
in many different ways. All the same, he at one
point offered some University level courses to this alien
culture about his discoveries. Even there, he found
difficulties, because while many minds were sharp and
thoughtful, they all brought with them the mental debris
of their cultural background, and were not willing to let
go their attachments, so as be truly able to wander into
the new territory concerning which he offered to be a
guide.
Nonetheless he discovered a certain joy in being able to
express himself as to the depths of the work on which he
had spent his life.
[An aside: there has been some discussion here and
elsewhere about “spiritual teachers” and others that are
called “masters” or “gurus”. I have never asserted
that I am one of “those”. At the same time, in order
to do my studies of the “social”, I had to not only have a
method, but a method that could be taught. It is
part of the Age of Science that when one offers
“knowledge”, that we also at the same time, explain how we
acquired it in the first place.]
What is going to happen then is that I will be posting
here and there the various “Parts” of an Introduction to a
Spiritual Social Science. I welcome comments and
questions, and will even read critical remarks, but if you
want me to take your critical remarks seriously, you have
go much further than just saying you disagree. I do
science, and in science we get to require an in depth
explanation of why someone believes we are wrong.
I will also make a web page of these “Parts”, so that if
someone wants to go back and see what has gone on before,
that can be found. I will not post the comments or
questions of others, without first asking the person, who
made that contribution, if that was okay with them.
Keep in mind that this is an “introduction” - it would be
impossible to lay out the details of over 30 years work in
this kind of venue. Picture what we are doing here
as a kind of classroom, and the Parts (there are twelve)
will be offered at a rate of only one a week. They
are already written, but will be adjusted as necessary
according to whether the readers want to offer a
contribution, or to ask something.
Stay tuned ... at the bottom of each Part there will be a
link to the website, where the current Parts are all
recorded, as well as anything others may wish to offer.
: some
hints for those who might want to be “peers”. I’ve read a
lot of books. A lot. Someone wanting to be a
peer of mine, maybe should read, for starters: Steiner’s
“Spiritual Science and Medicine” (20 plus lectures).
I read it twice. Also Schad’s “Man and Mammals:
toward a biology of form” - Goethean science - read
that three times. “Olive Whicher’s Projective
Geometry: creative polarities in space and time”. Need to
make some drawings there. Also the novel: “The
Memory of Whiteness”, by Robinson. Its about physics
and music, and the Ten Forms of Change: retrogradation;
inversion; retrograde inversion; augmentation;
dimunition; inclusion; textural; partition; interversion;
and exclusion.
Spiritual Science and Medicine, and Man and Mammals, gets
you thinking about polarities, and the human form as a
kind of phenomenal expression of certain living laws,
while Projective Geometry trains the imagination in its
capacity to recreate the complexities of living form in
movement over time, and through space, in a very precise
and exact fashion. The Ten Forms of Change helps
with appreciating the musical nature of the movements in
the astral body as they effect the ethereal or life body
and from there changes in living form.
The “I” inserts its moral ideas into the astral body, and
those come to expression in various kinds of “lawful”
ways. In a way, thinking becomes kind of sensitive
to the ongoing processes of transformations that appears
in the “social”, and how the laws of the astral body,
which we all share, can be discovered to be expressed in
something like the way a family or a small community,
generates and shares certain language conventions, which
conventions in turn express the common meanings of
existence.
For example, one can learn to see that in the “tension”
between the “centers” in the anthroposophical society, and
the “periphery”, an involution (from Projective Geometry)
wants to take place, with the center and the periphery
turning “inside/out”, or changing places, as it
were. By holding rigidly to the traditional, the
more and more sclerotic center weakens the whole, and
while this is basically a micro-threefolding issue, it
begins to explain how the different cults of personality
(Prokofieff, Ben-Aharon, von-Halle etc.) weaken the
whole that the Society wants to be, leading to either
death, or, a rather cancer-like metamorphosis. As
long as we have no language for these living social
tensions, they will thrive in the unconscious, drifting
over into law suits and such, because no one really knows
how to resolve the situation unless one side is favored
over the other, when the healthy thing is to let the
desired differentiation take its course. Were we to
trust the situation, and appreciate that the social form
strives naturally for health - for balance and harmony, we
would treat social conditions in the same way a healthy
immune system in the individual human being needs certain
types of “nutrition” for support.
At some point we need to notice that Social processes can
be understood better in we use health and disease
metaphors, from Medicine, rather than frame the situation
as if this one has the right ideas, and that one has the
wrong ideas. In the latter case, the double makes
trouble, and we remain asleep. Holders of power love
holding power. Those given the frequent flyer miles
to lecture all over the world, start to think they are
smarter than the poor sod who had to stay home, and learns
his understanding of the social from what happens in his
garden, or school classroom.
[extracts from the same two pages, in the order written]
“... the structure of thinking and the structure of
reality have an actual correspondence ...”
“...the shortest events were all the same - he called them
glints, ... basic forms of change described in symbolic
logic."
“...events occurred chiefly in the sixth through tenth
dimensions - where particles per se had disappeared
entirely.”
“So with quantum mechanics fitting inside Holywelkins’[*]
more comprehensive physics, what do the equations
describe? Very short-lived events, in waves with
certain characteristics of form, amplitude, and frequency,
changing by inversion, retrogradiation, et cetera ...”
[*substitute the author ‘s name, Robinson, for Holywelkins
here]
“Exactly. We exist in the middle world. The
universe is about ten to the fortieth times bigger than
us, and glints are about ten to the fortieth times smaller
than us. That strikes me as suspicious and I suspect
it may be an artifact of our perceptual limits.”
[about 12 pages later, at the end of the relevant chapter]
It will be helpful here then to appreciate what the living
thinking - the Rising of the Sun in the Mind -
can make of the social form: the Corporation.
That story reveals much, and is an archetype of the
whole. To do this we follow Goethe, and simply
describe the changes in form (the leaves of the plant for
Goethe) over time. What is below, however, has to be
mostly conclusions, for the actual details would be far
too many.
All social forms are living in one sense or
another, their essential parts in all cases
being living human beings. These forms are born and then
die - perhaps even reproduce or undergo
metamorphosis. Many modern social forms are remnants
of Third Cultural Epoch hierarchical social forms, where
decisions are made at the top, which the bottom carries
out. Those forms were “normal” at the time of
Ancient Egypt, for example. The knowledge in the
Mysteries practiced within the Third Epoch hierarchical
social forms enabled a kind of divine order to inhabit
ancient cultures from top to bottom.
In the Fourth Epoch these forms matured, and then aged, in
such institutions as the Roman Church, and still had a
more or less pragmatically useful and good social purpose
for a while. But everything after a time outlives
its utility, and so with the dawn of the Fifth Cultural
Epoch, the needs of the Evolution of Consciousness could
no longer be easily satisfied by strictly hierarchical
social forms, witness the failure of such efforts to rule
the Russian People through Stalinist communism, or to rule
the German People through the Third Reich, or even the
deterioration of the great Universities and their eventual
domination by money and politics in recent times.
The early stages of the Epoch of the Consciousness
or Spiritual Soul saw the end of the aristocracies of
blood, to be replaced, at least outwardly, by
Western style democratically ruled Nation States, although
behind the scenes the aristocracies of blood were often
succeeded by, and incorporated into, aristocracies of
wealth. Even the very ancient Third Epoch rooted
theocracy of Tibet was not to continue, and was unseated
by the Chinese in 1949, scattering that culture all over
the world. The needs of the Epoch of the
Consciousness Soul were not to be denied. and such events
as the Chinese invasion of Tibet merely a tool to pry
loose from its mountain vastnesses a well simmered stew
pot of wisdom that the world’s cultures needed to be able
to imbibe.
Likewise with the business Corporation. It is one
"type" of a natural organism in our social ecology, and it
serves many purposes, for Christ and His aides multi-task
on a level we can hardly imagine. There are other
"types", such as institutional religions, educational
institutions, political parties and so forth. The
general social phenomenology of the business Corporation
is repeated elsewhere.
Originally a corporation was a social form for doing
business. The needs of the blossoming so-called
market forces, as the embryonic Economic Life emerged more
strongly in the 17th and 18th Centuries, invented stock
companies, which were in the beginning strictly regulated
by the instinctive Rights Sphere. But as wealth
accumulated in corporations and in the families that
sought to rule them (think of the Rothschilds in banking,
the Rockefellers in oil and banking and so forth), the
influence of wealth on this instinctive Rights Life led to
the corporation becoming more and more unregulated.
Corporations (again as a living social form) then became
multinational ... that is they became more and more
emancipated from any restraints by the Nation
States. All this driven from within by the cold and
calculating use of the abstract cause and effect thinking
of the intellect, led by the influence in the soul of the
ahrimanic aspect of the Double. Whereas in the early
years, the individual ego forces of the heads of most
corporate hierarchies were able to guide the corporation,
the inward nature of this social form began to develop an
amorphous and ego-less independent of leadership corporate
culture. If you entered into this hierarchical form,
the inner social forces began to drive the individual
toward conformance and obedience to the emerging dominance
of particular corporate cultures (Ways). These
social forces sought to separate the individual ego from
being able to apply the influence of the conscience to all
significant business decisions (see the
movies: Margin Call and Too Big to Fail).
At the same time, smaller more intimate corporations do
not succumb so easily to this loss of an ego presence at
the tops of their inner hierarchy. This change in
the corporation we are describing comes most often as an
effect of scale, or a kind of excess of growth - a
kind of inner social cancer as the corporate culture (Way)
outgrows its principle leaders' ability to control.
As this tendency develops, the individual members of the
upper hierarchies of the large institutional corporate
world also become easily replaceable and interchangeable,
and the “culture” itself begins to rule free of any human
interference. Imagine, for example, a Zen Temple
with no living teachers, only the doctrine and the
perpetuation of the doctrine starts to matter. This
is also true of many institutional religions - as social
forms dominated by their Way in the absence of living
teachers. Like a cancer, this growing independent
corporate culture frees itself of the human forces of
warmth - it is a cold social disease. This culture
is a social environment which values the cold and
calculated intellect above all else, and also becomes a
kind of social growth medium in which sociopathic and
certain aspergers personality types easily succeed,
because of the absence of conscience and empathy in their
soul life. This then eventually produces types of
corporate cultures (Ways) as lives in and dominates such
as Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, and Halliburton. The
individual no longer truly decides, ... only the
conscienceless ego-less corporate “culture” rules.
We might go so far as to suggest that while these
cancerous corporate cultures, individually exclude human
ego forces, collectively their ego is to be Ahriman, the
Father of Lies, who is presently incarnate (see my
book American Anthroposophy for details).
Everywhere we see the dark empty soul of these ego-free
spirit-free corporate cultures, which Eisenhower observed
in his farewell address in 1960, and called collectively,
because of the ease of their cooperation and similar
goals: the military-industrial complex.
Eisenhower, also in the same speech, noticed the loss of
moral sanity in the Universities as well, due to his
observations of their succumbing to the influence of money
over ideas.
The influence of the Ahrimanic Enchantment on social life
is seeking to leave behind a social-form “body” without a
heart - a body that can survive the social chaos which is
falling upon us even now, during the birth of the Third
Millennium. Nation States are simultaneously losing
any power and social control, they may previously have
held, over these multinational more and more half-dead
social forms of distinct corporate cultural entities -
purely ahrimanic in outlook and influence, and capable of
surviving well into the Third Millennium, by acquiring
private armies, and creating their own intelligence
networks and individual versions of “foreign
policy”.
Simultaneously there emerges socially the NGO, the
non-governmental organization. What Ahriman wants to
leave behind in the Third Millennium has a counter-pole
where the “not I but Christ in me” in the NGO creates an
alternative and warmer social order. At the level of
the social commons vast changes are also in play.
That this slow moving social-spasm of dynamic historical
changes occurs at the same time as what we are calling
Climate Change, is not an accident. Weather and
moral life are linked, in part because the separation that
we fancy exists, between any discrete object of perception
and another, is not real. Everything is
interconnected - everything.
It is a poor workman that doesn’t appreciate his own
skills. Who would want car mechanic who pretended,
out of false humility, that he probably wasn’t going to do
a good job? Or a neurosurgeon, for that
matter.
Now I could say Jeff says “that” and ECC says “this”, and
both (from my point of view) haven’t said anything useful
in relationship to that about which I was writing - yet,
who knows maybe they were not writing to me, but to some
imagined me, or some imagined person.
The main flaw (which is not a flaw) is that I was writing
about a subject neither of these two are qualified to
comment upon, but for sure they needed to have reasons to
comment anyway. So, it was important that they find
a reason, otherwise what is the point of them
commenting. As a result I am commenting on the fact
of their commenting, while not commenting on what they
actually said, given that they really weren’t commenting
on what I actually said (or so it appeared to me).
This is the silly part.
I write the above NOW, because for sure Jeff and ECC will
find further reasons to comment on my materials
concerning: Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science
(we’ve only seen the first of twelve - so sorry to clog up
your browser space folks, but you don’t have to read what
I write, or make silly and/or goofy (illogical) comments,
just to comment. Its sort of like going uninvited
into a class room where other people are perhaps receiving
a poorly given lecture, from a not very good lecturer, in
a field in which he is ill equipped to teach anyway.
That being the case, then who can blame them (Jeff and
ECC_ for the bad “lecture” was being given within
eye-shot, and as we all know the whole purpose of this
Facebook vector-noise accumulator is to provide empty
spaces for bored people to add their two-bits. This
is especially crucial if those commenting have issues
already with the subject whose “lecture” they wish to
interrupt and re-interpret.
As a consequence, I will be ignoring further comments from
either of them, or any others, when they refuse to
approach the ground (or territory) that I writing
concerning. Not all are doing this, and those who
are doing this - have fun folks but you are wasting your
breath. Sticks and stones etc. Anyone is
certainly welcome to comment on the social science
aspects, or the spiritual aspects as related to acquiring
socially scientific knowledge, but commenting on “me”
instead of the subject matter, however cleverly done,
remains ad hominem
The individual biography includes a complex of spiritually
intimate relationships. These are six-fold in nature
(to simplify). There is a lower threefoldness:
ahrimanic double or prosecutor; luciferic double of
tempter; and the human double (or the community of
egregores - psychic parasites, residing in the
astral body). The upper level threefoldness is the
higher ego or conscience; the individual guardian angel;
and the inspiration from the holy spirit.
Disciplined self-observation can distinguish these
influences, through their effects on the I. For
naive consciousness this is all very normal and is usually
experienced as movements of inner conflict or inner
support, as the astral body reacts the intimate spiritual
content mediated by this six “sources”.
In addition, because four of these sources are parts of
communities, they can operate in concert. For
example, when our angel is unable to get our attention,
the angel of someone near to us may inspire them to
provide us what is needed. Sometimes, when there
needs to be opposition to some activity in which we are to
engage, or are engaged, the ahrimanic community cooperates
such that our internal doubt can be on occasion supported
by external doubt.
When this happens another person will, by giving into the
own unconscious relationship with their ahrimanic double,
feel a need to pass on to us doubts which they have, but
which they feel they want to share. We can be a
community of people who have shared biographies, and among
whom circulate common doubts, fears, temptations and so
forth, including gestures of positive spiritual
reinforcement. Couples will find themselves having
an experience that seems as if they are having the same
thoughts.
A riot is a kind of mass overpowering of the influence of
the higher I of each individual member, by the shared
passions of an inflamed social moment. A guru, or
other kind of leader, (because of this phenomena) can
create a kind of mass hypnosis, that then results in the
formation of numerous psychic parasites or
egregores. The theory of memes is an effort to
notice the related phenomena, without appreciating the
spiritual dimension, and thus falsely assuming all the
transfered feelings, thoughts and emotions are being
transmitted in the social only.
Even in this venue, the ahrimanic aspect of one
participant may overflow into the situation of another
participant in the form of actions which create self
doubt. That particular tendency is increased by our
false assumption that “conversations” take place
here. Yet, in a real time face to face conversation,
none of the style of dialogue that take place here would,
arise, because in the physical/social all are present and
have the effect of a mutual awakening. “Mouth
to ear” was the way the ancient teachers gave out
spiritual knowledge. Reducing spiritual knowledge to
words on a page, even here, is a kind of weakness, because
the necessary social feedback loops are not available.
This is why, for a genuine spiritual social science, large
scale social processes cannot be understood without
tracing the “history” or development of Media resources
over time. A brief peek at a long discussion, from
my: Waking the Sleeping Giant: the mission of
Anthroposophy in America:
It was written in 1995, so is 20 years out of date, but
the reader should be able to fill in blanks of the rapid
changes now producing social media, and the relationship
of all this to such events as the Arab Spring.
“This is how then the dynamics of the polarity,
State-People, come to form the needed middle element. Now
Media, in the sense conceived here, is not a static thing,
but rather an evolving and developing process. The
technological achievement of the printing press is just
the beginning of a whole series of inventions which
ultimately produce radio, television, cable, VCR’s, fax
machines, computers and so forth. The series is not
finished. The interconnecting of home computers via the
Internet reveals that the knowledge commons is about to
become an electronic commons (Illich’s initial
formulation).
“Consider this picture. The coming into being of print
media constitutes a kind of rigidification of the dynamic
qualities of the word as those facilitate mutual
understanding. As Media further develops, it passes from
print form to image form, i.e. television. Television, in
that it provides our consciousness with images, puts to
sleep that part of our cognitive processes which fills out
the word with our own imaginations. This further weakens
political life (continuing the social dynamics leading to
the death of Western civilization), by disabling our
thinking faculty at the moment it is most needed to be
awake in order to “render” its civic responsibilities.
“But the technical evolution of Media is not over. Close
observation reveals that advertising dominated television
is losing its grip, and being replaced with cable services
and the possibility of self chosen viewing, the VCR.
Parallel to this is the weaving of the Web, the
interconnecting of individuals via the computer networks.
Electronic media is being less image oriented, and is now
interactive; i.e. the word is again becoming significant.”
“All phenomena are a kind of infinite madness.
‘Experience’ itself is utterly unfathomable. This is not
the confession of a bewildered, conventionally ignorant
and separative daily awareness — it is livingly penetrated
cognition, which expresses Itself in terms of paradoxes
and living ignorance, in terms of no-‘knowledge’, no fixed
‘self’, no fixations of presumption based on ‘experience’
or the ‘lie of illusion’. Curiously, from this living
cognition, all phenomena continue to arise, evolve and
fade away. In fact, great energy is released in that
cognition, so that more phenomena than you might
previously have been capable of tolerating may begin to
arise. All kinds of appearances, strange coincidences,
mysterious happenings, visions, dreams, psychisms — all
kinds of things begin to arise. But, if you persist in the
Philosophy of Freedom, the things that arise do not
support the conventional ‘point of view’ of the first 42
years of life. They are transcended as they arise. Thus,
‘experiences’ in themselves do not amount to a description
of reality. They are nothing but possibility, nothing but
a moment of infinite flowing that has neither center nor
bounds. Real cognition is ‘Craziness’. The Truth is
‘Craziness’, ‘Madness’ — not the psychosis of the fearful,
‘self’-bound lower ego but the ‘Madness’ of the creative
Logos. In that sphere, all the dogmas of human existence —
waking, dreaming, and sleeping — are penetrated fully.
Truly, there is nothing to say in that case.”
Attributed to Rudolf Steiner by Jeff Falzone, no source
yet given. Thus no context. Why Jeff posted it
is uncertain - he did not offer any connection to anything
else, even when asked. I asked a friend about this and he
said: “If this is Steiner it sounds very informal, like a
private conversation or a liberal translation. Maybe it
isn’t published in English.”
The key phrase is probably this: “ ‘experiences’ in
themselves “ Has anyone ever had one of these?
Experience without cognition? Yet, the word
“experience” exists in our languages and Steiner made a
very big deal of this in his A Theory of Knowledge
Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception. He even went
so far as to title one section: “Thinking as a Higher
Experience within Experience”
Owen Barfield, someone who seems to have understood
Steiner in this realm very well, called that work: “The
least read, most important book, Steiner ever wrote.”.
Jeff points to something which he labels (apparently after
Steiner): the pure percept. Odd, however, given that
the term percept seems to refer to something independent
of us that we perceive. Is there a content to
“experience”? I’m looking at my computer monitor as
I write this, and my act of typing magically makes these
codes we call letters march across the page. Is
there a there there that my “eye” experiences? Will
the reader of this have an experience? Or is the
only there there the consciousness that reads this?
It may, to some, appear to be an odd place to start, ...
in the middle of my Path, so to speak. For what I
write of next I didn’t at the beginning understand:
In order for the idea living in the object of
knowledge to draw near enough to be perceived by the act
of cognition, which is a creative act, we must love that
object which we seek to know. We can have an
interesting discussion of the act of cognition, or of what
and how “ideas” arise, but in spite of our epistemological
beliefs/philosophy, the fact remains that for there to be
a “generative” act in cognition, its root must be the
intention to the love the object of thought.
This is true in all fields of knowledge, even Art, and the
failure to practice this is what hobbles and lames most
thinking that tries to take hold of the social-political
life of humanity. Love in this instance is neither
antipathetic or sympathetic. Liking or not-liking
the object of knowledge only leads to confusion.
This is so because the liking or not-liking is an
instinctive feeling that arises in the own soul.
Following their lead we arrive at conceptions and ideas
that are ghosts, standing in between our acts of cognition
and the object concerning which we seek knowledge.
In surrendering to feelings of liking or not-liking we end
up only seeing ourselves - our own souls, not the object
of knowledge.
Again, if we take a kind of interesting side-road into the
region of whether or not the object of knowledge is
something separate from ourselves, we begin by being in
denial of our own experience in this Age.
Separateness is built into the modern human consciousness,
and to have a theory that it can be otherwise is just
another way to blind the act of knowledge. Learning
to Love the object of knowledge is part of the Path by
which that separation is to be overcome.
In point of fact, to practice this art - this love of the
object of knowledge - is to discover a special kind of
freedom. While there is more that could be said,
much of it playing in sterile fields of philosophical
speculation, this naked fact can be confirmed by anyone:
If I authentically love the object of knowledge, it will
withhold none of its secrets.
That said, we have yet to understand what it does mean to
love, especially when the object of knowledge is the
social-political world of humanity - a world where most of
us are certain there is expressed a great deal of evil.
Looking back over my own practice of at least three
decades, I could see that my thinking, in its qualitative
nature had developed along this line: thinking-about;
thinking-with; thinking-within; and thinking-as. I
could see here how the “gap” between the object of
thinking, and my own I, narrowed over time. The
whole adventure could only be practiced in the natural
sequence of moments and becomes then a learned skill,
craft and the art. My first essay reflecting on this
process, is the second essay in Living Thinking in Action
(
“In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of
Discipleship.”
To make this a bit concrete, consider the term “America”
which is used in all kinds of contexts and with many
different (often conflicting) meanings. How do we
“think” America? Most ordinary thinking is “about”,
which deals with America as a construct of an
ideology. If you are Muslim, you might well “think”
America is the Great Satan. If we wish to go beyond
that type of antipathetic judgment, we can try to
think-with America, by telling her “story”. We set
aside the judgment, even a sympathetic one - we sacrifice
the instinctive feeling. When was She born? Under
what circumstances? How does this
social-form/nation-state do today? Has it changed?
If we want to think-within, we have to ask whether there
is anything transcendent here. Has the Genius of
History created something, and for what purpose? We
don’t just think-with, and tell the story from Her point
of view, but we also include the context - that what
others have done and are doing, for in their actions and
thoughts there is a viable “in"sight into who and what
America is. To think-within, we sacrifice (renounce)
pre-conceptions - the mind must empty out.
So I write this way: We are the People of Peoples.
We are the errant adolescent child of the world, bearing
all the worlds weakness, and virtues in one (Out of many,
one; E Pluribus Unum). The world is our Father and
Mother. The world is also a scene of great social
chaos and change, and as the World Economy came to be,
given the already existing differences among various
peoples, it seems quite predictable that at a certain
point in time one would dominate. Not because it
ought to dominate, but simple because of the soul forces
driving the evolution of consciousness, social wealth and
power aggregates and concentrates in “centers”.
To think-as, we have to sacrifice our “self”. We
aren’t there, and it comes to think in me (as Steiner puts
it), or we practice “thinking on our knees” as Tomberg put
it. Then we find America poised between Heaven and
Earth, - a region of spiritual existence with Christ Above
and the Holy Mother Below. America is a Being.
Sometimes when I think of what it might be like to be
someone else, I am surprised by the thoughts. Recently I
saw a bit of a quote from a Steiner lecture where he
warned about the future dangers of an excess of
intellectualism. This is what I wrote:
I sometimes picture Steiner, at a lecturn, or just free
standing (maybe he sat in chairs too), ... the audience is
quiet, their attention rapt.
Does he have visions of spirits floating over the
audience? Does he see elemental beings, or auras? Is the
room full of colors none of the rest of us see?
Here people sit, who are already experiencing the
darkening of souls. Lost already in the intellect. Maybe a
few are even fully awake, their crown chakra open to
inspiration. Some frown in concentration unable to follow
him, others sleep, not really interested, but only there
because for social reasons they want time with the great
master.
He starts as he always does, with simple statements rooted
in the basic books, linking one thought to another, laying
the ground work for the themes that live in him just that
day from his own meditation. Perhaps he has sees the fires
of spirit shift, and move, first for this one and then
that. Their attention grows, or dies. He shifts his words,
perhaps his tone of voice, or his gestures.
The colors move, and like a kind and loving teacher that
he is, he conducts the colors he sees, knowing that they
must above all be free. The colors and forms hover, move
forward, retreat, rise, fall, change, glow, darken, ... he
is a conductor at a symphony, where each player of their
own instrument deserves their fates, and he can do little
to change the courses of life to which they cling.
But, he must try. He has been given a gift and he must
try.
So, he tried to stop the keeping of the records of his
lectures, knowing few would understand them. Knowing we -
his future karmic brothers and sisters would wound
ourselves by making rigid rules of the most inadequate
comments. The intellect he tried to keep at bay was in the
room with him, and he was a friend of the Sun trying to
hold back an avalanche of Ahriman’s influence covering
over the German Spirit and drowning It in the ashes of
dead and dying thoughts.
And, in spite of the Burning of the Goetheanum, of the
ongoing and coming betrayals, of the failures everywhere,
including his own, he never ever gave up. Nor has he yet.
This isn’t like going to a grocery store or a library, and
wandering around picking and choosing what-evers.
The chief feature is moral in nature: the Good. As a
consequence, what we might or might not get to know is
governed by a kind of Art. Just because you believe
you want to know who the current incarnation of the Future
Maitreya Buddha is, doesn’t mean you get to know it.
A central element of this Art is need. Not our need,
but what I call “other-need”. That’s were love
fits it. Love isn’t about us, ... its about
others. The mother needing to know something
important for the immediate care of her child is not
denied that knowledge, whether or not they are a certain
religion, or even if they are fallen and fighting with
drug addiction. The core of it Christ called: Ask,
seek and knock.
As in a lot of form-structures that come into existence,
there is a kind of threefoldness. Tomberg wrote of
the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love that arises between
them. So we are the Lover, and then there is the
object of knowledge - or the Beloved “other” we seek to
care for and know, and these two are joined by Him (or a
representative) - that is, Love joins the Lover and the
Beloved into a unity. “Wherever two or more ... “.
This “love in between”, I first became mostly aware of in
my spiritual social science research work. Through
1988 to and including 1996, about ten years altogether, I
worked on the grave-yard shift of a for-profit psychiatric
facility. When I had moments or opportunities to
have questions, and to think about the social-political
world, I did. I acquired certain habits. I
always carried with me 3x5 ruled note-cards and a pen, a
copy of the U.S. Constitution (which included the
Declaration etc.), and a small pocket Bible: the Psalms
and the New Testament.
So I might be “thinking” about something in the mysteries
of the social, and there would be this “feeling”, - which
I later started calling: “other-presence”. As I grew
into this (over more than a decade) I called it: “the
delicate and subtle presence of Fullness and fullness of
Presence”. When my asking, seeking and knocking then led
to the potential for deeper thoughts (understandings or
knowledge) about the social-political, I would have this
“feeling” of not being alone in my mind. Even if I
was driving, I would pull over and make notes on the cards
I always had with me, of the then present thought-stream.
The same phenomena was available in the social - the
person to person moral life, but this involved other
nuances I will not go into here. Occasionally I
would look back (review) my inner biography, and became,
through reflection, more awake (and write about) those
inner skills and crafts I was learning to use.
Details are in the collection of essays: Sacramental
Thinking.
Eventually I had to confront my Double, and my own version
of the abstract intellect, which I must sadly report does
not go away. These are features of the boundary
condition (the threshold) between my own I (spirit) and
the world of the invisible beings - some presentments of
which we might call: Ideas. The surest guidance
comes from the feeling-in-thinking element described above
(the participation of other-presence), while at the same
time it is crucial, through practice and experience, to
appreciate the role of the intention (or the why) and the
attention (or the what) - that is, of my own
self-conscious willing-in-thinking. The
self-conscious choices of why and what are the How or
method. Then arises the Content - the “what”, being
Being, opens itself to us, and begins to reveal its
secrets.
The core element of the feeling-in-thinking aspect is our
own will to surrender, or sacrifice, or practice
renunciation, as the situation facing the thinking
requires. That’s when the Sun rises in the Mind -
that is, when thinking becomes perception (clair-thinking)
because it shines a light into and through the darkness of
the threshold. At this point - the arising of the
own Sun in the Mind, the darkness (the double and the
unbound intellect) is no longer able to take hold of
it. Then we experience true spiritual freedom.
Picture Steiner in his room with his notebooks, sitting in
a chair. No outer-world doing is demanding his
attention. He explores a subject that he cares
about, and records the thought-content, that falls out of
his inner encounters, into words on the pages of the note
books. In a poetic manner he composes this content,
stretching the natural elasticity of the German
language. I suspect, like Mozart, there are no
strike-overs, no erasures. In that quiet room,
Steiner and the Michaelic Cosmic Wisdom are united.
Yet, he has to write books and give lectures. Mouth
to ear - the true standard for the teachings of the spirit
- is only available in private conversations. For
his public life he has to murder, even crucify, what the
Sun in his Mind perceived, by entombing it in words, a
subject he spoke of often - noting how weak language was
for the conveying of what he experienced in the spirit.
We don’t get what Mozart brought by reading the notes on
the sheets of music. Those near-mathematical
formulas are only realized when the Opera is
performed. The same with Steiner.
Anthroposophy is not on the pages of a book, even in the
German, and certainly not in the words moved from German
into some other language. Anthroposophy must be
“performed”, and we are to be the performers.
Outside my window, as I write these words, the first true
snow of the coming Winter is falling. A half-foot is
predicted. The snow began as a kind of lazy dance,
just a few little ice angels floating earthward in
spirals. The trees and ground are receiving this
gift, and in a slowly accelerating passion, a coating of
falling whiteness changes the whole color of the
air.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. In the living room are my
lady and her two daughters. The 96 year old
grandmother watches TV in her day-room with a respite care
giver, who has been with the family for years. The
laughter of women resounds through the house. A
birthday is to be celebrated today. A chocolate cake
sits on the kitchen table.
On my TV, the apologists of the recent and ongoing
Brown-Wilson Ferguson riots argue the good and the
true. They are all of them right and they are all of
them wrong - the truth is not to be had, and each believes
they do the good. I have the sound off, and listen
to the snow. The silences of Nature are such a
grace. For that gift, I am very grateful.
On the macro-scale of social phenomena, we can find active
processes that suggest that there is a kind of wise
intelligence in the living social body which is
characteristic of large groups of people. Even the
Catholic Church recognizes that a source of moral
“authority” can be found in the Body of Christ - the
people of the Church. See 1 Corinthians 12-31.
Here is something I wrote in Uncommon Sense: the
Degeneration, and the Redemption, of Political Life in
America:
“Now within these natural divisions there were certain
tensions that went all the way back to the original
framers of the Constitution. One significant
question was: Do we have a strong federal government, or
do we have a weak central government, with most of the
true power in the States. For a long time there was
a lot of well reasoned virtue in the idea of State’s
Rights, of which the beginning considerations of Barry
Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative” gives a decent
explication (the later chapters are falsified by his
ideological tendencies). The problem was that social
progress was being held back within the States by this
assertion of weak powers for the central
government. So for example, first
slavery, and then segregation was justified as a matter
for the States alone.
“There then came a time when the majority of Americans
could not any longer tolerate this intolerance, and while
State’s Rights were valid in the sense of the original
ideas of the framers, the whole Society needed a more
cogent moral center, and the only way for this to happen
was for Federal powers to be expanded. In a similar
way, during the first half of the 20th Century, the use of
police powers was often excessive with regard to the poor
and weak, so that the same social conscience appeared for
a time in the Warren Court (e.g. Brown v. Board of
Education, and Miranda v. Arizona).
“In these examples we can see an important general
underlying social law (not an ideological principle, but
how societies actually work). Societies will
progress in spite of the rules and ideals which were
honored in the past. While there is law and order on
one hand, there is also the will of the People and their
interest in social justice on the other; and, this will
for social justice is stronger than law and
tradition. Law and tradition would have made the
colonies remain allied to England, but social justice -
the conscience of the People - required something
else. And, when the resistance to social justice by
those in power is too strong, violent revolutionary change
becomes necessary.
“Even today, where the Lords of Finance work behind the
scenes in all manner of ways to exert social control and
manage large populations of people, the force of
conscience for social justice is stronger. In a
great sense, violence in a society on any large scale
connected to social justice is always the fault of those
in power, who prefer to cling to their privileges rather
than admit to the wiser will of the social conscience.
“Well for one thing it means we are on the cusp of
considerable danger. The more the central authority
tightens the screws of social control, the more injustice
they will create. The more injustice is created, the
stronger will have to be the response of the social
conscience.”
We see the operation of the social conscience today in the
events spreading out after the decision in Ferguson to
keep the power centralized in the authority of the local
prosecutor, and in the governor of Missouri.
This “collective” social judgment - the social conscience
- can be distinguished from “political correctness” which
appears in the Paula Dean case, where the TV performer was
socially chastised for comments she said about members of
a certain race. This political correctness process
is akin to something that we observe on a smaller scale,
where gossips in a community pick on a single individual,
while at the same time these gossips put nothing at
risk. They do not riot, or destroy property in their
own community, nor does their activity lead to an
advancement of social justice. “Political
correctness” is a kind of abstract intellectual judgment,
done at a distance, in which the ones judging are often
not even clearly identified.
The crucial aspect is “personal risk”. Individuals
risk life, limb and prison, while property rights become
secondary to individual social needs. In the fact
that rioters seem very self-serving in their thefts of
property, we are seeing something that is not unlike the
release of excess “steam-pressure” from a release valve in
a steam engine. The “passion” for social
justice has to go someplace, so tables are over-turned and
the “money changers” effects are bodily removed.
Another historical example of the “social conscience” in
America is the labor struggles at the beginning of the
20th Century, which then led to changes in the law
regarding child labor, working hours, and other
considerations of the “right”, or the good way that
workers should be treated. The traditional
authorities had not kept up with the views of the social
body as regards what is “right” to do.
Rudolf Steiner pointed out how, among English speaking
peoples, the Consciousness Soul (the pursuit of the good
and the true) appears instinctively in the Life of Rights
(see: The Challenge of the Times). While explosions
of anger are often criticized, we are reminded of Christ
throwing the money changers out of the Temple.
The underlying social “source" is the evolution of
consciousness, which the Steiner lectures collected under
the title: From Symptom to Reality in Modern History,
explicate in detail. A soul-spiritual current from
beneath the surface of events rises up and moves through
events for a time, conforming the shape of history
to met its needs. In the Ferguson related events we
are seeing this process in action.
Forgiveness. Just conceive of how things would be if
Christ and the Holy Mother actually were the angry Gods of
yore, and did not Daily Forgive us. So Christ
teaches: Forgive us our trespasses ...
Everyone mostly gets what it can mean to love
oneself. Even to love another. Yet, conflict
is everywhere. Antipathy and sympathy are
everywhere. Experience teaches that loving others is
best nurtured by our learning to forgive ourselves.
Its easy to love someone who is nice and kind and does
what we expect, but there are those who vex us, and these
are the ones most important to love.
We know ourselves most intimately - more intimately than
the “other” - the seemingly separate. We know the
evil that we do. The harm we have caused. The
evil and harm we may yet do. Can we forgive
ourselves? Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, said:
Judge not. Again, ... judging seems the most natural
thing we do. It is almost as inherent in who we are
as are the rhythms of the blood and of the respiration.
Do we judge the hurricane, or the tornado, or the tiger or
even the Ebola virus? We know they have an essential
nature, but other human beings? Do they have an
essential nature for which they should not be
judged?
At the same time, to disavow our tendency to judge seems -
perhaps - to be going too far. What is lost if that
aspect of who we are, which is so natural, is
forgone? Be true to yourself, say many sages.
But, ... we can justly counter, ... I am also that which
does evil. How can I be true to myself, and yet
permit myself to be or do evil?
Rudolf Steiner tried to point out that existence contained
many paradoxes - many contradictions that seem
incompatible with each other. “I am multitudes”
wrote Walt Whitman in Song of Myself.
If we believe, as many do, that something Divine created
the World, and ourselves, and all the various details,
there is probably no greater paradox to existence than the
co-existence of God, along side the presence of
evil. Convoluted logics have flourished in
many places in order to try to smooth out this
contradiction.
Sometimes paradoxes can be understood by appreciating that
not everything exists within the same context. You
can’t grow a sea horse in a jar of peanut butter, can
you? Perhaps, that which to name or we decide is
evil, only has that quality because of something we do,
which quality is not inherent it its own being. It
is our judgment that sees evil.
What is the world? What is the social-political
world? What does life and death have to do with all
of this? To create a Spiritual Social Science we
first need good questions. And an essential
beginning question is what do we, with our capacity to
label and judge the actions of others to be evil ... what
do we as perceives of the darkness in the world contribute
to our knowledge by perhaps not seeing the
social-political world at all ... by perhaps only seeing
our judgment, ... something we create and which does not
exist in what we observe.
Again: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
trespass against us". And, "Judge not, that ye be
not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye
shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall
be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the
mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the
beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say
to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye;
and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou
hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;
and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out
of thy brother’s eye."
How do we see clearly the social-political world?
A key word above is “knowledge”. Is there just one
kind of knowledge? Owen Barfield points to this
problem in his book, Worlds Apart, where he has a
character say:
“Every kind of knowledge, including science, is valuable.
But all kinds of knowledge are not valuable in the same
way, or for the same reason. There are many different
kinds of knowledge, and one kind is the kind which we
require to enable us to control our material environment
and make it serve our purposes. You can call it knowledge
of things if you like. But there is also another kind of
knowledge - knowledge about man and about the values which
make him man and the best way of preserving them;
knowledge about his relationship to God and God’s
creatures. The mistake you make - the mistake nearly
everyone makes - is to assume that the first kind
necessarily includes the second.”
So, is a Spiritual Social Science a science like
physics? What do we do with such a science?
In order to deal with this as we go forward in this
Introduction to this kind of Science, I am going to try to
deal with the situation using two concrete kinds of
“social” problems. We will take as a given that a
“social” riddle is something quite different from a riddle
in physics, although in passing we need to confess that a
great many people can’t yet make this kind of
distinction. The two kinds of problems I am going to
be working with are: 1) the political life of America;
and, 2) the social developmental life of the
Anthroposophical Society. Most of those reading this
will have some familiarity with these situations.
I have written (and thought) extensively about both of
these problems, for major aspects of my website are
devoted to their discussion. The titles I gave are
not inconsequential:
What did I mean by the terms: “Freely Thought”? I
meant the kinds of thoughts and thinking that result from
being able to see through (penetrate) the mythological
confusion that surrounds the subject under
discussion. The terms from 2.1.2 above: The Rising
of the Sun in the Mind, or clair-thinking, are an adequate
way of describing what Freely Thought means. As
pointed out above, the central will-in-thinking aspect is
to “love” the object of thought, which in this case is
America on the one hand, and the Anthroposophical Society
on the other. Only love can lead to the revealing of
the secrets of what lives within those social forms.
Here in this section 3. etc, we began by dealing with
forgiveness and judging, or what otherwise arises in the
own soul, which we recognize as sympathy and antipathy, or
liking and disliking. Recall Christ: Thou hypocrite,
first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then
shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy
brother’s eye.
We are not, by the way, going throw out these instinctive
feelings of liking and not-liking. We have them
because we need them. Rather we are going to
“refine” them. It is an alchemical-like process,
where we remove the lead in order to find the gold.
Since these feelings are ours, then the lead (the beam) is
first discerned in ourselves. Both instinctive
liking and disliking contain lead, beneath which lives
gold.
The first essential and required step is to learn to see
the own “beam”. That is not easy. Not easy at
all.
If, for example, we think of the government in Washington
D.C. as “America”, then we might have arise within us an
antipathy - we don’t like what that “America” does.
If we think of the Anthroposophical Society as a carrier
of the work of Rudolf Steiner, who we admire, we might
have then a lot of sympathy - we like what the Society
does.
Sympathy and antipathy tend to live in two related “modes”
of thinking: associative thinking, and comparative
thinking. So we “associate” Steiner with the
Society, led by our instinctive feeling of sympathy; and,
we compare what the government does with what we think it
should do, and led then by our instinctive feeling of
antipathy made a “judgment”.
The reader needs to “sit” with these comments, and
intentionally work with them. To look within, ...
otherwise the real meaning will not be found. The
real meaning is not on these pages, but rather only in the
Book of your own Soul. Let me end this with a story
from my own developmental experience.
My first intense encounters with the A. Society, happened
when I moved to the Fair Oaks area of California, to get
my eldest daughter into the Waldorf School there.
Rudolf Steiner College was also there, as was the Emerson
Study Group, fostered by Carl Stegmann. While I had
to work and be a family man, as much as possible I
immersed myself in the local “anthroposophical” social
life. Without going into details, I met a great deal
I did not like.
After about three years I had to move away, further North,
to the area around Mt. Shasta in California. This
area was a place of serious economic dysfunction, and I
had after a while - just to have any kind of work at all -
to work away (its a six hour drive) from my home and
family there, and returned to Fair Oaks, to find
employment as a gypsy house painter with a friend.
One day, about a month or so into my return, I felt the
“urge” to go to the Steiner college campus, where I
stumbled “accidentally” into a memorial celebration of a
member of the A. Society that had recently died. I
had not known this person, but the main meeting room at
the College (Philadelphia Hall) was filled with several
dozen of folks who with which I had previously become
acquainted.
Because of my “antipathies” and “sympathies”, I was
experiencing a lot of “feelings”, while in that room,
listening to people tell their tales of the life and
meaning of this recently crossed-over person, and her
relationship to the A. Society and the College. I
made a kind of prayer asking for understanding of these
feelings, and was then immediately touched by an
“other-presence”, which rightly or wrongly I assumed was
this woman who had just died, and who had been drawn to
our activities by the remembering memorial process.
With this “touch” I saw. By the way, I don’t
conceive of what she did as containing the images seen,
but rather she felt my pain, touched me, and in this way
became a kind of conduit to higher Beings. Next is
what I “saw”.
The A. Society was a collection of people who had two
basically distinct relationships to that Society.
The majority of members and friends (perhaps four out of
five), had a “sympathetic” relationship, which induced
them to view the Society through a kind of golden haze,
which haze was largely related to their somewhat
mythological conceptions of the formative years of the
Society in Central Europe, when Steiner was alive.
These folks did not see the present-day Society, except
through the romantic/sympathetic mythological golden haze
- their conceptions of the Society were derived from
golden-past that they “associated” with the Society and
its meaning.
The second group (one out of five), tended to look at the
Society and felt antipathies - “felt” something was
wrong. They had formed conceptions in their souls,
not of what they imagined the Society was, but rather of
what they imagined the Society could be. They
compared the present day Society with that imagined
conception of what it could be, and found the Society
wanting. Their thinking was “comparative”, and
compared what they saw as the present-day “what-is” of the
Society, with the future “what-it-might-be”.
This “impression” lived strongly in me, and when I wrote
my book American Anthroposophy [
]
twenty years later, I devoted a Chapter to what I then had
learned to call: the Martha Impulse and the Mary Impulse
in the Society. The Martha Impulse is to preserve,
and the Mary Impulse is to innovate (this is an over-
simplification - one should read the original text for
details). The title to that Chapter is: The Natural
Transformation of the Anthroposophical Society in America,
and it was written in the Season of Michaelmas 2007.
It has been my experience that “support”, from higher
worlds as regards ones research work, is enhanced by the
cultivation of “modesty” of intention. What do I
seek to know? How far do I expect my spiritual
“reach” to be able to go? Am I willing to “receive”
what is offered and be content with that?
Intercourse with higher Beings has some qualities that are
similar to a love affair. We don’t seduce, and are
not seduced. If we are seduced, then that is the
opponents. We are cautious and
straightforward. Circumspect. Patient.
Do we bring gifts? Are we to be “romantic”?
What makes us worthy?
Discipline. Doing the preparatory work. We pay
attention to the requirements of our ordinary life, and do
not shun what that life needs. We learn.
When this “attitude” has been applied to my main subjects
of spiritual social research: America and the A. Society,
some respect as regards those subjects was essential, for
what is there (in America and the Society) is already
“filled from within” by spiritual qualities related to
various Beings. This thought returns us to the need
to love the object of knowledge, although love can
encompass pain as well, for our beloved may have troubles
and be in need.
Most of us “treat” these matters in our lives this way,
already. We care for our families. We seek to
do a good job. It matters to us to be a good son, or
father, or brother, or parent, or co-worker, or
boss. We serve, and perhaps come to understand that
the basic gesture (captured in total in the Seven Stages
of the Passion of Christ) is “washing the feet”.
Why is this “service” important? Because this
quality is everywhere in higher Beings. Steiner
spoke of this in a beautiful way when he described:
“mankind is the religion of the Gods.” Our lover
serves us and is devoted to us, and that “relationship”
needs to be reciprocated.
Oddly, the First of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha
is: “Life is suffering”. Do the Gods serve us by
making us suffer?
Or, do they serve us by loving and forgiving us, in spite
of the suffering we inflict on each other and on
ourselves. The infamous inhumanity of man to man.
Are we honest with ourselves about who we are, and what we
really do in this world?
A dozen years ago, I was in a mood of despair. I was
well aware of my failings. Years of hopes and dreams
unfulfilled. Of course, that wasn’t all that I was,
but it was a big part of what I was. I was at the
time in meditation and surrendered to this
“feeling”. Rather than run from it, I entered
it. My anguish deepened. I was more and more
acutely aware of all of us, of all of humanity, creating
an endless stream of horror and troubles for ourselves and
for each other.
I was not playing a game, by the way. This is not an
“exercise”, but something quite real - this confession to
being a cause of harm.
During my “descent”, as it were, I knew that all that we
human beings did was also known to them - to Christ and
the Holy Mother. We had no secrets from our most
profound lovers. They knew us, and knew our deeds,
and this intimately. They were that much “with” us,
that all that we did, all the horror of it, was open to
Them, for that is how They were - They received into
themselves all the terrible that there was. Whether
it was us suffering through the doing the of the awful
deeds; and/or, the suffering of those who received the
effects of our deeds - They knew it all.
In shame I cried out with my whole soul to Them: “How do
it deal with this? How do you receive and live in
all this endless horror manifested by human beings?”
Then She spoke, in a voice like the most sublime Bell in
tone - a pure resonating and all penetrating alto.
This is what She said: “We turn it into love”.
I was shattered by the power and depth of this Act.
It wasn’t just the words, for the words made me “see” as
well. At the same time I was comforted. We
were Loved. All of us. In spite of all the
worst that we could do They transform our evil and
suffering into Love.
Much later I wrote some lines in a poem:
This is from a poem written on the anniversary of 9/11, in
2004, called: “a gift from another’s eyes”, which is
collected in a little work of poems called: “the America
Quartet”:
Steiner describes the soul qualities this way: thinking is
more conscious, feeling is less conscious - kind of like
dreaming, and then willing is hardly conscious at
all. By “conscious” I believe he means: How
intentional and awake to that soul activity can our spirit
be. Some of these differences may have to do with
how our “soul” “reacts” to outer events.
For example, yesterday I watched a movie, Monsignor, that
is about a man who is a priest during World War Two, and
who has a compromised conscience. He is used by
someone in the Vatican to do certain tasks, and ends up
running the Vatican Bank.
There was a scene at the end where the camera draws back,
and we have a long shot of St. Peter’s Square, after
knowing of the inner power struggles that the movie had
portrayed. I looked at the Stones of the Buildings,
and “felt” them as being there while all the difficult
moral trials of that place went on, somehow absorbing some
characteristic or quality of these events.
This line then arose in mind: “And the Stones Wept”.
This small “idea” about the consciousness (or not) of the
material reality, such as stones and rocks, and concrete
buildings then unfolded in my thinking/dreaming soul over
the next hours. Do places remember?
The Earth is old, ancient beyond number. It comes
into existence as part of the very first acts of the
Creation, even if, as according to Steiner, the
Saturn-Earth stage was just a body of warmth. Of
what was the Body really made? The acts of cosmic
Beings? Do these “acts” linger and have
consciousness? Do they remember?
In the Class Lessons, Steiner speaks of “fields” of
thinking and feeling and willing - of our life on the
Earth as existing in these “fields” “Fields”, I used
to suppose, like a magnetic or electrical “field”.
Or, today, are these “fields” of thinking, feeling, and
willing something that arises because the Farmer has
tilled the soil and planted there seeds. Which
metaphor do you, dear Reader, prefer.
When we go to sleep, again according to Steiner, the ego
(or warmth body) and the astral (or desire body) separate
from the life body and the physical body, and leave these
latter two aspects of our organism in bed. When we
die, something similar is said to happen. Ego,
astral, and life bodies separate from the physical body,
which goes on to decay - dust to dust. But the life
body has our memories and so our life passes before our
eyes, as this life body dissolves into the general life
“field” of the cosmos, planting the “memories” into the
astral body, so that in the after-life we can work on what
happened in that just lived life.
Our knowledge of natural science suggests that not only is
matter and energy conserved, but consciousness may be
“conserved” as well.
I look out the window of my study, and the naked trees
stand there silent. The air is colder this time of
year, and a bit of snow still remains on the ground.
Does this place remember the Spring and Summer and Fall
just past? Does it remember the tread of the bear
the visited our yard one night, or the flight of birds, or
the dancing of squirrels, or the elegant passage of two
deer a few days ago, as they delicately and regally walked
past my study window to the delight of my lady’s eye and
heart.
The Ancient Earth is stone, ... stone that was once
living, the way our bones are the end process of something
that began as an aspect of life. Underneath in
catacombs, all over the world, are piles of human
bones. Do these bones remember? Do they weep?
As anthroposophists we use such strange abstractions, as
“cosmic memory” or the “akashic record.” These terms
fill a need of the intellect, but do they fill the needs
of the heart?
In Dornach sits a concrete building on a hill. A lot
has happened there since Steiner went there and wandered
in the local caves before accepting that “place” as where
to build the original Goetheanum. The perceptive
nature of “feelings” gives a qualitative aspect to our
experience that is free of the savage cold of the
intellect by itself. Even the term “heart thinking”
is a horribly empty abstraction. This is why poets
write poetry - to leave behind abstraction for the “heart”
of “things”. Years ago, I wrote:
“the Anthroposophical Society, Money, and a very necessary
spiritual Revolution" An essay in applied Spiritual
Social Science on the future of the A. Society
One of the more curious experiences of my life has
involved becoming aware of “opposition” to my work - to my
spiritual research and writing. It might be possible
to describe these as “attacks”, which from a certain point
of view they are, but my view has become over time that
these “attacks” are basically aspects of
“resistance”. Our will is, in fact must be,
resisted. Life cannot be easy. Not only that,
but because of our egoistic tendencies, we also need a
kind of “weight”, something that holds us down, when the
luciferic (the prideful etc.) might want to take flight
and jump off the rails.
Everyone will feel resistance and weight in their
lives. Each will have to become awake to their
own. The most usual way we describe some of these is
as “bad habits”. If we want to use a more spiritual
jargon, we might think of karma, or of the Native American
story of the two wolves. For those new to that: “A
young man spoke to his grandfather. The young man
was concerned about the ‘bad’ things he seemed to do in
the company of his friends, and sought understanding from
his grandfather. His grandfather told him that
inside of us are two wolves. One is hungry to be
good, and kind and prudent and all that is otherwise
virtuous. The other is hungry to satisfy appetites,
or indulge in anger or jealousy. Then the
grandfather paused, and the young man thought for a
moment, before asking: ‘what was one to do about these two
wolves? How do we tame them?’ The grandfather
said: ‘It all depends on which wolf you feed’. “
In anthroposophical jargon we speak of the double, which
my research discovers is threefold in nature (no surprise
there). There is the tempter - the luciferic double;
the prosecutor - the ahrimanic double; and, the human
double which is our untamed appetites and so forth.
It would be possible to write at length on this, which I
have. [ The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the
Sermon on the Mount:
In a more “Christian” mode, we might speak of the Seven
Stages of the Passion of Christ: washing the feet; the
scourging; the crowing with thorns; the carrying of the
Cross; the crucifixion; the death; and, the
resurrection. In this beautiful imagery we might
discover some very remarkable ways of describing
resistance and weight, and other qualitative aspects of
our developmental trials in life.
For most human beings, whether or not their belief system
is “Christian”, the biography has both inner (of the soul
and spirit) and outer (of the social interactions)
“resistance” phenomena. The double is part of the
inner (only part), and the outer biographical is described
by the Seven Stages. Inwardly, the good wolf is
supported by the higher ego (the conscience), the guardian
angel, and the Holy Spirit, while the bad wolf is “helped”
by the threefold double complex. In order to
experience karma and fate and destiny, we have to be
helped by the relevant aspects of the Divine Mystery.
In my biography, as a kind of detail and not the whole or
all of it, when I am on the right track in the pursuit of
some aspect of spiritual research, and the related
writing/sharing of that work, I have found that an
indicator of the importance of that work is in the
resistance offered by/within the biography.
Temptations are easy, for we are fallen and falling.
Rising up is harder, and the chief way this rising up is
opposed, or resisted, is from and through others - visible
or invisible. So we are scourged, or crowned with
thorns.
That is, people move toward us or around us that have
powerful antipathies towards us, and act out those
antipathies by the saying of unkind things (scourging), or
the assertion that our thoughts and points of view are
radically in error (crowning with thorns). More
details can be found here: Cowboy Bebop and the physics of
thought as moral art:
That our biographies have such realities, and qualities of
experience, reveals the perfect organism of vast spiritual
communities (within and under the aegis of the Cosmic
Christ) that surrounds us, and which is subtle and
delicate, and complex beyond our ability to imagine.
“You can’t always get what you want, But if you try
sometimes, well you just might find, You get what you
need”
There might be a question as to the source of the
“understanding”, and some might think that we get that
from other, or higher, Beings. In my experience we
create the understanding ourselves. It is our human
nature to form the conceptual according to our human
needs. This is true for even the efforts at
objective sciences, such as something seemingly so basic
as chemistry. We’ve acted as if the world of
experience was this objective and permanent structure,
although given the developments in physics in the 20th
Century that seems to not be the case.
What then is the character and nature of our
“understanding/knowledge”, even in the so-called hard
sciences? Well, we tend to act as if we were going
to get knowledge that is true for all time - we tend to
insist if be fixed and permanent. Perhaps that is
not the case, and I wrote an essay on that problem, here:
Electricity and the Spirit in Nature:
Now we embark on studies of the social - human
associations that are something rather quite fluid and
variable over time. Will we find there that which
is, and can be, fixed and permanent?
At the center of all that we can call “the social” are
human beings, and their various “social” connections and
arrangements. These represent a kind of social
what-is. We can argue about what it means, what are
its laws, and so forth, but we can’t really argue it out
of existence. The social is. We live in it, we
study it, and we have even given it a name: the social.
All of us have been raised in some kind of culture, from
which we acquired language and words and Ways of seeing
the world. Some of these Ways of seeing the world
have become habits of mind. As habits of mind they
have limitations, for if we will believe we already know
something, then that too is a ghost in the own soul.
Commonly we can refer to these problems as: Unwarranted
assumptions. So we swim in a sea, within our own
souls, of antipathies and sympathies as well as
unwarranted assumptions.
Owen Barfield wrote of what he called: collective (shared)
representations. An example is that there is a past,
and a present, and a future. This is generally a
collective representation in most cultures. The
content of any of these collective representations can
lead us astray, when they are unwarranted
assumptions. So when we look at our present - our
now - we might include among the related concepts and
ideas, stories of origin (religious creation, the big
bang), and stories of end times (Armageddon, the heat
death of the Universe). Different social communities
share different collective representations.
Factually we seem to make up those stories of origin and
end times. We certainly don’t see them - we don’t
directly perceive or taste a religious creation or a big
bang. That various people hold to such stories is
not unimportant, but if we are going to have a “social”
“science”, we have to be empirical. One glaring
empirical fact is that our consciousness is bound to the
present - the now. We can make up stories about the
past and the future, but we don’t live in those
stories. We live now. The big bang is a theory
then, a story of a past we cannot ever empirically know.
Unless people can find some justification for doing
otherwise, at this point I want to confine our
appreciation of the social to empirical observations we
can make in the present. Most of these are already
expressed in our languages. So, we could say, that
the social includes: the individual; various relationships
of individuals; families; communities of various types,
and so forth.
To simplify, let us describe these varieties of
arrangements as “social forms”.
For those who might think this is a bit silly, just keep
in mind that we are trying to create a Spiritual Social
Science, and to do that we need, at the least, to define a
few terms. What makes a social science
spiritual? A good question, which I am letting
develop over the course of these various “Parts”.
Another fact, which ought to seem obvious, is that the
social is living (at the least). After all, all its
“parts” are human beings, who are themselves living.
We can then, without stretching out of shape our
imagination, conceive of “social forms” as living.
An individual life has a biography. So does a
family, and so do various communities. If we study
(observe its details) the biography of any living social
forms, we realize they change over time. The
Anthroposophical Society is a type of social form that has
undergone all manner of changes over time, and probably is
living, although its degree of vitality might be
questionable.
Just consider the social form: marriage. While the
tradition of having marriages is apparently a cultural
artifact, specific individual marriages do seem to undergo
“seasons”. We speak of the honeymoon, and then of
the end of the honeymoon, for example. Social forms
are born, grow, die, and even undergo metamorphosis.
Many social forms are embedded inside other social forms,
such as the forms families and marriages being “parts” of
communities.
Here, briefly, is some earlier work I did in thinking
about social-form changes over time, from my American
Anthroposophy
“Next, let us take up the family...and simultaneously, the
community. Here again we have general or universal
characteristics, and when we get into the fine details,
quite individual and unique characteristics.
Remember we are also going to work with this as something
in movement over time.
“Take an old world village, perhaps about 500 years ago
(at the beginning of the Age of the Consciousness Soul),
for example. Many large families. Often a
dozen births for each mother, not all of them live.
Many relations, as well. An old world village might
contain any number of large extended families (a few
grandparents, many parents and several dozens of children
and related cousins). Rules as to marriage across
these complicated lines of blood existed for very
practical and obvious reasons.
“Such a village (community) would often have one language,
one general culture, one religion and social political
structure. Different villages in different locales
in Europe would have differences of language, culture,
religion and social political structure, but all would
have large extended families as the dominate basis of the
community.
“Everyone would know most everyone else. Children
born into such families would have destinies almost fixed
in nature (the son becomes like the father, the daughter
like the mother). No one violates social norms
without severe consequences. Individualism is
generally unheard of. People almost do not have a
thought outside the standard and shared point of
view. Most are uneducated, and few can read and/or
write.
“Now let us jump forward a bit - say New York City in the
mid to late 19th Century.
“Here we have neighborhoods. Large extended families
continue, but not as large or as extended as an old world
village. As immigrants, parts of families were left
behind in the Old World. It is harder now to keep
tradition alive. Religions, cultures and languages
butt up against each other, often in conflict (mirroring
in a small way the frequent wars in Europe rooted in the
same differences). Children are less inclined to
follow in the footsteps of the parent. Marriages
across lines of religion, language and culture are
frequent. Individualism increases, and the ability
of the community (now fractured from within, and attacked
from without) to cause conformance to its dominate values
lessens.
“During the transition from the older isolated villages to
the neighborhoods in the great cities, two important
changes have appeared - natural science and
industrialization. Religion, as a family and
community cohesive forming force, is weakened by natural
science; and, the family and community by the industrial
revolution (the father is driven from the home and into
the factory, along with many of the children, as people
leave the villages to find work in the growing cities).
“Flash forward now into the present - Los Angeles 2007.
“An inner core and an outer rim. Mere vestiges of
neighborhoods, mostly racial ghettos in the inner core,
with smaller families. Better education, similar
poverty. In the outer rim, a different racial mix,
tiny (nuclear) families. In neither place does a
coherent community exist as once did in the Old World
village.
“A staggering increase in homelessness. None of
these individuals has a place to call home. Even the
family has fractured into individual splinters. The I is
alone even there (c.f. Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd).
Children wouldn’t think of following in their parents
footsteps. Individualism triumphs and the old world
cohesive nature of community and family is near dissolved.
“What happens in our consciousness when we move these pure
abstractions through time? What happens when we
recreate in the imagination the gesture of social form
over the last 500 years in Western Civilization?”
Valentin Tomberg had a kind of running argument with the
directions begin taken by the Anthroposophical Society,
following Steiner’s death. Eventually this lead
Tomberg to leaving aside the teaching of Anthroposophy,
declaring that Spiritual Science wasn’t really possible,
and offering as an alternative his “Meditations of the
Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism.”
As part of this gesture away from Steiner’s seeming
teachings (as practiced by the A. Society), Tomberg
declared (in Meditations) that authentic spirituality was
made up of three parts: Magic, Mysticism and Gnosis.
If we were to see this “argument” as a kind of theological
matter, we would fail to grasp what Tomberg was seeking to
understand, and to teach.
It was Tomberg’s view that one could not describe reality
correctly, and include the spiritual, without recognizing
that the Creation itself was a magical act - a projection
of the Divine Will into manifestation, ... into “being” or
existence. We were “made”.
This process was not a separation, either. We remain
“connected”, and these connections then involve the
“mystical”, which includes the fact that even while
apparently “separated”, we are nonetheless continuously
“touched” by the Divine. In addition, we have (or
can have) “knowledge” of this “connection”, which is aptly
named “gnosis”.
Here I simply want to introduce into our wider
considerations the questions of trying to discern
what aspects of our social existence can be described by
such terms as: magical, mystical and gnostic. We
have already noted above that our psychology is such that
we are inwardly joined to the spiritual through six
relationships. Three lower relationships in the
three-fold double complex: the tempter, the prosecutor,
and the “bad habits”; and three higher relationships: the
conscience or higher ego, the guardian angel, and the Holy
Spirit.
Nothing is changed, ... we are just coming at the
situation from a different angle, which can then shed some
light on (illuminate) certain qualities of existence in
which we swim, but sometimes fail to notice as part of our
social experience. Always what is sought is to
become more and more awake to the actual nature of
reality.
Recently in America was celebrated an annual “rite”:
called Thanksgiving. Soon we will celebrate a
similar “rite”: Christmas. Depending upon our
“religion”, we can also celebrate Ramadan or Hanukkah, in
each case what is essentially a social “rite” which is
magical, mystical and gnostic ... i.e. partaking of the
qualities of manifestation (magic), being touched
(connected - mysticism), and having some kind of knowledge
thereof (gnosticism).
As an aspect of these social rites of “dance”, we have
language, or the “word”. This “word” is both inward
in discursive thinking, and outward in speech.
Individuals are then embedded within families and
communities wherein aspects of our inter-relationships are
carried out via magical, mystical, gnostic means, all
linked together by the “word”.
Anthroposophists go to study groups, and join Branches, as
well as on occasion involve themselves in what is called:
the First Class. These are “traditions”, and can be
described as “ritualistic” in form. The “social”
then includes all kinds of “rituals”, and accompanied by
the “word”, we engage in rituals even in verbal
intercourse: “Hello”. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, how are you?”
Again, the point is to enliven our appreciation of the
ritual (magical, mystical, and gnostic) aspects of our
shared social existence. In fact, we can strive here
and now to begin to appreciate the truth, beauty, and
goodness that seeks to appear within our social
arrangements. Dating. Courtship and
Marriage. Love making that produces children.
Birth. The raising and schooling of children.
Labor (work). Divorce. Disease. And,
Death.
Individuals tend to have “routines”, ... habitual “rites”
in which they engage on waking and then again in getting
ready for bed. To practice prayer and meditation is
to be religious or spiritual. To live is to create
“Temples”. The home can be a temple dedicated to
Love, and the bedroom in the home a temple dedicated to
that form of love we call Eros. A bank is a temple
dedicated to money. A football stadium a temple
dedicated to emotional catharsis (all that cheering and
screaming and yelling and beer drinking).
In the wonderful movie “the Contender”, the main
character, played by the actress Joan Allen, while
defending her atheism before a congressional committee,
describes her religion as public service, and the place
where she practices this religion - the Senate, as a
Temple to freedom and democracy.
Are these Facebook pages any kind of Temple? What
rites of manifestation (magic) do we practice here?
What human connections (mysticism) do we forge? What
knowledge do we come to share, or offer each other, or to
honor (gnosticism)?
Human social-political life is the gradual emancipation of
“human society” from the raw and untamed energies of
Nature - both supra-nature and sub-nature We have
suffered the Fall into matter. Now we find that
together we can overcome its consequences, and set our
course once more for the gradual individual and community
participation in the Divine Mystery, from which we were
first magically born. The Christian metaphor for
this rite of dance, ... we know as the parable of the
Return of the Prodigal Son.
Many years ago, decades in fact, I began to realize that
the world-as-it-is was Speech. At the same time, I
encountered the Idea that sensible reality was Maya - an
illusion. Even Steiner on occasion used that
term. What is usually meant by the Idea of Maya is
that “true” reality is the invisible spiritual that is
hidden behind the Maya of existence.
Recently some new friends visited me, and one of them
quoted Steiner as saying that he too sees a Tree, he just
sees it far better than most of us. Its still a
Tree, and it is the “seeing” that is different.
There is more to the sensible object than we realize.
As my own view evolved on these kinds of questions, I
asked myself whether the Divine Mystery would hide itself
from us. Over time I came to understand that what
the cultural East sees as Maya, or illusion, comes from
their memories of the prior times when clairvoyance was
normal, and their teachers (such as the Seven Rishis),
taught about the Golden Yuga, called the Satya Yuga, which
then descends cyclically to a Dark Age, or Kali Yuga.
All that aside, as I studied the Idea of Goetheanism, it
was clear that there was a “Book” of Nature that Goethe
had learned to “read”, and that if I paid the right
attention to the social-political, I could see that there
was also a “Book” of the Social World that could be
“read”. The social-world was Speech, uttered by the
Divine Mystery for our edification.
What this means is that the intellectual abstractions
behind such terms as: individual, family, community,
nation, and so forth, had living meaning. There were
no accidents. Rather what was happening is that in
the evolution of consciousness, the individual had to go
through a period of cultivated ignorance and separation -
what we “see/read” today, in order to pass onward toward
what Barfield called: “final participation” - the
reuniting of the ego with the rest of cosmic existence,
... another way to understand the Return of the Prodigal
Son.
We were pushed/fell out of the Garden, in part in order to
hunger to return.
Now the differentiation which is individualism goes fully
into all the details. Each of us is to have a completely
unique character, biography, and collection of mental
conceptions, feelings, and impulses of will.
Sameness, if we experience it, (all rapists or abortions
are alike) is false. How can we know that?
Well, do we see just a tree (sameness) or do we see that
Tree in all its glory? In Steiner’s The Theory of
Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception, he writes
of the “type”. In the realm of reading the Book of
Nature, that is the highest knowledge we can have - of the
“type”.
In reading the Book of the Social, the highest knowledge
is to perceive the Individual. Only the Individual
can “speak” of who they are. Where we see sameness,
we remain only aware of the “type”, and so we have all
these abstract generalizations which we use, such as:
anthroposophists, Republicans, criminals, blacks,
redheads, blonds, doctors, addicts, fat people, smart
people, initiates, ... endless variations on the type, but
if we stop there, we do not see what the Individual is
there to teach.
The same with families. Yes, there is the
generalized category of family, but lets face it, no
constellation of individuals that are members of the same
family is like any other such constellation.
A lot of our thinking is caught up in the expectable
residue of the Age of Natural Science. Natural
Science hardly even recognizes the “type”, being unable to
see beyond the “part” to any kind of whole. This has
led to the fascination with particles and quantum
events. For all these "theories”, no flower or poem
is made up of parts, ever.
Here is a must read essay by Patrick Dixon, an English
“actor”, whose stage name is Alexander Barry.
America: the Central Motif. It is found in this
piece of mine: Searching for Christian Rosencreuz (based
in part on the “idea” in the movie Searching for Bobby
Fisher) - regarding the fundamental flaw of Steiner-
said:
Nothing I have ever read, using the anthroposophical
language created by Steiner, recognizes sensible reality
as Speech, in quite the way Dixon does it. Here is a
sample:
“The five Islands sunk as the five senses became immersed
in the physical plane and the human being began to rise
above the sea of pre-individual clairvoyance; to see the
Promised land of ego-based consciousness. This
condensation of and separation between the watery and
aerial mantles of the Earth (this fall of the sea out of
the sky) paralleled the fall of the Etheric body of the
human being, into closer proximity with the densifying
physical body that was rising into differentiation as the
less defined etheric body was sinking. This division
between the water and air elements reverberated deeper and
higher, both densifying the earth as a receptacle for the
more gravity-bound water and dividing further the sub- and
super- terrestrial fires. Levels that were clearly defined
to higher beings then began to form into the Jacob’s
ladder that would be experiencable to beings bound to a
sense world losing consciousness of its supersensible
origins.”
Go to that link and just scroll down the page a bit.
Dixon’s “essay/contemplation” is not short, but well worth
the trouble to read many times. He “sees” the
dynamic Divine teaching parables that compose the music of
Earth Existence.
On the practical side of things, you might want to copy
and paste Dixon’s essay/contemplation to your word
processing software, and print a copy. That
will make it easier to re-read when the time comes.
A copy is also in the appendix of my book American
Anthroposophy, which can be purchased here in physical
form:
Rudolf Steiner’s schema, regarding social threefolding,
speaks of a Cultural Life, a Political-Legal life, and an
Economic Life. I have been using the term:
social-political on occasion, and here I want to face any
possible confusions that might exist in my readers in
regard to what is meant.
Early research of mine, into the social, developed the
idea that social-threefolding was already appearing in
Western Civilization over time. During the third
cultural epoch (Egypt etc.), the Cultural Life dominated
the social order, with the Mysteries having the greatest
influences. People were in “classes”, and the
aristocracies (such as the Pharaohs) were a part of a
divinely inspired social order.
With the beginning of the fourth cultural epoch (around
600 B.C.), at the time of the founding of Western
Civilization, both the Greeks and the Romans made a
distinction between the State on the one hand, and the
Citizen on the other. This was the birth, basically,
of the Political-Legal Life, and became crucial in Roman
Law, which has become the tired and worn down fundamental
laws we use today. The older idea, of Cultural
social dominance, remained, in a sense, in such ideas as
the Divine Right of Kings, and as well in the fact that
there were (with the coming into being of the Roman
Church), two kinds of Courts of Law - regular courts
dominated by the blood aristocracies, and ecclesiastical
courts dominated by the Church. For an important
historical look at the development of Law, leading to the
U.S. Constitution, read John Randolf Tucker’s book on the
Constitution, which traces the underlying legal principles
all the way back and through the history of the Celtic
peoples, who were originally the Germanic tribal peoples -
the “barbarians” - that lived north of Rome at the time
that it Fell.
At the beginning of the fifth cultural epoch (around the
14th Century A.D.), the Economic Life began to appear in
embryonic forms. World exploration and colonization
led to trading empires, which in turn led to the arising
of the mercantile and banking classes out of the old
guilds. These merchant classes then entered into a
war with the waning influence of the aristocratic classes,
and the best book for coming to knowledge here is the 2700
page Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson (7 novels in three
volumes), which uses the imagination (rather than a dry
intellectual approach) to show how modern banking
practices came into existence at the same time as did the
spirit-less natural science of Newton (he believed in
matter-only atoms, and his chief opponent, Leibniz,
believed in monads, which Leibniz thought of as having
consciousness and will). With the American and
French Revolutions, the aristocracies of blood were
displaced, and the illusion of modern pseudo democracies
came to be (although behind them were new aristocracies of
wealth, such as the Rothschild and Rockefeller families).
These same historical processes brought about an inner
threefolding of the Political-Legal Life. The
Cultural Life was threefold in the forms of science, art,
and religion, but with the arrival of the printing press
(which began the replacement of oral culture) we have the
string of changes leading to newspapers, radio, television
and now the Internet, cell phones and social media.
In between the State on the one hand, and the Citizen on
the other, arose a naturally socially-generated
modern Media.
Steiner has suggested that the Economic Life was also to
be threefold: producers, distributors, and consumers
. So we could say that the middle of the three
Spheres (Cultural, Political-Legal, and Economic), was the
Political-Legal Life, and in the middle of that was the
Media, as the means by which the State and the Citizen
were connected. The Media, then, in terms of
Steiner’s schema, is metaphorically the heart of the heart
of the threefold social organism.
A kind of discussion arises over what our social-political
existence Means. It is not an academic - ivory tower
- kind of discussion. It is often angry, rancorous,
and filled with lies. We are today in the midst of
one such heated discussion, over certain aspects of the
idea of Justice that is to inhabit our legal system
(concerning police - law enforcement - and their too
frequent murder of unarmed black men) . This then is
the political-legal Life, and it is dynamic and living,
not abstract and academic. Rudolf Steiner has said
that English speakers live instinctively in the
Consciousness (or spiritual) Soul, in their Life of
Rights. In that Sphere is debated the Meaning of the
Good and the True, and everyone is being forced to form
their own thoughts. If we watch such as CNN and Fox,
or follow Twitter etc., “opinions” are all over the place.
Part of these discussion involve how to change our
Society, and in particular the Political-Legal
aspects. Such debates as getting money out of
politics are a good example of these discussions. My
studies have revealed a certain kind of logical flaw,
common to most of these discussion, which it will help to
learn how to recognize. If we want our
social-political life to change, we very much need a
“Spiritual” Social Science - we need to know how the
social-political actually works, and to stop following
blindly any theory or political ideology. It is
eminently a practical problem, for as Steiner pointed out
over and over again: If we can’t appreciate the spiritual
components of our existence, we will fail to understand
the “organism” in which our lives unfold, or to know how
to heal any dysfunctions.
The Logical Flaw: This follows a kind of abstract
formulation, which is repeated almost everywhere, and is a
common feature of this Age of Materialism. The
formulation goes like this: If only A would do B, then C
would be the result. In essence we are trying to
approach the social-political as if it operated as a
“cause and effect” process - kind of like the geometric
causal problems of the game of pool. We are aware
of, but frequently overlook, that people are not like the
game of pool - they are instead several orders of
complexity more disorderly.
Especially in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, everyone
wants to be their own “lawgiver”, and fractious argument
is to be expected. So one person will say: “If only
the rich (A) would be less greedy (B), then there would be
more wealth for all of us (C)”. Or another person
might say: “If only the poor (A) would work harder (B),
they would then have a better material existence (C)”.
Notice the first two words: “If only”. This makes
the whole statement essentially a dependent clause - i.e.
it can’t be a statement of fact. It may be a truism,
but that is not the same as a true statement of social
facts. There is no fixed aspect, and all it really
means is that if a certain “class” of people would act
differently, then all will be better. As we
previously noted, generalized “classes” of people don’t
actually exist. That way of thinking is an
abstraction, and the social-political is living, dynamic
and wondrous.
One purpose of a “Spiritual” Social Science is to brush
aside the confusion, and enable us to see more clearly
into the real way societies evolve. This is entirely
consistent with Steiner’s works on medicine and education
and so forth. I have spent most of my life trying to
offer such a Science to the Anthroposophical Society, so
as to take us into the necessary work required for the
spiritualization of the Third Millennium. My life is
not yet over, yet at the same time it is the destiny of
Anthroposophy to take about four centuries before really
impacting civilization, if it ever does. We can’t
“push the river” of social evolution.
If the ill-logic of the “If only A would do B, then C
would be the result” isn’t workable, what is workable?
Using weather phenomena, as a metaphor or analogy, can
help, but just keep in mind this approach has
limits. Our modern language usages has some
familiarity with chaos theory, complex systems, and we do
have the idea of “fractals”, which are an interesting
mathematical/geometrical phenomena. Probably the
most interesting (to me) newest thinking can be found in
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book: “Antifragile”. It has
the subtitle: “things that gain from disorder”.
The basic idea is that too much order, or organization,
and the system is fragile, mostly because it is rigid and
inflexible. The more disorder in a system (not
defining disorder, yet ...), the less fragile.
Antifragile systems survive extremes of stress, and
fragile systems do not.
Most everyone not asleep realizes that climate change is
happening. Yes, there are a lot of features to
climate change that can be argued about, even the
assumption that human beings have caused it. We
could say that the extreme sides of these “arguments” are
fragile themselves, because they represent fixed and rigid
thinking. What has been most curious to me is that
few scientists that get heard, do a good job explaining
that climate is a complex system, and what that
means. You can hear that idea, of weather as a
complex system, lurking in the ways they talk about it,
but simple clarity (which is possible) is lacking.
Try this ...
In general systems theory we can encounter the idea that
complex systems have a tendency to have a kind of rest
state, - a state of general equilibrium.
Periodically (and unpredictably), a complex system will
undergo systemic changes - the basic parameters will alter
in some kind of fundamental way. When this type of
change is occurring, the complex system will loose its
state of equilibrium, and extreme variations of its normal
parameters will arise. We see that in our climate in
all the variations of extreme weather now being
experienced. The former state of equilibrium has
been lost, and until a new state of equilibrium is
reached, with its own new basic parameters, extreme
variations will be the “order” of the day.
That’s where climate is today ... extreme variations
waiting for the eventual new state of equilibrium.
Many climate scientists, in thinking about the long range
consequences of this, posit a kind of linear process, and
unfold pictures of the future that are straight-line
predictions, such as rising sea levels of so many feet,
and global temperature increases of a similar
nature. This linear thinking won’t work.
Climate is too dynamic and living, just ask your local
weatherman, who only is willing to predict a few days out,
much less years and decades.
Several years ago, I listened to a speech by Oren Lyons, a
Native American Elder, at a Bioneers Conference [
]. His thinking was not linear, but pictorial
(imaginative). He made this analogy about climate
change, which I paraphrase: “Your dinning room has a
overhead light that is on a rheostat. As you turn it
up, the light gets brighter and brighter, and then when
you reach the end of that process, the light goes
off. We are not heading toward a warmer climatic
conditions, but toward an ice age. Heating will
bring on the long winter. Human beings will
survive. We always do. But not everyone.”
One version of the potential “causal mechanics” of such a
change is in the film: The Day After Tomorrow, where the
melting of the ice cap in the northern hemisphere, being
fresh water not salt water, changes the salinity (and
temperature) of the Atlantic Ocean, causing the Gulf
Stream to stop distributing warm equatorial waters to the
north Atlantic and warm temperatures, via air currents
heated by the ocean, to Europe and America. The air
masses of the earth, which receive their “energy” from the
warmth of the oceans, lose that “energy”, and snow starts
to fall, never to stop until a new climate equilibrium is
reached.
Macro-social forms, such as Western Civilization, have
aspects that are fragile. The “structure” of these
social forms is similar to complex systems. Complex
ideas inhabit our civilization, and scientific
materialism is a rigid Way of thought, as is religious
fundamentalism. The same with political
ideologies. These are paradigms that masses of
individuals share, and out of which they choose to act.
At the same time, the soul-currents underlying our current
stage of the evolution of consciousness (see Steiner’s
From Symptom to Reality in Modern History), rise from the
inner depths of human nature. They are not readily
visible, unless one learns to read the Book of the
Social. A main dynamic feature of these soul-streams
is a kind of rising conflict in each individual between
the impulse for increased moral warmth (socially - aka the
Christ Impulse), and the arid and cold intellectuality of
the untamed intellect (the ahrimanic within).
There can be no linear prediction of how human societies
will move forward, as this conflict increases. Some
aspects have to be “felt”, and appears in our
consciousness in a kind of dreamlike Way. A good
example of the conflict is the general disagreements as
regards the care of the Earth - of the environment on
which we all depend. I wrote an essay some years ago
about this conflict over the “environment”: The Quiet
Suffering of Nature [
]. There isn’t even a right answer, because while
the environmentalist wants to preserve something in
Nature, the people whose Way of Life is woven into the
exploitation of Nature, also, with a rational sense of
justice for themselves, too want to preserve something.
The main problem was, to me, that the environmentalist
wasn’t yet willing to go far enough, so as to include in
his working paradigms the idea that Nature has being and
consciousness - an existence with which we could
communicate. The central unanswered question then
was: What does Nature want? Aboriginal peoples and
traditions assume this possibility of communion, while
materialistic science assumes its opposite: Nature was
just dead matter, with no spirit at all.
In fact, one of the weird flaws as to what the Bible might
have to say, is that the idea in Genesis, that mankind was
to have dominion over nature, - this idea was a
mal-interpretation of the Hebrew, and should be read:
mankind was to have communion with nature. This
itself is connected to the loss of the Goddess religions,
and their being overwhelmed by the monotheistic
patriarchal religious versions of the so-called “people of
the book”, the Jews, the Christians and the
Muslims. It is patriarchal impulses that seek
dominion over, while it is matriarchal impulses that seek
communion with.
Without a truly “Spiritual” Social Science, there is no
appreciation that we live inside, and are completely
permeated by, a Cosmic Being, the Christ, and all the
hierarchies that work under His Impulse, including the
10th hierarchy - the human beings.
To return to where we started: If disorder helps make
social structures be antifragile, how does this disorder
enter the “system”?
Our thinking is born in those personal soul qualities most
akin to the Mother forces - the realm of the uncreated and
unformed. In us, and in our seeking for individual
moral freedom, lives the potential for new and living
antifragile thinking. In the old doctrine of the
elements: Fire, Water, Air and Earth were all born from
Chaos - from the realm of the unformed and uncreated, just
as is the Creation Itself being brought forth.
When the individual, in relating to his personal social
existence, draws his actions from out of that inwardly
accessible creative place, instead of living in arid and
rigid habits of mind, that’s where the social-weather
receives is equilibrium producing forces - from what we
think of as individualized love and kindness, and all the
other such self generated ideals. Rudolf Steiner
perceived this situation as leading to a split in
humanity, that would be so profound that physical
evolution would be effected, and we would come to see, by
looking at the human form, the moral nature of any
individual human being.
I don’t agree or disagree. I just believe that this
indication of Steiner’s leads to a lot of important
questions that are yet to be answered.
Rudolf Steiner encouraged us to look to Goethe for
understanding certain potential perceptual knowledge
processes in which human beings might engage. The
main one, as described by Goethe, was: exact sensorial
phantasy. By this Goethe meant the process of
recreating in the imagination an exact replica of the
form-nature of a specific plant, as it developed over
time.
When I was developing my Spiritual Social Science I was
acutely aware that whereas Goethe had the real sense-world
plant, as something to copy in his phantasy (imagination),
such terms as individual, family, community were
conceptual abstractions. There were no direct sense
referents for these abstractions, although all of us know
specific examples. We can go out into the social
world and find a individual “family” to study, but will an
individual family give us what we need in order to learn
of the general rules governing the coming into being of
all “families”?
In fact, our cultures have many collective representations
here, otherwise we would not have the words: family,
community and so forth.
So, ... if I was to follow Goethe, how would I do that,
since there was no sense-world analog to the abstractions
family or community, that was not made up of individual
human beings. I suppose this is a similar situation
to the relationship between a forest and its individual
trees. In fact, the processes of “forests” are today
beginning to be well understood, which suggest that we can
also study families and communities. That, of
course, is what regular social scientists in fact do.
Ordinarily, to do what I am trying to do, would require
that I become familiar with such as: Hobbs, Hume, Hegal,
Marx and so forth. I have read some of that, but was
stuck with something that otherwise was unsatisfactory in
following their examples. So that while my favorite
“social science” book is C. Wright Mills: The Sociological
Imagination, I had a different kind of experience of which
I had to take account. That next ...
Now we get to why “Spiritual”, and what aspect of my
experience is that which is meant to be the exact
referent.
Following an acute change in the nature of my
consciousness around Michaelmas 1971, I became someone
different from whom I had otherwise been previously in my
biography. In the beginning, I did not fully
appreciate this.
Nevertheless, I found myself with a very awake mind,
living in the social-cultural milieu of Berkeley
California, in the late 1960‘s through the 1970‘s.
Many discussions, lots of books, and along side politics
and social change, there was also personal spiritual
change being pursued. In that context, I started
having what today I would call: atavistic spiritual
experiences. The existence of a spiritual dimension
as real could not be doubted.
Around 1978 - seven years into the change, I was reading a
book by Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, when it
dawned on me that behind every theory of the
social-political lay an idea, sometimes intentionally
expressed, of the nature of the human being. Most of
these “ideas”, in the modern sense, saw the human being as
a material / physical being, forged out of billions
of years of chance evolution. I was unable to accept
this premise given my own “spiritual” experiences.
I then wrote in a notebook in which I recorded “ideas”,
something on the order of: If the human being is a
spiritual being, living in the world which at its
foundation is entirely spiritual, what is the significance
of that fact for our theories of the social / political
life of humanity? About three weeks later I began to
meet Rudolf Steiner through his books.
As I am currently re-reading Barfield’s Poetic Diction, I
have become even more acutely aware of the fact that one
effect of the invasion of Logical Positivism into the
minds and souls of human beings, has been the near
eradication of any sense of a spiritual explanation of
human social reality. The “duality” - mind and body,
attributed to Descartes, was seen as falsified. The
sociologist, the psychologist, the historian, the
philosopher, ... all basically succumb to the current
avalanche of thought that the human being is only matter,
and never spirit.
I had to find a way to develop a social science that did
not accept that error of thought. The means for
doing that I found in Steiner’s writings on the problem of
knowledge, particularly his: A Theory of Knowledge
Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception. Since I was
now working from a very specific idea of the nature of the
human being, integrating my work with the general trends
of social science became impossible - more and more so the
deeper the social sciences began to rely on statistics and
numbers, in order to try to illuminate the nature of the
human being.
I was traveling a path of introspection in order to
discover the inner truths of human nature, and there were
basically no peers in the outer would that came to my
attention. In the years since, I had hoped to find
peers in the Anthroposophical Society, and particularly in
the Social Science Section of the School of Spiritual
Science, but alas those folks were so involved with
Steiner’s social ideology, that they could not see the
true social-forest for the trees.
We were asking entirely different questions.
Uncritical believers in Steinerism were fascinated with
Steiner’s idealistic version of how a healthy social order
“should work”, and what could be done to bring those ideas
into social reality; while I was involved in the question
of how does the social world “actually work”, on its own,
for clearly the idea of threefolding was not present in
the social life of humanity, except as a kind of latent
potentiality slowly unfolding over time, yet never
noticed.
What are we to do? How do we take abstract thinking,
convert it to “exact sensorial phantasy”, and in this way
learn to read the “Book” of the Social-Political
World? Has anything appeared in the modern world
that can help one develop this kind of “exact” imaginative
discipline?
As done in many other circumstances, Steiner “pointed a
finger” (gave an “indication”). He urged upon us the
study of projective geometry. Thus, I found myself,
in my early years of working with this question of exact
sensorial phantasy of abstract ideas such as families and
communities, simultaneously studying projective
geometry. I wish I could take credit for doing this
consciously, but perhaps I was help to proceed in this
from other, less obvious, kinds of inspiration. In
any event, the two studies road side by side from several
years. Although, I was mostly involved with jobs and
family needs, and this work was a kind of avocation.
(June 2011) [originally published as an appendix to my
book "Manure for the Garden of Anthroposophy"
This is in part a report of an actual experience connected
with some inner work I engaged in with regard to the
social form: The Faust Branch in Fair Oaks California. The
Branch was getting ready to celebrate its 35th
Anniversary, and in preparation I did the following inner
work.
First, through conversation, I collected the history of
the Branch from a number of individuals, including going
all the way back through the day (in 1977 I believe) when
at a meeting of the Branch Carl Stegmann, the retired
Christian Community priest (one of the original priests
and the author numerous books, including The Other
America: the West in the Light of Spiritual Science),
stood up out of inspiration and indicted that a Center for
the Study of Anthroposophy should be formed in the Fair
Oaks area. His conception was that this should be an
organism of two parts: one directed at teaching the
fundamentals of Anthroposophy, and the other at doing
research on the spiritual history and meaning of America -
a kind of American Studies program done under the
inspiration of anthroposophical insights and practices.
Committees were set up to bring this about and various
personalities began to prepare themselves to participate.
One individual went so far as to take leave from his work
and family, and go to work with Francis Edmunds (in either
England or Scotland, for a year). Many lives began to
change as this proposal was being brought into
incarnation. Money had to be raised and land acquired, as
well as all the other aspects of creating a viable
cultural institution.
Seeking a leading personality for the anthroposophical
studies aspect, it was eventually worked out the Rene
Querido (a central European expert in Waldorf eduction)
and his American wife Merlyn were brought in to head this
anthroposophical study center. However, when the dust
settled something strange had happened. The American
studies aspect was left aside and the anthroposophical
studies program soon warped into a Waldorf teacher
training center, under the leadership of Rene Querido,
which was eventually named: Rudolf Steiner College.
The man who went to study with Francis Edmunds was
shattered when he returned to find this condition, and
eventually left the Society. A number of others, who were
drawn into the idea of working on research on the
spiritual America were also left high and dry. When I
arrived in Fair Oaks in about 1983, there was only a
remnant of the impulse to study America, gathered around
Carl Stegmann and called: the Emerson Study Group, which
produced Carl’s works, as well as 12 issues of a journal
that called itself: American in the Threefold World.
I wrote for the journal a number of early materials that
later became aspects of my own work, including the
original report on the relationship between anthroposophy
and the Hopi Prophecy, as well as a first attempt to
develop the idea of a Goetheanism of the social, which I
called at that time (1985): Listening to the World Song.
[This link will give a more mature (1999) version of my
thinking on this process of applying Goetheanism to the
social.
For the 35th anniversary meeting of the Faust Branch I
prepared by taking the stories of the history of the
Branch and recreating them in my imagination. I would sit
meditatively at my desk (altar) and slowly create pictures
of these events as best I could based on the oral
histories I had collected.
When I got to that aspect of the history related to the
strange dynamics involved in the formation of Rudolf
Steiner College, I experienced the gift of an Imagination
(a supersensible symbolic picture), which I will next
describe.
There were two main figures, one to the left and one to
the right. The left figure was in blue lines (these lines
were realized much like an artist would sketch the most
basic elements needed to picture that to which their art
was to refer), and the right figure was in red lines.
These lines were not exactly static, but contained a kind
of gesture of movement.
The left pictures showed Rene Querido somewhat rising up
in the air as if he was rotating slowly around. Included
with him were three seemingly adoring students who also
were rising in the air, but below him somewhat. All
figures were not on the ground.
The right figure pictured Carl Stegmann, sitting on a half
built stone or brick wall, somewhat in the form of Rodin’s
the Thinker. Around him, sitting or laying on the ground
were three others, surrounded by smaller suggestions of
half-built walls and weeds.
Simultaneously I experienced certain ideas in connection
with these pictures, and I have since this event continued
to study (call it forth), and think about the relevant
problems, such that my ideas as to its meaning have grown.
My present conclusions:
The fact that it was Rene and Carl was secondary, not
primary. It could have been any two European
anthroposophical personalities, with the three companions
of each, any three American personalities.
The point, as it were, of these pictures was to reveal the
effect of certain Earth forces, as described by Steiner,
that arise in the Americas in connection with the fact
that the mountains in the Americas run North-South, while
the mountains elsewhere in the world all run East-West.
These forces come from the kingdoms/spheres of the
Interior of the Earth, and are also related to what
Steiner called: sub-nature.
These forces influence the nature and structure of the
soul born in these geographic regions. Steiner in fact
tells us that the soul is formed in large part out of the
“geography” of where the birth takes place. We can make
too much of this if we think of this “geography” as solely
material/physical, but rather we have to think of it as
simultaneously ethereal, astral and egoistic. The soul is
formed in a “field” of intersecting activities of diverse
spiritual communities (see the Class Lessons for this).
Americans are born with a specific kind of soul density,
particularly connected to the double, such that we easily
exist in this more earthly “field”. This is why Steiner
describes the double in America as far stronger than the
double elsewhere. When Europeans come to America, this
field of earth forces, particular to this region of the
world, tends to push the European soul off the ground so
to speak. The astrality of the soul seeks a kind of
equilibrium with the general astrality of the place.
The Rene-like figure then represents this “European"
influence as is carried out within the American
Anthroposophical Society - it ungrounds the European, and
to the extent we try to imitate or emulate European soul
life, the American as well ungrounds himself (the other
three adoring off the ground figures in the left image).
The Carl-like figure represents what can happen when a
European permeates themselves with the love of America
before ever coming here (as Carl clearly showed to all who
knew him). This grounds them, although Carl is still
somewhat above as well, since he is depicted as sitting on
one of the walls. The sitting and lying on the ground
figures symbolize the natural state of Americans.
The half built structure is of course American Studies,
which has languished for almost all of the time
anthroposophy has been studied in America.
The colors represent: for blue (water) the life of
feeling, and for red (fire) the life of willing. The
European is more of an artist, and the American more of a
doer. More could be said, but I think this is enough hints
for someone who has troubled to read this far.
Introduction: 5.1.2 Projective
Geometry and the Ethereal Imagination
In linear Time, and in three dimensional Space, such as
appears on this page, the eye of the mind apprehends
experience within certain natural limits. When we create
a mental picture, or use the imagination, the field of
inner experience is not 3D, but Flat. It still takes
place in linear Time, but not in normal 3D space. The
space element of the mind, in its pure thought-creative
activity, is “flat”, like a geometric plane.
In a very exact sense, the picture creative activity of
the “I”, in the field of the mind (the inner eye”),
involves a “projection” of a content out of the will
forces of thought-creation onto what is our personal
locus of what in Projective Geometry is called: the
Plane at Infinity. True thinking is, in this sense then,
an ethereal act both in process and two-dimensional
fact.
Now were the reader of this to practice the drawing
disciplines in Olive Whicher's book: Projective
Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space and Time, the
ability of the rules of this geometry to create
three-dimensional appearing objects on the flat surface
of a page are learned. That this is possible helps
establish for us how it is that thinking transcends the
three-dimensional limits of Space, and arrives at the
remarkable potentials for three-dimensional-like objects
to appear in the “flat” mind space. This
“flatness” is not dead, but living.
At the same time, we learn to understand through direct
personal experience how what Steiner called the
“ethereal formative forces” - the “life” forces which
come from the periphery (i.e. the Plane at Infinity) are
able to “project” their forces into three-dimensional
space and form the living shapes of the objects which we
experience when we move through the three-dimensional
world of normal experience.
Keep in mind here that this apparent loss of a dimension
is not a diminution of our experience, but rather an
intensification, for this “flat” plane is one way in
which what we call “the threshold” to the spiritual
world is experienced by the mind’s eye (recall my report
above about the Imagination experienced involving the
two characters, one a drawn figure in blue, and the
other a drawn figure in red). As explained by
Steiner toward the end of the 5th Chapter of Occult
Science: “One who wholeheartedly pursues the train of
thought indicated in these books [A Theory of Knowledge
Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception, and The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity] is already in the
spiritual world; only it makes itself known to him as a
thought-world.” While the perception of concepts
and ideas is “flat” (at the threshold), the “what” that
is experienced is dynamic and living, and therefor
presents itself with an intensity that is richer
than ordinary visual sense experience.
To appreciate this a little better, perform the
following thought experiment: Imagine a perfect circle,
with a radius of one meter. Now imagine this circle
“spinning” free of the “flat” surface, and creating a
perfect sphere. As much as we might try, we cannot
imagine the three-dimensional sphere, but we can imagine
how to construct it, using the faculty of picture
thinking or the imagination.
Yes, we can have a kind of illusion of inner
three-dimensionality, but that arises because thinking
can shift its point of view (mentally walk around any
mental picture of an imagined physical object. All
the same, each separate “picture” during the “walk
around” remains “flat”. The 3D nature of the
mental picture or imagination appears because of the
carelessly noted habit, which we apply from sense
observation. In point of fact, in sense
observation were we not to have two eyes, the 3D aspect
would disappear. The mind’s eye is singular.
Now this circle/sphere construct has a radius line, as
noted, of one meter. If we contract that radius line
length to zero, the circle/sphere disappears, and only
the “idea” of a dimensionless point remains. If, on the
other hand, we increase the radius line, all the other
geometric aspect of the circle/sphere also increase. If
we take this radius line and make it infinite in length,
all the normal aspects of the circle/sphere increase,
except for the odd fact that the arc of a segment of the
curve of the circle/sphere becomes straighter and
straighter, until at infinity there is no curvature at
all.
If we place our “I”, imaginatively in the center of a
circle/sphere with an infinite radius, the outer
surface, with respect to our “I"'s point of view,
becomes an all surrounding Plane.
Yes, the habits of the normal mind has some difficulty
with this “imaginative” expansion of the radius line to
an infinite length, and the resulting transformation
from the circle/sphere to a Plane, but keep in mind that
no rules of geometry have been violated at all. The
underlying laws have been exactly and precisely
followed.
This means that all spheres occupy an intermediary place
in between a dimensionless point and the Plane at
Infinity. So, for example, when we look at the starry
field of the night sky we are looking at the left-behind
primal “space-penetrated” objects that arise projected
from the Plane at Infinity. When we look a field of wild
flowers in a high meadowland, we are seeing the most
earthly manifestations of the intersection of multiple
suctional forces (the forces from the Plane at Infinity
are levity forces, not gravity forces). The whole
periphery draws the living toward it as the “all-around”
Plane, and being as levity draws in all directions,
living form is essentially sculpted from multiple
gestures from the all-around periphery, which magically
remains a Plane. This is why plants overcome the
forces of earthly gravity and grow upward.
From this all surrounding Plane at Infinity, living
forces, via their suctional levity powers, give shape to
all the lives ... again: Steiner’s ethereal formative
forces. Working inward toward the
three-dimensional earth “sphere”, form/shape is
projected from the all-around Plane, under the guidance
of invisible Beings. Where the “seed” resides as a
point/gravity center, forces from the all-around, grow
the Plant world outward toward the
periphery. There is a relationship that can then
be noticed between Life and Light.
Light rays from the all-around periphery sculpt the
crystal with which we are so familiar. Because the
Plane at Infinity (the all-around periphery) is so rich
and unbounded (being infinite), the matter from which
the Plant, in all its variety of forms arises. The
Green-world is, after all, just one Being - the Plant -
that is able to be shaped into countless forms, which in
their turn become the locus/home of numberless elemental
beings, such a sprites and faeries.
“In It (the Word) was Life, and the Life was the Light
of the World” (the prologue to the John Gospel, verse:
1:4. From the light - which itself is not visible
- then arises color, such that Goethe tells us that
color comes from the deeds and suffering of light.
What then happens in the picture thinking - the
application of the imagination - in the ordinary human
mind?
A war breaks out between the warmth element (the Christ
Impulse), and the cold element (the abstract heartless
intellectual thinking), in the thought-creation process
as that arises in the application of these forces within
the “field” of cognition wherein “meaning” is invented
as a natural activity of the 10th Hierarchy, eventually
to become language and speech in the social realm of our
shared existence.
The fundamental cosmic power to create light
(illumination and meaning), from our own life (ethereal)
forces, manifests in thought. Our thinking
“colors” the world with self-generated “meaning”.
From Steiner: “Think on it: how the point becomes a
sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou
understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point,
and then come again, for then the Infinite will shine
forth for thee in the finite.”
For details regarding the stellar world: “The
Misconception of Cosmic Space As Appears In the Ideas of
Modern Astronomy - and as contained in the
understandably limited thinking embodied
in the conceptions of the nature of parallax and
redshift” go here:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/space.html
A question has been raised regarding the significance,
or not, of any kind of instinctive Goetheanism, and in
particular, as to the application of projective
geometry. I recently made a reference to the works
of Frank Herbert, the creator of the series of six
novels begun with the remarkable and quite unique:
Dune. I may have described him as a natural
goetheanist. Whether one wants to argue that doing
something in full consciousness is, or is not, of the
same virtue as something done instinctively, such a
question to my mind is at the least frivolous, if not
entirely irrelevant. All the same, here is an
indication of Steiner’s, as paraphrased by Olive Whicher
in her introduction to George Adams “Physical and
Ethereal Spaces”: “... the quality of thought prevailing
in the new geometry is in reality indispensable both to
the scientist in his quest of world-reality and to the
individual on a path of spiritual development, ...”.
All I can attest to is that at every juncture, the
disciplines of projective geometry enabled my mind to
remain exact and precise even in moments where the most
abstract social transformation observations required an
ability to become awake to the various living qualities
that permeate all changes in social forms over time.
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science (Part Six)
Were we to live in another Age, we might do without the
naive distinction between inner and outer. But
given our Age, that distinction is primary, and readers
would be very confused were we to ignore it, for most of
the words we use have this meaning latent within them.
Thus our Spiritual Social Science only advances if while
we seek to understand the arising and becoming of social
“forms” (or “outsides”), we as well seek a deeper
understanding of human insides - that is of
psychological processes. In that quest certain
goalposts are necessary.
We have these ideas from Steiner: thinking, feeling and
willing. From our general cultural understanding:
truth, beauty and goodness, or in the sense of social
“forms”: science, art, and religion. The
connecting links reveals this: with thinking we pursue
the truth, which uses reason to create science.
With feeling we pursue beauty, which uses the
imagination to create art. With willing we pursue
goodness, which uses devotion to create religion.
We can make an abstract system, using a vertical schema,
this way:
thinking,
truth,
reason,
science
feeling,
beauty,
imagination, art
willing,
goodness,
devotion,
religion
The middle, or heart of this schema is: feeling, beauty,
imagination and art. A Spiritual Social Science
will only truly be visible as a work of art, thus: The
Art of God: an actual theory of Everything [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html ], which
seeks merely and humbly to describe the form structures
which the Divine Mystery has created in manifesting the
social-spiritual world of human beings; individuals,
families, communities, nations, peoples, languages,
cultures, paradigms, religious Ways, scientific
practices, modes of art, biographies, histories, and
even lies, fictions, crimes, emotions ... nothing is
left out, for the World is Whole, and all parts
relate to all other parts.
During my Berkeley years, before even meeting Steiner, I
saw: That the conceptions by which we emphasized “outer”
events and history, as being of great meaning, was a
false conception. God did not see the world the
way which we human beings saw it, and as He had touched
me the first time shortly after my incarnation, it was
not surprising that His touch left me capable of seeing
Him as loving each individual more than He loved “outer”
events, and history. The meaning, which Love and
Justice begat, was for individuals. All the same
it was to take me almost three decades to see how the
details of the Creation accomplished this action, which
was, when properly understood, the most beautiful work
of art in existence. How could the Creation be
otherwise?
This Art was so profound that It took account of any
manner of confusion we as individuals might impose upon
its “meaning”. There were no right answers,
nor even any right Ways. The “What-Is” was, is and
will always be, inclusive of all the varieties of the
acts of any single i-AM - the verb that lives, and
is in fact immortal.
The Perfect World took full account of all the
imperfections we could throw in our own or each others
Ways.
For me, a practical question remained, and was more or
less as previously stated. If there was to be a
“Spiritual” Social Science, what was its point or
purpose? As a pragmatic America, what could I do
with it?
Somehow or other, we billions seek progress. We’d
like better lives, or freedom from disease, or less
people in prison, fewer wars, less suffering, and above
all: more love. A “Spiritual” Social Science then
seeks to add to human knowledge whatever it can that
aids our progressive development, as individuals, or as
groups. while at the same time recognizing that the
human being is not just matter, but spirit as
well.
For the longest time I believed that my efforts, in this
regard, ought to find a home within the Anthroposophical
Society. Being vainly stubborn, as well as a
professional fool, I have yet to give up on that so very
romantic goal. While writing these bits of thought
on these Facebook pages, I have to confess that the
evidence is growing that I am not the only romantic
still in love with the works of Rudolf Steiner.
With that in mind, let us proceed.
Introduction 6.1.1: A Fantasy?
There were six of them – movers and shakers of the
American Anthroposophical Society. All Americans, except
one of them had spent so much time in Europe, that she
was only a ghost of her former American-self. She was
quitting the Executive, and this group was to discuss
who should replace her and how that was to be decided.
In that room was a seventh person, not sitting at the
table, just moving a broom around and doing some last
minute cleaning up. As the six settled down, with their
coffees and teas, and biodynamic fruits and muffins, the
older, fat, bald, and bearded worker pulled up a chair
and sat down with them. They starred, startled and
speechless.
“I won't take up much of your time, I just have a
message for you from that spirit you formerly knew as
Rudolf Steiner.”
There started to be some disagreeable mumbling, but the
stranger raised a hand very gently and this quieted
them. He began once more ….
“Michael needs your help. There are great changes
coming, and he would like to make a contribution. The
problem is that you are not paying attention – not at
all.
“This is America, not Europe. A very different place.
The reality is that the Society has a “product” it can
sell, which is a very American way of offering spiritual
wisdom. Right now what you do is eat your own resources,
by always seeking gift money, something more and more in
short supply. You can’t run a European-like
Society in America - it will fail.
“Just about everything you do follows the dead paths of
tradition – you do it because you did it before, and
Europe did it before, which is a horrible Way to do
anything at all. So you have the same people doing the
same things over and over again, - always expecting a
different result, something even Einstein described as
madness.
“You literally need new blood. People who are not on the
inside of things, but rather are on the outsides, on the
edges. Essentially you need to purge the American
Anthroposophical Society of all its European confusions.
You need someone who does not speak German, and who has
never been to Dornach. You need a revolution and a
declaration of independence from the European past. That
past has far too many ghosts. To much death, and hardly
any life at all.
“I recommend you replace Dr. Sease with me. A very
simple act, which among other virtues is so startling
that it will wake everyone up. A serious shock to the
whole system of dead and useless habits and
traditions. Another virtue of this, is that
because we live - we who live in the present instead of
the past - we have electronic means for
communication. I can fulfill my role as a member
of the Executive, and never leave my home. I have
no desire, for example, to run around the world giving
lectures. What local people think is far more
important thoughts than anyone from Dornach or the
Councils in America could ever think.
“My qualifications are many. In your system of approach
to the spiritual - which is not the only or even the
best approach, I am an Initiate, having meet the Lesser
and Greater Guardians. I am also a disciple of Christ -
one of the originals in point of fact, as is evidenced
by all of my writings and spiritual research on
Christianity, including the discovery of a Second
Eucharist in the Ethereal, that has accompanied the
Return of Christ in the Ethereal. As well, I am a
bodhisattva – well versed in Buddhism and its
relationship to both Anthroposophy and Christianity. I
am also a wizard and a fool, two disciplines one needs
to have in order to remain human in spite of being
cursed with great gifts of the spirit. And last, but
certainly not least, I am a Shaman, something essential
to appreciate because in the Americas a relationship to
the world of the ancestors, the rock people, the green
world, the four-legged and the winged, is essential if
one is to live with and within the Earth Spirit fully.
“No member of the Society, or of the School of Spiritual
Science is as qualified as I am. This all with the
further virtue that I was trained in all the above
disciplines by the Spiritual World itself – I am It's
gift to you, even tho' flawed and human, and goofy as
well. We don't need someone who we want to imagine is as
perfect as Steiner wasn't, and Prokofieff wasn’t
either. Cults of personality have no place in
modern esotericism.
“I've been through “the Narrow Gate” and I know how to
show others the Way there as well.
“In addition, I know how to make money and thereby how
to free our work from the endless demands for more and
more gift money. I understand the social and the
political life of modern societies to a depth you cannot
imagine, trapped as you are in Steiner's Threefold
Social Order ideology. I know about the Double, and the
Mystery of Evil, the ignorance of which is a grave
impediment for the future development of
Anthroposophical Medicine.
The social world needs all kinds of knowledge that are
far beyond what Steiner already gave. The
spiritual world didn’t shut up when Steiner died.
Why would they?
“A social tsunami rushes towards us, and I am the soft
fore-wind that warns and guides, those who are ready to
ride the vast wave of change from which the Third
Millennium is to be born. And, best of all, I have the
beautiful personality of an old and cranky curmudgeon,
who everyone will want to hate, but for those few that
know this is the thing the Society most needs, I am well
trained in how to give the members and friends a swift
kick in the ass. Rent and watch the movie “12
O’clock High”, if you want to understand the needed
approach to a sleepy and out of touch and uninspired
social group, which the American Anthroposophical
Society certain is. Michael needs real courage and
risk taking, not the safe and superficial hiding behind
the words of the Great Initiate, that has become the
dark and dank cave or our shared arrogant ignorance.”
The old man then stood, and told the whole dumbfounded
group: “We – all seven of us - are the right people in
the right place at the right time. All of which shows
that the Gods have a very weird sense of humor”.
With that, parting shot, he turned and left the room.
---------------------------------------------------------------
end of fantasy?
For some very practical ideas and context, about subtle
changes in the A. Society, that can gain much and do not
need the permission of Dornach to inaugurate, go here:
Anarchy, Social Chaos, and Revolutionary Transformation,
within and about the Anthroposophical Society
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/schoolmoney.html
The real power in the Society is on the periphery, not
in the Centers - but in the Branches and the Study
groups, right where it should be, and exactly where
Steiner placed it when he wrote: The Life, Nature, and
the Cultivation of Anthroposophy.
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science (Part
Seven)
Let us return to social forms - to the outsides of the
social.
We shall begin first with a diagram - something at once
simple, yet based upon a quite real and extraordinary
complexity. These are some of the basic “laws”
underlying the creation of social forms. It will
help the reader to conceive of these “names” as
processes in movement, with simultaneous upward and
downward gestures, following the rhythmic nature of the
lemniscate.
There are nine lines, with single words each. It
is a “stack” of three threefoldnesses, “inside” of which
are more. For example, there is this
connectedness: HEAVEN - SOCIAL FORM - EARTH, which is
itself a threefoldedness. In between HEAVEN and
SOCIAL FORM, there is the threefoldness: upward
into Being - the ideal - downward into living
incarnation. While this structure is “lawful” -
that is it represents a kind of order or organization,
all the same behind/within each process is a community
of spiritual beings. It is thinking/cognizing
which perceives the relationships, which relationships
are themselves not in fact representative of
“separation”.
HEAVEN
upward into Being
the ideal
downward into living incarnation
SOCIAL FORM
upward toward rigidity
an ideology
downward toward disorder
EARTH
Social Form arises from a combination of ideology and
the ideal as that is lived out through the individual
human being in his collective social structures -
family, clubs, churches, communities, nation states,
peoples and so forth. Both the ideal and the
ideological are necessary. For example, ideology
is at its most ideal when embodied in the Law, while the
ideal is most ideological in codes of moral conduct
(such as the Ten Commandments).
Too much ideology makes social form excessively rigid
and leads to too much order. This then leads
to the paralysis and eventual death of the living
element of the individual social form within the total
ecology of the social organism. The rise and fall
of Russian Communism is an example of this type of
excess. Too much of the ideal keeps the
social form from being fully incarnated, a fate that
befalls all utopian social schemes, even such as
Steiner’s threefolding of the social organism.
Keep in mind that the arising of “social form” is an
indirect consequence of other activities. The
primary activity is Christ’s Love of the individual, and
the care then that needs to be given to each individual
biography. The nine “terms” are fields of
inter-related processes, which sing together in a kind
of natural harmony. We’ve given here an abstract
representation of that which in reality is living and in
constant movement. Thinking perceives the effects
first, and then via reflection finds secondarily what
stands behind them.
Introduction 7.1.1 Darkness and the Life of the Small
If I, as a part of the grand ant-mind, go on a long
journey, perhaps taking one whole cycle of the warm
light, I will crawl and climb and go around many bones
of the world I have not yet sensed as smells.
Having little weight, I may even use a fallen leaf as a
bridge over a tiny stream of living water. Here
and there will be the messages left by my brothers and
sisters, in the language of the fathers. Some
pungent with danger, others sweet with hints of
food. At right moments I will join in communion,
the wonderment of talking with the reaching touching
parts, brushing moments of joy in not being alone.
Scent as song. Holy rhymes to the sacred silent
reigns of light.
But ... sometimes ... there be giants. We too are
food, and what a gift to be nourishment for
others. The hardest light of all some of our story
tellers call: “thoughts”. The greatest giants, who
do not even honor us as food, but simple crush and
destroy, unmake the most beautiful leaf bridges or the
greatest poems of the once living bones, the gifts that
fall in the winds from great heights, where the living
earth has touched the sky, and some of our cousins - the
winged angels rest for a time, while the flutter-bys,
make wind songs themselves of the heavens so far
above.
I saw a star once, it rode a leaf in a long slow spiral
down and down, then waited while we drank some life from
its cup, and told a tale with words too strange to
remember, but whose sound was the thunder of the dark
storm that remakes worlds and floods the birthing
chambers, making tunnels in our castles built so
carefully and cautiously against just that power over
which not one of us could ever be safe.
The tale the star told was terrifying ... of giants that
rode giants, and never minding where they stepped, left
destruction everywhere. But what was worse than
this, the star told us, was the heavy thoughts, so dense
and solid that there was nothing they could not break,
nor any reign of light they could not erase no matter
what flutter-by had written its death song across the
brilliant cascade of light and song that made the ballet
of moving wind so precious that even the Creator
trembled in wonder and delight.
Memories awoke then, of my earliest times as a birthing
grub, tiny and blind, only touching but not yet
scent-seeing, - a tale so terrible, that told that the
giants that rode the other giants, were in fact the
Creator’s children, playing in ignorance of all the life
and self-awareness that seated itself in every tiny
thing and in every tiny place.
Giant children that dreamed that the night’s peoples
were places to go, and wonders to seek, not even
noticing how much more delight could be found in what
lived in the worlds and universes that were where we
sang the holy songs with flutter-bys, and knew all
the secret dark caves where the smallest of the small,
the dancing lights wove from nothing but the heart-songs
of the Creator’s Mother, all that was and ever would be.
There was no color without these song-poems of the reign
of light, and we of the ant-mind were the privileged
builders that throughout the seasons, while dancing to
wind’s symphonies, worked tirelessly to see that when
the winter came every seed and stone had found its
rightful place for the long pure rest and holy sleep
from which life itself was reborn every
Spring.
7.1.2: In the worlds where Steiner never existed.
To we-moderns, who might have some memories of the 23rd
Century, there was that vague lost science of physical
archeology. For most, who played with the vanity
of remembering the forgotten, there was the tender art
of astral archeology. Few of we-moderns worried
much, for the latest art was more fun, involved no
remembering of the physical or the astral, but only the
joy of past-invention - the joy of making up the
what-might-have-been, without any need for arguments and
the like - for such as history or even
myths. Far easier for we-moderns to decide
the past to be what we liked the past to be, and leave
the present then free of such weights to our freedom.
The Arch-Collective, who enjoyed much the thrust of
forgetting anything remotely ancient, went so far as to
play at burning-books, and tempesting tombs, but only
when young. Things were found, and collected and
displayed for parties ending up in the trash..
Word players especially liked to un-invent, to un-find,
to ruin remembering. Those weighty matters that
might make us less free once-upon-a-time were then
during the mind-wars of the 25th Century destroyed, and
unraveled. So much delight in taking-apart, and
then throwing the broken pieces of memories no longer
wanted up into the air, so as to watch them fall - a
chaos giving birth to whatever past-pasts we wished had
been.
Some of we-moderns found an old place one once, high in
mountains whose names had disappeared, where broken
stones were piled and then unpiled and then repiled and
then reptiled. As we let our children play at the
mind-art of moving stones by thought alone, one made a
name from bits of stone: Inerest it was, and sadness
broke the holding of the stone and it fell on the child
who had made it, spilling blood and flesh until the
Mender came and took those parts of broken child, from
which to fashion another, lesser somehow, but free of
sadness and the terror of memories that had haunted that
place.
After we left, the Foregettings came and cleaned that
place of Hauntings, so that no-child would ever again be
broken there, or have their mind captured and imprisoned
in some past-pasts.
A deepness was called forth, and those ever-so-few of
we-moderns, decided to unremember the name of times of
past-pasts, so eventually numbers died and there was no
more a 23rd or a 25th Century. Only
now-nows, dreamed into birth from made-up
past-pasts.
With the lost of even the names for time, we-moderns
became so free, so unweighted, so light, that birth
itself was forgotten, and each child was given their own
cave of broken stone, while mountains were torn down,
and seas made into mists such that not even the name of
colors would darken the joy of aloneness, while all
wishes became true the instant they were thought.
Once-in-a-while the what-is itself dissolved and even
the greatest of haunts, who had been called Gods in some
past-pasts, wept for they held to memories the
longest. Words faded last. No need for even
speech. All was not, and even the never-was
consumed itself such that only ash remained, for a
brief-brief. Not even mind, and the last thought
was dust to something, but no one could remember or even
care as the nameless will-o-wisps blew through a
universe of never-wases and neverwheres. Gone, and
forgotten.
Introduction: 7.1.3: Anthroposophical Bullshit
Pretty much everything that is thought and then written
in anthroposophical media, whether books, or newsletters
like “being human” or “Anthroposophy World-wide”, is
most likely to be anthroposophical bullshit (AB for
short). This come about mainly because the Society
lost its original connection to the concept of how one
practices a “science”. Even natural scientific
publications have a lot of bullshit in them, for the
problem is systemic in modern culture.
Science, properly understood, involves a discipline
through which one seeks to find the “truth”. Not
“The Truth", but rather something more ordinary and
plain, i.e. that which is factual and which can be
verified by another following the same methodology.
In regular science the principle protections against
regular scientific b.s. is what is called “peer review”,
and verifiable or repeatable experiments. At
typical way to recognize scientific b.s. is that the
general public becomes aware of it through a press
conference, which in order of time is not preceded by
either peer review or experimental replication. A
fantastic breakthrough is announced and then later the
arguments against this appear in small publications,
which never obtain the same “publicity” status as the
original press conference. A good example is “cold
fusion”, which had a lot of press, but then faded from
view although once in a while someone tries to suggest
they have an experiment that suggests the “theory” of
cold fusion still might be viable.
Another recent example of scientific b.s. was the
announcement that the higgs-boson (the “god”
particle) was observed during super-collider experiments
in Cerne. That too has now faded from the popular
press scene, which would have happened right in the
beginning if the press had bothered to actually read the
scientific articles, instead of just the press releases.
In the case of Anthroposophical Bullshit (AB), we have
something a bit different, although slightly similar to
scientific b.s. It is not so much that AB begins
with a press conference as such, but rather that
anthroposophical media publishes the articles simply
because the author is a member of the current in-group,
on some level or another. There is not even an
attempt at peer review before or after
publication. The AB is just published, and if it
manages to quote Steiner with sufficient suggested
“authority”, that’s the only truth value the article has
to have. Since Steiner is treated has having never
made any mistakes, to quote him is to stand upon what is
presumed to be god-like knowledge of spiritual facts, to
which we have added the appellation: “science”, as if
the use of that term placed the work in question in the
same realm as regular offerings in various fields of
natural science.
Steiner is in effect a dead infallible Pope on all
matters spiritual, and woe to the person that suggests
otherwise.
The most recent and egregious case of AB has been the
elevation to spiritual scientific sainthood of the
personality Sergei O. Prokofieff. A dead
infallible Saint, whose interpretive writings regarding
a dead infallible Pope, now sits astride the world view
of anthroposophists, and once again, woe to anyone with
the temerity to suggest otherwise.
Were any such similar set of circumstances to arise in
any field of natural science, the whole community of
scientists would make the author of such suggestions a
laughing stock on a scale seldom seen these
days. Even P. T. Barnum would easily find
that his comment that there is a sucker born every
minute applies to most members and friends of the
Anthroposophical Society.
Now this does not mean we are stupid, or otherwise
lacking in moral integrity. The problem is much
simpler, and for that reason all the more tragic.
Steiner’s early books on the problem of knowledge (GA-2;
GA-3; and, GA-4) should have settled the matter easily,
but they are not studied, and even those who see the
flaws hidden in them in plain sight, are too timid to
stand up to the tide of blind acceptance - a kind of
faith in a religion that has to be called: Steinerism,
and which has nothing whatsoever to do with science.
Myself, I am basically of the view that this situation
is the result of the yet unresolved karma between
the Aristotelians and the Platonists, pointed to by
Steiner in the karma lectures nearly a century
ago. If you took a Platonist such as myself, and
put me on a stage with an Aristotelian such as Peter
Selg, I would be able to reduce him tears in about a
half hour or so, not because I know more than he does,
but because I know less, and I am therefor able to ask
far better questions than does he, precisely due to the
fact that my ignorance is more carefully constructed and
my knowledge more exactly defined as against any
opinions, assumptions or theories lurking within and
around my more general views of matters spiritual.
The total content of any mind is often vast, and
frequently assembled in an undisciplined fashion by an
Aristotelian, while for a Platonist the single idea or
concept is so adored that it cannot be placed just
anywhere where its meaning is anything less than
precises and exactly harmoniously integrated into the
whole, in the same way Mozart insisted be true of every
single note he set down on a page.
For the final arbiter of the good or the true is neither
one or the other, but simply beauty. There is to
the Platonist a quality of moral aesthetic before which
all other considerations are in vain. God is,
quite factually, in the details, not a single one of
which is out of place.
Introduction 7.1.4: The Serenity Prayer, and
Social-Political Realism
Think ... for a moment, of the state of medicine 100,
200, 300 years ago. Factually we are still far from the
truths about health and illness ... closer, yes, but
still far away.
Partially this is due to the fact that the social
component, that is how families and schools and grocery
stores and television advertising effect appetite and
consumption, and how the need for greed effects food
production and how far our climate science is from its
laudable goals.
If you know something of Steiner's contributions here,
you will also realize how far was is our culture are
from creating social institutions that support good
nutrition, healthy exercise, stressless work
environments, and all other kinds of ways in which
health and illness defy our efforts to fix what we know
to be wrong. The grip of scientific materialism is
relentless, and stands in the way of almost all efforts
for progress regarding questions of health.
Now, transfer that level of complexity to what makes the
political and social life of humanity function in any
kind of healthy or balanced way. Our ignorance is huge,
and our ability to cooperate almost not at all apparent.
Then throw into the mix the idea of karma, or the
questions of morality. The very idea there are any
easy solutions is simply a near fatal fantasy. To
believe idealistic solutions exist is a kind of madness.
The fundamental question is not even seldom asked.
We have plenty of ideologies of how the social-political
world ought to work, but no real science of how it does
in fact work.
Anthroposophists, who ought to be well trained in arts
of thinking, don’t seem to even have their feet on the
ground. There are people doing important work, but
most of them have never heard of Steiner, and if they
saw what people who follow Steiner do socially, they
might just run the other way.
Do I argue for despair? Of course not. But I
do argue for
realism.
The main virtue for realism is that we end up a bit
where the addict has to go when he prays: “God, grant me
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The
courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to
know the difference.”
A perfect social-political world is not in the
cards. Something much more workable is, but we do
have to admit for starters we need a true “spiritual”
social science, rather then just a lot of empty and
sentimental platitudes about how if only this or that
person would change what they do, matters would get a
lot better.
The only thing we can do is change ourselves. “the
Political Anthroposophist, and Social Michaelic Courage”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/politicalanthroposophist.html
Introduction 7.1.5: Questions every single practicing
spiritual scientist needs to be able to ask
themselves, and to answer with full honesty.
There is no correct or right answer, except the one
that is honest, which only we ourselves may judge.
One of the differences between Platonists and
Aristotelians is to what degree, and in what Way,
are they aware of certain questions, which are the
fundamental questions regarding knowledge in the
scientific age. These questions are behind all
that Rudolf Steiner did, in that he wrote in his youth
these three books: GA-2: “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit
In Goethe’s World Conception” (1886); GA-3: “Truth and
Science” (1892 - his dissertation); and, GA-4 “The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” (1894). It is
not precisely these particular questions either, that
are crucial. It could be a variety of similar
questions. The central, or essential, matter
remains the same, however we arrive at it. These
particular questions are just one approach to the same
riddle.
1) Do I know everything?
2) If I don’t know everything, am I capable of learning
more?
3) Is it possible that when I learn something I didn’t
know before, that this will cause me to change my views
about that which I believed before that I knew?
Each of the above questions has as its center the
question of what is knowing and what is knowledge.
So another way to ask the first three questions is:
4) What is knowing?
5) What is knowledge?
Then:
6) Can I learn knowledge from someone else, or must
knowledge be some aspect of my own direct experience?
To help illuminate the underlying question here,
consider that I am looking at a house that is painted
white, on all the sides that I can directly see for
myself. (The idea-source for this careful way of
“seeing” and “judging” is from Robert Heinlein’s book:
“Stranger in a Strange Land” - 1961)
7) Am I justified in saying to another person that the
side of the house I cannot see is also white?
Now suppose someone I trust tells me the other side of
the house is also painted white.
8) Can I, on the basis of that secondary, but not direct
experience, tell someone else that the other side of the
house is white? Or,
9) Am I required to admit to the person I am speaking
to, that while to my personal direct experience the
house is white on all the sides of the house I do see, I
only know indirectly - through a secondary or
derivative source - that the side of the house I cannot
see is also white?
We have now wandered into the territory of the
difference between direct and inferred (or derivative)
experience.
In addition to this riddle, matters change when I use
the terms thought and thinking instead of knowledge and
knowing. The changes are subtle, but not
unimportant. This then leads us to:
10) Can I gain actual knowledge from reading a book
(about a house I will never myself see, ever)?
In order to appreciate this question we have to have
some kind of understanding of the role of thinking and
thought in the act of reading, which is why then the
riddle of the relationships between knowledge and
thought, and knowing and thinking, become crucial.
Again, as a sub-riddle inside the others: (10.1) Can I
answer that kind of question from reading a book, or
must I - especially in this instance, rely entirely on
my own direct experience?
Question #10 is also related to our problem of direct
and derivative knowing. If we assume the writer of
the book knows whereof they speak (such as they know the
house is white on the side, which I cannot myself see),
we have one kind of problem. If we don’t know
whether the writer knows the color of the side of the
house I cannot see, we have a different kind of a
problem, especially if they claim to know its color.
In both cases we actually don’t know the color on the
side of the house we cannot see. In the first case
we assume the person who is telling us the color on the
side of the house we can see is correct - an assumption
for which there is no justification. In the second
case, we know we don’t know, and at the least that fact
(our ignorance) can be communicated.
This whole situation changes when I speak to someone
else, and try to tell them what the color is on the side
of the house I cannot myself see, based upon what has
been reported to me in a book, or even verbally by a
trusted friend.
Now in the field of natural science, these problems are
not uncommon. What is worse, is when the question
of the color of the unseen side of the house becomes a
matter of competing theories, because no one actually
sees that side of the house at all. And that is
not the end of the ways which the logical and knowledge
problems become more complex, because sometimes what can
happen (and actually happens a lot), is that even though
we use the same words, we often don’t mean, by those
same words, the same thing.
Now if the reader of this believes I am sneaking up on
the questions that result from the fact that in
anthroposophical circles, a whole lot of what people
talk about comes from the fact that the main person that
is used to tell us the color of the side of the house we
can’t ourselves see is Rudolf Steiner, please be assured
I am not in anyway sneaking up on this question at
all. Rather, I am going at it quite directly.
Most of the dialogues in anthroposophical publications
consists of the uses of language and meanings that are
derived from the observations of one human being, and
which are treated as if they are unquestionably
true. To use a somewhat ugly, but nonetheless
quite apt metaphor, the underlying logical riddles
multiply like long-lived maggots on the body of someone
who has been dead for some time.
None of this is intended to suggest that there is
anything wrong with advice given by Steiner in
agriculture, medicine, education and similar areas were
verifiable results are found with ease. That is
not what is at issue. What is at issue is the
details of the world view that the spiritual history of
mankind has taken a certain course, and that we, who are
modern, are justified in assuming that these courses: a)
happened the way he said; and b) will go forward into
the future in such a way that reliance on his
“indications” is beyond question.
It is that attitude, that is found everywhere, that
represents the principle problem. Not because
others are not committed to a trust of all things
Steiner, but because Steiner himself, in his works on
the problem of knowledge made it very clear that: a) he
was not to be considered an authority; and, b) that
reliable knowledge obtained through thinking required
certain types of inner disciplines.
The mere quoting of Rudolf Steiner is never justified by
anything he himself provided. In fact, we can find
him saying such things as: That the world more needs
materialists that think, than it needs anthroposophists
who do not. It is the turning of Steiner’s lecture
materials into matters of absolute faith and belief that
destroys the effects Steiner hoped for Anthroposophy to
have on the future of human culture. He even gave
us a name for this gross and irreparable flaw: the
intellectualization of the Cosmic Michaelic
Intelligence.
By giving over to the raw intellect (the realm of
Ahriman - the Lord of Lies), the teachings of the new
wisdom as a “system” of beliefs, we have already lost
the battle Steiner wanted to avoid that was crucial to
the whole development of the Third Millennium. We
need thinkers, not believers. And, right now this
is the last issue the leaderships in Dornach, or the
Councils in America, are willing to face, in large part
because the culture of the Anthroposophical Society
lives in complete denial that this question has any
meaning at all. Yet, it is the central riddle
posed by Steiner in his youth, and remains the most
important question anyone who wants to work with
Steiner’s thought must master.
To return to where we began:
1) Do I know everything?
2) If I don’t know everything, am I capable of learning
more?
3) Is it possible that when I learn something I didn’t
know before, that this will cause me to change my views
about that which I believed before that I knew?
Now imagine asking these three questions of the
neuroscientist Sam Harris - to which like all of us he
must (if honest) reply “no” to the first, and “yes" to
the second and third), and then ask him to explain what
“consciousness” is. Since that is the principle
riddle in the field of study in which Harris appears to
be a recognized expert, and is as well a question very
much unanswered in the field (dozens of theories), you
might now recognize the problem involved in pretending
to knowledge one does not in fact possess. In
fact, in this time of Ahriman’s near total control over
the intellect, this is a normal feature of humanity’s
life of soul.
Next, rephrase that series of questions to someone such
as Peter Selg, and ask him to explain what supersensible
cognition is - i.e. how do we know that the color of the
side of the house we can’t see is, but which Rudolf
Steiner assures us he can? (a field in which Selg seems
to pretend to be a recognized expert). If we do
that, then the same dilemma faced by Sam Harris
arises. Our level of genuine ignorance is huge,
and to pretend otherwise is simply to lie. When I
wrote recently about Anthroposophical Bullshit, this was
that to which I was referring.
Right now, for the members of friends of the
Anthroposophical Society, the main lies are the ones we
tell ourselves. Something rather common throughout
the human world - few people willingly recognize the
limits of their own knowledge and tend to be in love
with their opinions above all else. We -
anthroposophists - are nowhere near ready to speak of
these matters to the rest of the world. In fact,
one of the greatest gifts we can give to the world is
the confession of our ignorance. We actually
possess fairly good questions, were to we learn to stop
pretending otherwise. A good question is of far
greater value than any vague collection of unjustifiable
beliefs, regardless of how often Rudolf Steiner
expressed them as an aid to our understanding of
reality. Reread the introductory material to
Theosophy and Occult Science: an Outline, and there you
will discover how careful Steiner was to distinguish the
qualitative nature of understanding as a completely
separate riddle from the problem of knowledge.
In point of fact, properly disciplined the capacity of
anthroposophical thinking is quite capable of
taking scientific materialism entirely off of the table
of modern rational inquiry. An anthroposophist,
with a well trained and discipline thinking, is quite
able to insist that science completely reconsider the
assumption that there is only matter, and, as a
consequence, no spirit. In that sense the
philosophical errors of the 19th Century have been
eliminated. The only problem remains
that far too many alleged followers of Rudolf
Steiner have merely substituted one set of beliefs for
another. Anthroposophy has been, by them, reduced
to a vain Steinerism, and if that condition continues,
Ahriman has won.
This then is the central battlefield at the Dawn of the
Third Millennium: Between the instinct to lie, which
belongs to the raw untamed and cold egotism the the
intellect, and that warm and empathic humility that
arises when the Christ Impulses faces the riddle of
knowledge with self-honesty, knowing just how ignorant
we truly are. People will be surprised just how
much freedom there lives in that humble truth of
authentic ignorance. Here abides in glory the real
meaning of: “the truth will set you free.”. Being
able to say “I don’t know” is probably the second most
important phrase, after “I love you”, a human being can
ever learn to speak.
Both sets of word are emotionally dangerous, because we
become so utterly vulnerable when we say them.
Rudolf Steiner might have done us a greater service had
he lectured less, and learned to say both of those
phrases far more often than he did. At the same
time, he was, after all, an Aristotelian by karma and by
necessity - surrounded by other Aristotelians, all of
them living in a culture whose main language assumptions
were themselves rooted in generations of Aristotelian
thought.
At the time of Chartres (around 1000 A.D.), when the
Aristotelians incarnated and the Platonists left, the
whole work of the Aristotelians was set on a course to
develop, through the great dialogues of the Scholastics,
all the crucial language distinctions upon which the Age
of Natural Science (which began around 1400 A.D.) was
later to be built. Read Owen Barfield for help in
“understanding” this, should it not otherwise be
obvious.
That world was at its Aristotelian heights in the 19th
Century, when Rudolf Steiner incarnated and began, with
great wisdom and delicacy, to unravel the confusion of
materialism, and set the world once more on the right
track to the truth, in a way where even the higher
worlds, as represented by the Anthroposophical Movement,
Christ, and the Holy Mother, were all of the same
Thought, that human freedom to choose what to think was
to remain inviolate. The “I” was now
enthroned in the Kingdom of the Mind.
Introduction: 7.1.6 Mood swings ...
my mood, since Christmas Day afternoon, has been a bit
“edgy”, and I would not be surprised if it effected some
of what I wrote in those items listed as Introduction:
7.1.3; 7.1.4; and, 7.1.5. On the early afternoon
of Christmas Day I found myself leaning over my girl
friend’s mother’s body, trying to perform CPR, while she
lay in her wonderful lounge chair in her sitting room,
dying - turning blue actually, while the 911 guy tried
to walk me through it as we waited for the EMT’s to
arrive (that only took them about 3 or 4 minutes).
But by the time they got there she did not have a heart
beat, nor was she breathing. We couldn’t find the
DNR, although we did find the document that let Linda
make decisions, so she had to tell them whether or not
to use the paddles or intubate her, a rough decision to
have to make, but the two of them (Marion and Linda) had
talked many times, so after about two or three minutes
of discussion Marion was pronounced dead at about 4:30
Christmas Day afternoon. She was 96 years old, and
I had known her since 2008, when I first met Linda and
started dating her.
As we prepared over the next days for the wake, the
internment and the funeral, I asked Marion is I should
speak, and she told me not to. In this, as if
life, she was wise, so I ended up not going to any of
these “events” (I would have not been able to speak),
but was able to write the following which was read at
Marion’s funeral on Tuesday, the 30th of December.
What was read follows. Yes, it is personal, but
fuck it, I need to share it here, because I know I have
some friends here as well ... it goes like this:
“some thoughts on my dear friend Marion ...
Sometimes I am very slow to notice things ... in this
case, that I had fallen in love with Linda’s
mother. Nothing in my life had prepared me for
even such a possibility, our culture is so fixated on
sex, and that it often does not notice love at all ...
but there I was, and she was getting ready to pass, and
I was in love with her, and hardly knew how to tell her
at all just how deeply she had touched my soul ...
when we put her in the car to take her to ReHab, I
kissed her on the forehead on impulse, and of course she
had no idea what I meant, nor did I have any words with
which to tell her ...
love is like that sometimes, so delicate in form and
nature that we cannot but be clumsy in every attempt to
express our feelings ... I’m trying to make up for that
now, for I know she will hear what is being read here,
and of course is now even better able to see into my
heart ...
to say she was a saint is both a truism, and completely
misleading ... lots of folks are saints, and even at the
same time sinners, and Marion was all of that and more
... we played cards, her favorite game (she beat us all
just about every time) was called: “may I”. Linda
and the girls can explain it later if you want ...
It was during these card games that I discovered that,
when she wished, she could swear - as we say - like a
sailor ...
she was many things for all of us, but for me she was
especially someone I would have to call a “spiritual
teacher”. She never preached or offered advice,
she just was, and what she was mostly calm and quiet and
gentle and kind and I don’t think I ever once saw her
put her own needs in front of someone else’s. If
that doesn’t make for a saint, I don’t know what else
might be needed.
one last secret, which I observed and most did not ... I
think she put off dying for months, for the simple
purpose of making sure that Linda and Jessica (and
others to a lesser degree), could try everything
possible to keep her alive and pain free and
happy. Her own pain and suffering was less
important to her, than was the fact that when she did
finally let go, her caregivers would feel no
self-recrimination - would not feel they had not tried
everything possible.
So she waited and endured, and finally when all avenues
had been exhausted, she let the Lord take her, because
that was the final gift she had to give ... that those
who cared for her would feel they had tried all that
could be tried.
I talk to her now on occasion - it is a delicate art to
listen quietly enough to hear the recently crossed
over. Marco, the family dog, knows when she is
about the house for he seems to bark at nothing, and as
well seems to know there is a smell in the room that
belongs to her ... we were all talking about her a day
or so ago, and an ornament fell from the tree, at which
point Marco jumped off the couch and went running around
the room, nose leading the way as he tried to find
her. These days he also can be heard, in her
sitting room, moaning a cry of such longing and pain
that you can’t but feel he too misses that mistress of
his life that it was his duty to love and guard and
serve.”
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science (Part
Eight)
The Wall. In his book “Speaker’s Meaning”, Owen
Barfield called the Wall: taboos.
Decades ago, and with a kind of gentle humility I tried
to get my early works published, in Anthroposophical
Society publications. I didn’t push myself on
people. I thought, if I just did the work,
the work would have value, and be seen as
contributing. So I did the work.
Because I was a member of the Emerson study group around
Carl Stegmann in Fair Oaks, California, in the early to
mid-‘80‘s, I was published in that study group’s
journal: America in the Threefold World.
Only 600 copies per issue would be produced, and
there were only ever 12 issues altogether. It was
read more in Germany than in America, because of who
Carl was - one of the original Christian Community
priests, who had moved to America - to California -
after he retired from the priesthood at the age of
70. It was there that my first efforts to share my
work appeared: “Listening the World Song”. I was
just leaning how to “read” the phenomena of the
social-political world, but in Listening to the World
Song I was able to present the idea of seeking to know
how the social world actually worked, and what might be
the needed disciplines, which thinking required in order
to perceive.
When the Threefold Review first appeared in the early
‘90‘s. I sent in an article: “Threshold Problems in
Thinking the Threefold Social Order.” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thpts.html
1991] It was ignored, although several years
later, in the book “The Future is Now: Anthroposophy at
the New Millennium [1999]”, an article by Terry
Boardman: “The Idea of the Threefold Society at the Dawn
of the Third Millennium”, made positive mention of my
article, because by that time I had my own website, so a
Google search would discover it. Otherwise that
article has remained mostly ignored.
In 1992, at a meeting of the Social Science Section in
Ghent NY, a friend had advised me that to get published
one had to become political, ... that is go to many
conferences, and form relationships. But I was
poor, and in my own idealism I still maintained that the
work had value, and should be recognized for that
value. I believed, like a natural American
romantic, that the Anthroposophical Society was a
spiritual association of free thinking
individuals. I was wrong. A more apt
description of the Society is that it is very much like
an academic department at a University, with all the
political craziness that thrives in such a competitive
social environment. Its subject may be the works of an
obscure philosopher, and few Universities even today
would accept this as an official “department”. But
still, the Society serves that function, however badly
or well one wants to presume.
In 1995, I wrote a five-part article (writing it in five
parts was intentional so as to make it possible to fit
something quite long into five separate issues of the
then Anthroposophical Newsletter in America): “Waking
the Sleeping Giant: the mission of Anthroposophy in
America” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/wkslg.html
]. It too was ignored, although I was able in that
article to take the time to elaborate in more detail the
state of my research work into the living nature of the
social organism.
What happens when the Wall presents itself, according to
Barfield, is that when thoughts are presented in a
community that are at odds with a prevailing, or
dominating, paradigm, most thinkers - already living in
the prevailing paradigm - can’t go to the new. To
go to the new is taboo, and puts at risk their own
position in their community. This is why
biologists, who find indications of spiritual activity
in their research, can’t quite take that final step in
thought and actually come out and say it (witness the
work of Rupert Sheldrake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
).
In my case the Wall was the assumption that all thinking
on the social had to conform with what Steiner had
already indicated.
So after a time, I just wrote articles and books on my
studies of the Way the social world actually worked, and
had to accept that those for whom I was writing - my
fellow thinkers in the Social Science Section - they
could not hear it, because of the Wall. I was able
to place material on my website, and self publish
on-demand books, but that would have to satisfy
me. What I needed, and most hungered for, was
critical dialogue. I knew my work was suffering
some kind of loss, due to isolation, but without
critical exchanges, my thinking would certainly lack
something.
Yet, when I self-published my “American Anthroposophy”
in 2008, there was a bit of grace, such that a review of
that book (by William Bento) was written and published
in the Evolving News for Members in the Summer-Fall 2009
issue, along with a small paper of mine on how the
Western in American culture plays the same role as the
myths did centuries ago in Greece. Here is a link
to both the book review, and the article as a PDF
document: [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/JWendt-review-article.pdf
]
All the same, the Wall is there. It is real.
It kept me out, but like all Walls it was also a prison
for them - for those who maintained the Wall. The
existence of the Wall is an important factual phenomena
for understanding the course of ideas as they travel in
the Social Organism. Again, read Barfield’s
“Speaker’s Meaning”, where he speaks of taboos, rather
than as I do - of the Wall. The Anthroposophical
Society has its own Walls, as do any large social forms,
such as the Catholic Church, or the Republican
Party. Walls that keep out, while at the same time
making, for the Wall-builders, a prison.
In LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed”, the Wall is discussed in
many places, and from a variety of points of view.
Her book is a bit idealistic, in that her main character
is able to finish his isolated and solitary work
anyway. Only time will tell if that is to be true
for me as well.
I know from direct experience, that my work is supported
by the spiritual community Steiner called: “the
Anthroposophical Movement”. Their cooperation is a
fact of my inner life. I could not continue it
otherwise - the Wall would have defeated me
psychologically. Their support is part of why this
sequence of articles arises, called: “Introduction to a
Spiritual Social Science”. When I think and write,
I am not alone inwardly - their “presence” is
unequivocal, and all the more remarkable because this
support is offered freely, and in a fashion where I
remain free as well. I practice what Tomberg
called: “learning to think on your knees”, with the
consequence that I experience at the same time what
Steiner called: “it thinks in me.”.
Between myself, and the Anthroposophical Movement, there
is no Wall; but rather a large set of French doors that
remain open daily, in all weather, and through which
light and fresh air blow into and through my soul on a
regular basis, in accord with the natural rhythm of all
the Seasons of the Year.
Some of these breezes are remarkable, such as this that
came unbidden one day a few months ago: “Albert: in
Fugue”, a short-short story:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Albertinfugue.html
Read it. You will be glad you did.
Introduction 8.1.23, divided by infinity: Yes, I did
loose my mind but when looking for it, Grandma helped
me make a serious and life changing attitude
adjustment ....
In the dark of the night, when your back hurts (level
11.5 on a scale of 1 to 10), and you are waiting for the
drugs (acetaminophen and oxycodone) to kick in, and
after the battery-is-empty-alarm has gone off on the
smoke detector, and you can't pry the damn thing of
the wall, yet the only thing that works is a prayer to
your recently deceased girl friend's mother who does
manage to make the alarm behave and shut up (thank
heaven for ghosts who like you), its probably not a good
idea to take out your credit card and go to
Amazon.com looking to see what Peter Hamilton,
William Gibson, and Richard Morgan have been up to.
I think Amazon is renting an extra truck just to deliver
what I bought. But then it is 15 degrees outside,
although last night it was - 10, but who's counting. My
well developed Jedi weather sense did tell me yesterday
that when you get February cold snaps in early January,
that Spring will come early this year, because while we
can fuck up the weather while its trying to do a major
climate change, the Seasons are resistance to extreme
fluctuations, which means that while a February
cold-snap in early January can only signal an early
Spring, its not a good predictor of the March snow falls
that will precede that Spring, except in the sense that
the Loki-Weather spirits are really likely to do the
"yes we can make it snow three feet every 7 or 8 days
throughout March and into April first, dance."
Meanwhile, the weirdness factor has jumped up, and while
I do enjoy having 175 Facebook friends, I maybe should
reconsider adding just anyone who asks, because for 10
days now I've been getting e-mails from people who
invite me to join in e-mail arguments over subjects so
obscure that the latest guy informed me that the NSA and
aliens were blocking all his e-mails, so he warned me
that even though he badly needed me to reply, I might
not get through.
This is true, and yes funny. The worst thing of all is
yesterday I started watching Fox Noise, because I
realize that what they were really up to was a whole new
level of comedy. Given the general state of the world,
and with Bill Mayre having falling off the edge of the
every Muslim is a mad terrorist cliff, and yes, Jon
Stewart is getting even funnier, but we are losing
Stephen Colbert to main stream television, so somebody
had to step into the breach and increase the level of
absurdity, - well thank our lucky stars, Fox stepped
right up. I know it seems a bit odd, but you know these
weird diagrams that look one way, until you internally
shift your point of view, I've discovered that with Fox
all you have to do is realize they so jealous of The
Daily Show, but so scared of the ratings that are
disappearing, that all you have to do is watch them and
imagine them wearing clown makeup, and I kid you not,
they are better than some of those mushrooms I used to
eat in the '70's.
Just for fun I sent a little prayer out to Rudolf
Steiner, asking about him and humor, and he replied
instantly that WTF did I think all those books and
lectures were about. His hardest job when incarnated was
keeping a straight face, not because what he said wasn't
true, for it certainly was, but people were so serious
about everything.
Part of his job was to get us to be so excessively
serious about the state of reality, that eventually we'd
get it that this was the Age of Everyone has a Stick up
their Ass. Had to happen, so the Gods just brought us
all to the same party, just so the resulting disaster
would happen and maybe we might get over ourselves. We
could even start getting back to what every little kid
knows, which is that existence is the most fun and
coolest thing ever, so stop being so serious about it
all, and go make some mud pies, after which just lay
back in the sun and realize God made the world for
pleasure, and it was well past time to get over it - it
being that whatever shit that sticks in our craw and
makes us think we have to go out and fix something.
I started to argue about rape and war and child abuse
and all that and he said for sure there are a lot if
dick heads around right now, but they will get their's
in the afterlife ... God's Justice is pretty awesome
when you get down to it. Wilie E. Coyote never does
catch the Road Runner, because when that time finally
comes, he'll discover its himself he's been chasing all
over creation since forever.
Plus, think about this ... quadzillions of sunsets, not
one of them ever wasted. Same with people, stick up
their asses and all. Want to know what happens after the
Day of Judgment? We spend the rest of Eternity watching
each others reruns. Never gets boring, ever.
Introduction 8.1.33 A more overt transition to the
practical arts.
A lot, so far, has been theoretical and was rooted in a
need to develop not only certain language conventions,
but also to explore what might be called the “story”
telling, or “tale” telling aspects. A newspaper
reporter, or a news reader on TV, basically tells a
“story”, and this is often how the matter is
represented. So we get stories about medical
issues, or crime stories, or political activities,
sometimes mixed in with lighter bits, - a kind of search
for “good news” to go with all the sad news and the
tragedies.
Modern Media has a certain style, and is also (these
days) divided into many different forms. We have
the big TV readers who tell their major world shaking
(sometimes actually historical) stories for a half hour
in the evening, and then the local news TV readers who
tell the local stories and the weather and sports, and
sometimes have hours more time than the major network
news readers.
Then you have the Cable networks, with their attempts at
a 24 hour news cycle, mostly created after Ted Turner
created CNN. Along side all this is radio, which
often finds a certain amount of traction through the
personalities of the news reader or the
“announcer”. Most of this is driven by the need to
sell advertising, for without the revenue there would be
hardly anymore “news” at all. Somewhere along the
line this kind of media content began to be called:
“infotainment”.
70 years ago New York City might have had a dozen print
newspapers, most of them producing a morning and and
evening edition, and then in some instances a “halt the
presses” special edition. Then came TV, finally the
arrival of the Internet, and now with what is called
social media, there has been a kind of fracturing
process. A lot of different takes on individual
stories, and a lot of different audiences. We, for
example, have the fascinating fact that a large number
of young people get their “news” from Jon Stewart’s The
Daily Show, which is a comedy half-hour on Cable TV four
days a week. Contrast this with the fact that Fox News,
which has really let itself become an advocate of a
certain political propaganda-like point of view, more
than a teller of stories perhaps related to the truth,
... this Fox News is not only slowly loosing audience,
but most of its actual audience is older people.
In a sense, there are so many “sources” of news stories
that the individual taking a look at the news can
pre-select a point of view he already likes and tends to
believe. We live in a world where the “truth”, if
there is a “truth”, has a hard time becoming
known. Rather the various kinds of media are so
diverse that it is possible to live in a “news”
environment from which we actually receive no news
stories at all - just some kind of mirror imagine of our
own biases.
Yes, everyone might know that several men invaded a
media business in France and killed a lot of
people a few days ago. All the same, what that
means, or what the “true” details are, would be
difficult to find.
For example, when George W. Bush won the American
presidential election in the year 2000, with the help of
a curiously lawless Supreme Court judgment, fraud and
outright violence was applied by the Republican Party in
Florida, that State which became the focus of all the
various legal questions regarding the validity of Bush’s
election. The tragic matter was that media in the
United States never really investigated the details and
it was an English journalist’s book that later exposed
just how unlawful and criminally that election had been
achieved.
http://www.amazon.com/Live-Armed-Madhouse-Press-Audio/dp/190485964X/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1420852575&sr=8-8&keywords=Greg+Palast
So, we have two problems. One is that the news is
not a very good source of knowledge about the world,
except in the most superficial sense such as perhaps
what are the main trends in what stories are dominating
the news cycle any particular day.. That other
problem is that because of this ineffectual observation
of modern events, it is almost impossible to understand
their larger meaning though watching the news. We
are encouraged to enjoy our own opinions, and easily can
find “news” sources that cater to every personal
prejudice and whim.
Rudolf Steiner tried to help our thinking overcome this
media fun house mirror show by speaking and writing of
what he called “symptomatology”, with his basic material
on this art presented in the lecture cycle: From Symptom
to Reality on Modern History. Unfortunately,
it is my experience that this art is not well practice
in anthroposophical circles, in large part because of
the tendency of those who practice it to take as factual
almost anything Steiner said, and then include that
material in building up the “stories” they tell about
current history and events. Among those who have worked
successfully with Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom,
this can be called the problem of the “pre-thought
thought”.
We can approach any object of thought with the
truth-sense of the soul already disabled.
The most common defect has to do with the problems of
antipathy and sympathy, where we uncritically accept our
instinctive feeling of liking or not liking the object
of thought. The second defect/weakness, while not
so difficult is similar in nature, yet requires that we
love the object of thought. Love in this sense is
not sympathy, but an actual internal mental action by
which we seek to identify with the subject, which can
include such as the various villains given to us by
modern news media: murderers, criminal bankers, corrupt
politicians and so forth. To develop this love of the
object of thought is the attempt to perfect what Christ
meant when he said “Judge not.”: “You hypocrite, first
take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will
see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s
eye.”
The third, and most obvious defect, if we are willing to
notice it, - is the “plank” The “plank” exists
usually because of either an excess of sympathy or
antipathy and an absence of love, such that we already
believe we know what can be known. This
semi-conscious assumption is the “pre-thought thought”,
which haunts the soul like a ghost. We then see
the ghost, not the world.
Now, we have then traveled a bit of a journey to reach
this point in the Introduction. In the next Parts
our work will endeavor to look at ongoing events, in
America, and in the Anthroposophical Society, and see if
we can “read” them (appreciation their “symptoms” and
meanings) with the help of some of the principles
already learned, including the utility of an appropriate
measure of self-generated whimsy and the absurd.
There is a lot to life that is just plain funny, and
learning to laugh at ourselves is the first step in
seeing the world with the clarity that comes from:
“Judge not.”
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science (Part
Nine)
Service. As a practicing scientist of the social,
there were occasional opportunities to apply this
growing understanding, which included a real time
ability to “see” the social aspects of our
existence. A doctor notes a phenomena on the skin,
and couples that with some additional facts, and makes a
diagnosis - suggesting a course of treatment. My
discipline was creating a capacity for healing social
dysfunction, in many places including the
Anthroposophical Society.
I was often around Waldorf School communities, having
young children of my own in the ‘90‘s (my second
family). One day, while riding in a car with
another Waldorf parent, I spoke of some of the ways I
saw our particular school, and this individual
urged me to write an article about my understanding and
its application in practice. This led to my
writing: “The Social-Spiritual Organism of a Waldorf
School Community” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ssows.html
].
In doing this task, I first found myself drawing certain
distinctions between what I was to call:
Macro-threefolding and Micro-threefolding.
Steiner’s basic social ideas were not useless, they were
just asking a different kind of question, and did
provide a vocabulary that could be of service.
In Macro-threefolding, the concepts of the three spheres
(Cultural Life, Rights Life, and Economic Life) did
provide a direction to move toward with respect to large
scale social forms. In Micro-threefolding, the
related social forms were much smaller in scale, and I
found it necessary to think of “processes” and
“functions” rather than “abstract categories”. It
wasn’t so much that a certain activity belonged in the
cultural sphere, but rather that the activity revealed a
kind of related dynamic and living social process.
I had been fortunate to be a parent in the Pine Hill
Waldorf School, when following a serious crisis, the
social life of the School spontaneously
“threefolded”. As that community,
particularly the teachers, tried to deal with the
crisis, they kept applying, in an abstract fashion,
Steiner’s concepts, which in effect blinded them to the
real observable dynamics that arose in the school, when
in addition to the Board of Trustees and the College of
Teachers, there was, seemingly out of nothing, generated
a purely parent body, called there: the Friends of
Waldorf Education. These three functional social
organs / processes in the School solved the
crisis-problem, but traditional thinking ended up
defeating the natural micro-threefolding that had for a
time blessed this community.
The article arose from these experiences, and I offered
it to Renewal, which is a parent-oriented Waldorf
publication in America. It was refused, in large
part because it suggested that for there to be social
health in a Waldorf School, the parents needed their own
separate and functionally living organ in order to fully
contribute. Details can be found in the article.
Sometime later in my biography, it came to my attention
that there was a kind of stress related tension in
Waldorf in America, between those schools who treated
the Waldorf pedagogy as an ideological system to be
applied to education, and those schools, who were
particularly modeling their social form in the Charter
school format, in order to bring to children “adapted”
versions of the pedagogy. These were
contrary impulses, and I worked out how to provide a
mutual understanding and resolution of the
conflict. This too I offered to the magazine
Renewal, but once more met the Wall. “Waldorf Charter
Schools in America: some social observations:” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/wcsma.html
] While the editor of Renewal liked my article,
the Board of Trustees did not.
During discussion with the College of Teachers at Pine
Hill, for example, a rather peculiar event
happened. The School brought an outside expert to
help mediate the situation. I was a parent
at Pine Hill at that time, and because of that I was
also one of the editors of a parent sponsored little
magazine. The outside expert (I believe his name
was Michael Spence) took it upon himself to see to
interviewing various members of the School Community and
I was recommended by some members to be one of those he
interviewed. He and I spoke for about two hours,
and while I had not yet written my article on the
Social-Spiritual Organism of a Waldorf School Community,
my basic thinking had developed many of the ideas later
in that article more concisely formulated.
At the end of our conversation, this gentleman said to
me that the School Community was lucky to have me as a
member given the depth insights on the social issues I
was then able to describe. So, at his
recommendation, I was subsequently interviewed by the
College of Teachers, and was there able to offer my
thoughts on how the social situation could be
healed.
Unfortunately, Waldorf Teachers, to my experience,
easily consider themselves as experts in various fields,
because I suspect that part of their development as
class room teachers require they educate themselves on a
wide variety of subjects - at least superficially.
So when I made an effort to speak to the phenomenal
expression of threefolding in Pine Hill, I was basically
told I could not be right because abstract cause and
effect thinking, using Steiner’s threefolding ideas,
already knew the parents role in the school was in the
“economic sphere”. If effect, this presumed
knowledge of Steiner’s threefolding ideas, served as a
kind of ghost in the mind of the College of Teachers,
such as they already knew the answer, and while they
thanked me for offering my suggestions, since I
“violated” their preconceptions (my terms), what I had
to offer, with its discussions of functional
micro-threefolding, was irrelevant.
This was one of my first experiences in meeting the Wall
in practice, in a situation where it was inconceivable
that an individual could become something like a
“doctor” of the social, since Steiner never said that,
although all his work on the spiritual sciences in his
book “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World
Conception” clearly implied that such sciences not only
would, but in fact needed, to come into existence.
This encounter with the Wall has continued to this day,
even though I have been a member of the Social Science
Section for a couple of decades now. It is simply
inconceivable to those working in the Social Science
Section to consider the possibility that their personal
expertise in understanding Steiner’s social threefolding
ideas, in an abstract way, could, would, and should
be
supplanted with a more living form of Goetheanistic
cognition, - one that experienced directly the nature of
social phenomena free of the ghost-like pre-thought
thoughts the reading of Steiner produces in a mind that
believes it needs go no further than learn to quote
Steiner endlessly.
As a beginning practicing Platonist, I was, to the
Aristotelians running the College of Teachers at Pine
Hill, someone who could not possible teach them anything
of importance they didn’t already know. This
remains true with the Anthroposophical Society as well,
for in spite of all the various problems of recent
times, that someone might even exist whose appreciation
of the Social was more expertly developed is an
impossibility. You cannot tell
anything new to someone whose mind is already made up.
In spite of the Wall, I have continue to do research,
and below is a partial list of relevant materials
developed by a Platonist on social questions regarding
the future of the Anthroposophical Society, in order of
latest first. Just keep in mind that the
iconoclast, a kind of Socrates among the Philistine
Aristotelians of our modern Athens, Dornach, is
traditionally asked to commit suicide, so that the
authorities do not have to face his/her vital
contrariness. The use of the Wall is as effective
as suicide, or even murder, since the effect is to hide
uncomfortable ideas, and control the access of regular
members and friends to material with which the so-called
“leading personalities”, concerning which, like all good
politicians, they would not like to be asked questions.
1) “Anarchy, Social Chaos, and Revolutionary
Transformation, within and about the Anthroposophical
Society” A look at some contemporary goings on in the
Anthroposophical Society, from a critical and humorous
point of view.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/schoolmoney.html
2) “the Anthroposophical Society, Money, and a very
necessary spiritual Revolution” some radical ideas
about the Society, its relationship to money, and how to
foster needed change.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/moneyrevolution.html
3) “The Potential Mission of the Anthroposophical
Society in the Early Centuries of the Third Millennium
the understanding of this Potential Mission is
intimately connected to first fully understanding: the
Culmination*”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Culmination.html
4) “Letters to some Friends” a collection of e-mail
letters to a few members and friends of the
Anthroposophical Society, from a confessing Platonist
about the Aristotelian thinking-limits dominating the
Society.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/lettersfriends.html
5) “Zen Anthroposophy” What happens if we modify
the practice of Anthroposophy with the simplicity and
precision of a Zen-like attitude of mind.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ZenA.html
6) “parallel thinking” individuality and social
questions in thinking about the Anthroposohical Society.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/parallelthinking.html
7) “Campaign Tour: Notes for my Campaign to run for the
office of General Secretary of the Anthroposophical
Society in America”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/campaigntour.html
8) “American Anthroposophy” {an effort to extend further
the work of Rudolf Steiner, albeit within the context of
a different characteristic (American) soul-life, than
the European soul-life he mostly taught}
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/AmericanAnthroposophy.html
9) “Manure* for the Garden of Anthroposophy: A small
flower box of seemingly pungent essays,
creatively preparing for the future evolution of the
Anthroposophical Society, at the beginning of the Third
Millennium”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Manure.html
10) “subversive pamphlet” (created for the 2012 Ann
Arbor Conference):
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/conf2012research.html
11) “A Challenge to Dornach and the Councils in America”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Challenge.html
12) “The Conscious Death, and the Resurrection, of the
General Anthroposophical Society”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/gaslife.html
The total collection of essays can be found here:
“Freely Thought Anthroposophy”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/anthroposophy.html
(many of these are more positive or informative, and
include critical book reviews of the works of others;
... while a printed collection of older essays can be
found here: “Dangerous Anthroposophy”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/DangerousAnthroposophy.html
Introduction: 9.1.1: I believe, after Grandma*
reminded me of how much I was - in a lot of cases with
regards to my various criticisms (see links above) of
the Anthroposophical Society - myself a guy with a
stick up my ass, that it was time to find a
precise question that could begin a train of
thought, which might led then to the right conclusion
and its nefarious relatives. [*Hereinafter “Grandma”
refers to my girl friend’s mother, who passed on
Christmas Day, 2014, and who my friendly
anthroposophical nemesis, Liz MacKensize {
http://www.christianesotericist.talktalk.net/
} described as singing in the afterlife the words to the
song: “If I had a hammer, ... “ now that she is no
longer trapped in a physical body]
While sitting on the toilet (an appropriate place for
thinking about “sticks up the ass”, yes?), I began to
wonder: Did or does God have or has He had a stick
up His ass? If not, how did we get one? If
He did, or does, what evidence do we have of that, and
the only limitation I set for myself in trying to answer
that question here was that I could not use a Steiner
quote, unless I first could establish clearly not only
whether Steiner had one, but what evidence for that do
we have. Also, what about his girl
friends? So many fun questions and so little time.
I Googled “a stick up his ass” and came up with these
“relatives” from the Urban Dictionary: anal, anal
retentive, fussy, meticulous, stiff, and stuck up.
Now I fancy that there might be a few folks that never
exhibit such qualities of soul, but I also have to
confess that at times I certainly have done so. I
also think the very image itself has something to offer,
if we imagine someone trying to walk or move (or even
run) with such a rigid object (probably long) in such a
private place.
Recently I was sharing in a casual conversation with my
primary care physician that it may have been Hegel
(I could be wrong) whose view of the five stages of the
history of civilizations ended with this characteristic
stage: Bureaucracy. Anyone familiar with the
movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from the
book of the same name by Douglas Adams, may be familiar
with the creatures therein called: Vogons. Viewing
that film will give you a pretty good idea of what it
means for there to be a whole race of aliens all with
sticks were the sun doesn’t shine - the perfect
bureaucrats for the whole universe.
Vogons make you stand in long lines, only to find out
that the form you need can only be found in that line
over there, as long as you’ve got the right requesting
form from that building down the street.
We Christians do have the image of St. Peter at the
Gates of Heaven looking at a book which may contain
reasons for which you would be barred from entry.
God did apparently give us rules carved in Stone, and I
suspect that Rudolf Steiner committed a forest full of
trees worth to books with rules about how the Creation
is supposed to work and what we have to do to be
initiated into seership. The Lesser Guardian of
the Threshold does, in some descriptions, seem to be a
creature well up on every single bad or awful things
we’ve ever done.
Bureaucratically speaking, is there anyone in class who
has any further questions? The test will be posted
15 minutes before class time, and you will be required
to memorize it as there will be not only be no copies of
the test provided in the class room, but no pens or
papers as well. Writing answers on the walls in
blood is preferable to the use of feces. A stick
has been provided as the appropriate instrument for
writing, and everyone should know precisely were to find
their own.
Typing answers on a keyboard to be posted on Facebook is
okay, but only if you wear a blindfold. Quoting
Steiner will be accepted, but only so long as you get
the quote exactly correct, including the page number and
date of publication of the text to which you will be
referring, including some original German - at least one
term in each sentence. Crayons will be
provided, as well as colored chalk, but only for those
with a certificate from an accredited Waldorf School.
Thanks for not taking offense, for none was intended.
Introduction 9.1.2 4 a.m. stomach pain.
I get up to drink some water and take some drugs. Check
Facebook. Notifications points me to something I wrote
in April of 2013, and people are still commenting on
that thread in Jan. of 2015. Time Warp. Facebook
indicates there have been 127 comments. Some people are
still doing “likes” of the original post from almost two
years ago.
Stomach hurts worse.
Facebook forums are types of social forms. They collect
people like “tar baby”, a character from the Uncle Remus
Stories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar-Baby
A Facebook forum allows for a certain safe interpersonal
distance. Posts, while not anonymous, don’t tend to meet
each other in real time. Its a bit like the United
States Senate, which is open 24/7 to allow members to
come give speeches about anything, as if the Senate was
filled with people that are actually listening. This is
probably the reason there are so few physical
altercations in the Senate these days, and certainly
cause for less violence in a Facebook forum (assuming
words can’t hurt)
.
What is it that motivates people to talk to an empty
room? The TV camera is there in the Senate, and in the
case of the Facebook forum, that written material and
related art are also “recorded”. So in the Senate and on
the Facebook forum it isn’t really relevant whether
anyone is listening in real time at all.
It is probably not an insignificant fact that the first
reader of the Facebook post is the writer of the post.
He or she is looking in a mirror and wondering: Are my
thoughts being offered here as important as I believe
them to be, such that I’m now recording them for
posterity?
Then there is my personal (Joel A. Wendt) website. More
communications I get to read first, and which then are
searched by Google etc. So recently a woman who knows my
girl friend was trying to find her e-mail or snail mail
address, and knowing my name (as the boy-friend) did a
google search on me and discovered this
auto-biographical material from more than 10 years ago:
http://ipwebdev.com/campaign/biogy23x23.html
Have the ego forces of human beings created their own
imitation of the Akashic record in the electronic
aethers? Years ago people used to keep diaries. Some of
these collections of thoughts and memories extended to
several volumes.
I don’t own a cell phone except for emergencies, so I
can’t take a “selfie”. My kids take pictures of the food
they are about to eat while dinning out. I read a recent
article that a restaurant that was loosing money, yet
seemed even more popular (always full) did some research
and discovered patrons were staying twice as long at
their tables playing with cell phones instead of eating
and having conversation. Not only that, there was a
serious uptick in complaints about the service and
delays, clearly due to (they hired a company to make
digital videos of what was going on so as to discover
this) people not taking responsibility for ordering
late, and for filling up the dinning experience time
with this electronic in your pocket Senate-like personal
Tar-Baby.
This has been a capsule social observation brought to
you by my stomach ache. No thanks are necessary.
Introduction: 9.1.3 Big Questions, such as “clashes
of civilizations”.
So, there’s this geographic place - the middle-East,
which over the period of a couple of thousand years gave
birth to three patriarchal monotheistic religions (the
Hebrews, the Christians and the Muslims).
Looked at historically, in a living way, we have a kind
of war between the older Goddess religions, that ruled
in many places, and efforts by men to become free of
what was to them a certain kind of domination.
Most of what St. Paul wrote is based in this effort to
assert the patriarchal over the older matriarchal,
whether he knew it consciously or not.
We live in an age where the arid intellect dominates
most thinking - we can call it the age of the Ahrimanic
Enchantment if we want. Everywhere there exists
instinctive resistance to Ahriman’s rule over our
consciousness - our soul life. In the
Anthroposophical Society Steiner hoped for us to be more
awake to these issues, but the needed meeting between
the Aristotelians and the Platonists is still proceeding
at a snails pace.
The idea of there being a “clash of civilizations” is
one of those arid intellectual products, as is the
concept of the war on terror. Recently I ran into
some wisdom, that came mostly from the novelist Salmam
Rushdie in a discussion on the Bill Maher show on
HBO. Mr Rushdie pointed out that there was no war
between Islam and the West at all, but rather a big
unfinished war within Islam itself - something going on
for hundreds of years. Isis etc. are just bit
players in this struggle and few of them even are
educated enough to perceive the wider questions.
I suppose its their version of our wars between
Protestants and Catholics, which produced (and still
does in some places) enormous collateral damage
everywhere in the world.
These apparent conflicts between “religions” then give
rise to all manner of silliness about what religion is
and why we get to blame religion for all the wars in
recent history. Again, the roots of this silliness
is found in domination of the intellect by its own
forces, without appreciating how to get the heart
involved. Christ left clues all over the place,
such that the novelist Kurt Vonnegut has said that the
deepest and most important religious text ever produced
is The Sermon on the Mount.
Rushdie and Vonnegut might suggest to us that we would
do well not to pay attention to either academics,
politicians, scientists or religious authorities if we
want to understand the world
better. No accident then that Steiner went
for the “poet” Goethe; that Owen Barfield was friends
with the “novelists” J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis;
and, a lot of American’s like William Gibson, who just
published a new “novel”: The Peripheral.
The “imagination” has powers yet to be fully recognized,
but for sure one them includes the taming of Mr.
A. For those who think science fiction and
fantasy are luciferic (and lacking intellectual rigor),
lets not forget that Steiner said that the cure for Mr.
A. was Mr. L.
American Phoenix:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/joel-wendt/american-phoenix/paperback/product-21565198.html
at the cost of printing the book on-line, or if you
want to go for a free look see:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/amphx.html
on my website.
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science
9.1.4: Media Games:
Forty years ago, when there was a Coup in South America,
or Africa, one of the first acts of the so-called
“rebels” was to take over the radio stations and the
newspapers. This is one of those facts which
Goethe called: “an instance worth a thousand”. By
this Goethe meant that the natural world revealed some
of its deep nature in the occasional single action, if
we were careful enough as thinkers and observers to
notice the importance of that particular
situation. The World Spoke, and all we had to do
was listen.
This centrality of Media remains even more true today,
although it is all a bit more complicated since Media
itself has fractured and become nearly
individualized. Young people may spend a lot of
time glued to the tar-baby selfie phone, and find all
kind of distractions that keep them from having no clue
as to what is going on in the wider world, unless like
in Ferguson or Paris the events are so inflamed that it
becomes impossible to at least not know they took place.
When ISIS announced itself, it revealed a great deal of
sophistication with certain aspects of social media, and
seems to be recruiting all manner of people who for one
reason or another have been marginalized by their own
society, and are now looking for some payback.
The Age of Information has spawned a new kind of war
zone, one in which most people have no idea how easily
they are being manipulated by false information.
In the run up to the Iraq war #2, the Bush II White
House even had a special room in the Pentagon where a
small group micro-managed media output in order to
create not only a desire for war in the wrong place
(Iraq instead of Afghanistan), but sufficient
disinformation that major media agreed that to oppose
either war was the equivalent of treason.
Then the powers behind the scene created a fake anthrax
attack on Congress which immediately rolled over,
exposed its throat like a good dog, and then passed the
Patriot Act, at over 300 pages, without ever reading
one. If any of this is news to you, you can
be pretty sure you are absorbing a lot of information
without making any effort at all at discernment.
Rudolf Steiner did not even begin to answer all
questions that needed answers, from a spiritual
scientific point of view, and here we are 15 years into
the Third Millennium and the Anthroposophical Society
still doesn’t know how or why to pay attention to
Media. We still print books for god’s sake.
All kinds of people have given up on the A. Society, or
simply think of it as a place were basically nice people
do mostly well intended actions, rooted primarily in
Steiner-said. What the world needs is not in books
by Rudolf Steiner, and the Spiritual World is pretty
busy shouting at us through daily enraged events, in
response to which the best that seems to happen in these
Anthroposophical Facebook Forums is a shrug followed by
a quote from someone who is supposedly a spiritual
teacher of some sort.
Yes, the world is ending with a whimper and not a bang,
while on these pages the whimper seems quite a chorus of
people, most of whom don’t seem to know much at all,
except that something must be wrong somewhere, and they
are pretty sure its the other guys fault. After
all we recycle, and read wonderful books of wisdom.
Just in case you haven’t got it yet, in a lot of places
in the world people are walking away from their
computers, and taking to the streets. Tragically,
by that time, it is usually too late.
Want to know what to do? Get involved in local
politics, including the politics of your local
Anthroposophical Society Branch. Raise some hell
and take a few risks. You will be surprised how
many folks are wanting to go to such a party - a party
that has real world meaning.
Celebration and Theater: a People’s Art of Statecraft:
http://ipwebdev.com/celebration/
Introduction: 9.1.5 An analysis of the
terrorism threat estimate
Anyone can Google and find out that deaths by terrorism
are a minor figure in the total number of deaths per
year. You could make that percentage higher if you
included all wars as acts of terrorism, and as well all
murders. A lot depends upon how you define
what you want to know.
For example, a doctor friend of mine once said, to a
whole group of people gathered in his home for a
discussion of politics: that the biggest cause of death
in America was the doctor. Since my friend was a
really brilliant anthroposophical doctor, its worth
paying attention to that one. Most of us can
figure it out, if we count mistakes in diagnosis, errors
in the giving of medicine, use of the wrong medicine,
overuse of existing medicine, lying in writing papers to
the public about which medicines really work, giving
people flu shots, and or so-called inoculations against
so-called infectious diseases, not keeping hospitals and
doctors offices properly disinfected and so forth.
Where’s the rub? The basic problem is the idea of
“cause”.
Its possible to make the case that terrorism arises
because other people go to places they are not wanted,
and steal, main and kill, using very advance weapons and
lot of money, because it is very profitable to take
stuff at its lowest cost and find the ones willing to
pay the highest price. Economics 101,
really. Except, ...
The victims of this avarice don’t like this, but not
having unlimited money and advanced weapons they turn
women and children into bombs and kill innocents
wherever it is easy. No military victory seems
possible, and terrifying the crap out of people not so
difficult. Used to be places like Israel got a lot
of this, but now its coming to a theater near you.
In the era of newspapers, we were free of this.
Then comes TV, major media, and infotainment, which
means even the local new gives you all the house fires
and car wrecks it can. Attracting viewers makes
money, so right now we are seeing a huge increase in
talking heads going on and on about what it means that
some people in France got killed by “terrorists”.
Some of them actually might say something wise, but who
has time to watch it all just to find a good nugget or
two.
In effect we have two kinds of events: 1) the killings
and/or acts of terror-creation; and, 2) the narrative
the arises in the media in response. The events
and the “stories” are often not the same.
Now in my own life time I have been involved in three
events that became “stories” on the media, and each time
they got it wrong, and in two of which it was clear they
“edited” the story to make it seem worse (or more
“exciting”) than it was.
Enter the real bogyman, and he is not the
terrorist. People know how to feed and control the
beast that the media has become. The media-beast
wants good film (what makes for good TV), and talking
heads that it can tell the rest of us are experts, which
I suppose means they are more believable.
The Pentagon has divisions of people that monitor media
and seek to manipulate it all over the world. The
second season of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom made a really
crazy story about that one. Some where there are
people trying to determine the nature of the narrative,
and have incredible resources to back it up. It
isn’t just the meat business that feeds us pink-slime
and calls it hamburger.
Here’s a link to some informational pink-slime:
Pentagon’s PSYOPs: Information Warfare Using Aggressive
Psychological Operations:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/pentagon-s-psyops-information-warfare-using-aggressive-psychological-operations/7789
Now in a war we probably would like our military to use
its vast resources to defend us, but when it uses some
of those same skills to mind-fuck its own people then
maybe, just maybe, something is very wrong inside the
Beltway. Here’s a link to Google asking about:
“Pentagon psyops against Americans”:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Pentagon+psyops+against+Americans&spell=1
Are we having fun yet? Not really, but a decent
question is the “cause” matter noted above.
Why? And, who? If, in a way, the narrative
is more important than the event, why are we getting
informational pink-slime from our own elected officials?
Eisenhower warned us of the Military-Industrial Complex,
and a lot of people believe these folks, used the
MK-Ultra mind control program to created the assassins
that killed both John and Robert Kennedy. Same
issue with 9/11 in New York. Our own government is
felt by a lot of people to be behind this stuff.
Is there some secret way to know the truth? Do we
really want to know the truth?
The Roman emperors were gifted at providing “bread and
circuses”- that is, to keep the people fed, and give
them a release for their more aggressive
tendencies. A nice terrorist attack did take the
Ferguson please stop the police from killing unarmed
black men off the front page, didn’t it. The Super
Bowl is coming up, and lots of channels now show not
only totally fake wrestling, but also very real live
combat men on men and women on women with almost no
rules, and everybody inside of a cage. Pass the
popcorn please, and when are the hot wings going to be
delivered?
The really weird thing about a Spiritual Social Science
is we don’t need to find a way to blame Ahriman, or
Lucifer, or the Anti-Christ or the Sun-Demon or the
Asuras, do we. No, we just accurately describe
what is visible to our thinking about the social.
The social sings its own songs, and most of them (in
spite of pink-slime infotainment) are
glorious. Go to Youtube and look up funny
dances:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+dances
Ordinary people make Youtube. Just folks. No
hidden agenda, although you can be sure if ISIS can try
to crack Youtube, our own Pentagon will not be far
behind.
Here’s some George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPcRQubF8cY
(watch out God)
Some Robin Williams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9FMrjDasBk
(a bit raw and wild and wise, from 80‘s in SF)
And for dessert: some Ellen Degeneres
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29uPRNoVB2A
Its cold here today, Friday. Tomorrow, Saturday,
it will be near zero. I have the flu and Linda has
a cold. Sunday the Patriots are going to do battle
with the Colts, and the temperature is expected to be
40. If I’m still alive I’ll be watching.
Yes, and with the popcorn, although last week was wings
... this week I’ll go for ribs. I know, I should
think about poor in Haiti, but I don’t. So
sue me.
ALERTS TO THREATS IN
EUROPE: BY JOHN CLEESE
by John
Cleese - British writer, actor and tall person
The
English are feeling the pinch in relation to
recent events in Syria and have therefore raised
their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved."
Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet
again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The
English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the
blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out.
Terrorists have been re-categorized from
"Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time
the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning
level was in 1588, when threatened by the
Spanish Armada.
The Scots
have raised their threat level from "Pissed Off"
to "Let's get the Bastards." They don't have any
other levels. This is the reason they have been
used on the front line of the British army for
the last 300 years.
The
French government announced yesterday that it
has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to
"Hide." The only two higher levels in France are
"Collaborate" and "Surrender." The rise was
precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed
France 's white flag factory, effectively
paralyzing the country's military capability.
Italy has
increased the alert level from "Shout Loudly and
Excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing."
Two more levels remain: "Ineffective Combat
Operations" and "Change Sides."
The
Germans have increased their alert state from
"Disdainful Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and
Sing Marching Songs." They also have two higher
levels: "Invade a Neighbour" and "Lose."
Belgians,
on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual;
the only threat they are worried about is NATO
pulling out of Brussels .
The
Spanish are all excited to see their new
submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully
designed subs have glass bottoms so the new
Spanish navy can get a really good look at the
old Spanish navy.
Australia,
meanwhile, has raised its security level from
"No worries" to "She'll be alright, Mate." Two
more escalation levels remain: "Crikey! I think
we'll need to cancel the barbie this weekend!"
and "The barbie is cancelled." So far no
situation has ever warranted use of the last
final escalation level.
A final
thought - " Greece is collapsing, the Iranians
are getting aggressive, and Rome is in disarray.
Welcome back to 430 BC".
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science (Part Ten)
Above, I mentioned in passing, that the general
assumptions regarding the social life of humanity, which
placed in the center of things large scale conflicts,
historical developments, and great leaders, was an error
in thought. That, from the standpoint of Christ,
the main object of Love was the individual biography,
and the contexts (or Stage Setting) were epiphenomena -
that arose in service to the primary phenomena: The
application of Love and Justice to the lives of
individual human beings.
At the heart of this progressive evolution, that was
occurring in spite of global wars, atomic bombs, and all
manner of ecological crises, was something that was
happening in the interior lives of human beings.
The outer-social forms served the inner life dynamics
and karmic needs of individuals. The idea of the
“masses” for example, as distinct from the lives of the
great (even such as Steiner), was a misdirection of our
understanding of the real purpose of the social, and had
us looking away from its essence - the individual Play.
At the core of the human biography was arising what I
described as: “The Second Eucharist in the Ethereal”
(See the essay: “The Meaning of Earth Existence in the
Age of the Consciousness “Soul [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/liveT.html
]. The whole development of historical causes,
forming the shared Stage Settings of the world, had an
entirely “other” purpose, which is: The creation of
social conflict in order to support the individual’s
facing of real existential moral dilemmas.
In my book, “the Way of the Fool: the conscious
development of our human character, and the future* of
Christianity - both to be born out of the natural union
of Faith and Gnosis” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf.html
], I described three paradigms of spiritual development,
which were not meant to be the only such paradigms.
There was the Kings stream of Christian wisdom, carried
by Rudolf Steiner in his role of the John the Baptist
figure of the Second Coming of Christ (the voice crying
in the wilderness of scientific materialism).
There was also the Shepherds steam of Christian wisdom,
brought forward by Charles Sheldon in his book In His
Steps. This latter led to the thinking/ideal of
the “what would Jesus do” movement. So we had an
initiate in Germany writing his fundamental book: The
Philosophy of Freedom in 1894, while more or less at the
same time, a young pastor in Kansas was writing his
book: In His Steps, in 1897. Then in 1933, a
pivotal year in the unfolding of the Second Coming in
America, supported by both Christ and the Holy Mother,
there came into existence the idea of the Twelve Steps [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/TwelveSteps.html
].
These three soul/spiritual developmental processes were
quite similar in their fundamental nature, which is why
a whole chapter of my book - the Way of the Fool - was
devoted to describing their inner relationships. A
core aspect of all three was the support and
encouragement of individuals making their own moral Way,
outside of the normal religious rules.
In addition to these phenomena of the social life of
humanity, there arose among the artists working in film
and television, the capacity to notice that human beings
were facing moral choices everywhere. In my
writings I have given several examples, but most
especially two films by the director/actor Clint
Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby; and, Gran Torino.
The film and television artist sees the human condition,
and using original, or derivative, sources portrays this
problem of moral choice (“the” question of the
Consciousness Soul Age) in a dramatic fashion. The
same impulses, namely to notice and describe our moral
dilemmas, is alive in all the various versions of
popular music. Both film and music have world-wide
scope, and in fact have been having international
cultural “intercourse” for many decades.
All of these phenomena are described in my book: “The
Art of God: an actual theory of Everything” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html
], which is fundamentally a social science text, with an
obvious spiritual orientation.
I urge readers who have understood this to look around
at their own social experience and see if they can find
instances of where individual biographies are constantly
facing personal moral dilemmas. Ferguson comes to
mind, not the event itself but the later protest
aspects, which include the reactions of police forces,
who feeling attacked have circled the wagons. This
does not at all mean there is a “right” answer ... there
isn’t, at least from the stand point of the Christ and
the Holy Mother via their influences which produce the
Love and Justice in which the whole sequence of human
biographies swim (including all incarnations and the
total time spent in the Afterlife).
There is only the existential arising of social
conflict, which produces for each individual involved a
personal moral dilemma, whose true parameters only they
see. As observers of the lives of others this
confronts us with the need to truly practice: Judge
Not. For unconscious antipathy, or even sympathy,
is the beam in our own eye.
This is why we believe we live in a world of moral
horror, such that the fundamentalists of all religions
(including natural science*) finds enemies around every
corner, and lost in “Judging” can do nothing more that
seek to destroy that which lives in the other, because
what lives in the other most mirrors something in
himself of which he is deathly afraid. That’s why
the Path means for us to perceive and understand the
beam in our own eye, for as long as that is there, there
is no way for us to truly help our brothers and sisters.
*(This is why the brain scientists, and their servant
philosophers, attack the idea of free will and the
existence of an individual “I” which guides human
action. Were they to admit to the truth, then they
have to look to their own moral activity (there
beam/mote), and face its meaning. See: “I am not
my brain”: [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/brain.html
]), for details.
Introduction 10.1.1 The Fantasy Magic of Computers
Those who do deep studies of the history (including its
modern iterations) of Natural Science, such as Owen
Barfield (“Worlds’ Apart”, “Saving the Appearances: a
Study in Idolatry”) and Ernst Lehrs (“Man or
Matter”), sometimes speak (as did Steiner, but
from different perspectives), about the tendency of the
thinking in Natural Science to look at phenomena and
“invent” something beneath or behind the “appearances”.
Taken to an extreme we get such interesting ideas as
atoms, odd and ever more weird and tinier parts of atom,
indeterminacy, quantum mechanics, quantum computing and
so forth. The “ghost in the machine” of the
material world.
Goetheanism takes a different approach. It treats
the appearances as a kind of speech (Goethe’s “Book of
Nature”). The Goethean scientists just describes
(basically) the phenomena and the phenomena themselves
tell the needed story. This is far more
complicated than a lot of people might first imagine,
and a good link to go to (and bookmark) is: “The Nature
Institute”:
http://www.natureinstitute.org/
At that link one will find a lot of discussion of
“context”. In the wonderful work being published
there on the biology of the “cell”, Stephen
Talbott,Craig Hodredge and friends, find out that even
natural scientists are beginning discover that in the
“cell”, a quite complex organism, the whole seems to
effect the parts, rather more than the parts effecting
the whole. You should read the material at that
website for details ... they are delightful.
Now translate that idea - that the whole causally
effects the parts - and imagine the scientists working
in particle physics trying to wrap that one around their
heads, amidst all those giant machines smashing small
things into each other. If biology follows such a
law - lets call it the law of context - maybe physics
has to as well. Which is a variation of what
Steiner taught in “the Warmth Course”
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA321/English/MP1980/WrmCrs_index.html
, “the Light Course”
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA320/English/GSF1977/LitCrs_index.html
, and “the Astronomy Course”
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA323/English/LR81/AstCrs_index.html
. For something more modern (and very “Steiner”),
read Lehrs’ “Man or Matter”:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5641
Yes, your are right, ... what does any of this have to
do with The Fantasy Magic of Computers?
Well, ... the same style of thinking (abstract
intellectualism) that created the fantasy that there
were little tiny things that came into existence at
creation (the so-called Big Bang), and that these
ultimately led to biological forms that can “think”, has
(somewhat inadvertently) played a kind of game with
words. For example a computer is said to have a
memory, which as a word usually/historically referring
to something only human beings have. At the same
time, brain scientists (and others), still
believing/thinking everything has its causal origin in
the tiny, started to describe what goes on in the brain
as if the brain was like a computer. So we get a
lot of language of the sort where the mind and
consciousness are produced by a meat organ, evolved from
the Big Bang, and this meat organ stores “information”
(in the form of memories) in the same way a computer
stores “data” on a hard drive.
It really doesn’t take much to logically destroy this
Fantasy Magic thinking (I’m using magic in the modern
sense of something “supernatural” that can’t be true),
and more than a few scientists and philosophers have
done so. The following is quoted in my article: “I
am not my brain”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/brain.html
“From Wikipedia
“Qualia is a term used in philosophy to refer to
individual instances of subjective, conscious
experience. The term derives from the Latin adverb
quālis, meaning “what sort” or “what kind”. Examples of
qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or
the perceived redness of an evening sky.
“Daniel Dennett (b. 1942), American philosopher and
cognitive scientist, writes that qualia is “an
unfamiliar term for something that could not be more
familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."
“Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), the famous physicist,
had this counter-materialist take: The sensation of
color cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s
objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist
account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has
of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes
set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the
brain? I do not think so.
“The importance of qualia in philosophy of mind comes
largely from the fact that it is seen as posing a
fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the
mind-body problem. Much of the debate over their
importance hinges on the definition of the term that is
used, as various philosophers emphasize or deny the
existence of certain features of qualia. As such, the
nature and existence of qualia are controversial.”
This is important to appreciate because we have such
cultural figures as Sam Harris explaining that in the
future computers will have super memories and superior
(than human) intelligence.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/can-we-avoid-a-digital-apocalypse
He seems uncertain as to whether or not this machine
will have consciousness, but like a lot of folks his
fear is that the “machine” might take over the
world. Even Ahriman knows this won’t happen, but
it is a common meme about The Fantasy Magic of
Computers. The current plots on the TV show
“Person of Interest” have two sentient machines duking
it out over who (or what) is to control the world; and,
the movie “Transcendence”, with Johnny Deep, tries to
show the horror of what might happen if we were able to
upload a human consciousness into a computer.
As to Ahriman, he’s not deluded about the nature of
reality, he just plays a rather “interesting” part in
it. We’ve even got anthroposophists that are
convinced the Computer is going to take over the
world. Here is an article on S.O. Prokofieff’s
version of these fantasies
https://zooey.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/spiders/
And, here is a link to my critical review of “From
Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley - Spiritual Forces in the
development of computers and the future of technology” -
written by Paul Emberson:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/counter-silicon.html
Our ordinary thinking using common sense will have no
trouble. Just cogitate for awhile about your own
memories. Call some up. Think about how they
come and go unbidden. All the varieties of human
experience we relate to “memory”. Consider
PTSD. I had a patient I helped in hospital - PTSD
from Vietnam. Woke up in the middle of the night
believing he was back in the jungle. Told me
stories of how it was common for him to have vivid
“waking” memories or nightmares about all the people he
killed in that bad place. He was pretty clear he
was being constantly visited by many of their ghosts.
A computer doesn’t have an “I” that experiences.
It just moves numbers and codes around very very fast,
and then formats that according to instructions.
You open your word processor program, call up a stored
document and there it is on the screen. There was
no act of “memory” there at all. The fantasy
magical machine was completely unaware of
everything. Humans use the term “memory”,
metaphorically, to describe this. This is not even
poetical, and certainly not logical.
Intelligence ... like Einstein, or your cat? Next
time you want to try a Turing Test (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
) of a supposed AI, ask it to describe how it tied its
shoes that morning.
Expert Systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
“In the 1990s and beyond the term “expert system” and
the idea of a standalone AI system mostly dropped from
the IT lexicon. There are two interpretations of this.
One is that “expert systems failed”: the IT world moved
on because expert systems didn’t deliver on their over
hyped promise.[17][18] The other is the mirror opposite,
that expert systems were simply victims of their
success. As IT professionals grasped concepts such as
rule engines such tools migrated from standalone tools
for the development of special purpose “expert” systems
to one more tool that an IT professional has at their
disposal.[19] Many of the leading major business
application suite vendors such as SAP, Siebel, and
Oracle integrated expert system capabilities into their
suite of products as a way of specifying business logic.
Rule engines are no longer simply for defining the rules
an expert would use but for any type of complex,
volatile, and critical business logic. They often go
hand in hand with business process automation and
integration environments.[20][21][22]”
Notice the terms: “business logic and “the rules an
expert would use”. Any married person knows that a
logic and rules approach is out of the question, and we
even invented a term for the required skills: emotional
intelligence, to distinguish it from the older idea of
IQ. Now emotional intelligence requires that you
actually yourself “feel”. Oddly enough you have to
have a physical body and senses to “feel”. I know
there are software engineers everywhere trying to
“teach” their machines to interpret tones of voice, but
again married people know the years of experience
required to do that simple act. The same with
“face recognition”, ... all kinds of software efforts,
but when you read the details of the work you learn that
a machine has a hard time distinguishing a grin from a
grimace, much less keeping up with the back and forth of
a husband and wife having a good verbal fight face to
face across a kitchen table, the main content of which
most of the embarrassed-to-be-there children would
understand.
No doubt the ultimate solution for some will be to get
rid of as many of those pesky unpredictable human beings
as possible, and just leave the world to the
machines. Now there is something scary there,
because who becomes servant and who becomes
master. I suspect that there will be a human being
someplace using the machines as a tool that same way the
greedy and the powerful use money and political
corruption. All the same, not sure a machine will
ever get as “evil” and manipulative as as a cheated on
angry spouse.
All the same the science fiction writers have been
playing with this one for years, and while they can
imagine all manner of the most “fantastic” possible
technical advances, we really are very far away from
what is needed just to adequately mimic a human being in
conversation.
Part of the problem for those, who fancy the probability
of “intelligent” machines, has to do with their own more
or less cursory self-knowledge of what they do when they
think. They’ve noticed the train of words, and
that they seem to “talk to themselves” (what we in the
profession of scientific introspection call: discursive
thinking). The linguistic analysts did this, along
with some of the French Post-modernists, and they then
ran off the cliff that language has no real meaning,
because it is highly subjective, ... so can you imagine
two AIs challenged to have a public argument with each
other representing one of those two points of
view?
The basic problem is missing factual information that
only comes from the scientific study of one’s own
mind. Do that long enough, and trying to imagine
thinking is about logical processes of words and grammar
structures fails to even begin to explain what happens
in our “minds” (not everyone can even agree words, much
less sentences, always mean the same thing).
The brain scientists and their philosophical cousins,
manage to get away with their fancies, because they
remove from consideration the whole problem of qualia
referenced above. How do you teach a machine to
recognize the taste of spoiled milk by the smell?
Yes, a weird sentence, but who you smell spoiled milk
you remember the taste. A machine might be
sophisticated enough to do a chemical test representing
one sense, but there will be no inwardness that can
remember the relationships.
The idea that we can create machine-made complex analogs
of human sense organs is a kind of insanity, and I don’t
mean that charitably. Talk to a trained singer
about their “instrument”, and singing becomes so complex
only a human being could do it. The knowledge of
breath and breathing and opening and closing of the
lips, the movement of the tongue, the resonance chambers
of the head, the sinuses, the throat etc. etc.
etc. It is seriously crazy to imagine a machine,
however complicated and supposedly self-learning, ever
doing that.
But a baby learns to do that by age 2 or 3.
Overlook that miracle, and I’m sorry, we are back to
crazy again.
The sticky wicket is words. You get sloppy with
those, and use memory as a metaphor for what a hard
drive does, and intelligence as a metaphor for what
modern expert systems do (whatever their current name),
and you are responsible yourself for the creation of a
mental illusion. Lucifer and Ahriman helped us
make a crazy mirror house maze, and it was to offer us a
distraction from actually finding out what a real human
being is, and what real human potential is. Sloppy
thinking is the swamp land that scientific materialism
is sitting on. The purpose was to make us
swerve away from finding the divine within for a time, -
to help the “I” come to a state of feeling deeply alone
(a kind of culture-wide dark night of the soul). A
big giant lollipop of a distraction, and serious parts
of the whole our modern culture falls for our own
self-induced con-job, hook, lie and stinker. Well,
not exactly. There are plenty of people not
drinking that kool-aid (the Romantics,
Transcendentalists, even a few Anthroposophists, New
Agers and a lot of modern physicists, philosophers and
other scientists - some of their debates are intense and
illuminating).
Funny things its the same fake out that lead the way to
the Ahrimanic Enchantment (materialism) at the beginning
of the Age of Science. Keep in mind that
“materialism” is not just in science ... its everywhere,
for example the reliance in religious texts as precisely
and exactly true). The untamed intellect (Mr. A.),
coupled with the undisciplined fantasy (Mr. L.)
collectively causes a mostly asleep thinking to loose
the logic (Logos quality) of the situation.
Natural Science started taking things apart, forgetting
(with help) that the parts all originally appear
together as wholes in the first place (see my
“Electricity and the Spirit in Nature” for some
examples:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/electricityandthespiritinnature.html
). All analysis and no synthesis naturally leads
to the conclusion there is only matter and no spirit
When this lets-just-look-at-the-parts thinking gets to
biology, the same anti-logos spirit puts the imagination
into the state of undisciplined fantasy (Goethe does the
opposite, with his “exact pictorial fantasy”). So
we look at evolution and see a mechanism, and natural
selection, never noticing that logically the words
mechanism and selection require an intentional act not a
random one, otherwise they have no logos-meaning.
See: “Evolution and the New Gnosis: Anti-establishment
Essays on Knowledge Science, Religion and Causal Logic”,
by Don Cruse. Don, by the way, has passed
on, but I loved to listen to his stories of how he would
write materialists in biology and ask them to write a
sentence about “mechanism” and “selection” and only use
words meaning random undirected processes. Which,
of course, they could not do.
As with the confusion over the computer and human
consciousness, the metaphors fail to be grounded.
A computer has no memory, or any intelligence.
Only human beings have that. The software creator
can perhaps mimic that, but the engineers can’t give the
silicon inwardness. This is why Mr. A. and Mr. L.
encourage the assertions so common today, that the brain
has no inwardness, is an analog of a hard drive, its
processes are hard-wired by evolution, there is no free
will, and the human being’s experience of a
self-identity is an illusion.
Ask yourself what Dornach is doing about this, and
you’ll see just how far out of touch with contemporary
reality the Aristotelians dominating there have gotten.
The logos-mind balances and harmonizes the erratic
tendencies of the untamed intellect and the
undisciplined imagination or fancy (Steiner’s statue:
The Representative of Humanity). That is,
each ordinary human being has the capacity to see
through the Ahrimanic Enchantment, by noticing false
metaphors and engaging a careful concrete thinking of
the relationship between the descriptive (or
metaphorical) “word” and its real “idea”.
The “context” (remember that the whole determines the
parts) of the information Age is human beings. We
make the computer what it is to become, and a main way
we “make it” is by the naming capacity of the individual
logos-mind. We name the world in accordance with
the truth, goodness and beauty we find there, once we
wake up to making our own “beam” our servant and not our
master.
Best way to do that? When you get a question that
interests you, ask yourself to answer it and don’t go
running to that wall of books you’ve collected for the
answer. The logos-mind (to be metaphorical: the
Rising of the Sun in the Mind) requires practice,
nothing else.
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science 10.1.2 The
Mystery of American Politics
I have tried in previous sections to allude to the fact
that as I developed my “appreciation” for the living
dynamics of the “social", I studied two social
“forms”. One was the micro-threefolding form: the
Anthroposophical Society; and, the other was the
Macro-threefolding form: America.
I studied these because this was where my karma placed
me, and so it was obvious that I must have chosen to
incarnate in these spheres. I now want to begin to
concentrate more on the phenomena of the Macro-social
form: America. I have been writing (and
singing) about America for decades:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/americanpolitics.html
We Dream America.
We Sing Her Shadow and Her Light
We Dream America, and
America Dreams Us
Now the purpose of a Spiritual Social Science is not to
create a bunch of textual material that someone later
has to quote, but to enable the individual to think for
themselves by providing them an understanding of
something, that has been developed by a mind that is
disciplined and has approached the situation
scientifically, and in full consciousness of the fact
that reality is rooted in the Beings of the Invisible
World, the speak to us through its Voice, the world of
appearances, or as I have called it, after Goethe: The
Book of the Social-Political World.
In all the years I endeavored to learn to Listen to the
World Song, this is what I sought. However, not
everything that can be said, will be able to be said on
these pages. The reality of the Social-Political
World is even more rich than the Reality of what Goethe
tried to read in the Book of Nature. Why?
Because humanity has slowly been emancipating itself
from the Natural World. The Natural World is our
Mother. All children leave the nest, or are kicked
out of the nest when the time comes. For humanity
that time is Now.
A city is not natural. A farm nearly is, but
thousands of years have now passed since most human
beings lived in the Womb of the Mother, as aboriginal
tribal peoples. We are, clumsily to be sure,
creating our own food: that’s what is hidden in the
gesture of scientific materialism that produces
“genetically modified organisms”. The City lives
outside the rhythms of the Seasons. People don’t
sleep at night, they sleep when they want. If it
is cold or hot, we’ve taken from Nature “electricity”,
atomic energy, coal, and now seek to gain power from the
winds and the sun ... to do what? To do whatever
the fuck we want. To have heat in the winter from
our “furnaces”, and cold in the summer from our “air
conditioners”.
We no longer clothe ourselves in the skins of animals,
but we manufacture materials that never before
existed. Its called “coal tar chemistry”, and just
like in the movie The Graduate, the whispered advice of
the man at the party, that the Dustin Hoffman character
get into “plastics”, is part of reality. The Child
has been set Free, and now we live in the debates of
whether this is wise in anyway, because, while many see
clearly that we seem to be killing our Mother, others
don’t give a shit.
While the Hippie idea of getting back to nature was
nice, given Vietnam and a lot of interesting drugs in
the Dionysian Ritual (self-development through
intoxication) that was the 1960‘s, you really can’t step
in the same river twice. There is no going
back to Nature, because Nature Herself is kicking us
free.
A really good question is to wonder what the Mother
wants? My guess is She wants us to take
responsibility, and that She is the Toughest Bitch in
the Universe, and can survive anything we do.
Why? Because we live in the age of materialism,
and haven’t yet gone around to even knowing enough about
the Spirit to imagine that we can screw that up
too. For these who like to quote Steiner, he did
say that in the prelude to the infamous War of All
Against All, we will have all become wizards, magicians
or sorcerers - holders of spiritual powers yet to be
imagined.
The Planet will die, or at least its physical
body. That’s the big “spiritual” transition that
is coming up. New Jerusalem is a non-material
existence. Will some degenerate version of human
beings live on the burnt out husk of the “physical”
Planet we are now eating to death? Probably.
As to Her, I don’t think we can eat Her. The
Asuras, ... the Beings that eat the spirit, they work
for Her.
Well, actually they don’t eat the spirit as much as
mulch it and recycle it, when some poor sod has gone so
far down the hole of being a crack whore or a degenerate
raper of children, that their “ego” (spirit), has no
value even to themselves anymore, ... then the Asuras
come along, and like the “bugs” that recycle a dead
physical body, they recycle a “spirit” that has chosen
not to function any more at all. Personally I hope
there is a planetary existence somewhere, where the “I"s
that fail to be “I"s get to sleep until the Day of
Judgment, where they get woken up and asked if they’d
like a second chance. I suspect all of them will
take it.
Back to Earth now. Last night Obama gave the
traditional State of the Union Speech. It was,
well ... it was pure Obama. That rational idealist
seeking to comfort the confused, who couldn’t find the
truth if it slapped him/them in the face.
The actor Kevin Spacey, when he was preparing for his
role in the Netflix series House of Cards (a rehash of a
great English BBC drama of the same name from a couple
of decades ago), ... Spacey said he hung out with
Congressmen and Senators and asked them straight up what
was going on. They told him, sometimes more or
less in exactly these words: “Its all a play.”
Now when I was writing my book “American Anthroposophy”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/AmericanAnthroposophy.html
, a certain weird and at the same time difficult
question kept popping up: What about Ahriman? Is
he going to incarnate in America? And, if so,
when? And, why?
Here I am writing this book, and that’s a pretty big
question not to at least say something about. Fact
was, however, I didn’t want to approach it with the
proverbial ten foot pole. I knew my limits, and
that one seemed way beyond me. Way beyond.
Then I read this: “The Future is Now: Anthroposophy at
the New Millennium”, which appendix was called: “When
did Rudolf Steiner Expect the Incarnation of
Ahriman?” by Hans-Peter van Manen. Where I discovered
that Ahriman had hidden the time of his incarnation by
getting translators and readers of Steiner’s works on
Ahriman to not notice something. Here is the
correct language: “And, just as there was an incarnation
of Lucifer in the flesh, and as there was an incarnation
of Christ in the flesh, so will there be, before even a
part of the third post-Christian millennium will have
passed, an actual incarnation of Ahriman in the West:
Ahriman in the flesh.” R.S. lecture, 1 November, 1919
In my copy of that book, and its translations of this
lecture, instead of it reading “before even a part”, it
reads “only after a part”. “Before even” and “only
after” lead to two very different ways of thinking about
Mr. A’s incarnation. “Before even” means prior to
the year 2001, and “only after” could mean 300 years
into the Third Millennium. Remember what we noted
in the previous 10.1.1 on the Computer, how Mr. A. and
Mr. L get us to become confused by shifting our
attention with just a few words.
So there I was, in 2007, stuck with the possibility that
Ahriman might have incarnated in America sometime in the
20th Century, and I am writing this book, which has to
say something about it. So I worked and worked on
the problem, and while few have found my solution as
elegant as I believe it to be, none of the naysayers
with which I have communicated ever did any real
“thinking” work. I spent months writing that part,
and had two heart attacks in the same day (Sept 19th,
2007), because of getting too close to such a
power. Here is a link to that aspect of my book,
called therein “Outrageous Genius”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/genius.html.
And here is Liz’s MacKensie’s review of my book “The Art
of God”, on the same theme: Ahriman’s Incarnation in the
West: “ The Esoteric Import of Art of God, an
actual theory of everything by Joel A Wendt”
http://www.christianesotericist.talktalk.net/The%20Esoteric%20Import%20of%20Art%20of%20God.html
I’m going to skip my solution, because as far as I am
concerned, if you want to know how Mr. A. is doing,
while incarnate in America, read the whole f’n
article. If you are too lazy to that then f’ you.
Obama ... During his original race for the Democratic
nomination in 2008, Obama and his chief opponent Hillary
Clinton, disappeared from pubic view for a
weekend. They canceled events and
disappeared. Reporters came up with this story -
lets just leave it as a “story”. Obama and Clinton
meet that weekend in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s home in
San Francisco, and in furtherance of the Democrat
Party’s needs, agreed he would get the nomination and
she would become Secretary of State for the first term,
assuming Obama wins. Then in 2016, she runs and he
helps set up her bid for the Presidency.
Its a kind of win-win situation, because Obama gets the
“black” vote, as the first potential “black” candidate,
and then 8 years later Clinton gets the “womens” vote,
and the first real potential female candidate. The
“calculus" of politics in action. Sorry Elizabeth
Warren fans, she got co-opted when she drank “why don’t
you run for Senate” Kool-aid. Warren is probably
right where she is supposed to be anyway. We need
more saints in the Senate than we do in the White House.
Want to know what bullshit Clinton will run on?
Read or watch Obama’s latest State of the Union
Address. Its like a set-up shot in
volleyball. Up it goes, and she jumps in and
spikes it. The Republicans are getting ready to
run their usual collection of clowns, and now that they
“own” the Senate, they are trapped, because of the
ideology of opposing Obama. Obama last night
presented a list of all the things the polls tell
politicians Americans want. The Republicans are
incapable of giving us any of it. 2016 is a slam
dunk for Clinton (I’m only sort of sorry for the sports
metaphors).
Just keep in mind that after this meeting in 2008
Obama’s campaign started to inherit all manner of people
involved in Bill Clinton’s former staff, including all
the Goldman-Sachs folks, who were already in the path to
driving the world economy to its knees. Yeah, we
can blame Bush II, but we are mistaken to be looking to
D.C. for the seat of this disease. Its not
there. Its on Wall Street.
So the world is going in the toilet, Ahriman is
incarnate in America, and the “Nation State” America
seems to be leading the way to hell. Hmmm, maybe
that’s a bit of a one-sided picture. Maybe
Presidential politics, with its actors and clowns, is
just a side show at a carnival.
Is there a “real” America? If so, what is “It” up
to?
I’ve written a lot about this “America”. A
collection of my essays is called: “On the Nature of
Public Life: or The Soul of a People, the Spirit of a
Nation, and the Sacrifices of its Leaders”.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/plife.html
Fundamentally America is an Idea. Always has been,
and always will be. I am currently writing a movie
script about that and related matters, which is titled
(right now): “Consent”, after the use of that word in
the Declaration of Independence: “to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed” Declaration of Independence, July 4th,
1776
Basically contemporary Americans are trying to
rediscover “Civics”, the teaching of which has gone from
our schools, becoming subsumed by “social
studies”. “Civics” is about what America is for,
why it came into being, and what was hoped to happen
when the American Experiment was launched. The
movie is designed to portray “civics” in living way in a
drama, with as little lecturing as possible. But
given that America is an Idea, that’s not as easy as it
might seem.
So we could say that the real America is an Idea, that
has become tangled up in a jungle of lies, and it is no
wonder then that the Father of Lies incarnated here,
just so at the beginning of the Third Millennium, he
could screw with the Idea of what America is.
From a philosophical point of view an idea is a complex
of concepts, as Steiner described it in A Theory of
Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception.
For me, poetically, and spiritual scientifically, an
“Idea” is the Ethereal Garment of a Spiritual
Being. The funny/odd thing about an “idea”
is that you can’t kill it - its immortal or
eternal. America is the answer to the
question: How does a free people go about
governing themselves? The more free human beings
become, the more important is the answer to that
question.
Steiner gave us the “concept” of spiritual freedom in
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, but it was up to
an American, Ursula K. LeGuin to give us a pragmatic and
down to earth imaginative picture (Garment) of that
“Idea” in her novel: “The Dispossessed - an ambiguous
utopia”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
to be continued ...
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science 10.1.2a
The Mystery of American Politics (continued)
Where, and how, do we meet an “Idea” in social reality -
particularly such an idea as America, and that in the
context of political life?
My screenplay “Consent”, near the beginning has this
poetic voice over, done in the voice of the Native
American homeless character: Sam walks in dreams.
“I walked in a desert, on a moonless night,
and tripped over a black rock.
Already then on my knees,
I looked under the rock
and found a diamond,
that was not a diamond.
It was a living light that sparkled in the darkness of
time.
In a bell-like whisper, it sang me its name:
America.
Then, surprised, ... I fell awake,
while beneath my feet the very grains of sand wept for
joy.”
There were people living on these lands - on/in the
Americas - before the Europeans came and declared
ownership of all for God, Country, and Queen.
While Columbus Day is remembered by
the descendants of the aboriginals that lived here, not
as a holiday to celebrate, but a day that will live in
their souls in infamy, there was a time for a while that
the USA aspect of America was known as: Columbia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_%28name%29
This “feminine” aspect, mostly attributed to certain
English thinkers, should not be taken lightly.
This aspect of the Idea, in the sense of Columbia, also
can be related to something know these days as the Black
Madonna. This “coloration” of the figure of the
Holy Mother, lives particularly strongly among
aboriginals converted to Catholicism in South America,
One of the stranger mysteries that I stumbled on, during
the almost 14 years of my early (1969-1982) adult
“education”, at the hands of Divine Providence in the
environs of the San Francisco Bay Area (principally
Berkeley, California), was the Hopi Prophecy.
Briefly the Hopi oral history remembers the destruction
and fleeing of Atlantis, with some fleeing to the West
(the Americas) and others to the East. Details of
my research on the spiritual scientific meaning of this
can be found here: “The Mystery of the True White
Brother”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/eldbr.html
which was updated here: “the Songs of the True White
Brother”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twbhp.html
One basic way of putting forward this concept of the
True White Brother is that the Hopi were told, by the
Creator, that there would come a time when their way of
life was being destroyed, and at that moment an aspect
of the invading white race - the True white brother -
would come to them with the life plan for the
future. In the words of one leading Hopi Elder,
“they are Sun Clan, they are the Children of the
Sun.” Anthroposophy, by the way, is the New Sun
Mystery.
When I was living in Fair Oaks, California (1983-1985),
I first wrote of Hopi Prophecy, and Anthroposophy, in
Carl Stegmann’s study letter: America in the Threefold
World. This writing prompted a local half-breed
woman (half white, half Cherokee), studying Waldorf
Education at Steiner College, to reach out to me and
encourage me to go to the Hopi Mesas in the Southwest of
the USA (the Four-Corners area), and actually visit the
Hopi, which I did over the Easter Weekend of 1985.
Details of that visit can be found in the above essays.
One remarkable story she shared with me was that when
she was first allowed to attend special ceremonies of
her Cherokee relatives, given in their aboriginal
language, the Chief (priest) kept using the word:
Christ. Afterwards she asked him why, and he told
here that their people had always know there was an
Earth-Spirit, and now they knew His Name. Recall
then Steiner, that when the blood fell to Earth from
Christ at Calvary, the aura of the Earth changed, and
Christ became the Spirit of the Earth.
Aboriginal peoples have always had their own mysteries
and these elder (Saturn) mysteries should not be
overlooked. Some historians of the USA,
attribute the “idea” of Articles of Confederation to the
encounters between colonists and the Iroquois
Confederacy. (See the book: Forgotten Founders
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FF.html
. Ben Franklin was apparently friendly with
these people and often attended their meetings, quite
surprised by the way they conversed. Each new
speaker, before offering their own thoughts, repeated in
summary form what the previous speakers had said.
Would that members of the Anthroposophical Society had
such discipline).
In some tribes belonging to the Iroquois Confederacy, by
the way, the female leaders choose the male leaders -
the Chiefs, through a long community process our modern
politics would be unable to imagine. No one was
elected by a manipulatable popular vote, and only people
of proven character were given such
responsibilities. Imagine an Anthroposophical
Society based on that principal - one done in front of
everyone, instead of hidden away in private groups that
essentially pick their own successors.
With this background then, let us return to the
question: Where and how does an Idea live in a social
form, perhaps keeping in mind that in the Americas,
there may have been an Idea already living here before
the Europeans invaded.
From my screenplay: “Consent”:
”Carl, looking at laptop camera: “America is an
idea. Its always been an idea. A main
element of this idea was to answer this simple
question: How does a free people govern itself?
We’ve been engaged in that experiment for over
200 years. An experiment testing whether
self-interest could be wise. This has been true
among most ordinary people. We play by the
rules, we work hard, and we mind our own
business. Some people have chosen to not
play by the rules, and to corrupt our political life
with money and to steal our freedom, essentially
making us wage slaves in a great big version of the
Company Store. Corporations and money rule,
not the American People.
” “This is wrong. Can it be fixed? Yes, and
without violence. We just change the nature of the
conversation. We talk about the real ideas; and,
... because we are many and those who try to rule are
few, we will prevail, without violence, just with
peaceful and politically real conversations. No
b.s., just plain talk.” “
One of the aspects of all this that can confuse people,
especially non-Americans, is what does this have to do
with us, who live in Europe, or South America, or other
places different from the USA. From my
book/collection of essays: On the Nature of Public Life:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/plife.html
“Now some may think that if the United States is being
forged into a People of Peoples, what does that mean for
the rest? This is a quite legitimate question.
“As was pointed toward in the beginning of this paper,
the 2004 presidential election in the United States is
the concern of the whole world. In a very real
sense the rest of the World’s Peoples are the Father and
Mother of the People of Peoples, and we who live in the
United States are their offspring. We are their clumsy
and errant adolescent child, who in our natural
nationalistic egotism think we should be in charge, and
that the whole world should revolve around us. In
a kind of self important drunken ecstasy we stumble
around the house and the neighborhood, wreaking
everything in sight.
“I am sure this is written everywhere in the various
wisdoms of the world, but in that which comes to Western
Culture as the Ten Commandments, number four or five
(depending upon your rite) implores: “Honor thy father
and mother” (“...in order that thy days may be prolonged
upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth
thee..”). As I tried to point out in the essay
America’s Growing Moral Debt (see below), the People of
the United States owe a great deal to the rest of the
World.”
The Earth is One Place, not many. And the motto of
the USA, E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many, One, does not
just apply to us. Part of the Mystery of American
Politics is that it belongs to the whole world. It
will not be healed of its dysfunctions by its own
people. How long, if your neighbor is a wife
beater and a drunk, do you stand by watching her and her
children suffer, while doing nothing but sitting there
in self-affronted judgment?
America is a universal Idea. It never has and
never will belong to just a few. From my “Economic
and Social Rebellion”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Rebellion.html
“The American Experiment (its Spirit, as it were) is not
confined to the geographic America. It is related
to a slowly evolving universally human impulse for
brotherhood, which at its highest moral/spiritual level
includes individual and mutual sacrifice. An
excellent example of this all-human impulse was
represented by an office worker standing in front of a
tank in Tienanmen Square, in an effort to show
solidarity with the protesters there, many of whom were
soon to be killed. This same moral-spiritual
solidarity impulse arose in the recent social phenomena
we are calling the Arab Spring.”
to be continued ...
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science 10.1.2b
The Mystery of American Politics (continued)
Some Occult Background Material
America, in having to become the place where Ahriman
incarnated on Dec. 25, 1950, has what might be called an
occult or esoteric “history”. Every place does of
course, but only certain “thinkers”, with the right
help, can put the pieces together. This is a bit
of a diversion, but is needed as “background” so as to
appreciate other matters we will take up later.
First it is important to recognize a couple of dividing
lines, as it were. One physical (the Atlantic
Ocean) and the other Spiritual (the meaning of the
“event” of the Second Coming of Christ). While
Rudolf Steiner was the John the Baptist figure of the
Second Coming (the voice crying in the wilderness of
scientific materialism), he realized he should not cross
the Atlantic, so in spite of invitations, never went
further than the Western reaches of Europe in the
British Isles.
The Second Coming is not Christ doing something
different (He’s always been available: ask, seek and
knock), but a change in human consciousness was first
necessary (the arrival of the on-looker separation),
which allowed “self-consciousness” to arise (Barfield
points out that this word only appeared in English a
little over 250 years ago.
Prior to the beginning arrival of the Return of Christ
in the Ethereal perception capacity, there was a
spiritual/physical battle in Europe, which led to the
American and French revolutions. These were part
of the necessary beginning of the end of the old
aristocracies of blood, which had to happen to make
possible the arrival of the appearance of democratic
institutions, although that was to fail, and the occult
brotherhoods succeeded in creating, among the new
mercantile and banking families, a vast money reservoir,
and thus a successor aristocracy of wealth, to replace
the one of blood. Hidden oligarchies of wealth are
what really appeared.
These latter wealth aristocracies still strive to rule
today, from behind the scenes, but having been seduced
by ahrimanic economic theories, rather than a true “Sun”
economics (Rudolf Steiner and Elizabeth MacKenzie - see
her: “Aesthetics of Economics and The Scottish Masonic
Tradition In the Light of The Folk Spirits”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/bgae1.html
), the families of wealth are realizing that making the
growth of wealth fully dependent upon Central Banks
endlessly printing more and more money, contained an end
game limit that was bound to fail. (
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102354830
- google other stories if you want more details)
The leader of the spiritual/religious aspect of this
battle was Christian Rosenkreuz, the founding teacher of
the Rosicrucian Order (Order of the Rosy Cross).
The personality more involved in the physical/social
aspects was Saint Germain, who was the founding teacher
of the Free Masons. Legend actually has Saint
Germain (known publicly as “the professor” in America),
yelling from a balcony at those hesitating to act, “Sign
It!”, at the moment the Declaration of Independence was
signed. The esoteric aspects of the Catholic
Church, of course, wanted both these men dead, but the
power of the Church to routinely kill heretical leaders
was fading.
All the same, significant portions of this battle still
rage today in America.
We know the Free Masons designed Washington D.C.,
although letting it be built on a former swamp was
perhaps not a good idea. The Occult Brotherhoods
are very active in these battles, which one can discover
by researching what goes on at the Bohemian Grove in
California, and the Skull and Bones Society at
Yale. America Rhodes Scholars are sent to England
to become educated in the now failing elite (favorable
to the aristocracies of wealth) economics, which is what
happened to Bill Clinton and tied him to those
personalities like Larry Summers, and others at Goldman
Sachs. At the height of the 2008 crisis, falsely
blamed by some on Bush II, the Secretary of the Treasury
was Henry Paulson, a former Chief Executive of Goldman
Sachs.
Wall Street, as observed before, as the center of the
temporal power of the oligarchy, is stronger than
Washington D.C., which has adopted the role of a well
paid, but passive, servant.
From a certain point of view, the main spiritual nature
of those developing their gifts in the Americas, has to
be seen as gifts of the will. Americans do.
Thinking philosophically, in the sense of European
residues of the Epoch of the Intellectual Soul
(something that has rendered our Universities powerless
to understand the world), has limits. Christ’s
teachings are acts of will. For example,
those who think I write too much, need to realize that
I’ve driven completely across the United States, a
journey of more than 3000 miles, five times, seeking the
resolution of various biographical riddles.
A profound act of will (of several people) occurred in
the founding of the 12 Steps of AA around 1933, a
significant year as regards the Second Coming (see my:
“The Spiritual Scientific Import of the Twelve Steps of
Alcoholics Anonymous”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/TwelveSteps.html
). The overcoming of addictions (and we all have
them folks, we just don’t name them that - mostly we
call them bad habits) involves serious applications of
the will - the intellect/heart is pretty useless except
for understanding and sympathy. “Bad” habits
(psychic parasites living in the astral body) are only
removed by the application of will forces.
Even Rudolf Steiner knew that the Double in America was
far more powerful than the Double among the Europeans
(see Geographic Medicine), which is why the sciences
dealing with the Double (such as the 12 Steps) are far
more advanced here. AA arose through an
inspirational cooperation between Christ and the
Holy Mother, that led to aiding the wills of living and
deeply troubled human beings. They (the human
beings) led, and the higher Beings followed.
So one way to see the modern situation in America is
that while the Occult Brotherhoods fight over power at
the top of society (still confused about the declining
value of hierarchical social forms), ordinary people
engage in profound spiritual development at the level of
ordinary life. At the social commons lies a whole
other kind of “power”, one that will ultimately be far
superior to dying institutional forms, many of which
were born all the way back in the Third Cultural
Epoch. Only the multi-national Corporation seeks
to live on into the Third Millennium, a creature all of
its own, completely free of the “I” forces of human
beings. Nation States are being made things of the past.
(see 1.1.3 for details)
The American Anthroposophical Society could play a more
awake role here, but is blinded by Steiner-said, and a
basically complete failure to even begin to appreciate
American Culture. Here is an article I wrote on a
few of the characteristics of American Culture still
ignored by the Society: “American Culture - a first
look”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/americanculture.html
As a kind of cherry on the top, of this essay/dessert, I
will share with you next some of the stories of a
classic American “will-initiate”, my long time friend:
Arthur Lisch. Arthur, by the way, was a member of
the “diggers”, along with Peter Coyote (fake actor’s
name of a guy who maybe wanted others to forget his once
being a serious hippie), and Wavey Gravey, the hippie
Clown. Here’s one of their stories - a reprint of a
newspaper article on the “diggers”, who went about
feeding hundreds of thousands who gathered in San
Francisco for the Summer of Love in 1966 etc (a second
echo of the Return of Christ in the Ethereal):
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19671007&id=CQMqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_CcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2263,4010626
I didn’t meet Arthur until later, when he had settled
down, become an anthroposophist, and married a Waldorf
School teacher. He has many stories, and beginning
in the ‘60‘s traveled around a lot (wandered), ending up
in odd places. He trusted his instinctive will,
and once found himself and his girlfriend in some
forested country land in the East of America, where they
drove by a place where there were dozens of cars parked
out on the road. Being Arthur, they walked in and
introduced themselves.
Turned out this was a meeting of serious Native American
elders, and some of the young folks present wanted
Arthur and his girl to leave, until one of the elder
Elders reminded them, more or less by saying: “if he
found us, he is meant to be here”.
I once heard him give a remarkable presentation on what
he called: spiritual geography, at a conference around
1997, in Sonoma County, CA. He had a relatively
large topographical map of California, with actual
raised three-dimensional features. He demonstrated
for us that if you looked carefully at the raised
features of this map, you could see the impression of a
dragon, lying in a way that essentially surrounded the
San Francisco Bay Area, with its open jaws pointed at
San Francisco from the North and its body and tale
curled all the way around first north, then east, and
then south, encompassing the whole East Bay, including
Oakland and Berkeley.
He then showed us the locations, all through California,
of all the Catholic founded monasteries there named
after St. Michael. There were at least a
dozen. The most southern monastery, was near the
coast of Southern California, just opposite an island
off that coast that local Native tribes called: the Gate
of Death. Not only that. you could draw a straight
line from the most southern, all the way north traveling
through Santa Cruz just south of the SF Bay Area,
through what is now called Mt. Davidson in SF itself,
but which was originally called Mt. St. Michael, and has
a 60 foot concrete cross on the top, finally
passing through Santa Rosa. All the Michael
monasteries in California were on this line.
The monasteries in Santa Cruz (cross?) and Santa Rosa
(rose?) showed the influence of the Rose-Cross on this
geography. The line, according to Arthur, was a
spear, and it goes right through the mouth and head of
the dragon, and what this represented was a geographical
premonition of Michael’s defeat of the dragon in 1879,
wherein the dragon was thrown to the earth.
Keep in mind that the western edge of California is on
the meeting border of two of the four Ethers, circling
the earth. These borders of the four ether-zones
run north south. “The Etheric Formative
Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man: A Path of Investigation
into the World of the Living.” by Guenther Wachsmuth: (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guenther_Wachsmuth
). Carl Stegmann, author of “The Other-America:
the West in the Light of Spiritual Science”, describes
therein that the giant-ism of plants in that region of
the earth, such as the Redwoods and the Sequoia, as due
to this confluence of these two ether-zones. Nor
does one want to accidentally step on one of the huge
“banana slugs”, that come crawling out of the plant life
in Northern California in the course of a nice winter’s
rain.
California is also on the Ring of Fire (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Fire
), which is the left over remains of when the Moon was
removed from the area of the Pacific Ocean as described
by Steiner in Occult Science, order to create a realm
for certain classes of Beings that would have keep Earth
evolution taking a course in the direction excessive
hardening.
One last Arthur story ... One day, I think this was in
the late 80‘s or early 90‘s, Arthur, then living in
Northern California felt the urge to go to Washington
D.C. and investigate the architectural stuff of the Free
Masons. So he went, and while doing some research
visiting with various clerks in government offices,
found out that near the center of the cross formed by
Lincoln Memorial, the White House, the Capital Building,
and the Jefferson Memorial, in which in more or less the
middle also lies the Washington Monument, there is set a
small (3x3x4 foot) concrete block, placed their decades
ago by the U.S. Geological Survey, as a marker from
which to take exact instrument readings of directions
(exactly East, North, South and West), as well as an
exact above sea level elevation measurement.
Arthur was aware of the significance of the Four
Directions to Native Americans, as well as the fact that
the Four Directions are clearly mentioned in the
Foundation Stone Meditation, and in fact that when
Steiner did an open air ritual ceremony connected to the
laying of the actual foundation stone for the original
Goetheanum, he actually spoke to the spirits of the Four
Directions directly, - Arthur then of course went to
find this Survey marker.
While he was looking at this remarkable artifact,
pointing in exactly the Four Directions, he noticed,
perhaps a hundred yards away, a circle of people, who as
he walked toward them turned out to be Native American
Elders, some of whom remembered meeting him years ago
when he wandered into their gathering in an Eastern
forest. He had had contact with a couple of them
in the intervening years, and he was welcomed into their
circle.
He discovered they had been coming to the Mall for
several years, doing a seven year cycle of ceremonies
praying for the future of America and of the
Earth. When Arthur pointed out the Four Directions
artifact, the group moved the circle there, and the last
couple of years ceremonies were held with that Four
Directions artifact in the center of their ceremonial
circle.
When I went to visit Hopi Elders, on the Easter Weekend
of 1985, to discuss their prophecies of the True white
brother, Arthur was to go with me, but at the last
minute his wife fell ill, so I drove myself alone, the
almost 2500 mile round trip, for that effort to make a
connection, between Native America spirituality and
Anthroposophy. A connection did happen at a
spiritual level, but not on the physical plane.
See the essays mentioned above.
Of course, Arthur and I are not the only
anthroposophists seeking to foster such relationships
with America’s aboriginal peoples, and in my view, given
the general failures of the Society in America to become
grounded here, the Michael Festival that Steiner hoped
would be inaugurated, has never come to pass ...
apparently.
The fact is the “Spirit” finds other places, when
something It tried to foster fails. For that
reason I believe that the annual meeting of the
Bioneers, which takes place around the middle of October
in Marin County in Northern California, is that
Michaelic festival. Here is a link to an article I
wrote some years ago on the Bioneers:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/bioneers.html
Here is a link to their website:
http://www.bioneers.org/
In fact, I suspect that the spear drawn on that map by
Arthur years ago, goes right through the “eye” of that
dragon, as it passes through the location of the Marin
County offices, which are used for the Bioneers
conferences and were designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright. Here’s a link to google images of that
remarkable building:
https://www.google.com/search?q=marin+county+frank+lloyd+wright&biw=1863&bih=971&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=PEnBVPPFIMb-yQTHk4HgAQ&sqi=2&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ
I hope you have enjoyed this slight and introductory
material on the Occult Mysteries in America. There
is a great deal more should one bother to lift their
heads above their collections of the texts of Rudolf
Steiner ... with a bit of reminder of one last theme
that has been presented before: the Culmination (
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Culmination.html
). This event, taking place between 1997 and 2003,
on the Internet discussion group “the Ark”, at least at
this point seems to have had no notable effect on the
Mystery Nature of American Politics, although at least
four American personalities involved, all richly
connected to Rudolf Steiner, participated in the
Culmination, three of whom are still living, and one of
them (me) does write a lot about American Politics, and
is currently shopping a screenplay on the deeper Idea
nature of the Republic.
to be continued ...
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science 10.1.2c
The Mystery of American Politics (continued)
The World Is. It includes me, and others.
Words wander by, not unlike the bird songs, and whispers
of the wind in the trees outside my window. I go
out into this world, most often of necessity: getting
groceries, visiting the doctor. Sometimes for
pleasure, but age and infirmities often set
limits. Can’t walk well at all.
I have a TV, and a computer or two, as well as a
phone. Then there are books, some of them so
lovely they make you cry, like the recent one by Patrick
Rothfuss: “The Slow Regard of Silent Things”.
Some of my five children call me weekly, or more
often. My eldest is helping me write my
screenplay. I live with a woman, and she has her
children and her life and interests. All around me
the play of words, from friends, from the TV, from
books, even from the wind, which sighs and roars and
whispers songs only felt in the heart.
Then there are the crows. What a funny word to
describe a lot of crows: a “murder” of crows. I
came home one day from a meeting near the Old North
Bridge in Concord, MA, where the American Revolution
began supposedly with the “word” spoken by: “the shot
heard ‘round the world.” My family - we were
living at River House (
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/riverhouse.html
) at the time - told me that a “murder” of crows had
visited that morning, 50, 60 ... more, countless,
everywhere on the roof, in all the trees, pecking at the
ground.
That evening a bunch from the meeting earlier in the day
at the Bridge invited themselves to visit - they were
having a conversation and needed a place to continue it,
and thought we might want to join in - Linda and
I. The group was connected by an interest in
Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy - except Linda, of
course. Linda reads Sanskrit, studied Vedanta for
20 years, and is on Vestry of the local Episcopalian
Church. Makes for interesting word experiences.
One of the visiting gentleman, a European, was ask to
speak about his “spiritual experiences” and talked for
almost 30 minutes about his “initiation” where he fought
with Ahriman and won. In the silence when he
was done, where several people had clearly become
hypnotized, I yelled out: “Fuck Steiner. Fuck
Initiation.” The spell was broken. Later,
after everyone had left, or gone to bed somewhere in
that big house, I wondered out loud to Linda whether the
murder of crows had visited earlier in the day because
Ahriman was coming to visit that night.
I miss River House, and especially the Grandmother Tree
(
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/GrandmotherTree.html
), who was a very good friend, and give the best and
calmest kinds of advice.
I once worked very hard for weeks on an essay about the
Third Fatima Prophecy: “Saving the Catholic Religion
from the Roman Church - through deepening our
understanding of the Third Fatima Prophecy” (
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/SavingCatholicReligion.html
). After I posted it to my website, I walked down
the driveway at River House, to put a Netflix envelope
in the mail box, when a river (50 or 60) of squirrels
erupted from a copse of trees on my right, danced back
and forth in front of me for about two minutes, and then
disappeared into a copse of trees on the left.
I’ve always felt the presence of the Holy Mother and Her
Friends in my Nature experiences.
I tell these stories because I spend most of my day (and
have for years) with a TV in line of sight with my
computer screen. I keep it on CNN, with the sound
off, keeping a bit of an eye on the material scrolling
across the bottom. I read Drudge everyday, get a
digital NY Times everyday, read Alternet, and Democracy
Now, and also get Sam Smith’s Underground News a few
times a week.
I follow the links and am apt to read The Wall Street
Journal, or the London Times. I subscribe to Al
Jezeera’s Internet feed, but it is more or less the same
as everyone else, including the Huffington Post, which I
also get through e-mail.
I listen to the world song, as it comes through the
News, with the same love and appreciation of what lives
there, as that which comes to me from Mother Nature.
I pay special attention to films and television
dramas. My experience is that the artists involved
are often very perceptive. My book The Art of God
is full of references to films, because I find artists
so acutely attuned to the human adventure.
I have 180 “friends" on Facebook, and 936 subscribers to
my videos on YouTube. Some people are reading what
I write on the couple of Anthroposophy Facebooks groups
to which I belong. I send stuff, on occasion, to
“being human” and Anthroposophy World-wide but hardly
get acknowledgement of receipt anymore.
Then there are thoughts. A head full of thoughts,
from waking up in the morning to going to sleep.
Songs everywhere, some in my head, some outside via the
senses. On many occasions they seem connected, as
if there was an intelligence weaving them into a
whole. Is that intelligence me? In The Art
of God, I described God as distributed. In
everything. So is God talking to God in all these
words, or all these songs? Or is God talking
to Himself? Is there a difference?
Politics has a lot of words. A flood, a torrent, a
tsunami. I live now. I live in a wonderful
boat, doing well in the seas of now. What about
the other boats? Do I care? Should I
care? How can I care?
Years ago I gave up on some of these kinds of questions,
and just decided if all that is, sings, then I should
sing too.
Here is the current version of the last scene, before
the credits, of my screenplay “Consent”:
[background - Gloria is subpoenaed to appear before a
Congressional Committee, chaired by a Republican.
Their concern is to reassert the ongoing narrative that
the government is in charge, and there is no
oligarchy. Gloria appears by herself, with
apparently no attorney. This takes place about
half a year after the “event”.]
Gloria has sat down in the chair before the microphones,
alone. She has no papers with her.
Chairman Roscoe: “Mrs. Stephenson. You seem to be
alone. Were you not advised to come with a
lawyer?”
Gloria: “I am one.”
Roscoe: “What? You are what?”
Gloria: “A lawyer, Mr. Roscoe. I’m a lawyer”
Roscoe: “Oh, well .... okay, By the way my proper
title is Congressman Roscoe.”
Gloria: “Well, if we are going to do proper titles, then
maybe you should call me Citizen Stephenson.”
Roscoe (looking at aides): “Huh ... I’m sorry. I
don’t understand.”
Gloria: “I know Roscoe, ... that’s why I came here, ...
to help you understand.”
more conversations among the aides and such
Matrix (the committee’s main legal council): “Mrs
Stephenson, there are certain protocols for this
place. It is proper to refer to the Chairman as
either Chairman Roscoe or Congressman Roscoe.
Please do so in the future.”
Gloria: “Really? What’s the plan then?
You going to spank me if I don’t behave?”
Matrix (showing some anger): “Mrs Stephenson, I’ll
remind you, you are under subpoena. If you don’t
follow the rules, you’ll be found in contempt of
Congress.”
Gloria: “Well, you are right about that, I do hold
Congress in contempt.”
bits of applause and laughter from the audience in the
room, Roscoe bangs his gavel for silence.
Roscoe (trying to get his “authority” back): “Mrs.
Stephenson, we know you have ... “
Gloria (interrupting him): “That’s Citizen
Stephenson to you, Congressman, if we are going to have
titles and such. (Roscoe tries to get control
back, but Gloria just goes on, talking over him).
You see Congressman, the reason you and your groupies
back there are confused, is that you haven’t been paying
attention. I’m a Citizen of the United States of
America - you know the ones - the ‘We the People'
folks. You work for us not the other way
around. The only reason I came here today was so
that what went on between us would be on live
television. You need a lesson in Civics and I’m
here to deliver it.”
more applause and laughter ... Roscoe uses the gavel,
and it is ineffective ... finally things quiet down.
Matrix and Roscoe confer, and someone comes toward
Gloria carrying a Bible for her to swear on.
Matrix: “Lets get on with this, and leave the sideshows
aside. Please stand and raise your right hand and
put your left hand on the bible.”
Gloria: “Why?”
Matrix: “That’s the usual procedure Mrs. ... ah
Citizen Stephenson. People take an oath
before testifying to the Committee, ... to tell the
truth.”
Gloria: “Are you and Congressman Roscoe going to take
that oath as well? If I’m supposed to swear to
tell the truth, you should swear to tell the truth
too. This is American isn’t it, and one of our
fundamental legal principles is equality for all under
the law. So if you want me to swear, then you
should swear too.”
Roscoe, interrupting: “We are here to have you
testify ... ma’m ... (trying to avoid calling her
citizen). That’s why we’re here.”
Gloria: “Its not why I’m here. If you get to ask
me a question under oath, then I get to ask you a
question under oath. That’s only fair, isn’t
it? The law is supposed to be fair, right?”
more applause and laughter, Roscoe tries again to gavel
things into silence, and this time it doesn’t work, so
he and the other politicians and aides just get up and
leave the room.
Gloria (getting up and turning to the audience):
“Shows over folks. What do you say we all just go to
lunch someplace, have a drink, or smoke a joint and get
better acquainted.”
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science (Part
Eleven)
Revolution. Anarchy. Steiner’s The
Philosophy of Freedom was a textbook version of
philosophical anarchy. Freedom was not there as a
moral principle, but as a means by which the
individual’s own personal sense of what was right and
what was wrong was philosophically and scientifically
justified. Steiner said this most clearly in A
Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’ World
Conception: “Man is not behaving in accordance with the
purposes of the Guiding Power of the world when he
investigates one or another of His commandments, but
when he behaves in accordance with his own
insight. For in him the Guiding Power of the world
manifests Himself. He does not live as Will
somewhere outside of man; He has renounced his own will
in order that all might depend upon the will of man.”
The Second Eucharist in the Ethereal* reveals that
Christ so powerfully supports individual spiritual/moral
freedom, that in that Second Eucharist Christ spends His
life forces into the will of the morally free human
being. We choose, He follows. What is a
physical/material Host in the First Eucharist, is, in
the Second Eucharist, aspects of the Life Garment of the
Creator God Himself.
*[For the whole, see Living Thinking in Action:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/liveT.html
. A part of this is at the end of this Part Eleven
introduction.]
The first hundred years of anthroposophical activity was
to make possible my book: The Art of God: an actual
theory of Everything. What I did was eat what
Steiner and his best pupils gave/created. When I
found my Way to those works, in the second seventh of
years of my incarnation, I devoured them. I ate
Steiner, Coleridge, Emerson, Adams, Whicher, Schad,
Schwenk, Hauschka, Barfield, Tomberg, Klocek, Clarke,
MacCoun, Bornfield, Stephenson, Zajonc, LeGuin, - I
dined on dozens of minds through their books, including
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
I was the dry sponge needing, what is said in the First
Leading Thought: “ ... only they can be anthroposophists
who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the
universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels
hunger and thirst.”
To that heady stew I added my own seasoning - my own
nature. Nor was I any kind of intellectual - that
was not my gift. Yes, I was a truth seeker, but
even more I was driven to find and act out of knowledge
of the good. Was I perfect? Good grief
no. But the main core of my inner life, to the
extent that I sought knowledge, was selflessness.
I did not act for me, and in point of fact, my
knowledge-seeking actions often came at a personal cost
to me.
William Bento’s review of my American Anthroposophy
called it “bitter medicine” (
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/JWendt-review-article.pdf
). Again and again, I sought out and spoke the
truth to my fellow anthroposophists, and this act above
all led to the Wall. The creators of this Wall did
not like the truth, but rather preferred their
self-generated myths: that Steiner was perfect and never
made an error; that Prokofieff was the perfect
interpreter of Steiner, and he never uttered an untruth;
and Ben-Aharon was flawless as well. Pick a supposedly
significant anthroposophist and there you will find a
myth.
Yet, I failed/refused to so believe, and as a
consequence I would not be published precisely because
the mirror I held up to the Society was too clear and
too revealing - Bento was correct, it was: “bitter
medicine", although even he did not fully understand
that work, so I had to write my own commentary on my own
work “Bitter Medicine* - Saving Anthroposophy from the
Anthrposophical Society and Movement” (
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Saving.html
).
The Anthroposophical Society had no life in it.
The discussion processes in the Society did not take
account the rules of knowledge illuminated by Steiner’s
early writings on epistemology. Steiner thought
was turned into unquestioned systems of belief.
That was no end to the flaws I found.
In the end, I even had to go so far as to discard
Steiner’s threefolding ideas, for my attempt to describe
the existing order of the social world of humanity, and
there found not threefolding, but Christ. Christ
was right out in the open, in plain sight.
We lived within Him. But the Society, and
especially the Social Science Section, was blind by what
they turned into a spiritual ideology - threefolding was
the way the human social order ought to be organized,
and how Christ had actually ordered it be damned.
The Art of God (a Sixth Gospel) will be hated by both
the religious and the scientific, for it does the
unthinkable. It actually explains how the world
works. And, that in a far better and more
understandable way than does any fundamentalist
religion, ... even that fundamentalist religion we have
to call Steinerism, and those aspects of natural
science: the theories of the Big Bang and Darwinian
Evolution.
It is not me, by the Way. I only describe the
order and the organism of human social existence as
being the effect of Christ’s Love. What could be
more radical to science, religion, and traditional
anthroposophy, then to unveil the fact that the social /
political earth organism is the Being of Christ - a
matter even Steiner pointed toward when he said that at
Calvary, when the blood of Christ fell to the Earth, the
Christ became then: The Spirit of the Earth. A
Cosmic Being had descended as far as was possible into
the world of matter, and so became what all human beings
fed on, and thirsted for, and incarnated to find.
He eternally says: “I will be with you unto the ends of
time”.
I was a anarchist among members of a Society that did
not seek spiritual freedom, but rather by bowing in
reverence to Steiner-thought managed the opposite,
succumbing precisely to that which Steiner warned about
in the last sentence of the original introduction to The
Philosophy of Freedom: “One must be able to
confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will
fall into its bondage”.
In the lectures given after and explaining the fire that
destroyed the First Goetheanum, Steiner even lamented in
Awakening to Community (lecture three), on the
consequences of failing (which has happened) to properly
take up The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (or
Freedom): “The way it should be read is with
attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly
different way of thinking and willing and looking at
things....The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom
has not been read in the different way I have been
describing. That is the point, and a point that
must be sharply stressed if the development of the
Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that
of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind,
anthroposophy’s conveyance through the Society will
result in its being completely misunderstood, and its
only fruit will be endless conflict!"
But our true Teacher is not Steiner, but Christ, who
acts in such a Way that it was entirely unnecessary for
human beings to even acknowledge His Role.
Christ’s Gift was completely selfless. The Author
of the Creation required of us nothing, but that we
recognize what we and He all shared: Our Father.
From: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the
Consciousness Soul:
“...Christ as holy breath breathes upon the slumbering
burning embers of our own good nature, just as we
breathe upon a tiny fire in order to increase its
power. He sacrifices His Being into this breath,
which gives Life to the tiny ember-like fire of our
moral heart. The holy breath becomes within the
soul of each human being who asks, seeks and knocks a
gift of Living Warmth that enlivens our own free fire of
moral will...
“...The outer world is but a seeming, and what is
brought by the Culture of Media mere pictures of the
Stage Setting for the World Temple that is home to our
biographies. When we think away this outer seeming
- this logos formed and maya based sense world, and
concentrate only on the Idea of the moral grace (Life
filled holy breath) we receive and then enact out of the
wind warmed fire of individual moral will - as
individual law givers, as the fulfillment of the law and
the prophets - we create this Meaning of Earth
Existence. Every act of moral grace, given greater
Life within in the deepest intimacy of our life of soul,
is an ethereal communion with Christ, even though we may
only experience it as what to us is a mere thought of
what is the Good at some moment of need in the
biography.
“Christ gives us this Gift, by Grace, freely out of
Love, and with no need that we see Him as its
Author. We hunger inwardly to know what the right
thing to do is, and when this hungering is authentic, we
receive Christ’s Holy Breath. This does not come
so much as a thought-picture of the Good in response to
our questing spirit, but rather as the contentless
breathing substance of Christ’s Being. We are
touched (inspired) by Love, and at this touch we shape
that Breath into the thought that we then know. The
nature of its application, and the form in which we
incarnate this thought, is entirely our own. We
shape the thought completely out of our own freedom -
our own moral fire of will - for only we can apply it
accurately in the individual circumstances of our lives.
“As the Age of the Consciousness Soul unfolds
accompanied by this Second Eucharist, the Social World
of human relationships begins to light and warm from
within. For each free act of moral grace rests
upon this Gift of Christ’s Being to us - an ethereal
substance received in the communion within the Temple of
the own Soul, freely given in Love whenever we
genuinely: ask, seek and knock during our search for the
Good. Our participation in this Rite, this trial
by Fire leavened by Holy Breath, leads us to the
co-creation of new light and new warmth - the delicate
budding and growing point of co-participated moral deeds
out of which the New Jerusalem is slowly being born.
“This co-creation is entirely inward, a slowly dawning
Sun within the macro Invisible World of Spirit.
Moreover, we do it collectively (as humanity).
While each of us contributes our part, it is our
collective conscious celebration of the Second Ethereal
Eucharist (creating the Good) that begins the
transubstantiation of the collective (presently
materialized and fallen) thought-world of humanity into
the New Jerusalem.”
Introduction: 11.1.1 The Yearning for the Sacred
We can hear, among many today, a sentiment that goes
something like this: “I am inclined to the spiritual,
but I am not religious.”. In America, according to
polls, the admission to having religious beliefs are
holding firm - if not growing, while in Europe, they are
declining. Recent movies, “Transcendence” (about a
man, and then a woman, who join their minds to machines
only to become one with nature in a mechanical way), and
now the Luc Besson film “Lucy” (about a woman who
accidentally takes a lot of synthetic growth drugs,
whose consciousness expands until she too unites
with “everything”) - in both these films the “theory of
evolution” (Darwin) becomes a kind of intellectual trap
(or limit) which the creator of these film cannot go
beyond.
These are popular films, ... there are lesser known
films, such as “Cafe”, where the encounter with the
divine is expressed by the appearance of a young woman
to a computer nerd in a Cafe, who explains to him that
he and his friends are “programs” she (as a kind of
“god”) has created, but at the same time set free to
make their own choices. Here the sacred is bound
inside a computer metaphor that in its own way too
limits the imagination of the film’s writer.
On the other side of this spectrum of neo-religious film
art, there is Mel Gibson’s movie about Christ: “The
Passion”, which focuses almost totally on the scourging
of the Christ, and then His death on the Cross, without
really appreciating the significance of the
Resurrection. To this we can add the more recent
“Noah”, in which the flood story is done as if “Noah”
was a kind of obsessed nut job, who God used to save the
animal kingdom, but not human beings.
Meanwhile, a new Pope, Francis, gives out pieties that
many today want to hear, while the Catholics seem not
quite sure what to do with the fact that this pleasant
and kind man was also first a Jesuit. And, in
America, the political Right, and the political Left (to
a lesser degree), can’t produce a politician who is free
to be an atheist, although the earlier movie “The
Contender” is about the Senate confirmation of an avowed
atheist as Vice President, when the prior one has died
in office.
Then over in California, a sexual/physical movement (the
OM movement) has burst forth, spreading out all over
America, which tries to renew sex - or at least deepen
on a physical level the sexual relationships between men
and women, but can’t find the word Eros in its
vocabulary [
http://nicoledaedone.com/mas/
]. The Hippies came and went (for the most part),
and sensed God was in everyone, but no longer up in the
sky wearing a white beard and looking powerful and wise.
Many young, believing completely the doctrines of
materialist science about evolution and the big bang,
manage not to recognize that these doctrines too are a
kind of religion, where the neo-priests are called:
scientists. These folks, when thought about
by serious and skilled philosophers, are now being
called anti-theists, as opposed to atheists, because
they mostly are against religion in the sense of God as
a “cause” of everything, but not entirely unsure with
what to replace it.
Then there is Anthroposophy, which got seriously lost in
Guru worship, and cherry picked what parts of Steiner it
would turn into a belief system, while at the same time
ignoring his warning that the most dangerous thing to
the Anthroposophical Society was the Christian Community
(see lecture six, of “Awakening to Community”).
Now Steiner was no slouch when it came to spiritual
insights, and he basically stayed away from
Christianity, leaving its deeper future to a Myth he
created about a great coming to a theater near you
spiritual teacher, the Future Maitreya Buddha - who
would be “the Flesh become Word”. The
anthroposophists go to the First Class (at least some of
them) and want to treat it like going to Church, and
believe in their own Myth of the magical Christmas
Conference, trying very hard to pretend that whole thing
didn’t fail as soon as Steiner died.
If one was to generalize, we could say that with the
change of consciousness in the last couple of hundred
years, leading to a firm self-consciousness, everyone
wants to be a spiritual teacher of some sort or another,
even if they don’t call it that name. Just follow
the blog of Sam Harris [
http://www.samharris.org/blog
] (who wrote The End of Faith) if you want to catch that
impulse in action.
In American Christianity, on the Protestant side of
things, we have the rise of the mega-churches, which are
a kind of Whole Foods supermarket of all things
community and possibly spiritual. 25,000 members
all going to hundreds of groups inside on organization,
run from the top down by a charismatic preacher.
These preachers used to be all over television, and are
still found on the radio at odd hours, although radio is
mostly dominated by payola driven record companies and
far right talk show hosts - hate based politics as
religion.
Then there are celebrities. Movie stars.
Television stars. Pop music stars.
Occasionally a writer, such as George R. R. Martin,
whose fantasy novels were made into a hugely popular
series on HBO. And, lets not ignore the
professional celebrities, such as Paris Hilton, or the
Kardasians, who have no talent for anything
whatsoever. And, lets not ignore the
neo-terrorists like ISIS and Boko Haram, who have
provided a level of hate-filled violence that borders on
the absurd, but at the same time yearns to dominate
publicly via social media such as websites, Facebook,
and Youtube.
Here we encounter one of the darker sides of
Media. I once watched a CNN bit about a protest
over violence in the middle-East somewhere, that seemed
to involve hundreds, until the camera pulled back
(accidentally) to reveal that the protesters only
amounted to about 30 people with signs and burning
flags, while in the far background you saw all kinds of
people going about their ordinary business, totally
uninvolved. If the TV camera wasn’t there, there
probably would not have been any protesters either.
Andy Warhol was right: Everyone wants their 15 minutes
of fame. The Arab Spring led to more oppression,
and anyone know what happened to the Occupy Wall Street
People? I think most of them are on Twitter and
Instagram these days. Hell, I made over 270 videos for
Youtube.
Egotism, anyone?
Maybe something else is going on, and these seemingly
out of control efforts at standing out against the
background of faceless masses is all about something
else.
When I wrote “The Art of God: an actual theory of
Everything”, I used the terms: “the distributed God”,
borrowing that metaphor (sorry folks) from distributed
computer networks. If computers, massively linked
together when otherwise not being used, could be set to
work to solve problems requiring a lot of processing
power, what about people all over the world trying to do
the good? A massive creative parallel synergy of
good. Or, sometimes, not so good.
Most people aren’t “standing out”. Most people
just go about their business, raising families, trying
to do a good job, and not get too lost in some kind of
defective addiction or other problematic bad
habit. They are often consumers of what the
“standing out” folks are up to, finding “spiritual (?)”
nourishment or inspiration in others.
On a certain level we live in a modern Tower of Babel -
every “standing out” person throws new kinds of language
usages into the mix, and the “consumers” find words or
ideas there that satisfy some yearning of their
own. If we step back a bit from what goes on on TV
News, we can see this “language” creative process in
action. For example, we’ve recently entered the
age of “gates”, such as Watergate, and more recently
Deflate-Gate (if you don’t get that last cultural
reference just “Google” it).
Are religions falling apart because at some point
everyone is going to have to create their own
“religion”? Yet, somewhere deep in the souls of
human beings there are yearnings, desires, wants,
appetites for some kind of “meaning”. Included in
those desires is one to decide for themselves what the
world and their lives is to “mean”.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that with billions of
individuals wandering the modern world, the search for
“meaning” seems to create a lot of noise, because just
about everyone wants to self-determine the good and the
true. Rudolf Steiner was pretty much right-on when
in Theosophy he defined the Age of the Consciousness (or
Spiritual) Soul as:
“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 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 her 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.”
Is this the individualization of the yearning for the
sacred? Why not.
Introduction: 11.1.2 The Sacred Nature of the
Lower Chakras
Rudolf Steiner was fairly clear that in thinking, we are
most awake, in feeling, we are dreaming, and in willing
we are mostly asleep. Thinking is dominated by the
processes at the nerve-sense pole of the physical form,
while feeling is dominated by the processes at the
rhythmic pole - the circulation and the breathing.
Willing belongs to the metabolic-limb pole.
He seemed to turn the whole thing upside down by
suggesting that the economic sphere belonged to the
nerve-sense pole, the rights sphere to the middle
rhythmic realm and the cultural sphere to the lower
pole. I’ll leave that aside, because I never
understood it. Perhaps someone will read this and
clarify the situation.
My own research suggests that there is thinking in
thinking, feeling in thinking and willing in
thinking. Likewise there is thinking in feeling,
feeling in feeling, and willing in feeling, as well as
thinking in willing, feeling in willing and willing in
willing. The fact of there being willing in
thinking leads to thinking’s higher potential when we
learn to control both the attention and the intention
(acts of will) in thinking. Want to understand
thinking in willing? Athletes and dancers know
this ... you can’t think and act (will) at the same
time. You train, but at the crucial time it is the
feet and hands that think. Scientists mistakenly
call this muscle memory, but at least they have noticed
the phenomena.
The chakras are a seven-fold system, that consists of
the three three-fold subsystems. We can directly
observe these processes (we don’t need to be
clairvoyant), during meditation, when the body has
become very still and at rest. At that point the
total field of “consciousness” - of soul - is available
for our introspection (acts of our spirit). The
next is an addendum to my longer essay: “Sex, Porn, and
the Return of the Divine Feminine”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/sex,porn.html
“The seed for these next thoughts arose during a
conversation with another person about some of these
ideas. None of this is meant to be definitive -
that is the reader doesn’t have to buy into any of
it. Rather the point is to direct the reader’s
thinking-attention in certain directions - that is
toward their own inwardness instead of the sense world,
concerning which they should ultimately form their own
concepts/ideas ...
“The seven chakras are an integrated system - they are
not separate and individual, but form a whole.
Their traditional names in certain representations: the
Crown Chakra; the Eyebrow Chakra; the Throat Chakra; the
Heart Chakra; the Solar Plexus Chakra; the Reproductive
(or generational) Chakra; and, the Base Chakra.
“There are in this system (or arrangement) three more
obvious threefoldnesses - or three subsystems of a
sort. Threefoldness is an important concept needed
for understanding how complex systems function
together. The heart is the center of two
polarities: crown, eyebrow, and throat above, and solar
plexus, reproductive, and base below. The eyebrow
is the center of the “above” system, with crown above
and throat below; while the generational is the center
of the “below” system with solar plexus above and base
below.
“Each “polarity” is a kind of mirror of the other, with
the three above the heart more heavenly in nature (more
conscious to the “I”), and the three below more earthly
in nature (less conscious to the “I”). In each
subsystem the same rule of relationship applies: the
crown is more “heavenly” and the throat more “earthly”;
while the solar plexus is more “heavenly” and the base
more “earthly”. As a consequence there is a
relationship between the centers of the subsystems -
that is between the way the eyebrow chakra functions and
the generative chakra functions - each metaphorically
the “heart” of that subsystem,
“Within the eyebrow chakra, from the standpoint of our
human personal experience, that is where mental pictures
and other inner picturing such as via the “imagination”
takes place. This is a spiritually “generative”
activity - this creating of mental pictures and the use
of the “imagination”. Lust, or better represented
- Eros - i.e. the generative power in the lower or
earthly sense, often becomes inwardly linked in the soul
with the power of fantasy - for example we have: sexual
fantasies.
“The solar plexus, where bodily movement is “generated”,
is also where “dance” arises. But first, to better
appreciate this, we need to borrow from Tomberg an image
of “two eyes”, one over the other, that he uses in
several ways. Keep in mind that we are “looking”
at this from the inside out. For example, close
your eyes and make an image - any kind will do.
Where in the spacial sense of your bodily organization
does this picture arise? That “where” is what our
eyebrow chakra looks like from the “inside”.
“This two-eyed seeing is the natural cooperation of the
crown and the eyebrow centers. Tomberg is trying
to get us to realize that in our inner “picturing” these
two “eyes” cooperate - and experientially we can observe
this meditatively. When we truly think (that is
when we “generate” thoughts), we actually engage in a
kind of perceptual seeing which is double natured in a
way. We attend most easily to the eyebrow
function, especially when we consciously create an
“image” as a “spiritual” exercise. But the “crown”
is open to the spiritual world in a way - it is a kind
of receiver or antenna. So when thinking serves
“others” (or the Thou), the “wind” or “spirit” unites
with our thinking via the crown or antenna
function. Our thinking-perception becomes a
cooperative “art” - two “eyes”, one above the
other.
“In “dance” we think with the limbs - in the sense of
their function as an extension of the “will” into the
physical world. This thinking with the limbs (in
dance) is two-eyed like the mirrored above with the
crown and the eyebrow function. Dance in this
sense is also a mirror of what we might conceive of as
the “play” of the imagination, most obvious in fantasy,
yet more disciplined in Goethe’s work on exact pictorial
fantasy that stood behind his development/perception of
what lived in the manifestations of the “plant”.
”“Dance” and sexual intercourse are the most obvious
expression of this two-eyed lower chakra functional
interrelationship. For example, a few of those who
dance with partners speak of “dance” as making love in
the vertical. In addition all we have to do is
recall all that we have seen of different kinds of
“dances” over the years of various cultures, and of the
importance of dance as an aspect of ritual.
In America - to continue the example, when “rock ‘n
roll” arose African based sexual rhythms combined with
tin-pan alley romantic love songs, and Elvis Presley led
the change in the nature of popular dancing among
whites, so as to include overtly erotic movements.
“Armies “march”. Protesters march. Limb
expressions are basic, and when the child learns to
stand and then walk and then run, the soul is
manifesting more and more of the lower chakra powers,
all hopefully directed by the upper chakra powers or
capacities.
“At the same time, in thinking we use the term “grasp”
as a metaphor for when we “understand” an idea or
concept. Thinking contains a lot of limb-like
functions, and in The New Mystery of Thinking we strive
to appreciate in practice the twofold nature of the
“will-in-thinking” in sense of the “attention” (that
which we think concerning) and the “intention” or why we
think - that is: what is our purpose or what is the
riddle that drives us.
“Now in the upper pole (crown, eyebrow, and throat), we
also have the function of the phenomena of
sub-vocalizing. Some people can’t “read” without
almost reading aloud, and reading/thinking does involve
a movement of the lower pole (the throat center) of the
upper threefoldness in the sense of what we experience
as “discursive thinking”. Certain meditative
practices involve the inner repetition of words, so that
this near-silent inner-wording guides the two-eyed
function of the eyebrow and crown centers in a certain
direction. Some of the “power” for this comes from
the fact that the throat center is nearest the heart,
and that thought/concept should led us to also
contemplate the significance of the solar plexus center
also being nearest the heart.
“Again, close your eyes and talk to yourself inwardly
and silently in the way you sometimes think. Where
in your bodily organization does this inner wording take
place?
“The point of all this discussion is to direct the
reader’s mental activity in the sense of realizing that
the study of the chakras, or seven soul functional
centers, can be carried out by thinking itself, if it
just contemplates normal human behavior as well as what
we experience directly ourselves within our own
souls. No atavistic visual clairvoyance is
needed. We just need to think carefully about our
own nature, and how that is also a universal
representation of all of human nature and ultimately of
all of human social life. Everything is
interconnected, or as Emerson puts it - the mind forms
rays of relationship between all objects of experience.
“The reader is invited to make their own observations,
for that activity is then the surest way to better
appreciate just how much we can ourselves “know” through
thinking. Sit quietly. Let go of all outside
inputs. Only pay attention to the field of
consciousness that is the totality of our experience
while at rest in a chair. Our feet hurt, our back
is not properly relaxed, a finger itches. Engage
in making inner pictures and speaking mantras.
Notice where in the total field of our consciousness
these experiences take place. The soul and spirit
are right in front of us all the time - we just have to
attend to them, keeping in mind that the act of
attending is itself a spiritual act.”
Now we know procreation has to be one of the most sacred
acts in which human beings engage. The Roman
Catholic Church has tried to morally/forcefully control
this “power” for a long time. If there are no physical
bodies being generated, there are no avatar-bodily forms
in which the spirit can incarnate. Lets think
about this a little bit.
In the essay above, Sex, Porn, and the Return of the
Divine Feminine, it is explain how “lust”, or physical
desire (a lower chakra process), brings together human
beings for procreation. It is also explained above
that this “lust” includes the hunger for incarnation of
the child still in the spiritual world. There are
not two “lusts” active in sex, but three. Millenia
ago, this “generational” power was understood, which is
why the Goddess Mysteries celebrated “sex” in the
Temple. It was only after the three patriarchal
monotheisms (Hebrew, Christian and Muslim) arose that
the destruction of the old Goddess Mysteries was carried
out so explicitly.
Please remember that St. Paul, was not a disciple, but
went around trying to crucify early followers of
Christ’s Teachings, as part of an effort by the Hebrew
Mysteries (in which he was an initiate) to eradicate
competing mystery wisdom. Christ had to literally
knock Paul off his ass onto his ass, to get him to pay
attention. This Saul/Paul transformation was not
the only one to arise, but like all sudden converts, a
thoroughly overzealous Saul/Paul wrote his somewhat
beautiful letters everywhere excoriating others to what
was to be the right way to follow Christ. These
letters clearly sought to keep women from priest-like
roles, and to force the view that the physical body (the
corpus) was the seat of sin.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine made his pact with
the devil hidden in some of the early Church leaders,
they collectively finished off the ancient mystery
temples, destroyed their libraries, and created a
so-called “New” Testament in which the now sainted
Saul/Paul was made to appear as the founder of the
Christian Religion, when clearly the Disciple Peter was
meant for that role. The Gospels that had other
unapproved teachings were eliminated, although Fate was
able to preserve several so that in our Age we could
rethink Christ’s Teaching in their light.
The Goddess religions of ancient times understood the
chakras, yet their holy and sacred nature had to become
then lost for a while in the mists of time. The
Roman Church was unable to hide the Eucharist, however,
although it did not understand it. When Christ
gave this Teaching during what we today call Holy Week,
it was, yes, His Body and His Blood that was to be taken
as spiritual nourishment, but the early Church did not
understand that all of the physical world was the Body
and Blood of the Cosmic Christ. There is nothing
in which He does not reside, as the representative of
the Father (I and the Father are One; and, No one get to
the Father except through Me).
We can wonder at the loss, except for the fact that this
loss was allowed intentionally by the Mysteries, so that
the human being could become completely free. What
Barfield called “original participation” had to
disappear into the “onlooker separation”, so that
humanity would find itself on its own. The modern
Age was for all to become a collective Dark Night of the
Soul.
The fundamentalists fight a rearguard battle, trying to
force people into blind faith in the God of the
Book. But the Divine Mystery never was
captured by any Book, and has always inhabited the
all-that-is.
Steiner made an effort (lets not bother with whether he
did a good job or not - that’s just sour grapes from
people who could not begin to do what he did accomplish)
to rediscover the Divine Mystery in Everything.
Beginning with thinking, via his writings on philosophy
and epistemology. At the same time, Steiner could
only work overtly with the chakras from the heart and
above. People were just not ready for those below.
Yet, what else has begun in Biodynamics, but an
understanding of the mystery nature of the substances we
need for “nutrition”. The preparer of food is
encouraged to be conscious of the sacred nature of their
arts, and we pray before meals. The farmer “stirs”
the preparations, and when they can, they get a lot of
people to take a turn at “stirring”.
Steiner taught that when food is digested it is
completely destroyed by the “metabolic” (another lower
chakra) processes, and then recreated as it crosses the
intestinal wall into matter that has become completely
owned by our own spirit - our own warmth organism.
While basically unconsciously, all food is
transubstantiated in the human body by the human
I. It is dematerialized - and disappears from
existence, and the unconscious will forces thus
generated exercise something in the soul and astral
body-spirit complex. Only after this is new matter
created - an original act of creation.
Because our food is so poor however, so degenerated into
the non-living, it has to be eliminated and the astral
body-spirit complex warmth body forces necessary cannot
be exercised. If they cannot be “exercised” than
initiation is made more difficult, because o the role
those forces then developed in the warmth body need to
play in the katharsis or purification of the astral body
is not fully developed in the modern human being.
What can't be so transformed is eliminated and returned
to the wiser and more thorough processes of
Nature. Remember the chakras function as a whole
and the upper three can contribute to the work of the
lower three, especially by beginning to realize how
completely the Cosmic Christ penetrates and supports the
totality of the Creation, at all levels. The lower
chakras are sacred, just as is everything else.
Up next: The Transcendent and Holy Beauty of the Double
...
Introduction: 11.1.3 The Transcendent and Holy Beauty
of the Double
What we despise we cannot understand; and, we can only
gain knowledge of that which we choose to love.
Let’s start with a tale, parts of which we shall borrow
from Steiner. I’m not looking here for any kind of
rigid technical accuracy, but rather for the poetry of
the situation as it were. Why is evil ugly?
Perhaps it is not:
https://greekgodpan.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/8105219985_349da2547f_ojj.jpg
A long long time ago, a sphere of purest warmth is
created by Beings, so exalted in the great scheme of the
Creation that trying to give them names, such as
Seraphim, or Cherubim or Thrones or Spirits of
Personality or Spirits of Form is almost ... almost but
not quite ... blasphemy. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a
wonderful tale called: the Nine Billion Names of
God. Perhaps the reader can see the problem.
This sphere was coextensive with the current orbit of
Saturn, and Steiner labeled it the Saturn Incarnation of
the Earth. By any measure that is something very
large, and seems to have arisen in three-dimensional
space, and at a certain time, so we could say that
already Time and Space had been created, perhaps just to
house this warmth artifact of the Divine.
Into this womb of warmth was placed ... what? The
embryonic nature of human beings seems not quite
adequate. Perhaps individualized tone creators is
a bit better. Not one of them was destined to be
alike any other, and if each sang a different melody and
had a different rhythm we might get a bit of a hint of
what was growing there.
It is said, in the oldest stories, that this sphere of
warmth was immobile in a way - static. That is
until the Son manifested Himself as a mere point, and
sacrificed His own capacity to move. Thus
anchored, the whole sphere of warmth itself began to
rotate urged on by the love from the surrounding powers,
and as it rotated currents arose around each of the
singing motes, and these motes began to dance their
becoming in a cosmic womb of warmth.
Eventually warmth and tone became matter, but first
there was Let there be Light, and the Sun incarnation of
the Earth arose. In the vast darkness of Space and
Time, Light played upon the warmth, and ... “1 In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And
the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was]
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters.”
There could be more, but lets just leave the richer
poetry to the true poets - who wrote all the Great
Creation Myths which humanity currently possesses
...
Uncountable eons later, human beings began to loose
their connection to the Divine. The creation
stories seemed less and less true as that aspect of the
evolution of consciousness, known as the on-looker
separation, brought about the appearance of the Age of
Science as the most modern path of Knowledge. By
that time the singing dancing “motes” had acquired
physical bodies, and some of those creative processes
left debris in the rock-like layers of the material body
of the Mother, who we call today the Planet Earth.
The scientific mind, freed now of the mortal necessity
to believe the creation myths (heretics were killed,
remember), looked at the debris and said: “well, all
this stuff came from somewhere, lets figure out where it
came from”. A quite reasonable question under the
circumstances.
Now modern science was born in Western Civilization, and
those who wanted to think freely, chafed under the
dominating influence of the Roman Church, so it was
natural to look for (or perhaps invent) an explanation
in which Gods or Goddesses played no role.
Supernatural explanations were not needed, and the
latest supposed great genius (Stephen Hawking, now
replacing Albert Einstein) wrote a book that asserted
this was so: “The Grand Design” [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Design_(book)
]
According to Wikipedia: “It argues that invoking God is
not necessary to explain the origins of the universe,
and that the Big Bang is a consequence of the laws of
physics alone.[1] In response to criticism, Hawking has
said; “One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but
science makes God unnecessary."[2] When pressed on his
own religious views by the Channel 4 documentary Genius
of Britain, he has clarified that he does not believe in
a personal God.[3][4][5]”
A curious word that “Design”, however. From
Wikipedia: (noun) a specification of an object,
manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in
a particular environment, using a set of primitive
components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to
constraints; (verb, transitive) to create a design, in
an environment (where the designer operates)[2]
Does Hawking or his fans even notice the hypocrisy to
hold to a view that a random chance created process
“designs” something? The word design requires an active
agent with goals. Oh, well.
Science begins by taking things apart (we’ve been over
this before) but then forgets that experienced
phenomenal stuff comes in wholes and as processes - not
parts. Yet, by the time (and sort of as the last
thing to examine) science starts to look at
consciousness. Already committed to a matter-only
conception of the universe, it becomes quite difficult
to admit that consciousness by its very nature is not
visible, even to instruments. There is material
“brain stuff” there, but however else they approach
this, clearly they are trying to explain this invisible
inside of the human being as a product of the meat.
Except, ... to the “instrument” of ones own mind, this
inside is perceptible. We directly experience
“consciousness”, and while some maintain we can’t
examine our own consciousness, the whole history of
depth spiritual practices is about that very act.
Anyone who practices even meditation knows that.
Not everyone draws the same conclusions, but that act is
practiced all over the world by millions.
So ... meanwhile ... what happened to the dancing
singing motes?
They Fell. My recollection is that Tomberg
describes this as a “fall” into number, suffering and
death. What evolutionary biology discovers, by
examining the geographical remains (mostly fossils and
bones), is a long sequence of highly ordered “plant” and
then “animal” forms, arranged in long periods of time
(millions of years by our “numbering” - remember part of
the Fall is into “number”), broken by short periods of
chaos (one “explanation"/theory is the so-called:
punctuated equilibrium [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
]
Biologist “assume” that until there is nervous system,
there is no consciousness. They don’t know this,
but rather it their best guess.
To return to our tale ... the dancing singing motes are
very special - very special. You might say they
are seeds of the Father principle of the Creation.
Because the Divine Mystery lives naturally outside of
Time and Space, in Eternity, the whole of the Fall, and
its resolution is seen, from “In the Beginning ...
“. In fact, the Prologue to the John Gospel says
this: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was
towards God, and God was what the Word was. It was
with God in the Beginning.” (see the Unvarnished
Gospels*, by Andy Gaus). The phrase ... the
Word was towards God ... implies a state of separation,
coupled with the concept of return - or why go
“towards”?
*[Translations from the Greek leaving aside the years of
“interpretations” of the Gospels to make them
conform to later arising theological doctrines.
For example, a Catholic Bible will say that the First
Commandment is to Love God with all thy heart and all
thy mind and all the soul, while in the original,
un-doctored Greek, it reads: Love God with all they
heart and all thy mind and all thy spirit.]
So, ... the special dancing singing motes Fell into
matter - into number, suffering and death.
This happened so that there could be resistance.
In the same way Christ ceased to move so that the warmth
sphere of the Saturn existence could begin to turn, so
did matter arise so that there was a “world” that
resisted the motes. If we look at the bones in the
geographical record we see the story of the evolution of
these avatar-like bodies - what James Cameron in his
movie Avatar imagined man could build and into which
could be transferred human consciousness. Only the
Divine Mystery was way ahead of Cameron’s imagination in
that regard, because that is what he already himself was
- an immortal dancing singing mote residing for a
time (from birth to death) in an avatar-like physical
material body, that falls apart - dust to dust - when
the mote abandons it at death. The story of the
“bones”, assumed by evolutionary biology to tell the
whole tale, really only show the process of development
by which the avatar-like physical body was created, step
by step, to become capable of receiving the mote.
For most of the physical evolution, the mote resided in
a non-material body, “above” the developing physical
body, only dipping into the avatar-like organism for
moments at a time. Thus, the line of humanoids
slowly became tool makers, as the divine intelligence
carried by the mote participated longer and longer in
the daily lives of these avatar-like bodies, until the
time arose when we could inhabit them for great periods
of time, until it was necessary to “sleep”, for
consciousness was antithetical to life, and the two
processes had to be kept in balance. So at night, for
modern human beings, we sleep ... that is the ego or
warmth body, and the astral/desire soul body leave the
life and physical bodies in bed, regularly and if
possible rhythmically, so that the damage done to the
avatar-like body by “ego-consciousness” can be repaired.
Earth was also very attractive - it had to be a “Garden”
otherwise who would want to live there. Eventually
the spiritual masters of the East decided that modern
times were so much darker than they had been in the
beginning - in the time of the Garden, that getting off
of the wheel of life was important, thus was discovered
enlightenment and the seeking after nirvana.
This was a okay idea (from the 6th Buddha), until the
Creator sent His Son to become human and to also
experience: number, suffering and death. We
falsely believe human beings did that to Christ.
Not so. He followed us. He imitated
us. He too Fell, because what else does perfect
Love do when Its lover seems lost. It willingly
goes as far as to Hades, and this the Christian myths
teach, for after death, and before the Resurrection, on
the Saturday of Holy Week, Christ - we are told -
descended into Hell. A path He had to take so as
to Fall all the way into the arms of the holy mother as
so wonderfully depicted by Michaelangelo in the Pieta.
After Christ’s sacrifice, which was to follow us where
we go, the 6th Buddha - now in Heaven - inspired
then what is know today as the Bodhisattva vow, which is
that as one approaches enlightenment, that goal is set
aside until the Age arises when all sentient beings can
become enlightened (leave the wheel of life).
All the same, the dancing singing suffering dying
numbered mote is a bit delicate and
undeveloped. We are young and
inexperienced. We need help. The Fall into
Matter is not easy. So the Divine Mystery, during
the Fall, way back at least to the Moon Earth existence,
creates hierarchies of helpers. Once in matter,
the motes cannot be seen by the physical senses,
although they can be inferred. But in the realm of
the soul they need all kinds of invisible help, and this
help then takes the form of six types of communities of
also invisible beings.
Franz Bardon, the teacher of magical powers and their
related trials, says: “there is nothing unclean in the
whole of the Creation”. Think about that a
minute. We may Judge, but the divine does
not. Its too busy doing other stuff, like loving
each individual unconditionally.
So we have three lower types (or classes) of helpers,
and three higher types (or classes) of helpers, all
invisible while we reside in matter, and normally only
have regular sense organs. In our present we have
these kinds of names. For the lower helpers: the
luciferic double, the ahrimanic double, and the human
double (or psychic parasites/egregores). For the
higher helpers: the guardian angel, the conscience or
higher ego, and the holy spirit (which is a community
sometimes called “the Paraclete").
Why do the higher helpers get the more cool names?
Prejudice, ... and fear. Neither group is more
holy or sacred or beautiful than any other class of
invisible helpers, who reside in the soul as close to
the “I” as your own skin is to your own body.
We could call the luciferic double the tempter (Tomberg
did). The Tempter says: yeah, you deserve it, grab
that pint in premium ice cream off of the shelf and go
home and indulge. You just saw your boy
friend holding hands with another woman and you deserve
a treat.
Meanwhile, your higher ego (giving you one of those
painful pricks of conscience) knows that you haven’t
called your mother in weeks, but wants to forget what
the lower ego knows, which is that mom’s a pain in the
ass drunk who is just as likely to call you a failure as
say something kind or nice, so the ahrimanic double (the
prosecutor according to Tomberg) intervenes, and says:
be cold, forget it, you don’t need the grief, and yes
you are a failure so what. She is too, where do
you think you got these bad habits in the first place.
Years ago, in the animated Saturday afternoon cartoons,
you would see the main character (say Bugs Bunny) with a
devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other and the
two are arguing. All of these six
communities of beings are helpers for the “I”.
And, it is the “I” that is to decide, not the
“helper”. The “I”, or invisible dancing
singing mote, is caught in between the communities of
helpers, just as Christ is everywhere “in between”.
The psychic parasite or bad habit is most often from
karma. When you excarnate after death, these
creatures are saved by various communities of spiritual
beings during the afterlife, as our astral body is
slowly purified by the higher helpers. When we
re-incarnate on the way to a new birth, which ever bad
habit is needed for the operation of karma in that life
is added to the astral body, by the same community of
spiritual beings that preserved it in the first place.
So the tempter is also a friend indeed, as needed for
comfort and advice to just cool your jets and take a
break from the goads of conscience. The prosecutor
judges you and everyone else - its an equal opportunity
asshole, and all of us are at one time or another
assholes. You don’t like the voice that calls you
a drunk, then stop it by stop being a drunk.
Meanwhile the related psychic parasite (Tomberg’s
egregore) is something you created, so if you created
it, you can un-create it. Nice thing today is
there are 12 Step groups, so you don’t have to fight
those battles by yourself. Best to have company
and a shared community of the similarly troubled.
Our “I” - our personal wonderful dancing singing mote
has the very best invisible friends one can ask
for. Give you shit when you need it, give you
comfort and good ideas when you don’t. Pay
attention, but remember: you are the one in charge, not
them. Oh, and while He doesn’t need credit, nor
does She, personally I think some words of gratitude
might go to Christ and the Holy Mother, ‘cause they made
this system up, run it rightly for the purpose of Love
and Justice, and never ever forget to listen to you ...
ever. After all, we live in linear time, and They
have all of Eternity to care about us. Maybe even
for the helpers too - some gratitude might be in
order. Can’t hurt, can it?
Steiner, stuck with folks living in the Intellectual
Soul, could not but depict the three lower helpers (the
three-fold double complex of tempter, prosecutor and
egregore in Tomberg’s somewhat judgmental way of seeing
things) in the early Class Lessons as “creatures”,
perhaps a bit ugly in form, not unlike Gollum in the
Tolkien stories. Or, Lucifer and Ahriman as
bogeymen under the bed.
But the Divine Mystery doesn’t make ugly, - that is a
human judgmental conception. The Creation is
everywhere strangely and exotically beautiful.
Only in the intellectual West, does Good and Evil exist
in the form of good and bad (ugly demonic)
hierarchies. All over the rest of the World,
aboriginal peoples populate the “Underworld” with pipe
playing (though horn-footed) Pans, making music for
circles of half-clad and sexy dancing nymphs.
Introduction 11.1.4 The Bill Gates Syndrome
Bill Gates is a man, who through a combination of hard
word, theft of the inventive work of others, and an
extraordinary bit of luck, became a
multi-billionaire. If a billion is a thousand
million, Gates supposedly has around 50,000 million give
or take. His luck, if you don’t know that story,
was to offer the DOS software he wrote to IBM as a
licensing arrangement, instead of outright selling it to
them. IBM did not anticipate the growth potential
of what was coming, and said sure, we’ll pay you a
licensing fee every time we use your software.
Bill is not liked in a lot of places, and since his
partial retirement has been in the News a lot, via money
he and his wife give away, and such recent
pronouncements (along with a rising chorus), that
intelligent computers are coming and we should be very
scared. He and his foundations have also gotten
involved in education, all over the world, on a huge
scale.
It is kind of like a giant, walking all over culture
world-wide, without having the common sense and
decency to recognize their own limits.
The “syndrome”, I am naming after him, is where an
individual whose fate it is to be very successful in one
sphere of activity, begins to believe he/she is such a
genius that there isn’t any problem (sphere of activity)
in the world that can’t be solve out of that genius and
with the tool of vast amounts of money.
Most of these people are “specialists”, and don’t even
have the idea from their education that there can be
“generalists”. Generalists would probably do a lot
better with its application, but are also likely never
to find their way to that level of wealth.
The Koch brothers have this syndrome, they just apply it
to the realm of political life. They are not as
evil as some like to think, but just true believers in
themselves as right about how the world should be
organized, with enough money as a tool to shape the
world according to their desires.
For both the 2008 and 2012 elections, Karl Rove
collected money from many true believers with a
conservative business bent, made a lot of promises, and
turned out to be wrong. He was so wrong at one
point, that he was caught on Fox Noise exclaiming, just
wait, just wait, Ohio is going to go for us. It
didn’t and some folks believe Karl had gone so far as to
try to fix the election through manipulating electronic
voting machines and similar devices so as to change the
vote, while it was being counted.
George Soros has the syndrome to a degree, and has
written a kind of philosophy of governing,which has
resulted in this: Open Society Foundations
http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/ If
you don’t know who George Soros is, he is a very
successful individual who buys and sells (and
manipulates according so some) in the currency
markets. Currency markets really just buy and sell
“air” - there is no real there there at all.
During that last century or so, Central Banks all over
the world have been pouring made up money (just print
it, and then step back and see what happens), such that
in finance today less than 1% of value comes from the
production and sale of real goods and services and the
rest is fake money being manipulated by all kinds of
“players”, who think they know the nature of the
game.
Most of the commerce in the world, even in oil and such,
is rooted in debt, because the fake money has to
borrowed from these banks in order to come into
existence. Yes, the oil is sold as a viable
commodity, but the money to purchase it, refine it and
deliver it comes from debt, not savings or
earnings. It was massive debt that caused the 2008
financial debacle, and the follow on response in the
financial world is to increase even more the amount of
debt at play in the world.
A lot of them know this is a zero sum game. “In game
theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a
mathematical representation of a situation in which a
participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly
balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the
other participant(s).”
Now years ago I read a very curious remark of Steiner’s,
where he basically said that a lot of giants of industry
were initiates in former incarnations. While the
movie Aviator, about Howard Hughes, offered the
explanation for his genius as connected to OCD, yet if
you read the various books about his life (I have), you
can see again and again how an unusual “intuition”
gifted him with all manner of quite remarkable
insights. Since I like to write these bits with a
few pieces of an entertaining sort, let me tell a story
about Howard Hughes, now dead, but at one time one of
the richest men in the world.
Because of his desire for privacy, and his need to
control, he discovered that Mormon men, with their
habits of no drinking, no smoking, no fooling around,
and basic honesty and hard work, were perfect to have
around in large numbers doing all the personal stuff and
also acting as filters between him and the vast world of
all his business interests.
At one time Hughes was living in the top floors of a Las
Vegas hotel (which you can look up if you
want). He hardly ever left his main room, did a
lot of weird things there, which included watching over
and over again the same film: Ice Station Zebra [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station_Zebra
], while eating mostly Baskin Robbins French Vanilla ice
cream.
His aides, never telling this to Hughes, decided that
instead of always having to run around Las Vegas to get
this particular ice cream, contacted Baskin Robbins and
arranged to purchase a semi-trailers worth of this
product. They took over a giant freezer at the
hotel, off loaded the thousands of gallons of this ice
cream, and from that day forward Hughes never again
asked for this ice cream to eat.
Now my view is the Hughes was atavisticly clairvoyant,
but had no way to talk about his experiences, given his
other quirks. So one way he entertain himself, via
his special intuitions was to mess around on occasion
with the people that worked for him. He “knew”
about the massive ice cream purchase and since the way
he spent his money was often highly personal, he did
something that to him was funny.
Some of you might be asking if there is a point
here. Yes.
The rich are not evil, but rather they are, just as is
often said, very different. They are not like the
rest of us at all. And, having ego’s just like us,
their individual peculiarities often end up seeming to
act on the world in ways we believe we never
would. But that’s the rub isn’t. What would
you do if fate gifted you with 50,000 million dollars?
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science (Part
Twelve - the last “part”): Why? Why a Spiritual
Social Science? Why this series of
“essays”? And the answer is: Final
Participation - the beginning: the role of
Anthroposophy in America, and the Redemption of a
Sacramental Way of Life.
I recently watched a TV show in which a kind of why
question was asked by a character trying to pretend to
admire a guru type individual. The character
asking the question wanted to know what the “purpose” of
the “teaching” was, and the guru type said: there is no
purpose, but there is a “reason”.
In Catherine MacCoun’s wonderful book: “On Becoming an
Alchemist: a guide for the modern magician”, she, in
pondering the questions of what goes on in the Now,
makes a distinction between “how” and “why”.
In appreciating How the present Now came to be, we can
begin to discern something “spiritual”, because we can
look back into the past, and see the sequence of choices
and events involved. Why the present Now came into
existence comes to us out of the future, and can’t be
seen because we can’t see the future, except in the form
of hints and premonitions. Yet, as the Now goes
forward, the whys sort of pile up as it were. We
move through them and as we do they “explain” the Why of
the sequences of Nows we have come to endure, and
hopefully love.
For example, in early January of 2008 I left Fair Oaks,
California to travel East.
In the year 2007, my life was a series of crisis -
I was in my 67th year of life as regards my physical
body. My girl friend at that time had kicked me
out of the house we shared. My body was falling
apart with the arrival of a condition called a-fib, and
then, and in the Fall of 2007 I was to suffer two heart
attacks on the same day. A month later, my
passionate efforts to dissuade the local A. Society
Branch (the Faust Branch - oddly a very European name
for such a Branch in California) that to continue the
study of Paul Emberson’s book: “From Gondhishapur
to Silicon Valley - Spiritual Forces in the development
of computers and the future of technology” [ see my
review here:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/counter-silicon.html
] was dangerous, because the study of that book’s
misinformation was pushing Michael and Christ away from
the Branch meeting, and inviting Ahriman in (which I
could “see” with my thinking). This led to angry
outbursts and an in-effect social dismissal of me as a
member of the Branch.
My mother died in November, at age 95. Another
long story, but a good end to her trials in life.
The man owning place where I was renting a room, asked
me to leave at the beginning of December, because he was
becoming associated with a Persian woman (an educated
Iranian woman), and she was uncomfortable with a single
adult male possibly sharing the house into which she was
to also move.
A kind of friend living in New Hampshire, a half-breed
Mohawk and Scottish Highlander clairvoyant,
offered me an apartment that had been built in half of
her garage. So the choice arose, do I go across
the whole Country Eastward, or hunker down someplace
near my children (four of whom lived in the northern
parts of the San Francisco Bay Area).
Without knowing why, it was clear to me that I ought to
choose the “adventure” and once more go to New
England. I then drove across the Country in the
“dead” of Winter, a whole other story in itself, which
the word adventure barely describes. After a
series of unclear events New Hampshire, I ended up
moving back to Concord, Mass. in the Fall of 2008, and
while there went to a meeting sponsored by some other
old friends, and at this meeting I met Linda. I
started courting her, and one day we were sitting on the
sofa in her family/TV room, and leaned into each, and as
our shoulder’s touched, all desire slipped away, and a
great wave of contentment appeared to envelop both of
us. From that moment we knew that with each other
we would always be home. We have been together,
other than the usual get to know each other trials,
since October of 2008.
How and Why. Linda was well versed in the Eastern
philosophies, had had her own version of a satori-like
enlightenment, and thus began a long discourse on East
and West between the two of us, where her special wisdom
lent a powerful “wet-stone” to the sharpening of my own
mind. Since living with her, I’ve created over 270
videos for YouTube, written: “The Art of God: an actual
theory of Everything”, another book: “The Mystery of
Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount”, finished
my novel American Phoenix, as well as dozens of essays.
About a year ago I joined these Facebook pages on
Anthroposophy, and became very frustrated for all manner
of reasons, some of which clearly belonged to my own
attitudes. It was a good learning experience, but
I did become aware that while I could on occasion point
to some of my previously written material on my studies
of Social Science, there did not exist anything
organized or really coherent as regards the whole.
So I sat down in October, 2014, and wrote over a couple
of days a kind of 12 part subject outline for an
Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science, and then
committed myself to write weekly, and as well to create
along the way something for my website, which now runs
to about 110 pages in my word processor.
I anticipated that there might be comments, and tried to
invite them and make room for them, but for the most
part the “air” in that regard was dead. Except for
the odd fact that I started getting a lot of “friend”
requests - a lot. Previously I did not honor such
requests, but changed my mind and from perhaps 30 or so
Facebook friends, I currently have: 182. I also
tended to get a lot of likes, which is a nice thing, as
people are very busy, but at least I suspected they read
what was written, even if they didn’t have time to go
further.
So, in a certain way, a whole lot of people helped me
write a small book summarizing my research and its
related inner processes. Thank you.
This has been the opening remarks of Part Twelve, and as
has been my practice I may write more in the following
week, but next Saturday, February 7th, 2015 will
be the end of the whole exercise. All the same,
over the next seven days or so I intend to write some
details about:
Final Participation - a beginning:
the role of Anthroposophy in America, and the
Redemption of a Sacramental Way of Life.
Introduction 12.1.1 The Relationship Between
America and Anthroposophy.
It is not an accident of history that there is an Old
World and a New World. The mystery of the Gamer
Brain:
http://badgeville.com/wiki/The_Gamer_Brain
I’m also more and more convinced that the distinction
between fiction and non-fiction doesn’t really work,
because after all most non-fiction consists of a lot of
opinions and speculations masquerading as facts and
truths: e.g. Big Bang cosmology and Darwinian evolution
at the level of speciation.
Another way to look at the same thing is to notice the
role that the picture making capacity of the mind
participates. Fiction we often consider the
product of an act of fantasy; while, non-fiction we
consider to be the product of an act of intellect,
sometimes related to logic or reason. These last
two, logic or reason, tend to be formalized in natural
science, but in normal consciousness we often use a
non-formal sensitivity, which we call “common
sense”.
One of the founding documents of America is Thomas
Paine’s “Common Sense” [
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/147
] From Wikipedia [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_%28pamphlet%29
]:
“
Common Sense[1] is a pamphlet written by Thomas
Paine in 1775–76 that inspired people in the Thirteen
Colonies to declare and fight for independence from
Great Britain in the summer of 1776. The pamphlet
explained the advantages of and the need for immediate
independence in clear, simple language. It was
published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the
beginning of the American Revolution and became an
immediate sensation. It was sold and distributed
widely and read aloud at taverns and meeting places.
“Washington had it read to all his troops, which
at the time had surrounded the British army in Boston.
In proportion to the population of the colonies at
that time (2.5 million), it had the largest sale and
circulation of any book published in American
history.[2] As of 2006, it remains the all-time best
selling American title.[3]
“Common Sense presented the American colonists
with an argument for freedom from British rule at a
time when the question of whether or not to seek
independence was the central issue of the day. Paine
wrote and reasoned in a style that common people
understood. Forgoing the philosophical and Latin
references used by Enlightenment era writers, he
structured Common Sense as if it were a sermon, and
relied on Biblical references to make his case to the
people.[4] He connected independence with common
dissenting Protestant beliefs as a means to present a
distinctly American political identity.[5] Historian
Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as “the most
incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire
revolutionary era”.[6]”
Something was happening in the New World that had not
been possible in the Old World - a kind of logic and
reasoning free of “the philosophical and Latin
references used by Enlightenment era writers”.
While the early colonists in America, mostly came from
European countries, they nevertheless had to encounter
and deal with the so-called savages already living here:
the Red Indian. For a long time it was difficult
for American History (the story of America) to recognize
that the Red Indian peoples had a viable culture,
although Ben Franklin and others saw immediately that
this was true (See “Forgotten Founders”: [
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FF.pdf
], whose subtitle is: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois
and the Rationale for the American Revolution.
Notice, please, the use of the word “Rationale” in Bruce
E. Johansen’s 1982 book.
Native American cultures did not need the
“Enlightenment” in order to understand Nature or to be
wise. Rudolf Steiner, in discussing America, noted
this: “
...America is the place at which races or
civilizations die.” R.S. The Mission of the Folk
Souls, lecture 6.
And this: “
The Indians then took over with them
to the West all that was great in the Atlantean
culture. What was the greatest thing of all to
the Indians? It was that he was still able dimly
to sense something of the ancient greatness and
majesty of a period which existed in the old Atlantean
epoch, in which the divisions of the races had hardly
begun, in which men could look up to the Sun and
perceive the Spirits of Form penetrating through a sea
of mist. Through an ocean of mist the Atlantean
gazed up at that which to him was not divided into six
or seven, but which acted together. This
co-operative activity of the seven Spirits of Form was
called by the Atlanteans the Great Spirit...He clung
firmly to the Great Spirit of the primeval past.”
R.S. Lecture 6 above.
And this: “
The time will one day come when this
American woodenman, which actually everyone is still -
when he begins to speak. Then he will have
something to say very similar to European
Anthroposophy. One can say that we in Europe
develop Anthroposophy in a spiritual way; the American
develops it in a natural way.” (R.S. lecture to
workmen 3 March 1923)
Imaginatively, the Atlantic Ocean is not just a physical
barrier between Europe and America, but at the same time
a psychological and spiritual barrier. This
“barrier” functions in such a way so as to free the
American from certain effects of the degeneration and
falling apart of Western Civilization in Europe, which
is more peculiar to that region of earth-existence, and
involves grave economic problems coupled with a large
immigrant population that is not being successfully
assimilated to the degree that immigrant populations
have been and are being assimilated in America.
The Americas are also the most materialistic and at the
same time physically densest region on the Planet.
That spiritual/evolutionary process we call “the Fall
into Matter”, finds its deepest point of penetration in
the Americas (the “woodenman”). This also effects
social processes, such that communities and families
also become hardened and dense - less able to flex and
adapt in the same way common to European social
forms. The density is so intense that the
“individual” is actually squeezed out of the family and
pushed into the world free of all the old ties of blood,
so otherwise binding in Europe, and elsewhere. See
Clint Eastwood’s wonderful movie Gran Torino for a
dramatic exploration of the differences between an
iconic American individualist, and his neighbors, fresh
from the mountain regions of Southeast Asia, the
Hmong. The latter are being assimilated, and by
the third or fourth generation, only the individual will
remain. Recall Steiner, from above, once more:
...America
is the place at which races or civilizations die.”
R.S. The Mission of the Folk Souls, lecture 6.
Now “woodenman” is an unusual metaphor (pictorial
thought). From my book American Anthroposophy [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/AmericanAnthroposophy.html
]:
“
I have spent some time contemplating Steiner’s use
of the adjective wooden in describing the American’s
instinct for Anthroposophy. Clearly he could
have used an even more material metaphor, such as
crystalline. That he did not, but chose instead
to us a term from the world of plants, particularly of
the higher plant which is the tree, can give us
something to help our understanding. The tree,
while rooted in the earth, in making its wooden pillar
makes the earth itself into a living form which then
raises the tree’s leaves and blossoms much further in
the direction of the cosmos than those plants that
remain nearer the earth on the forest floor.
“Our physical nature, as Americans, is of the
earth, and to the extent that we remain instinctive,
so is our soul life captured by this earth bound
existence. Thus our thinking is also
earthly and material, unless we spiritualize it,
unless we bring moral forces into it
consciously. The more our native goodness
penetrates our thought life consciously (instead of
instinctively), the more we do what the tree does when
it spreads its leaves and blossoms (on its way to
bestowing its fruit for our benefit) into the air far
above the earth. Here is what I wrote in the
essay below on conscious thinking out of the American
Soul (“In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music
of Discipleship”): “The purified will (an
appropriately moral intention and attention) creates
heart warmth in the soul-soil of feeling, out of which
the light and life filled flower of thought is born”.”
“American” thinking produced: “Common Sense”; “the
Declaration of Independence”; and, the
Constitution”, all of which represent an early effort to
create a social order where free individuals may thrive
- something still not generally possible in Europe (the
social Center) or Asia (the social East). Old
Worlds and a New World. The French are obsessed
with being “French”, for example. The Folk Element
remains dominant.
The free individual is a necessary precursor to moral
freedom. And moral freedom is the
goal/purpose/reason/how/why Christ said the following,
which aptly describes what is beginning to happen
naturally in America:
Matthew 10:34-40: “
Don’t think I came to cause
peace across the land. I didn’t come to cause
peace, I came to wield a sword, because I came to
divide a man against his father and a daughter against
her mother and a bride against her mother-in-law, and
to make a man’s servants his enemies. Whoever
prefers father or mother over me is not worthy of me;
and whoever prefers son or daughter over me is not
worthy of me; and whoever does not take his cross and
follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever
found his life will lose it, and the one who lost his
life because of me will find it. Whoever
receives you receives me, and whoever receives me,
receives my Sender.”
Contemplate this during meditation, prayer, and
thinking, if you dare. While America is going
through a stage as the People of Peoples, the net effect
of the social order is to steadily increase
individualism. It wasn’t too long ago when critics
of individualism spoke derogatorily of the “me”
generation, although in the ‘50‘’s there a come a book:
“The Lonely Crowd”.
Young people today, especially those called
“millennials”, are noted for their absence of racism,
sexism and other judgmental confusions of the generation
of their parents. They thrive in social media, in
group dates (not as couples), and are also oddly
a-political. Its not that they don’t have a point
of view, for those points of view are over Facebook,
Twitter and so forth, but rather that they can’t find a
point to voting or joining political parties.
The need for environmentalism, and for dealing with
climate change, they take for granted. Another
peculiarity is the attitude that “information” should be
free, and the need for intellectual property rights
makes for many no sense at all.
The generation, born and educated on the cusp of the
Third Millennium after Christ’s Birth, are naturally
moral, and have trouble understanding why the rest of us
are not. They are also rather inventive and
creative in ways that again seem part of their
nature. Just watch YouTube, with is tsunami of
individualized art. The generation, that will grow
into adulthood in a world on the precipice of financial
chaos and ruin, expects to be able to deal with it.
While the reader of this may wonder how I observe such
things, just keep in mind that I have raised five
children through adolescence and into their young
adulthood (they are now 52, 49, 43, 31, and 26). I
read the books they recommend, converse with them about
their lives and live amazed at their habits, which
include all kinds of time spent playing computer
games.
Their use of modern technology is as natural to them as
breathing, and when asked about the “games”, they
reveal a remarkable sophistication at the social arts of
cooperation, making friends in distant places, for the
purpose of solving shared “game” problems, which often
require the building of communities and other
functioning group behaviors in order to thrive in the
“game” environment. They turn their back on “our”
cold intellectual world, preferring one in which the
imagination and relationships plays the greater
role.
It is we who make fun of the so-called isolated gamer,
never really appreciating that world at all, because we
have already judged it to be false. We have a lot
to learn and they have a lot to teach. They
are a new species of human being - living in a
post-literate world. From an obvious spiritual
point of view, we need to recognize that these young
people came into this Now prepared to deal with it, in
ways we will not be able. Remember the first rule
of a Spiritual Social Science: We must learn to love the
object of thought in order to have true knowledge of its
nature.
Introduction 12.1.2 More America and Anthroposophy -
the Mystery of Tianniman Square
[
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2010/12/10/charter-08/
]
During the 20th Century, the Anthroposophical Society
found a way to forget what Anthroposophy was.
Lacking that understanding, the Society instead of being
what it was meant to be, became a festering locus of
Steinerism, and lost all connection to the rest of the
world (thinking it was spiritually better than other
systems). This was mostly fostered by what
happened in Europe - two world wars, and related social
failures, causing the Society there to draw into itself
- circle the wagons so to speak, and otherwise become
entombed in the concrete of its own illusions about
Anthroposophy.
Here is some Steiner, paraphrased: “In Anthroposophy, it
is the Truth that lives in it. In the
Anthroposophical Society it is the Life that lives in
it.” These are not mutually exclusive conditions,
but rather bear a reciprocal inter-supportive
relationship - the one building up and maintaining the
other.
The American Anthroposophical Society, making itself
fully dependent upon, and looking only at what went on
in the Center (Dornach), to the exclusion of
understanding the place (America) in which it found
itself, failed as well. The Platonists gathered at
the periphery of the Society in America, but were again
and again rejected by the Aristotelians that dominated
the Life of the Society, believing they knew best.
Spiritual egotism (Lucifer) won the day, and in spite of
efforts for years by the Platonists, the Aristotelians
remain fixed in their views and unable to believe they
could use any help.
As a consequence Michael abandoned the Society, both in
Europe and America, and sought other forums in which to
inspire what was needed for the rebirth of
civilization. These were many, for humanity itself
was ready and willing to find the Truth. Humanity
just didn’t need to take the Truth in the form of a
worship of dead German philosopher/guru’s conceptual
frame of reference, which he had called: Spiritual
Science. The Society, in America and Europe had
the words, but not the deeds.
Even in 1933, a light appeared in Dornach, and it was
not V. Tomberg, but rather the Englishman Owen
Barfield. In a lecture given there (see Barfield’s
Romanticism Comes of Age), Barfield makes a crucial
Platonist distinction between method, and the content
produced by method. Anthroposophy - the New
Mystery of Thinking, was the method or how, and
Spiritual Science was the content or what was produced
by the method. But the method required a devotion
to Natural Science and its moral foundations, which were
laid in the open in the idea that any knowledge of the
True (content) had to be accompanied by an exact
description of the how (method) it was produced.
We can easily forgive what happened in Europe, for the
Opponents were successful in destroying German Culture
by making it appear (via National Socialism and its
cohorts) to be filled with the vilest evil possible (the
Holocaust). The only chance for a Michael Impulse
to enter into civilization was America, and at the turn
of the Millennium, the attack on America was begun.
By 2000, Ahriman incarnate, Karl Rove, had found his
tool, a son of privilege (George W. Bush), whose soul
was weak, horribly immature, and dominated by a father
and a grandfather that had themselves made agreements
with the Agents of Chaos. The grandfather had
supported Hitler, and the father then supported the
Saudi’s whose Islamic fundamentalism and oil riches,
enabled them, via a vast anti-west educational system
(the Madrases) to foster hate against the “Great Satan”,
among underprivileged Muslims all over the world.
When Rove and Bush occupied the White House, and thus
the center of political power in America, they were able
through fostering two completely unnecessary wars, and
systematic torture, to nearly destroy the America Dream
as it lived among the poor and oppressed all over the
world. Just as with German Culture, American
Culture was to be crucified.
However, American Culture was not like German
Culture. It was not rooted in decadent and
decaying hierarchical social forms, that functioned from
the top down, but rather was consistently inventive from
the bottom up, from the social commons. Where did
the computer revolution arise? Not from DARPA, the
military-industrial complexes research arm [
http://www.darpa.mil/default.aspx
], but in garages, and basements. Ordered wealthy
structures did not produce the computer revolution, but
rather the social commons and such amazing cultural
artifacts as open source software [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
] designs - something that happened all over
the world where free individuals created something out
of nothing.
Two other artifacts of American Culture need to be
recognized: film (including television) and the musical
revolution created by Rock ‘n Roll. While
corporate entities tried to dominate these for
commercial gain, the creative impulses again belonged to
individuals. The whole world entered into,
following film and music, a Michaelic Conversation at
the level of the social commons. Some brief
examples follow, hopefully pointing the reader in the
right directions:
Akira Kurosawa, in imitation of the American Western
(see my Learning to Perceive the American Soul:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/learning.html
) begins to create a series of films about the Samurai
era of Japanese history (just like we have a history of
the Western), reaching international acclaim with his
Seven Samurai, which is soon imitated by American
filmmakers with The Magnificent Seven. Not to long
after, the Italian director Sergio Leone creates the
so-called Spaghetti Westerns, taking an American TV star
Clint Eastwood, and putting him on the world stage,
leading Eastwood to an acting and directing career of
epic proportions. Even today, Eastwood’s latest
film: American Sniper has created a much needed
conversation about the recent wars, and the role and
damage done to America soldiers in these morally
unnecessary adventures.
In my essay above, we will see the reason for the
importance of the Western as an archetype of the
individual as a free actor in the Age of the
Consciousness Soul. This individually free moral
actor is not confined to the geographic America, for the
American Spirit is fundamentally an all-human impulse,
and was especially characterized by an office worker
standing in front of a tank in Tiananimen Square in
1989.
With Rock ‘n Roll, specifically Elvis Presley, social
dancing underwent a completely new direction, where
Black rhythm and blues was combined with white Tin Pan
Alley romantic songs, and the musical fuel for the whole
1960‘s and ‘70‘s in America was set in play. Thus
began a still ongoing (also true in film) international
Michaelic Conversation that led for a while to Jamaica,
Bob Marley, and Reggae. Then later on to what was
known as World Beat [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbeat
], although the dominance of commerce in the United
States kept a lot of this music off of the radio
airwaves. World Beat was a response from all over
the world, at the level of the social commons, and when
this “answer” to rock ‘n roll was heard in the inner
cities of America, Hip Hop was born, although Gangsta
Rap (again, a fake commercial art) dominated the general
public's mind).
Some years ago, I was listening to Terry Gross’s public
radio show Fresh Air, and she was interviewing the poet
laureate of England, and asked him if he was aware of
any poetic voice that was as powerful as had been that
of Bob Dylan [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ
], and he said yes, the Hip Hop singer Eminem (Marshall
Mathers) [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AqnCSdkjQ0
], was the new poetic seer of America, and perhaps the
world. See also the movie 8 Mile [
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298203/
].
I took a walk once, in the dark of night in that region
of Detroit, Michigan, known as 8 Mile. It is a
story well worth telling ...
In 2003, I had recently moved to Prescott,
Arizona. My friend Stephen Clarke lived
nearby in Sante Fe, New Mexico. There was to be a
mostly private gathering in Detroit, of some
anthroposophists disposed toward trying to understand
the spiritual America. So I drove my pickup truck
to Sante Fe, and Stephen and I drove one of his rebuilt
Mercedes across the lower middle of the United States in
the direction of Detroit. We stopped a couple of
times at Indian reservations, where Stephen, who was
cultivating relationships with Native Americans, would
go into various offices and seek out certain Elders who
he knew the name of, but had not yet met. Stephen
brought with him gifts of tobacco, a kind of social
gesture he had learned was important.
After the second stop, in the middle of emptiness in the
Oklahoma Panhandle, the car broke down. We hitched
a ride to a nearby town, holed up in a local cafe, and
Stephen placed calls to obtain the rental of a truck and
a trailer on which he could put his car, to drive back
to his own garage (he own’s Mozart’s Garage in Sante
Fe). He urged me to take a bus or two and continue
my journey, but I denied the wish, and said it was more
important to me to keep company with my friend while he
dealt with his car issues.
A year later I was living with my then girl friend,
Kelly Sutton (an anthroposophical doctor) in Prescott,
while she took a kind of sabbatical and rethought what
she wanted to do, her medical practice in New England
having fallen into near financial ruin because she
needed 2 and 1/2 employees just to handle the insurance
claim issues. We learned that an Annual General
Meeting of the A. Society was scheduled for early
November, 2004, in Detroit, so we made airplane, car
rental, and motel reservations.
The AGM’s theme was to be America, and several of our
friends (in the America Work as we called it) were going
to speak (Stephen Clarke, and Steve Burman, for
example). This theme had been set up by the
Central Regional Council, chaired (I believe) at that
time by Robert Karp (he now works for the American
Biodynamic Association). Just a month before the
AGM, all the speakers were canceled, and it was said
(via social undercurrents) that this was due to the
disliking of one scheduled speaker: John Stirling Walker
(by what were called “leading members” of the
society). Apparently Walker had publicly insulted
a certain female figure who had a high position in the
Society.
I am, by the way, not defending Walker, for he was
certainly a kind of conversation dominating
rascal. What didn’t make sense to us, was why the
whole list of speakers and the general theme was
canceled, just to eliminate one speaker.
Kelly and I, having spent money (mostly hers) on
reservations, went anyway. We arrived late in the
evening, the day before the AGM was set to lead off with
a speaker at the Detroit Waldorf School around 7
p.m. Trying to find our motel, we got lost.
This led to a verbal altercation (who was responsible
for us getting lost). Kelly (Irish Catholic born)
verbally kicked me out of the car, and I found myself
walking in the cool of a rather dark late evening, in
the 8 Mile region of Detroit. This was where a lot
of Black people lived, in case the reader hasn’t yet got
the point.
I was mad. The neighborhood was full of street
lights that didn’t work, empty lots full of trash and
discarded furniture, and dark houses many of them
boarded up. I expected at any moment to be
accosted by black gang members, robbed and killed.
My mind was in a turmoil. I looked in vain for
distant lights indicating a major intersection that
might have gas stations or fast food places where I
could make a call for a cab. I had my airplane
ticket, and was basically planning to go to the airport
and cash it in for the first flight back to Arizona.
Slowly it dawned on me that Kelly and I had both been
attacked by our ahrimaic doubles, acting in concert, so
as to once more prevent me from connecting with
anthroposophists in Detroit, just as had happened a year
ago, when Stephen and I had tried to drive there. Nor
was this so much about me delivering a message at the
AGM, that was the lesser deed. The real deed was
for me to meet, and become conscious of, the ahrimanic
fear-driven interference, and overcome that and go to
the meeting in spite of the inner opposition.
Eventually I saw off in the distance, some lights at an
intersection. By the time I got to that area of 8
Mile, I must have walked 4 miles (my knees were not so
bad as they are today). I had wrestled the
ahrimanic double to the ground and told him to go fuck
himself.
The intersection was just a couple of streets are right
angles, controlled by stop lights. On one corner
was a fried chicken place, well lit. Everywhere
else was dark. I walked into the chicken place and
I was the only white person there. Several booths
were occupied, and the workers were behind a six inch
thick window of Plexiglas, in the middle of which as a
rotating tube of Plexiglas, that could be used to
receive money and turned in such a way that food was
then dispersed to the customer.
A Very Large black man got up out of a booth, walked up
to me and said: What the fuck are You doing here?
He was not angry or hating me, he was just totally
shocked. I told him my story of the fight and the
walk and wondered if someone had a cell phone I could
borrow to call a cab. He reached into his pocket
for his cell phone and called a number, as the cab was
actually on the other side of the chicken place, where
the driver hung out waiting to hear of fares. The
very large man introduced himself, and introduced me to
the cab driver and off I was looking for the motel,
whose name I knew, but whose directions were not clear.
Kelly meanwhile, regretting having made me leave the
car, drove around a lot and found an open church, and
was righteously warned not to treat her man the way she
had treated me. I called her from the motel when I
got there, and she was already on her way. When
she walked through the door of the motel, I looked at
her and said: “What took you so long?” We both
laughed.
My next letter here will tell the story of that AGM,
which is by itself very instructive and not to be
missed.
Introduction 12.1.3 The 2004 Annual General Meeting
in Detroit, Michigan. Ahriman and Lucifer’s
ability to overwhelm the membership of the
Anthroposophical Society in America, via the threefold
double complex.
This, unfortunately, is a tragic story. As
previously mentioned, Kelly and I traveled to Detroit
originally expecting for the first time to have an AGM
that took up the subject of the Spiritual America.
A month before our leaving Prescott, Arizona, we found
out that the expected thematic material had been
completely changed, and the reports on the research on
the Spiritual America canceled. This was
allegedly done because one of the speakers was found
severely lacking in certain social graces (a true fact),
although no mention was made (or apparently considered)
as to whether his lecture on the relationship between
Lucifer and Ahriman and the Democrat and Republican
Parties, might prove illuminating. Nonetheless,
the powers that be in the A. Society in America canceled
the whole Spiritual America program and replaced it with
something else.
The evening before I was confronted with my own
ahrimanic double (while wandering in the 8 Mile area of
Detroit), which forced me to overcome its resistance in
order to go to the AGM in spite of the obstacles placed
in my way. This was a rich experience, although
not one what was pleasurable in any ordinary sense.
The next day I found a local Kinko’s Copy Shop, where I
duplicated several dozen copies of two essays that I
intended to hand out during the AGM weekend. Since
I was not being published anywhere in regular Society
publications, this was the only recourse I had in order
to be able to offer the results of my research.
These were 1) “The Law and the Spirit” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/lawspirit.html
], which I felt qualified to write, in part, from having
obtained a law degree, become licensed to practice in
both Montana and Colorado, and having served as a clerk
for a Montana Supreme Court Justice for a term; and, 2)
“Concerning the Renewal of Anthroposophy - rediscovering
the true meaning of the New Mysteries”: [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/concerning.html ].
That Friday evening the AGM led off with a somewhat
lengthy lecture by a well known European born
anthroposophist, Dr. Ernst Katz, who had been living in
America for some time. It was given with
intelligence and some enthusiasm, but at the same time
was filled with thoughts that basically began:
Steiner-says. It was, sadly, Anthroposophical
Spiritual Science presented in the form of religion,
something I had begun a few years before to call:
Steinerism. No mention was made of the
metamorphosis of thinking - the “method” that is unique
to Anthroposophy, and all inner work was, according to
the lecture, to be devoted to the idea of meditation, as
if the A. Society was the only group teaching a style of
meditation practice.
Someone, not Dr. Katz but one of the moderators, asked
the participants to think about what was said, and to
prepare themselves overnight to offer their thoughts on
the next morning, before the Saturday work was
commenced. I hardly slept that night, given my own
inclinations, and the need to work up my courage to say
what was in my heart.
The next morning, when the time came, I went to the
center of the hall (all this was taking place in the
Detroit Waldorf School), faced the audience and said I
wanted to speak about the elephant in the room - namely
the fact that the planned conference on research on the
Spiritual America had been at the last minute canceled
and was now replaced with something completely
other. I wanted to know why, what reason could be
given for such a last minute change, especially since
only one speaker was “irregular”. I was very
nervous, and while I was making my statement, Kelly was
moving through the audience passing out copies of
the articles I had printed the previous day.
There were many gasps. Who was I to disturb the
sleep of all present, and ask them to wake up and
perhaps look at the reality of what was going on.
Some shouted at me to leave my position before them,
take my seat and essentially shut up. I paused,
and when I said I could not in good conscience pretend
nothing had happened, silence finally reigned.
Robert Karp got up and related that he was satisfied
with the explanations given to him and the Central
Regional Council, although after the end of the AGM he
admitted to me in a private conversation, he should have
taken the opportunity to speak of his real feelings.
The powers that be, who never act in front of the rest
of us with any transparency, had removed him from his
position as head of the Central Regional Council, and
blamed him for the fact that Mr. Walker was a
jerk. Robert was the scapegoat, and the morning
meeting accepted his effort to make peace, given that
Wendt was up there disturbing everyone’s slumber. I
didn’t move, but soon it was offered to me that time
would be given for a public discussion of the questions
that I had raised, and would that satisfy me. I
consented, went back to my seat, and the AGM proceeded
on its already established path. Of course, the
promised time for discussion of these issues never came
to pass.
There were three basic lectures offered during the rest
of the time of the AGM, before the actual Annual General
Meeting of the A. Society in America happened on Sunday
morning, as required by the legal rules of incorporation
for non-profit organizations, a matter never clearly
admitted by any AGM anywhere, as far as I know.
The lecturers were all women of social rank in the A.
Society in America (Gayle Davis, Joan Almon, and Marijo
Rogers), who were also fans and friends of the European
born Waldorf expert, Rene Querido, who had crossed the
threshold earlier in the year.
Instead of celebrating America, we were invited to
celebrate the work of a man (Rene), who had taken over
the impulse to found a center for the study of America,
as well as providing a foundation year for
anthroposophical studies in Fair Oaks, California, and
turned it into a Waldorf teacher training center,
leaving in the dust the inspiration of the Christian
Community priest (one of the originals) Carl Stegmann
(author of the “Other America: the West in the Light of
Spiritual Science”), to found a place where the
Spiritual America could be researched.
Now to better appreciate this switch to Steinerism, and
the celebration of Rene Querido, instead of presenting
research on the Spiritual American, you have to
understand that the Tuesday before this early November
AGM, George W. Bush had just been re-elected. The
Country was in turmoil, it was clear that serious
cheating just like in the year 2000 was at play in this
latest election, we were involved in two
unpopular wars, and while nobody knew it yet,
Ahriman’s incarnation was in full swing, with Karl Rove
sitting in the White House, playing the role of
the character from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, called
Wormtongue, and with amazing clever genius manipulating
others via lie after lie affecting the whole situation
of the world, not just what was going on in
America. Even today, we mostly dislike Bush II and
Dick Chaney, forgetting completely that Rove is still
out there, playing with our politics, cleverly behind
the scenes.
At the final plenum, where the members are offered a
brief opportunity to speak their minds, a young woman,
perhaps a fresh Waldorf teacher, or Waldorf mother,
spoke up with much quiet and plaintive emotion:
“Weren’t we suppose to know something about
America? Wasn’t anthroposophy supposed to be able
to speak about the madness ruling our Nation?”
I hung my head in shame, covering my face with my hands,
upon hearing this lament, so profound and to the
point. At the end of the Plenum, Kelly, an
anthroposophical doctor no less, went up to one of the
co-chairs, who were sharing the job of General Secretary
at that time, and announced to her that she was so
disappointed with what they had done, that she was
quiting the Society. In my own journeys, through
the years of membership in the Society, I have watched
countless beautiful people leave, all with mostly broken
hearts at what we have become.
Can the A. Society in America be redeemed? I
sometimes think it should be destroyed, and then I
remember it is already doing that on its own. I
will write here on Facebook a few more papers, as I wind
up the original effort to create a more formal
“Introduction to a Spiritual Social Science.” On
one of the Facebook anthroposophy pages, someone
wondered what was the point of reading me, or of my
writing? Not a bad question. I write because
that helps me think, enables organizing, and as well
there is often the wonderful experience of a new
perception, even of something thought about once
before. People are free to read or not. I
get a lot of likes, which is one sign.
One fellow recently posted that he didn’t read me
because I am claimed to be “the bodhisattva”. It
really is amazing how lazy people are. All the
knowledge and understanding one can need is in my works,
yet most people don’t bother, and/or just make
superficial judgments. Their loss.
For the future, I will work on finding a producer for my
screenplay. Maybe that will lead in some
unpredictable direction. I will also return to
creating videos for YouTube, finding some new tools with
which to play: an electronic white board, a tiny rhythm
synthesizer not economically feasible before, and wonder
of wonders, a pen that leaves a fluid on a page that can
carry an electrical current, which product includes
various types of transistors, and the like, that look
like tiny band-aides. Just plop them on the page,
make a circuit with your “pen” that goes to a tiny power
source, and viola, a radio on a sheet of paper.
Meanwhile, the Aristotelian Anthroposophical Society in
America, can’t find America, connect to the Platonists,
or much less discover the door to the 21st Century (very
out of touch with social media). This is not a
criticism, it is simply a fact.
These members and friends of the A. Society are all
basically well-intended human beings. Yet, the
collective human errors of over nearly 100 years since
Steiner died, have accumulated like a much too long
winter’s snowstorm. We are buried in
them. I use this metaphor because right now, it is
zero degrees outside, and with a second storm just
finished, our yard is buried under 4 and 1/2 feet of
snow now, with more on the way later this week.
No critical analysis of the Society’s works, and the
contents of its publications, is carried out. We
claim to do some kind of Science, but most members don’t
know what science is. We study Steiner endlessly,
but give little evidence of learning anything from
anywhere else. I’ve hundreds of pages of the
Society’s problems (and potential solutions) on my
website, with all manner of quotes of Rudolf Steiner in
support my conclusions. I have equally hundreds of
pages of fresh spiritual research, but being a
Platonist, the Aristotelians that dominate the Society
are completely perplexed with what to do about any of
it.
I’ve reported on the existence of a Second Eucharist in
the Ethereal to go with the Return of Christ in the
Ethereal. I’ve done considerable research on the
threefold double complex. I wrote a whole book
about how the social-political order of the world is an
embodiment of the Word (how it is that we live within
the being of the Cosmic Christ). I’ve identified
Ahriman’s incarnation. I’ve researched the New
Mystery of Thinking. I spent decades preparing
myself to be useful to the A. Society, but
unfortunately, my message remains, as William Bento
described in his review my American Anthroposophy:
bitter medicine.
Why? Because we are not an functioning esoteric
Society. We are most like a university department,
devoted to the works of a single thinker (Steiner), with
all the infighting and competition normal to such a
social form. We run on habit, and tradition.
We are neither as smart or as wise as we pretend to
be. We have a “guru", and still have not learned
the basic lessons having to do with the problem of
“knowledge” in the Age of the Consciousness Soul,
although our “guru” tried every which way to guide us
there.
Meanwhile, time marches on. Michael has his own
agenda, and we don’t much figure in it anymore - at
least as much as many anthroposophists believe.
Introduction 12.1.4 The Paradoxes of Existence
There may be no escape from our Now. There may be
no escape from our Self. When “I” go to sleep at
night, isn’t it still the same “I” that wakes up the
next morning?
Maybe I am wealthy, beyond measure. I sleep in a
large bed with at least three blond bombshells every
night. Women willing to grant my every whim.
Each night a different three. I have to forget
that I know their hair color is not natural, nor the
size of their breasts, or the shape of their
behinds. Maybe I have to forget as well that I
have no organ for the purpose of sex, without that
famous little blue pill, which if I take too many will
kill me.
Bored, I might get into drugs, except ... the addictive
part, whether physical or psychological, which will seek
to soon rule me, instead of me ruling it.
Perhaps I like other, less “normal” pleasures, which
some might call perversions. Even with great
wealth I would need an army of workers to fuel the
system which brings what I hunger for fresh every
day. What has happened to all those children whose
pictures haunt the sides of milk boxes?
Is it possible that being poor is not such a bad thing?
Maybe not. Maybe I spend each day in a Mexican
prison, the toy of bigger men, and lazy guards. If
I am once in a while lucky, perhaps no other prisoner
will steal that days ration of gruel, or if really lucky
a scorpion will come in the night and end my
every-lasting misery. When alone, and not
bothered, I wonder if suicide might possibly actually
lead to an eternal darkness and unconsciousness, where
the endless Now and the never satisfied Self are truly
no more. Is that not the siren song to which the
Asuras respond?
Or, I could be a dark skinned woman in Darfur ... kept
pregnant by those who rule the camp. Babies with
fat bellies swollen with emptiness. Seemingly
forever walks up and down a long dusty road, with an old
but now clean olive oil can balanced on my head, filled
with water. Every few days some white woman comes
by in the once in a while with washed and clean clothes
sent by others who no longer need them, and some
uncooked rice for me to make into food. With
others like me I live in a city of tents, to hide from
dust storms, while our babies play - how odd the joy
that children bring in spite of having big empty bellies
and no toys but a stone, a broken piece of wood and a
torn piece of cloth.
What about memory? If I took a pill that destroyed
memory would each day bring a fresh Self? What
really is it like to have one of the different kinds of
dementia? Can my Self and its Now become invisible
in some form of Madness? Did Helen Keller ever -
even for a moment - regret waking up?
Sleeping/waking.
Remembering/forgetting. Life/death.
Madness/sanity. Which is an escape from which?
The I that I name Joel A. Wendt seems to have written
millions of words, some of it even recorded in speech on
video for YouTube. Am I those words?
I worked for a while as an egg-flipper (a breakfast
cook) in a large family restaurant off of Interstate 5
in Northern California, near Yreka. There were
usually two front line cooks, until summer started, and
then there had to be three. Always there were a
couple of old lady back cooks, making gravy and biscuits
and hard boiled eggs. Baking turkeys and hams on
holidays.
It took three cooks in the summers at the two six foot
long grills and the six burner stove, to serve a 1000
people a shift. With one partner-cook, we once
served 800 breakfasts, just the two of us, in about 7
hours. With another we went to his trailer one
afternoon, where his wife and six kids also lived, got
very stoned on weed and an eight-ball of speed, and
tried to figure out just how many eggs we had cracked
between our two careers (his was longer than
mine). When we easily passed the first million,
the giggles took over.
How many breaths in a life of 74 years? How many
heart beats? One boring night when I worked the
graveyard shift at the psychiatric hospital, I tried to
count up how many times I had opened the doors to
patient rooms to check and see if they were still in bed
and breathing. 10 years, five nights a week, 40
rooms, and bed checks every half hour. When
working in a factory, another guy and I created a
186,000 pieces of mail on one machine in an 8 hour
shift. Our names then went up on the record board
in main floor machine room.
How many thoughts in a life? Can number ever
measure anything? On the television show, the West
Wing, President Bartlett, when finishing some bit of
work with his staff, would often ask: “What’s next?”
As I write this: “What’s next?”
My nose itches. I had beans for a late
evening snack because it is 2 degrees outside, and I
find my body wants something warm in its tummy before
going to sleep in the cold of winter. Except I
drank a glass of Mountain Dew, and between the caffeine
and the beans, my tummy growls and the bathroom
beckons. Ah, just gas.
Yes, ... it is a mystery why I write this, although the
greater mystery, perhaps, is why you read it.
Seven billion people all trapped in their own Now,
coupled inextricably to their own Self. Each story
and each context different and unique. When Christ
suggests we not Judge, is He perhaps giving us a clue
about precisely how to gain intimacy with some of these
individual mysteries - a Way to find and to truly “know”
the other - the Thou?
How many of these billions have the mental categories of
good and evil? Do they all agree on what is good
and what is evil? If they don’t agree, can there
by any good or evil outside of some individual’s
subjective judgment? Yet, each one seems to act as
if They know the real good, and others do not. So
much we share in common, and so little we are alike.
Number, suffering, and death = living existence?
Read: “Everything and More: A Compact History of
Infinity”, by David Foster Wallace. He committed
suicide on September 12, 2008, at age 46. How many
angels does it take to square dance on the head of a
pin?
In the dark of a long winter’s night, the muse of crazy
finds purchase inside my head. We make love and
words fall through my fingers against the plastic of a
keyboard, to wind their way in a swirl of wires and
bored mothers, to appear like magic on a field of white
- letters as secret codes running across the world of my
vision, screaming their pain at their existence.
Does a paragraph or a sentence have consciousness?
Don’t think so? Why not they ask? Do we not
exist too? Do we not climb on waves of light into
doorway to your mind via the vortex of rays that impinge
on the back of your eyeball?
Is there a world of ideas somewhere? Invisible to
the physical eye, but blatantly visible to the spiritual
eye. I even wrote a thing: “The IDEA of the
Thought-World - and its practical implications for our
shared political life”: [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thoughtworld.html
] I truly wonder whether anyone has ever read
it. Or should read it? Why bother when your
own “I” has its personal access panel to that
world?
I sing poems of goodbye now, to the Facebook pages of
Anthroposophy and Independent Anthroposophical Research
Examination. When I quit those pages in a few
days, will it be like an electronic suicide? Will
I be missed? Will I miss the others that danced
with me there among the Electronic Aethers? Will
there be an emptiness in my soul ... an ache of sorts,
needing to be filled? Even grief?
Yet, I have all kinds of “friends” now, whatever
“meaning” can be found in that -which is not at all
sarcastic by the way, for Facebook friends do send
unexpected gifts. I will still, every morning, as
part of my regular routine (my acts of my Self, in the
corners of my Now) go to my Facebook page, looking for
clues left there from the wonderings of other
minds. Bits of sage advice quoted from sages
old and new. Pictures of food, or parties,
or dogs and cats, or dancing quarks amid evil
prognostications of eminent collapses of civilizations,
and the odd features of stranger than strange doings
across the boundaries of words, concepts and ideas the
haunt these pages - ghosts of something mirrored in
dozens upon dozens of minds - all searching for the
great viral video that makes us laugh, at least at that
moment, and pretend that ISIS hasn’t beheaded anyone
today, or that politicians actually offer wisdom when
their mouths open.
How many snowflakes fell here these last couple of
days? If I had Eternity could I ever count them,
and write all their names in the Book of
Existence? I suspect, and even hope, that our
sharings lend warmth to each other, of such strength
that the dancing of angels on the heads of pins is
because we billions of human beings heat up the whole of
existence with such fires of Being that those very pins
are too hot to stand on, and that the angels dance
because they must, although the rhythms to which they
dance comes from the best music heard everywhere and
anytime, which is the simple laughter of playing
children, who transcend every moment of the youthful
existence, the fantasy prisons of Now and Self, knowing
with grave and wondrous instinct that the best way to
live is to always color outside the lines.
Introduction 12.1.5 The Individual Self as the
co-Conductor and co-Composer of the Music of the Now
With the above last words of 12.1.4: “
... the
simple laughter of playing children, who transcend
every moment of the youthful existence, the fantasy
prisons of Now and Self, knowing with grave and
wondrous instinct that the best way to live is to
always color outside the lines.” we have drawn
closer to what Christ, the Son, as the stand-in for the
Father, meant by: lest ye become again as little
children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.
Similar to music, the Now follows rules of order, which
rules are the active presence in the nature of
existential reality of the near-god anthroposophists
have learned to call: Ahriman. Ahriman is limited
in what he can and cannot do by the Holy Mother and Her
Companions, and by Christ and His Companions, both of
whom work with us as individuals in the co-Creation of
the totality of Now, which in a most magical way
includes thousands of millions of human beings.
While Ahriman provides Order, Christ and the Holy
Mother, along with us, provide “meaning”, which word in
turn can include Justice and Love.
“Meaning” is drawn from the unlimited well of the realm
of the uncreated and unformed. This “well of
meaning” is helped by having Ahriman’s geometrical and
mathematical nature offer “order”, as a kind of
oppositional and resisting force to the unlimited
quality of the uncreated and unformed, which the
ancients recognized as Chaos, and by which they never
meant what so many mean today by chaos: random
chance.
Evolution arises as a natural consequence of the
interaction among the tendencies between Order and
Chaos, both of which are sublimely creative, and which
appear most obviously in the distinction between living
matter and consciousness, which Steiner sometimes noted
as a kind of Rite of Opposition, in the human organism,
between the forces of life (order) and the forces of
death (consciousness, or the gateway for the actions of
the uncreated and unformed).
If you will recall our earlier discussions of past and
future, and how and why, these Ideas are deepened by
relating Past, How, and Justice, to each other, as well
as Future, Why, and Love.
We have the most powers as regards our individual
“Self”, whatever you want to take that reference to
mean. We are the actors in the Play, which the
Bard described centuries ago, this way: “
All the
world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely
players; They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts, ... “
As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.
The best artistic expression of the essential nature of
the Self, in particular as it presents itself to the
rest of the world, I found in Catherine MacCoun’s
remarkable book “On Becoming an Alchemist”, where she
calls individuality our: “style”. Everyone has a
unique “style”, from ways of dress, patterns of speech,
to how we walk and so forth.
One of the primary rules of Order/Life, in the
fashioning of the Now, that is given to us to help keep
our tendencies to excess in check (somewhat, and
depending), is the Day. The Fable/movie Groundhog
Day gives wonderful expression to the mystical/magical
nature of the Day. The Day does not always have to
be too governed by routine, such as is imposed on the
nun, the monk, the prisoner and our own minds.
Remember the child, and that each Day will present
itself with fresh opportunities to “color outside the
lines”.
The Day, as presented in the film in archetypal
formulation, is repetitious. We live day be
day. We survive day by day. We grow/become
day by day. We decay day be day. Steiner
often spoke of the “power” of this rhythmic
potential. To pray, or meditate, daily - regularly
and rhythmically, is to strengthen something
daily. The danger is to let the will-in-thinking,
the true mind - the spirit - go to sleep, and allow
routine to become habit, and not deliberate
activity. In the fable/film this is what the main
character wakes up to: the potential of the Day’s
magical and mystical openness to receiving/giving
everyday, something new - something from the
never-before.
Macro-cosmically, the Day exists inside the Seasons of
the Year. Rudolf Steiner taught of this in his
Calender of the Soul, where he reveals how day by day
and week by week, the soul expands and contracts over
the course of the Year. This expansion and
contraction is written large in the Cycle of the
Seasons, and in the lives of the lower kingdoms of
Nature: the silent stones, the glowing green world, and
the singing of the four-legged and the winged: Spring,
Summer, Fall and Winter. Life, Expansion, Decay
and Rest.
So too then the human Biography. Life, Expansion,
Decay and Rest. What we sometimes fail to notice
is that Decay, which is mostly of the material order
inhabiting our physical organism, is accompanied by a
freeing of the “style” of our innermost
being/self. The old man and old woman often become
less socially inhibited. We even sometimes
metaphorically speak of this “time” of life as a: second
childhood. I wrote of this in my essay:
Dragon-Riders: the human being in maturity [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/dragon-riders.html ].
Further “time” structures of order are the Century, and
the Millennia. We today are in the first Century
of the Third Millennium, following the Incarnation,
which singular Event Steiner characterized as: the
turning point of “time”. Within these larger
cycles of rhythm and time, Steiner noted the Epochs and
the Ages. Civilizations, Races, Peoples,
Paradigms, Religions and the Evolution of Consciousness,
rise and fall within these larger cycles of
“time”. These larger time-forms tended to follow a
rhythm of “seven”, much like the seven year rhythms
existing in the biography.
The order of the soul, and its energy centers, is ruled
by the rhythm of “seven”. There were,
according to Steiner, seven Elohim in the form nature of
the Sun Being, as was the Creation in the Hebrew Bible
given an order of “seven”. Everywhere “order” in
the sense of number. Unity, duality,
threefoldness, quarters, sevens and on. Lines in time,
out of which the human being is slowly learning how to
color beyond. We sleep and wake and work now
according to our own rhythms, ignoring those of Nature
and the hourly cycle of the Day.
We now get to “style” so many basic aspects of our
personal biographical time and life. People even
give individual order to diet, something far less
possible in ages past. The metabolic life needs
rhythm as does the life of the blood and the
circulation, while less so the life of the nerves and
the senses. Remember, consciousness in the
totality of the human organism seems to be opposed to
the “forces” of life.
As someone who has experienced the 10 seven year rhythms
of the biography, I can report that Steiner aptly
characterized each one. Most near at hand, and
recent in “time” was when at age 63, upon entering the
10th period, karma fell away. Whereas before, my
biographical life was dominated by outside influences,
such as work and family. I retired on Social
Security at age 62, and less and less did my children
need my presence. Work and family slipped into the
background, and each Day became open, almost to the
point of being capricious.
I was being given no choice but to invent within the
Day, and the Week and the Month and the Year. The
lines of time themselves dissolved, in a way which I
have to confess was also much filled with Grace. I
did not have karma taken away, so much as the Gods
themselves lifted generous aspects of its “weight”. Yet
this was such a gift, that without fully understanding
the Why of it, I could feel the How it was
happening. I knew this fresh freedom, and
personally, inadvertently, began its Season with a 45
Day fast.
Now don’t think I was being religious. I was
not. I was grossly overweight, and needed to give
to my body some rest from the punishments my
consciousness had imposed upon its metabolic
nature. I had not anticipated or expected the
“visions” that came, about 21 days into the fast, so I
took notes, of these dream-sendings that flooded in most
every morning. Just to give one example:
I woke up one morning in this half-asleep dreaming
state, and saw within my mind’s eye a stream of pictures
of all the significant women in my life, as if they were
images on a deck of cards. This “condition” lasted
for a time, and I could, a little bit, make the pictures
move back and forth, but not really un-glue them from
their time-related unfolding. All the same, the
pictures were not just images, but were accompanied by
“feelings” and there was order to the “feelings” for I
was being “shown” how it was in my biography I had been
taught about Love, by the women whose presence had
adorned it.
What the dream-sending taught me was that what in memory
was segmented - in parts - was also in fact a whole, a
kind of story-tale that I was capable of putting into
something like what Goethe did when he recreated in his
imagination, the sequence of leaf forms through what he
called: exact sensorial fantasy.
Upon reflection is was if the Holy Mother was saying to
me: “
Look here you fool, we of the female persuasion
have given you many gifts. As you go on, do not
let them rot in some dry corner of your soul,
gathering dust. Put the clues together - there
is wisdom in them”.
This experience, gifted in the dream-sending, I have
over the years brought more consciously to mind and this
inner reflection has then fueled the video series:
Misery Loves Company: the Redemption of Eros, which
begins here: [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn6-XLtFVyg&list=PLCD1E5C8BC8B45118
]
These “Instructions in the Arts of Love” are all derived
from what the women in my life taught me.
Other visions were written of in a notebook, and many of
the related ideas were later (after the fast) more
consciously thought, so as to become through the rhythm
of time (as karma slipped away, and my own creative
freedom came more to the fore) the first of several
books: “the Way of the Fool: the conscious development
of our human character, and the future* of Christianity
- both to be born out of the natural union of Faith and
Gnosis” [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf.html
]. This book was a conscious effort to create a
connection between the Shepherd’s Stream (Faith) and the
King’s Stream (Gnosis) - see the references in Steiner’s
Foundation Stone Meditation. “
... Light Which
warms The simple shepherd-hearts, Light Which
enlightens The wise heads of Kings.” [
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA260/English/SGP1980/FStMed_meditation.html
]
Respect the potential creative Rhythm of the Day, by
coloring outside the lines of time, social structure and
mental confusion. You will be pleasantly surprised
by what then arises within, and without. The
Rising of the Sun in the Mind happens one Day at a time.
Introduction: 12.1.6 Cleaning up some old Business
... while saying goodbye ...
I’ve had my share of “relationships” with women.
They tend to have very curious attitudes about anger, or
perhaps better said: fiery discharges. They don’t
like to be on the receiving end, and if you let them
know you have a plan to engage someone else (not them)
with such a burst of emotional energy and force, they
will urge caution, and offer that the truly spiritual
believe in being “nice” and “kind” in speech.
Forgetting that they too wake of up on the wrong side of
the bed, and when its them being fiery in anger, or even
worse, cold, it is always best to give them the last
word, and otherwise keep one’s mouth shut.
Now, I have also been told that I have a “woman” inside
of me as well as a man, and while I don’t spend a lot of
time thinking about this, I am aware that on occasion
there needs to be a “discharge” of energy, that if not
released turns inward and can become depression.
So this next bit begins with a bit of fuss and bother
concerning my time spent on these Facebook groups.
Not to worry, I get more mellow at the end ...
Technically, this is the last bit in what will be a book
on my website. So I thought about my last words,
and thought, and thought ... no, not really. In
fact I started writing the below after looking at some
comments on a section in the Facebook discussion group:
Anthroposophy. The curious thing was I was the
subject of this comment thread. Not all of was
about me, but enough. Some of it was kind, some of
it was confused and some of it, ... well, some of it I
did not like at all. So this is what I wrote, and
I'll have to live with it, in the same way those who
made my personality a subject of discussion will have to
take responsibility for and live with their words.
So, ... I’m going to be leaving two anthroposophical
Facebook discussion groups. But got to say a
couple of things ... about things that piss me
off. Linda, that’s the girl friend, says I
shouldn’t. She might be right, but I don’t care.
First on the list is Jeff Falzone. Makes me feel
like I’m walking across a school yard, minding my own
business, and then from left field, over by the trash
cans, he lobs a rotten tomato in my direction. Has
to make a comment. He isn’t adding anything to
what some folks like to think of as a “conversation”,
he’s just talking trash. Keep in mind the comment
is there by choice - its an act of will - nobody forces
him to write it and the content belongs to him.
His deeds, to me, seem very immature. Not to say
he’s stupid, ‘cause he’s not. Which makes it all
the worse for being so juvenile, and coming from a guy
who advertises himself as a therapist. He might
even be good at that, but when it comes to me, sure
doesn’t feel like he’s even trying to be “good”.
Now the things he says are not all that bad,
either. But still, its kind of like getting poked
at by a stick, with him knowing before hand (and/or
during) that I’m not going to like it. He’s not
the only one that pokes, however, but the other ones
they are not so persistent and repetitive. From
them, this could be nothing. Linda said to be
above it all, and I said, well I was from Montana, and
if you are from Montana, them’s fighting words.
Guy throws wrong and unkind words at you, he better be
ready to put up his fists.
Like I said. Same as being in a school yard.
So, how do I know ‘bout Jeff’s attitude, you
ask? ‘Cause he doesn’t stand behind his
words. Flies by, says ‘em and then goes
away. Does it all the time, which is a pretty good
clue its personal and purposeful. He seems to want
to force a public argument. Call me out in front
of others. Why is that deed of his so
revealing? Well, if he has some intelligent
criticism, then there is a right Way to do that.
When I complain about the quality of someone’s work, I
do it the right Way. The complaint could be wrong,
but the Way is right. Long essays, all kinds of
quotes and arguments and stuff. I’ve done
Prokofieff, Ben-Aharon, von Halle and others. Well
written, carefully argued.
Jeff doesn’t even have the courtesy to do that.
Just lobs in the rotten tomato and walks on.
I’ve asked for direct calls, on my phone, on my skype
number, even e-mails. Nothing. Doesn’t stand
behind his words, but used the Facebook comment function
as a way to make noise. Seems kind of cowardly to
me.
Practicing anthroposophy is a Way that requires respect
for the truth. Jeff doesn’t give evidence of
respecting the truth. He just comments, says the
sames things he’s said before, but doesn’t really stand
behind it. I’ve un-friended him, and he’s one of
the main reasons I’m leaving these groups. I don’t
mind reading stuff arguing with what I say, but his
stuff is just plain mean and he knows it.
And, I am tired of looking through a bunch of comments,
seeing his name, and feeling: Oh, crap, another turd
from Oregon.
Second on my list is the folks who judge me for making
“claims”, about being an initiate or a
bodhisattva. Most of those folks have clearly
never thought much about any of that. They seem to
think that if you say such a thing, it must be a brag -
a not-truth - and so they judge you. They don’t
investigate, or do any work. Yet, Steiner can say
all kinds of things hard to verify and these same folks
will treat it as the word of God.
If any of them care, or even know how to read (always a
good skill to have, but you have to practice it or it
doesn’t mean anything), there’s this: “Five Paths to the
Spirit”: [
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/fivepaths.html
] Don’t want to bother to read and understand what
I write, then don’t be going around saying I’m making
“claims”. That’s just more useless unsubstantiated
trash talk. Sloppy thinking to say the
least. Not as mean as Jeff, ‘cause they don’t keep
coming back at me again and again, but still a reason
for me to be tired of these lists.
Now Robert Mason has said similar things about the
“bodhisattva” stuff, but I respect how he’s gone about
doing them. Tried to do research. Tried to
have standards. Wrote long screeds. Actually
(more or less) carefully read some of my stuff, in
particular “biographical necessity”. He even
recognized that I didn’t come out and actually claim to
be the Future Maitreya Buddha. He just thought
that I was being tricky - clever, and tried to call me
out on that. Mostly, however, he just gives
conclusions - judgments - and doesn’t quote me carefully
at all. Better than Jeff though. More effort
given.
Tom Mellett, who seems to have suffered some kind of
invisibility complex - he liked to mock me about the
“Buddha” stuff in lots of other Internet venues.
That mocking business I don’t respect either (just
another lame version of trash talk), but he and I have a
lot of old business - a lot of history, so I’m not going
to go over any of that again. A lot of that
belongs in the “private” file.
Then there is the general quality of stuff on these
lists. I can’t blame a lot of folks for what they
do here, given the examples they’ve meet while becoming
introduced to Anthroposophy. If you imitate a bad
example, we really can’t say you should have known
better. You are just behaving like what you saw
others do.
So anthroposophists in general talk about meditation,
and over-quote Steiner, and never heard (most anyway) of
the New Thinking Mystery or the New Community Mystery
(the “reverse cultus”). I’ve written a ton or
articles on this, made references to those works in my
own comments, but there never is much evidence people
read my research. That’ just plain lazy, by the
way.
Nor do they seem to have heard about the split in the
Society after Steiner died and all that trash talk then,
that ended up with people being kicked out of this
and that and the various National Societies all getting
huffy and having a big break up (institutional
divorce). Later they made up, sort of, but only on
the horizontal level of the social. Not on a
spiritual level at all, which might have required a
little more inner work than has become the
standard. Want to be an actual esoteric Society,
then the remarriage should be esoteric as well.
What’s that mean? Well, ... at the least Michael
should have been invited to officiate in some way, and
as far as I know, that never happened.
All that stuff mostly before everyone’s time, so the
modern A. Society people don’t talk about it, like it
was some bad cousins who did wrong stuff, and needs to
be a well kept family secret. Then, who can blame
people who come along and don’t know Ita Wegman, and
Marie Steiner and Elizabeth Vreede treated each other
like screw-ups for the first ten years after Steiner
died.
What’s funny, when you read the stuff that was said, is
how “polite” it was in a way. Long letters and
papers on this one or that one speaking an
“untruth”. Legal fights over who owns or controls
Steiner’s literary estate. Another fight over who
should lead the Class Lessons. More fights over
who was to be on the Vorstand, or the Executive.
Discussions about Tomberg, and whether he could succeed
Steiner, who clearly declined to name a successor.
If they’d done that over here - in America near our
present, everyone would be wanting them to go to therapy
together, get out of their heads and talk about their
“feelings”.
Oh, things did get “heavy”. People got voted out
of various associations. Groups took sides.
So, for example, we could get interested in George
Adams’ amazing works on science and math and physics and
the fact that he translated Steiner’s lectures.
When Steiner went to England. Steiner would talk
for 15 minutes or so, then Adams would render a free
translation. But, guess what? Adams made the
mistake of taking a side while the ladies where
fighting, and boom, they booted him out of the club, or
at least one of the clubs. A great genius, and he
gets the boot because all this other petty stuff was
going down.
Can’t say Steiner didn’t warn them. Told them
straight up before he died that if they didn’t get their
soul/spiritual lives together, then “karma will hold
sway”. Guess that’s what’s happening still
today. Karmas running all over everyone’s
dogmas. Got to stand far to the side, if you don’t
want to get some errant rotten tomatoes on you.
Get Frank T. Smith to give you a precis on the
“constitutional question” over the last 15 to 20 years
or so. Unkind words, lawsuits, attempts at palace
coups. The Executive spending a lot of our dues
money defending itself from being removed. Power
pushes to make sure Gordienko’s very revealing book on
Prokofieff doesn’t see the light of day.
Now maybe I have karma with Jeff. Could be, don’t
care. What I haven’t done yet is drive to Oregon,
and give him a bloody nose. Think about it
‘tho. Think it would be real fun. Manly
even. Maybe not nice-nice spiritual, but I do
favor a good revenge fantasy on occasion. Got to
not forget we have a dark side. When you pretend
that you don’t, that’s when it just sneaks right up on
you and gives you a nice kick in ass. Why?
Because that’s what you need. “You can’t always get what
you want. But if you try sometimes well you just
might find. You get what you need”. You know that
one. From the bad boys of Rock ‘n Roll, the
Rolling Stones. [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7leQB_Oe_k&list=PL7sBCGkQNm0AnGpgm3kxVFTq5M-V24LcZ
]
There is a tricky part here, a deeper truth as it
were. I’ve never met Jeff, and he’s never met me -
not really (although I vaguely believe he might have
visited me once when I lived in Fair Oaks, but that
somehow didn’t make all that much of an
impression. Fact is, I’ve hardly met me.
I’ve also never met those who think I make “claims” that
are not true. I’ve never met any of the people on
these Facebook groups who seem fascinated with Steiner
and at the same time seem fully unconscious as regards
the real nature of the history of the Society, its true
current conditions, or even appreciate what Steiner
actually meant when he used the word: Anthroposophy.
Messages found in some bottles on the long long shores
of a very ancient sea. This is just another
one. Each of us walks these sands of time, picking
up some bottles and believe (or not) that
communication/conversation is a real in the moment event
that occurs regularly on these Facebook groups.
Maybe it does. Even if it does, and even if the
impressions are real, I’ve lost interest in continuing,
however else we may characterize the experience.
Not bored actually, just tired. Wears me down to
read a lot of stuff here. Be a lot better were we
to go on a month long retreat with each other and have
some nice face to face encounters, with plenty of time
to figure out how easily we use the same words to mean
entirely different things.
Good luck to all of you who continue to journey
here. To those who have asked me to be friends, I
thank you for what you will share, have been sharing,
and I hope that what we continue to share in that
environment - my regular Facebook home page - can have
meaning for us all.
Life is precious, it just needs to not be held to too
pretentiously. Color outside the lines, at every
opportunity. And if you can’t, move the lines
around to where you do color. Lots of Ways to be
in this world and all of them are right, at least for
the person that lives them. Even Jeff. Got
to respect Jeff for being Jeff. Somebody must have
a use for him, even if I don’t, ... yet.
Let’s take the trouble to revisit (at least from my
point of view) what Jeff and I argued about ...
For a long time now, I’ve been putting forward the idea
that, as Owen Barfield put it, the book “A Theory of
Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception” is the
least read, most important book, that Steiner ever
wrote.
Now Jeff is not a unskilled thinker, and he read a lot
of stuff, thought about his own mind, and came to the
conclusion (this is my version of it, Jeff’s will be -
no doubt - a bit different), that Steiner made some
observational errors in that book, which Steiner later
regretted, and made various efforts as he grew older to
correct those problems. It was Jeff that got me to
take a look at Steiner’s “Anthroposophy - a fragment”,
which I eventually did. [ “an alternative introduction
to Steiner’s Anthroposophy (a fragment)”:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/afragment.html
]
Now I’m going to skip over the “tricky” parts, but in
brief say that a serious question Jeff raised is what is
it really that we use the term “experience” to describe,
a word Steiner made a big deal of in his book “A Theory
... “. Somewhere in those discussion Jeff used a
term something like (relying on memory here): the pure
percept. In Steiner’s The Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity we get the terms: concept and percept, while in
“A Theory ...” we have the terms thought and experience,
including a Chapter titled: “
Thinking as a higher
experience within experience”.
Jeff’s argument (as I understand it at least) is that
this division between percept and concept or thought and
experience doesn’t really grasp the nature of the
reality of what appears to and within our
consciousness. There is really only the “pure
percept” - the experience in all its unlimited endlessly
varying glory, and we can find Steiner saying at various
times something on the order of: That he (Steiner) just
saw the world with greater intensity and that then
revealed what was hidden (or not yet visible) from (or
for) the casual perceiver.
This is important stuff. Jeff is definitely onto
something here.
Even though I got “that”, it was clear to me that at the
same time Jeff was a bit goofy on aspects of the “whole”
situation. For example, Jeff “sees” things in a
perhaps better way (maybe), and finds the works of
regular anthroposophists, including folks like me)
wanting in this respect. We should get what he
sees too, Jeff seems to think. But not
“perceiving” the Way Jeff wants, he describes us as
having “filters”. And, a filter is a kind of
unchangeable preconception that stands in the way of
perceiving the “truth” of the situation (again,
according to Jeff).
So then I counter that point of view, by pointing out
that this perception of the pure percept is something in
the future of the human evolution of consciousness, not
something in the present. It is more in accord
with Barfield’s idea of “final participation”, and
ignores where humanity is today, which is the “onlooker
separation”. In terms of the evolution of
consciousness, we need to be exactly where we are, not
where Jeff seems to have gone, and for which our not
going there is to Jeff a kind of flaw. So
periodically Jeff throws these rotten tomatoes at me,
which is to try to remind me that I too am flawed.
I asked him, for example, where is the book. You
(Jeff) make a serious and respectable offering as
regards Steiner’s early fundamental epistemological
thinking, so maybe Jeff should give us all the gift of
his insights, instead of just throwing rotten tomatoes
from the sidelines. Get on the field of inquiry
and become an actual player. That’s my challenge
to Jeff.
But, he doesn’t produce such a book, or if he has, there
is no evidence of that.
Then to make things worse, I remind Jeff that this one
of Ahriman’s tricks (according to Steiner), which is to
bring something from the future into the present and
outside the stream of time as it is meant to
unfold. I basically accused Jeff of the “crime” of
an excess of ahrimanic thinking, far too clever, and not
in accord with the real nature of the present justified
stage of ordinary human consciousness.
Everyone gets a bit cranky on occasion.
I’m not arguing with the “truth” of his observations,
but rather with what he is doing with them, particularly
as regards me. Because, as I have carefully
explained to him a couple of times, I’m writing to
ordinary consciousness, and so was Barfield. That
means it is just fine to use Steiner’s map to the mind
in “A Theory ... “, especially given that what is urged
upon people is not that the truth is found in that book,
but that what they really need to study is their own
minds. The concepts of experience and thought in
that book remain quite correct for many people as a
place to start the adventure of the investigation their
own consciousness.
Plus, while Anthroposophy is not for everyone, this
business of helping people find a way to the New
Thinking may be a real need in order to halt materialism
from going to far.
Were Jeff to write his book, a perhaps too daunting task
for him in his own stage of development (he’s not my
age, and this suggests his soul/spirit matrix is not yet
ripe enough), the whole world might benefit, and it
might even help the development of Anthroposophy as it
continues to seek incarnation during the 21st
Century. Instead Jeff just appears for a
bit, throws a rotten tomato at me, and goes back to
whatever he does with the rest of his life.
There are also some additional tricky aspects to the
situation. Jeff and I seem to agree (from
different perspectives) that where people are is where
they are supposed to be. But for Jeff to go down
that road, he has to spend some effort (apparently,
since he never shows such “cards” here), paying
attention to what modern scientists, philosophers,
religious people, and even politicians are talking
about, because the whole world is in “conversation”, and
each of us is invited to play a role there as
well. The arguments about the brain and the mind
are going to influence all kinds of ways in which the
future unfolds. People, who can help that argument
be more “sane”, are needed, and Jeff just might be one,
given his avocation as a decent philosopher, coupled
with his work as a therapist.
Jeff, at least here, appears to believe he can stand on
the sidelines of theses conversations, throw his rotten
tomatoes at whomever he likes (pointing out their
filters, which he does not confess to possessing), and
that satisfies whatever obligations, duties, moral
intuitions or whatever, by which he is a member of the
human race. He does hint of other activities, but
does not share. We are left then with how he
“behaves” here, and that I find less than
desirable.
Enough said on that subject ...
Oh, and by the way. Put down your Steiner books
and read mine for a while. That’s if you’re still
into reading. Not good to have just one kind of
spiritual food in your diet. I’m quite skilled at what I
cook up, and I’ve had a lot of help from various Beings
(Jeff doesn’t seem to notice Them - another mystery)
that have an interest in the work of Real
Anthroposophy. Don’t want to read, ... I made some
videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vB23oD0iMg&list=PLA20F33D25732B7FC
Each of these Facebook groups has a future. What
will it be? I won’t be here, ... I’ve given what I
can and need to conserve forces and focus them in other
venues. I just urge folks to get it that a
“scientific” attitude is helpful, and as my eldest
recently said on one of these groups, making Steiner
into a demi-god is not very useful. One of the
main reasons I am leaving is the endless messages that
begin with quoting something from Steiner. Another
is the people who have no faith, and actually believe
the world is organized in a such a way that the Stage
Setting is going down in flames and we are all going to
die. Well, guess what, we are all going to die
anyway, so maybe just maybe (at least from an
“anthroposophical” truth point of view), too much beam
in your own eye about the world and the rich and the
rest, needs to change.
Me I’m just seriously tired of reading that shit over
and over again, in places where people at least have the
possibility of being a lot wiser.
Me, I’ve been losing track of what Day of the Week it
is. A Day is just a Day. Linda is more bound
to the days of the week, than I am. I need to keep
track of dates, because of doctor appointments, but they
can be any Day of any Week. She has church
and stuff, ... I’m always in church.
Makes a difference whether its light out or not.
More hungry in the morning, less at night. Most of
my best writing is between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m., if we go
by the clock on the DVR. Hear the muse, need to
pee or drink some water, get up and write. No
muse, back to bed waiting on the dream-sendings.
Take naps, later. Linda likes the News. I’d
rather watch the squirrels play in the trees or the
birds feeding on the deck. Or read a good book.
Snow keeps getting deeper. We’ve another storm
coming - looks to snow for three or four Days
straight. Lots of Crazy out there in the
wilder more crowded places. People have all kinds
of hungers ... hardly ever satisfied. I used to
want really badly to be “right” all the time. No
so much anymore. Leave the Big Picture to Them ...
They are way better at it than I am. “Good night
and good luck”:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433383/
P.S. Want to know what the biggest paradox of all
is? We are never ready for whatever comes, and we
were born ready for it all.
