Before we enter intimately into the work involved in understanding modern social existence, it will help if we examine, somewhat more carefully, certain ideas introduced in part one concerning the transformation of our ordinary given thinking into a new form of cognition.

There is probably nothing more central to Rudolf Steiner's work, and nothing more frequently mis-understood, than those practices outlined in his book: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

First of all, there are no answers found in the book.  All that is to be understood is only found by looking objectively at one's own inner processes.  The book serves as a guide, a kind of a "soul life" for dummies.  I don't mean to disparage anyone by this, by the way, but it is possible (and has been done) to discover these things without recourse to the book.  That being said, the book is a great
help (although for some a bit stiff) for any one on the path to self knowledge that wants to avoid the pitfalls of mere "mystical feeling", for a more scientific and rational (reproducible) gateway into the realm of the spirit.

The book also contains the intriguing sub-title: "Some results of introspection following after the methods of natural science."

The book begins by pointing out to the reader the problem of free will, and suggests that the reader try to become self aware of the inner nature of desire (apparently un-free will), how that manifests, and whether it is possible to "desire what we desire".  It concludes that we can "choose" the moral imperative of our deeds, and that such a "choice" is free  -- therefore the human being does possess a free will, providing he/she engages this will at the appropriate level (the moral level).  Doing that in practice, however, is not so easy.

It becomes necessary then for the student of objective (scientific) introspection, to wake up inwardly to certain matters, especially concerning the "act" of thinking (the will in thinking).  This leads to the exploration of the distinction and relationship between percept and concept, or between experience and the ideas we form about our experience.

It becomes apparent, after a time, that even such knowledge depends upon "thinking", with the result that a certain kind of inner gymnastic mental act needs to be learned and practiced.  We can't, in the act of thinking, watch ourselves think.  But we can "turn around" just after thinking, and remember what it was we just did.  This is a very curious experience, but quite necessary.  It must be done repeatedly until it becomes a regular part of our soul life that we notice (immediatly) afterward, just "how" we have thought.

After some time it begins to become apparent that this "activity" has components to it, stages as it were.  The preliminary ones involve the mood of soul and the moral imperative -- the why we are going to "think".

This means that there is a feeling element involved in thinking, and a willing element.  The feeling element is in the mood of soul and the willing element is in the moral imperative.  Mostly we sleep here inwardly.  We don't notice these at all, we just "think", instinctively.

However, once one is awake here, then it becomes possible to cultivate a mood of soul and to choose a moral imperative, precedent to the act of thinking.

For example, when we are angry we have a certain mood of soul and because of our anger may want to hurt someone, who seems to have hurt us.  So we have this kind of firery mood and will to hurt back, with the result that the "thoughts" we form have a certain quality as a result.

We could also cultivate a specific mood.  Suppose we are concerned about someone else and want to find some way to help them.  We can at this point choose to let love arise within, to open our heart to them, to imagine the holy spirit in them.  In this way we create a "mood", a kind of sacred feeling inwardly.  Then we can consider the moral nature of how we want to act toward them.  Perhaps we will notice that our desires include something for our own advantage.  Because we are more awake inwardly we notice that, while we wish for something good for them, there is also a component of self interest.  Noticing this we can choose to sacrfice this self interest, to set it aside and to only seek for what is best for them, at whatever cost to ourselves.  With this mood of soul in place and with a consciously choosen moral imperative in place, then we "think" about how to help then.

Practice will show that what is produced by the act of thinking is very different depending on the qualitative nature of these elements of mood and moral intention.

A further stage of work involves "thinking" about invisible beings, after preparing both mood and moral intention.  It is here that the work can begin to achieve contact with the threshold -- where the path of cognition becomes a path to the spirit.

Leaving that aside, once percept and concept are understood in practice, as well as mood of soul and moral imperative, once we are awake to our own activity of soul when we "think", then it becomes possible to understand what is meant by "moral imagination" and "ethical individualism".

As this objective introspection matures and gains experience, it becomes possible to become more awake to the "voice of conscience".  It is crucial to be able to distinguish this "voice" from feelings of guilt and low self esteem etc.  The differences are subtle, but real, and must be noticed.

Now suppose one is faced with a moral dilemma of some sort.  It is all very real and knowing what to do is very confusing.  Everyone has ideas about what is right, but somehow that is not satisfying.  Some people will say follow your heart, and that is basically good folk advice, but in terms of "moral imagination", something else is called for.

It is possible to bring into contact with each other, in the soul, the voice of conscience and the ability to form pictures -- to imagine.  We put to these combined soul aspects the moral question we face, and there will arise within the soul certain (perfectly true)  moral knowledge -- we will know, within the forum of our own consciousness (soul), what is morally correct in the given situation.

We will not need outside ideas about what is right and wrong.  We will not need principles taught to us, or holy books, or the advice of preachers.  Morality will be known to us directly as an act of our own disciplined thinking activity -- "ask and it shall be given unto you".

We imagine the consequeces of the acts we are forced by life to choose, in conjunction with the conscience, in a fully conscious way, and we will be able to "see" what is right to do.   However, this does not mean we will do it.  To know what is right to do, and to act on that knowledge are two very different things.  All that the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity promises is the arising of the capacity to know.

This process does not give us "superior" moral judgment.  We don't know what someone else should do.  In fact, if we are judging someone, we are sleeping inwardly in precisely this arena (see my essay: pragmatic moral psychology)

The process of imagining is itself a free act, and can be done in a number of ways.  We could, for example, ask ourselves what would Christ do?  Posing and answering this question, in the right way (mood of soul, moral imperative, active conscious thinking), will unveil what is right.

Of course, for the moralist, the one who works from codes based on holy books, the one who sees morality as something outside the soul that the soul has to draw into itself, something true in all instances, and if violated makes one immoral, for someone who thinks this way, this "ethical individualism" that results from the inner training inspired by Steiner's book will be assumed to be flawed.

The fact is that Steiner has discovered that we are free in the realm of morality as well (in the sense that we can come to our own knowledge of what is moral, without having to be taught) -- that we can have direct personal gnosis of what is moral in the dynamics of our own lives.  This is due to the fact that the "voice of conscience" is the penetration of the higher self into the lower, and is a grace
given aspect of our soul life.  We have been created with the possibility of unfolding this capacity within our own souls.

In fact, it is the hallmark of this stage of the evolution of consciousness that this awakening to the own moral compass, this passingbeyond outwardly defined morality to an inwardly determined morality, is the main karmic necessity of our age.  The true battle between good and evil does not take place outwardly in the social world, but inwardly in the own soul.  It is here, where the ego can awake and master it, that the essential struggle of the age arises.  The social chaos we observe everywhere is just the side effects and karmic context which enables us to individually confront the transition from an age of socially imposed morality, to the possibility of a society based on a freely chosen morality.  Modern civilization is the result of this long coming Manichean crisis.

With this background in mind lets us now look at that process in our thinking by which we form judgments about conditions of social life.  My experience has taught me that, while our sentiments are often correct (we know in our hearts there is wrongness in the social sphere), and we know what the result should be (how society should end up if it was to become more healthy), it is much more difficult to know how to get from one to the other.

Many people make an assumption (there is no error in making it, it is as natural as breathing to think it), that because we can form thoughts about social existence, we assume that our judgments about HOW, to get from point (a) -- the wrongness, to point (b) -- the healthier place, lies within our capacities as individuals.

    It is as if we were to think, since I know I am ill, and I know what health feels like, I can perform heart surgery on myself.  Certainly we know socially there are problems and we can imagine a society free of these problems, but we need to ask ourselves whether we have the competence to understand how to get from the one place to the other.

I say this as one who has been there, and spent many hours in dialogue proposing solutions on the order of: "If only everyone would, ... then life would be wonderful."

Eventually I began to understand that society and the individuals that make it up were not simple things, and that if I was actually going to accomplish anything in this realm I needed to understand how society and people work, how changes arise in society, and what was possible in a practical sense in any given historical moment to accomplish.

I've basically spent over 40 years thinking about just these questions and about 20 years ago I came upon a tool which completely transformed my capacity to "think" about social questions.  This was the discovery of R. Steiner's book: Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception -- my introduction to the discipline understood as "goetheanism".

To make a brief overview of certain aspects of that book: Our given thinking, learned in language acquisition and in schooling, is only able to take a hold of the material/mechanical aspects of existence.  In order to "think" about that which has "life" we need to develop, in addition to this quantitative thinking, an organic qualitative thinking. Following on this development, in order to understand the soul-spiritual aspects of existence, we need to develop "moral" thinking. Neither of these developments is easy to obtain, nor should one believe, because they have a sense of what the words "organic" and "moral" mean, that they can easily imagine what it means to "think" in these new ways.  The path in the transformation of our capacity of cognition, as pioneered by Steiner, is not easy.  There are thousands of individuals who have come to know of it, and very few truly organic and/or moral "thinkers" have emerged from this group.

Human society, being made up of living beings, and being formed and ordered from the highest spiritual and soul-lawful causes, cannot be "thought" except by a "thinking" which has at least some mastery of goethean (organic) thinking, and a beginning relationship to spiritually scientific (moral) thinking.

By saying it (society) cannot be "thought", I mean to suggest that our ability to understand, to comprehend, to know in the sense of have knowledge of, is dependent upon developing a certain self-conscious discipline between the act of thinking and the making of observations.  We easily have thoughts about any subject matter.  True knowledge of the subject matter is much more difficult.

Keep in mind that I am speaking about knowledge of how to get from point (a) to point (b), from illness in society to health.  To know this how requires a lot of work and effort, both inwardly in the disciplining of the life of soul and spirit, and outwardly in the nature of the care taken in the observation of social phenomena.

Yes, as I said at the beginning, we all know, in our hearts, the wrongness and rightness, but to prescribe particular medicines to our social ills, that requires a whole other level of understanding. Unfortunately, one of the peculiar conditions of the age is that most people don't realize this difference, or the limits of their own ability to know.  We wouldn't let an amateur perform a surgical operation on our child, but we routinely think that we, or the pundents, or the politicians can easily fix what is wrong with our civilization.

One of the principles of goetheanism is to never go beyond the facts.  The mind is disciplined in such a way, that theorizing, as a kind of thinking, is held back.  Rather what the mind is lead to do is to more carefully observe, to see more deeply and organically (holistically, contextually) the actual facts.  In this work the capacity to form pictures, to imagine, becomes central.

In part one we discussed briefly the nature of the imagination, and the need to further its development within the human soul.  This use of the picture making capacity of the soul is essential to beginning to understand modern social existence.

    At first the soul (the mind) is unfamiliar with using the imagination in a fully conscious way.  It is something that has to be learned, and it can only be self taught, because everything of significance occures only in the forum of one's own consciousness.

Thus can arise an art and a craft I have called: Listening to the World Song.

The social world really holds no secrets.  Everything is quite out in the open.  The problem is being able to keep in mind, in picture form, what actually happens there.  Usually people only hold to a very few facts and these in the form of abstract concepts.  The mind then can only cognize, can only think on the surface of events, but cannot perceive (see with the pictorial thinking) the depths.

Let us consider a few simple matters.  Our basic rule is to not overlook the obvious, or impose theoretical explanations (shadows) in between us and the actual phenomena of social existence.

Consider for a moment the Day.  Everything happens during one of these constantly recuring periods of time.  We awake in the morning and sleep at night.  Every human being on the planet follows this rhythm.  Certainly there are exceptions, for example people who work night shifts.  But the the rhythm is the same, wakeness following by sleep followed by wakeness -- day after day after day.

During the Day there are two sets of events -- those that occur outwardly in the social world, and those that occur inwardly in the soul life (consciousness) of individuals.  For example, someone cuts rudely in front of us on the freeway on our way to work, and we become angry and stressed by this event.  The first is an outer event, the second an inward one.

An important exercise in the development of the social imagination is to be able to inwardly behold the happening of a Day, from the first waking moment of one day to the first waking moment of the next.   We need to be able to behold our own Day, both inwardly and outwardly.  We need, as well, to be able to behold the Days of others, with as much empathy as possible.

As the practice grows, it is as if a certain kind of light begins to shine into the life around us, the social order we share with others.  Moreover, when we pick up a newspaper, or watch the news on TV, we will begin to add to those abstract concepts and images the missing contextual elements without which they cannot be understood.

If this practice goes forward simultaneously with the objective introspection of our own inner life, as inspired by Steiner's Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, then our ability to imagine, to empathize, to think the depths of everyday social existence will increase in manifold and surprising ways.

At the same time as we are exploring the phenomena of the Day, with all its rich inner and outer events, we can use the imaginative faculty for an additional exercise.  We begin to imagine a sequence of Days, as a series of unfolding and related dramatic themes.  We begin this exercise by looking at our own  biography, by reconstructing it in the greatest and most honest detail.

Our own biography helps in two ways.  In the first instance it is a necessary work of self examination, upon which further moral self development depends.  If we lie to ourselves about our past, we undermine our future.  The second help is that the study of our own biography increases our ability to accurately empathize, to accurately see into the biography of another.

These then are the building blocks of our abilty to think/perceive social existence -- the image of the Day and its basic sequence of dramatic form - the Biography.

Parallel to these exercises we can begin to imagine the interplay of the Days and Biographies as these play themselves out in small social forms, such as the Family or some other basically continuious social form such as a school community, a church, or an office.  We ourselves move from one group to the other in the course of a Day, so it is important to be able to reconstruct in the imagination the inner and outer dynamics of these events.

One should not be surprised if the inner contemplation of these forms of activity begin to be experienced in ways analygous to musical and dramatic forms.  However, it remains important not to "explain" or theorize the why of various happenings.  One must strive for accuracy and contextual detail.  Think of it this way.

Imagine yourself outside the Earth, looking down on the remarkable blue-white globe.  Then imagine moving inward, so that this totality begins to disappear, and more surface detail begins to emerge.  It is the same with social life.  One must develop the ability to see the whole as itself and then move closer and observe (reconstruct imaginatively) more detail, yet retaining a sense of the relationship of the whole to the detail.

At a certain point it will become useful to begin to imagine certain social forms in movement, as changes occur to this form over time.  For example, the relationship of families and the individuals within those families, and the relationship of those families to their particular communities.  Detail will be lost, but other factors will stand out.

Many observations that can be made, have already been made, at least in a very abstract way, in the discipline of ordinary social science, so we should not be surprised if a certain common terminoloy will arise in expressing these developments.  What is crucial, however, is what is going on inwardly without our own soul, as these inner picturing activities are carried out.  When we reduce these pictures to words, there will be a certain relationship to normal socialogical terminology, but inwardly the experience will be much richer.

For example, we can notice that over time children have less and less followed in the footsteps of their parents, no longer imitating the work of the father, or passively modelling life after that of the mother.  This change arose over time in the social history of Western humanity, and it is important to recreate this change in the imagination, not just think it abstractly, because eventually one will become aware of the "force" emanating from the individual spirit as it overcomes the social restraints that previously confined it.

Such work also makes us "sensitive" to contemporary events in a new way.  Their dynamics, their living qualities, become more and more apparent.

The tendency in modern historiography is to view historical trends as driven by particularly significant individual acts and the progress and development of ideas (e.g. the invention and use of the atomic bomb).  This view sees the individual as acted upon and essentially determined by the larger forces of history.

It is my experience that it is possible to so carefully observe changes over time in human history that this whole picture inverts, and it is the need of individual spirits for a certain kind of experience during incarnation that also drives events in a kind of "suctional" way (as opposed to a "radiating" process, coming from individual deeds -- such as R. Steiner's work).  The "evolution of consciousness" proceeds very organically, with each epoch offering particular experiences to the incarnating spirit, with the result that the texture of a certain epoch is determined not just by the great events  but also by the needs of the mass for a special experience.  The karmic need for the present stage of the evolution of consciousness is to wake up inwardly to certain processes of soul life, in order for the ego to self determine matters previously unfolded instinctively.

In our particular time this calls forth forces and events at the level of history and social life that "destroy" traditional social structures, thus creating a lessening of the ability of the outer social fabric to determine the nature of our inner life -- i.e. social chaos is the necessary birth place for an advancement in spiritual and moral freedom.

The two (social chaos and emerging moral freedom) involve an interrelated and self regulating polar interdependency.  With the outer social structures weak, the individual is thrown upon him/her self to make choices previously defined by the traditions of community.  These choices further disolve the social order, making more free choices necessary, such  that in great waves the social order
convulses under the influence of these interacting processes (e.g. the sixties).

As to Islamic societies -- we have there an argument of the Gods being played out on the earth, with the tendency toward social chaos being especially and violently opposed by an intensification of the application past social strictures.  Because Islam contains an impulse contrary to the development of the Christ Impulse, Islamic societies are trying to resurrect the imagined glories of a past that never
existed in order to form a barrier to those social chaos producing forces mostly emanating from the West, and particularly America.

But as the just failed experiment in Russia reveals, authoritatively organized societies end up shooting themselves in the foot, because they wind up the controls too tight.  The developing ego has no choice but then to "explode" against what tries to bind it.  The ego, being a piece of the Father God, can't be restrained over the long term.
 
I heard a story a few years ago that is a good example of what I am descibing.  A peace corp worker living in a rural Islamic villiage described a business run by an area entrepreneur.   This latter individual drove a flat-bed truck around the area, from village to village, on the back of which was a gas electrical generator, a TV and a VCR.  At his arrival the whole village would gather around to watch old episodes of Dallas, paying the businessman for this privlege.

Now we may think this is an obnoxious bit of culture for them to experience, but not if we are recognizing that the point (in the ongoing living dynamics of the social world) is to do what is feared by the religious leaders, to undermine the social order, thus taking a small step forward in that reciprocal process leading to spiritual freedom.

We all recognize the beauty of the natural world, but not so many of us can see the beauty in the social order, with all its raw and untamed energy.  Our hearts are often broken by the pain we see, and our likes and dislikes lead us to thoughts that this or that social phenomena is a terrible evil.  But it is precisely in these all too real alchemical trials that the future nature of the developing ego is
forged.]

*       *       *

Further lessons are developed here: Living Thinking in Action, and the most recent material is in the book in progress (not finished) The Art of God.  Also relevant is: Transcendentalism Comes of Age.