The Redemption of Eros

- Seeking Comfort and Companionship in a time of increasing Social Chaos

or
sex and the single anthroposophist -

[ under construction]

by Joel A. Wendt

Those carefully observing modern social processes will have become well aware that an era of increasing social chaos has been with us for some time.  These are necessary developments arising as a consequence of the current stage of the Evolution of Consciousness.  In order for human beings to confront, in their biographies, the needed moral dilemmas belonging to their individual consciousness soul development, a degree of social disorder is required.  This has two effects.  One is that it further weakens the ability of the social order to require conformance to moral rules, whether rooted in social tradition or religious instruction.  The second is that the I is meant to be thrown onto its own resources as much as possible.  It it not to be able to  rely for its moral determinations on community support, or any outside set of rules, but only on its own intuitions.

This process can be very isolating.  Such isolation, however, is not necessary if the I is a member of a community that recognizes the significance of individual moral choice.  The Anthroposophical Society and Movement are meant to be one such community, but it is clear from what is written and said today in anthroposophical media that this situation is little appreciated or understood within our circles.  We simple fail to honestly observe our own activity, and treat it with a kind of happy talk illusory conceptual process that lives mainly in denial of the real events in everyone's lives.

An appreciation of the rhythmic elements of time, as this increasing social chaos intensifies, suggests that the peak will be around 2012 (the end of the first third of the first third of the 21st Century).  Anyone following the news is well aware of how fragile the world social order has become, and that there are far more ways in which this increasing disorder can intensify, than ways in which it can moderate.  Students of complex systems are aware that such systems occasionally undergo massive transformations, which generally take the form of increasing disorder until a kind of condition of chaos ensues, after which a new equilibrium emerges.  Such is what the near future of the social organism offers to all, including anthroposophists.

While this transformative chaos serves the needs of the developing consciousness soul, that aspect of this process that leads in the direction of isolation is really meant to make us more aware of our need for community.  We suffer the isolation precisely in order to appreciate all the more the accompaning loss of the old and tired traditional community, such that we may then find within ourselves the will forces out of which to engender new community.  Such a creative process is, however, far more difficult that we imagine, for the I has to forge the new community out of freedom, and this leads to all kinds of challenges.

Among the traditions that have fallen into distress, because of the increasing individualism, is marriage.  While the Christian Community can maintain the Sacrament of Marriage, it is not really yet able to provide true community building forces outside its own circles, and this includes the Branches and Study Groups which are the core social element of anthropsophical life.  We all know this.  Marriages everywhere increasingly fail, following which people are unable to provide for themselves the natural intimacy that belongs to a healthy psychological (or soul) life.  The whole of Western Culture exhibits stress and fracture lines just in this realm, and if we are to consider outselves bearers of new wisdom, then certainly we ought to be able to address these issues.

Lets approach this in a deeper way by remembering some recent history.

In the 1950's in America, there arose what was soon to be called the sexual revolution.  This had many positive and negative social effects.  Women's liberation emerged from this transformation, and ultimately gay activism.  These were social and political challenges to the status quo of Western Culture, that were feared by many and embraced by many more.  Social dancing changed, such that erotic movements became more in style, which today in the commercially driven Pop and Rap Music Culture can be seen to have achieved a kind of level of clear excessive absurdity.  There is no Art in these dances, only an excess of individual expression and animal energies.  In my book the Way of the Fool, I have called this social condition, that dominates our culture: Fallen Eros.

The true significance of that aspect of love, which was once understood as Eros, has become culturally degraded in the extreme.  For more about the basic four aspects of love [selfless love (Agape), nurturing love (Storge), brotherly and sisterly love or comradeship (Phileo) and erotic and sensual love (Eros)], this will be found in the above book.

Following this sexual revolution there arose a period in which sexual activity increased, with many people frequently engaging in many casual sexual encounters.  As might be expected, this led to an increase in sexually transmitted disease, one of which has reached epidemic world-wide proportions: AIDS.  The excessive freedom of casual sex in the 60's and 70's became in the 80's a place of grave danger.  People had to think more carefully (if they cared to) about casual sexual encounters.

Something new came into the world with the generation born in the later years of these changes.  Where in the 1950's, the focus was on going steady and monogamous relationships, by the beginning of the 21st Century young people incarnated with a different ethos.  They stayed away from forming couples and began to go out in groups.  They recreated casual sexual encounters, but gave it a new name: hooking up.  Protective devices against sexual transmitted diseases were encouraged, as well as a great deal of birth control.  None of this was, of course, perfect by any means.  Even so, something had changed.  The social aspects of the sexual revolution engendered a period of chaos, which appears to be beginning to create a new equilibrium.

In the wake of this, more mature people still carried some baggage from the past.  Tradition demanded couples, casual sex was dangerous, and in terms of the soul needs, the idea of a relationship and commitments begin to dominate.  If one needed physical intimacy and touch (being held, or nuturing love often was only available through the rite of passage into a sexual relationship), there were few clear social rules, and much confusion.  Television and film dramas express these social phenomena quite well.  What woman or man could ask a different sex friend to come over for the night just to hold each other and be comforted, as a healthy psychological response to enduring the stress of modern life (something common in the marriage bed, but unavailable to single people)?   The need to be nurtured could only be met through casual sex in the form of fallen eros.

In point of fact, among both women and men there is a great deal of confusion about the true significance of the erotic and sensual aspects of our human nature.  Eros has fallen far indeed.  It is just here in our self understanding of our more primal natures (the lower chakras: when we think about all our issues with food and nutrition, for example, we are involved in these dilemmas, not just when we think about sex)) that our civilization exists in a chaos of confusion and essentially bad information about what it means to be a woman or a man.  One could say that this is also necessary for the development of the I, via the consciousness soul, but in the absence of new wisdom in the culture nothing here will turn out to the good.  While Rudolf Steiner had a great deal to say in many areas of life, about this he clearly avoided the issues (no one was then ready).

Steiner, by the way, had a few troubling problems with the questions of Eros.  His basic response was to hide from assertive feminine energies in marriage.  Not that these were especially personal problems, but it was not an easy subject to take up in the culture in which he was teaching (see in this regard the essay by Catherine MacCoun: "Work on what has been spoiled" http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ktmc1.html  (It is well worth reading, but not for the faint hearted.).  Can you imagine him trying to deal with Americans in the early 21st Century, after the sexual revolution and women's liberation?   Maybe you can.

*Here is Steiner himself on the problem of the differences between higher development and more ordinary social interaction (quoted in Catherine's article above):

"The force that enables us to understand the spiritual world belongs only in the spiritual world; this same force causes all kinds of harm if it is directly and thoughtlessly transferred to the physical plane. For what is the nature of this force? It consists in making ones thinking independent of the physical plane. When this capacity is applied to the physical plane itself, it turns into deceit and dishonesty. Thus, people who were called upon to disseminate spiritual science have always seen great danger in doing so, because what is needed for understanding higher planes of existence is harmful when applied directly to the physical world."

Steiner also writes quite explicitly of sexual desire in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and I've included a great deal of what was expressed there, below (including a few comments of my own).

Anyway, here is the problem as I see it.  As anthroposophists, with our increasing individuality and moral freedom, we have seen (as has the greater general social order) difficulty in maintaining relationships, whether in marriages or outside a marriage.  The elements of desire, the nature of love, the significance of Eros and sensuality, - a thousand questions can bloom once we start to ask them; and, in our Society we have many many single people, all of them with various emotional and physical needs.  What makes this matter harder for us is that we are deeply involved in our spiritual Way, and this is so important to us that forming any level of intimate relationship with another person, not of the same Way, becomes quite difficult (many do, but many more do not).

We also live, as we have seen, in a quite oversexualized culture (Fallen Eros).  Everything is sexually stimulating (from the obvious advertisements to the more subtle curves of many commerial products, for example), and women are in constant states of undress (much immodesty), or wearing clothes that are too tight fitting.  Men generally don't understand themselves as sexual beings, and probably most women as well.  There is more bad information than good out there about our sexuality.

We naturally seek partners in life, someone who is both attractive and interesting to us, and whose soul life is on the same page as our own.  Yet, we often seek sex when what we really want is to receive nurturing touch (comfort) and other related physical intimacies.  Something indefinable, called "the relationship" is frequently a goal, when our actual needs are otherwise.

At the same time, the Way of Anthroposophy, even our quite individualized version of it, reaches deep into our souls and touches almost every aspect of how we live life. In Waldorf, for example, we know of many there who as parents have lost the marriage to disagreements over Waldorf and/or Anthroposophy.  As socially responsible human beings, struggling to form communities with each other, can we any longer not begin to have conversations with each other in which we seek together for wisdom, for new ways of being human with each other in regards to our most intimate needs and passions?

Presently, we have to go outside our circles for such conversation, to therapists or to the priests of the Christian Community, all of whom are skilled and who no doubt can help us with problems.  But what if our questions are not about problems, but about just being I'm okay and you are okay too?  Don't we get to come at this from a position of just plain folks and adequacy instead of having to have a difficulty first?

Perhaps our Branch life has not kept up with our human needs.  Perhaps we need more purely social gatherings were individuals can meet each other, especially single individuals can meet single individuals.  Perhaps we need to take these kinds of questions out of the closet of our fears and anxieties, and put them squarely in front of us in the realms of social (horizontal) conversation, where we share our hearts with each other, and seek together for inspiration to move within our circle so that something we cannot think of alone, we might be able to think of together.  This social (horizontal) conversation is not meant, by the way, to be the same as the reverse cultus (a vertical conversation).

This, however, brings once again the mystery of the quote above:  

"The force that enables us to understand the spiritual world belongs only in the spiritual world; this same force causes all kinds of harm if it is directly and thoughtlessly transferred to the physical plane. For what is the nature of this force? It consists in making ones thinking independent of the physical plane. When this capacity is applied to the physical plane itself, it turns into deceit and dishonesty. Thus, people who were called upon to disseminate spiritual science have always seen great danger in doing so, because what is needed for understanding higher planes of existence is harmful when applied directly to the physical world."

What does this mean in practice?

Who then has the courage to begin to explore these questions of the rite of passage that comes prior to adult play and intimacy.  Yes the details are private, but doesn't the community have an interest in the pyschological health of the lives of its members?  How do we as a community foster a healthy human environment where people can learn to understand and make those first steps leading to getting their intimacy needs met as single people, and yet remain involved in the wonderful anthroposophical life of personal development and freedom?  Does anyone reading this think that we are all supposed to be celibate, and that sex is only for marriage?  If there is a rule - a moral rule - that some think should apply to all, where is our human freedom?

Here are two paragraphs from Catherine's article:

"Now the great initiate, if he wishes to avoid being pestered night and day with such questions, would be wise to shrug and respond, "Beats me." But Steiner, it seems, never met a question he didn't like. The shrug was not in his repertoire. He complained repeatedly that members of the Society were failing to take initiative, that they were wearing him out by insisting on his participation in the most trivial administrative matters. He had become an esoteric micro-manager, unable to delegate even when he wanted to. And this can be traced to the fact, that despite his avowals, there was no horizontal matter that he or his students regarded as strictly horizontal.

"In the social life of a spiritual community, a strict separation between the horizontal and the vertical cannot be maintained. Community life is moral life, and the moral is the meeting point of vertical and horizontal. While failure to conceptually isolate one dimension from another is a cause of much craziness, failure to bring them together is a cause of stagnation. Healthy spiritual life, both for the individual and for the community, is a matter of circulation - fluent movement from one dimension to another, and within each dimension according to its own laws." 

I can only compare our weak approach (to these significant elements of community life) to those amazingly healthy traditional approaches in Native American communities. If we were to discover how to listen to this living wisdom, one yet deeply rooted in its own spirit recollection, we will notice that as their children mature into adolescence, a number of social processes of initiation into the mysteries of adult responsibilities and behaviors are undertaken.  The community has a deep interest in there being healthy soul (psychological) life among all its members, and to ignore that we are beings of sensuality and erotic impulses is to ignore reality. 

I have often felt at anthroposophical meetings that there was an undercurrent of sexual energies, repressed and unacknowledged, that would burst forth as such energies do, into tiffs and minor arguments between individuals that are attracted to each other, but have chosen (for reasons of karma, or out of just plain confusion) to join a spiritual community that wants to remain asleep to fundamental human impulses and needs.

These are not matters for some book, by the way, or some lecture, but rather correctly and acutely belong to any community that wants to bring conscious wisdom to its human relationships.  The whole outer society has been in dialog for decades now on these issues, but where among anthroposophists, in the clear light of shared conversation, are they addressed?

the problem of desire as seen from the point of view

of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity

Next are some quotations from Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom (Spiritual Activity), which then could form the background for our shared considerations of these so very important matters.  Steiner has attempted to face these matters squarely and there is here much food for thought.

All the same, if we vainly believe that he has said everything, and that there is no room for any other thought that could be truer or wiser or more beautiful, then it would seem that the Gods have made a very strange error in letting anyone else after Steiner said  think.  If Steiner is to be the authority to which all other minds must bow down, then why do the rest of us have minds at all?

Out of such an obvious impulse then, I urge the reader to look at what is below with two additional thoughts in mind: 1) Christ loves us, whether we are unfree or not, filled with desire or not, and He has artistically woven together our mutual karma fully aware of the nature of appetite and desire.  2) the Divine Mother, who rules the dark of humanity from below, has placed in the powers of sexual attraction the grace and gift of procreation.  Eros overcomes moral/ideal resistance all the time, precisely in order to make it possible for the stream of heredity to create the bodies needed by everyone (EVERYONE!) to incarnate.  Below, where Steiner seems to have had to forget this (and other aspects of horizontal existence), I have inserted a few comments in [brackets].

Chapter 1

"On no account should it be said that all our action springs only from the sober deliberations of our reason. I am very far from calling human in the highest sense only those actions that proceed from abstract judgment. But as soon as our conduct rises above the sphere of the satisfaction of purely animal desires, our motives are always permeated by thoughts. Love, pity, and patriotism are driving forces for actions which cannot be analyzed away into cold concepts of the intellect. It is said that here the heart, the mood of the soul, hold sway. No doubt. But the heart and the mood of the soul do not create the motives. They presuppose them and let them enter. Pity enters my heart when the mental picture of a person who arouses pity appears in my consciousness. The way to the heart is through the head, Love is no exception. Whenever it is not merely the expression of bare sexual instinct, it depends on the mental picture we form of the loved one. And the more idealistic these mental pictures are, just so much the more blessed is our love. Here too, thought is the father of feeling. It is said that love makes us blind to the failings of the loved one. But this can be expressed the other way round, namely, that it is just for the good qualities that love opens the eyes. Many pass by these good qualities without noticing them. One, however, perceives them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What else has he done but made a mental picture of what hundreds have failed to see? Love is not theirs, because they lack the mental picture."

[If I have a need for physical intimacy, what saves my seeking that from being merely bare sexual instinct.  It would seem that I can actually admire the spirit of the person with whom I am to dance the dance of the rite of passage from casual social intercourse into a more intimate sensual and erotic experience, and thus remain free.  I do this by consciously forming a mental picture of the truth of who they are - see really what they will - not how they look.  If I live in a community that develops a vocabulary and an understanding of such free social processes between individuals, then how much healthier is my soul life, my psychology?  If the community has discussed what is a healthy relationship and what is not, yet without attempting to create standards or coerce our freedom, that discussion becomes a basis in the life of the community for honest and straightforward verbal play among adults who discover consciously that they are seeking a same or similar intimacy, whether just a single night of emotional satisfaction and shared comfort, to something more in the nature of courtship perhaps leading to marriage and children.]

Chapter 9

 The first level of individual life is that of perceiving, more particularly perceiving through the senses. This is the region of our individual life in which perceiving translates itself directly into willing, without the intervention of either a feeling or a concept. The driving force here involved is simply called instinct. The satisfaction of our lower, purely animal needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.) comes about in this way. The main characteristic of instinctive life is the immediacy with which the single percept releases the act of will. This kind of determination of the will, which belongs originally only to the life of the lower senses, may however become extended also to the percepts of the higher senses. We may react to the percept of a certain event in the external world without reflecting on what we do, without any special feeling connecting itself with the percept, as in fact happens in our conventional social behavior. The driving force of such action is called tact or moral good taste. The more often such immediate reactions to a percept occur, the more the person concerned will prove himself able to act purely under the guidance of tact; that is, tact becomes his characterological disposition.

[Not to make to much of it, but this commentary made me wonder whether Steiner was a virgin.  I don't mean this in a critical way, just that without actually having had sexual experience, how could he not see that precisely one element of desire is necessarily the letting go of thinking in the direction of a state of not thinking at all.  What would seem necessary, in order to remain morally free, is that one enter this rite of passage seeking intimate companionship with a great deal of wide awake conversational play, in which an agreement is reached, without one person invalidating or dominating the other*.  This agreement is one of ultimately and mutually surrendering into the abandonment of almost any and all restraint rooted in thought.  At the same time, we all know (who are not virgins) that thought never really leaves us.  The truth is that we are more like the rider of a horse, who more and more gives free rein to this animality, yet never actually stops paying attention - never loses conscious awareness of what is happening.  Yet, without frank adult conversations, how are we to learn from each other that necessary vocabulary that enables us to meet each other in the pursuit of sensual and erotic experience, which satisfies many emotional and intimacy needs quite beyond the mere moment of the so-called climax - the moment of deepest surrender.  What I think he is doing above is actually laying the foundation for a healthy social life in which human sensual and erotic desire is seen as fully capable of being moral, yet he had to go at this from such a round about set of circling phrases and sentences, that we almost lose the true train of thought.  He lived among people who were not in any sense sexually liberated, nor were the women seen as more than subservient to men.  In such a social environment, circumlocution is essential in order that the heart of the message not get lost in some sensationalism connected to a particular (though significant) detail.  This sense then of "tact", or "moral good taste", is the insight leading to the how  that speech and gesture in ordinary social intercourse can lead to that agreement and consent to move beyond verbal flirting, into verbal foreplay, and then into sensuality and eros.  By discussing this in a community, we enable the male and female natures - the active and receptive gestures, which are not actually confined to physical gender - to express their practical sense of such tact and good taste.  We teach each other something very important and needed by all.  Until we take up such a task, it remains undone, and we remain in darkness and confusion.

*Obviously the use of intoxicants, can render us essentially unconscious, due to the effect of many of them in causing the ego to loose its hold on the blood.  All that I have written here assumes a state of normal (unintoxicated) consciousness.]

Chapter 9

There are many who will say that the concept of the free man which I have here developed is a chimera nowhere to be found in practice; we have to do with actual human beings, from whom we can only hope for morality if they obey some moral law, that is, if they regard their moral task as a duty and do not freely follow their inclinations and loves. I do not doubt this at all. Only a blind man could do so. But if this is to be the final conclusion, then away with all this hypocrisy about morality! Let us then simply say that human nature must be driven to its actions as long as it is not free. Whether his unfreedom is forced on him by physical means or by moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his unlimited sexual desire or because he is bound by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view. Only let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, seeing that he is driven to them by a force other than himself. But in the midst of all this framework of compulsion there arise men who establish themselves as free spirits in all the welter of customs, legal codes, religious observances, and so forth. They are free in so far as they obey only themselves, unfree in so far as they submit to control. Which of us can say that he is really free in all his actions? Yet in each of us there dwells a deeper being in which the free man finds expression.

[Again, it is obvious is it not, from our vantage point, that custom is not to restrain free men and women (ethical individualists) from understanding their carnal nature - the gifts woven into having incarnated in a physical body.  The problem, as seen from the point of view of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, is that we learn how to ride the horse of desire in a manner in which our conscious free moral intention never forgets that it is holding the reins of the lower impulses, and can direct them out of higher motives, thus redeeming what seems merely animal and making it something that can justly be called human.  In the Epoch of the Consciousness Soul we are challenged to face all of carnal desire and inform it from out of the own I with freely chosen moral goodness]

Chapter 13

 By a very different argument von Hartmann attempts to establish pessimism and to make use of it for ethics. He attempts, in keeping with a favorite tendency of our times, to base his world view on experience. From the observation of life he hopes to discover whether pleasure or pain outweighs the other in the world. He parades whatever appears to men as blessing and fortune before the tribunal of reason, in order to show that all alleged satisfaction turns out on closer inspection to be illusion. It is illusion when we believe that in health, youth, freedom, sufficient income, love (sexual satisfaction), pity, friendship and family life, self-respect, honor, fame, power, religious edification, pursuit of science and of art, hope of a life hereafter, participation in the progress of civilization - that in all these we have sources of happiness and satisfaction. Soberly considered, every enjoyment brings much more evil and misery into the world than pleasure.

[This last sentence - as well as most before it - would seem to be von Hartmann, not Steiner - in any event the reader is cautioned here.]

Chapter 13

I can speak of pain only when desire runs up against the impossibility of fulfillment. Even when an enjoyment that I have had creates in me the desire for the experience of greater or more refined pleasure, I cannot speak of this desire as a pain created by the previous pleasure until the means of experiencing the greater or more refined pleasure fail me. Only when pain appears as a natural consequence of pleasure, as for instance when a woman's sexual pleasure is followed by the suffering of childbirth and the cares of a family, can I find in the enjoyment the originator of the pain.

[Is Steiner here giving the counter argument to von Hartmann?  This is a chapter on pessimism, and von Hartmann would seem to be a pessimist, such that Steiner is showing us how carnal desires and pleasures, even though they can in excess lead to moments of pain, the pleasure remains itself.  Read the first sentence above again, especially the word: only.]

Chapter 13

Anyone who follows fairly closely the line of thought of such thinkers as Eduard von Hartmann may believe it necessity, in order to arrive at a correct valuation of life, to clear out of the way those factors which falsify our judgment about the balance of pleasure and pain. He can try to do this in two ways. Firstly, by showing that our desire (instinct, will) interferes with our sober estimation of feeling values in a disturbing way. Whereas, for instance, we ought to say to ourselves that sexual enjoyment is a source of evil, we are misled by the fact that the sexual instinct is very strong in us into conjuring up the prospect of a pleasure which just is not there in that degree at all. We want to enjoy ourselves; hence we do not admit to ourselves that we suffer under the enjoyment. Secondly, he can do it by subjecting feelings to a critical examination and attempting to prove that the objects to which our feelings attach themselves are revealed as illusions by the light of reason, and that they are destroyed from the moment that our ever growing intelligence sees through the illusions.

[Again, is Steiner agreeing with von Hartmann, or disagreeing, especially in the last sentence where Steiner writes: attempting to prove.  I believe Steiner is disagreeing, but again in the style of circumlocution necessary to not losing the main message in something that others might sensationalize.  We are the judges of our pain and pleasure, and the eventual masters (out of freedom) of our choices in this regard.  To argue that carnal (bodily) pleasures are illusions, is to mistake the medium for the message.  Illusions abound, but they are not without meaning, for everything that is maya instructs us, and gives us choices.  If there is any comment that needs to be brought here, it is this (and it is from Tomberg in his book Meditations on the Tarot.  He there makes the observation that pleasure, pursued for itself, is sterile.  That is it is unproductive.  I suggest this is an excessive judgment on his part.  Pleasure's main flaw is that you have to go back to it again and again.  It does not remain.  Again, here is a point of view that would make of us monks and nuns, such that no children would come into the world, and there would be no bodies in which people could incarnate and seek out their karma.  Tomberg has hidden in his judgment a moral ideal to which he seems to think all should agree.  Has Steiner in his book on Freedom done anything similar?]

Chapter 14

 It is impossible to understand a human being completely if one takes the concept of genus as the basis of ones judgment. The tendency to judge according to the genus is at its most stubborn where we are concerned with differences of sex. Almost invariably man sees in woman, and woman in man, too much of the general character of the other sex and too little of what is individual. In practical life this does less harm to men than to women.

[Is this here the seed of understanding out of which was to be grown women's liberation?  We are led then to wondering what would happen today, in anthroposophical circles, where as adults and where the women are liberated, and the men more sensitive (and I say both of those with a bit of irony - understanding that such is only partially true) we took up among each other frank discussions of that which general human culture has been debating for years.  Without dialog, all remains unspoken and potentially prey to the Shadow out of the unconscious.  This essay is much more of a warning, than it is an advocacy of some kind of sexual excess in our Society and Movement.  My experience is that we are more in danger from the consequences of repression - of keeping such matters in the closet, than we are in danger from the consequences of enlightened conversation.  The Anthroposophical Society and Movement - that is our social life - has, for example, frequently mistreated gay men and women, in circumstances where unredeemed antipathies and sympathies were allowed to lash out at particular individuals.  We have a long way to go as a community, and once more this essay merely seeks to suggest that it is time to take the bull by the horns and get on with it.  It will be messy in any event, but the longer we wait, the more likely that something of these carnal forces and powers will join together with the Shadow and make of our work something far more chaotic than any of us need.  Years ago I discovered a principle.  I found that I had created whole piles of undone deeds, because I saw them as difficult and set them aside for later.  Doing only the easy matters first, I soon had too much of the hard and difficult ones on my plate.  Then I began to look at any day, and select for the first deeds of the day the most difficult or otherwise uninteresting.  I soon found that these were quickly done, and that their apparent terror (in the form of anxiety) was greater in my mind than in the doing.  Moreover, the rest of the day was much easier, for the hardest tasks had been cleared away, and I was no longer bothered by them.  In our social and community life as anthroposophists, we face similar problems - not only mistaking much that is non-essential for the truly essential, but also never doing the truly essential because it appears to be too difficult.]

Let us now come at this from another direction entirely...

There is much confusion in the Anthroposophical Society in America, far more that people would imagine.  The main source of this confusion is because we live so strongly under the influence of Ahriman here.  This comes to us through our double-complex - we are very ahrimanic out of the influence of the double.  Now the form this takes is very interesting, and somewhat obvious at the same time.  What American anthroposophists do is take in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner in such a way that makes them quite comfortable.  We take these ideas into us and make a kind of very comfortable world view out of them.

For example, we will see various kinds of aspects of modern social life that will evoke in us a kind of horror.  We see these terrible things, and then we explain them away by seeing that these horrors arise because of the work of the opponents.  We have explained that which we have observed away and actually not made much contact with it at all.  Now not everyone does this.  Some, who are of the Mary Folk (see the essay above: The Natural Transformation of the Anthroposophical Society in America), react more strongly, are more disturbed in their feeling life and find they have to enter into the world process more directly.  But for many others, they have this explanation using the opponents-idea, and this makes them comfortable.

A similar kind of thing happens when anthroposophists look at our Society and Movement.  Here the gesture for comforting thoughts is more powerful.  All our media are full of happy talk about the Society and the leadership of the various Councils in America and about Dornach, as if everything was wonderful, and there were no problems at all.  So our thinking experiences our own social life and makes these very comfortable inner pictures.  Yes, we say to ourselves, nobody is perfect, but at the same time everything is just fine.  We are well led and nurtured from our institutional leadership.  They give us all the right guidance.

Of course, one has to not notice there is no growth in the Society - the number of new members more or less equals the number who drop away out of disinterest, and few young people are drawn into the work.  We have less membership today than we did five years ago.  We have to not notice that Waldorf in America is falling apart socially (the schools are full of social problems), or that Anthroposophical Medicine is held entirely at bay - no growth at all in America.

Those who criticize, as the quote above from Emily Dickenson reveals, are ignored, their thinking put in the chains of don't listen to him, he is dangerous.  Don't bring us bad news says the comforting voice of the ahrimanic double, we don't want to be troubled by the prospect of any kind of failings.

That is just one part of it, for the other is the luciferic influence.  We have this very dreamy relationship to what Steiner taught.  We follow it like some kind of old favorite story-book play of which we never get tired.  Our Society walks backwards into the future, and has yet to even get on the ground in America.  The most recent events were remembrances of something Steiner did a hundred years ago, and what the Templers did 800 years ago.  We are trapped in a cul de sac of spirit recollection, a very luciferically fascinating study of everything Steiner every did and said.  But the spiritual present, what the spirit wants to show us today, to that we don't know how to listen.  We can't hear this inwardly because we have woven around ourselves this world of dreamy comfort that is disconnected from any thought that might make us wake up in the present and really begin to take responsibility for the spiritual future.

Most anthroposophists actually don't know how to experience the world directly into our thoughts.  Instead we dip into memory - what did Steiner say we ask ourselves.  I had a very brief discussion this last summer (2007) with a leading anthroposophical doctor about the double.  He said to my face that I couldn't say anything about the double until I had read and mastered everything Steiner said about it.  It didn't occur to him that someone was sitting across the table from him who had spent ten years working on this question of the shadow and who had a rich inner life full of experiences.  He believed everyone he met in Anthroposophy thought like he did, and had to rely on Steiner.  What an easy way to dismiss another, by comparing them to a dead authors words from 100 years ago as if the spirit spoke only once to only one man and never had anything to say to any other human being.

Of course, for me to speak to an anthroposophical doctor about the double was challenging to him, albeit probably unconsciously.  Steiner had pointed clearly at the double and its relationship to health, and if one asks anthroposophical doctors about this subject, we find that in all of 80 or 90 years no new knowledge about the double and illness has come forward.  There are just some hints, but no research.  Morever, the double is hardly spoken of at all in the medical literature out of anthroposophy.

Now what's the point here.  Well, if we read Steiner (and there are a lot of reasons to read Steiner for inspiration) we will come upon the idea in his writings on Lucifer and Ahriman, that the cure for the luciferic is the ahrimanic and the cure for the ahrimanic is the luciferic.  This idea is then what stands behind this essay on sex, and which is near the end of my book on American Anthroposophy, because we are coming down to earth.

In order to overcome the unground luciferic tendencies in the Society here (the walking backwards into the future in this dreamy way), we take up in the social the encounter with the sensual.  We begin to meet each other in the social as beings who have lower chakras, not just higher (dreaming luciferic chakras).  We have appetites.  We celebrate the life of desire by seeing its oh so very human qualities and their necessity.  We make the journey down the vertical axis into the Realm of the Dark (the Realm ruled by the Divine Feminine by the way).  We think together about what it means to be beings of desire and appetite.

To cure the ahrimanic, the world of comforting thoughts we have woven around our conceptions of our work as if it was all right and everything was perfect, we have to dream.  We have to make imaginative pictures of what we could be if we were honest about our real state of being as a Society.  We seek visions of the future from a point of view that is honest about the present.  How do people think the future arises?  It comes from the dreamers, the ones who trouble themselves to be discontented with the present.  We have to be discontented with the Society, and dream its betterment.