I will try here to be very straight forward, although the situation is complex enough that this will be difficult.   Many people, on hearing this term: the Songs of a True White Brother will naturally connect this to the Hopi Prophecy of the True White Brother.  I must confess it is my intention that such a connection be made.   However, I recognize that this is likely to  bring to the underlying concepts in many peoples minds a number of assumptions.   One such assumption may be that only the Hopi can identify who or what the fulfillment of their Prophecy is.   Another assumption, even deeper in the background (being perhaps less conscious), may be that one can even use the term the Hopi and refer to something coherent and organized.  Let me address these concepts shortly, but first a comment on the term: Songs.

I had originally called this material The Teachings, and then later: the teaching Tales.  Upon reflection, I decided to moderate the nature of what I was offering, by suggesting that the reader (or hearer in the case of the videos) look upon the speaker as not just a teller of tales, but a Singer of Songs of Adoration of the Divine Mystery.  I had in mind here to as much as possible leave the reader/listener free to interpret and use what they read and heard according to their own sensibilities.  I also wanted also to avoid seeming to stand in relationship to what is being written and said as if I was any kind of authority.  I am just a human being with an unusual (to some minds) biography, which has led me to becoming deeply aware of the Divine Mystery's Presence in all human affairs.   This is not merely a matter of faith or belief by the way, but rather of actual perception.  I see and know this Presence intimately.

Clearly what is offered here is born in my own experience, and from my personal point of view I will be speaking as much as possible only of what is true to that experience.  However, we all know that the reader/listener's experience will be different.  To them I am really only telling a story, sometimes with some skill, craft and art, that is in the form of a Song.   Concerning this material I intend for them to be free to disregard it to whatever degree it fails to conform to their own experience.  While this is a subtle matter, I believe it is nonetheless essential.

To return to the problem of assumptions mentioned above: While I have a great deal of affection toward all First Nations Peoples, as a general class, they are not all uniformly good, not all perfectly tribal and not all worthy of the kind of fantasy honor superficial people might want to grant to them.  They, like what some Natives call the Anglo People (the white people), are human, flawed, and even then on occasion still wise and caring.  The same can be said of the group of people whose works live in my experience and stands behind the tales and Songs of a True White Brother (of the Hopi Prophecy) - that is, they (including myself) are also human and flawed.  That's why I use the article a before the terms True White Brother.  I am one of many.

Lets consider some basic facts.  The Hopi People reside in many different villages, which their own oral history shows often arose because of conflicts and disagreements among themselves.  They have different Clans as well, and these villages and clans do not speak with the same voice.  In addition, like many First Nations Peoples the Hopi tribal council form of "government" was recently (mostly in the early 20th Century) imposed on them from the outside, by certain political groups within the United States government.  Often Tribal Councils were created in order for the folks in Washington to be able to pretend that agreements and treaties had been reached, when in fact they had not, because the Way of self-governing by First Nations Peoples was often quite different from the Anglo Way.  While this history of tribal councils is complicated and even changing today, the point being made here is to recognize that there can appear to be unity in form, that does not exist in substance.  So if anyone were to put forward the idea that the Hopi believe this, or the Hopi say that (or Native Americans believe this or that), such an idea needs to be taken with a large grain of salt, because there is no true coherence of belief or thought among those individuals who are genetically or culturally of Hopi descent, or live on the Hopi Reservation Mesas, that are surrounded by the much larger Navajo Reservation, in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest.

There are actually a number of different versions of the Prophecy, depending on which elder, which village, or which book or which clan provided the material.   I ended up personally working only (once I realized the number of differing interpertations) with the version by Hopi Sun Clan Chief, Dan Katchongva, released in booklet form in the early 1970's under the title: From the Beginning of Life to the Day of Purification.

In fact the Prophecy itself recognizes that at the time of its fulfillment, maybe only one or two individuals will still hold to the ancient ways.  Modern Hopi do not even all believe in the Prophecy or the Oral History, or their Religion, or practice and worship in the Kiva, for a lot of individual reasons, of which one is certainly due to their having received a contemporary education in schools organized by Western (Anglo) culture.

I do not then, in putting forward this material, seek in any way to take something away from the Hopi People (in the form of the Idea of the True White Brother), a few of whom I have met and greatly admire.  The situation, however, does contain a fundamental difficulty.   The Hopi Prophecy is complicated, as anyone familiar with any of its versions  well knows.  One of the matters it addresses is the arrival of a time in human history, when great destructive (yet perhaps also creatively transformational) forces will bear down upon humanity.  The Prophecy (in the version I have concentrated on) says there will be three great crises, and that the final one will be determinative.  According to this Hopi Prophetic tradition, just at this moment the Elder Brother, or the True White Brother, will come from the East, from the Rising Sun, and bring to the Hopi the Life Plan for the Future, and as well inaugurate a certain coming period of future time for all of humanity, which the Prophecy calls: the Day of Purification (meaning by the concept "Day", certainly, a long period of time - no doubt many centuries, if not millennia, at least).

Details, in the Prophecy, as to the identity of the Elder Brother, or the True White Brother, are limited.  How could they not be, since whoever this group is (it is remember, not a single individual), it will have (as the Hopi themselves have) its own history, and social and cultural context - all of which in the beginning of the encounter will be unknown to any Hopi.

There appears, in fact, to be different levels of communities of individuals within the manifestation of what I have been able to identify as the True White Brother.   One smaller level of this is more conscious, to a degree, has a somewhat coherent point of view, and tends to form a kind of community.   The other level, which is instinctive and less conscious, actually seems to contain large numbers of individuals, and forms a multitude of individual communites, as well as just single individuals.  This latter group includes (in terms of numbers) millions all over the world, while the former is quite small (officially perhaps 50,000 world-wide, less than 5,000 in the United States.  In a certain sense the True White Brother impulse (if such a term may be used) is equal to, if not larger than, the total number of aboriginal peoples all over the world.

An important way to view this is that as humanity progresses during its long evolutionary history, including cultural history, certain ways of looking at the world arise, and then fall away.   Some of these older ways (paradigms) leave traces in the present, so for example we know a certain amount today about the culture and views of the ancient Egyptians.  The Hopi Prophecy comes from one such ancient way.

Western Civilization is more modern, and contains all kinds of points of view.  As the True White Brother is to be seen as a spiritually oriented Way, then what I am suggesting is that there are, in the present, different levels of a number of different Ways (including individual) that form a spectrum of degrees of self awareness of their activity, and yet can be seen from a certain point of view to express in modern life aspects of what the Prophecy expected.  As this small essay moves forward, I hope by giving concrete examples to fill out in more detail this necessarily somewhat vague picture.

Those who are members of the more conscious aspects of this group (what I have at one time called: the Elder Brother People - in an essay now 11 years out of date) are not organized even superficially tribally as are the Hopi.  They are all free individuals, and will often be found acting in the world as free individuals out of their own initiative, although  many have tended to become associated with a specific modern spiritual movement.  This is an important initial point: only those who are in fact representatives of this spiritual future (as anticipated by the Prophecy) - who consciously  are of the Elder Brother People - can actually speak for this impulse and what it hopes to contribute to world culture.  Only the more conscious True White Brother People know who they are, and there is no reason that they will even call themselves by that name (almost all of them do not - for details see below).

As one such free individual, who is part of this spiritual organism or movement, it is my personal initiative that applies this name* to our activity and begins to put on YouTube and (perhaps) Google Video the many videos in which aspects of the tales and Songs concerning many of these individuals are introduced.   This my freely chosen task - to introduce this work to some small part of the world via these Internet resources, from out of the context of my own perspective and life experience.   You can find more about me (should you wish) by going to my website Shapes in the Fire (where most of my books and other writings are available for free), or by buying hard copies of my books at my storefront on lulu.com.

*Regarding the name: the Songs of a True White Brother (of the Hopi Prophecy) - this is also not so simple.  Here I will say a few words that hopefully will not only provide the necessary clarity, but also set to rest certain fears which some may have, that an idea (the idea of the True White Brother) apparently belonging to a First Nations People, the Hopi, has been taken from them in some kind of wrongful fashion.

During my visit to Grandfather David Monogye, at the Hopi Mesas over the Easter Weekend of 1985, I spoke to him more or less as follows (the details can be found in my book American Anthroposophy): "Native Americans know that the Earth is a living being.  Western Science has decided not to believe such a thing is possible.  I am associated with a spiritual movement* that comes from Europe, from the East, from the Rising Sun, and we are showing the way to rediscovering that the Earth is a living being, while at the same time doing this out of the true principles of natural science."

*Regarding the idea of a "spiritual movement", this nuance needs to be added.   To the extent that the Hopi Prophecy, in that it speaks of the Elder Brother coming from the East, from the Rising Sun, suggests a movement in the horizontal - in the social life of humanity - this is not precisely accurate.   While to a degree a spiritual content is passed from one person to another - that is it is often shared through oral or written sources - the means by which this spiritual content is originally produced lies in the vertical, not the horizontal.  This vertical dimension is purely spiritual - that is those who produce original content, do so because of their personal relationship with one or more aspects of the Divine Mystery.  It is this intercourse, between the human individuality and the Divine Mystery, that results in a co-created, spiritually produced, content.

So that while we might perhaps say, in a social sense, that the more conscious Elder Brother People (the True White Brother) brings the Life Plan for the Future (the other half of the broken Stone Tablet) from the East and, while we might also say that this can be seen as a content (a Teaching represented in a Tale that can also be expressed in a Song), it is also true that the means by which the Teaching /
 Tale / Song is produced lies in the vertical relationship of an individual with the Mystery.  These Songs of a/the True White Brother of the Hopi Prophecy then also contain (in addition to a content) exact descriptions of a fully modern Path or method by which such content is produced out of intercourse with the Divine.   This method is both scientific and rational, which is why it is so appropriate for our present historical Age.

Such a set of conceptions, necessarily rendered so briefly here, hardly begins to touch the truth of the matter.  It would be nice (and some might prefer it) that everything be very simple.  But human life is not simple, and the coming true of the Hopi Prophecy should not be conceived of as something simple, either.   This is why I expect to make several dozen videos on YouTube (and perhaps for Google Video), and still do no more than create an introduction to the underlying realities.

Let me put the matter this way.  Humanity currently lives under a dominating world conception, which might be called scientific materialism, and which conceives of the world, and of the human being, as composed only of matter and never spirit.  This scientific world conception actually makes it impossible to understand the present world social and political/economic crisis, or the possibilities of the future, because the truth of the world must include the spiritual.  Scientific materialism by itself is an illusion, and until we learn to move past it, without leaving behind the essential core of rational (or scientific) thinking, we will wander in a barren conceptual desert, which is arid and full of the forces of death, instead of the forces of life.   For that is all that scientific materialism has so far bequeathed to the world - forces of death.   There will be no true Life in our world conception, or in our understanding of ourselves or each other, until we once more return to its proper place in our thinking, the truths of our essential spiritual nature.

Such a process, as it takes place historically, will not be easy, will not include everyone, and will not create the fantasy world of peace and happiness so many would like to see.  Thus we have the Hopi idea of the Day of Purification, as a long period of crisis, through which everyone may have the opportunity to encounter the possibility to be spiritually reborn in an alchemical crucible of trials and troubles.  We enter a time of Social Fire, where the processes of purification can burn away the foolishness and vanities of many.  And, unfortunately, while some will emerge from this travelling on an upward path toward true humanity, many others will make those choices that lead them downward into raw untempered animality and inhuman evil.

The Future is not for Wimps, although those who choose to be peaceful (as the Hopi are traditionally thought to be the peaceful People) will find, in the company of each other, much that they need.  While those who choose aggression and think of others as prey - they will find that that price is far too high, for such a short-sighted path is certain to ultimately lead to despair and deep loneliness.  The Day of Purification is a time of choice, and the Songs of a/the True White Brother of the Hopi Prophecy are meant to help people find their way into a healthy social future, through this most intense, world-wide, Rite of Passage.

Obviously, many will take a look at these teachings/tales/songs/works and find them not to their taste.  That is fine, for nothing about their content or method is meant to compel.  These are, oddly, quite practical once clearly understood.  They do not even seek to over-ride someones beliefs (although to the extent a belief is rooted in an irrational mode of thought, the method, by its development of organic and pure thinking, will lead many to set aside such beliefs, although only by their own choice).  The Songs are not a system or point of view that must be adopted.   On the contrary, they cannot be truly understood or applied except out of the complete freedom of thought of the individual.

We should also realize that these Songs are not intended to replace or supersede the ancient teachings of Aboriginal Peoples the world over.  The Hopi Prophecy recognizes the existence of two halves to the broken Stone Tablet of Wisdom, with the Elder Brother having one half, and the Younger Brother the other.  It is the marriage of these two Ways of Wisdom, in individual souls, that will lead to healing.  One does not dominate the other - both are needed.

More details I will not go into here.   Those wanting such details may find what they need by watching my videos and reading my books and my website, where hopefully I will be able to demonstrate some results of a many years effort to achieve this marriage in my own soul life.  And, then from there they may go on to study some particular aspect of the teachings, tales and songs of others that I point toward (many more books and disciplines, if one is so inclined), but most crucially the Book of Life and the Book of our own Soul.   I am not a teacher by the way, but a fellow seeker and lifetime student of self-education.  I simply point to the teaching, tales and songs* of the True White Brother, saying: look here, for here you may well find, by yourself, that which you seek.  It is not me by the way, but us, for We are (in truth and as the Hopi are said to have noted) the people we have been waiting for. 

*About these works, and to provide a last bit of perhaps needed information, let me elaborate on what was said above: "Only the True White Brother People know who they are, and there is no reason that they will even call themselves by that name (almost all of them do not - for details see below)"   Also keep in mind that we are at this time discussing those who are more conscious of being part of the central core of this future spiritual-cultural development, that has emerged from Western Civilization (come from the East) toward the Hopi and other First Nations Peoples.

The "Elder Brother People" do not give themselves that name.  Why should they?   That name rested for millennia within a deep spiritual tradition and oral history preserved for us by the Hopi People.  Its terminology was born in their language, and their culture, all quite ancient.  Recall also what I said above to Grandfather David Monogye, when I went to visit him in 1985: "Native Americans know that the Earth is a living being.  Western Science has decided not to believe such a thing is possible.  I am associated with a spiritual movement* that comes from Europe, from the East, from the Rising Sun, and we are showing the way to rediscovering that the Earth is a living being, while at the same time doing this out of the true principles of natural science."

In the Nineteenth Century, mostly in Europe, Western Civilization reached a kind of rational high point in the fields of Natural Science, but also in other realms as well where rational thinking was applied.  It was the nature of such thinking that it was one-sided, that is, it could not but wander into illusion, because it tended to value the rational at the expense of the artistic and the religious.  The human being is all three, and the world we inhabit is born of all three (reason or rationality, imagination or artistry, and devotion or religiosity).  So we have today such a book as Sam Harris's The End of Faith, which pretends to the heights of rationality, yet manages to not actually know anything at all about the religious impulse in human beings, much less recognize the value of the artistic impulse.

This one-sided condition in human cognition, born in Western Civilization and from there polluting the whole world with its inherent confusions, has a point however.   This point was to free a large number of human beings from religious tradition.  True Religion, which is filled with Life, dies when it resides too long as a system of beliefs, or as a tradition (which is why the original Hopi life plan is now spiritually exhausted).  The Spirit is living, not dead.  As a consequence the development of a group of people, who were to live fully for a time mostly in their rationality, was meant by the Mystery as a gift - a gift of freedom from the binding ties of something that remained fixed in its essential nature.  No one in advancing Western culture, for example, in Institutional (as contrasted with heretical) Christianity (according to many) was to be allowed to think outside what is in the Bible, or the official doctrines of the Church to which one belongs.

This is an impossible situation for any truly awake thinking human spirit, and so Natural Science drove itself toward many of its conclusions in large part because of an effort of free thinking spirits to get out from under the thumb of Roman Catholicism.  In the beginning of this struggle (the 15th and 16th centuries), free thinkers were burned at the stake for heresy, and then later excommunicated when it was no longer politically possible to just kill them (an indirect consequence of the Enlightenment and the Reformation).

Now the Mystery has never abandoned humanity, yet at the same time, given that a certain anti-religious impulse was needed to be introduced as an antidote to non-living dogmatic excesses in Christian tradition, it nonetheless was important to find a way to save rationality from its own defects.   As a result was born (incarnated) an unusual human spirit, Rudolf Steiner, into 19th Century Europe (in 1861).  The first products of his genius involved what to some is an obscure aspect in the disciplines of Philosophy - what is sometimes called epistemology or a theory of knowledge.  This field of intellectual inquiry concerned itself with the questions of how do we know what we know, and how do we know we know it.

Steiner's response was two-fold.  First, at age 25, he published this book: A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception.  Steiner recognized in Goethe an individual whose thinking had not fallen prey to the one-sided rationality of the Natural Scientists, or to the confusions of dogma and tradition in organized Religion.  Goethe, in fact, was at core an artist.   It was with his artist's eye that Goethe rebelled against Newtonian Optics by publishing his own Theory of Color, a remarkably fine study of the experience of color following scientific methods of observation and thought.   But Goethe had never thought about thinking (he just did it in an unusual way), so Steiner, on being asked to edit Goethe's scientific writings, first wrote a treatise on how one might go about thinking in a Goethean (organic) way, and why that would lead to the experience of the Spiritual in Nature.

Most important, this book was itself a Path, if one followed it carefully.  It not only explained the nature of organic thinking, but if one self-observed ones own activity as a thinker, following these indications, ones own thinking would slowly metamorphose into organic thinking and away from the one-sided rationality Western Culture inherited out of the many understandable and justifiable achievements of the 19th Century.

Steiner's second response was to publish at age 34 (or so) his book: The Philosophy of Freedom (or Spiritual Activity).  Steiner's subtitle for this book was: some results of introspection following the methods of natural science.  Again, this book was not just a commentary, but more crucially a Way.  If one followed it carefully, one could move from organic thinking (the Goethean thinking) to pure thinking, which Steiner described in many ways, but a most apt one is: thinking which has life within itself.   This thinking is not bound to the brain, but becomes a means of spiritual beholding of a thought-world which turns out to have a non-material independent existence.  Plato taught this centuries ago (the Idea as Real), and in such moderns as Roger Penrose, Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel, one finds among these modern pure mathematical thinkers that they too experience ideas as seeming to have independent being.  [Penrose, in his The Emperor's New Mind, relates how as a mathematician he is beginning to think mathematical truths have their own independent existence. "...I cannot help feeling that, with mathematics the case for believing in some kind of ethereal, eternal existence, at least for the more profound mathematical concepts, is a good deal stronger..." (pp. 97)]

Now the import of this is that while Natural Science was proceeding to influence the world in its one-sided hyper-rational fashion, Rudolf Steiner was giving birth to a Path or Way that showed that a properly disciplined thinking could itself find transcendent experience (thinking which has life within itself).

From Steiner's lifetime of teaching activity then was eventually born, Anthroposophy.  And out of Anthroposophy came the Anthroposophical Society, Waldorf Schools, bio-dynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, Goethean Science and much else besides.   From those of Steiner's true students (who follow his path to the New Thinking - avoiding temptations to dogmatism and sectarianism) has come even more, all of which transcends the hyper-rational style of thought common to the 19th Century (and today) and transformed it into a style of thought which is simultaneously rational, religious and artistic.  This was referred to above as the method, which then produces the content.

Like all such spiritual movements in humanity's complex history, when Steiner (its leader) crossed over into the pure world of spirit, most of his students were unable to go forward without turning his work into just another spiritual tradition.  The content was made more important than the method.  What Steiner said and thought was turned into dogma -  something which has to be called: Steinerism.  None of this fall from grace, however, diminishes Steiner's original works on organic and pure thinking (nor were his students, during this tragic collapse, anything more than gloriously human).

As someone who has followed where Steiner led in the realm of organic and pure thinking, I eventually became faced with a choice of how to introduce his work outside the circles of those who falsely believe themselves to be anthroposophists, while at the same time free it from its capture by the dogmatic confusion of the many priests of Steinerism.  I had known many years ago that Anthroposophy had to be the True White Brother of the Hopi Prophecy, which is why over the Easter Weekend of 1985 I went to see Grandfather David Monogye in the first place.  For a long time (20 years) I tried to work within the Anthroposophical Society, but in the end found that this was impossible.

The Mystery enabled me, following a heart attack (at age 66) in the Fall of 2007, to reconnect with an old friend, who was a Mohawk, and to come live on her land in New Hampshire, where I was able to work at healing body, soul and spirit.  During this healing period I decided not only how to create material for YouTube and Google Videos, but how and why to frame it conceptually as the Songs of a True White Brother.  This was the only way I felt it could be given to an entirely new audience* (outside the community of supposed anthroposophists), and yet remain true to itself as a spiritual teaching.

*[We'll come to this shortly.]

So..., while most will call it anthroposophical and out of Steiner and try to fix his thought into irrational dogma, it is true to my vision that the very best and most apt name for these teachings, tales and songs, not only for America, but also for the whole world, is found by connecting it to the Prophetic Tradition of the Hopi.  This ancient and wise spiritual view of human existence still has enough life in it, such that akin to all the impulses of Aborniginal Peoples all over the world to love Mother Earth (the earth as a living being) it (and they) can be married to the highest spiritual impulses latent and hidden within Western science as these come forward through a Path that shows the individual how to move their thinking into its organic and then its purely spiritual potentials.

This then is a brief hint of the teachings, tales and songs of the Elder Brother People, the True White Brother of the Hopi Prophecy, that in a social sense seems to come from the East, from the Rising Sun, just in time to help us understand the present great world crisis and conflict through which all must now pass as the Rite of Passage of the Day of Purification.  A New Mystery Wisdom, just for this time, that allows humanity to find once again the truly spiritual without sacrificing the rational.  What a blessing!

As a last, and quite significant note in the melodies of this essay, I'd like to say a bit about the new audience, just mentioned above.

Far above I noted the existence of both a more conscious expression of what we might call the True White Brother impulse*, and a less conscious expression.  What I suggested there was, in fact, a quite wide spectrum of ways and approaches.  Here I want to develop this further, as a kind of reaching out from one of the more conscious participants in these changes to a new spiritual culture, toward those who do it more instinctively or naturally.

*By impulse, I mean to suggest a urge and will within the human ego or I-am (spirit), that reacts to the modern world and tries to find healthy and more spiritual ways of living on the earth and of being a member of the whole of humanity.  This impulse has and is creating much good in the world, and we know it as civil society, the environmental movement and so forth.  In such groups as the Bioneers, we see profound manifestations of this activity.  Also in such activities as the World Social Forum.  As I suggested above, the True White Brother, in his instinctive and natural aspects, is everywhere.

We should keep in mind, however, that as you can read on my bookstore, or in the older (11 years old) version of the essay on the Mystery of the True White Brother, in its concentrated more conscious form, the teachings, tales and songs of the True White Brother conform exactly to that part of the Prophecy which states, in regard to the three great world crises it anticipates:  This third event will depend upon the Red Symbol, which will take command, setting the four forces of nature (Meha) in motion for the benefit of the Sun.

As the meaning, for modern ears, of this central idea of the Prophecy is a very deep matter, I'll leave it to the reader's further interest to pursue those details in other places in my writings.  A short statement concerning this is found on the right column of my bookstore page.