Being Human - Fall 2011

Portland, celebrating life

Anthroposophical Medicine

Anthroposophy & Contemporary Philosophy

Renewing the Foundation Year

The Foundation Stone Meditation

“A community to care for, celebrate and embrace the needs of those in their elder years”

Invites resident coworkers and their children to join our new community in beautiful rural Columbia County – with proximity to Hudson, Albany and the Berkshires.

Full benefits include: Housing, complete family medical package, Waldorf schooling, paid vacation, and the opportunity to be at the forefront of a new paradigm in elder care in this country.

Background in Anthroposophy and Camphill preferred. Please apply by email, along with any supporting documentation you may feel would be of interest.

Contact: Helen Wolff: wolffhelen@hotmail.com Please visit our website at www.camphillghent.org

FALL 2011

ANTHROPOSOPHY NYC

LECTURES, WORKSHOPS, ART EXHIBITS, FESTIVALS, STUDY GROUPS

RUDOLF STEINER BOOKSTORE

Works of Rudolf Steiner and many others Spiritual research, Waldorf education, personal growth, Goethean science, Biodynamic agriculture, holistic therapies, the arts, and more www.asnyc.org

Sept 9, Fri 7pm - Monthly Members Evening: Theme of the Year (also 10/7, 11/4, 12/2)

Sept 10, Sat 7pm - Eugene Schwartz: Auditioning For Antichrist, Pt 1/4: Setting the Stage, 1850-1900 (in 2012: Wilson 3/3, Hitler 4/14, Stalin 5/12)

Sept 14, Wed 7pm - David Anderson: Evolution of Religions in World History, Pt 1/10: Form Drawing (10/12 World Religions, 11/16 Ancient India, 12/14 Ancient Persia)

I believe that miso belongs to the highest class of medicines, those which help prevent disease and strengthen the body through continued usage. . . Some people speak of miso as a condiment, but miso brings out the flavor and nutritional value in all foods and helps the body to digest and assimilate whatever we eat. . .

—Dr. Shinichiro Akizuki, Director, St Francis Hospital, Nagasaki

Sept 17, Sat 1pm - Carole Johnson: Open Saturday: Nutrition & the Spirit, Pt 2 (Open Saturdays also 10/15, 11/19, 12/17)

Sept 26, Mon 7pm - Linda Larson: Eurythmy Workshop (also 10/24, 11/21, 12/12)

Oct 2, Sun 2pm - Michaelmas Festival: Community Pot-Luck Celebration with Music

Oct 16, Sun 1pm - Phoebe Alexander: Seasonal Painting, Fall Trees

Oct 21/22, Fri 7/Sat 10am–4pm - Mary Adams: “Welcome to the Dark Ages”: Star Knowledge in Urban Environment & in Spiritual Practice

Oct 27, Thu 7pm - Fred Dennehy: Georg Kühlewind Memorial Lecture

Nov 9, Wed 7pm - David Lowe: Leonardo, Michelangelo, & Raphael

Dec 9, Fri 7pm - Fred Dennehy & Dorothy Emmerson: A.R. Gurney’s Pulitzer-nominated play “Love Letters”

Dec 26 – Jan 6, 7pm - The Holy Nights

the New York Branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America 138 West 15th Street, NY, NY 10011 (212) 242-8945

From the Editors

Portland, Oregon, is said to be a very livable and forward-looking city. Our annual fall conference and members meeting is there (see page 41) and Leslie Loy, my collaborator on our E-News and a force in the Youth Section, shares her love of the city in words and pictures (page 6). We hope you’ll come, October 13-14 (youth events), 14-15 (conference), and 16th (members meeting). It’s more celebration of Rudolf Steiner’s 150th birthday!

We have two lengthy articles in this issue. Christopher Bamford, editor-in-chief of SteinerBooks, wrote a superb essay for the volume Introduction to Anthroposophic Medicine (see back cover). We’ve had little about health, and this illuminates that subject as well as key aspects of Steiner’s life, and that of his predecessor, Goethe (p. 10).

Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon (“Jesaiah” to his publisher) is a spiritual researcher of the most fundamental questions, including the nature of consciousness, the “knowledge drama” of our time, and the Christ’s return predicted by Rudolf Steiner. Yeshayahu is well able to stay abreast of current philosophy and the life of the mind, as Steiner did in his time, so we’re delighted to share a major lecture given in Alsace in 2007 (p. 19) bringing us up to date!

We “e-interviewed” Brian Gray about Rudolf Steiner College’s evolving Foundations in Anthroposophy which he directs. We share highlights on page 40, and the full text is online at anthroposophy.org (see Articles). — Rudolf Steiner’s “Foundation Stone Meditation” is featured in eurythmy at the Fall Conference; we share a perspicacious introduction and translation by the noted American poet Daisy Aldan (p. 44) to help you prepare for the conference. Or if you can’t be there in person, you might join in from afar by way of these reflections.

John Beck

Both book reviews (pp. 34-39) from the Rudolf Steiner Library in this issue are concerned with history. I review The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes, which tells the story of the development of science—the “second scientific revolution”—in the English Romantic period. Mr. Holmes’s book explores the development of science—often reflexively thought to be antithetical to Romanticism—during this time, and finds science and the Romantic movement to be intertwined in the wonder of discovery and hunger for what is new. According to Owen Barfield, Romanticism “come of age” is anthroposophy.

John Scott Legg, in his incisive review of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, explores a more recent historical development: the effects of digital technology on our brains, our memories, and, especially, our changing notions of what it means to be human. While the narratives of the two books are obviously very different, taken together, they underscore how rapidly the popular conception of our humanity is changing, and call implicitly for a renewed understanding of our essential nature. We may hope that anthroposophy, with its improvisational and living capacity to meet the future, will contribute to that understanding.

The annotations (page 51) introduce a wide range of new books, including: Joseph Beuys: Parallel Processes, a large-format exhibition catalog; Initiative: A Rosicrucian Path of Leadership, by Torin M. Finser; A Modern Quest for the Spirit, by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer; The Guardian of the Threshold and the Philosophy of Freedom , by Sergei O. Prokofieff; and Life as Energy: Opening the Mind to a New Science of Life, by Alexis Mari Pietak.

How to receive being human, how to contribute, and how to advertise

Sample copies of being human are send to friends who contact us (see below). It is sent free to members of the Anthroposophical Society in America (visit anthroposophy.org/membership.html or call 734.662.9355).

To contribute articles or art please email editor@anthroposophy.org or write Editor, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. To advertise contact Cynthia Chelius at 734-662-9355 or email cynthia@anthroposophy.org.

Fred Dennehy

Being human, briefly noted

The Center for Biography and Social Art

Leah Walker has sent us two articles, now posted at anthroposophy.org under “Articles,” about a new “Center for Biography and Social Art” and its first event this spring, “The Magic of the Triptychon.” The center grows out of fourteen years of a program guided by Signe Schaefer and Patricia Rubano at Sunbridge. Leah writes, in part:

“Like many endeavors born of Rudolf Steiner’s teaching, biography work has developed relatively quietly for several decades. Now its role is growing, resonating with the needs of individuals and groups, and its strongly practical nature is coming to life: as a path for self-development and a vehicle for group process and progress; as a tool for healing relationships and building community; as a doorway into the great mysteries. Those of us vested in this spiritualscientific work have found ourselves immersed in a new art, social art, an art that illumines the sacred space between us. Through this work we shed light on our own unique unfolding and develop eyes and ears for the other, which is of real significance. And we come to recognize along the way, sometimes suddenly, that we tread the path of all humankind: in the life story of the individual we meet the universal...

“We know now that the Center for Biography and Social Art has been gestating for years within the hearts of those of us who love this work and we do love this work! We love the human being, the connection between people; we love social richness, conscious speaking and active listening; we love questions. The Center is a gathering of forces and resources, working from the inside out, radiating to communities and people in need. The ‘center’ also finds its existence at the periphery: the center is the individuals doing the work, being the rays themselves: social artists and community participants—all persons who engage actively in self- and social-development. The Center does not yet occupy a physical location, although one day it may. The thing is: social art happens in the world. It is practiced wherever people come together. The center for biography and social art exists where people gather, work, live, converse, struggle, grow—the center is human consciousness.

“To work with biography is to deepen one’s reverence for the life journey. The challenge of self-development is both wrenching and rewarding: can I take on a deep study of my life patterns, find meaning in the inherent intelligence of my biography, and take increasing responsibility for directing my life purposefully? ... Social art implies that a studio exists between people; indeed this will be increasingly the case, if we choose to treat it so. What a remarkable development it is: to understand that the human meeting is an artistic medium. As Goethe wrote, ‘What is more quickening than Light? Conversation!’ Our natural environment is human encounter, the social dynamic, where two or more are gathered. Clearly, the individual and the social environment are interdependent. But it’s not easy. We know all too well the difference between a light-filled conversation and one where light is absent. How do we work it out, this ‘individual life together’?”

To learn more about the Center for Biography and Social Art, please visit: biographysocialart.com , and direct inquiries to Kathleen Bowen at center4biography@gmail.com . And visit anthroposophy.org for the full articles describing the Center’s history, plans, and recent activity.

Elderberries Green Café

Excerpt of a post at the N. American Youth Section Facebook page:

“My name is Dottie Zold. I’ve been working with homeless youth, mostly from the Foster Care system for about 10 years now and mentally challenged adults. I opened a little café called Elderberries Green Café in the heart of Hollywood. It took me a year and a half to open and we opened on September 30th of last year. We are raw and also vegan and make our own cashew milks and almond milks in the morning as well as raw oatmeal and we are soon into sprouting. My coworkers are young people from an after school girls program that go to a school that is considered a last chance spot for the youth who have been kicked out of other places and mostly kids from the system. Our hope is to be a training spot for the kids from local homeless shelters so that they may learn a talent and then be able to apply for jobs that ask for experience. — Elderberries was not built for one. It was built to go across the country in the hopes to create spaces where young graduates of Waldorf and other like-minded youth, could work, further their education if they wished, and also create change in their communities.”

For much more to read of this great post, along with nice video links, scroll down at facebook.com/home. php?sk=group_189473471075203

Note

Portland, Oregon:

Sensing a City’s Celebration of Life

by Leslie Loy

I don’t remember my first airplane ride into Portland—or if I got there by car. I do remember when I first smelled Portland: it was such an immediate sensorial reconnection with some inner part of my self. Portland smells green, it has a lushness to it. The very air invites me to sink my bare feet into the rich, temperate green grasses. I tried for days to describe how that luxuriant grass moved me. I knew it wasn’t about the color or the texture or the perfectly cooled air around it. Something had moved inside of me, catalyzed by the grass, and whatever that was lived freely in Portland. Later I would put it down to a cultural awakening: my European heritage melding with my American roots in a wonderful harmony.

Only snippets remain of that first visit: reading a book on a park bench while friends played Frisbee; munching on a giant bowl of cherries and blueberries; sitting still in the Japanese Garden, watching the trickle of water in its creek; marveling at the individualistic bridges spanning the Willamette River. I recall endless rows of books at Powell’s; like a child’s my hand had to touch every spine, and my nose tickled with the smell of ink on paper. I watched the sunset from a friend’s studio apartment in the Pearl district, cold marble floors beneath my feet and the ceiling-to-floor window searing the palms of my hands, as the sound of jazz floated up from a club down the street. I remember thinking, Portland is magical.

When I realized that I wanted to call Portland my adult home, it began to live inside me. I never thought a city could do that. In Portland each block seemed different from the one before it—elegant and crisp or hip and expressionistic or simple and solid. Portland articulated itself so freely, it did its own thing so openly. Unabashedly it showed its jewels and its wounds and I appreciated that honesty. I never thought a city could do that, either.

I arrived to stay in early August 2006 with my car packed with boxes, books, and pictures—and my mother and sister in tow. The air was surprisingly humid and thick. Fans were running, and the entire world had slowed down. The neighborhood I moved into had rolling hills for streets, lined with giant trees that cooled the sizzling sidewalks. Children ran outside, their skins turning shades of brown and red, playing softball, soccer, blowing bubbles, selling homemade cards and lemonade; it was idyllic.

I wandered at first in a haze of marvel. A moment stands out in my first week, when I went to a yarn store on Hawthorne and discovered that this dainty little shop had gorgeous spools of wool and cotton to sell, and coffee and beer. I think I literally clapped for joy: What kind of a city sells beer at its craft shops? And so the love began.

Mind you, I am not a big fan of beer. No, I loved the fact that here people were clearly not afraid to be themselves. They could admit both to being crafty and to enjoying a good brew and could take pleasure in such a combination. That spoke to a part of myself that begged to be expressed and to be safe in its expression. That moment was a seed—of knowledge and of self.

Portland is a smart city, both in intellectual

competence and in general visioning capacities: before moving there, I learned that it was in the process of putting solar panels on low-income housing. Portland is filled with trees, ZipCars, buses, streetcars, train tracks, and bike lanes. It has long been a vibrant hub for the counter-culture which had been pushing the city since the 1970s to embrace the alternative and to thrive on it. Its indie music scene is as infamous as its roller derby; both thrive beside zine publishing and social activism.

I found myself bike-riding along river trails, visiting local farmers markets, taking the because it was easier, and delighting in the unexpected and the real. Sitting one night on the curb outside Ken’s Artisan Pizza off Pine in Southeast Portland, a glass of cool lemonade in my hand, I was admiring houses, clapboards with bright colors and wild gardens, when suddenly a man dressed in tuxedo and top hat rode by on a six-foot high bike. I chuckled and then laughed out loud at a woman riding behind the man dressed in miniskirt and fedora on a kid’s training bike.. So funny—and so real.

Or the birthday when I was riding in the elevator to the Portland City Grill, (spectacular cuisine, high atop one Portland’s tallest buildings). A tag on my lapel read, “Kiss Me, It’s My Birthday.” My friends had dressed me in a bright boa with bunny ears and I was grinning, no

Photos by Jennifer Bricker & Leslie Loy

doubt, from ear to ear, when the elderly gentlemen across from me, who was dressed to the T, suddenly leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Startled, I demanded to know what he was doing, but he chortled and replied, “It’s your birthday!”

Portland is filled with unexpected surprises—even in elevators. Likewise, Portland But, more than that, the legends are not just histories, but are living stories or people who are part of the fundamental fabric of the city. Yes, Portland is relatively new to the scene, but it has its legends. (People love the stories of captains who, to kidnap sailors, would get them drunk in bars, and then throw them into the city’s underground “Shanghai” tunnels.) Historically, the city’s birth on a quiet resting spot along the banks of the Willamette came about because of three men, one coin and a common vision.

In the early 1840s, one William Overton decided to build a commercially-viable city at the junction of the Columbia and Wil-

lamette rivers. The natural resources of the area were astounding—fish, fur, wood, and rich green land—and he saw infinite potential. But Overton was flat broke, and so had to convince a Boston-based friend, Asa Lovejoy, to help him buy the land—all 640 acres of it. In the end, Overton’s contribution was a mere25 cents. Later, he sold his portion to a man named Francis Pennygrove in Portland, Maine. Pennygrove and Lovejoy couldn’t agree on what to name the city, so it was decided by a coin toss. Pennygrove won and he baptized the harbor town Portland after his hometown. It’s a good story, and it also sets a tone for the biography of Portland.

Portland appreciates life. As a result, life is everywhere. Early mornings from mid-March until late Fall, the rivers are dotted with crews of rowers dipping oars into the shimmering water, while joggers, bikers, and dogs run on the shore banks. One of my favorite sights as I traveled to work in downtown Portland was these mornings along the rivers.

In the middle of a busy workday, Portlanders downtown meander to Pioneer Square. They hustle like all city-dwellers, but they also lounge a lot, enjoying the scenery. The Square offers music, laughter, the occasional bum, dogs running back and forth, even sometimes a llama or two.

I recall sitting back on the white Adirondack chairs scattered on the red brick of the Square, watching hip-hop and break dancers, while groups of teen-

agers offered free hugs to any willing passerby. Tourists munched on Voodoo donuts or steaming piles of Pad Thai. Businesswomen slid off their heels and took a few minutes to sunbathe on the steps. Often, I would peer into booths at multicultural fairs or feel the vibrations of a radio festival. The best time in the Square, however, is when the entire block becomes a garden with hundreds or thousands of potted flowers and bushes transforming its brick floor into a blossoming heaven.

Portland’s setting is magical. A little over an hour in any direction lands you in different kind of nature: desert, mountains, beach, the river. The people are notoriously progressive and hardcore: snow, rain, wind, sunshine, hail, even sleet cannot keep them from their business. Bicyclists race the roads at any hour, in any kind of weather, in all kinds of attire: quintessential Portland.

A couple of years ago, Business Week released a survey that claimed that Portland was the Unhappiest City in the country. People were furious ! I couldn’t understand that conclusion either. I saw abundant creativity, joy, ingenuity. I saw caring, compassion, celebration.

American author M.F.K. Fisher once wrote: “Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.” Portlanders live life through food—it is how friends come together, how heartbreak is healed, how benchmarks are celebrated. People meet over Stumptown coffee, mouthwatering cakes, almond croissants, frog legs and alligator jambalaya, vegan donuts, mason jars of sweet tea, or chilled glasses of frothing beer. They love farmers markets with their sumptuous cheeses, flowers, fruit, breads and exotic spreads—all local, all fresh, all gorgeous. Restaurants harmonize simplicity with affordability to tantalize the palette. There is, for example, the Whole Bowl, which has mastered the art of one simple dish–there’s nothing else on the menu–brown rice with red and black beans, decked with fresh avocado and “trace amounts of attitude.”

Food, art, and the outdoors are all creative outlets inspired by the scenery. This is what drew me to Portland. I wanted to live in a place

where adults had imagination and weren’t afraid to express it: I wanted to be surrounded by people who celebrated life through all of their senses—and expressed it as smart, sassy, creative, wild, appreciative, present. There’s something clearly alive in Portland, and it continues to evolve and sustain us. The stories engage, the sights inspire, and the people are open.

Portland offers the best of city life without much less grime and traffic. Its diversity (impoverished and superbly wealthy communities, mom-and-pops and the box stores, the quirky and the banal) feels to me like a celebration of life. Nature is honored, spirituality is respected. It is not only a city where sky and skyscraper meet, it is the city of my dreams, where river and rower move together and where the future is beckoning with light and great anticipation.

In

Portland?

here are some great locales to enjoy:

Food Papa haydn’s the Carts

Fong wong’s dim sum the delta lounge

Mother’s Bistro

voodoo donuts

Sights Powell’s Books Japanese Garden rose Garden the Grotto hawthorne avenue

saturday Market

Explore the willamette trail sauvie island

willamette Falls riverfront

Introduction to Anthroposophical Medicine

by Christopher Bamford

After the First World War, and indeed presciently, as it was already drawing to a close, in response to the widespread social-political chaos and the sense of profound psycho-spiritual and cultural rupture—civilization ending—Rudolf Steiner felt impelled to become outwardly and socially engaged in a new way. There were powerful practical reasons to do so. The collapse of the old social order made it seem possible to reorganize social, economic, and cultural life according to human reality and spiritual principles. There were compelling esoteric reasons, too. Above all, the moment was right. Cosmic and spiritual circumstances made it possible (even necessary) to infuse initiatory and mystery wisdom into the germination process of the coming civilization. The future evolution of humanity in some sense depended on it.

Thus, from 1918 onward, new initiatives flowed out of anthroposophy into the world: first, the Movement for Social Renewal or “The Threefolding of the Social Organism” (1918), followed a year later by the founding of the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart (1919). Then, in 1920 businesses were founded and, most importantly, a major effort was made to refound the various disciplines of learning, the arts and humanities as well as the sciences, out of anthroposophical insight and research. At the head of Rudolf Steiner’s list of sciences (and professions) potentially receptive to such insight and research stood medicine. This was a field of longstanding and passionate interest, with which he had always hoped to work.

At the beginning of the year, on January 6, as the second of three public lectures in Basel, Switzerland, on the topic “Spiritual Science and the Tasks of the Present,” Steiner gave a talk titled “The Spiritual-Scientific Foundations of Physical and Psychological Health.”

He stressed that while practitioners of modern science strive to exclude the human being from their picture of the world, to remove themselves from it and be as value-free and objective as possible in their concepts, anthroposophical spiritual science always strives to be holistic, moving from the wholeness of the healthy human

being to the wholeness of the cosmos into which it is integrated and out of which it is organized. The field of spiritual science thus encompasses our whole being and is able to investigate the complex and continually metamorphosing relationships and connections between our soul-spiritual and physical aspects. He then turned to medicine, which most clearly demonstrates the “disadvantages” of the natural scientific approach for “it is the most striking example of what happens when science eliminates the human being from its methods.”

Mere intellectual knowledge of the laws of aesthetics does not make you an artist. By the same token, simply knowing the current natural laws does not make a person a healer. Physicians must be able to live in the activities, the ebb and flow of nature, with their whole being. They have to be able to immerse themselves completely in creative, weaving nature. Only then will they be able to follow with sincere, heartfelt interest the natural processes accompanying illness. At the same time, studying healthy people will help physicians to understand them when they are ill.

After alluding to some spiritual-scientific insights— such as the threefold thinking, feeling, and willing human being mirrored in the sensory-nervous, respiratoryrhythmic-circulatory, and metabolic systems—Steiner then concludes:

Precisely when it comes to such an area as truly intuitive medicine, it would be the spiritual scientist’s ideal to be able to speak before those who are specialists in the field. If they could find their way in and allow their expertise to speak without preconceptions, they would see how much spiritual science could enrich their specialty. Spiritual science, which is no unprofessional dilettantism, does not fear criticism from experts. It seeks to create deeper scientific sources than those of today’s conventional science and it knows that amateurism, not

Christopher Bamford

expertise, is what it might have to fear—had it not long since overcome fear for reasons that are easily understood. Spiritual science has nothing to fear from expertise or lack of preconceptions. It knows that the more expertise is brought to bear on its findings, the more positively they will be accepted. In considering what might be a perspective for an intuitive medicine, we might remember an old saying ... [which] in a narrower sense is certainly applicable to the art of treating the sick human being. Wise folk of old said, “Like is known only by like.” To heal human beings one must first know them. The part of the human being with which science today concerns itself is not the whole human being. When the whole human being is called to know the human being, then will like (a human being) be known by like (another human being). Only then will a human knowledge of the human being and a healing art arise that will, on the one hand, keep the human being as healthy as is possible in his or her social life and, on the other, treat illness in a way that is possible only if all the actual healing factors are considered together.

Clearly Steiner was issuing a challenge, or at least a call; but it was not one that was taken up by any of the physicians present. In fact, only a chemical engineer, Oskar Schmiedel, heard it. Acting on what he heard, Oskar Schmiedel organized the first course in anthroposophical medicine. As he himself noted, this fact made anthroposophical medicine very different from all other anthroposophical initiatives (like eurythmy, Waldorf education, The Christian Community, and biodynamic agriculture), which without exception were undertaken by Rudolf Steiner in response to specific requests. Schmiedel wrote:

The first doctor’s course was not given at the request of doctors or medical students, or in fact on the basis of any request at all. The reason why Dr. Steiner departed from custom probably has to do with the fact that he thought it important and timely to speak about medical questions without waiting for doctors to approach him with the request for such a course. Furthermore, this first doctors’ course proved how much he could offer the doctors. Everyone attending the course felt something like the opening of the floodgates. The future was to show how important it was that the course was held at just this time. Preconditions were thus achieved that made it possible to start Dr. Wegman’s Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, as well as the one in Stuttgart. My own role was simply to create the outer conditions that en-

abled Rudolf Steiner to give the lectures he wanted to give. (Italics added)

Given the dire economic conditions in Germany, Schmiedel spent the months preceding the course organizing lectures and collecting money to make it possible for German physicians to come to Dornach. He also organized the course itself, which unfolded under beautiful spring weather. More than thirty doctors and medical students attended. Steiner was very strict about admission: he would allow only professionals. Otherwise, he said, he would have to give entirely different lectures. Natural healers, midwives, nurses, and even a Russian medical officer were banned. Only three exceptions were made (Marie Steiner, Walter Johannes Stein, and Roman Boos), and Steiner was apologetic about them! The course itself was a great success. Planned to comprise two weeks, at the request of the participants it was extended to three. Steiner lectured in the morning, and either he or someone else gave the evening lecture. At the same time as the medical course, another course, “Anthroposophy and the Various Branches of Science,” was taking place. During this same period, a theology student from Basel, Gertrud Spörri, came to ask Steiner whether it would be possible to create an anthroposophically oriented movement of renewal within the church. Steiner replied that he would speak to young people on that topic quite differently than he spoke to the doctors, as in fact he did when a year later he gave the first theology course for priests. All of which is to say that things were moving very fast at this time.

The medical course, however, stands apart. The organization of the course was interactive and to some extent spontaneous. Steiner had a general program of what he wanted to accomplish, but within it he left himself open to improvisation based on the needs and questions of his audience. Before beginning, he asked those assembled to jot down specific wishes and submit them. He then undertook to integrate his responses with their requests as the lectures unfolded. Consequently, these lectures have the aliveness and excitement of a dialogue: the sense of dealing with living concerns, not theory. Another important consequence is that the course achieves a fullness, even as Steiner himself says, a “sort of completeness,” unusual in such an “introductory” presentation. So much is covered: the meaning of sickness; the history of medicine; polarities in the human organism, in the cosmos, and in nature; the heart; the three systems (nervous, rhythmic,

Those attending the course felt something like the opening of the floodgates.

and metabolic); nature outside and nature within the human organism; soul, spirit, and body; diagnosis and the whole person; mineral, mercurial, and phosphoric processes; the therapeutic use of metals; the senses; homeopathy—the list is wellnigh endless.

As Schmiedel noted: Everyone attending the course felt something like the opening of the floodgates. Readers of this book, Introduction to Anthroposophical Medicine, will confirm for themselves how right he was. It is as if Rudolf Steiner had been waiting for the opportunity to engage these subjects: to talk to doctors, to address their concerns our of spiritual science, but in the language of medicine and healing. Rarely has he seemed so at home in his subject, so familiar with it, so passionate about it. Rarely, too, has he seemed to have so much enjoyment in giving a lecture course, feeling so much pleasure at being able to layout a series of overlapping perspectives in the certainty of being understood. It is as if, here, he felt himself to be among those with whom he was completely at ease.

Though not a physician by training, as he stressed in his lectures, Rudolf Steiner’s medical interests were clearly longstanding, deep, sophisticated, diverse, and far-reaching. A scientific education at the Technische Hochschüle in Vienna (the M.I.T. of its time), coupled with a lifelong passion for learning (reading all the latest books meant that his knowledge of many fields— including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, zoology, botany, and geology—was always detailed, professional, and up-to-date. Justifiably, therefore, he has been called a “Renaissance man.” There are few disciplines of which he was not master from his own, special point of view. But medicine—healing—holds a special place in his biography and mission. Examining it will provide a background to the founding lectures of anthroposophical medicine collected here.

It must be said that the combination of the range and depth of Steiner’s knowledge often seems hard to believe. Certainly, in many ways it was unique. To begin to understand it, we must imagine a person who, from a very early age, was single-mindedly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the human condition, and used every available opportunity to deepen, test, and enrich his worldview. However, we must not imag-

ine a person interested only in abstract or theoretical knowledge, or knowledge for its own sake. Rudolf Steiner’s search for knowledge was always practical and existential. He sought to know because he wanted to act consciously and freely out of the truth of what it meant to be a human being. He did so in order to make human life truly and profoundly conformed to reality in all its details. In other words, he was a “detail” person for whom—as it was for Goethe before him—the phenomenon, that is, the given fact, must in the last analysis be the theory. For him, theory must be immanent in experience, not something super-added to it. At school, his interests were threefold and interrelated. He loved geometry and mathematics, and was always deeply interested in what he could discover in the sciences, especially physics, chemistry, and astronomy. What united this diversity (and led to what we might call a “sub-interest” in world history and the evolution of consciousness) was a passion for thinking itself, for posing questions whose answers he would try to discover for himself through a disciplined process of meditation and study. Thinking for him was not a limited, skull-bound, private activity, but the essential human experience by which a person could begin to participate in those cosmic processes whose traces the various sciences try to parse and formalize. Thus, in parallel with his school courses, from adolescence on, he began to read what he could of philosophy, above all the German Idealist tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, whose influences could be felt everywhere in his environment. Thus, he struggled with the great questions, such as: Are there limits to knowledge? What are space and time? What is matter? What is life? What is light?

Three signal, life-altering extracurricular events, really the three major influences in his life—which would not only prepare him for his later role as spiritual teacher and anthroposophist, but also orient him, at least implicitly, toward medicine and healing—occurred shortly after Steiner entered the Hochschüle.

Officially, during his first year he was registered for classes in mathematics, natural history, and chemistry, Unofficially, he also attended other lectures and read deeply and widely in the library. Continuing his interest in philosophy, he attended lectures by the now-forgotten Robert Zimmermann and the still-celebrated Franz

To understand the range and depth of Steiner’s knowledge, we must imagine a person dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the human condition...

Brentano (who was Husserl’s teacher, taught the only philosophy course Freud ever took, and inspired Martin Heidegger to investigate Aristotle’s theory of being.) Most significant, however, was a course offered by the literary scholar Karl Julius Schröer on Goethe and Schiller and, what we might call, the consequences of Romanticism in German thought. Steiner and Schröer became very close. Steiner read Goethe’s works (Faust 1 and 2) for the first time and passed many memorable evenings talking about Goethe with Schröer. As Steiner writes: “Whenever I was alone with Schröer, I always felt a third was present—the spirit of Goethe.”

Schröer, however, knew little about Goethe’s science. At first, Steiner likewise had little interest in it. He was more interested, as he says, “in trying to understand optics as explained by physicists.” Trying to do so, however, was sheer agony for him. Physicists understood light as vibration and colors as specific vibrations, but Steiner intuitively understood light as an extrasensory reality experienced within the sensory world that revealed itself as color. Such thoughts prepared him for the task that would come to him through Schröer when, in 1882, on his teacher’s recommendation, Steiner was asked to edit Goethe’s scientific writings for a collected edition, adding his own introductions and explanatory notes.

Encountering Goethe’s work (in honor of whom he would name the new mystery center of anthroposophy the “Goetheanum”) and spending more than fifteen years studying it intensely was certainly life-confirming and life-altering in many ways. Above all, we may say that it introduced Steiner to the alchemical Hermetic tradition, itself the growing tip or germ of that sacred science of the ancient Mysteries that Steiner would bring to modern consciousness and contemporary fruition in anthroposophy. For Goethe, the great opponent of Cartesian-Newtonian mechanicomaterialism, did not come to his scientific views unaided. He was, as R. D. Gray showed in his Goethe the Alchemist “profoundly influenced throughout his life by the religious and philosophical beliefs he derived from his early study of alchemy.” Goethe’s science in essence was alchemical and Hermetic.

Goethe was not alone in his interests, though he alone by his genius made a science out of them. In his era, the study of alchemy was still widespread; many people had

alchemical laboratories. Alchemical language and philosophy, deriving from Jacob Boehme and Gottfried Arnold, had become part of the then-dominant spiritual revival called Pietism. Indeed, it was a Pietist friend of Goethe’s mother’s, Katerina von Klettenburg, who introduced him to alchemy during a severe illness at nineteen when he had a tumor in his neck, which could have been fatal.

As Goethe describes her, Katerina was an extraordinary woman: “a beautiful soul,” that is to say, serene, graceful, patient, accepting of life’s vicissitudes, intelligent, intuitive, imaginative, and above all a moral and religious genius. In their meeting, one genius discovered another. “She found in me,” Goethe writes, “what she needed, a lively young creature, striving after an unknown happiness, who, although he could not think himself an extraordinary sinner, yet found himself in no comfortable condition, and was perfectly healthy neither in body nor in soul.”

Katerina provided medical assistance in both body and soul. She found him a doctor, Dr. Metz, who prescribed, in addition the conventional remedies of the time, some “mysterious medicines prepared by himself of which no one could speak, since physicians were strictly prohibited from making up their own prescriptions.” These medicines included “certain powders” as well as a “powerful salt”—”a universal medicine.” To encourage their efficaciousness, Dr. Metz further recommended “certain chemical-alchemical books to his patients ... to excite and strengthen their faith,” and to encourage them to attain the practice of making the medicines for themselves.

Thus, as Goethe convalesced he and Fraulein von Klettenburg began an intensive study of certain texts: above all, Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, Eirenaeus Philalethes (George Starkey), Georg von Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum, van Helmont, and the Aurea Catena Homeri (The Golden Chain of Homer). At the same time, Goethe began laboratory work.

Goethe’s alchemical work continued intensely for the next few years. He continued to study alchemical and Rosicrucian authors. Two years later, he still claimed “chemistry” was his “secret love.” As he wrote to his mentor E.T. Langer: “I am trying surreptitiously to acquire some small literary knowledge of the great books, which the learned mob half marvels at, half ridi-

Steiner intuitively understood light as an extrasensory reality experienced within the sensory world...

cules, because it does not understand them, but whose secrets the wise man of sensitive feeling delights to fathom. Dear Langer, it is truly a great joy when one is young and has perceived the insufficiency of the greater part of learning, to come across such treasures. Oh, it is a long chain indeed from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.... “ For a time, his alchemical studies occupied Goethe completely. In fact, until he met the cultural genius Herder and turned to more “acceptable” studies, they dominated him almost obsessively. As he writes, “My mystical-religious chemical pursuits led me into shadowy regions, and I was ignorant for the most part of what had been going on in the literary world at large for some years past.”

Here a brief aside on the four-stage history of medicine—Greek, Monastic, Paracelsian, and Romantic—may be useful. The point is threefold. First, it was these studies that determined Goethe’s worldview and especially his science, which is alchemy translated. Second, these “mystical-religious chemical pursuits” that provided the ground for an anti-materialist, living approach to nature and natural processes differed fundamentally from ordinary, “value-free,” quasiobjective science in that their raison d’être was clearly to heal: to serve humanity. Many alchemical texts, in fact, were explicitly “medical” in orientation. Unfolding an alternative science, they also provided a theoretical and practical model for an approach to medicine. Third, in order for Steiner to understand Goethe and “translate” his worldview and epistemology for the last third of the nineteenth century Steiner would necessarily have had to study the Paracelsian and other alchemical-medical works that Goethe studied. Therefore Rudolf Steiner’s encounter with alchemical medicine—represented by Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, and the Rosicrucians—began very early and was very deep, fired by the ambition and the intensity that his work with Goethe required.

Ancient Greek medicine, transmitted by Hippocrates, Aristotelianized, cast in stone by Galen (much in the same way as Euclid petrified Pythagoreanism), and passing through Islam (and Avicenna), reached the Middle Ages, where it in turn soon ossified. In parallel, through the triple confluence of traditional Western herbal knowledge, the transmission of alchemy from Islam, and esoteric Christianity, what we might call “mo -

nastic medicine” arose. The medical texts of Hildegard of Bingen and Albertus Magnus, for example, give some idea of what this meant. The Renaissance then witnessed the overthrow of the ruling medical paradigm, which, despite monastic medicine and the growing presence of alchemical approaches, was still based on Aristotle, Galen, and Avicenna.

The revolution came through the turn to experience. Through anatomy and dissection certainly, but most significantly the Paracelsian synthesis that combined the fruits of monastic and folk culture with the newly available Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and gnostic insights, and the flowering of Christianized alchemy in a new, nature-based, experiential, existential spiritual science. Paracelsus’s influence was tremendous and continued through the end of eighteenth century, when Hahnemann reformulated certain aspects of it as homeopathy. Hahnemann was, however, only one of those attempting to create what we might call “Romantic” medicine, a living medicine, a medicine of life, that would be the practical enactment of a true philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie). At the heart of the Romantic moment—say 1770 to 1830—was an attempt to put medicine as the science of life at the heart of a general reformation such as the Rosicrucians had first announced. Such was the tip of the iceberg that Goethe’s work presented Steiner.

In addition to his life-altering encounter with the works of Goethe, two other—yet strangely related—lifealtering encounters helped form Rudolf Steiner’s basic orientation. First, there was a meeting with a nature-initiate, a factory worker and herb gatherer, Felix Kogutski, “a simple man of the people.”

Once a week he was on the train that I rook to Vienna. He gathered medicinal plants in the country and sold them to pharmacies in Vienna. We became friends and it was possible to speak of the spiritual world with him as with someone of experience. He was deeply pious and uneducated in the usual sense of the word ... With him, one could look deeply into the secrets of nature. He carried on his back a bundle of healing herbs; in his heart, however, he carried the results of what he had gained from nature’s spirit while gathering them .... Gradually, it seemed as though I were in the company of a soul from ancient times .... One could learn nothing from this man in the usual sense of the world. But through him, and with

At the heart of the Romantic moment was an attempt to put medicine as the science of life at the heart of a general reformation such as the Rosicrucians had first announced.

one’s own powers of perception of the spiritual world, one could gain significant glimpses into that world where this man had a firm footing.

The meeting with Felix Kogutski, important as it was, was only preparatory to an even more significant encounter with the figure Steiner refers to only obliquely— in his autobiographical notes for Edouard Schuré—as the M. (or the Master). As Steiner puts it “... Then came my acquaintance with the agent of the M. ... I did not meet the M. immediately, but first an emissary who was completely initiated into the secrets of plants and their effects, and into their interconnection with the cosmos and human nature....”

While the Master’s identity must remain to some extent conjecture, it is nevertheless dear from Steiner’s own indications that the teacher in question was Christian Rosenkreutz, the founder and guiding spirit of the Rosicrucians. However redolent of charlatanism the word “Rosicrucianism” may sound today, given how many different groups and persons have often evoked it for less than reputable purposes, in this instance it must be taken seriously.

Rosicrucianism first burst—there is no other word for it—onto the scene of history in the early seventeenth century with three surprisingly widely distributed texts, originating in Lutheran circles in Tübingen, Germany, and published sequentially in Kassel in 1614, 1615, and 1616. The first two texts—the Announcement of the Order (Fama Fraternitatis) and the Confession of the Order (Confessio Fraternitatis)—told the story of Christian Rosenkreutz (1378-1484) who, some two hundred years previously, had traveled the world in search of spiritual, scientific, and universal wisdom before returning home to Germany, where he gathered students around him and formed an order. The time was, however, not yet propitious for public work and so he decreed that, following his death, his mission and teaching were to remain hidden for one hundred and twenty years—that is, until 1604, the legendary date given for the opening of his tomb. The third text, The Chemical Wedding, an alchemical allegory of spiritual development, was obviously different in tone, but served the same purpose: to proclaim a “general reformation” of science, art, and religion, a revolutionary program of cultural transformation based on raising into modern

consciousness and thoroughly “enchristing” the entire harvest of ancient and traditional mystery wisdom. The manifestos called for all like-minded people to join the movement. A furore —literally, frenzy—resulted. Paracelsian physicians, philosophers, alchemists, artists, and scientists from all over Europe began writing tracts and treatises to qualify them to join the movement. But no one knew who the Rosicrucians were, or where to find them! Chaos ensued. Reactionary and repressive forces from the church and materialist science arose to quell the revolt—unsuccessfully at first, but within a few years, what they were unable to do, the Thirty Years War (1620-1650) accomplished very efficiently, and the Rosicrucians disappeared from the exoteric world.

Rosicrucianism as a historical and cultural impulse is important for Steiner’s approach to medicine above all in three ways. First, we may note the “rules” of the original brotherhood: First, to profess no other thing than to heal the sick, and that gratis. — In other words, the primary orientation of the Rosicrucian is toward healing as an act of service. We may call this the rule of love or compassion, which, as Paracelsus wrote, is “the true physician’s teacher.” As service, it also implies an orientation toward the world— toward other beings, for we can love only other living beings—as well as the dedication to work selflessly and compassionately for world evolution. The Rosicrucian thus works for the sake of the world and from this point of view sees no difference between the healing of soul and body and the healing of the world. This dedication to heal affirms the primacy of action. If one is a true Rosicrucian, one walks, as Rudolf Steiner walked, “the true thorn-strewn way of the Cross,” renouncing all egotism for the sake of the healing of the world.

Second, to wear no kind of special habit, but to follow always the custom of the country in their dress. — At its simplest, this second injunction has been taken to mean that Rosicrucians were called to live anonymously, unpretentiously, plying some ordinary trade. But at another, higher level, since chief among the customs of a country is its language, the rule invokes the “gift of tongues,” possession of which enables one to address people in their own language, that is, in the way and at the level appropriate to their understanding. This implies, too, that a Rosicru-

The Rosicrucian works for the sake of the world and sees no difference between healing of soul and body and healing of the world.

cian is attached to no form or dogmatic belief and is able to translate wisdom into any form as circumstances may require. Rudolf Steiner’s adherence to this second “rule” is manifest in his task and vocation—in fact, his “commission,” for his encounter with the M. directly led to it—of adapting or translating (that is, restating on the basis of his own experience) Rosicrucian-alchemical wisdom into a form appropriate to modern scientific consciousness.

Third, to meet together at the house Sancti Spiritus every year at Christmas. — This rule affirms the primacy of communion in the spirit and of the unity of humanity through participation in the spirit.

Fourth, to seek a worthy person to succeed them after they die. — That is, to teach, to create a lineage of friends.

Fifth, to make R. C. “their seal, mark, and character.” — In other words, to have the Rose Cross, the union of love and knowledge, inscribed in their hearts, which is to say that to conjoin the Rose and the Cross, love and knowledge, in nature and human nature as one, to heal and unite nature and human nature in its center or heart, is the goal of the Rosicrucian work. (To complete the “rules,” the sixth and final rule specified that these rules were to “remain secret for one hundred years” [more precisely, 120 years] after Christian Rosenkreutz’s death.

The second way in which Steiner’s Rosicrucian calling significantly determined his approach to medicine was the central role accorded Paracelsus in Rosicrucian lore. The Fama mentions him as a forerunner who, “though he did not enter our Fraternity,” read carefully in the Book of Nature with great effect, failing however to bring about the revolution he desired because of his irascible temperament. Nevertheless, not surprisingly, his books were held in such high esteem that he is the only author mentioned by name as having his works stored for continual study in Christian Rosenkreutz’s tomb. This Paracelsian emphasis carried two further associations, namely: the primacy of medicine (in the original documents paired with theology)

and the importance of alchemy and its “universal medicine,” despite the cheaters and quacks who confuse it with the search for material gold.

All these elements (Rosicrucian, Paracelsian, and alchemical), which are really one universal approach, contributed significantly to Rudolf Steiner’s understanding of the ethics, philosophy, and practice of medicine and the art of healing, which may therefore be called “Rosicrucian-Paracelsian-alchemical.” More generally, since this tradition is, in fact, heir to the entire Western mystery tradition, whose source, finally, as Steiner will repeatedly stress, is the ancient mysteries themselves, we may call what Rudolf Steiner brought into the world as anthroposophical medicine “traditional Western medicine” in the same sense that we speak of traditional Tibetan or Chinese medicine—but spoken anew out of contemporary experience and consciousness.

From the beginning of his professional career as a Goetheanist, philosopher, and man of letters, this tradition was thus Steiner’s constant, if hidden, companion and study. It accompanied him as he wrote his books on, and introductions to Goethe, and as he hammered out an epistemology or theory of knowing appropriate to contemporary consciousness, one that could legitimize what we might call a “Paracelsian” approach to nature. It was not his task—nor was he yet ready—during this first period of his life to bring it into the open. For that, he had to wait until he had reached the necessary maturity (forty years of age) to stand forth as a spiritual teacher. Then, in 1900, as if foreordained, the opportunity arose when he was asked to give a course of lectures in the Theosophical Library in Berlin. “By means of the ideas of the mystics from Meister Eckhart to Jacob Boehme,” he wrote later, “I found expression for the spiritual perceptions that in reality I decided to set forth. I then summarized the series in the book Mystics after Modernism.” It was an important moment. As Paul Allen, in his introduction, puts it, “This book is significant in the life-work of Rudolf Steiner because it is a first result of his decision to speak out in a direction not immediately apparent in his earlier, philosophical writings.”

For our purposes, the key chapter, which comes after three more or less epistemological chapters, is chapter 4: ‘’Agrippa von Nettesheim and Theophrastus Paracelsus.” Here Steiner shows that what the “mystics” Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Jan Ruysbroek, and Nicholas of Cusa worked out as a way of thinking or path of consciousness, Agrippa first more tentatively and

We may call what Rudolf Steiner brought into the world “traditional Western medicine” in the same sense that we speak of traditional Tibetan or Chinese medicine— but spoken anew out of contemporary experience and consciousness.

then Paracelsus more fully and thoroughly put into action as a “natural science” to the extent possible within the limits of their times: a new way of knowing and working with nature.

Steiner shows how Paracelsus, taking a stand on himself, on experience, seeks to ascend through his own cognitive powers to the highest regions. He does not want to accept any authorities, but to read directly in the Book of Nature for himself. But this does not come without a struggle, for he is faced by the mystery of human experience that feels itself the apex of, and woven into, universal nature, and yet is hindered from realizing the relation because one experiences oneself as a single individual, separate from the whole. Paracelsus understands that in the human being what is a reality within the whole feels itself a single, solitary being. Thus he knows he experiences himself at first as something other than he is. In other words: we are the world, but we experience our relation with the world as a duality. We are the same as the world, but as a repetition of it, as a separate being. Such for Paracelsus is the paradoxical relationship of microcosm and macrocosm.

Steiner goes on to explain that Paracelsus calls what causes us to see the world in this way our “spirit.” This seems singular, individual: a repetition bound to a single organism. While the organism is part of the great chain of the universe, its spirit seems connected only to itself. The struggle is to overcome this illusion.

In reality our nature falls into three parts: our sensory-bodily nature as an organism; our hidden nature, which is a link in the chain of the whole world and is not enclosed within the organism, but lives in relation with the whole universe; and our highest nature, which lives spiritually. The first he calls the “elemental body”; the second, the “astral body”; and the third, the soul. Usually, we are locked within the elemental body and world with which our “individual” spirit is associated. But once this spirit is quieted or no longer active, “astral” phenomena and cognition become possible.

On the basis of his threefold division, Paracelsus, as Steiner describes it, then goes on to articulate a more detailed sevenfold division. There is first the elemental, or purely physical-corporeal body; within which there are the organic life processes that Paracelsus calls the “archaeus” or the “spirit of life.” The archaeus makes possible the “astral” spirit, from which the animal spirit emerges. This in turn makes possible the awakening of the “rational soul” within which, through meditation and reflection, the

“spiritual soul” able to cognize spirit as spirit, can awaken. Through immersion in the spiritual soul, a human being can experience “the deepest stratum of universal existence,” and ceases to experience itself as separate. We may call the final level the “universal spirit,” which knows itself in us. As Paracelsus says: “This ... is something great: there is nothing in Heaven and on Earth that is not in a human being. God, who is in Heaven, is in a human being.”

Turning to Paracelsus’s alchemical understanding of evolution, Steiner shows that his vision is monistic and developmental. The universe is in a state of becoming in, with, and through humanity, just as humanity becomes in, with, and through the universe—a relationship that unfolds and is perfected through human creativity, which is called to complete what nature begins. “For nature brings forth nothing into the light of day which is complete as it stands; rather, humanity must complete it.” Completing by art and science what nature begins is what Paracelsus calls alchemy, which is the “third column of medicine” (the first two are philosophy and astronomy; the fourth is virtue.): “This method of perfection is called alchemy. Thus the alchemist is a baker, when he bakes bread; a vintner, when he makes wine; a weaver, when he makes doth ...

[Therefore] the third pillar of medicine is alchemy, for the preparation of remedies cannot take place without it because nature cannot be put to use without art.” Yet nature is always primary. Paracelsus learns endlessly from nature and from his own experience. Certainly he takes his understanding of the four elements (fire, air, water, and earth) and the principles of sulphur and mercury from traditional alchemical cosmology. But from his experience, he creates the new triad of sulphur, mercury, and salt—combustibility, vaporability (solubility), and fixability, the residue—so that each object and each condition thus has its own sulphur, mercury, and salt.

In this short account, Steiner merely introduces Paracelsus as an important precursor of the anthroposophical

The universe is in a state of becoming in, with, and through humanity, just as humanity becomes in, with, and through the universe—a relationship that unfolds and is perfected through human creativity, which is called to complete what nature begins.

(Theosophical) approach to nature, but he does not mention the two central ideals that inspired Paracelsus’s life and work: the primacy of healing as the service to which we are called and the cosmic and earthly-human importance of Christ for this work. The time was perhaps not yet appropriate to do so. Yet these same two ideals, clearly and with a like primacy, inspired and motivated Steiner, too. For Paracelsus as for Steiner, every human being— thus every sickness, each patient—is individual and must be treated accordingly. For both, each individual arises out of and exists within a context: earthly-geographic, social, cosmic, and spiritual-karmic. (Not for nothing is Paracelsus known as the “father of environmental medicine.”) For both, the triadic nexus of sulphur, mercury, and salt processes is ubiquitous. Both, too, were homeopathic, not allopathic, in orientation and understood the primacy of the law of similars. Both made considerable use of minerals, in preference to herbs, in creating remedies. Both understood the “spirituality” of disease. And for both, Christ was present in all things.

Thus as the years of Steiner’s teaching unfolded we can observe these two ideals coming into ever greater focus. The centrality of Christ is self-evident; the devotion to healing perhaps less so. Yet reading between the lines it is equally dear. Throughout the next years, lectures on various aspects of health and illness, as wells as references to Paracelsus, Boehme, Basil Valentine, van Helmont, and those he calls “the old philosophers” (the alchemists) recur with regularity. At the same time, the depth of his research into the complex field of the spiritual, psychic, and physical-sensory interactions and relations that constitute the living human being increased from the lectures in the course Occult Physiology (1911) to the final hammering out of the understanding of the threefold human organism (1917). But these are only traces of a deeper, more passionate interest.

Confirming this interest, Rudolf Steiner sought contact with practicing physicians from the beginning, and there were always doctors among his students. Mention must first be made, of course, of Ita Wegman, later his dose collaborator and in a real sense the co-creator of anthroposophical medicine. She first met Steiner in 1902, and in 1905 on his recommendation moved to Zurich to study medicine. Ludwig Noll and Felix Peipers, for whom in 1911 Steiner created the sequence of heal-

ing images of the Madonna, date from the same period. Later, other doctors would join the Anthroposophical Society and begin to work medically out of what they were learning. Here two facts must be borne in mind. First, that for Rudolf Steiner anthroposophy was always simultaneously a path of spiritual research and a way of social and cultural ethical action. Research, although perhaps undertaken in a certain sense for its own sake, was never to be purely “theoretical.” That was anathema. Steiner did not believe in research that did not bear concrete fruit in life. Therefore, he is always exhorting his students to live the path of anthroposophy: to bring it into life, to manifest it for the sake of the greater whole. Second, that however cosmic and removed from human concerns anthroposophy sometimes seems, Steiner’s focus is always human beings in their concrete and in their specific individualities. While understanding human beings contextually as divine-cosmic-spiritual beings, his larger purpose is thus always to aid and further human-earthly evolution. He calls on human beings to know themselves not as “cosmic hermits,” but as “cosmic citizens”—citizens of the cosmos—who at the same time embody this knowledge in their arts, sciences, and social life. Thus Steiner’s research—even when focused on what appear to be the most arcane details of spiritual evolution—is always centered on the concrete human being. It follows from this that, as he was always pursuing a particular interest in healing, no matter what topic of research he was addressing, his findings would inevitably contribute toward the understanding of human health and illness.

All this came together in this first medical course— Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine. It was of course only a beginning. As Rudolf Steiner said in concluding:

It was difficult to begin .... But now that we are at the end, I must say that it is even more difficult to stop! ...I am speaking out of truly objective, not subjective, heartfelt feelings when I say to you, whose attendance here has demonstrated your great interest in this beginning, “Until we meet again, on a similar occasion!”

Many more lectures and lecture courses followed. The movement grew. Clinics were established. Together with Ita Wegman, he co-wrote in the last year of his life (1925) Extending Practical Medicine: Fundamental Principles Based on the Science of the Spirit. Fittingly, it was his last book. Anthroposophical medicine was launched.

Not for nothing is Paracelsus known as the father of environmental medicine.

Anthroposophy & Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue

Observations on the Spiritualization of Thinking

by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon1

What a great pleasure it is that I am able to be here with you. This is the first working visit that I have made to France. Strangely enough, though I don’t speak or read French, I have always closely followed the development of French cultural-spiritual life in the twentieth century and today and have been engaged particularly for many years with French thinking and philosophy. And I would like in this lecture to make you aware of the role French thinking plays in the invisible spiritual drama of our time.

I referred to what took place in the 20th century behind the curtains of world events in my books, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century and The New Experience of the Supersensible, both written at the beginning of the 1990s. There I described my spiritual-scientific research on the esoteric, super- and sub-sensible realities graspable only by means of modern spiritual scientific research methods. Until the 1960s very little light was created on the earth at all—and so much darkness. Not that the darkness-producing forces and events have diminished since then; on the contrary, they increase exponentially. But the good news is that in all walks of life, thought, science, art, and social life, new forces of hope started to flow in the 1960s, and in my books I described the hidden sources out of which these spiritual forces are flowing. And some of those rare and precious rays of light emanated from French creativity in the second half of the last century.

During the whole European catastrophe of the 20th century, before, between, and after the two world wars and during the cold war, there took place in France a very intense and vital debate, intellectual but also cultural and political. The forces at work in thinking, with all their ingenuity, were not yet strong enough to penetrate social and political realities; many believed them to be so “revolutionary” and radical, but they could never really break through to new social ideas and social formations. But in the field of philosophy it was different; here some true creativity took place which was indeed striving to break new ground.

The last century had an enormous task coupled with the most grave and fateful results for good or ill. This task can be described in various ways. For our

1

This lecture was given to members of the Anthroposophical Society in Alsace-Lorraine, in Colmar, Alsace, France, on June 1, 2007. The occasion was initiated by the late Christine Ballivet, and its publication is dedicated to her.

purposes tonight, because we are approaching this task from the point of view of the development of thinking, we can call it the spiritualization of consciousness, or more specifically, spiritualization of the intellect and thinking. This is an expression often used by Rudolf Steiner. His whole impulse, the utmost exertion of his will and love, was poured into this deed. And his life long hope was that free humans would do what he himself was striving to do: truly to transform themselves! He had hoped that this would be achieved at least by a limited number of people already at the beginning of the 20th century, and that it would then be taken up by ever more people during the course of the whole century, reaching a certain intensive culmination at the end of the century. In a transformed manner it would then powerfully enter the global scene of the 21st century as world-changing creative power.

New Beginners

It is not enough nowadays that one person does something alone even if he is the greatest initiate, because others should no longer be simply led or pushed in his steps—unless we are speaking of impulses of evil. The good can only spring forth from the depth of free human hearts and minds, working together in mutual help and understanding.

And if you look at the world situation today, anthroposophy included, from this point of view, you can surely say: well, then, we are definitely only at the very beginning! We are all therefore kindly invited to begin again, anew. If we understand truly what was said above, we are asked to see ourselves as real beginners. Ever more people should understand that the Zeitgeist is now seeking new beginners, and is quite fed up with so many “knowers” who are constantly creating havoc in our social, spiritual and economic life.

This spiritualization of the intellect is the first and unavoidable step needed as foundation for further transformations of human nature and society. It is the precondition for the spiritualization of our social, cultural, political and economic life. This is our main entry point, simply because we have become thinking beings in recent centuries. Everything we do starts from thinking, and wrong thinking is immediately a source of moral-social destructive forces, while truthful thinking is a building and healing power.

For this reason Steiner referred to his so-called “nonanthroposophical” book The Philosophy of Freedom as his most important spiritual creation. By means of this book,

he said, if properly understood and practiced, each person can begin, without any former spiritual knowledge or belief, from her or his daily thinking consciousness, daily perceiving consciousness, daily moral activity and social experiences. Each can start here from where one stands in real life.

And I have had the experience, early on with myself and now also with friends and students in the world, that with The Philosophy of Freedom , if you take it in the right manner, it is indeed the case that it gives us powerful means to realize this spiritualization and bring it to consciousness. This was my own spiritual-scientific way of development from my 21st to my 35th year. After starting from Steiner’s general anthroposophical work, I then concentrated specifically on his philosophical-social work. For the building of the Harduf community, on the one hand, and for my spiritual research, on the other, I searched for the hidden stream of becoming of anthroposophy, for its living supersensible continuation.

How can Steiner’s starting point for thinking be continually updated, brought into the stream of the developing Zeitgeist ? This was my burning daily problem. I was also aware of the retarding forces at work inside his legacy. So I was conscious early on that I must create my own way as I go, alone, and that it is not simply given out there. And when you search in this way you have to find Michael’s footsteps in history and in present day spiritual, cultural and social life. This is the reason why I was intensively following the new developments in the sciences, arts, and social life, and also in thinking and philosophy in the course of the whole 20th century.

Then I found, through life itself, through my work itself—and this applies for my own experience, one cannot generalize—that whenever and wherever I looked for a way to continue after 1925, after Steiner’s death, the way to a further development of thinking and the spiritualization of the intellect was leading to the abyss opened with the last two German thinkers—the converted Jew Edmund Husserl and his National Socialist pupil Martin Heidegger—through the ruins of European culture in the Second World War, and into the 1950s and 1960s.2 And it was in this following in the tragic steps of Husserl and Heidegger that I came to French philosophy, because the French thinkers were the most ardent and receptive pu-

2 I wrote about my knowledge struggles in this regard in the introduction to the German translation of my book, The New Experience of the Supersensible. I describe the development of my spiritual researches in an interview added to the new English edition (2008).

pils of German thought. Therefore, in order to introduce some central figures of French philosophy I will have to briefly summarize the decisive turning point in German spiritual history.

A German Excursion

The first German thinker who was acutely aware that the time of German idealism and Goethe’s time had gone forever and cannot be revived was of course the great and tragic Nietzsche. He literally lost his mind in his efforts to find new, unforeseen venues to spiritualize thinking. And as historical symptom and clue to the gathering storm leading to the German tragedy it is significant that precisely in those years, the end of the 1880s, Steiner was working on his philosophical dissertation Truth and Science as basis for The Philosophy of Freedom . When the latter was published in 1894 he wrote to his close friend Rosa Mayreder how greatly he regretted the fact that Nietzsche could no longer read it, because “he would have truly understood it as a personal experience.” Now, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a contemporary of Steiner; he also studied philosophy in Vienna under Franz Brentano one or two years after Steiner studied there, probably in the winter semester 1881-82. They almost met in Brentano’s classes, as it were. Karma couldn’t have spoken more clearly, because Husserl was striving to develop Brentano’s thinking further and created his phenomenology in the direction of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom. But Husserl’s radicalism was not radical enough; he didn’t overcome the deeper limitations of traditional, Kantian philosophy. This left in German thinking a yawning gap, an abyss, before, during, and after the First World War, which was the most decisive time for European and German history.

And the year came in which German destiny, and Europe’s, was to be decided: 1917. In this year Lenin is sent by Ludendorff in a sealed train carriage from his exile in Zürich to organize the Bolshevik revolution in the East; and the US enters the war from the West. Middle Europe’s fate was in the scales, tipping rapidly to the worst, and Steiner initiates social threefolding as a last rescue effort. Also in 1917 Brentano dies; Steiner publish-

es a “Nachruf”3 to Brentano in his book Von Seelenrätseln [Riddles of the Soul ]. Here philosophy, anthropology, and anthroposophy are brought together for the first time in a fully modern and scientific way, without any theosophical residues—free, that is, from traditional occult conceptions and formulations. This book states clearly that Steiner is now ready to start his real life task as a modern spiritual scientist and social innovator. But his hopes to create a world wide social-spiritual movement collapsed already before his early death in March 1925.

After Steiner’s death Max Scheler, an original and free-thinking pupil of Husserl who met and appreciated Steiner, converts to Catholicism in 1927, the same year in which Martin Heidegger’s influential book Being and Time is published. In his destiny as the last German thinker Heidegger embodies the destiny of his people. He could not rest content with phenomenology, and justifiably so; nor could he open himself to the new impulse working in the direction of The Philosophy of Freedom . Instead, he transforms Husserl’s phenomenology backward instead of forward, to create in German intellectual life a powerful and highly suggestive intellectual Umstülpung (a reversal inside out) of The Philosophy of Freedom .

Between Husserl and Heidegger the tragedy of German spiritual life plays itself out in the late 1920s and 30s, until in 1933 Heidegger delivers his infamous Antrittsrede, his inaugural address as Rector of Freiberg University, presenting himself as an enthusiastic Nazi. Later he also supports the excommunication of his aging teacher according to Nuremberg’s denaturalization racial laws. Husserl, fortunately for him, dies in 1938. The decision that fell already in 1917 was now made fully visible, and with it the fate of Germany and Europe as a whole.

Since Nietzsche’s and Steiner’s time it is rather a strong either/or situation: thinking can be either with the spirit of the time or be strongly against it. Heidegger’s unquestionable greatness was forcefully mobilized to serve the adversarial spirit most opposite to Michael.4 But nowadays only an abstract intellectual, or a fanatic religious believer, would believe that he can

3 Literally, an “after-call.” –Ed.

Martin Heidegger

4 Rudolf Steiner identified the Zeitgeist or Time Spirit or “spirit of the times” as an actual spiritual being of the rank of archangel. with the Archangel Michael performing this role since 1879. –Ed.

Franz Brentano

Friedrich Nietzsche

Edmund Husserl

know in advance the difference between truth and falsehood. Anthroposophy is also sometimes taken up in this manner.

Practically speaking, it is precisely the case of Heidegger which demonstrates the difficulties one faces when one strives, through real experience, to discern the difference between truth and falsehood , especially where they are reflected and deflected by the threshold 5 If you imagine the threshold level as mirror surface, then one of the pair would appear as a sub-threshold and polar brother, even a twin, but turned upside down to create a counter-picture, a mirror-opposite of its upper-threshold origin!

Here I would like to point to a very significant fact that has served my work well through the years. By struggling with present-day thinking in various fields one is highly rewarded not only by finding true Michaelic inspirations, but also through the painful uncovering of adversarial streams. They, too, can teach us a great deal, and first hand, concerning Michael’s true intentions precisely because they strive to do the very opposite!

From this point of view we may begin to understand a great riddle, namely, why Heidegger became perhaps the most influential philosopher in 20th century Europe, and for French philosophy in particular. And why Levinas said—and he was a close personal student of Heidegger in Freiburg—“we must admit, we were all unfortunately Heidegger’s students.”6

The French Philosophical Century

Since the 1920s and 30s, between the wars and during and after the cold war, we find a great series of French thinkers who always begin by assimilating German philosophy. The most recent philosophical food supply for French thinking comes from the great fourfold German Götterdämmerung7 stream: Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. Let us now invite and introduce briefly a few of these thinkers. But this introduction can only be episodic and fragmentary, a flitting and momentary inscription on a narrow and rap -

5 The threshold between the physical and spiritual worlds. –Ed.

6 This isn’t the place to enter into Heidegger’s philosophy in detail, an interesting and timely study that should perhaps be realized in Germany.

7 The Twilight of the Gods, last opera of Wagner’s Ring trilogy. –Ed.

idly vanishing path.

A beginning can be made with another born Jew, Henri Bergson, contemporary of Steiner, resurrected from oblivion by Gilles Deleuze who used as one of his major starting points Bergson’s Matter and Memory from 1896, two years after The Philosophy of Freedom . Then we have the great phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, born 1908; his 1945 book The Phenomenology of Perception is a fine study of sense perception and perceptual consciousness, and who pushed the limits of perception increasingly into the supersensible, striving to transform sense-perception and body experience into spiritual experience. Somewhat at the other pole is the “dark” Maurice Blanchot, born 1907, whose The Space of Literature (1955) exerted strong fascination through the later century. And then we are already with the greatly influential Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).

Sartre transformed the fundamental ontology of Heidegger into phenomenological existentialism; during the war he wrote his main work, Being and Nothingness (1943) as a reply to Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time Read the chapter on “the look of the other” in this book, and you will find a most exact and brilliant phenomenological research of the perception, being and relation of the other —something without precedent in the history of philosophy or science.

After the war we see the emergence of the stream of French structuralism with Levi-Strauss and his school among others. They had a significantly fruitful influence, right up until our times, in anthropology, sociology, myth study, and ancient cultures. But this was all prologue, setting the stage for what will become the truly exciting thirty years—1960s, 70s, 80s—in which one after the other you see the most brilliant stars appear, shining over the intellectual horizon of France, and now world renowned. Then it was all beginning, but I am sure you are all familiar with those remarkable names, names like—? Names like—? (No answer and laughter in the hall.)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Jean-Paul Sartre

Maurice Blanchot

Henri Bergson

First let us name another Jewborn—yes, they are still all over the place, despite some efforts. I mean Jacques Derrida, an Algérien -born Frenchman. He is now rather famous, but not always truly understood, as founder of a philosophical stream that he called “deconstruction.” Derrida took an opposite (or polar) path relative to Foucault and is often portrayed as his opponent; toward Deleuze he was more of a friend, from rather far away. His effort was directed towards deconstructing and dismantling the centralistic and centralizing, monotheistic father-god forces working in past and present philosophy and literature. But this was not the goal in itself, rather a means of uncovering the peripheral forces working in language and writing. Derrida discovered and described some of the formative strategies of decentralized, peripheral forces that in spiritual science are called “etheric formative forces,” and he revealed the texture of the text, the weaving of text through the warp and woof of language’s artistic tapestry. Derrida was increasingly influenced by Levinas and turned his attention to ethical, political and religious investigations, studying the problems of radical alterity, the transcendental otherness of the other as unbridgeable difference. He died October 9, 2004 and has an ever growing circle of influence, felt strongly in the Americas; he is one of the few philosophers of the 20th century to become known as a cultural figure outside the philosophical milieu.

The concept of “postmodernism”8 is articulated for the first time as a philosophical concept in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition—A Report on Knowledge (1979). Inspired by Kant’s idea of the experience and cognition of the sublime (part of Kant’s Critique of Judgment), he tried to create a non-positivist, “ event -ful” concept of knowledge and art, and to apply it to social and political thought. We could name others here like the truly brilliant Paul Virilio, original

8 The term “postmodern” is sometimes used generally of the recent French thinkers, but it is philosophically misleading. All the central thinkers I mention did not consider themselves “postmodern” but even its opponents. Levinas, Derrida and Deleuze spoke strongly against it.

thinker of modern and postmodern technology, military affairs, urbanism, and architecture. And how can we not mention Jean Baudrillard who died last March (2007), a sharp-minded observer and critic of electronic communication and globalized media and TV, who also wrote the short and remarkable “Spirit of Terrorism” after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

And then we come to Emmanuel Levinas, mentioned above in connection with his teacher Heidegger, a Lithuanian-born Jew who became orthodox after the war and remained observant of the commandments and Torah for the rest of his life. He is beside Derrida the most widely known French philosopher of our time, and his influence is also steadily growing. His innovative and radical concept of “the other” is introduced not through phenomenology as developed by Husserl, Heidegger, or Sartre, but through such remarkable concepts as “the face of the other” and “the mortality of the other”—to which I am primordially responsible. Levinas believed this to be the only way to create a “contra-Cain” force, which he saw as the true mission of Judaism that was suppressed by western philosophy, Christianity, and middle European culture. He sought to resurrect Abel and find the answer to Cain’s primordial fratricide, which he experienced as repeated on a European and global scale in the 20th century, especially in the annihilation of the Jews (as original Abel’s sons) by the Germans (as modern Cain’s sons), but also in every persecution of the weak wherever they are. This constitutes the essence of his thought: I am my brother’s keeper! In this manner Levinas tried to bring a new religious-moral impulse into the philosophical and cultural-political discourses and consciousness of the post-Holocaust world.

The last of these great figures to be mentioned now, because our time is short, would be Alain Badiou who still lives and works today, a militant Maoist-Leninist who began as a disciple of Sartre and the French philosopher of psycho-

Emmanuel Levinas (photo: Bracha L. Ettinger)

Jacques Derrida

Jean-François Lyotard (photo: Bracha L. Ettinger)

Alain Badiou

analysis, Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan, and was grooming himself to become the lifelong contender against Deleuze. He is the rather lonely and last star still shining in the twilight of a truly wonderful French philosophical century. Badiou wrote an excellent students’ introduction to his thought called Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil , and he wrote the best book on St. Paul that I have read in recent literature. Yes, it belongs to the strange and audacious symptomatic of our time that a non-repentant French Maoist-Leninist writes the best book on St. Paul!

These are more visible representatives of dozens of creative and original thinkers, artists, and scientists in the 20th century that lived in France. They are only the more clearly marked names, the more strongly visible planets shining on the background of a whole spiritual-cultural European and French constellation, caused by the destruction of Europe in the last century and the vacuum created by the disappearance of German thinking.

But now there was one so daring and inspiring in his originality that in a way he towered over them all, so much so, that Deleuze said: “The author who wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge makes it possible for us to hope that true philosophy will again be possible.” And he meant Michel Foucault. “Foucault is closer to Goethe than to Newton,” Deleuze writes in his fine book Foucault, because just as for Goethe “the light-being is strictly indivisible condition, an a priori that is uniquely able to lay visibilities open to sight and by the same stroke to the other senses,” so with Foucault’s new concept of language and thinking : their essential being is the imperceptible force that makes all discourse visible and possible at all .

And this is the reason why Foucault could prepare and open the way for the very most significant French thinker of the 20th century, Gilles Deleuze himself. Even the otherwise careful and rather restrained Derrida, speaking at Deleuze’s funeral, exclaimed: “The author of Repetition and Difference [one

of Deleuze’s main books] is the sublime philosopher of the event.” Like a sun which outshines all the French intellectual stars but also contextualizes them, giving them their historical formation and placing thinking on its way in the trajectory and direction of its future cosmic destination and constellation, Deleuze fully deserves Foucault’s statement, “The whole philosophical 20th century will one day be called the Deleuzian century.” And elsewhere: “...a lightning storm was produced which will bear the name of Deleuze: new thought is possible; thought is again possible.”

It was Deleuze, alone and together with his collaborator and co-author Félix Guattari, who pointed out philosophy’s future role and task, in all his writings. Aphoristically speaking, let us pick one statement which can be inscribed—from the point of view presented in this lecture—as a symptomatic signpost in the evolution of philosophy. We find it in his last book, written with Guattari, What is Philosophy? There we find this statement:

The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the event.

This powerful transformation of the role of philosophy by Deleuze is a result of a common project, to which each of the above mentioned thinkers contributed, starting with Heidegger who was the first to thematise the event as a central philosophical concept. Suffice it here to say that with this concept Deleuze expresses a complicated and multi-levelled happening, which he described and varied repeatedly in his works during three decades.

Translated somewhat into our words, this “event” will be understood as pulsing systole and diastole, a breathing of immanent life, the always occurring incarnation and excarnation process in every single element of matter, space-time and consciousness. Deleuze conceived life and sensibility as existing everywhere in nature, culture and cosmos with and without organic-bodily or material foundations. If we rephrase his statement in this sense we may formulate it therefore thus:

The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the ever pulsating, breathing, vibrating movement of universal immanent life.

Gilles Deleuze

Félix Guattari

Michel Foucault

Riddles and Problems of the Spiritualization of Thinking

Over against Guattari & Deleuze’s revolutionary restatement of the meaning and essence of philosophy, we will place now some of Rudolf Steiner’s statements. He says, for example, now that the role of philosophy is fulfilled (meaning, at the end of the 19th century), we must have the courage to let the lightning of the will strike directly into thinking through the wholly singular being of the individual person.9 This will element can fire thinking and release it from its bodily fetters, freeing its wings to soar and ascend into the open cosmic etheric universe. Then it will no longer be the same “I” who thinks, but it will be the stream of cosmic thought that flows through my transformed being. “IT thinks in me” will become a truthful experience and real supersensible event.10 But precisely

9 From Rudolf Steiner, lecture of 7 October 1922, Stuttgart; in The Younger Generation , René Querido, trans.; p61-3: “This is the very significant situation at the end of the nineteenth century: Certain circles realized that the old intuitions, the God-given intuitions, were no longer there; that if a man wants to prove with his head the ideas of the people of old, moral intuitions simply disappear; science has silenced them. Human beings even when receptive are no longer capable of receiving moral intuitions. ... So, on one hand, there was the alternative of withering. ... The other alternative was to become fully conscious of the following: With the loss of the old intuitions we are facing Nothingness. What can be done? In this Nothingness to seek the ‘All’! Out of this very Nothingness try to find something that is not given, but which we ourselves must strenuously work for. This was no longer possible with passive powers of the past, but only with the strongest powers of cognition of this age: with the cognitional powers of pure thinking. For in acts of pure thinking, this thinking goes straight over into the will. You can observe and think, without exerting your will. You can carry out experiments and think: it does not pass right over into the will. You can do this without much effort. Pure thinking, by which I mean the unfolding of primary, original activity, requires energy. There the lightning-flash of will must strike directly into the thinking itself. But the lightning-flash of will must come from each single individual. Courage was needed to call upon this pure thinking which becomes pure will ; it arises as a new faculty—the faculty of drawing out of the human individuality moral impulses which have to be worked for and are no longer given in the form of the old impulses. Intuitions must be called up that are strenuously worked for. Today what man works for in his inner being is called ‘phantasy.’ Thus in this present age which has, apart from this, silenced inner work, moral impulses for the future must be produced out of moral phantasy, moral Imagination; the human being had to be shown the way from merely poetical, artistic phantasy, to a creative moral Imagination.” Emphasis added. –Ed.

10 “‘It is not merely I who think, for it thinks in me—world-becoming expresses itself in me and my soul provides only the stage upon which

this remarkable spiritual achievement—the “IT thinks”—poses serious problems of epistemology, identity, and of course ethics, which cannot be resolved by means of present day philosophy and science.

The main problem here is this: when “IT thinks” in me, who is this “me” in and through which “IT thinks”? In the night, when IT really not only thinks in me but also builds and shapes the foundation of all my existence, my ordinary self-consciousness totally withdraws and is wholly absent. I become unconscious in order to allow IT to take over my existence, because my ordinary self cannot yet fulfill at all, in spiritual self consciousness, the needed maintenance of my whole being. Therefore in the night, and also unconsciously during the day, I am given to IT’s cosmic guidance, and healing forces, and beings.

I hope I have succeeded in making this problem a bit more problematic and concrete for you: how can this depersonalization and over-personalization process be experienced consciously? How does the one self—the ordinary—go out, and the other—the Higher Self—come in? And who is the “one” (now already two, and it will be further multiplied the more the spiritualization process advances!) that mutually recognizes, organizes, and brings these two—and the many—into harmonic composition? And in what sort of self-consciousness would this “IT thinks” become conscious?

The same problem can also be expressed in this manner. Steiner said that he regarded Descartes’ famous statement, “I think therefore I am,” as nothing less than “the greatest failure in the evolution of modern thinking… because precisely there, where I think, I am not… because ordinary thinking is mere empty picture, image, representation, and is bereft of any real, substantial being.”11 This statement characterizes an essential existential as well as experience of contemporary philosophical as a whole and especially of the French philosophers above.

What contemporary philosophical thought could achieve to a certain extent and in various ways and different degrees, is part of this first aspect, namely, the “cosmicization” of thinking and the realization of “the thought

the world lives as thought.’ Philosophies can, of course, reject this attitude. ... [It] is an idea that can be acquired only through inner experience.” Rudolf Steiner, A Way of Self-Knowledge, 1912; p.69.

11 See among other works of Steiner The Foundations of Human Experience, trans. Lathe & Whittaker, 1996, p.50.

Rudolf Steiner, 1905

of the outside” and the “IT thinks inside” (Foucault-Deleuze); but such thought felt that it must completely sacrifice the reality of the subject, the individual, to achieve this. With this complete sacrifice we cannot concur. Yet we must also admit, as pointed out above, that apart from Steiner’s own lived, initiatory example, we do not have first-hand descriptions of a successfully carried-out experiential solution of this dilemma.

Altogether we may say: contemporary philosophy did develop, in an original and new manner, some aspects related to the spiritualization of thinking, but stopped at the threshold in relation to the deeper problems of the “I”. The celebrated though little understood statements of Foucault on the death of the subject, author, etc., can only be understood as symptoms pointing to this unresolved problem, as we will see later in greater detail.

Let me summarize briefly the first main stages in the process of the spiritualization of thinking and then indicate the full meaning of Steiner’s understanding of “the sole purpose of philosophy.” If the transformation of thinking through the “direct lightning of the will” takes place, and thinking becomes a singular event,—when I have come thus far with spiritualizing my own thinking, I have as a matter of fact caused the nullification and emptying of my ordinary soul and mind contents. Now because my ordinary experience of my self is nothing but the sum-total of these contents, when they disappear, my ordinary self disappears as well. I forget my subjective inner life, which as it were goes to sleep. In its stead, IT thinks flares up. IT flows into the empty, self-less place, and IT thinks through this place as a wholly other, alter-Self. As a result the following may occur: IT now jolts my otherwise unconscious real Self—not the subjective, conscious, personal self that is already obliterated—rather IT jolts my real Self out of the physical body. And this real Self may find his way to Humanity’s Higher Self, swimming and flying on the waves and in the currents of the real “world-wide-web,” spread out and mingled with infinitely multiple and diverse non-organic living cosmic forces, events, and beings.12 But this is the central problem: IT thinks alone cannot guarantee that this meeting will take place. The force needed to enable the meeting between my real Self and Humanity’s Higher Self, can only be found elsewhere. But where?

12 Deleuze called the elementary precincts of this world the realm of non-organic, immanent, infinite life. He explored it in great detail especially in the second of the pair of volumes he coauthored with Guattari, Anti-Oedipus from 1972 and A Thousand Plateaus from 1980, which together are subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Therefore, it is immensely significant to notice how Steiner refers to pure thinking also as pure love in these words from The Philosophy of Freedom. When the thinker becomes one with the stream of “love in its spiritual form that flows through thinking,” he or she realizes and individualizes this experience as a “moral intuition,” conceived freely out of the spiritual worlds, and brought down to the Earth through individual deeds of love. This second side of the spiritualization of thinking has to do with the free love for the Earth, humanity, and physical life as a whole. In other words, spiritualized thinking can create a connection between the two selves—the human and the cosmic—only if it becomes an expression of love. Only then can it connect the Higher Self experienced outside the body, and the human self that receives the moral intuition and must protect it and make it real on the Earth.

Now if taken from both sides, namely, from the cosmic experience of a Self as part of the non-organic world of life forces and beings, and as a source of moral intuition to be realized on Earth, Steiner’s following statement may be appreciated in its full weight. He says13 that philosophy’s future purpose will be “to save human self-consciousness” in order that self-consciousness can be remembered at all as humanity advances further in its present and future spiritualization process. If this remembering of self-consciousness is not achieved, the spiritualization process will still continue, because the evolutionary time for it is due. However, it will lead humanity away from its true Self and its true mission on the earth and in the universe. This means that philosophy has truly something to be “worthy about”: the salvation and redemption of self-consciousness for all future stages of the spiritualization of humanity, without which human consciousness will not be able to enter in a healthy way into the spiritual worlds.14

In the Deleuze-Guattari vein we can now finally paraphrase the statement quoted above from their book, What is Philosophy? We may now reply from our own side: The sole task of philosophy is to be worthy of the event of spiritualization of self-consciousness and remembering of the true ‘I’.

13 In GA 137, Lecture of June 12, 1912, Oslo.

14 A detailed treatment of these problems is the basis of my book The New Experience of the Supersensible

The author at Steiner’s Berlin home.

The Absent Great Dispute

Our characterization of philosophy’s “sole purpose” resounds strongly to meet Deleuze’s challenge as a warning and admonition from the side of the Michaelic stream. This warning is truly not given to foster pedantry and intellectualism, but on the contrary, to balance the true and real but one-sided impulse of the contemporary spiritualization of thinking. It is precisely because the spiritualization of thinking does advance further and becomes real, and because thinking has truly begun to merge with the stream of cosmic forces, that this message resounds from Michaelic spheres, encouraging the thinker not to forsake the mysteries and problems involved in the extremely complicated and contradictory relations between the ordinary earthly subject and personality and the Cosmic Ego, also called the Christ, or Higher Spirit Self. This task is something wholly new in human evolution and is perhaps the most crucial impulse of the immediate present and near future, namely, to create a self-conscious bridge between the earthly self and supersensible consciousness.

Philosophy understood in this way will offer the only means “to save the self-conscious ‘I’—self consciousness as such—for supersensible consciousness.” In other words, the clairvoyant, on achieving true spiritual consciousness, must be able to look back and remember—in the first stage of spiritual development—her or his “I”. And this saving of self-consciousness can only be achieved through spiritualized thinking, in the direction indicated by The Philosophy of Freedom

Now, as mentioned above, it is precisely in connection with the concept of the “I” that post-modern thinking has the greatest difficulties, because this problem cannot be addressed by means of pure thinking alone, be it as spiritualized as possible. The “I” problem must be approached from a polar and opposite side; and this side marks the place of real absence in Deleuze’s thinking also, although, as with so many aspects of Deleuze, his absent “I” is much more alive than many dead and frozen concepts concerning this “I”!

From this point of view I would like to turn your attention next to the possibility of a remarkably fruitful spiritual battle —concerning the problems of the “I”— and dialogue —concerning pure thinking—that could take place, provided that anthroposophical thinking has advanced far enough that such problems become its true living problems. As I said above, I have myself been benefiting greatly from engaging in this battle for the last

thirty years. And I would like to try to ignite in you also a little spark of enthusiasm for true spiritual battle, true dialogue of the spirits, minds, and hearts.

Here a richly and mutually rewarding “disjunctive synthesis” (to use Deleuze’s unique phrase) could have taken place—but never did, because what could traditional anthroposophy bring, authentically, to this field? As just described, only genuine individual achievement can stand up truthfully to this challenge and face the real power of contemporary philosophy’s achievements. Self-transforming anthroposophy benefits greatly from engaging contemporary philosophy—along with the arts and sciences, of course. This is so because contemporary philosophy grapples rather unconsciously with the same problems that one encounters if one begins to realize the actual first steps in developing supersensible consciousness.

In accordance with the medieval manner of discourse—which was much more civilized (that is, truthful) than ours—we may use the term “dispute” for this rare and unique dialogic battle or battled dialogue—for a true combat of the spirits. The greatest of spiritual battles was preordained but never fought in history, because the spiritual battle of the 20th century, as I mentioned above, was decided for the worst early on. When in the second half of the century and especially towards its end the great culmination of anthroposophy should have taken place, only the other stream was culminating, alone. Its true opponent was simply not present out there to fight, because its decisive Michaelic battle was lost already in the beginning of the 20th century.

However, this was only the first century of Michael’s present age as Zeitgeist, with the first of three great battles, and so many smaller ones in between! Presently we are humbly striving to prepare some suitable starting points for the second great battle—the battle of the 21st century. Now that we are seriously working on self-transformation, and with it on true spiritualization of the intellect, we are strongly attracted to our rivals, or to their legacy, because our living striving is asking for a true dialoguebattle, without which it cannot thrive and develop further. And we will have at our side Deleuze’s being, leading, and the beings of his colleagues. They will serve as a strongly awakening, reminding, and truly challenging warning—and as a stark temptation as well—so that we may realize on the earth, now and in the near future, the great supersensible battle raging in the spiritual worlds closest to us, between Michael and his hosts and the adversarial—but always also helpful—spirits!

Some Personal Remarks

So we can say, Gilles Deleuze went farthest toward fulfilling this task of the spiritualization of thinking, but he accomplished it in a strongly one-sided way. With Deleuzian thinking we have before us at the end of the 20th century the best example of how far one could have travelled to bring this goal to a certain temporary culmination. And as I continued to study the development of consciousness through the scientific, political, artistic, philosophical, and anthroposophical developments of last century, I had to say to myself again and again: here at the end of the century we have this wonderful line up of characters, thinkers as well as artists and scientists, across the whole century, so brilliant, so shiningly original, who strive to bring thinking further.

Then I looked at my own efforts, and in order to develop my own anthroposophical thinking further, I had to work through these schools of thoughts, I really had to delve very deeply, without prejudice, into the work of many individual thinkers. I really had to struggle in order to transform each stage, each person’s thinking, each decade, to arrive at what these developments could offer as part of the stream of the ongoing spiritualization of the intellect: enriching, challenging, also tempting and misleading.

I experienced myself pretty much alone in this battle. Even among thinking anthroposophists I couldn’t find anybody who wished to engage with this struggle explicitly, in this sense of spiritual battle. There were of course always those eager to refute each other, and also post-modern philosophy. That was always there; but I wasn’t interested in refuting anything or anybody, I was trying through these thinkers to grapple with the deeper spiritual impulses at work, which either corresponded to our Time Spirit, or fought against it, or mixed the two in many bizarre ways. There I could find some important and hidden footsteps and clues that guided me on the way of the spiritualization of thinking. Of course the same non-dispute happens all the time also on the other side. One could not discover any wish to be even slightly aware of Steiner’s contribution in those thinkers that I have mentioned. And their conscious un-knowing was served well by the absence of presently engaged anthroposophists!

That was, and still is today, a strange situation. I asked myself, what’s happening here? It is as if I am observing a strange dramatic performance. The stage is set and some

players are busy performing; they speak and act wholly unaware of the grotesque situation. They are not aware that the other players, their counterparts, aren’t even there! What I see is only a half-play, a spiritual dramatic piece cut in two. The real script isn’t played out, and what is played isn’t the real script at all! This should have been a whole scene of battle, but we have only a half, the other group is playing no role what soever in the script that they themselves wrote! They wrote it bravely in spirit, with the strength given to them by Michaelic beings in the sun sphere, in the supersensible Michaelic school; but on the earth they have forgotten, and in that sense also betrayed, the roles they appointed for themselves before birth.

It really should have been, from the beginning of the century to its very end, a perpetual huge battle—and a most fruitful dialogue, because spiritually seen a true, sincere dialogue is also a battle. A real brotherly dispute should take place between thinkers deeply connected to anthroposophy and the thinkers I have mentioned above. This grew very clear as the end of the century drew near.

This dispute was prepared in the middle Ages and was predestined to take place in the 20th century. But we live in the age of freedom, in which all former scripts are easily changed by the present decisions of the present players! Some eight hundred years ago, in completely different spiritual and social conditions, this battle did take place, in the high Middle Ages. Let me touch upon this particular historical as well as karmic background, in order to outline also the present and future battles that face us now.

The Great Medieval Dispute

In the high Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, beginning with the Platonic renaissance of the 12th century and developing in the 13th and 14th centuries, there was

St. Thomas Aquinas

Albertus Magnus

an enormous philosophical, spiritual battle, mainly here in France, in Paris and its university. Here the great Scholastics were striving mightily to unite Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy, under the leadership of Thomas Aquinas, his older teacher Albertus Magnus, and their extended circle of students from the Dominican order. They were engaged in fierce struggle on several fronts. We shall name only one and indicate this only in outline. One powerful opposing stream comes from members of the Franciscan order. This order presents a series of outstanding religious and philosophical teachers. In the 13th century they were headed by “Doctor Seraphicus,” as St. Bonaventure (born John of Fidanza) was called because of his ecstatic religious-mystical devotion and temperament. He was personally initiated through a miraculous cure at the hands of St. Francis of Assisi himself. Bonaventure was a contemporary and powerful opponent of Thomas’s effort to unite and thereby transform Christian theology with his renewed Aristotelianism.

Thomas died in 1274, and for us the most interesting personality isn’t a contemporary but a thinker and theologian born around 1266, who developed his thinking career in Thomas’ wake. He is also not such a clear-cut opponent. In the Scholastic traditions he is considered to be a unique Realist, in opposition to the main Franciscan tradition, and he considered himself an independent pupil of Thomas and Aristotle, more an innovative successor than Thomas’ enemy. Indeed, he diverged and contradicted Thomas in many original ways on important theological and philosophical matters. I mean here the truly brilliant and original philosopher Johannes Duns Scotus, known as “Doctor Subtilis” because he enjoyed synthesizing varying and opposing elements in surprisingly untraditional assemblages. (Let me remark in parenthesis that the philosophy of being of Scotus, specifically his teaching on the categories and on meaning, was the subject of Heidegger’s “habilitation” dissertation in Freiburg, 1915; for the esoteric-karmic undercurrent of our lecture this is also a symptomatically telling fact.)

Many differences traditionally seen between these rival streams must be significantly modified today; especially in

the case of Duns Scotus they are far more complicated, and very interesting indeed. In the customary understanding, the Aristotelians, or Dominicans, are known as Realists. What does it mean to be a Realist in the middle ages? It meant on the one hand to be able still to experience thinking as part of the cosmic intelligence, and on the other, Aristotelian side, to experience thinking as strongly connected with the human soul and spirit, with the thinking individual. The Dominicans with Thomas at their head could still capture the last remnants of spiritual content and substance that had come from the spiritual worlds in earlier epochs, but now they were striving to grasp it firmly with their thinking as it became earthly and human. Above all they were struggling with what was already a problem for Aristotle almost 2000 years before: the riddle of the spiritual nature of the human being and the problem of immortality. In the Christian High Middle Ages the question was formulated thus: religion promises the hope of salvation and immortality through faith in the revealed divine message of the Bible; but would it also be possible to think—and in thinking not only logically to prove or disprove but actually to experience and realize —the immortality of the individual human soul?

Their Franciscan opponents belonged to the so-called Nominalists, because they could no longer experience thinking’s true spiritual-universal being. Due to this inability, Franciscans trying to gain knowledge of spiritual matters, apart from established religion, were searching for it in more mystical-ecstatic ways. An interesting corollary is that this avoidance of thinking in matters pertaining to the deeper spiritual quest adorned their striving with a peculiar mystical and intuitive brilliance. It was endowed with a lustre of the supersensible that, for more spiritually inclined persons, temptingly outshines the conscientious, painstaking, and seemingly dry labor and technique of thinking developed by the Dominicans—those Steiner refers to as truly loyal at heart to the cosmic intelligence ruled by Michael.

Another interesting trait of some leading Franciscans was their effort to bypass Aristotelian-Platonic ideas with the help

St. Bonaventure

Johannes Duns Scotus

of otherwise marginalized Stoic traditions. The Stoics assimilated a rich and diverse mixture of philosophical and religious elements right before and after Christ, drawing on Gnostic and pagan traditions. Before neoPlatonism they were already keenly attentive to the awakening inward and individual soul life of the human personality, as well as the growing darkness surrounding its fate on earth and after death.

Steiner described this unsolvable problem in one of his karma lectures. He recounts a discussion between a young and an older Dominican. He speaks movingly and intimately when he describes this event. The younger Dominican spoke to his older teacher: Look, master, the ancient spiritual power—originally Michael’s—that still inspired the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Scotus Erigena, is dying out. People in the future will not be able to experience it any more. And he said further: If things continue as they are, then people will lose all spiritual substance and truthfulness in their thinking in the future. And this thinking, the heavenly intelligence, which streams from Michael to the earth, will fall prey to Ahrimanic-demonic spirits that will use it to drag humanity into the abyss of materialism and corruption. Michaelic cosmic intelligence, still administered by the gods in ancient time, will be transformed into increasingly Ahrimanic thinking in the not so distant future.

He went on to say that something has to happen now on earth through us, in the human soul itself, to prepare a seed for future transformation that will be available when Michael starts his new epoch. This seed must be prepared now in order to sprout to life in an age in which otherwise only materialistic-intellectual thinking will prevail. And he said: For now we must hold apart the powers of faith and of thinking, but in the future this separation will no longer serve humanity. The new seed must be there at that future time to enable at least few humans to spiritualize in their hearts and minds the fallen intelligence, and so to connect it again with true spiritual reality.

The great champion of the Realists, the “silent ox” as Thomas Aquinas was nicknamed, tried with all his strength to prove that when a person thinks by means of the nous poeitikos, the active intellect, rather than the nous pathetikos, the passive intellect, he may unite his soul intimately with real spirit substance; then he may rightfully believe that after his death, though he will be carried to heaven on the wings of Christian salvation, he may find his individuality again, endowed with a full self-consciousness similar to the intensive, active human self-con-

sciousness on the Earth. All this could only be hoped for and believed in, but not yet fully experienced in the individual soul. Individual immortality could become selfconscious experience neither before nor after death. It was not yet possible to experience how, through the actualization and realization of living, intuitive thinking, human individuality is transformed and immortality becomes a reality as supersensible experience, so that the human “I” can live as a conscious eternal being in the spiritual world right here and now, and therefore also after death.

Steiner adds that indeed only the preparation for this could be made, and that Thomas Aquinas died with this burning question, this huge problem, because he could not resolve it in his time. And Steiner formulates this question of Thomas thus: “How can thinking be redeemed? How can the Christ impulse [the spiritual “I” power] enter into thinking?”

But what is the so-called Christ impulse? What is this spiritual “I” power? It is the power of transformation, the power of metamorphosis working in the individual human soul, reaching also into thinking and leading it, transformed, from within, back to the spiritual worlds; and doing so in such a way that the eternal nature of the “I” will be realized in the process. In other words, if the “I” is to become immortal, it must first become so here on the Earth, through free human activity. This becoming is what is truly meant by “the Christ impulse.” This Thomas could not accomplish in the 13th century, but Steiner realized and actualized this task at the end of the 19th century, when the new age of Michael began. He expressed this self-realization in The Philosophy of Freedom and all his subsequent spiritual-scientific work.

This may allow us a glimpse of what is working behind the curtains of human history, and how karma works from one age to the other. The 20th century was supposed, among other things, to become again a fruitful time of a great new dispute between the reborn Dominicans, together with their more platonically inclined colleagues from the school of Chartres, and the reborn Franciscans who already in the 13th and 14th centuries experienced thinking as a fallen, earthy-human element, and searched for redemption through other venues.

In the 13th century, Nominalists and Franciscans said: Thinking is only a human-earthly faculty; thinking can only give names to sense-perceptible objects and to humanly fabricated concepts. If there is a universal intelligence (and many of them did believe it), it doesn’t enter human thinking. Human thinking is as sinful as

the whole human being and cannot partake in the grace of having an actual, presently real, heavenly origin. Divinity in its real essence is wholly transcendental, totally beyond human cognition; with thinking no human being can grasp supersensible reality nor find there his eternal individuality.

Today (as contemporary philosophers) they say: the human subject, the earthly personality, has no significance! They proclaim “the death of the subject” as in the Middle Ages they denied the immortality of the “I”! Today the meaning of human personality as such is deemed unreachable and unknowable. As then it was disputed whether there are real universals, now the existence of the single object, the single personality, is denied as well.

The great dispute of the middle ages was taking place in the 13th century between Realists and Nominalists, and externally-historically the Realists seemingly fought a lost battle. Inwardly, however, they prepared the ground for what was to come to light in the new age of Michael, which is now present. And we are still at the beginning of this new battle, though we are well into the second Michaelic century!

Today ordinary humans like us must find the courage to become again true beginners, to try humbly but sincerely to take the first and most elementary step in this direction. Can we release the imprisoned heavenly intelligence and transform it in our hearts so that thinking can break through to a genuine spiritual reality? Can it become real event ? Can we produce in this process a real spiritual “I”—an individual-singular being? And what really does it mean to become neither single-private personality, nor abstract-general universal being, but truly “singular” being?

Back to the Future

Returning to what for the Realists was the future, let us go back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Steiner publishes The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894 as individual-singularspiritual achievement, unaccepted and unrecognized by general middle-European culture. This is the inaugural event, laying the foundation stone on which the future spiritual life of humanity will be built. For the very first time in history a human being was individually able to realize, in and through the spiritualization of the intellect, in and through pure thinking, an actual production and creation of the eternal, moral, spiritual substance of

a human individuality as a genuine self-conscious spiritreality. And he could achieve this remarkable deed as a free and modern human being, without depending on any given mystical or atavistic supersensible consciousness or esoteric traditions. It is a free deed of actualization and realization of new selfhood through cosmic thinking. The power of transformation, transubstantiation, and metamorphosis, had been so strongly individualized in the Middle Ages that an answer could now be given to the unresolved riddle and problem with which Thomas Aquinas died: How can thinking be redeemed, and with it and through it the human self?

This was the main theme of my 1995 book, The New Experience of the Supersensible, which I subtitled: The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming. At the beginning of this book I placed three quotations which for me summarize the drama of the century’s end, the culmination of the struggle to achieve even a minuscule individual seed of this vast human task. To these three I will now add also a quotation from Deleuze.

The first quotation is from Heidegger, celebrating man’s life-unto-death as expressing the essence of his being. The second is Foucault’s famous statement concerning the disappearance of the human being as we know it. The third demonstrates Deleuze’s real struggle with the legacy of his Franciscan forerunners, trying mightily to solve the riddle of individual immortality. The fourth is from Steiner’s words written on his death bed as concise future directive.

These passages are arranged in a certain ascending order—from a profound denial of everything that the Michaelic impulse of our time is striving for (Heidegger), through the two greatest representatives of contemporary French philosophy, Foucault and Deleuze, to Steiner, who was there first in time, but is and will be always the last one to be understood by our culture.

Being held out into the nothing, as Dasein is ... makes man a lieutenant of the nothing. We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing through our own decision and will. So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in existence that our most proper and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom.

– Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 1929

It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. [...] Then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

, 1966

Every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double… Only the free man...can comprehend... every mortal event in a single Event which no longer makes room for the accident... It is at this mobile and precise point, where all events gather together in one, that transmutation happens: this is the point at which death turns against death; where dying is the negation of death, and the impersonality of dying no longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment when death loses itself in itself, and also the figure which the most singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me.

– Gilles Deleuze, “Twenty-First Series of the Event” in Logic of Sense, 1969

If this were all , freedom would light up in the human being for a single cosmic moment, but in the very same moment the human being would dissolve away. ... We are here pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christimpulse which makes it possible for him to leap across the gulf.

– Rudolf Steiner, “The Freedom of Man and the Age of Michael” in Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, GA 26, January 1925

In 1929 Heidegger named the human being the Statthalter des Nichts —a “commander of nothingness.” And he said: the whole of human existence is founded only on death, on finiteness. That was the first “statement” through which the reversal of human history was made philosophically conscious—and then politically and socially realized in so much ending and annihilating of human lives. There can scarcely be a formulation more profoundly anti-Philosophy of Freedom than this one.

Remember what I said at the beginning: Heidegger’s influence is arguably the most significant one in 20th century philosophy—at least until Foucault’s prophecy is fulfilled, that “the 20th century will one day be called the

Deleuzian century.” Now when Foucault writes, 33 years after 1933, he says: the human subject, the ‘I” as we know it, is a momentary phenomenon, caused by the evolution of consciousness in the 19th century; and it is rapidly disappearing. This is a somewhat better statement then Heidegger’s! First, because Foucault isn’t speaking about the essence of the human being as being finite, as Heidegger does; and second, because human essence is for Foucault exactly this: the process of open-ended becoming, of transformation—and in this sense not finite at all. He says: our understanding of the human subject changes, it will be different in the future. So he really means: the death of the 19th century concept of the subject is occurring in the 20th—a fact that can also be supported from anthroposophical perspectives as I indicated above. He never meant to announce the end of the human being!

The third is a typically suggestive passage from the post-modern thinker who experienced, perhaps more than any other thinker in the last century, that we are crossing the threshold , that great eventualities await us on the other side. But more than that, he knew very well that we have already crossed and are living on the other side, wholly unforeseen and uncharted, and facing infinite new frontiers. This thinker is Gilles Deleuze.

In Deleuze we find wonderful descriptions of what one can experience and express in concepts and words, if one has spiritualized one’s thinking to a certain extent. One experiences the essence of life: “We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else.... A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.” 15 The same experience has a twin, an “other” or flip side, that comes organically woven with it. If one has come so far as to experience the essence of pure life, one has begun at the same time also to lift into consciousness the unconscious and real (that is, living ) death processes that underlie ordinary thinking. Death begins to rise to consciousness, and begins to reveal its true being, namely, the (veiled) gate to eternal cosmic life

When one is so far on the path that thinking becomes an experience of life-in-death and death-in-life, one can experience truly that “this is the point at which death turns against death; where dying is the negation of death.” And when, moreover, one experiences with one’s released etheric body the cosmic, impersonal, nonorganic life forces, one knows also that “the impersonal15 From the essay “Immanence: A Life” in Pure Immanence – Essays on a Life. New York, 2005.

ity of dying no longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of myself.” And that means, if we turn the negative way of speaking to its positive sense: The impersonality of dying indicates the moment in which the true I AM appears outside my ordinary self.

One comes then closest to the spiritual-scientific mystery of the “I”, and only a hair’s breadth, grace’s breadth, separates one from being granted this experience. While the mental image, the Vor-Stellung, of the “I” disappears, as we pointed out above with Foucault, and the IT, the impersonal life-forces of cosmic thinking, begins to think through me, then the real “I” is resurrected and comes to consciousness in and through the impersonal cosmic stream. This real “I” is a being of resurrection, and one can experience its reality at this stage neither through cosmic thinking nor through personal volition, but only through a gift of grace. IT is the vehicle, or chalice, not the giver of the grace; the giver of the true “I” can only be the being of humanity’s “I”, the Higher Self; the Christ. And Deleuze, with everything that he brings with him from former life, can advance so near—but “only” so near—to the cusp of this moment, to the threshold of this grace. And as a matter of fact it is so, when one has really spiritualized thinking so far that one can experience impersonal cosmic thinking—I really mean experience, not merely think the abstract concept—then one really doesn’t find there again the mental pictures of the ordinary self, the subjective subject that “thinks and therefore he is.” In this moment, that self is nothing, and the IT is all; and therefore Deleuze could also not find it in his authentic experience of crossing the threshold of life/death. How close he stands there, on the threshold, facing boldly the being of death and experiencing how death dies. But he doesn’t see really into what death dies ; he cannot produce enough fire to concoct and conduct the alchemical combination that alone can fuse entirely—annihilating any difference in between—absolute, pure, immanent life with absolute death. He therefore doesn’t see what, or better who, faces him; what happens at that very moment; which event takes this sacred place of time. He cannot experience what he has at hand, namely, how “through the grace of the real ‘I’ life becomes death and death becomes life”—how in Christo morimur : how we die into the fullness of life. But how movingly close he does come to unravel His secret, when he experiences “the moment when death loses itself in itself, and [becomes] the most singular life… in order to substitute itself for me.”

The moment when this substitution occurs is the

most sacred that one can experience after ordinary death. The beginner-initiates that we can become today may be granted the grace of this sacred moment in the midst of physical life. We may truly grace-fully die... and may experience in full consciousness exactly how this “most singular life”—the Higher Self—will “substitute itself for me.” Only in this manner can the battle of the middle Ages that truly took place, and the battle of the culmination of the 20th century that remained almost entirely virtual, be still realized in the course of the 21st century. This is indeed our humble elementary mission.

Now what makes freedom into reality? Not intellectual “reality,” but moral-human and at the same time supersensible achievement? It is precisely this that the Franciscans say is impossible in principal, and in Deleuze’s case we can even see how this becomes manifest in his individual and very personal karma. Look at his fingers, and compare them with Brentano’s hands that Steiner described as “philosopher’s hands,” and then with Steiner’s own hands. Hands and fingers do not reveal primarily past karma (as the head does) but karma-in-the-streamof-becoming. If you contemplate Deleuze’s fingers, what would you experience? He had to let his fingernails grow very long because he couldn’t stand the physical sense of touch with his fingers; it was for him too painful! What do the fingers experience, deeply, unconsciously, when they touch? They sense our becoming, and they also experience constantly the fire that burns at the end-of-ourbecoming, the so called second or soul death. In other words, the fingers live and move and become, all the time, beyond the threshold , where our spiritual stream of karma weaves and shapes our present life out of future lives.

The leading Dominicans knew that true freedom is indeed only temporarily impossible; they have labored hard to prepare its seed through their loyal and faithful devotion to Michael’s future impulse. And this seed can now begin to take root and sprout from the earth upward in the beginning of the second Michaelic century.

All alone, Steiner pioneered this individual deed through his sacrifice and toil for humanity. We are invited to be as beginners, as he was when he conceived and wrote this humble book, The Philosophy of Freedom , the seed for the spiritualization of thinking, consciousness, and humanity and the earth in the future.

He made it possible. And even despite the fact that not his but Heidegger’s concept of the human triumphed over Europe and the whole globe, Steiner’s deed made it possible that, in the historical moment in which “free-

dom [lighted] up in the human being for a single cosmic moment,” freedom will not be lost. That, in face of the fiercest evil of annihilation, brought about by so many “commanders of nothingness” all over the earth in the course of the 20th century, “...in the very same moment the human being would” not any longer “dissolve away....” And therefore, indeed: “We are here pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes it possible for him to leap across the gulf.”

Though on the much-hoped-for large scale this battle didn’t take place at the end of the 20th century, I wanted

Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter Reviews

to tell you that it still may become a fruitful and joyful seed of new life in each of our hearts. This was the sole purpose of my sharing tonight, “to make philosophy worthy of this event.” I wanted to inscribe it here in my first working visit to France, Colmar, Alsace: to share with you some of my experiences in the last decades of the last century, in order to encourage you, too, to begin and become beginners of the now beginning, new Michaelic century.

This fall and winter, along with a new book The Spiritual Event of the 21st Century, and a new website, Dr. Ben-Aharon will give talks and workshops across North America. Individuals or groups interested in hosting an event can contact the editor (editor@anthroposophy.org).

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, 276 pgs.

Review by John Scott Legg

In 2008 Nicholas Carr inspired a good deal of discussion with a cover article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly with the blunt but provocative title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is an expansion of that article in both breadth and depth. Written for a popular audience, the book is a careful dissent from the mainstream thinking that prevails today, thinking not commonly inclined to seriously question , beyond the superficial, the true significance of technology in our lives, let alone how it may be affecting the very definition of what it means to be human. Carr does this, and so places himself on a small but important shelf of writers who have attempted to put the technological advances of humanity into a larger, more meaningful, perspective. Reading The Shallows, one comes to realize just how extremely important, and rare, such a perspective is these days.

Nicholas Carr is not, however, a critic of technology as such. Rather, his book can be seen as an attempt, sprung from the very mainstream thinking just mentioned, to reinsert the human being into our understanding of today’s world. He begins with his own story, the path that led him to write the Atlantic article and then this book. As is the case for many people of a certain age, the story of the growth and development of home computing and later, the internet, is reflected in Carr’s own biography. Hardly a Luddite, Carr briefly outlines the role of computers in his life history with no regrets and a good deal of informed appreciation. As a young man in 1986 he spent most of his and his wife’s savings on an early Macintosh. He recalls how, turning it on for the first time, he immediately found himself “smitten.” He bought a modem in 1990 and was among the first wave online. “When the Web went 2.0 around 2005,” Carr writes, “I went 2.0

Nicholas Carr

with it.” He registered his own online domain, started a blog, joined all the major social networking sites, and enjoyed constantly keeping up with the world in a way that felt to him both “new and liberating.” A few years later, sometime in 2007, a “serpent of doubt” entered Carr’s “info-paradise” and he “began to notice that the Net was exerting a much stronger and broader influence” over him than his old stand-alone PC ever had. His ability to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes had all but disappeared, and he found himself, even when away from his computer, longing to check his email, to do some Googling, to “be connected.” He came to realize that the very way that he used to think had changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Thus begins his journey. The book that follows is, at its heart, an attempt by the author to validate, and in some sense rescue, a picture of the human being that is becoming increasingly invisible in light of, among other things, the “intelligent” machines that first we program and “thereafter they program us.” It is also intended as an awakener. The shift from an “analog” to a “digital” world occurred so rapidly that it seems to have happened somewhere beneath our waking consciousness. This shift, of course, is still ongoing. Already today, and increasingly in coming generations, advanced forms of digital technology will be entwined with human beings from the cradle to the grave as a matter of course. What relationships are there between human beings and these technologies we have created? How does technology change us, change how we think? To what extent is it permissible to attribute intelligence to machines? What is the concept of the human being behind all these developments? Is Google making us stupid? These are some of the main questions Carr deals with in the ten chapters and four unnumbered “digressions” of The Shallows

After sharing his own story in the first chapter, Carr endeavors to establish a working picture of the human being. His starting point, not unsurprisingly, is today’s science of the brain. It is, after all, intelligence that is at issue here. Carr is an adept synthesizer of scientific research, and his book is further enhanced with brief, lively, and illustrative historical and mythological anecdotes. The story that introduces the book’s second chapter,

“The Vital Paths,” concerns the consequences of Friedrich Nietzsche’s purchase of his first typewriter in 1882. A friend, in a letter to Nietzsche, remarks on the subtle but recognizable change in the philosopher’s writing style after his compositional switch from pen to typewriter. “Our writing equipment,” Nietzsche observed in his reply, “takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

This is a useful tale for Carr’s theme and he will have occasion to revisit it. It is told by way of introducing one of the more exciting developments in neuroscience of the past thirty years, the long-delayed acknowledgment of the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s enormous—and admittedly little-understood—ability to “restructure and reorganize itself on the cellular level.” The idea is not new. Proposed in the late 19th century by William James and others, it was generally ignored until the 1970s and 80s. Today, the widespread acceptance of neuroplasticity has completely overturned the long-held academic view of the mature brain as being fixed and unchanging. The metaphor of the machine no longer applies: brains are “flexible...they change with experience, circumstance, and need.”

This is of course a scientific validation of an observation that is itself hardly new: namely, that human beings are never, by default, finished products, but have the innate and continuing capacity to improve, learn, adapt, change, evolve. Applying this understanding to how cells function has already led to new, ingenious treatments for people suffering from serious injuries, enabling them to quite literally heal themselves by, for instance, “coaxing [the] neurons and synapses to form new circuits” that then “take over the functions once carried out” by circuits in a damaged part of the brain. Good stuff indeed. There is, however, a downside to neuroplasticity that is important to Carr’s inquiry. Although this flexibility provides “an escape from genetic determinism” and “a loophole for free thought and free will,” it also, according to the experts—and with them Carr—“imposes its own form of determinism on our behavior.” That is, despite the capacity for flexibility revealed in the working of our brains, the tendency, once the neurons are functioning in a certain manner, is toward rigidity. And “bad habits,” Carr says, “can be in-

grained in our neurons as easily as good ones.”

It seems, then, that our ability to evolve mentally does not in any way guarantee, or even necessarily suggest, the direction this evolution will or will not take. The question then is what mental habits are we developing as we marry more and more of our lives and our day-to-day cognitive activities with the ephemeral “intelligence” of the internet ? In what direction are we headed? Carr wisely gets to this indirectly. A few chapters of intellectual history follow as he sketches a kind of evolution of consciousness through the developments in our “tools of the mind,” of which the internet is the uncontested pinnacle. Special emphasis is given to the advent, ascent, and apparent decline of that most humble and extraordinary invention, the book, which leads, naturally enough, into the story of the rise of the backlit screen as a primary method of communication.

By the last third of the book, beginning particularly with chapter 7, “The Juggler’s Brain,” we are led closer to the essential question of our humanity— our being human —in relation to the ever-prevalent technologies of our day. Considered from a certain widely held perspective, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that our online lives are making us more, not less, intelligent. Carr’s method of inquiry relies on both historical/literary sources and a broad array of relevant academic research, and he demonstrates convincingly that this perspective is rather superficial. Our much-lauded ability to “multitask” has been repeatedly demonstrated to have detrimental effects on creativity, reasoning, and memory. Similarly, the strengthening of “visual-spatial intelligence” that seems to accompany an increase in working with computers also seems to correlate with a weakening in “inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.” The Internet “is making us smarter,” Carr concludes, “only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards.”

That those standards are suprahuman becomes clear in the next, perhaps most telling, chapter of the book, “The Church of Google.” Here Carr introduces a human ideal that is in no way separate from the technology under discussion, but inevitably united with it for the ostensible betterment of humanity. From the perspective of those who would promote artificial intelligence (AI) as a worthy goal and solution to many of the world’s problems, the ideal is in no way human , but rather involves overcoming the flaws of an imperfect computing machine, namely the subjective human mind. The internet is itself a kind of artificial intelligence, as Google’s founders are well aware,

and Google’s “mission” to digitize all of the world’s “information” and make it accessible and searchable is very much in line with its AI roots. The force at work behind Google (characterized by its CEO as a “moral force”) is in essence the spirit of the world we enter when we go online. Here lives, although usually in the background, the idea that the human is a being whose intelligence and lot in life would be greatly improved were it supplanted with the artificial intelligence of a reliable computer. As one of Google’s founders told a Newsweek reporter in 2004, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Carr’s penultimate chapter, called “Search, Memory,” explores more fully the argument, exemplified by Google, that human intelligence can be massively improved by two things: digital access to all of the world’s information, and the “ultimate” search engine to scour said information. He does so by taking up the subject of memory, both human and computer. It certainly says a great deal about the situation we find ourselves in today that a chapter such as this one, which eloquently upholds the dignity and place of human memory as well as points out the differences between it and computer memory, so needed to be written. But it did, and it was, and for that I am grateful. The argument could be clothed in many ways, but Carr’s words are to the point:

Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not. Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes... Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal. The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits....

Today it is necessary to make such seemingly obvious distinctions. With The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has injected a homeopathic dose of informed and sensible caution into a mainstream that regards with scarcely a question each new technological advance as an inevitable boon to humanity. There is no doubt some truth to this, but it is not a full truth. Gaining a more comprehensive understanding of our situation, of where we are truly headed, and what this all means is not so simple. The Shallows is a much-needed contribution toward just this.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Richard Holmes; New York, Pantheon Books, 2008, 552 pgs.

Review by Frederick J. Dennehy

Be honest. If you had been a publisher in 2008 in search of promising topics in intellectual history, “romantic science” would not have appeared on your “A” list. Put Goethe to the side for a moment. Isn’t there a yawning abyss between the sciences and the humanities (let alone Romanticism), the “two cultures” whose “war” with one another C.P. Snow made famous more than fifty years ago? Who among the Romantics would have been angling for détente? William Blake, for whom “Newton’s sleep” was tantamount to epistemological hell? William Wordsworth, who tells us that “we murder to dissect?” John Keats, who at his literary coming-out party in 1816, probably awash in claret, remarked that Newton, in his Opticks, (as he later phrased it) tried to “unweave the rainbow?”

None of this is a problem for Richard Holmes, who may be the most renowned contemporary literary historian of the Romantic era. Holmes is impatient with what he terms the “rigid debates and boundaries—science vs. religion, science vs. the arts, science vs. traditional ethics.” What we need, says Holmes, are “a sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.”

We had these for a time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the movement dominated by Descartes, Bacon, Newton, and Locke, had ushered in a specialized form of knowledge of a fixed and obedient universe whose secrets had to be pried out through a patient application of mathematics and a modest technological extension of the senses. This first stirring was followed by what Coleridge termed the “second scientific revolution,” highlighted by the radical breakthroughs of William Herschel in astronomy and Humphry Davy in chemistry, and characterized generally by what Holmes describes as a “new imaginative intensity and excitement” in science, and “intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.”

Coleridge watched all this unfold with intense interest, and even some participation. Since he found con-

nections among everything, he saw the new science as “poetical” because it was “necessarily performed with the passion of Hope.” But if there are Romantic poets even more emblematic of this second revolution, they are Shelley, in his radical and passionate visioning of the future, and Byron, at least in his European superstar persona of the solitary and hungry seeker of experience, contemptuous of convention and open to the new.

What links the stories of this book—and Holmes tells wonderful stories—is the sheer magnitude of the possibilities of space, time, and individual achievement. The book begins with an account of the young Joseph Banks, the official botanist on James Cook’s voyage to Tahiti. Banks not only

reaps an overwhelming harvest of previously unheard-of plant specimens, but acquits himself extraordinarily well on a personal level. Not only does he avoid scurvy and venereal disease, but he manages to learn the native language, and is instrumental in keeping the peace between the islanders and the overbearing British crewmen. Banks returns to Britain as a hero, is soon elected to membership in the Royal Society, and eventually becomes its president. He is the connective tissue of the narratives. He knows personally almost all the principal actors featured in the book, and his life spans almost the whole of the second scientific revolution.

Holmes then introduces one of the two major protagonists of his book, William Herschel, a German émigré who, with his equally gifted sister, Caroline, spent virtually his whole adult life in Britain. His development of the reflecting telescope enabled him to see farther into the skies than anyone had before him. Herschel is the “watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken” called up by Keats in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” He discovered the planet Uranus. The discovery so impressed King George III that he provided an annuity for Herschel that enabled him to devote the remainder of his life to watching and mapping every segment of the sky, becoming, along with Caroline, a true intimate of the heavens. It was Herschel who recognized the hazy stellar clouds of the night skies as universes in their own right, and came to perceive the cosmos as composed of an immense succession of galaxies. Herschel changed forever the ordered, reductive picture of the universe that had emerged from the first scientific revolution. He was also fervently convinced that humanity was not alone as an intelligent species, and that there were other, perhaps countless, “civilizations” or other forms of life on other planets in other galaxies throughout the immeasurable wideness of space.

Interspersed with Holmes’s accounts of William Herschel and the other principal figure of his book, Humphry Davy, are stories of sheer adventure. The first material incarnation of the human dream of flight was ballooning, which began in earnest in 1783. Initial experiments were promising, and in late November of that year the first piloted flight, carrying two men in a balloon designed by Joseph Montgolfier, rose over Paris to a height of 900 feet, drifted across the Seine, and landed some 27 minutes later to a wild, cheering crowd. Ten days later, Alexandre Charles made the first ascent in a hydrogen balloon, which rose to a height of 10,000 feet in only ten minutes. Charles later observed:

I was the first man ever to see the sun set twice in the same day. The cold was intense and dry, but supportable. I had acute pain in my right ear and jaw. But I examined all my sensations calmly. I could hear myself living, so to speak.... Never has a man felt so solitary, so sublime—and so utterly terrified.

Within one-half hour Charles was back on Earth, only three miles from where he had taken off—the first solo flight in history. He never flew again.

The remainder of the chapter centers on the race to cross the English Channel first, either from France to England or England to France. It is reminiscent of the time of Lindbergh, and every bit as exciting, bristling with the names of sadly forgotten heroes like Lunardi, Pilatre, Blanchard, and Sadler. Benjamin Franklin was fascinated by the phenomenon of ballooning, and even Dr. Samuel Johnson was an enthusiast. It was emblematic of the new face of discovery, which might be called scientia gratia scientia , if one bears in mind that the word “scientist” itself would not be in general use for another fifty years. In fact, if you had wanted to acquaint yourself with the latest findings in the field in the early nineteenth century and went to the nearest library, you would have been directed to the “Natural Philosophy” section.

These were days before there was an artificial separation between the arts and the sciences, before there were the academic “watertight compartments” that Owen Barfield speaks of in Worlds Apart. Holmes tells the story of a young Scotsman named Mungo Park who, in the 1790s, with the encouragement of Joseph Banks, set out to explore West Africa. Park, at the age of twenty-one, was a medical doctor, and also a poet, a student of astronomy and botany, and a mountain climber. On his first expedition to West Africa, his unthinking self-image as the discoverer, the gift-giver, and the apostle of civilization was reversed. Near death, he was rescued by a family of women, and realized that he, the heroic white man, was “in reality, the lonely, ignorant, pitiable, motherless and unloved outcast. It was he who came and sat under their tree, and drank at their river.”

Park was the quintessential Romantic explorer, endlessly curious about the new terrain, the new species of plants and animals, the new peoples. His final journey to Africa was in 1805. About 500 miles downstream from Timbuktu, he and his companions were either drowned, killed when they came ashore, or—it will never be known—swallowed into captivity. Park was last sighted jumping into the Congo River holding one of his com-

panions in his arms. There is no further explanation, and nothing of him has survived except an astronomical almanac and a single sword belt.

It is hardly surprising that Holmes devotes a chapter to Frankenstein, the product of a late-night wager among the poets Byron and Shelley and Shelley’s wife, Mary. Mary was the undisputed winner, although her brilliant speculative novel has been forever popularized into a Gothic monster story—a transformation that began more than 100 years before the James Whale film starring Boris Karloff.

Frankenstein is in reality an exploration into the farther realms of the theory of vitalism. Mary Shelley imagined a corpse dissection in reverse: organic life generated by a voltaic jolt. That was the premise. Whether the animated creature would have a soul, whether it would be human, was the question, and the answer was a resounding yes. Even though the creature lacks the spark of heaven, he evolves at breathtaking speed through a panorama of anthropological stages, learning to use fire, to cook, to read words, and then to study Plutarch, Milton, and Goethe. The more he develops, the more he incurs the need for companionship and love, finally begging his tormented creator, Victor Frankenstein, to create a wife for him. Keats’s “vale of soul-making,” it seems, cannot be without friendship and love. Without companionship there is a “terrible corrosive and destructive solitude” that will eventually turn the creature against the rest of humanity, but in full self-knowledge.

If the book has a representative hero it is Humphry Davy, another polymath—a prolific poet as well as an original experimenter and inventor. In the solitude of his library he encounters not only the secrets of chemistry (discovering elements such as sodium and chlorine), but the virtually unlimited powers of the human mind. Davy always follows his sense of wonder. The first of Holmes’s chapters on Davy centers on his consuming experimentation with nitrous oxide—often one-on-one with young women. Although he is discouraged at the prospect of its therapeutic benefits, he recognizes (but does not exploit) its power as an anesthetic. But Davy was no self-insulated weaver of theoretical webs. He worked feverishly to devise a safety lamp for coal miners, which saved the lives of countless nineteenth-century British miners. Once Davy was entranced by a project, nothing could stop him. He typically initiated his chemical experiments on himself, and the dangers of unconsciousness, poisoning, or explosion could not dissuade him from pursuing his questions

to the end. He was a mentor as well; for more than a decade his assistant was Michael Faraday, one of the very few nineteenth-century scientists to become greater than Davy himself.

There simply was no chasm for Davy between art and science, feeling and thinking. For him, the genius of Newton was not different in kind from the genius of Shakespeare or Michelangelo. And in a sentence that would have delighted Georg Kühlewind, Davy said that “the perception of truth is almost always as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty.”

For Holmes, Romantic science is a prelude to Victorian science, the era of astronomer John Herschel (the son of William), Michael Faraday, and Charles Darwin. Holmes sees Darwin as the great inheritor of the second scientific revolution’s expanded understanding of time as well as its divestment from the stale, moldy notions of a calculating, anthropomorphic God.

What this magnificent book lacks—sadly—is anything approaching a recognition of the significance of Goethe, whose contributions to the philosophy of science are only beginning to be recognized. And although Holmes is a biographer of Coleridge, there is no hint of the overwhelmingly original genius that Owen Barfield discovered in Coleridge’s prose writing and presented in his What Coleridge Thought. Coleridge glimpsed new dimensions of mind in his notions of the “esemplastic imagination” and the universal significance of polarity. Goethe went even further in his original understanding of light, the archetypal plant, and meaning as multiplicity in unity. In their daring and in their sheer proleptic intelligence they represent, more than did Darwin, the culmination of Romantic science. Goethe in particular, of course, was the precursor of Rudolf Steiner, who, as Owen Barfield showed us, was the epitome of Romanticism come of age, both the most gifted and the most neglected inheritor of the Age of Wonder.

Holmes’s incomplete portrait of Coleridge, and, much more, his virtual omission of Goethe, strike this reader as a burnt portion—singed and brown—in the text of one of the pages of a treasured text. But, The Age of Wonder is a breathtaking exploration of a time when art, science, and spirit grew together in one another’s light, when the veil was lifted from time and space, and the old presumed limits of our lives became distant illusions. Wonder is at once the most simple and advanced of all instruments of discovery.

Renewing the Foundation Year

Excerpts from a interview with Brian Gray of Rudolf Steiner College

being human – You lead Rudolf Steiner College’s Foundations in Anthroposophy. What does it aim to accomplish?

BG – We want to find meaning and purpose in life, but suffer from homesickness and amnesia. We can’t remember who we are, where we came from, who our friends are, or why we’re here. Our ‘prenatal intentions’ elude us; we’re not even sure there is a spiritual world. We have longings, dreams, ideas, visions, hopes, aspirations, and want to focus them toward achieving our goals. We want to change the world and work with a community of loving friends. We want to share our talents, insights and creativity, and develop new skills. We want to find our passions and do what we love. How do we find our way? Our program helps students wrestle with such questions and provides tools and insights to help individuals search for their own answers.

bh – Just how are you changing your program?

BG – Rudolf Steiner College offers one of the few full-time Foundation Programs in the world. Students are amazed to find how quickly they change and find their true nature and vocational interests. It is quite beautiful to witness their transformations. But there has always been a creative tension in trying to serve the needs of those who want living experiences of anthroposophy and its incredible gifts, and those who want to become Waldorf teachers. In 2011-2012, we are clearing pathways for both groups to be fully served within the same program. The fall semester offers comprehensive explorations of many aspects including the basic books, Rudolf Steiner’s life and work, Parzival, biography and life cycles, inner work and phenomenology, and the arts. In the second semester, students may enter the track “Deepening Anthroposophy,” which allows greater depth and research into the esoteric core of anthroposophy and its applications, or students may enter the “Waldorf Teacher Preparation” track and focus on child development, Waldorf curriculm and arts, and skill building needed to

become a Waldorf teacher. Both will offer extensive coursework in the arts, which are key to personal transformation. We are also compressing each semester into 14 weeks of classes held three and one-half days per week, all day Monday-Wednesday and Thursday mornings. This will allow students to breathe, study and prepare assignments, work part-time jobs and spend time with friends and family. We offer evening elective classes in star wisdom, eurythmy, esoteric Christianity, and will hold several intensives on Thursday afternoon and Friday (and some weekend workshops) including biodynamic gardening, music history, evolution of Western consciousness, and projective geometry. The electives and intensives are designed to meet the students’ interests and allow them to pace themselves through the year. The three and one-half day week allows us to reduce tuition and make the Foundation Program more affordable in these difficult times, without losing the advantages of richness and continuity of the full-time experience.

bh – Rudolf Steiner’s “basic” or fundamental books—are they still so important?

BG – The wisdom (Sophia) an initiate bestows to humanity cannot be fully accessed until one hundred years have passed. Then human souls have ripened sufficiently to open and begin to embrace her. This became real for me when we held a centenary celebration at RSC for The Philosophy of Freedom, in 1994; from that year the book has became more and more transparent and accessible to everyone!

bh – What else is involved in the studies?

BG – Five attributes radiate through anthroposophy. Exploring and pursuing these with artistic balance and intention can set the stage for a healthy Foundation Program. Few spiritual movements demonstrate all five attributes so fully as does anthroposophy. Adult education can become ‘transformative’ when all five dynamically guide its shaping. This is our guiding star for the Foundation Program at Rudolf Steiner College.

In the full interview (online at anthroposophy.org under “Articles”) Brian Gray gives further background and a concise appreciation of each of Steiner’s basic books. See also the RSC ad on the back cover for program details and contacts.

2011 Annual Conference and Members Meeting

October 14-16 – Portland, Oregon

We are a bridge Between what is past And future existence; The present is an instant: Is momentary bridge. Spirit become soul In enfolding matter Is from the past; Soul becoming spirit

In germinal vessels Is on the path to the future.

Grasp what is to come

Through what is past; Have hope of what is growing Through what has emerged. And so apprehend

Existence in growing; And so apprehend What is growing in what is.

~ Rudolf Steiner

from Unbornness by Peter Selg

With permission from SteinerBooks

Keynote Speaker

Since 1984, Virginia Sease has been a member of the Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland. A Fulbright scholar at the Univeristy of Tubingen with a PhD in German Literature from USC, she has been a Waldorf class teacher and college professor, and helped establish the Waldorf Institute of Southern California. From 1991 - 2001 she led the Section for the Arts of Eurythmy, Speech and Music at the Goetheanum, and she is responsible for its Anthroposophical Studies in English program.

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s birth

At this conference we want to understand how what Rudolf Steiner brought to the world is crucial to a future worth living, and how that vision can remain living and evolve. We will explore the contribution we each can make to gain and fulfill such a vision. Our explorations will proceed thoughtfully, artistically, and out of our own life experience. The goal of our time together is that we gain inspiration to bring something new into our life and into the future. Our task in evolution is to become more fully human. Anthroposophy supports this evolutionary path.

Sun Forces Penetrating the Earth

• artwork by Robert Logsdon

How can we create a future worthy of the human being?

How can we create a future worthy of the human being?

Friday, October 14 – Sunday, October 16, 2011

Portland Waldorf School

2300 SE Harrison Street, Milwaukie, OR 97222 • 503.654.2200

Friday • October 14

5:00 pm Registration and reception

7:00 pm An Evening with Rudolf Steiner

Saturday • October 15

9 am Foundation Stone Meditation, an offering by Lemniscate Arts

9:20 am Virginia Sease : “Rudolf Steiner’s Vision for the Human Being: Love Manifested through Spiritual Activity”

10:30 am Break

11 am Conversation Groups

12 pm Speech with Kim Snyder-Vine

12:30 pm Lunch at the school

1:30 – 2 pm Singing with Diane Rowley

2 – 3:30 pm Workshops How are we creating a future worthy of a human being? (Choose from ten – details are at right)

3:30 – 4 pm Break

4 – 4:30 pm Sharing Workshop experiences and bringing responses to the question: How are we creating a future worthy of a human being?

4:30 – 5 pm Speech with Kim Snyder-Vine

5 – 5:15 pm Virginia Sease – Closing words

5:15 pm Foundation Stone Meditation, an offering by Lemniscate Arts

6 pm Dinner at the school

7:30 pm Rudolf Steiner’s Birthday Bash!

Sunday • October 16

9 am – 1 pm Annual General Meeting

The Annual Members’ Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in America will be held on Sunday, October 16, 2011 at the Portland Waldorf School, 2300 SE Harrison Street, Milwaukie, Oregon. The meeting will begin at 9:00 a.m. and conclude at 1:00 p.m. — Members are invited to submit proposals to be considered for the meeting. Items for consideration may be addressed to the General Council and must be submitted in writing and sent via first-class mail postmarked by August 29, 2011 at the latest. Send your request to the Society office at 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104. Thank you.

Workshop Details

How are we creating a future worthy of the human being?

1. The Human Terrain: Exploring the Influence of the Four Ethers in Health and Illness – Dr. Paul Kalnins

Modern medicine is founded upon the belief that health and illness are determined by the activities occurring within the body’s cells. In recent years, research has revealed that the extracellular matrix, or the space between the cells, may be an even more important determinant of cellular function. The matrix forms a vast web, connecting all the body’s individual cells, tissues, and organs together into a comprehensive whole. This workshop will explore the basic features of the extracellular matrix, and how imaginative perception reveals it to be the working ground of the four ethers discussed by Rudolf Steiner in relation to anthroposophic medicine.

2. Working with Christian Rosenkreutz and Master Jesus – Linda Connell and MariJo Rogers

Rudolf Steiner was clear that relationships are at the heart of anthroposophy. Anthroposophy enables us not only to know about leading figures in human evolution, such as Christian Rosenkreutz and Master Jesus, but to develop living relationships with them. Through his years of lecturing and writing, Rudolf Steiner spoke often about these two individualities, their importance for humanity’s spiritual progress, and how to develop a relationship with them that can deepen and enliven our daily lives. MariJo and Linda will provide initial seed talks followed by conversation among participants.

3. The Future of Waldorf Education – Torin Finser

What is being asked of us in the years ahead in terms of the needs of our students, parents, current trends in education in the U.S.? How can we as teachers and parents best prepare ourselves to meet these present and future challenges? How can we better foster collaboration between Waldorf schools and the broader anthroposophical movement in general and the Anthroposophical Society in particular? Rather than just “react” to events, can we find new ways to support initiative?

4. Working with Questions – Leslie Loy, Luc Schloss, and members of the Youth Section

For some time, the Youth Section has been working with different social technologies to understand how open social spaces can be created where new ideas can emerge and where the future can be listened to. Our recent collective work has intersected around moving questions

into actions. How can we learn to listen, develop, reframe and move questions into an impetus for change? This workshop will be collectively developed during the course of the Youth Section’s event prior to the Society’s conference and be offered up as an experiential journey.

5. Eurythmy Forms – Anna Marie Baeschlin

This workshop with master teacher Anna Marie Baeschlin will focus on the eurythmy forms given by Rudolf Steiner, through his work with Edith Maryon, in Eurythmy in the English Language. Anna Marie is recognized throughout Europe as one of the leading eurythmists today. This is her second trip to the U.S., and her first visit to the west coast. This unique opportunity is open to all.

6. Holding the Vision for the Cultural/Spiritual Sphere – Section for the Social Sciences

Rudolf Steiner contributed a wealth of insights about a healthy life in the realm of economics and in the rights sphere. His most developed innovations, however, were in the cultural/spiritual life. What was his vision of the cultural/spiritual sphere? How does this life manifest today? How can we, as individuals and together, aid in the necessary transformation?

7. Biodynamics & the Promise of the Food Movement – Robert Karp

Biodynamics is an intimate part of a growing food movement that has become a genuine source of spiritual, social and economic renewal in America. This workshop will explore the esoteric dimension of this movement, its evolving forms, and the role that we each can play in helping this movement fulfill its promise in our lives and communities.

8. At the Intersection of Money and Spirit – John Bloom

Whether by its presence or absence, money affects our lives on a daily basis. It connects us to the economic world. How can we understand money and our relationship to it well enough to cultivate resonance and reciprocity between our inner and outer lives? In this workshop, we will look at this money journey as a basis for co-creating the new economy.

9. A Bridge Across the Threshold: Creating a Living Connection – Marianne Dietzel

How do we let go of someone we were close to after they have crossed the threshold, while at the same time feeling a nearness to them as a spiritual being? Experience a condensed exercise in staying connected through the moods of nature, using gesture painting.

10. What are the New Mysteries? – Matt “Matre” Sawaya and Kathleen Morse

What is initiation in our modern times? How are the new mysteries emerging through our daily experiences? How can modern art forms, or new arts forms—ranging from music to the social arts—help us to begin to perceive these initiations into the New Mysteries? This will be an exploratory, experiential workshop.

Registration Information

Conference Fees: Member fee for the conference is $130; non-member $160; youth under 25 and seniors over 65, $50. The conference fee covers all lectures and workshops, the Friday evening performance and reception, and the Saturday evening Birthday Bash. Saturday lunch and dinner are an additional $15 each. If you need financial assistance, please contact Marian León at the Society’s office, 734.662.9355. A few scholarships are available. Donations to our scholarship fund will be gratefully accepted. The scholarship fund will be used to enable others to attend the conference.

Cancellations: Refunds of the conference fee, minus a $35 processing fee, are available if requested by Monday, October 17th.

Travel: For air travel, you will be flying into PDX [www.portofportland. com]. There is easy, direct transportation all around the city and you can use the MAX system [www.trimet.org] from the airport straight to the hotel and from the hotel to the school. If you are driving, directions and information about parking will be provided in your registration packet.

Housing: A block of rooms has been reserved at the Hotel deLuxe for $109 per night. For this discounted rate, please make your reservation by September 12 and refer to “Steiner” when booking.

Hotel deLuxe [www.hoteldeluxeportland.com]

729 SW 15th Avenue

Portland, OR 97205

503.219.2094

For private housing or sleeping bag space call Valerie Hope at 503.775.0778 (email: valerieannhpdx@aol.com) beginning in September.

Meals: A light supper reception will be offered Friday evening from 5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. The lunch and dinner on Saturday will be served at the school and cost $15 for each meal. Sign up on the registration form and indicate a vegetarian or non-vegetarian option. All other meals will be on your own. There is a restaurant in the hotel, and others nearby, for breakfast.

Single event registration will be available on-site only, space permitting. Register online at www.anthroposophy.org.

THE FOUNDATION STONE MEDITATION

A Spiritual Foundation for the Human Future

by Rudolf Steiner, translated and with a preface by Daisy Aldan

The German text of the Foundation Stone Meditation reproduced here is as given by Rudolf Steiner to the members of the General Anthroposophical Society and as published in the Nachrichtenblatt, No.1, January 13, 1924. — The translator gratefully acknowledges the collaboration of Ingeborg Maresca.

PREFACE

Itwas George De Ris who first presented the Foundation Stone Meditation of Rudolf Steiner to me when, as a new member of the Anthroposophical Society, I began that ‘voyage’ into anthroposophy. It has never ceased to be a source of healing, strength and revelation in the crises of life. Therefore, it has been a special joy for me to add my translation to those already existing, in the hope that it may shed another small light on this awe-inspiring work which will continue to reveal aspects of itself for generations to come. May I urge readers to use the translation only in conjunction with the original.

The original Foundation Stone was a double pentagon-dodecahedron made of copper which was laid into the ground for the first Goetheanum building in Dornach, Switzerland. Ten years later, a tragic fire destroyed the nearly completed building. In 1923, at the Christmas Foundation meeting, Rudolf Steiner pre sented a ‘spiritual Foundation Stone: the ‘Dodecahedron of Man,’ as he called it, to the members of the newly-formed General Anthroposophical Society, which was to initiate a new phase in the revelation of the Mysteries of mankind. The meditation is mantric, that is, a spiritual revelation in which sound, form and rhythm integrate with the esoteric meaning which lies in layers of evocative multiplicity.

The mantram has four major divisions, three of which are in parallel structure, concerned with the threefold aspect of the human being, as a being of willing, feeling and thinking. A progression is in process. If the three

divisions are placed side by side, the lines may also be read across, and there will occur an experience as of music, with major and minor themes, commingling vertically and horizontally, which directions in subtle variations are evident throughout. Indeed, penetration into the complex structure will reveal a pentagonal dodecahedron implicit in the number of lines, directions indicated, etc.

Part four veers off into its own direction, yet encompasses, concludes and unifies the whole. Much more may be said of the intricate inner structure of the work, but the above will indicate the potent workmanship and artistry of its author.

It is not my intention in this brief introduction to enter into a study in depth of the far-reaching relationship of the Foundation Stone Meditation with the Lord’s Prayer, or with the Macrocosmic Lord’s Prayer given by Rudolf Steiner on the occasion in 1913 of the laying in the ground of the Foundation Stone for the first Goetheanum in Dornach, or with Knowledge of Higher Worlds, The Philosophy of Freedom , The Letters to the Members, and other works, but merely through direct concentration on the mantram itself, to point out some of the central directions of meaning which readers may then further pursue.

Itis important to bear in mind that the meditation is addressed, not to mankind in general, but to the human soul.

In the first verse of part one, the soul is reminded that it has its existence within the limbs of the human being, the instruments of will, which bear him through the world of space. It is not physical space alone which is here referred to but space which leads into the being of the Spirit-ocean. The limbs may here be considered as arms, legs, and in a certain aspect, the head which is a kind of metamorphosed limb. A dynamic of direction is implied which makes the immediacy of the meditant’s identifica-

tion with the process of the mantram possible.

The head, mirroring the vault of heaven, is directed upward to the cosmos and thereby may connect with cosmic existence. The arms extend to the periphery in an exchange with the world—giving and receiving. The legs meet earth, and as they walk in the footsteps of one’s biography, they create world destiny. To be aware of this is to begin liberation from imprisoning substance.

The soul is reminded to live in remembrance of Spirit. This does not imply that a horizontal line of memory of past events of earthly life be traced, but that a vertical direction should be charted to the origin of the soul itself within the breast of the Divine wherein it still has existence. The soul was involved in majestic Creation, and in that process, the individual began to evolve out of the great I AM. If the past is drawn into the present, the present with its vast potential may be enriched, and thereby, the future also is drawn into the point of presence. Thus the present is redeemed from fleeting insignificance and despair. The Self may be experienced as a participant in eternal world-being and becoming.

Inverse two of part one is revealed that He who is referred to as ‘The Father Spirit of Heights’ descends into the depths to bring forth creative being—as a ceramist might bring forth and mold the amorphous clay with care and sensibility, imbuing it with his very essence.

The Spirits of Form are exhorted to sound forth the creative clarion call of shaping in such a way that the depths may respond, for nothing exists in isolation and that which is formed is created by the loving encounter with its creator. In this way, mankind itself has its origin in the Divine Thought and is responsively defined by that Divine.

Already the Elemental worlds of Spirit are aware of this great truth which is heard in the East, heard in the West, heard in the North, heard in the South. Those locations must not be conceived of as physical geography: They have particular esoteric significance and form a balancing cross, which image may serve as a support for the knowledge which is to penetrate into human souls. Through remembering their origin in Spirit, those souls will be enhanced by the ever-waxing revelation of the truth expressed.

THE FOUNDATION STONE

Human Soul!

You live within the limbs, Which bear you through the world of space

Into the Spirit-Ocean-Being:

Live remembering Spirit

In soul-depths, Where in majestic sway

Of World-Creator-Being

Your own I

In God’s I

Is begotten:

And you will live truly

In the Being of the Human World.

For there reigns the Father-Spirit of Heights

In World-depths, creating life.

You Spirits of Force

Let from the heights resound

What in the depths an echo finds; This speaks:

Of the Divine is Mankind born.

This hear the Spiritual Beings in East, West, North, South: May human beings hear it!

DER GRUNDSTEIN

Menschenseele!

Du lebest in den Gliedern, Die dich durch die Raumeswelt

In das Geistesmeereswesen tragen:

Übe Geist-Erinnern

In Seelentiefen, Wo in waltendem

Weltenschöpfer-Sein

Das eigne Ich

Im Gottes-Ich

Erweset;

Und du wirst wahrhaft leben

Im Menschen-Welten-Wesen.

Denn es waltet der Vater-Geist der Höhen

In den Weltentiefen Sein-erzeugend:

Ihr Kräfte-Geister

Lasset aus den Höhen erklingen, Was in den Tiefen das Echo findet;

Dieses spricht:

Aus dem Göttlichen weset die Menschheit.

Das hören die Geister in Ost, West, Nord, Sud: Menschen mögen es hören.

n part two, the human soul is again addressed. It is reminded that not only does it have its existence in the limbs, but also in the pulsating of heart and lungs, the middle region. In this rhythmic beat and flow—diastole/ systole, inbreathing/outbreathing, expansion/contraction, the soul may grow conscious of Time—not merely chronological time, but the eternal rhythms of life and death. Meditation will reveal the soul’s relationship to all cosmic being: the rotation of the planets and the fixed stars, day and night, the seasonal cycles, the passing years, the great epochs. It will breathe with oceans, winds, tempests, and will know itself as a being of feeling which makes of it an individual.

on Spirit,” urges the mantram, in conscious equanimity, and through deeds rising out of the heart’s unsullied feeling, the union of the higher self with the I of evolving worlds will be revealed. Then will be overcome the tendencies to lose oneself in the flood of excessive sentimentality or to rigidify in the ice-cold regions of repression: in composure born of right

meditation, with a sense of measure, creative deeds of love in community with free individuals will become possible. This community entered reality when the Christ united Himself with earthly destiny, and He now moves horizontally within the earth-sphere bestowing grace so that human beings may rise upright.

The Spirits of Light are beseeched to allow that which the East has to offer—spiritual insight—to ignite the defining capacity of the West, thereby creating a harmonious Middle. Through the sacrifice of the Christ —His union with earthly being—the twin evils of death—dissolution and rigidification—were transformed. Death becomes Life.

Already the beings of the world of Spirit in East, West, North, South, know this, and now it is time for human beings to grasp it. Through the free act of meditation, consciousness will dawn and as that dawn breaks, despair and death may be consumed.

“And death shall have no dominion,” as John Donne wrote, “for the Christ Light overcomes death.” Thus, “Death itself shall die.”

Human Soul!

You live in the heart-lung throbbing, Which guides you through the time-rhythm

Into the feeling of your own soul’s being:

Live meditating on Spirit

In soul equanimity, Where the surging World-evolving acts

Your own I

With cosmic I Unite;

And you will feel truly

In Human-Soul-Creating.

For there reigns the Christ will in the earth-sphere

In Cosmic rhythm gracing souls.

You Light-Spirits

Let from the East ignite

What through the West takes form: This speaks:

In the Christ, death becomes life.

This hear the Spiritual Beings in East, West, North, South: May human beings hear it.

Menschenseele!

Du lebest in dem Herzens-Lungen-Schlage, Der dich durch den Zeitenrhythmus

In’s eigne Seelenwesensfühlen leitet:

Übe Geist-Besinnen

Im Seelengleichgewichte, Wo die wogenden

Welten-Werde-Taten

Das eigne Ich

Dem Welten-Ich

Vereinen;

Und du wirst wahrhaft fühlen

Im Menschen-Seelen-Wirken.

Denn es waltet der Christus-Wille im Umkreis

In den Weltenrhythmen Seelen-begnadend;

Ihr Lichtes-Geister

Lasset vom Osten befeuern, Was durch den Westen sich formet;

Dieses spricht:

In dem Christus wird Leben der Tod.

Das hören die Geister in Ost, West, Nord, Sud: Menschen mögen es hören.

“Meditate

Inverse one, part three, the soul is addressed for the third time. and is reminded that not only does it realize existence in the limbs and in the throb of heart and lungs (will and feeling), but also in the realm of thinking, the calm reposing head

In exercising control over all haphazard meanderings, the soul may attune itself to the reception of universal thinking which makes human being possible. As the Great Poem, Cosmic Thought graces mankind. Through expanding Vision (in the larger sense of that word) to encompass spiritual reality, the growth of moral and creative intuition becomes possible. The soul recognizes itself present in that reality as the physical body is present in the world of nature.

The charting and defining aims of the Divine and the individual’s own part in that process, clarify themselves. Light from universal thinking pours in to stir the will forces which are needed for evolving acts of destiny. Freedom from compulsive action, and deeds of love emerge through ennobled thinking. This may be designated as

union with the Holy Spirit. Past, present and future become that pinpoint of conscious being. Illusion gives way to truth as what is perceived in all worlds unites with primal reality by means of thinking. The universal thought is ever present, awaiting the encounter with the vision of the human being which alone may individualize its essence.

The very Spirits of the Soul are petitioned to formulate in the depths the question which will draw forth an answer from the heights, for only the right question can accomplish this, Parsifal could become the Grail King only when he had learned to ask the appropriate question out of the depths of being.

Then the Heights will answer, and they will say: The soul may awake to know the universal thoughts of Spirit.

In Elemental worlds of Spirit this is known: in East, West, North and South. Through enlarging Vision to encompass spiritual being, mankind will grow in spiritual stature, and earthly existence itself thereby will be ennobled.

Human Soul!

You live in the reposing head

Which out of eternal springs

Unfolds for you Cosmic thoughts: Live with Spirit-Vision

In thought’s tranquility, Where the eternal goals of Gods

Grant

Cosmic-Beings’-Light

To your own I

For free willing;

And you will think truly Out of founts of Human-Spirit.

For there reign the Spirit-Cosmic-Thoughts

In the World-Being, Light imploring.

You Soul-Spirits

Let from the depths be prayed for What from the heights is granted: This speaks:

In the Spirit’s Cosmic Thoughts the soul awakens. This hear the Spiritual Beings in East, West, North, South: May human beings hear it.

Menschenseele!

Du lebest im ruhenden Haupte, Das dir aus Ewigkeitsgründen

Die Weltgedanken erschliesset:

Übe Geist-Erschauen

In Gedanken-Ruhe, Wo die ew’gen Götterziele

Welten-Wesens-Licht

Dem eignen Ich

Zu freiem Wollen

Schenken;

Und du wirst wahrhaft denken

In Menschen-Geistes-Gründen.

Denn es walten des Geistes Weltgedanken

Im Weltenwesen Licht-erflehend:

Ihr Seelen-Geister

Lasset aus den Tiefen erbitten, Was in den Hohen erhoret wird;

Dieses spricht:

In des Geistes Weltgedanken erwachet die Seele. Das hören die Geister in Ost, West, Nord, Sud: Menschen mögen es hören.

n part four, a new rhythm and impulse spiral in as revelation of how all that has been declared has been made possible, We are told that, “At the turning point of time,” that is, at that crucial point of midnight in humanity’s evolution, that time when all ends and all may begin—the Christ Being entered earthly existence. Utter debasement was rampant and the corrupt soul of mankind stood on the brink of annihilation. But that fall had run its course and there was a breakthrough from spiritual worlds: Daybreak! “The day breaks and the shadows flee away...”

This day-Light began to stream into human hearts, for the Sun-Spirit came not for an elite but for all humanity—for simple shepherds whose hearts held innocent love, as well as for great rulers—Kings with golden wisdom. Now all might meet in equality around the Cradle of the Child—the I AM who brought redemption, renewal and the seed of freedom and individuality.

The mantram addresses this Majesty directly: “Christ-Sun” / Son, imploring Him to lead present humanity to flower from that seed of awakening planted at that turning point of time.

“Bring love into our hearts, wisdom into our heads,” so that through our hearts’ warmth, we may be receptive to those living thoughts which will stream into our will, enabling us to carve out our destiny and that of the world in harmony, in dignity, in truth and beauty.

Indeed, this might become reality if all mankind took into its heart and consciousness the Foundation Stone Meditation, for it is a healing source of strength and inspiration, a path which leads to a transubstantiation.

Rudolf Steiner placed this mantra as a seed in fertile soil of hearts: May human beings tend it!

Daisy Aldan Dornach,1979

At time’s turning point

The Cosmic Spirit-Light entered Into earthly life-stream.

Night-darkness

Had ended reign.

Day-bright Light

Rayed within human souls. Light

Which warms

The simple shepherd-hearts, Light

Which enlightens

The wise heads of Kings.

Godly Light

Christ-Sun

Warm Our hearts

Enlighten Our heads

That good may become

What we From hearts found

What we From heads

Direct with single will.

In der Zeiten Wende

Trat das Welten-Geistes-Licht

In den irdischen Wesensstrom; Nacht-Dunkel

Hatte ausgewaltet; Taghelles Licht

Erstrahlte in Menschenseelen; Licht, Das erwärmet

Die armen Hirtenherzen; Licht, Das erleuchtet

Die weisen Konigshaupter.

Göttliches Licht, Christus-Sonne, Erwärme

Unsere Herzen, Erleuchte

Unsere Häupter, Dass gut werde, Was wir

Aus Herzen gründen, Was wir

Aus Häuptern

Zielvoll führen

Wollen.

The Anthroposophical Society in America

General Council Members

Torin Finser (General Secretary)

MariJo Rogers (General Secretary)

James Lee (at large)

Virginia McWilliam (at large)

Regional Council Representatives

Ann Finucane (Eastern Region)

Dennis Dietzel (Central Region)

Joan Treadaway (Western Region)

Marian León, Director of Administration & Member Services

Jerry Kruse, Treasurer being human is published four times a year by the Anthroposophical Society in America

1923 Geddes Avenue

Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797

Tel. 734.662.9355

Fax 734.662.1727

www.anthroposophy.org

Editor: John H. Beck

Associate Editors: Judith Soleil, Fred Dennehy

Cover design & layout: Seiko Semones (S2 Design)

Please send submissions, questions, and comments to: editor@anthroposophy.org or to the postal address above.

©2011 The Anthroposophical Society in America. The responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

News / Events

Living Questions, at Threefold

Exploring the Role of Individual & Community in Spiritual Scientific Research

Threefold Educational Center, Spring Valley, NY, has announced a Research Symposium for September 30–October 2, 2011. The symposium will include the presentation of individual research findings in different content areas, artistic offerings, and conversation groups hosted by the Sections of the School for Spiritual Science. “Taking up the Michaelmas mood, participants will engage with the burning questions of today and explore how we might imagine, form, and cultivate the spaces necessary for research that will address such challenges.” — The Symposium will be preceded by a week-long residency by Threefold’s Researchers in Residence for 2011, eurythmist Dorothea Mier and sculptor and geometrician Frank Chester. Their continued cross-disciplinary conversations illustrate an important approach to researching common questions. Dorothea and Frank will present their work and methods Saturday evening, October 1. — In addition, during the week before the symposium, a variety of working groups are invited to utilize the facilities and participate in creating an interdisciplinary research atmosphere, cross-pollinating different themes and topics.

Any individual or group interested in learning more about holding a pre-symposium meeting or displaying their research during the symposium may contact Jordan Walker at Jordan@threefold.org. See threefold.org/research for more details.

September 30 – October 2, 2011

Threefold Educational Ctr, Spring Valley, NY

WRC Visits San Diego

After a day and a half working on their own, members of the Western Regional Council met with the San Miguel Branch at the San Diego Waldorf School in Susan Starr’s Kindergarten on May 14th, 2011. The potluck dinner beforehand was full of congenial conversations. All present were ‘hunkered-down’ on tiny kindergarten

chairs around kindergarten tables, which lent a fun kind of intimacy to the scene. Connections were forged or renewed with WRC members Linda Connell, Daniel Bittleston, Joan Treadaway, and special guest MariJo Rogers, General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America.

Joan Treadaway led the circle in a reading of the founding letter of the San Miguel Branch from October 1989, and the question was asked, “What are your hopes for the future?” After a flurry of memories of times gone by, branch members expressed a desire for renewed artistic work, particularly painting, and more activity to interest younger friends. The arising and unfolding of the WISC Adult Education Program was noted, and a commitment made for WISC and the Branch to coordinate activities. — The warmth of the circle in a branch meeting that was not an “AGM” or study group or one of the Holy Nights was partly due to the moderating ability of Joan Treadaway.

Marijo Rogers gave a presentation on Rudolf Steiner and the Appearance of Christ in our Time to a group that swelled to over 30 people and completed the threefoldness of the evening. MariJo addressed three events about which Rudolf Steiner had spoken beginning in 1910. One was the announcement of the appearance of Christ in the etheric to begin in the 1930s, a direct vision of the Christ possible even for untrained human beings. The second was the development of new soul faculties in mankind, a capacity for etheric vision and karmic vision. The third was Christ’s becoming Lord of Karma, the greatest event since the event of Palestine. Christ is interweaving all of humanity. In future we will learn that “I cannot move forward until you have moved forward.” What gifts of knowledge and experience were exchanged by the Western Regional Council and the San Miguel Branch on that cool evening after a rain!

Bruce Laurelin / Western Regional Council 70 Years in New Orleans!

The current Steiner Study group in New Orleans dates to the early 1980’s, when it included then-med-students Molly and Quentin McMullen (now practicing in Ann Arbor); Sabine Seiler, who took a po-

sition as translator at the Anthroposophic Press (now SteinerBooks); and Mary Lee Plumb-Mentjes, subsequent co-founder of the Aurora Waldorf School in Anchorage. But the recorded history of anthroposophy in New Orleans dates to 1941, with the arrival of Inge Elsas, a then 26-year-old who had left her native Hamburg in 1933 to train as a nurse at the Sonnenhof in Arlesheim, Switzerland under Ita Wegmann. Spared the fate of the rest of her family at the hand of the Nazis, Inge had upon completion of her training served as a private nurse to the children of Italian and US diplomats in Europe and Brazil, before coming to New Orleans to pursue a degree in social work at Tulane University.

As her tenure in Arlesheim was 1933-37, Inge had never made a connection to the Goetheanum (Ita Wegmann was among many prominent students of Rudolf Steiner tragically thrown out of the Anthroposophical Society in 1935) and was oblivious to the Society or initiatives in the States. Imagine her amazement in 1983 to see a notice of a Steiner study group! And imagine the group’s surprise (especially those medical students) to be contacted by someone who had trained under Rudolf

New Members

Steiner’s collaborator in the development of anthroposophical medicine!

Since that time, the study group has met primarily at Inge’s house, where Margaret Runyon first came to the group in 1985. By 1987 everyone but Inge who had been part of the group in the early 80’s had moved away and the focus shifted for a time to Waldorf education and the foundation of a school. This culminated with the first Waldorf kindergarten in New Orleans, 1996-98, spearheaded by Rita Amedee.

Margaret moved to Detroit in 1991, plunging into a lively anthroposophical community, returning in 1998. Soon after she joined the Central Regional Council, on which she still serves. Patty Carbajal came to us through a Reading for the Dead Group which met weekly from 1999 to 2002. Longtime Steiner reader Renee Lattimore found us through the internet (!) and has been a devoted member since 2000.

A Waldorf grades initiative (The Hill School) was begun by former kindergarten parents in a private home in 1999. Suzanne Hill, first teacher at the school, and her successor Alexander Wooge were both Study Group mainstays. Kitty Davis, MD was a parent at that school and through her in-

terest in anthroposophy, she not only came to study group, but eventually took up the anthroposophical medical training.

In late June 2005, the seven member signatories in the New Orleans Group submitted our request for official recognition by the Anthroposophical Society. Eight weeks later, we were scattered by flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. One family moved out-of-state permanently. Two of us whose homes had flooded were forced into exile. Meanwhile, Rita Amedee, whose home on Lake Ponchartrain had not been damaged, sprang into action. A longtime biodynamic gardener, Rita applied field spray throughout the city to help restore the etheric forces which had been stripped away by the storm and its aftermath. She rallied others to monthly “stir and sprays.” Those still in the city resumed Study Group late in 2005, and those of us living away joined as we were able.

The Central Regional Council organized a work service pilgrimage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at Easter 2006; 35 participants from as far as Germany and Alaska joined as we caravanned down along the Mississippi from St. Louis. In New Orleans we worked with the local Group, spray-

of the Anthroposophical Society in America, as recorded by the Society from 4/14 to 7/15/2011

Paul Barratt, Wakefield RI

Windsong Bergman, Ipswich MA

Joseph Bovaird, New Hope MN

Ryan Boynton, Shoreline WA

Stephanie Cesareo, Westminster CA

Barbara Dagman, Lemon Grove CA

Matthew Davis, Philmont NY

Pamela G. Devaney, Haverhill MA

Christina Drake, Portland OR

Donald Dubay, Kimberton PA

Rachel Dumaine, Torrance CA

Margrit Edelberg, El Sobrante CA

Elisabeth Emter, Madison WI

Julie Feves, Porter Ranch CA

Daniela Danlas Fischleder, Miami FL

Cheryl Fisher, Milwaukie OR

Anne Clair Goodman, Pittsburgh PA

Keenan Hand, Olympia WA

Dorothy Hope, Muskegon MI

Caitlin Kennedy, Wilton NH

Emmi Lappalainen, Pembroke Pines FL

Joan Leopold, Richmond CA

Karen Lonsky, Genoa NY

Alejandra Lorenzo-Chang, Baltimore MD

Kibby MacKinnon, Santa Rosa CA

Catherine Marcial, Bloomfield NJ

Joanne Margalit, Menlo Park CA

Alix Marquiss, Sacramento CA

Michael J. Mazock, Newport PA

Erika Medina, Long Beach CA

Walkyria Mello, New York NY

Mary A. Mitchell, Grapevine TX

Katie Moran, Austin TX

Julia E. Moreno, Eugene OR

MaryJane Noblehart, Reno NV

Jennifer O’Brien, Tucson AZ

Eileen O’Meacham, Downingtown PA

Jay Cee Pigg, Boulder Creek CA

Susan E. Poole, Las Vegas NV

Michael W. Prim, Durham NC

Padeen Quinn, Portland OR

Mona Rachita, Clayton CA

Elea Robinson, Brooklyn NY

Esther Sampedro, Miami FL

Terence K. Smith, Reno NV

Cathy Smock, New Albany IN

Maria Cecilia Staubli, Miami FL

Irina Toyne, Miami FL

Clifford Venho, New York NY

Ching Li Wang, Nashville TN

Audrey K. Wiebe, Boulder CO

Donald Wilke, Phoenix AZ

Sally Willig, Philadelphia PA

John Wood, Citrus Heights CA

Carlos Yepez, Cambridge MA

ing biodynamic preps in the Lower Ninth Ward, on the Riverfront and in Mid-City.

Since 2007, we’re all back home and our Study Group continues to meet at the home of Inge Elsas (now age 95!) every other Sunday evening. We also have a long tradition of reading throughout the Holy Nights, and have journeyed year by year through Steiner’s Gospel lectures and The Fifth Gospel at least twice now. There is much support for the Waldorf School among our Group, and we hope fellow seekers from that community will accept the invitation to be part of our activities. — We are thrilled to welcome the AWSNA Board and Alumni to New Orleans this spring. I trust that the decades of “living anthroposophy” that have gone on here at the etheric gateway to the heartland have helped create the vessel for a productive and fun visit!

Margaret Runyon

Rudolf Steiner Library New Book Listings/

Annotations

by Judith Soleil

Anthroposophy—Rudolf Steiner—Works

The Guardian of the Threshold and the Philosophy of Freedom: On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Freedom to the Fifth Gospel, Sergei O. Prokofieff, Temple Lodge, 2011, 114 pgs.

The author received a variety of questions from readers after the publication of his book Anthroposophy and the Philosophy of Freedom (Temple Lodge, 2009). This work is a response to one of those: Can one discover the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold in the Philosophy, and what about the fact that we encounter not one, but two guardians on the anthroposophical path? In the second part of the book, Prokofieff looks at the Philosophy’s connection with the content of Rudolf Steiner’s research into the Fifth Gospel, effectively linking Steiner’s early and later work.

Anthroposophy—Agriculture

Biodynamics in Practice: Life on a Community Owned Farm. Impressions

of Tablehurst and Plaw Hatch, Sussex, England, Tom Petherick, Sophia Books, 2010, 131 pgs.

This is the story of two biodynamic farms, England’s Tablehurst and Plaw Hatch, and how and why they came to be a cooperative venture in which the local community plays a crucial role. Featuring stunning full-color photos throughout, this book provides a succinct, accessible, and very attractive introduction to biodynamics and an inspiring example of community stewardship.

Anthroposophy—Art

Colour: Seeing, Experiencing, Understanding, Ueli Seiler-Hugova, Temple Lodge, 2011, 134 pgs.

The exquisite color photos from nature are reason enough to have a look at this book! Waldorf graduate Seiler-Hugova has created an attractive and accessible introduction to the world of color, leading “from perception to understanding, and from experience to practice.”

Joseph Beuys: Parallel Processes, edited by Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Marion Ackermann, and Isabelle Malz. Schirmer/Mosel, 2010, 432 pgs.

This is the catalog of an all-inclusive exhibition organized in Düsseldorf, artist Joseph Beuys’s hometown. The exhibit featured more than 300 works by Beuys (19211986), one of the most influential postwar German artists. Ten large-scale installations were the central focus of this wideranging survey that included drawings, three-dimensional works, and material images. This large-format book features extensive images.

Anthroposophy—Astronomy

The Archetypal Cosmos: Rediscovering the Gods in Myth, Science, and Astrology, Keiron Le Grice, Floris Books, 2011, 336 pgs.

The author the is founder and coeditor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, and teaches in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Postgraduate Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. “Heralding a ‘rediscovery of the gods’ and passage into a new spiritual era, The Ar-

chetypal Cosmos presents a new understanding of the role of myth and archetypal principles in our lives…” positioning the “new discipline of archetypal astrology at the center of an emerging worldview that reunifies psyche and cosmos, spirituality and science, and mythology and metaphysics to enable us to see mythic gods, heroes, and themes in a new light.”

Anthroposophy—Biography

Ehrenfried Pfeiffer: A Modern Quest for the Spirit, compiled and introduced by Thomas Meyer, Mercury Press, 2010, 281 pgs.

Ehrenfried Pfeiffer worked closely with Rudolf Steiner, and pioneered biodynamics in the U.S. He wrote his life story in English, but it was originally published in German by Perseus Verlag in 1999. This edition contains the contents of that publication, including a translation of editor Thomas Meyer’s introduction and reminiscences by and letters to friends and colleagues who knew Pfeiffer in the United States. It also contains the first of Pfeiffer’s three “heart lectures,” and a transcript of Pfeiffer’s last lecture given in Switzerland (1958), “The True Basis of Nutrition.”

Anthroposophy—Economics

Toward an Associative Economy in the Sustainable Food and Farming Movement, Robert Karp, New Spirit Ventures, 2007, 57 pgs.

Robert Karp, executive director of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, notes the remarkable growth and development in the Sustainable Food and Farming Movement in the United States, and has been actively involved in this growth as a community organizer, nonprofit leader, and consultant. The impetus for this essay is his “concern about what I experience as a lack of in-depth discussion in our circles of the larger cultural, social, and economic trends within which our efforts are embedded. For example, do we really think we can create a just and sustainable food system without a clearer vision of the future society within which this food system would find its home? What forms of ownership and finance characterize the economic system of this future society toward which we are working?What is our

vision of the role of government and government programs in our preferred future? Is our movement part of a larger awakening of “new spirituality” in North America, as some would suggest, and if so, toward what social or economic ends?”

Anthroposophy—General

Core Anthroposophy: Teaching Essays of Ernst Katz, SteinerBooks, 2011, 242 pgs.

Physics professor Ernst Katz (1913–2009) was a foremost teacher of anthroposophy, and this volume offers all of his carefully constructed teaching essays on such topics as “About Your Relation to Rudolf Steiner”; “Meditation: An Introduction”; “Thoughts about the Foundation Stone”; “The Mission of Rudolf Steiner”; and several others.

Zanders Erzählungen: Eine Kritische Analyse des Werkes “Anthroposophie in Deutschland,” Lorenzo Ravagli, Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2009, 440 pgs.

In 2007, academic historian Helmut Zander published a massive, two-volume study of anthroposophy in Germany (Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884-1945. Available from the Rudolf Steiner Library.) There has been considerable reaction to the work among anthroposophists, expressed in essays, reviews, and in this book by anthroposophical journalist Lorenzo Ravagli. Ravagli evaluates Zander’s main theses: that Rudolf Steiner was an “eclectic opportunist”; that his biography is characterized by “breaks” and crises that he attempted to hide; that he took most of anthroposophy’s content— content that Zander considers to be nonexistent—from the theosophical literature of his day; and that Steiner’s primary aim in life was self-validation. Ravagli suggests that Zander is unable to justify these theses using his own scientific methodology, and instead relies on assumptions and quotations taken out of context.

Anthroposophy—Literature—Poetry

A Private Voice: Selected Poems, Linda Benson, Between Islands Press, 2010, 30 pgs.

William Hunt, a very fine poet in his own right, created this lovely chapbook in honor of a special reading at the Ru-

dolf Steiner Library he organized last year. Longtime society member Linda Benson died in 2007, and after her death her husband, Leonard, was amazed to find a trove of her poems. He had been unaware of her writing, which spanned a period of many years, and was stunned by the depth and quality of her work. Linda was T. S. Eliot’s private secretary shortly before WW II, and after the war she became interested in archaeology. She met Leonard, then a young art historian (his Inner Nature of Color is available from the library) in Greece. These poems describe life in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, world travels, and the poet’s interior life. All are well worth reading.

The Architecture of Cottonwoods, Joseph W. Greif, Bennett & Hastings, 2009, 665 pgs.

Author Joseph Greif is an architect and an anthroposophist as well as a poet. He says: “This book is written in the imagination that nothing in life is done without significance. Everything we think, feel and will in our lives is connected.”

Anthroposophy—Meditation

The Calendar of the Soul: A Commentary, Karl König, Floris Books, 2010, 352 pgs.

Karl König often encouraged his colleagues to find inner strength from the verses in Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, and he wrote this book as a guide, drawing out the patterns through the course of the year. The book also contains lecture notes and additional essays.

An Inner Journey through the Year: Soul Images and the Calendar of the Soul, Karl König, Floris Books, 2010, 159 pgs.

Camphill founder Karl König meditated intensely on the 52 weekly verses of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul and created sketches to accompany each verse. The sketches, done with colored pencils, “were not meant to have any identity of their own but rather to be indicative towards something more: like signposts, helping one to find one’s way to the actual substance of the verses and their process of soul development, while always allowing space for one’s own further work” (from the intro-

duction). The book also includes A.C. Harwood’s translation of the Calendar, and an introduction by Richard Steel.

Anthroposophy—Science

Life as Energy: Opening the Mind to a New Science of Life, Alexis Mari Pietak, Floris Books, 2011, 280 pgs.

“To many modern scientists, a living thing is not significantly different from a lifeless object, and is to be understood in terms of its basic parts (genes and molecules). So while science has given us many wonderful things, it has also taken something essential away: our ability to seriously consider life as a unique form of energy.” The author, a biophysicist and biomedical scientist, “builds an entirely new and rational science of life to enhance our understanding of individual life forms, ecological systems, and even human sustainability on our living Earth.”

Anthroposophy—Waldorf Education

The Child from Birth to Three in Waldorf Education and Child Care, Rainer Patzlaff et al., Waldorf Early Childhood Assoc. of North America, 2011, 84 pgs.

The third part of a three-part study created by the German Association of Waldorf Schools, this is a companion volume to Developmental Signatures: Core Values and Practices in Waldorf Education for Children Ages 3-9 (also available from the library). The English-language edition includes a new introduction by Susan Howard and a list of resources. Beautifully illustrated throughout with full-color photographs. this is a clear and succinct summary of the anthroposophical view of child development from birth to three, with concrete, practical suggestions for care of young children in an out-of-home setting.

Topics in Mathematics for the 10th Grade Based on Teaching Practices in Waldorf Schools, Robert Neumann, ed., Lesson Plan Initiative of the Pedagogical Research Center in Kassel, 2011, 288 pgs.

This is the first time books from the German series “Mathematics for the High School” are available in English. These books contain suggestions for lesson blocks from a variety of experienced teachers. The authors describe the material not

only in theoretical terms, but also offer many examples and exercises that make concepts accessible for students. Essays on pedagogy and methods and information about the historical background of the major enhance the value of these volumes.

Topics in Mathematics for Waldorf High Schools: Volume 2 for Ages 14 to 18. How to Become Inspired and Wholehearted, Ron Jarman, AWSNA, 2010, 230 pgs.

This is the the sequel to master teacher Ron Jarman’s seminal Teaching Mathematics in Rudolf Steiner Schools for Classes 1-8, one of the library’s most-requested titles. Jarman briefly provides a succinct summary of child development from an anthroposophical perspective and then plunges in, presenting detailed chapters, bristling with equations, for topics pertinent to grades 9, 10, 11, and 12, including: geometry, trigonometry, projective geometry, differential and integral calculus, path curves, and chaos theory.

Anthroposophy—Social

Initiative: A Rosicrucian Path of Leadership, Torin M. Finser, SteinerBooks, 2011, 123 pgs.

This book, by general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America Torin Finser, poses pressing contemporary questions: How is it possible to live a spiritual life in our materialistic age? Can an individual person still make a difference? How can we use a whole-systems approach to innovation? How can planetary wisdom help us find appropriate leadership styles? What are the inner conditions needed to work with the transcendent Self? In the swirl of multitasking, how can we find moments of solitude and reflection? “Drawing on a variety of rich cultural and spiritual traditions, he makes the case for social change that begins within.”

The Whitsun Impulse and Christ’s Activity in Social Life, Sergei O. Prokofieff, Temple Lodge, 2010, 48 pgs.

“In this small book, Sergei Prokofieff discusses the significance of spiritual work conducted in a social setting and its crucial role in preparing for the future epoch of the spirit-self.” He posits that the spiritual and social tasks before us can be achieved only

“through mutual efforts with one another.” Moreover, for such social activity, the General Anthroposophical Society, “with all of its different groups and branches, which unite all anthroposophists in the world,” plays a fundamental role.

Bible

Studies in the Gospels, Volume 2, Emil Bock, Floris Books, 2011, 270 pgs.

Back in print in English after many years, this second volume of founding Christian Community priest Emil Bock’s gospel studies looks particularly at Christ’s teachings and at the Gospel of St. Luke.

Esoteric Christianity

The Spirit within Us, Evelyn Capel, Floris Books, 2010, 188 pgs.

How often do we ask: If only I could be wiser or more courageous in the face of events, people, problems, and decisions? Usually, we must find our strength from within, and author Capel insists that each of us has an inner source of strength—the Christ spirit. By developing an active inner life we can discover the spirit within. She offers practical and compassionate advice, helping readers to cultivate a richer inner life.

Descent into the Depths of the Earth on the Anthroposophic Path of Schooling, Judith von Halle, Temple Lodge, 2011, 144 pgs.

Author Judith von Halle says that when pursuing the anthroposophical path of inner development, at a certain point we cannot avoid experiencing what is traditionally called the “descent into hell.” This journey finds its parallel in the mystery of

the Christ’s descent into hell, through the earth’s nine layers. By entering the spiritual Earth organism, esoteric students encounter both the being of the Antichrist and the place where the substance of the Grail vessel originates.

Musicians—Wagner

Richard Wagner, Rudolf Steiner, and Allegories of the Ring: From the Mundane to the Esoteric, George Hastings, Bennett & Hastings, 2011, 170 pgs.

“Like many great artists throughout the millennia, Richard Wagner wrote his operas as allegories….When Wagner’s cryptic esoteric messages are deciphered they tell a story about the evolution of human freedom and consciousness that would be told two generations later in a different format by…Rudolf Steiner. The allegories of the Ring bear a message meant for today.”

Science

A New Renaissance: Transforming Science, Spirit and Society, David Lorimer and Oliver Robinson, eds., Floris Books, 2010, 311 pgs.

A New Renaissance diagnoses the urgent need for change and renewal in philosophy, science, and society. Reductionist science and “its materialistic values—a worldview that has driven modern culture for the past two centuries—is quickly losing credibility. Its objectives of growth and acquisition and its guiding principles asserting that there is no intrinsic meaning to life or purpose in the cosmos are now widely seen as creating an unsustainable world.” The essays in this collection are “a cultural response to the failings of the prevailing materialistic worldview.”

the teacher needs above all is a personal relationship to the world that is both living and true to reality

- Rudolf Steiner

A residential community for adults with developmental challenges

We are a Rudolf Steiner inspired residential community for and with adults with developmental challenges. Living in four extended-family households, forty people, some more challenged than others, share their lives, work and recreation within a context of care.

Daily contact with nature and the arts, meaningful and productive work in our homes, gardens and craft studios, and the many cultural and recreational activities provided, create a rich and full life.

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This seminar explores how human prenatal development expresses the essence of human spiritual unfoldment. Understanding the stages of embryological development provides a basis for therapeutic recognition of embryological forces in all later stages of life. This seminar is a rare opportunity to hear a world authority on modern embryology through a unique synthesis of scientific and spiritual principles.

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We are committed to the transformation of the whole food system, from farm to table, drawing inspiration from the spiritual-scientific insights of Rudolf Steiner, from which a holistic form of organic farming called biodynamics has been developed that continues to grow and evolve around the world

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Hellenic Odyssey 2012

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Subscriptions available in printed form or downloadable PDF format. 1 Year: $20, 2 Years: $30, Yearly e-subscriptions: $15. Visit www.Lilipoh.com or call 610-917-0792 to order

CORE ANTHROPOSOPHY

TEACHING ESSAYS OF ERNST KATZ

The Mission of Rudolf Steiner

The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity

Meditation, an Introduction

Meditation According to Rudolf Steiner

Cosmic Secrets in Rudolf Steiner’s Health Verses

Paths to an Understanding of the Foundation Stone Meditation Contemplations on The Holy Spirit

About Rudolf Steiner’s Concept of Four Kinds of Etheric Forces

Ernst died September 3, 2009 at age 96. Everyone whose life he enhanced is invited to contribute to the cost of publishing these essays in book form. Donations are tax deductible. Send to:

SteinerBooks

Gene Gollogly, CEO

610 Main Street

Great Barrington, MA 01230

Join us June 25th - July 18th, visiting the Mystery places of Greece, journeying to temples, oracles, places of healing –Athens, Eleusis, Epidaurus, Delphi, Mycenae, Sounion, Meteora, Ephesus, with storytelling, eurythmy, drama, dance & relaxation. led by Gillian Schoemaker, Hellenophile & eurythmist, Camphill Special School PA, & Glen Williamson, actor & storyteller NYC.

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Illuminating Anthroposophy

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Alongside

cultural and social innovations of anthroposophy and its contemporary development in North America.

New! Deepening Anthroposophy

Winter/Spring Semester, January – May 2012

The second semester of our Foundation Program

This unique new offering will guide seekers wishing to penetrate more deeply into the esoteric core of anthroposophy. Those familiar with the basic books of Rudolf Steiner may enroll in this 3½ day per week, 14-week program of discovery and selftransformation. A part-time option is offered as 3-week intensives.

The Healing Process Spirit, Nature, & Our Bodies

11 lectures

Aug. 28, 1923–Aug. 29, 1924 (CW 319)

Rudolf Steiner

Foreword by Richard Leviton

Introduction by Christopher Bamford

Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

ISBN: 9780880106412, 320 pages, $25

“Rudolf Steiner’s model of a spiritualized medicine could hold the key for the next growth phase in Western medicine, if it is to survive, flourish, and become consistently and deeply therapeutic instead of merely palliative.” —Richard Leviton, author of Physician: Medicine and the Unsuspected Struggle for Human Freedom

On the basis of his own powers of observation and his spiritual research, Rudolf Steiner could describe processes of health and disease that escape normal medical observation. In these broadly ranging talks, he introduces fundamental principles of anthroposophically extended medicine. Some of the most remarkable insights that Anthroposophy brings to medicine are contained in this volume.

Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine

20 lectures, Dornach

Mar. 21–Apr. 9, 1920 (CW 312)

Rudolf Steiner

Foreword by Dr. Steven M. Johnson

Introduction by Christopher Bamford

Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

ISBN: 9780880106429, 356 pages, $30

“Our task is to discover the real difference between those processes in the human organism that we call disease processes—which are basically quite normal, natural processes, even though specific causes must precipitate them—and the everyday processes that we call healthy. We must discover this radical distinction, but we shall not be able to do so if we cannot take up a way of looking at human beings that really leads to their essential nature.” —Rudolf Steiner

In these twenty lectures, given to medical doctors and students, Steiner presents a new approach to the art of healing, based on the insights of spiritual science. The result is an astounding new vision of medicine— one that is practical, spiritual, psychological, and fully human.

“Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able, of themselves, to impart meaning and purpose to their lives.”

—Rudolf Steiner