Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy: Meditation & Spiritual Perception

Selected and Introduced by Gertrude Reif Hughes. Series Editor: Robert McDermott. Anthroposophical Society in America, 2011, 140 pages. Review by Frederick J. Dennehy

One of the best-kept secrets in anthroposophical publishing is the remarkably rich series, Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy, ten volumes of essays and reviews selected from the long-running publication. As series editor Robert McDermott notes in the foreword to this volume, each collection focuses on a particular theme, “including Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophy, imagination, society, science, Waldorf Education, visual arts, Mani, Novalis, and meditation and spiritual perception.” The series will either remind or alert readers to just how valuable a gift we had for so many years. The essays strike one like an unexpected encounter with an old friend. Some are scholarly and some intimate; they all speak to the question of understanding and practicing anthroposophy from the place where most of us find ourselves most of the time—what the Gospel of John calls “this world.”

In her introduction to this tenth and final volume, Gertrude Reif Hughes focuses on the “how” and the “who” of meditation. The “how” is the praxis—the way to go about the activity that is or should be the center of anthroposophy. The “who” is the question that continually arises in the course of meditation—who do we become when we meditate?

There are fourteen articles in this volume. While none is primarily about the “practice” of meditation, each provides a grounding for practice by helping to turn us away from what Owen Barfield (as Frederick Amrine pointed out in the summer 2012 issue of Being Human), refers to as “the besetting sin of literalism.” That “turning” is a potent achievement.

The first six essays endeavor to locate anthroposophy in relation to other traditions and disciplines. Professor Tyson Anderson, in an address to the American Academy of Religion called “Is Science Relevant for Spirituality?” suggests that the answer is “yes,” but that we have to inform our understanding of science to exclude reductionism or else risk dealing with a science of delusion. True spiritual science views reality as iconic, a higher form of reading; its approach is strongly feminine, and imbued with heart consciousness. He suggests (surprisingly, I suspect, to the Academy) that the exemplar of the new scientific thinking is Mary Magdalene. As Rudolf Steiner recognized, because she was a woman she was naturally—structurally even—better able to understand something exceptional than could a man. Professor Anderson concludes that Mary Magdalene’s scientia—“thinking of the heart”—was the “radiant point around which the scattered Jesus movement began to coalesce into Christianity.”

In his “Traditional and Modern Elements in the Occultism of Rudolf Steiner,” Robert Galbreath, writing from outside the anthroposophical stream, provides a summary of spiritual science within the tradition of initiatory transformation—in the words of Mircea Eliade, the ontological mutation of the existential condition. The article is bracing in its clarity. Particularly impressive is Galbreath’s account of Steiner’s defense of reincarnation and karma through application of strictly Darwinian principles.

Gary Lachman’s essay, “Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and the Evolution of Consciousness,” is an acute, detailed comparison of the similarity between Gebser’s “structures” and Steiner’s “epochs” of the evolution of consciousness. Lachman acknowledges that Steiner’s and Gebser’s visions are “very different,” but he is a syncretist. When two separate voyagers discover the same country, he points out, it argues very strongly “for the unknown world’s existence.”

“The Christian Path of Edgar Cayce: A Possible Aspect of Michael’s Activity in America,” by Magda Lissau, Kurt Nelson, and Rick Spaulding, is an assessment of the work of Edgar Cayce through the lens of anthroposophy, particularly through Rudolf Steiner’s characterization of second sight, vision, and premonition as unconscious gifts of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. The destiny of individuals with such faculties allows them entrance into the spiritual world, and their karma protects them from most of its dangers, but not from the danger of misunderstanding. The authors also use Sergei Prokofieff’s Occult Significance of Forgiveness as an initiatory model for understanding the affirmations from Cayce’s study group readings of 1932. The authors suggest that “the higher self of Cayce woke up, in his health readings,” and brought “comfort and healing” as a “gift of love.” They conclude that Cayce’s legacy is “of inestimable value to all those in America who have a serious desire to develop their spiritual striving,” and urge that Cayce’s life be stud- ied seriously in the light of anthroposophy.

In “Emergence of Ethical Individualism in Science and Medicine,” Karl Ernst Schaefer details what he sees as the appearance of ethical individualism in the second half of the 20th century in four scientists who have had the courage to choose a middle path between polarized factions—those who believe in unimpeded scientific research without regard for moral concerns, and those who believe that scientists should not do any research where findings are likely to raise significant moral dangers— and have stood up to the hostility of their colleagues. Dr. Schaefer suggests that the foundation of moral neutrality in science, dating from the school of Jundi Shapur, may finally be weakening.

Although “Simplicity’s Contribution to a Threefold Society” by Mark E. Smith was written in 1998, it seems even more pertinent today. The essay is a sequel to the author’s “Anthroposophy and Nonviolence,” written three years earlier, and transfers the theme of non-violence to the economic sphere. Mr. Smith’s goal of “voluntary simplicity” in personal economic life is an exemplar of the “middle way,” and a contemporary practical realization of Rudolf Steiner’s “ethical individualism.” But “voluntary simplicity” is not simply a personal prescription; at the heart of the concept is the hidden understanding that individual initiative not only can, but will, contribute to societal evolution.

Ms. Hughes describes four articles as “autobiographical considerations of how the authors experience their meditative life.” The first is Danilla Rettig’s review of And There Was Light, by Jacques Lusseyran, including an excerpt from the book, which describes the special unfolding of the inner life of a man who lost his sight at the age of eight, together with the story of his courageous participation and leadership in the Resistance movement in France.

Alan Howard in “I Think; Yet Not I…,” explores the philosophical underpinnings of thinking, the spiritual activity that fills the state of emptied consciousness that characterizes meditation as Rudolf Steiner described it; while in “A Meditation on Inner and Outer Peace,” Raphael Grosse Kleinmann conjures the sunlight of peace, which he finds intrinsic to genuine meditative experience. And in “The Path of Initiation for the Present Day,” by Paul Eugen Schiller, the author treats meditation in its relation to the practice of Rosicrucian initiation.

The essay, “Meeting with the Dead,” by Albert Steffen, and the review by Tadea Gottlieb of Our Relationship to Those Who Have Died, by Reverend Hermann Heisler, speak about the relationship of the living to the dead, a subject that requires, in Ms. Hughes’s words, “anthroposophy’s objectivity and detailed spiritual perception.” The cultivation of a genuine relationship to the dead is itself a form of anthroposophical meditation; when properly directed at the so-called dead, this type of meditation may be the key to our most intimate connection with those who have died.

The collection concludes with two pieces that portray the hard-won optimism that is at the heart of anthroposophy. Hermann Poppelbaum, in an article dating back almost fifty years, portrays the “three humiliations” of the human being, ushered in respectively by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, in a “Christmas picture” in which the human being is moved to reimagine her eminent position in the cosmos and sees the faces of all the supersensible beings directed toward her.

The final word is from Rudolf Steiner, who in two very short excerpts urges us to understand that through desperate circumstances and inner soul trials a new vision—seemingly impossible in the utter darkness of these moments—will be born.