Seventh Worldwide Biography Conference

by Joseph Rubano

Since 1990 individuals dedicated to the development of biography work based on anthroposophic research have been meeting regularly. After meeting nine times, a rhythm of every two years was established in 2001 and the gathering began attracting biography counselors and biography workers from all over the world. It then began being called the Worldwide Biography Conference.

The conference is an opportunity for individuals engaged in biography work to meet colleagues from around the world to share questions and discoveries and to deepen their connection to the work by experiencing different methods and styles of working. Here friendships and collaborative relations are formed and strengthened and inspiration and support for the work is received.

In June 2013, the Seventh Worldwide Biography Conference was held at Emerson College in East Sussex, England. About 120 people came from 18 different countries; of eight of us from the States, all save one are connected with the Center for Biography and Social Art.

The theme of the conference was “I on the Threshold” and the focus of our group work was the Foundation Stone Mantra. We worked with it in the whole group, heard it spoken in the different languages of all the people there, spoke it all together in English, moved it with Spacial Dynamic movements, and worked in smaller groups where the conversations could move more freely, open new windows, and yield fresh insights and understandings. On the last day Rinke Visser from Holland invited everyone to take the internal substance from our working together into the night and to listen for any echoes or after images which might arise in us the next morning.

The following is what arose for me.

Some thoughts on the Foundation Stone

June 30, 2013

The Foundation Stone Meditation is a Spiritual Transmission given as a riddle, a koan. It is a transmission of the Enlightened Consciousness. It is a carrier of Enlightened Consciousness. Within the words and the rhythms of the words is the Enlightened Consciousness of the one who brought it. It is a gift from the Spiritual World given to a specific group of people, planting the seed of Enlightened Consciousness in their hearts.

It gives three gateways to the spirit—three gateways from individual consciousness to Cosmic Consciousness, from the separate, individual “I” organization, the sense of self, to an expanded sense of Self that is united to All. The Enlightened One has all three gateways open and therefore lives, senses, and thinks as the I Am for the good of all; the Will of God is done through him or her.

This koan, the riddle of the Foundation Stone, was given to a community of people. It occurred to me this morning that perhaps the key to this riddle, the unlocking of the riddle was not meant to be done by any one person, and perhaps it cannot be. Perhaps it is the engaging with it by many people working together that can set something, some invisible substance, in motion in each of us that can create or reveal the necessary heart thinking understanding, heart thinking beingness that allows it to come alive in us.

The Foundation Stone is a living force that can live in us as we work with it, move it, feel it, think it. It works in us as a feeling sense below and above normal day Consciousness; it cannot be understood from normal day consciousness just as our intimate connection to each other cannot be understood in day consciousness. Just as we are most intimately connected in sleep, in the spiritual world, in the etheric world, so the spiritual forces imbedded in the Foundation Stone work in us invisibly and are sensed as moving, life giving forces within us.

During the conference we all worked together in the large group and in smaller groups. We met, spoke together, thought together, sang, danced, moved, looked into each other’s eyes, embraced our own beauty, gave thanks for each other, created a space for each to be seen and heard. The Foundation Stone now for me, includes all of you—the sounds of your voices, the movement of your soul as you spoke. This was the revelation for me this morning—that it is our working together, it is how we live in each other, the love that moves between us that unlocks the essence of the Foundation Stone, that is the living essence of the Foundation Stone, because the Foundation Stone can only be understood by the Heart.

Perhaps it is Steiner’s Heart Sutra. It is not simply my heart that is opened, but Our Heart—the Heart of connection. Enlightened consciousness without the blossoming of love, without the lived connectedness of all of life, is impossible, makes no sense. The Elementals hear it, the Hierarchies know and carry it. The Human Beings have choice and the possibility, by working together, to hear, know and live it.

Because you cannot understand the Foundation Stone with normal day consciousness, one has to be changed, one has to be able to open to a softer, dreamier consciousness with a clarity of wakefulness—to be awake in the dream. When we find that our hearts are warmed, that we sense an inner light burning, that for a moment we experience a free clarity, a relaxed openness of being, a sort of emptiness where a fresh alive thought can come, a fullness and sense that I can do with confidence, that I must share this with others, that I am supported and held by many, then that is the radiation of the Foundation Stone, the seed of the Foundation Stone planted in our heart growing. Then the world rhythm can somehow be sensed in our breast, and we can know that we live in the heights and in the depths, that what we do and think matters, that we are co-creators with the gods, that we are weaving ourselves back into the world.

For more information on Biography and Social Art go to www.biographysocialart.org

Joseph Rubano (josrubano@hotmail.com) is a Biographical Counselor certified by the Biography & Social Development Trust in Forest Row, England, a Spacial Dynamic movement educator certified by the Spacial Dynamics Institute in New York, and on the faculty of the Biography & Social Art Certificate Program at Sunbridge Institute and Threefold Educational Center, Chestnut Ridge, NY.