personal and cultural renewal in the 21st century
Idea, Theory, Emotion, Desire (p.30)
Free Columbia –Spiritual Activism (p.18,33)
Review: The Impulse of Freedom in Islam (p.46)
Steiner, Nietzsche, and the Adversary (p.40)
a quarterly publication of the Anthroposophical Society in America
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The Christian Community is a worldwide movement for religious renewal that seeks to open the path to the living, healing presence of Christ in the age of the free individual.
All who come will find a community striving to cultivate an environment of free inquiry in harmony with deep devotion.
Learn more at www.thechristiancommunity.org
D. N. Dunlop (1868–1935) combined remarkable practical and organizational abilities in industry and commerce along with the gifts of spiritual and esoteric capacities. His life was changed forever when he met Rudolf Steiner—an encounter that “brought instant recognition.” This enlarged second edition features substantial additions of new material and an afterword by Owen Barfield.
ISBN 978-1-906999-66-7 | 436 pages | paperback | $55.00
Thomas Meyer’s major biography of Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz (1869-1945) offers a panoramic view of an exceptional life. This is a pioneering work in biographical literature, structured in four main sections that reflect the stages of an individual’s personal development. This first English edition is based on the latest German version and features additional material and 64 plates.
ISBN 978-1-906999-64-3 | 728 pages | paperback | $70.00
This important book offers profound insights into the struggles for individual freedom and voice during the early years of the Anthroposophical Society. Seeing the dynamics of that struggle can help us today to overcome differences to work toward common purpose, both in the context of our everyday lives and within a spiritually oriented community.
ISBN 978-1-62148-116-4 | 256 pages | paperback | $22.00
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T. H. Meyer was born in Switzerland in 1950. He is the founder of Perseus Verlag, Basel, and is editor of the monthly journal Der Europäer He has written numerous articles and is the author of several books.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” –Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, Jan. 6 1816
Jefferson wrote out of concern for a young nation’s political liberty. Today we face the challenge of creating, as Rudolf Steiner said, a future worthy of the human being.
Generations after Jefferson and ninety years after Rudolf Steiner’s death, in an age of marvels that challenges our humanity and casts a shadow on our future, what can be the role of a library for anthroposophy?
Making the work of Rudolf Steiner and others in this human-centered stream of living, caring, purposeful thoughts available—that has been a core goal of the Anthroposophical Society in America, involving translating, sharing typescripts, publishing, and creating the national Rudolf Steiner Library
From its long-time home on Madison Avenue in New York City, through its three decades in the Berkshire-Taconic region, the staff of the Rudolf Steiner Library have built an intellectual jewel—the single largest collection of anthroposophical works in English in the world. It embraces also the broader heritage of philosophical, religious, artistic, cultural, and sociological thought from throughout history: the rich context for anthroposophy’s research into humanity’s past and future. This combination opens up a dynamic conversation between anthroposophy and the world.
A new future for the Library has opened through the focused work of the library steering group, the national council, the Berkshire- Taconic community, and trusted advisors.
Care for the collection has started. New archives and rare materials are coming to light. Cultural heritage is being preserved.
A plan to digitize the journals is moving forward. Plans for expanded online discovery and access for both the archives and the collections are in the works.
Linking collections around the country, establishing a national service center in the Hudson Valley, and developing a complementary home for research & archives at the Rudolf Steiner House in Ann Arbor.
Reaching out across the movement— Waldorf, Camphill, biodynamics, health, social action—to deepen special collections. Working to expand access to works in English worldwide.
The initiative of individual human beings is where anthroposophy is constantly renewed. The Rudolf Steiner Library will continue to strengthen research and study, nourish our love of community, and inspire the wisdom for action.
We’d love to share our latest plans with you. Visit us online: www.anthroposophy.org/rsl or call 734.662.9355 to join our mailing list.
The Human Encounter: Parent-Teacher Relationships in a Waldorf School Community A Conversation with Torin
M. Finser, PhD
A school is a community, and like all communities its health depends upon the quality of its relationships. Joins us as Torin speaks to the parent-teacher relationship in all its dimensions o ering both practical advice and deeper, spiritual insights.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. ET Visit anthroposophy.org to register!
This webinar is co-sponsored by AWSNA and the Anthroposophical Society in America
•
BIODYNAMICS is a holistic approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition that brings health and vitality to the soil, plants, animals and humanity. Join the gardeners and farmers who are using biodynamics to turn their land, whatever its size, into a work of art, overflowing with life forces, diversity and vitality.
12 Validating Medical Remedies: Renewing the Research, by John Beck
18 Free Columbia: Spiritual Activism, by Laura Summer
20 Can Eurythmy Live Online, by John Beck & Cynthia Hoven
23 The Present Age, T.H. Meyer interviewed by John Beck
25 Deeds that Matter, by Christopher Schaefer
30 Idea, Theory, Emotion, Desire, by Frederick Amrine
33 Gallery: Free Columbia
38 Understanding the Imponderable in Nature, by Barry Lia & Science Section 40
40 Rudolf Steiner’s Meeting of Destiny with Friedrich Nietzsche and the Adversary of Our Age, by C.T. Rozell 46 The Impulse of Freedom in Islam, a review by Elaine Maria Upton
Rudolf Steiner: The Man & His Vision, a review by Fred Dennehy
51 Three Poems, by Maureen Tolman Flannery 52 Threefold Auditorium Renovation, by Bill Day
General Council Members
Torin Finser (General Secretary)
Virginia McWilliam (at large)
Carla Beebe Comey (at large)
John Michael (at large, Treasurer)
Dwight Ebaugh (at large)
Dennis Dietzel (Central Region, Chair)
Joan Treadaway (Western Region)
Marian León, Director of Programs
Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Director of Development
being human is published four times a year by the Anthroposophical Society in America
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Please send submissions, questions, and comments to: editor@anthroposophy.org or to the postal address above, for our Summer 2015 issue by 4/10/2015.
©2015 The Anthroposophical Society in America. Responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.
First a correction. In our last issue, in connection with Bruce Donehower’s review of Spiritual Resistance by Peter Selg, we placed a photograph of psychiatrist and anthroposophical leader F.W. (Frederik Willem) Zeylmans van Emmichoven (1893-1961) where the text was speaking of the work of his son, the Dutch physician and biographer of Ita Wegman, J.E. Zeylmans van Emmichoven (1926-2008). We received a correct photo from Jannebeth Röell, who also appears in this issue in a report of the Science Section meeting last fall in Portland, Oregon.
Welcome, Teachers!
Usually we get to talk here about what enthuses us in the content of a new issue, but this time we are enthusiastic about some new readers. Perhaps as many as a thousand teachers and others involved with Waldorf schools will be receiving this issue. We are delighted to have you with us, we know you already have a great deal of work to do preparing fresh, living, personalized meetings with young people and can’t possibly do all this extra reading right now—but, when you have a chance, please take a look. Perhaps just the couple of pages of the digest that follow immediately. Or anywhere else. And let us know what you think, candidly! We love new readers just as much as the loyal readers of several years, who first saw “being human” as a 150th birthday present to Rudolf Steiner.
So what about the contents? “Holistic.” Anthroposophy could be called a holistic anthropology, or a holistic humanism; but important words get turned into pressed sawdust, “buzz words,” and the meaning is sent away. Holistic is what a Waldorf teacher aims to do with each child: see her or him entire, whole, and yet in flow, in process.
Our contents are aiming at this same sort of goal, and while it’s quite impossible to reach, the attempts can be invigorating. There are many things in this issue which make an editor happy. We have a great collection of “initiatives” (though each item in each section could be in at least one of the other sections—that “holistic” thing, again). Great initiatives, the will of healthy people to do whatever they can, to be the changes the world needs, to meet the future with open arms.
Wonderful ideas! A Fred Amrine essay takes close attention, but it brings us so often that experience Rudolf Steiner pointed to: the birth of a new idea into one’s own consciousness. There, Dr. Steiner pointed out, something happens which is of the essence of human being and becoming. And if you don’t quite know why, go all the way to the back, page 62, where we reprint a poem, prefaced by a bit of Steiner, which Paul Margulies sent to us in 2011.
Copies
Sample copies are also sent to friends who contact us at the address below. To contribute articles or art please email editor@anthroposophy.org or write Editor, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
It’s a humorous poem from the Alka-Seltzer ad man, beloved author of “plop plop, fizz fizz” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” Here Paul shrewdly takes us laughing up to that final moment of realizing that thinking properly is not cold but supremely warm, an act of love.
I could say more about this issue, mentioning for instance the three fine poems by Maureen Tolman Flannery on page 51, or the three biographical sketches by Christopher Schaefer (page 25); but now I’m just delaying you from reading it.
So welcome, new reader, and welcome back, old friend!
John Beck
In this issue we present two reviews which, in very different ways, we hope are timely. Elaine Upton reviews The Impulse of Freedom in Islam by John von Schaik, Christine Gruwez and Cilia ter Horst, with a Foreword by Abdulwahid van Bommel and an Afterword by Ibrahim Abouleish, translated by Philip Mees. Among matters explored in this book, from a variety of viewpoints, are the meaning of “freedom” in Islam, and the question of whether and how the peoples of the NorthWest and the Islamic East can meet together in a “field of knowing.”
In the light of two magnificent biographies of Rudolf Steiner by Christoph Lindenberg and Peter Selg that have recently become available in English, I have reviewed a much older, non-scholarly biography by Colin Wilson aimed at a wider audience. The review seeks to assess an image of Rudolf Steiner that may still have currency in today’s world.
This digest offers brief notes, news, and ideas from a range of holistic and human-centered initiatives. E-mail suggestions to editor@anthroposophy. org or write to “Editor, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104.”
What do you do when you have a creative idea but lack the funds to develop it? Or you’ve proven a concept and want to put it into action? Or a friend or colleague is in need of medical funds? Or you’re young and can couch surf but can’t afford an plane ticket to this great gathering on the other side of some ocean?
Whatever its possible downsides, the internet as we know it began as a way to help share resources. (An internet “address” is a “URL” or “universal resource locator.”) And connecting up people to share resources in support of a project is now a common thing. When it’s information or ideas the term is “crowd sourcing”; when it’s financial support the term is “crowd funding.”
There are many websites ready to help you do it. Kickstarter.com is an early leader and “kickstarting” is another term for crowd funding. Many concerns of professional fundraisers like “donor fatigue” are becoming common with creative activists. “Hey guys—thought you might be interested in the kickstarter I’m working.... Don’t get too excited and spread it all over the world and wear out all your contacts (though a little would be fine ;) because I’m going to be sharing [another] kickstarter with you in a month and looking for some love and support!”
In the anthroposophical world where for every one person there are perhaps two-and-a-half initiatives, there are now “kickstarters” and “crowd funders” going along quietly all the time. Here are a few, not with our specific endorsement but as examples of the type:
Matre (Matt Sawaya), an anthroposophically inspired rap artist, has just successfully gotten $12,000 to make a professional video of his song “Listen” about LA school district security officers receiving military hardware [short URL: http://goo.gl/5oSjd8].
Friends have started funds to help with cancertreatment expenses of forms-researcher Frank Chester [ww.gofundme.com/h7m29o] and lazure master Robert Logsdon [www.gofundme.com/RobertLogsdon].
Eurythmist and social activist Truus Geraets started a drive helping the Lakota Waldorf School, which cannot survive without donations, to build a first classroom in traditional Native American “Tipi” style architecture [ www.gofundme.com/g5n4ig ].
The San Diego branch newsletter reported on Truus’ effort, with URL, which along with emails and Facebook page posts and likes is how this all spreads!
Free Columbia, profiled in the initiative! section and in this issue’s Gallery, will include crowdfunding in their advanced effort March 18 to April 26 to “pay forward” the upcoming year. Students will then be given their course freely and asked to help fundraise and pay forward the following year. Their multi-pronged campaign will end with a free culture celebration with performance by Matre and an “art dispersal” on April 25/26 in Philmont, New York [www.freecolumbia.org ].
Anthroposophical Society in America—a pioneer in this field—has long received earmarked donations for the North American Sections of the School for Spiritual Science. Currently the Youth Section is seeking funds to send several young high school graduates to the Connect Conference in Belgium [www.anthroposophy.org ].
There is the usual caution: know who you’re dealing with. Understand whether no one pays unless the whole goal is met, or all gifts are final and passed on at once.
And if you’re planning a kickstarter, you might go to TechSoup.org whose technology resources for non-profits include helpful discussions relating to this area.
On Saturday, March 14th the Christian Community we will celebrate an ordination service in Spring Valley, New York. This small, worldwide “movement for spiritual renewal” is unique in that its founders sought guidance from Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. This ordination is a milestone because the candidate, Lisa Hildreth, will be the first person to complete her whole training at the North American Seminary. “This has been our goal from the founding of the seminary in 2003, and we expect this to be a full training for future priests both here and for other countries around the world,” writes Rev. Oliver Steinrueck.
The ordination will be prepared by a five-day “open course” of the Seminary, “From Priest Ordination to Priesthood,” from March 10 at 8:00am to March 15 at 5:00pm. Contributors include Rev. Bastiaan Baan, director of the Seminary, and from the leadership in Berlin the Rev. Vicke von Behr, Christward Kröner, and Anand Mandaiker. Themes of the course include priesthood: origins, development, contemporary priesthood; prayer and meditation in daily life; the sacraments’ significance for the spiritual world, for humanity, for the Earth; and priest ordination in the development of Christianity: continuity and renewal. For information and registration contact: Link: www.christiancommunityseminary.org/events/
The co-founder of the New York Open Center, Ralph White, has observed of Rudolf Steiner that his is “the most impressive holistic legacy of the 20th century.” But what is “holistic” anyway? Steiner himself spoke of the need to see things from many points of view, and a powerful example comes where health and education meet.
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A program on “Holistic Approach to Autism” will be given April 25th in Scottsdale, Arizona with Waldorf remedial expert (and long-serving national council member of the Anthroposophical Society in America) Joan Treadaway. Presented by Holistic Special Education, the Association for Healing Education, and the Arizona Council for Waldorf Education, for parents, caregivers, therapists, and teachers, the gathering will discuss what can be done to accompany and support children who are revealing behaviors that are referred to as “autism spectrum disorder.” The conference will focus on Asperger’s and mild to moderate autism. Joan will give an illustrative story to enrich understanding of these conditions, and there will be exploration of therapeutic activities—rhythm, routine, play, imitation, movement, pressure, touch, quiet time and body awareness—while emphasizing the child’s strengths and gifts.
The holistic view does not incline so much to seeing experts “fixing” symptoms. As Steiner put it, “Our rightful place as educators is to be removers of hindrances. Each child in every age brings something new into the world from divine regions, and it is our task to remove bodily and psychical obstacles out of the child’s way, to remove hindrances so that the child’s spirit may enter in full freedom into life.”
Link: HolisticSpecialEducation.org
Rudolf Steiner is one of the most translated authors in history, not too far behind Moses and Mohammed. There is a global interest in education today, but Steiner’s own guidance was often given in specific working situations. Contemporary books are important to introduce the field.
One of the most popular is School as a Journey: The Eight-Year Odyssey of a Waldorf Teacher and His Class, by Torin Finser. The fact of a teacher accompanying a class for eight years is one of the more striking contrasts in the Waldorf approach, and it gives both a natural framework for insights about education and the opportunity to be practical and direct. Dr. Finser has gone on to lead the education program at Antioch University New England, serve as General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, and write several more books. But this early book still finds new friends. It has had a second edition in Mandarin and has been translated into Farsi, language of Iran, spoken by a hundred million people.
Leila Alemi, the translator, writes that “Waldorf education has been pretty unknown in Iran but very recently, I hear among pioneers of educational reforms in my home country that they are interested to know more. Unfortunately there are few reading materials about Waldorf education in Farsi. I deeply hope Waldorf education can gradually find a new other home in the heart of Middle East and serve Iranian children and families.” Torin explains that “Leila grew up in Iran during the war years. As a result of the suffering she experienced, she began to write healing stories for children. That lead her to a variety
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of spiritual questions and then finding anthroposophy on the internet. Despite many obstacles, she found books on Waldorf education and eventually succeeded in making it to New Hampshire, where she completed her degree this past year. She hopes to go back to Iran and start a Waldorf school after completing her internship in Ann Arbor.”
Other translations? Torin recalled that “the most noteworthy story occurred some years ago when a group of mothers and fathers gathered in Soul, South Korea, to work on a translation of School as a Journey. They met once a week in various living rooms, working through the book chapter by chapter. When they were done, they pooled their resources and published the book in Korean. There was a splendid celebration and conference.
“One philosophical thought: in a world ever more divided by religious, cultural and political differences, Waldorf education, biodynamics, Camphill and the other initiatives arising out of anthroposophy become ever more important as a unifying agent for global consciousness and striving for the universal human. The old ways do not work anymore, and people all over the world are looking for fresh ideas. Translating Rudolf Steiner and related authors must be a top priority if we are to reach those, such as Leila, who are seeking but have not had access to helpful material. If we can build an international coalition of spirit-seekers who act locally but think globally, we can begin to affect the flow of events. The world needs the insights of anthroposophy! I urge our readers to support the quiet, often unassuming midwives of cultural renewal, our translators, and the actual publication of small editions that might not ever appear on a best-seller list, but often prove to be a turning point in a person’s biography.”
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“The most impressive holistic legacy of the 20th century...”
Research at its most familiar modern level, in a laboratory, performing repeatable tests—that is what the Lili Kolisko Institute is bringing to the service of the medications used by anthroposophic and complementary doctors.
Free Columbia is multiple initiatives: art school, social funding, community involvement.
EurythmyOnline.com is a terrible mistake, or terribly brave—a breakdown or a breakthrough?
T.H. Meyer is bringing his intelligent European passion for anthroposophy into a new English-language publication.
Christopher Schaefer remembers three persons of initiative from the world of business and funding.
A four-year-old non-profit research institute in Wisconsin is working to validate and extend the knowledge on which anthroposophic and homeopathic health products are based. It is a natural outgrowth of the life commitments of three physicians who put Rudolf Steiner’s therapeutic insights at the heart of their practices, then sought to develop and produce new and improved remedies and supplements, and now are rallying support for the research he hoped to see almost a century ago. The production company, True Botanica, is well-known in the field, and the research institute was initially named for it. To make clear that its work is distinct from and aims beyond the company’s needs, and to honor an early and deeply committed researcher, the foundation has become the Lili Kolisko Institute.
Rudolf Steiner’s wrote his last book with Dr. Ita Wegman: Fundamentals of Therapy: An Extension of the Art of Healing through Spiritual Knowledge, as its first English translation in 1925 was titled. Anthroposophic Medicine (AM) is now practiced worldwide. As the word “extension” suggests, AM is “complementary” not “alternative” to standard Western medicine; the resulting practice is “holistic” or “integral.” Rudolf Steiner expected participants in his medical courses to be MDs or students pursuing the standard degree. On that foundation he added new insights from his research which materialistic approaches could not reach. These were grounded in a full picture of the human constitution: a physical body, an body of life and formative forces (etheric body), the astral body of feelings and lower consciousness, and the ego. Body, soul, and spirit are expressly considered in the nature of the human being.
AM also works from a “wellness” model, recognizing the health-giving activity of the body of formative forces as fundamental. In an “illness” model attention is drawn more to symptoms than to the whole being and “patients” often become a passive battlefield where doctors combat illness. In Steiner’s research health and illness appear as one dimension of an individual’s karmic path and life experience, and the individual self or ego can be powerfully involved in healing.
Medicine makes extensive use of healing substances. Many pharmaceutical companies are major corporations and major players in medical research and education. Steiner recognized and pointed out numerous therapeutic uses of plants, metals, and mineral substances, and considered homeopathy, the use of highly diluted and “potentized” preparations, a valid approach. The Weleda company was organized in Steiner’s lifetime to provide anthroposophic preparations.
In his last months of activity Rudolf Steiner observed that with adequate funds a breakthrough could be made in anthroposophical scientific research. Funds have never approached the level he hoped for, however, so in medicine and other fields the advances that are possible are often carried by the efforts of a few individual doctors, therapists, and independent researchers.
Lili Kolisko (September 1, 1889–November 20, 1976) was one of Rudolf Steiner’s most significant students. Her first meeting with anthroposophy occurred in 1914. She was working at the time as a volunteer helper in a hospital where she met her later husband Eugen Kolisko. (During
this time she learned practical laboratory methods, essential skills for her later research activities.)
At one point Eugen Kolisko asked her: “May I give you a book?” and when she agreed he gave her Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. It made a powerful and immediate impression on her. Apparently she read this through in one night and in the next several months read every single book of Rudolf Steiner’s that Eugen Kolisko had in his possession.
She met Rudolf Steiner in 1915. When she was introduced to him he told her, “Oh yes, we know each other already.” In her own independent and forward manner she decisively answered, “No,” and insisted on this “No” even as Rudolf Steiner persisted in affirming that they already knew each other, until he helpfully added, “Nevertheless, nevertheless, from before.”
In her first longer conversation with Rudolf Steiner, in May 1915, she reminded him that she had written him a letter and would have liked an answer. She had probably mentioned in that letter details about her very difficult youth and asked for advice related to her sleep. He answered her that that she should envision an abyss into which she would let rose petals float to the ground and then gather them again. He added that she had had a question in the letter about occult chemistry and advised her first to fill some gaps that she had in that area and only then tackle the specific problem. Then suddenly he said to her “You are seeing the ether.”
As a researcher, Lili Kolisko’s first contribution consisted in following up an indication of Steiner’s about the activity of the spleen. Rudolf Steiner had made the comment in lectures given in 1920 (Spiritual Science and Medicine) that one of the occult roles of the spleen is to regulate the intake of nutrition and its distribution to the various organs. He explained that the spleen has the function to give us the ability to eat at times of our choosing and yet enable the body to receive its nutrition on a regular basis, and felt that one could demonstrate physiologically this function in the laboratory.
Lili Kolisko studied the platelets that were generated by the spleen in subjects who had been eating regularly
versus people that had meals at irregular times. She discovered that under the appropriate circumstances a new type of speckled platelets would be seen under the microscope which she and Rudolf Steiner later called “regulator cells.” Steiner mentioned this work often and made the statement several times that if this type of research had occurred at a normal university it would have received international acclaim.
Her second major contribution was to develop a socalled germination test to show the influence of potentized substances on living organisms. This work grew out of a question that she posed to Rudolf Steiner essentially asking how one could determine which potency of a specific substance would be most beneficial to be used in a hoof and mouth epidemic that was occurring. Steiner advised her to grow wheat seeds and sequentially water them with various potencies of the substance in question. The resulting growth curves would give the desired answer. Lili Kolisko continued this work throughout her lifetime generating literally thousands of these curves and contributing greatly to our understanding of the work with potentized substances. It must have been a lifelong disappointment for her that the envisioned cooperation between her and medical doctors never came to fruition. It is in particular this aspect of the work that the Institute which carries her name is attempting to continue and further develop.
Rudolf Steiner valued Lili Kolisko also as an esoteric student. She was one of a handful of people that he personally allowed to read and hold the First Class lessons.
Lili Kolisko’s life continued to be both tragic and difficult. Due to extreme disagreements between the Koliskos and certain influential members of the Anthroposophic Society, she and her husband Eugen, then a much respected anthroposophic doctor and school physician to the Stuttgart Waldorf School, left Germany in the 1930s and resettled in England. Eugen died soon thereafter of a heart attack. Lili lived in extreme poverty. At one point apparently she was earning a living by sewing purses. Nevertheless during this whole time she continued her germination potency work as well as very significant research experiments on anthroposophic paper chromatog-
raphy. In these last mentioned experiments she repeatedly showed that one could demonstrate the effect of star constellations on metals and other substances.
The anthroposophic physician Gisbert Husemann pointed out that Lili Kolisko’s work begins at the same time—in 1920—when Rudolf Steiner lectured on Thomas Aquinas. Steiner pointed out later on that in those lectures he had intended to demonstrate the new path that natural science needs to take into the future. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas was still concerned with a material world on earth and a spiritual world “in the heavens.” Today, Steiner emphasized, this duality has to be bridged and the work of the spiritual world intimately affecting physical phenomena has to be recognized. It is perhaps not just a coincidence that the researcher Lili Kolisko was quietly beginning to fulfill precisely the challenge that Rudolf Steiner had postulated, bringing awareness for physical phenomena that are clearly caused by spiritual events. Husemann quotes Steiner (10.22.1922; CW 218) that in regard to Lili Kolisko’s work “we are working not just in the presence of an exclusion from the public consciousness but also in the presence of an exclusion of the interest from the Anthroposophical Society.”
One gets a heightened appreciation for Lili Kolisko’s work when one keeps in mind that Rudolf Steiner asked her to give a full lecture about her research during the Christmas Foundation meeting. On the same day he gave as the “rhythm of the day” the verse:
This the Elemental Spirits hear In the East, West, North, and South May Human Beings hear it.
Rudolf Steiner had intended to direct a renewed appeal to the members of the Anthroposophic Society for financial support of the Kolisko research. With his death in 1925 this appeal never materialized.
Drs. Ross Rentea and Andrea Rentea write: “Our family practice clinic in Chicago (Paulina Medical Clinic [www.paulinamedicalclinic.com]), emphasizing integrative, holistic, homeopathic and natural medicine, opened in 1983. Now more than 30 years later we look back with satisfaction on having helped thousands of patients with their health needs. Throughout we have used the gentlest, most holistic and natural medicine approaches that were possible for the treatment of both acute and chronic illnesses, for both adults and children. Our goal is main-
taining or recovering your optimal physical health so that you can continue a fulfilled moral and spiritual life that helps others around you.
Dr. Andrea Rentea graduated from the prestigious Chicago Medical School (now the Rosalind Franklin University), in 1975, and after her residency in Chicago she spent four years at various European clinics studying anthroposophic/complementary medicine. She specializes in women’s concerns and children’s problems, both physical and emotional. Outside her practice her additional activities include consulting to various Waldorf Schools on the medical needs and handling of difficult children.
Dr. Ross Rentea graduated from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and after his residency in NYC he also spent four years at various European clinics studying anthroposophic/complementary medicine. He has published numerous articles in peer reviewed medical journals (such as basic science studies on the effect of mistletoe extracts on the successful therapy of cancer) and holds a patent for a medical device.
Dr. Mark Kamsler provides pediatric medical care to all ages of children/young adults and also provides consultative care for adult patients looking for a more holistic input. He received his MD from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor and completed a residency in Pediatrics at CS Mott Children’s Hospital there. He has had a general practice in the Milwaukee area since 1995. He has worked extensively as a consulting pediatrician to several Waldorf Schools and has spoken to groups ranging from Birthing Centers and La Leche League to Grand Rounds at several hospitals.
Alongside their practices all three physicians are very active in public education, in lectures, conferences, and webinars. But their commitment has not ended there.
“Following a long standing interest in researching ways for creating new quality natural remedies, appropriate to the spiritual and physical needs of the contemporary individuals, three physicians founded True Botanica in 2004: Dr. Mark Kamsler, Dr. Andrea Rentea and Dr. Ross Rentea. The GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) compliant main facility is located in Hartland, Wisconsin,” west of Milwaukee and about two hours from Chicago. The company goal is “to create the most safe and effective full spectrum products possible that work harmoniously on body, mind and spirit. The formulas are designed by uniting the best that nature has to offer with the latest emerging modern nutritional technology.” The company is now offering “‘validated’ homeopathic/ anthroposophic remedies—a worldwide first.”
“Essential processes that constitute the core of our products are done by hand, in a quiet environment conducive to an inner sense of responsibility, reverence and gratitude to the natural substances used in the making of the healing products. All products are made in the morning, under conditions when we can be reasonably assured that only a positive energy will accompany the production process. (For example no manufacturing takes place during storms, etc.) The ingredients for our formulas are carefully sourced from non GMO, biodynamic and organic materials. The formulas are designed by keeping in mind the best of insights given by the scientist Rudolf Steiner and the latest in modern nutritional technology. Some features we are particularly proud of are:
A threefold design to our products that makes them particularly effective on all three levels of body, mind and spirit.
A proprietary method for a more efficient extraction of herbal materials, resulting in a non-alcoholic tincture.
Creating full spectrum formulas where the natural salts and minerals of the medicinal herbs are included.
New blends of entirely natural fragrances, valuable for the cosmetic line and aromatherapy, such as a blend of rhododendron and other steam distilled essential oils. These are currently used in our face moisturizer, cleanser cream, bath oils, salt body scrubs and health creams.
1 Quotations from www.truebotanica.com
Rhythmically preparing substances in order to achieve new qualities in the substances. Additionally, a final mixing is accomplished with the Swiss bioengineering Inversina™ mixer.”
Work with the True Botanica company led to the three physicians also co-founding the Lili Kolisko Institute which conducts education, research and social activities in the anthroposophic health care field. A laboratory is being built to conduct continuing research into the demonstration of the validity of anthroposophic/homeopathic remedies. The doctors wrote friends and donors last fall:
As we all would agree, introducing others to Rudolf Steiner’s work is a quintessential first step, and continuing to “spread the word” is of course crucial, but eventually the newcomers ask: “And what have you done with all the material you are so excited about?” Then comes the tough part, showing for example applications in clinical practice... and those in turn are based on previously done research and insights thus gained. Among many activities perhaps nothing is more financially demanding, and dependent on altruistic trust, than laboratory work. But the future benefits are enormous. The question everybody could ask themselves is: How many cents a day am I willing to sacrifice for the support of ongoing research? We believe that this work touches all of us, irrespective of our specific situation. This year we celebrate four years of research at the Lili Kolisko Institute. But the economy and materialistic feelings of our time are such that our financial situation is not rosy. We have had to let co-workers go. We have had to cut down on the number of projects, etc. Still, we trust in the future support of our community.
The Lili Kolisko Institute is the former True Botanica Foundation. The nonprofit 501(c)3 organization was renamed to more clearly show its independence from the True Botanica company. Its research results are available to all interested parties, and donations made to the Institute are tax deductible.
The True Botanica company whole heartedly continues to support the Institute, but it cannot cover all the costs by itself. To keep the research work and educational programs going we are dependent, more than ever, on donations from the enlightened community who understands and values this medical-biological work.
The research results are not theoretical. The results of this work have already been quite tangible. Over 180 new remedies have resulted to date from these experiments. Hundreds of people, lay and professional, have been introduced to the ideas and benefits of anthroposophic medicine. For the future, among others, we hope that with your help more data will be forthcoming showing the importance and reality of spiritual rhythms and forces.
The Kolisko Institute website highlights the following areas of current research:
Boswellia (frankincense) experiments; bioavailability of two commercially available brands compared.
Chromatography experiments: Boswellia, Lightroot™ (the yam Dioscorea batatas), Hyssop. “Chromatography, such as in the method demonstrated here, is a means by which one can begin to visualize the life forces (the etheric forces) that underlie either natural substances like plant extracts, minerals, etc., or that can (or should be) found in finished products.”
Germination experiments. “Experimental behavior of more than 100 substances to date have been analyzed by the germination method in order to find out which potencies are the more active for each specific substance.”
The Kolisko Validation™ Method: improving quality control of homeopathically potentized OTC drugs.
A substantial paper by Ross Rentea MD and Mark Kamsler MD discusses this last area, “a standardized biological test which allows validation, i.e. verification of effective activity, of homeopathically potentized substances. ... From a certain point forward this stepwise process of dilution and agitation [potentization] results in a product that has purportedly no molecules of the original substance left—and yet it is supposed to have a therapeutic effect. It is this characteristic that causes the scientific community to call homeopathic remedies ‘implausible’ and doubt their effectiveness.
“To our knowledge this is the first time that such an objective, statistically analyzable ‘potency validation’ test is included in the quality control process of manufacturing of homeopathic/anthroposophic products. This could constitute an additional step in assuring the consumer that the product containing an ultra-high dilution is not ‘just water or just sugar pills.’ Additionally, the test allows a more objective interpretation of the potencies of
each substance … [and] it is hoped that ultimately the resulting potency-validated homeopathic/anthroposophic medications will emerge as clinically more effective.”
So, how can it be established that an effect is present in the result? And how can the commonly used potencies be evaluated to show whether they are in fact the most suitable? “The answer was given by Rudolf Steiner already in the 1920s. In a reply to a question from his student Lily Kolisko about a method for finding the most appropriate potency of a substance that was to be given as a remedy against hoof and mouth disease in cows he suggested to her: Let wheat seeds germinate under the influence of a series of potencies of that substance. The response of the seeds to the various potencies will result in an overall curve showing the ‘vitalizing process,’ or lack of it, created by specific potencies on the seedlings. This, he added, would not only be valid for the plant but also for the animal organism. He further characterized the resulting curves in a lecture (3.31.1920):
“‘(In the series of potencies …) you will reach a Null point. Beyond that the opposite effects (of the test substance in the first zone) appear. But this is not all; the further path leads to another Null point for these opposite effects. Passing the second Null, you will come to a higher form of efficiency, tending in the same direction as the first sequence but of quite a different nature. It would be valuable and appropriate to plot out the different effects of potencies in curves of this special manner.’
“According to Steiner the curve for the first two zones can be seen on the paper but an accurate representation of the third zone would need to show the curve coming out of the plane of the paper at ninety degrees.
“Based on these insights Kolisko proceeded to do the work that led to germination curves of potencies. She pursued this project essentially lifelong! She let wheat seeds germinate for a number of days in separate containers wa-
tering them with either water as control or with increasing potencies of a particular substance. (In general 1x to 60x; many experiments however to 600x!) Above are samples of findings from one of her early experiments. (Here,
potencies D17 and D18: no response; D19 and D20: big response; D21 again low, and so on.)
“The value of Lili Kolisko’s work consists in demonstrating for the first time that sequential potencies increase and decrease in effectiveness in a rhythmical, semisinusoidal manner. When at a later time several of her germination potency curves were looked at cumulatively, the semi sinusoidal pattern emerged even more clearly. Kolisko herself believed that every substance has its own completely characteristic ‘signature’ curve and that it would be of extreme importance for every doctor to know the curve of every remedy as naturally as they would know the appearance and signature of every plant and mineral. To increase accuracy she would have welcomed, she said, a cumulating of several experiments of the same substance with the same potencies.
“Today the plant germination technique is generally accepted among credible researchers (Baumgartner et al.; Bellavite et al.; Betti L et al.; Bonamin; Fisher; Husemann, 1992; Scherr et al.) as a solidly recognized model for the study of potentizing processes. However, to the present, as far as we know, none of the in vitro plant models—or similar—have been used in the sense desired by Kolisko, and pursued by us, as a practical tool for quality control in the manufacturing process of ultra-high diluted (potentized) medicines. … We have developed a new relatively simple (albeit very labor intensive) protocol for a germination based model that we use to accomplish the stated purpose of demonstrating that the final potency going into a final OTC homeopathic/anthroposophic remedy is indeed active and can influence a biological system. To overcome the above stated weakness in the Kolisko experiments our method uses a statistical validation. …” In brief, the various potencies are tested against control samples. The variation from the control is evaluated statistically to obtain a degree of confidence that the preparation has an effect that goes significantly beyond the “mere” water control.
“The Helleborus graph (above, the control on the left, the 29th potency on the right) clearly demonstrates the significance of this anthroposophic research. Helleborus is a toxic plant that Rudolf Steiner indicated, for the first time, would be beneficial in inhibiting tumor growth. The final potentized product thus should show an inhibiting influence on the growth of the wheat seeds. (We have ample evidence to show that other substances have a stimulating influence on the growth of the seeds.) Indeed, we were able to show that the 29th potency has such an inhibiting effect. We call this ‘proving’ of the effectiveness of the specific potency a ‘Kolisko Validation.’
“Beyond the obvious importance of going a long way toward increasing confidence in the product itself this method is an indisputable contribution of anthroposophic medicine/research to a ‘real world’ medical quandary.”
At www.koliskoinstitute.org a full paper describing the above processes in detail is linked under “Research.”
Three dedicated physicians found anthroposophic methods effective in their work with patients. Together with a team of dedicated co-workers they went on to create new and assured-quality medications, and now to resume and expand a line of testing and validation originated by Rudolf Steiner and carried selflessly for decades by Lili Kolisko, all while engaging in efforts to educate the public on anthroposophic medicine. They see their efforts in the direction of Steiner’s wish that anthroposophy would make original, true contributions to solving the world’s needs. The question remains, will this core work find friends near and far with the will to sustain it.
John Beck is editor of being human and communications director for the Anthroposophical Society in America.
by Laura Summer
…Art is the ‘only’ possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole of creativity. —
Joseph BeuysThe date was September 14, 2009. Thirty-five people sat in a circle in Bright Wing Studio in Hillsdale, New York. Names traveled around the circle, the history of painting in that studio was described, memories and hopes for the future were voiced, the feeling of “dropping in” from a nine-foot skateboard ramp was mentioned. And Free Columbia began.
Free Columbia is an intensive exploration into art, Goethean observation, anthroposophy, and social change. When we talked about starting Free Columbia we realized that it would have to be available to everyone no matter their financial situation. It would have to be supported and free. But what does free mean? To create something free meant to create a vessel into which inspiration was free to flow, for teachers, for students. It meant expanding a form to include the unexpected, the challenging, even the unadvisable. Many people said not to do it. And not to call it free. That people would not support it, that they would take it for granted. And sometimes that is true; but mostly not. People have rallied around the principle of accessibility. The community holds us up. At the moment we have forty people making monthly pledges. We have
run for six years now and although we do sometimes run out of money it always flows back in quickly enough. We provide all of our programming without set tuitions or materials fees; we encourage everyone to donate.
In six years Free Columbia has grown from a little painting program in the studio behind my house to an initiative including many people working in a variety of ways. Here are a few snapshots from over the years:
In our third year eleven full-time students finished the program of painting, drawing, and puppetry with an exhibit of the year’s work held at a space next to the Family Dollar store in Philmont, New York. This exhibit in the middle of the town was reflective of our year which saw us moving out into the world around us. Our summer conference, concerned with artistic experience and the future of art, was held at the Basilica Industria in Hudson, NY and was attended by 45 people from many countries including Finland, Israel, Italy, and France.
In 2013/14 (our fifth year), eight people participated full-time, 120 people in part-time intensives locally and in California, Oregon, and Washington, DC. Over 1000 people saw the 2014 puppet show, The Legend of the Peacemaker. In Free Columbia’s four “Art Dispersals” 295 works of art have
What is art? What is freedom? According to Rudolf Seiner art is the movement in the soul created by the sculpture, painting, music, etc., that the person is observing. How do we move souls to become more alive, more balanced, more productive of a future that values truth, goodness, and beauty? At Free Columbia we teach our students to locate soul movement: the quality realm. How does blue make you feel, how is it different from red? We learn to quiet our sympathies and antipathies and to ask what is here, what language does it speak, can I enter into the conversation if I learn the language? This is a way of developing perception of non-material reality. It is a way to make anthroposophy practicable.
Between darkness and light, between one color and another, between one tone and the next, there is movement. In a conversation with Jesuit priest Friedhelm Mennekes, Joseph Beuys said, “Christ is in the movement.” Can we experience this? We can perceive here if we quiet our inner chatter and observe. In art we are working in a way often different from everyday concerns. We are learning to observe reality, see what is needed, and then to act.
Next year we will offer a six-month full-time course on perception through color in relation to social change, a low-residency intensive on painting, a module on social threefolding, and perhaps a program in sculpture, as well as ongoing practical arts classes, performances, children’s classes and camps, classes for developmentally disabled adults, classes in the prison, summer and winter intensives, study groups and conferences. Next summer’s two-week intensive will be on Rudolf Steiner’s sketches for painters. All accessible to everyone. All supported by gifting. All in all, a very engaging way to work with spiritual science.
In the spring we will also take our financial model to a new level. We will run a campaign to pay forward one-
third of our operating expenses. With one-third coming in in monthly pledges and one-third expected from donations throughout the year, a successful campaign will make it possible for Free Columbia to work without a monthly worry of running out of money.
“Work cures everything.” — Henri Matisse
If you are interested in our work, would like to participate in any way, or would like to help us move forward, please visit www.FreeColumbia.org. And see the Gallery (pages 33-36) in this issue for work from Free Columbia.
Laura Summer (laurasummer@fairpoint.net) is co-founder with Nathaniel Williams of Free Columbia. Her approach to color is influenced by Beppe Assenza, Rudolf Steiner, and by Goethe’s color theory. She has been working with questions of color and contemporary art for 25 years. Her work, to be found in private collections in the US and Europe, has been exhibited at the National Museum of Catholic Art and History in New York City and at the Sekem Community in Egypt. She founded two temporary alternative exhibition spaces in Hudson NY, 345 Collaborative Gallery and Raising Matter-this is not a gallery
Free Columbia mural in Philmont, NY, 2014
by John Beck & Cynthia Hoven
For over a year, I have been working on breaking through the digital barrier to create an online eurythmy experience. After long and hard and creative work, I finally launched the website yesterday, Michaelmas 2014. I would be delighted if you would take a look: EurythmyOnline.com. There are over 50 video recordings teaching people basic warm-up exercises, rod exercises, spatial movements, vowels, consonants and also a few soul exercises. Take some time to look at the site, check it out, get the “flavor” of what I am doing by reading the texts, trying some of the freebies, downloading the pdfs.
—Cynthia HovenTimes change—whatever that actually means—and we find ourselves in situations that demand choices, made on our own responsibility. When Ita Wegman, MD, proposed to move her medical practice from Zurich and open a clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland, near the Goetheanum, she of course asked her teacher and advisor Rudolf Steiner to approve or disapprove the plan. Which he declined to do. When she went ahead and months later was ready to show him the facility, it’s reported that he promptly started to help write the promotional brochure.
Rudolf Steiner created eurythmy, or discovered it, or revealed it, or all of those and more. It seems to stretch deep into the grounds of existence as well as playing a part still hard even to imagine in humanity’s future evolution. Eurythmy is a performance art, a healing art, a teaching art. Perhaps it is the flowing substance of life itself finding its newest expression, by invitation, through the wakeful and devoted human being?
So it is entirely natural that eurythmists have worked very hard to engage and manifest all that Steiner and Marie Steiner-von Sievers established of eurythmy in their lifetimes, and draw a line there. There is, after all, real opposition to a human evolution into freedom and love.
Rudolf Steiner made very clear that humanity today is locked in a struggle to become aware of great cultural-civilizational-evolutionary forces. He identified these with real “spiritual beings,” conscious and intentional entities working at a higher stage of development than present-day humans. Some of them strengthen us in the long run by trying to draw us onto their own paths.
Our current strongest opponent, reported Dr. Steiner, is a being for whom Steiner used the old Persian name “Ahriman.” Ahriman’s gifts and capacities help us release great physical powers and create material abundance. He helps us become hard-headed and objective. It also seems that his inclination is to remake the world on a mechanical basis; that is the kind of perfection that is within his powerful but one-sided understanding. Life in nature and free individuality in the human being do not fit within his understanding of cosmic purpose. If we do not recognize the force of his identity and intentions, then we will believe that it is we ourselves who want to merge human beings with machines, eliminate our messy free choice, and pursue an endless, painless, deathless physical life.
So would we subjugate this still-new art of eurythmy to Ahriman?
But then there is the equally large question of human beings’ taking responsibility for their actions and choices. And times changing, whatever that means. YouTube and online videos are the first point of reference for younger generations, and trained eurythmists willing and able to teach are few and far between (and must struggle to make a living). What do you do then—or rather, now? Do you
protect and defend, or step out and take risks?
Cynthia Hoven directed the eurythmy training program at Rudolf Steiner College, near Sacramento, California. When the program had to be closed for financial reasons, she was faced with personal needs as well as professional choices. She wrote a remarkable book on eurythmy. She worked with young people on new social visions. And she came finally to the conclusion that she might be the right person to create an online eurythmy learning resource. Service to eurythmy and to other human beings, and the challenges of her own professional and karmic path, are now fully intertwined. What follows is in Cynthia Hoven’s own words… —John Beck
I’d like you to see my personal mission statement. Just in case it sparks. I wrote it about 18 months ago, before I got started in earnest, to keep me focused. I like looking back on it, both in the times when I am getting paying customers and in the times when I’m instead getting dozens of non-paying customers—because just knowing that they’re doing eurythmy makes me sing.
Eurythmy is an art form that is inspired by, integrates, and makes manifest our divine nature in body, soul, and spirit. Eurythmy is a path of embodied spirituality.
This program is a bold undertaking to present an online eurythmy curriculum through e-courses, CDs, and video recordings, with uncompromising integrity, overcoming the limitations of technological media.
The primary purpose of this work is to make eurythmy and also the studies of anthroposophy and the arts that spring from it available to thousands of people, in service of humanity and the planet earth.
The secondary purpose is to create a vibrant and thriving business for me, selling lessons, and also teaching live eurythmy classes and other courses.
The third purpose is to create career opportunities for others to lecture and teach in this program.
For many many years I was as conservative as anyone else could be about the thought of filming eurythmy. I knew that Rudolf Steiner disapproved of movies. I know that in films you can only see the image of things—in two dimension—and not the thing itself. I consider that in watching films we tend to become inwardly passive and merely receive the images as they are presented to us. I know that in film we have only the illusion of having a real person talking to us: we don’t have the other person really with us, with blood and breath and body. I know that these are all true because the medium cannot carry the true element of the living etheric.
In time, however, I began to wrestle with other questions. Would it be possible to help eurythmy become more well-known by crafting a beautiful website? How could I help eurythmy become more of a cultural reality, and not something that belongs only to the trained eurythmists? Every person can sing or speak or play a bit of an instrument or paint: why shouldn’t everyone have some access to eurythmy? Is it possible to bring eurythmy to people who live in remote places and will never meet a eurythmist? What about people who do a bit of eurythmy at a workshop and want to do more, but can’t quite remember how?
As I entertained these questions, I realized how much I want to participate in creating a new openness around eurythmy—as in fact I had begun by writing my book about eurythmy.1 I know it is a modern path of movement meditation (with great initiatory teachings for those who go deeply into it), and that I want to be part of making sure that it lives and doesn’t just wither away because it is not known or because it is held too tightly by some who claim to “possess” it. Why shouldn’t a group of people do Halleluiah at a faculty meeting? Why shouldn’t friends do a bit of eurythmy themselves? Hopefully they will do some and then go on to look for a eurythmist who can teach them properly. In saying this, I don’t want to detract from the value of a eurythmy training! Trained eurythmists should be like graduates of Julliard, or blackbelt Tai Chi masters. But everyone can do a little bit!
So I resolved to start the website, but I recognized that I would have many obstacles to overcome. How could I present the lessons in such a way that the viewer would be able to overcome the limitations of the medium? Would it be possible for me to create narratives that
would enable people to internalize a lesson so deeply that they could recreate and enliven it from within themselves later on? What an exciting thought! I knew that because I have taught so many thousands of people, I would be able to introduce all of the lessons—threefold walking, contraction expansion, rod exercises, all the vowels and consonants: all 55 lessons—in clear, clean, poetic, inspirational language.
And so I dared myself to take on the task. And I feel that I have done as good a job as possible in the work. What remains to be seen is how well people will be inspired to take it up. What is missing in the lessons is the spark and the joy of working with a class of people, the contagion of having a live teacher carry you. What the lessons offer is an opportunity and a challenge for people to become self-motivated in their personal practices. How many people have the inner endurance, the inner power to commit to work on themselves in this way? I feel that this is the greatest limitation on the website.
The website contains four free lessons and over fifty paid lessons. About twenty to seventy people a day visit the website, and they linger for an average of 3.5 minutes— meaning some stay quite a bit longer. I judge that quite a few people are doing the freebies and that makes me very happy. Some people have purchased the special sequences, and some have purchased the whole set of lessons, designed to be enough for one lesson a week for a year.
For the most part, the feedback is immensely positive from those who are using the lessons. People are so grateful that I have freed eurythmy up for them to access on their own. Some have cried when they thanked me: they have loved eurythmy so much, but haven’t been able to continue on their own and longed for something like this. A few anthroposophic doctors have thanked me profusely for the work! Some eurythmists have expressed reservations, but others have thanked me and watch the lessons themselves before teaching their own classes because they find my style inspiring.
I was especially moved by a woman who works with women in trauma in Lebanon. She said she would never be able to find a eurythmist there, but she can use some of my offerings to help people become centered and feel peace. Here is another item of feedback:
We are a group of three women in Perth, Australia. Tomorrow morning we will embark together on your module for the Consonants. I have worked with your Freebies each day for a few weeks and find the gentle, methodical guidance very helpful. From there, creative
ways to deepen the practice are able to spring forth. It is so different from a class where several different elements are covered at one time. I feel this gently unfolding method will entrain a model of simplicity which will lay a strong foundation in each of us as individuals, and carry over into our shared movement.
It seems like only yesterday that I thought it would be madness to ever consider creating an online eurythmy website. Why? Eurythmy is all about living, moving presence. And that simply isn’t communicable through the computer. For all their bells and whistles, their fabulous color effects and images, and their capacity to transmit gazillion-bytes of information faster than the speed of thought, computers only give the appearance of reality. Computers live on the surface of things: they perpetuate the world of maya 2 They cannot give us the true experience of being in the warm presence of another person.
Eurythmy, on the other hand, opens the door for each of us to celebrate communion with our own spiritselves, and with the world-spirit that has created all. And every instance of eurythmy must be permeated with presence: with your presence, with spirit presence.
When I teach live classes, one of my most important responsibilities is that I am fully present throughout the lesson to witness the best and highest in each one of my students. In honoring the fact that each person is a child of God, an active spirit presence awakening to their infinite spirit potential, I am inwardly attentive, patient, supportive, and generous. And through this act of witnessing, I see that everyone is beautiful when they do eurythmy.
And so: when I decided to create EurythmyOnline. com, I had some tough questions to face.
Would it be possible to create recordings that were so carefully crafted that I and my students would be able to overcome the electronic media? Searching for a solution, I carefully instruct people to watch the videos only as long
2 In ancient Hindu-Vedic tradition, the experience (later a teaching) that the sense-perceptible world is illusory, only the manifestation of the work of spiritual beings. —Editor
as they need to, to internalize the material I am teaching and then to turn off the recordings and work in silence. In that silence, I know that they can awaken to their own experience of spirit presence.
And then I had to decide: what sequence of instruction should I offer? Should I require that students all start at the very beginning exercises (weight and light, contraction-expansion, threefold walking) before proceeding to learn how to do the sounds of language? Or should I allow people to enter the curriculum at their own level, and choose for themselves where to begin? It took many month of design for me to come to my present solution, in which I encourage people to do the whole curriculum, but also break the content down into modules so people can take smaller chunks if they prefer.
And then came the question of money, for eurythmy is actually priceless. And, because it is my ardent wish that everyone should be able to do eurythmy, how could I charge anything for it? On the other hand, I have had real costs in building this website and in sustaining it. And through paying money for the lessons, students allow me to continue to live and teach and serve spirit in all the ways that life asks of me.
I know that I will be asked: Why did I do it? And I will answer: Because the “Spirit of Eurythmy” is longing to be relevant, to bring its refreshing liveliness to our age.
Why? Because I am aware of the millions of people in the world who will never have a chance to meet a eurythmist in person, but who may have heard of eurythmy, in real life or through their Waldorf connections or even in their dreams, and who want to learn about it and try it.
Why? Because I know that if we as eurythmists don’t find a way to step into the culture of electronic media, we will become increasingly invisible and, unfortunately, irrelevant. Blessings, —Cynthia Hoven
So here is a fresh new initiative, six months old, inviting your attention and response!
You can view the site at EurythmyOnline.com and you can contact Cynthia at choven@sbcglobal.net.
JB: You are known in America for important books on subjects from 9/11 to Rudolf Steiner’s core mission, and remarkable biographical works on Gen. von Moltke and D.N. Dunlop. You also give lectures over here, and have written about anthroposophy since Rudolf Steiner’s death and into the future. Can you speak of your own core mission—essential concerns you want to share with anthroposophists today?
THM: Well, if I dared to speak about my own core mission, I would say it consists in the humble attempt to elaborate biographies in harmony with Steiner’s core mission, which was, next to the social question, the revelation of concrete karmic relationships. In the two biographical works you mentioned this perspective underlay everything I did. This is also the case with the newly translated biography about Ludwig PolzerHoditz, which traces this pupil of Steiner’s back to the times of the Roman emperor Hadrian. And precisely in this respect I would like to share my concerns with fellow anthroposophists: that a karmic perspective on individuals is often left to fantasy, speculation, and the immature or premature expression of personal experiences in this field. Or it is totally overshadowed by an approach to Steiner’s research by philologizing and psychologizing, as is done by the new “critical” edition of his works undertaken by an individual deeply convinced of the “truths” of Mormonism.
Another concern is: Will more and more anthroposophists turn to the “core substance” of anthroposophy instead of merely hoping for an external growth of the movement? The lost harmony between inner deepening and going out into the world, between involution and evolution—a harmony that Nature establishes in the course of the seasons—should be restored within the anthroposophical movement. In the last decades there was too much one-sided going out on the one hand—trying to become everyone’s friend—and too much one-sided going inwards on the other hand—like clinging to the idea of the “esoteric” character of the Anthroposophical Society and the like.
JB: There is also much more that you have been doing as publisher and editor, in German, and now you plan to bring the magazine, Der Europäer (The European) out in English. Will this be for readers in the UK primarily, or also for North America? What should readers expect from this?
THM: It is hoped that the English language version of the Europäer will reach readers in all English speaking countries. Since “The European” already exists as the title of a EU-compatible journal, we decided to call it The Present Age —“an international monthly journal for the advancement of spiritual science.”
Walter Johannes Stein, inspired by D.N. Dunlop, had already published a monthly with this title in the 1930s. By choosing this title, which could also arouse the interest of a Chinese or Japanese reader, we would at the same time also like to link up with the great, unfinished impulses of Stein, Dunlop, and others. Without getting dogmatic, we will not be shy in speaking about anthroposophy, trying to show its fruitful impact upon understanding all major questions of life. The first issue will feature an as-yet unpublished article about “The Meeting with the Being of Anthroposophy” by Charles Kovacs, an outstanding teacher and painter who lived in Edinburgh. The Present Age will try to cover all major events and developments of our time from a spiritual scientific viewpoint.
JB: We know that Rudolf Steiner depended on questions being asked of him, but not many were asked from America. Yet the global cultural and economic power of the USA has been a dominant fact now for seventy years. What should North American anthroposophists be concerned with? Have we been trying too hard to be good Europeans or Germans when the world movement needs something else from us?
THM: I do remember some questions were put to Steiner by an American, the economist William Nasmyth. He asked Steiner whether for developing the threefold organism one would have to start in America by separating Economy from Politics and for how long the tripartition would be valid. Steiner found these questions remarkable and replied to the latter question, “About two centuries.”
Steiner added that he would not speak about tripartition in America, unless he had lived there for at least three years.
D.N. Dunlop had envisaged holding a world economic conference in Washington in 1936 where a concrete psychology of the peoples of the earth would also have been integrated. This conference could not be realized because of Dunlop’s death in 1935. Today anthroposophists in the English-speaking countries should be ready to see, and possibly speak about, the real alternatives to the unhealthy processes of an undermining fiat-money economy as already developed by Steiner. When the next international crash arrives, clarity should be spread about such an alternative going beyond the scope and insights of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Even before separating Economy and Politics, this would seem to be the highest priority in the English-speaking world today. Apart from this task it seems necessary that more and more people in the West should become aware of the renewal of spiritual impulses that has, in fact, occurred in Old Europe, even if this renewal has stayed germinal.
JB: Speaking personally, I wonder about the possibility of a revival of European cultural leadership in the world. I was raised in the Rocky Mountains, deep in North America, but my cultural interests, language, music, literature, were all European. The loss of European leadership after World War I is very obvious to me. Why should we care about Europe today, except as a tourist destination? What should we be asking of Europeans, Middle-Europeans especially?
THM: A future revival of European cultural leadership is vital, but can only be realized indirectly, that is, insofar as a European spiritual renewal through anthroposophy is able to fructify the spiritual and cultural activities in the West. Steiner stressed in 1919 that the world responsibility for outer events has irrevocably passed over from Europe (including Germany) to the Western powers; but, he also stressed that these powers have the responsibility to develop new spiritual impulses. And this is simply impossible without recourse to the European spiritual renewal just mentioned. As long as Europe is no more than a cultural museum or tourist resort, the Western powers will not be able to stop the spread of what Steiner called the Kulturtod —the death of all culture—over the whole globe, a process which, especially after the events of 9/11, we are increasingly witnessing every day. A support for understanding the spiritual responsibility of the West can be found in the unexhausted impulses of Ralph Waldo Emerson who had, as you know, a deep understanding of what was preparing for the spiritual renewal of Europe.
“Seek the real practical life but seek it in a way that does not blind you to the spirit working in it; seek the spirit, but do not seek it out of spiritual egoism, from spiritual greed, but look for it because you want to apply it unselfishly in practical life, in the material world. Make use of the ancient principle, spirit is never without matter, matter never without spirit.” — Rudolf Steiner
It is a blessing of aging that you naturally reflect on the people whom you have met in your life and their contributions to your own becoming as well as to how their lives and deeds have affected the world. I wish to remember and briefly describe the life and work of three individuals who were committed students of Rudolf Steiner, and who, I believe, had a significant impact on American life, in particular in the realm of money and business. That they are not well known in public life is not surprising as they focused their efforts on how to bring spirit into matter, how to transform the egotism and self-seeking so prevalent in a market-oriented capitalistic system into a true service orientation. They are also not often remembered in the circle of people connected to Waldorf education and anthroposophy as they were innovators in business life, initiators in the realm of the will and not directly in the area of cultural renewal.
Elise Casper (1919-97) overcame the egotism often associated with wealth by fostering community responsibility in the allocation of gift funds through the creation of the Mid-States Shared Gifting Group
Dietrich Asten (1922-84), a successful businessman and part owner of the Asten-Hill Company, used his personal wealth selflessly and often anonymously to support the work of anthroposophy in its many practical applications: Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, adult education, the Christian Community, eurythmy and the healing arts, as well as supporting the Anthroposophical Society itself. In addition he transformed his company into a model employer committed to high levels of integrity, and initiated a conscious development process for all of its work groups and employees.
The third person, Bill Bottum (1927-2005), president and CEO of Townsend and Bottum, was engaged in a life-long search for how best to apply the teachings of
the Sermon on the Mount (the Beatitudes) to business life. This he did through finding a way to neutralize private ownership of his company through a capital trust form, by introducing a non-sectarian form of mission and value orientation embodying the universal lessons of the Beatitudes into his company, and by a program of individual and group development that helped the company to work successfully in a variety of foreign cultures as well as integrating a multi-lingual and multi-cultural workforce.
Elise Casper: 1919-1997
Elise Casper was born into an old Milwaukee family, a child of privilege, with family ties to the Milwaukee brewing industry and to the Steinmeyer Grocery chain. She was a strong and intelligent woman who received an excellent education and with her family supported the growing cultural life of the city on the lake, with its symphony and two large museums. As a young child she used to say, “Elise do,” manifesting her strong and independent will, which she used to establish Elise’s Personalized Social Services, a very successful wedding planning and catering business in the 1950s.
Elise found her way to anthroposophy through her long-time friend Paul Riesen. She noted that much of Rudolf Steiner’s work agreed with her thinking, which from my experience was practical, deep, and probing.
In 1943 she had a son, Tim, who had artistic talent and as he grew she would take him to Europe on artistic and cultural tours. While on a trip to France in 1964 he was tragically killed in an automobile crash and she was severely injured, leading her to a deep inner and outer crisis. She found some consolation and support from Gerhard Klockenberg, a Christian Community priest, in France. After recuperating from the accident she sold her business and returned to Europe where she developed a keen interest in questions of money and how to renew society, being strongly drawn to the threefold social order movement. She even moved to Achberg, an experimental social community on the Lake of Constance, promoting the “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism.
In the late 1960s and 1970s she split her time between Paris and Milwaukee. She also began living with the question of how she could best support anthroposophical work in the Mid-West. So, having some funds and being practical she created the Anthroposophical Foundation of the Mid-West in 1976, wishing to apply aspects of Steiner’s “Fundamental Social Law” to a renewal of cultural life. I remember sitting with her on a grey autumn afternoon of that same year at the Centre for Social Development at Emerson College discussing the question of how she could best integrate Steiner’s social insights and principles to life in the Mid-West and how she could further the work of anthroposophy in her region of the country. Could money be worked with in a new way, she asked; and so upon returning to the U.S. permanently in 1980 she started the Mid-West Economic Group to work together with the Foundation she had previously created.
This new group, consisting of diverse members, including myself for a time, was first of all a study group and it also helped Elise to allocate gift funds from the foundation. It was in this circle of people, which included Gordon Edwards, Deborah Kahn, Candyce Sweda, and Michael Dobson, and later, Donald Melcer and Bill Manning, that the idea of the Shared Gifting Group applicants allocating gift funds amongst themselves was first discussed and elaborated. Elise would ask, “How do I give money away in such a way that it is not directly connected to me, giving me power and creating an unequal relationship between donor and recipient?” This question became the basis of practicing fund-sharing in which the different initiatives applying for grant money would see themselves as having a proportional claim on the money to be divided or donated. Each applicant could then gift back part of their claim on the total amount to others based on their common understanding of the urgency of the need. This meant having a clear picture of what was happening within each initiative so that the group as a whole could allocate funds by common agreement.
Fund sharing was first practiced by the Shared Gifting Group in 1984, with members participating in the allocation of $25,000. Often Gordon Edwards and Michael Dobson chaired these meetings, which went from one-day meetings to a whole weekend over the years. Participants felt truly uplifted by the process and a series of guidelines and procedures were developed to aid the shared gifting process. After Elise’s death in 1997, the Rudolf Steiner Foundation became the trustee of her estate and since that time over five million dollars has been granted
to support the work of anthroposophy in the Mid-West, with the largest share going to the Waldorf schools of the region. As Candace Sweda, a long-time participant in the fund-sharing process remarked, “It is humbling to work from our needs into the needs of the whole region. How do we balance interests? This is where creativity comes in. Working on common problems is a source of inspiration… In the Fund Sharing Group a loyalty and love of the individuals and their institutions has been built up.”
Elise Casper was a social scientist in her deeds, looking for ways to free money from her will in order to make it more productive for the community. Christopher Mann, a colleague in supporting anthroposophy in the Mid-West, stated, “I admired Elise’s ability to give up control over the use of her funds in her interest to build community. This overcomes the egotistical tendency in America where there are high ideals, which often give way to manipulative practice. It is a huge deed for an individual to give up control over how their money will be used. It is an act which releases power.”1
I honor Elise for this important work, setting a spiritual precedent for the selfless use of money, by giving up control over its use in her lifetime and encouraging a social process of gift money allocation.
Dietrich was a sensitive and highly disciplined person who valued order and punctuality as well as loyalty. He would be pleased if you called him at exactly the time agreed upon, not later or earlier, a particularly German trait.
Dietrich was indeed German, although born in Eupen, Belgium in 1922. His father was a highly educated businessman with an interest in Eastern philosophy and his mother, an aspiring artist, joined the Anthroposophical Society in her late twenties.
As a young man Dietrich experienced the horror of World War II as a young German soldier on the Russian front. I think this experience marked him for the rest of his life with a certain gravity, an awareness of the evils which human beings can inflict on each other, motivating him to do the good in an unusually selfless manner.
1 All quotes and much information is drawn from Freya Secrest, Shared Gifting : From Commitment to Practice, Graduation Essay, Waldorf School Administration and Community Development Program, 2000. Available from Christopher Schaefer,
His artistic nature found expression in playing the piano and the harpsichord. It was a delight to see him deeply absorbed in classical music, which granted him much joy within a demanding life.
After the war Dietrich worked in his father’s factory, which provided textiles and felts for the paper industry. He joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1949 in Brussels, and married, soon having two children, Peter and Sylvia. He then moved to the US, at his father’s request, to work in a fledgling new branch of the company, located just outside of Philadelphia.
The company, then known as the Asten Manufacturing Company, then Asten-Hill and still later Asten-Johnson, thrived, diversifying into wet and dryer felts. In time, Dietrich, an engineer by training, became its CEO and Board Chair and the company grew to be the third largest supplier of felts to the paper industry in North America.
As the company grew and became more profitable Dietrich began a long-term effort to provide financial support to both the Anthroposophical Society and its many practical works. This work was personal and often hidden from public view, as he did not want to receive any credit for the support he was providing. He initially engaged in his philanthropic work through his personal connections to the pioneers of Waldorf education, curative education, Waldorf teacher training, the arts and the Christian Community, relying on his shrewd assessment of people and their capacities.
He lived a modest life and shared his wealth generously, and his philanthropic work was truly extensive. I remember one personal incident when my wife and I moved from England to the U.S. in 1981, to work at the Waldorf Institute in Detroit. Upon asking Werner Glas where our small salary was to come from, he said rather blithely, “Oh, Dietrich, although he was hoping you would move to the Philadelphia area to start a business consultancy institute.” It is rather easy to take financial support for granted and yet if you think of the 1960s and 1970s when Waldorf education was expanding rapidly, the need for financial support was great and there were not many people to help. Dietrich, along with a few other individuals, made a huge difference to the expansion and success of anthroposophical work in the United States. After his death in 1984, his philanthropic work was carried on by the Rudolf Steiner Charitable Trust.
Dietrich was also the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in the United States from 196274 as well as a Class Holder in the School of Spiritual
Science. It was in the 1970s that he met and married his second wife Erika, and together they created a gracious home and social center in Valley Forge as well as shaping and guiding anthroposophical life in the Kimberton area.
As Dietrich became both the CEO and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Asten-Hill Company in 1977, he was able to bring into his company something of his own morality and spiritual striving. Through working with Coenraad van Houten of the Netherlands Pedagogical Institute (NPI), he and his top management team gave the company a mission statement and a set of goals founded on service and integrity, a flexible de-centralized work structure, and an emphasis on teamwork. Dietrich also approved of a personal development and assessment process that was many years ahead of industry practice and helped to institute a profit sharing plan for employees. He also changed how he himself led and managed the company, moving from a strong hands-on orientation to coaching and advising his management teams. I remember visiting the company in the early 1980s and watching as Dietrich attended meetings, saying very little, mainly asking questions of his division and department heads, and adopting a much stronger goal and process orientation with his managers, thereby enhancing their independence and sense of responsibility.
Dietrich died in a dramatic fashion at an Anthroposophical Society conference in Spring Valley, New York, in 1984. Having just completed a lecture on Sacramental and Spiritual Communion and while observing a eurythmy presentation called “The Question of Destiny” he had a heart attack. It was a very sudden transition but one that I felt was somehow in keeping with his nature and spiritual striving and intention. He had done his work and it was time to go. He had helped countless initiatives and individuals financially, had served the Anthroposophical Society selflessly, and had turned his company into a model organization balancing service, integrity, profitability, and employee development.2
I met Bill for the first time in 1981 when he was the CEO of Townsend and Bottum, a large construction firm which was building power plants around the world. He had on his usual blue suit and white shirt and tie and greeted me warmly with shining eyes and a warm smile.
2 Forschungstelle Kulturimpuls, Dietrich von Asten, 1990, Dornach, Switzerland. Dietrich also wrote two longer essays, America’s Way and Sacramental and Spiritual Communion, both published by Floris Books.
“Call me Bill,” he said, as he invariably greeted everyone, and then proceeded to ask me about myself and my interests. He had about him the engaging openness, good humor and modesty of many Mid-Westerners, combined with a deep moral and spiritual awareness.
When Bill was just finishing college his brother asked him to teach Sunday school. Bill said, “But I don’t know anything about Christianity,” and his brother said, “Well, find out.” So he did and soon focused on the Sermon on the Mount, Christ’s first teaching to his disciples, as the distillation of Christian values and practices. The Sermon on the Mount, or the Beatitudes, were to become the central focus of his inner life.
After graduating from college he joined his father’s construction company and he wrestled with whether he should become a minister or a businessman? Then one night he had a vivid dream in which he was told that he could apply Christ’s teachings in business life. This he was to do in a remarkable and creative way. He put together his reflections and experiences on working with the Sermon on the Mount in a short book called Within Your Reach, which he was to edit and re-edit for the rest of his life. He also practiced and meditated on the Beatitudes on a daily basis for over fifty years and so turned them into a way of leading his life and of transforming his company.
Bill was continuously busy in looking for approaches and concepts that would allow him to integrate the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount into business life. Upon hearing about Robert Greenleaf’s work on Servant Leadership he sought him out and visited him a number of times in a Quaker retirement home outside of Philadelphia. Greenleaf had been a consultant to MIT in the turbulent sixties and had realized that many students were reading Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East. In this story, Leo has been the porter and cook for an expedition of Europeans looking for spiritual enlightenment. He disappears one day; and much later, the remnants of the group find their way to a spiritual retreat and monastery in the Himalayas only to discover that Leo is the master and teacher of this order. Greenleaf, out of his experience in business life, then wrote an influential essay called “ The Servant as Leader,” which Bill embraced, as it articulated his own view and practice on leadership, service, and integrity. He was later to become a Board member and promoter of the Robert Greenleaf Center on
Servant Leadership in Indianapolis and a keen supporter of this philosophy of leadership within his company and the broader business community.3
Perhaps the most far-reaching of Bill’s innovations was his solution to the question of the private ownership of capital and of business. He had inherited his father’s company as a family-held business. Through his study of Steiner’s work, in particular, Toward Social Renewal , and World Economy, Bill recognized the need to transform the privately held company into a legal form in which employees, customers, and the broader society had a stake and benefitted. He began a long search, examining cooperatives, employee owned stock companies, the Scott Bader Commonwealth, and the John Lewis Partnership in England. His answer was to transform Townsend and Bottum into a capital trust, a non-stock, for-profit company, owned by employees and representatives of customers and society, and governed by a Board which had the task of seeing that the company was dedicated to its mission and values. As Bill said, “This is what I had been looking for as a way of reward and justice for employees while also assuring continuity and preventing hostile takeovers.” Thus T&B became “...one of the few known instances in the world of a privately-owned business enterprise that had no proprietor, stock-holders or partners.” 4
In addition to his focus on servant leadership and finding a capital trust form for neutralizing the private ownership of his company Bill transformed other aspects of T&B. These steps included:
• Articulating a mission and values for the company emphasizing absolute integrity and service so that all of the company’s stakeholders—employees, customers, and suppliers—had a high level of trust in the company and its leadership.
• Instituting profit sharing so that 25 percent of net profits, before taxes, was set aside for profit sharing and employee bonuses.
• Committing to a process of training and development in order that all employees and suppliers learned more about themselves through a life-styles inventory program as well as extensive group process training, and
• Transforming the company’s culture and structure to multi-level cross-disciplinary work groups whose problem-solving focus and social skills enhanced effectiveness and profitability.
Bill’s goals were clearly idealistic, creating and developing a business organization that acted out of a commitment to spiritual values and teachings. He and his co-workers saw Townsend and Bottum “as an experiment which conceived the business world as a huge laboratory in which to try to live out the pattern of the Beatitudes,” in order to overcome the egotism and self-serving nature of the modern age. Even though T&B merged with a larger company in 1997, Bill and his coworkers’ effort led to a community of committed co-workers who met annually for many years to honor Bill and the moral and spiritual legacy of T&B.
Elise, Dietrich, and Bill stand in a long line of economic and social reformers seeking to transform economic life into a realm of cooperative activity serving the value of sisterhood and brotherhood. This they did in their private life as well as in the institutions they initiated and led. To bring about fundamental reform in the realm of economic activity requires courage, integrity, insight, and a long and persistent will. They drew on their own life experiences, on the many penetrating economic and social insights of Rudolf Steiner, and on their own deep commitment to Christ’s teachings to successfully demonstrate economic and moral alternatives to the competitive, self-serving laws of the market. Having done so, they make such economic reforms easier for future generations; to do something new and socially productive requires more effort and sacrifice than following established patterns. These three pioneers of the will established prototypes for the future of a healthier, Christ-imbued, economic life that acknowledges the truth of the social law of mutuality.
Martin Luther King stated this law in the following manner in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963:
In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, whatever happens to one directly, happens to all indirectly It has been a blessing of my destiny to have known and worked with Elise, Dietrich, and Bill.
Frederick Amrine gets to the heart of the question of the evolution of human consciousness in a way other professors will respect and everyone can follow.
Our gallery features Free Columbia, students and instructors of the school which is also featured in the initiatives section.
Then science and art “make nice” with each other for a few charmed days in Portland, Oregon.
For Mary Emery 1
Rudolf Steiner’s account of “the evolution of consciousness” is surely one of the greatest feats of intellectual history. Fully understood and assimilated, it would effect a paradigm shift as fundamental and consequential for the humanities and the historical social sciences as the Theory of Relativity was for physics. In opposition to conventional intellectual history, in which a succession of subjective ideas are seen as inhabiting epistemological structures presumed to be constant, Steiner argued that the structure of human consciousness itself has evolved. He saw that changing structure as the main contributor to the succession of different paradigms or mentalities.
Like other great ideas, “the evolution of consciousness” is simple in itself, but vast in its consequences and complex in its realization. Steiner unfolds it over many hundreds of passages in many dozens of books and lecture cycles. Owen Barfield’s great service was to have understood Steiner’s account so thoroughly, and to have expounded it so elegantly in Saving the Appearances (1957).2 Barfield would be the ideal guide through this new world, but Saving the Appearances is already maximally dense, resistant to summary. Instead I would like to convey the main concept of the evolution of consciousness via my own thought experiment in the spirit of Barfield.
Consider the etymologies of the four common English words in my title, two of which (“idea” and “theory”) refer to thinking, one to feeling (“emotion”), and one to will (“desire”). In tracing etymologies we go backward through time, into an earlier consciousness, which means that etymology provides insights into the history of consciousness itself. Barfield is the acknowledged master of this exercise, which he began already in his first monograph, Poetic Diction, and then pursued systematically in History in English Words. 3
Idea: This is Plato’s term. In Greek, idea is grammatically the past participle of the verb “to see.” For Plato, an idea is an “I-have-seen.” Earlier the word had begun with a digamma (“w”), which makes immediately apparent its kinship with the Latin verb video (pronounced “wideo”), “I see”; hence Cicero rendered Plato’s term species, from the same root as the verb specere, “to see” (cf. speculum , “mirror”) [HEW 106]. All of this conforms perfectly to Plato’s metaphysics: recall for example Phaedrus 247, where Socrates locates the Ideas beyond the Zodiac, whence they are viewed by the gods and any philosopher able to join their sidereal procession.
Theory: Greek and Latin theoria , contemplative viewing of a spectacle; the root is the same as that of the word “theater.”
Emotion: The earliest occurrence in English (1603) describes the “divers Emotions” of the Turks, meaning their various migrations; another of the earliest listed by the OED (1695) refers to an earthquake as an “accidental emotion” of the center of gravity of the Earth. Before the seventeenth century, “emotion” was used of material objects [HEW 174].
Desire: Via the Latin verb desiderare, “desire” is parallel to “consider” (literally “put two
1 Mary Emery teaches English at the Rudolf Steiner High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For decades she has dedicated herself to studying the evolution of consciousness and bringing it to life within the Waldorf high school curriculum.
2 London: Faber, 1957; rpt. 2nd edn Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1988 [StA]. Indeed, it was Barfield rather than Steiner himself who coined the term “evolution of consciousness.”
3 Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928; 2nd revised edition Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1984); History in English Words (1953; Great Barrington, MA: Lindesfarne Press, 1985) [HEW].
stars together”), de (from) + sider- (star). Both are artifacts of astrological paradigms, in which the motives of deeds and events are “influences” (another astrological term) flowing down from the stars.
There is a striking pattern here, and it will help us see it if we list the words vertically, suspending them as it were between the poles of “object” (i.e., things and events unfolding in the outer world, outside the self), and “subject” (i.e., private events unfolding within our own individual minds and souls):
And now the thought experiment: Where shall we draw the line (which you can do imaginatively now) between “subject” and “object” as just defined? Absent formal philosophical training and deliberate epistemological reflection (Barfield’s “beta thinking”), nearly all denizens of the modern world will experience ideas, theories, emotions, and desires—thinking, feeling, and willing—as something individual, private, and interior. We moderns draw a vertical line separating subject and object to the left of our four words, placing thinking, feeling, and willing on the “subject” side of the divide. But the older consciousness out of which these words were born draws the line to their right. It experiences thinking, feeling, and willing not as private, individualized, subjective events but as events unfolding within the larger world . In the older consciousness thinking, feeling, and willing are experienced as macrocosmic
As our four etymologies show, the human thinking, feeling, and willing recorded from our earliest human records through the high Middle Ages were macrocosmic events that the individual human mind participates. “Participation” as applied to the evolution of consciousness is Barfield’s term, not Steiner’s, but it has a venerable pedigree, within both ancient and modern thought. Participation (methexis) is Plato’s way of explaining predication and all other mental relations, and it is also the term used by the founders of modern anthropology, Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, to explain “primitive” structures such as those of shamanism and totemism. Barfield calls this “original participation” to distinguish it from a new kind of participation
that has only begun to emerge, beginning roughly with Romanticism, after a long eclipse of felt participation that both Steiner and Barfield term, felicitously, “onlooker consciousness.”
Once we develop an eye for it, evidence of “original participation” is so abundant that it is hard to know what to adduce first. A brief and vivid account is provided by Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).4 In his attempt to explain the biological evolution of human consciousness, Jaynes carefully examines Homer’s Iliad as the earliest record that can be reliably interpreted, and his conclusions are stunning:
There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad … The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. … Achilles will fight “when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him” (9:702f.). But it is not really an organ and not always localized; a raging ocean has thumos [69].
… Iliadic men have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will [70].
The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon (I :197ff.). It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold (6:234ff.), a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men (4:437ff.) that really cause the war (3:164ff.), and then plan its strategy (2:56ff.). It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. The be-
ginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods [72].
But ultimately Jaynes’s account is reductive and disappointing. Because he lacks Steiner’s understanding of the evolution of consciousness, Jaynes can only conclude that the ancient myths were mass hallucinations, literally a kind of schizophrenia (hence “bicameral mind”) afflicting not just individuals, nor even isolated communities, but the whole of humanity.
Jaynes is sadly typical: one could make a long list of such books that are brimming with brilliant individual insights, but ultimately fail to situate them properly within a larger interpretive context. It is tempting to reimagine such studies in light of the evolution of consciousness, however briefly. Jaynes is too reductive for further notice, but let us consider two other influential books: Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962),5 and Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908).6
Kuhn’s magnificent study, which every anthroposophist should treasure, has utterly and irrevocably changed the way we think about science. The main argument is well known: the growth of scientific knowledge is anything but linear, let alone the kind of parabolic accumulation described in the introductory textbooks and popular scientific writing; rather it is radically discontinuous, a series of sudden shifts between incommensurable “paradigms” that suddenly reveal unprecedented ways of seeing, but also completely new phenomena. Through careful analysis of key episodes in the history of science, Kuhn was able to argue persuasively that scientists working under different paradigms in some very real sense “live in different worlds.” Paradigm shifts are precipitated by rare intermittent crises, and the “normal science” that prevails as each paradigm unfolds—science as actually practiced—bears no resemblance to the methodological stereotype of falsification through direct comparison with nature. Kuhn’s account was immediately and nearly universally recognized as superior to the master narrative that had preceded it.
Nevertheless, Kuhn leaves a number of troubling questions unresolved. If reductionism does not work, can there be progress in science in any real sense? If the history of science is so discontinuous that it cannot be ra-
5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). This 50th anniversary edition contains an important introductory essay by Ian Hacking.
6 Chicago: Dee, 1997. Many thanks to Jennie Cain, who prodded me to think about the relationship between Worringer and Steiner.
tionally reconstructed, is science doomed to be governed by subjectivity and historical accident? It follows from Kuhn’s account that scientific progress takes place not principally within paradigms, but rather between them. And it is just these revolutionary, “extra-paradigmatic” moments about which Kuhn has nothing to say. In multiple places he declares the succession of paradigms to be “arbitrary.” Not only did Steiner anticipate Kuhn in many important ways: he and Barfield can explain very well why it is, for example, that Galileo and Newton follow Aristotle, but precede quantum mechanics. In a sentence, it’s because “original participation” gives way to “onlooker consciousness,” which then gives way to “final participation” in turn.
In his classic treatise on the history of art, we watch Worringer groping for the idea of the evolution of consciousness. He understands that the succession of paradigms (in this case, artistic styles in the broadest sense) is somehow inwardly motivated. Perusing the ethnographic collection of the Trocadéro Museum in Paris, Worringer suddenly intuited that humanity’s relationship to the world is not unchanging: there is an “artistic volition” that has not been the same in all ages [10]. He goes astray, however, by ascribing this shift in representation to changing subjective responses, to “peoples’ feeling about the world,” their “psychic attitude toward the cosmos” [15], not realizing that (as instanced by our discussion of the Iliad above), subjectivity itself arrives late on the scene. Worringer’s putative cause is rather an effect of something more fundamental: not a different reaction to the same set of phenomena, but a wholly different set of phenomena themselves. As Steiner and Barfield have taught (and as Kuhn later understood), it is not our feelings about the real world that change: collective representation, and hence reality itself, is what changes.
Noting that both primitive and modern art tend toward abstraction, Worringer rewrites the entire history of art from his new perspective. But the resulting schema is exactly backwards : the progression Worringer describes as epochs of “abstraction” on either side of a delving down into the “real” world must instead be described in Steiner’s and Barfield’s terms as one from “original” to “final” participation , interrupted by an eclipsing “onlooker consciousness.” What characterizes “primitive” consciousness is not fear and withdrawal from the world, but rather (as not only Steiner and Barfield, but also Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim taught), an intensely intimate relationship of participation. Barfield’s wonderful metaphors have medi-
Free Columbia, in Columbia County, NY, works at the intersection of several goals: art school, life training, community-building, social-economic experiment, cultural trust. Our Initiatives section gives a short overview (pages 18-19), and see the Digest for the Free Columbia crowd-funding effort. Images in this Gallery are by several Free Columbia students and by instructors Nathaniel Williams and Laura Summer. Laura’s work is also on the cover of this issue.
Top left: “Ethereal Rising” – Laura Travisano
Top right: “Shroud” – Inge Valetini
Above: “Yellow Wing” – Laura Summer
This page:
Above: “Lent” – Audrie Brown
Right: Laura Summer: “Milkweed”
Below: Laura Summer: “Heaven Spirit”
Opposite page:
Left top: “America standing on the skin of the Way” – Travis Henry
Left bottom: “Carrots Growing” – Kimberly O’Keefe
Right side, top to bottom:
Sara Parilli: “Image to Luster Study”; “Woodpecker”; “Color Perspective Study”
“Thank you for having faith. To me this has been an education in what it is to be human. It has given me insight into how to go forward into the world in a true way.” Laurel Iselin (student 1st year)
“May we all find our way to becoming more receptive and free. Thank you!” Laura Travisano (student 5th year)
“Free Columbia is about more than visual art – it is about the art of being human.” Rachel Fields (student 5th year)
“The year at Free Columbia was a kind of Being a Person 101. It brought certain aspects of existence into my awareness that hadn’t been present with intensity before...”
Daniel Ripperton (student 4th year)
“Free Columbia is a glimpse of the future.” Travis Henry (student 3rd year)
This page, clockwise from top left:
“Cup” – Laura Summer
“Freedom in Shadows” – Nathaniel Williams
“Table and Two Chairs” – Lailah Amstutz
“Circumstance progression“ Laura Summer
eval consciousness still “mortised into” the world [StA 78] and experiencing space “more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved” [StA 94]. Conversely, it is only in the Renaissance that abstraction and spatial depth arise as a general consciousness: that is why we speak of “Renaissance perspective.”
As a corrective to Worringer’s account, and as telling evidence of the reality of “onlooker consciousness,” let us consider briefly two specific episodes, neither of which is adduced by Steiner or Barfield. Both are profoundly symptomatic of this new relationship to the world that is precisely the opposite of Worringer’s description.
As James Hillman and others have argued, the Renaissance begins symbolically on April 26, 1336 with Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux,7 an event that witnesses not just a new sense of spatial depth, but also an equally powerful movement in the opposite direction, into a new sense of human interiority. Petrarch’s own account begins by explaining his motivations for this unprecedented 8 act: the mountain had drawn his attention for years because it was “visible from a great distance,” and his only motivation, he claims, was “to see what so great an elevation had to offer.” On the summit, the first thing that strikes him is “the great sweep of view spread out before [him].” But that is not Petrarch’s only response. Surprisingly, the view prompts him to open Augustine’s Confessions at random, and in a moment of perfect Jungian synchronicity, his eye falls immediately upon a passage dismissing natural beauty in favor of self-knowledge. Petrarch immediately concludes, famously, that “nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my eye inward upon myself …” Returning home, the summit of the mountain seems in retrospect to be “scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation.” Pace Worringer, Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux stands out because it is such an early and distinct symptom of “onlookerconsciousness”—of separation from the world.
7 Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 194-98. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), Hans Blumenberg likewise identifies Petrarch’s ascent as a profoundly symbolic episode, but he is unable to say exactly what has changed. Blumenberg is another great scholar who constantly comes up short because he lacks the concept of the evolution of consciousness.
8 This is not strictly true: in his own letter Petrarch reveals that a shepherd had ascended the mountain 50 years earlier. What is telling is that the experience had been lost on the shepherd, who complains that he “had gotten for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret.”
The other deeply symptomatic event is Galileo’s lectures on Dante’s Inferno (1587), in which he reduces Dante’s psychodrama to land surveying: Galileo proposes to calculate the physical dimensions of Hell. The spirit of this new mentality has been captured perfectly in an essay by the remarkable German poet Durs Grünbein9: “With each step, thinking is severed from concreteness—with enormous gains and enormous losses on both sides. At every turn, things and their mental representations retreat further from each other” [93]. Dante’s qualitative, dynamic topography of the soul gives way to sheer abstraction: “Galileo has long since entered another order, one of stasis and statics … He shall become the coordinator of static worlds, the lawfulness of Nature will obey his will, establishing itself in a vacuum, within the equilibrium of a pre-established harmony” [97]. “Away with qualities, which cannot be controlled. The senses stand in the way of knowledge” [98]; “The Golden Age of Reduction begins … It is also the end of the Harmony of the Spheres, of eschatologies, of interplanetary cosmic theater in a grand style” [100-101]. Sensory qualities are “secondary,” merely subjective; hence Galileo assures us that the fires of Dante’s Hell cannot actually be hot [102].
Worringer could not be more wrong about the art of “original participation,” and he fundamentally misconstrues the acme of abstraction in Renaissance “onlooker consciousness” as a confident merger of mind with “real” spatiality. Are we surprised then to find that he completely misunderstands modern art’s turn away from Naturalism as mere abstraction, motivated by fear of reality? Trapped in the “onlooker consciousness” of naïve realism, Worringer cannot begin to understand that artists such as (Steiner’s student!) Kandinsky had begun to cross the threshold into real spiritual experience. Alas, Kandinsky and other seekers of the spiritual in art read Worringer and were misled by him, in many places conflating spirituality with abstraction themselves. But that is another essay for another day.
Frederick Amrine (amrine@umich.edu) has been a student of anthroposophy his entire adult life. He teaches literature, philosophy, and intellectual history at the University of Michigan, where he is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in German Studies. His research has been devoted primarily to Goethe, German Idealism, and Romanticism. He is also a past editor of this publication.
9 “Galileo Measures Dante’s Hell and Gets Hung Up on the Dimensions,” in his eponymous collection of essays (Suhrkamp, 1996), pp. 89-104. Translations are my own.
A Report on the 2014 Natural Science/Mathematics-Astronomy Section Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon: “A Path To Understanding the Imponderable in Nature: Enlivening Our Understanding through Color”
We met December 4-7, 2014 at the studio of Jannebeth Röell and James Lee. A wonderful companionship was fostered as we daily sat around their table enjoying delicious meals they prepared in their home adjacent to the studio. The conference furthered our continuing theme of “inner capacity building” toward a qualitative science, with a focus this year on the “feeling understanding” spoken of in Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on Colour. 1
Johannes Kühl, Natural Science Section leader at the Goetheanum, opened with a public presentation at the Cedarwood Waldorf School on his recent book, Rainbows, Halos, Dawn and Dusk: the Atmospheric Colors and Goethe’s Color Theory (Adonis Press). Along with gorgeous photos of rainbows, halos, glories, and coronas in the sky, he brought a suitcase full of diffraction gratings and other demonstration equipment for us to experience “that all subjects of optics are approachable via atmospheric color phenomena.” In the end, he brought everything from the archetype of dawn and dusk to the wave-particle duality of light into an overview of the whole, in true Goethean fashion—re-weaving the rainbow, one might say. His closing image was an intense halo complex around a sun low in the sky, appearing as a central cross with two adjacent crosses on the Golgotha hill, indicative of the sacred feeling these atmospheric color phenomena engender.
Friday morning we began in the studio, with several artists invited to join us from up and down the West Coast. The impromptu inter-Sectional collaboration was delightful, thoughtful, and full of humor. Presentations and exercises led by Jannebeth, conversations, painting, and wonderful skits on the qualities of color, enabled us to begin to feel the more inner natures of color and to experience “art” as a research tool. Jannebeth began our first session by show-
1 Page numbers to follow refer to the second edition of 1996 (reprinted 2008) of Colour : three lectures given in Dornach 6 to 8 May 1921 with nine supplementary lectures given on various occasions; Rudolf Steiner Press.
ing her beloved hand-bound copy of Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven’s doctoral dissertation, holding it up to her nose for that familiar 1960s’ photocopy smell. She acquired it when training as a nurse with Dr. Zeylmans’ son-in-law. Combining quantitative and qualitative, Dr. Zeylmans had measured the heartbeat of children exposed to different colors as they spoke of how they felt that the color affected them. Jannebeth next introduced her art school’s approach, typified by one class exercise: a quite “scientific” array of hues and values.
We then dove into Steiner’s Colour lectures. Starting with prismatic color phenomena, we explored the color circle Steiner imagined as a bending of the linear Newtonian spectrum around to meet as magenta (p.38). Johannes noted that the resulting “Purpur” of Goethe’s spectrum is also called “Incarnat”— indicative of a baby’s changing complexion from a bluish hue shortly upon cutting the umbilical cord toward the living hue brought on by the first breaths. We then turned to Steiner’s scheme of Image colors (p.27), which Jannebeth enhanced with characterizations from other Steiner sources. This scheme engages questions of the continuous inter-relations of the physical (black), living (green), soul (magenta), and spirit (white).
After noon, Jannebeth led a “shout out” of the qualities by which Steiner’s Lustre colors (blue, yellow, red) affect us. After observing bouquets of flowers that adorned the studio in either the Image or the Lustre color combinations, we considered seven sheets of the separate Image and Lustre colors displayed along the wall, in order to play a simple drama game. Someone would say “So, I was right!” and each person was to reply, “That remains to be seen,” acting and speaking in the mood of a given color. Discussion transitioned to harmonious, characteristic, and non-characteristic color combinations, as well as turbidity, brightness and darkness phenomena, and related subjects.
Johannes brought us news of the Goetheanum and preparations for the Evolving Science 2015 conference in Dornach at the end of September at which he hopes for more participants from the States.2 He informed us that Wolfgang Schad, turning eighty this year, had a stroke a few months ago. With funding assistance from the An-
throposophical Society in America, the Section is organizing an international academic conference to follow Adonis Press’ publication in English of the second edition of Schad’s Man and Mammals later this year.
Johannes freely held the Seventeenth Class Lesson that evening and we had our conversation on the Lesson and theme Saturday morning. (One important comment made in our final review was how valuable it is to have a conference solely with those who have made a commitment to the School for Spiritual Science. On the other hand, some wondered whether tactful treatment of Class material in discussions—excluding the Lesson itself—might be a fruitful introduction for others not yet members of the School who share our interests and concerns.)
Jannebeth then led a painting exercise suggested by the “color method” of artist Beppe Assenza.3
In unpremeditated abstract patterns we were to juxtapose specific combinations of two Image and one Lustre color and to feel how the different combinations affected us.
After lunch, John Barnes led a discussion of imagination and methodology in qualitative science. We touched on Goethe’s sensory-moral nature of color and considered how Goethean “participation” in phenomena in general puts the scientist in a personal stance, a moral position even, with regard to the “subject.” Participatory methodologies can complement conventional, value-free “objective” science—recalling E. F. Schumacher’s distinction between “science of understanding” and “science of manipulation” in his book, A Guide for the Perplexed .
We touched on mainstream science’s new discovery of a non-visual photoreceptor system in humans, by which “blue” wavelength light stimulates brain alertness and “orange-red” light allows sleepiness. These physiological effects upon our circadian rhythm, cognitive performance, and mood4 could perhaps be considered another aspect of Goethe’s “sensory-moral effects” of color. When the oft-repeated notion was raised that, in speaking of the “wine-red sea” (or “wine-dark sea”), ancient Greeks could not see “blue,” the vision scientist present had to caution against a literal acceptance of such a statement. Consid-
3 http://lucianobalduino.it/method.html
4 For example, Chellappa et al. (2014) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111:6087-6091.
erations of physiology, language, and the evolution of consciousness continued after the meeting by email, with reference to Arthur Zajonc’s nuanced treatment of this notion in his Catching the Light. 5 That thread will be uploaded to the Section website.6
Saturday evening we read stories we composed overnight from a child’s point of view, incorporating all the Image and Lustre colors. Then we shared wonderfully creative characterizations of the colors, coming up with poetry, drama, music, eurythmy, and mime. There were insightful impromptu works as well as hoots and hilarity, yet here again art served as a modality of research.
Sunday morning, artists and scientists alike, we considered the nature of Section and inter-Section work, further discussed Goethean and conventional methodology, and appreciated the discipline of scientific practice as well as the value of artistic capacities. Marveling at the yetunfathomed depths of our subject, we felt we had moved from awe the first evening with Johannes to awe at our creative artfulness the night before, all in the loving hospitality of James and Jannebeth’s home and studio.
A key theme of earlier meetings in Portland with Jannebeth was “art as a viable research tool,” investigating the formative forces expressed in leaf and flower through drawing and other media. This theme has been part of our approach ever since in other venues, as the past few annual meetings have progressed from the physical to the etheric to the astral and to the human being last year.7 Now Jannebeth had led us masterfully, once again, as a company of researchers in participatory exploration of our colorful, soulful world, aiming for that “feeling understanding” Rudolf Steiner spoke of, which is brought to life and concrete experience by an artistic sensibility. by Barry Lia, together with the planning committee: James Lee, Jannebeth Röell, Jennifer Greene, Andrew Linnell, and John Barnes.
5 Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: the Entwined History of Light and Mind, 1993, Bantam Press, pp. 13-18.
6 http://www.naturalsciencesection.org/
7 2010, Chicago, “Building Capacities—a Study of the Spherical and Radial Principles in the Human and Animal Organisms with a focus on Horns and Antlers,” Michael Holdrege and Gary Banks; 2011, Water Research Institue, Blue Hill, Maine, “Experiencing Moving, Forming, and Rhythm In Water Flow: An Approach to the Fluid Event of Water,” Jennifer Greene and David Auerbach; 2012, Chicago, “The Threefold Principle in the Human and Animal Organism with a Focus on Recursion: Cultivating Metamorphic Thinking,” Mark Riegner; 2013, The Nature Institute, Ghent, NY, “The Supersensible within the Sensible: Experiencing the Inner Qualities of Animalness and Humanness,” with Craig and Henrike Holdrege.
Friedrich Nietzsche—as little understood as only a really great thinker can be—comes into focus thanks to Ted Roszell.
If grappling with Nietzsche isn’t serious enough, let’s talk about Islam and the human drive toward freedom. Elaine Upton is willing to grapple with difficult questions.
Colin Wilson first thought Rudolf Steiner didn’t get it, then became an admirer of sorts. Fred Dennehy looks back to thirty-year-old expectations that didn’t ask enough.
And poems by Maureen Tolman Flannery. Research? Good poems are always research. How do we take words, which are constantly being suffocated, dessicated, extinguished, and give them back their wings?
Finally, research on future needs: asking what is wanted from the Threefold Auditorium renovations.
For Armin Husemann and Peter Selg
This exposition is an excerpt from an ongoing series of seminars on Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on karma and reincarnation, given together with Frederick Amrine for members of the Anthroposophical Society and their guests.
The canvas of however many a fine nineteenth century landscape painter to the contrary, Rudolf Steiner pointed to the year 1843/1844 as the zenith of the enemy of mankind’s stealth encroachment on the earth, one that deferred the signature spectacle of its sprawling ugly face to our own time (CW 346.184). Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, with a capacity to systematically expose the emerging lie and glitter of the age that has materialized since, from Ausschwitz to Wall Street. Steiner knew that, and that the time’s driving anti-power shadowed Nietzsche’s birth, set to bend and capture the social forces that could otherwise have been unsheathed into the world, together with his friendship with the worlds of Richard Wagner’s imagination—for the Nazi wave and Hitler.
Friedrich Nietzsche remains undiscovered until one is able to recognize in him an archetypal, pivotal figure of our time, an individual utterly representative of the challenge and tragedy of our age at its deepest level; the riddle of the man focuses the mind existentially. Rudolf Steiner saw this on first acquaintance with his work, and he shared heart and soul in the adventure of the man, holding his breath, awaiting whatever conclusion it would lead to.
In the preface to his book from 1895, Friedrich Nietzsche—A Fighter Against His Own Time, Steiner wrote: “From the first page I read of Nietzsche (in 1889), I knew I would I read every page … every word. He awoke my trust immediately, I understood him as if he were writing directly to me. … The same sensibility was expressed in 1886 in my book A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World View. … I had arrived at many ideas similar to his. Independently and by different means than his, I had arrived at views consonant with Nietzsche’s books Zarathustra , Beyond Good and Evil , Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols.”
For all the consonance, Steiner maintained his independence from Nietzsche: “One can
speak in this vein without being what one would call a ‘true believer’ of the Nietzsche world view. And that in fullest consonance with Nietzsche’s intent not to have any such followers! Any more than his Zarathrustra could stand for any: ‘You all say, you believe in Zarathrustra? You, my believers? You failed to search to find yourselves—you found me instead! That is just what believers do, and that is just why believers are so useless! I suggest you all lose me and find yourselves instead! When you have rejected me in the right way, then I will be willing to come to you.’”
Rudolf Steiner recites in his preface pronouncement after pronouncement like this, the way fine poetry begs to be spoken out and shared. Steiner goes on to say: “Nietzsche is not so much a philosopher as he is a collector of honey.” And continues: “Nietzsche’s recalcitrance was instinctive and deep seated—he was not merely put off the way someone is who notices a logical flaw in an argumentation, but more the way a color can pain the eye. The things people were saying with words about guilt, sin, bad conscience, the next world, God and country and the like were simply painful to him. … The free thinkers of his time had an instinct to portray human will as unfree. The contemporary instinct is rooted in a Christian orthodoxy that is completely contrary to Nietzsche’s sensibility.” (With one ear held to the ground, one can hear Rudolf Steiner and Friedrich Nietzsche both taking the Pharisees to task the way Jesus himself did. And indeed, Nietzsche’s word for Jesus was that he was the only true Christian there has ever been.)
“And so Nietzsche charts a different course—the will to power. The strong, authentic individual isn’t interested in being served up what to think or hold to be true—that person instead wants to be privy to their very creation and inception. Such a person’s vision of what is true is creative law, and such a person’s will for the truth is equally their will to power…” For Steiner, it requires an individual as awake as Nietzsche to ask, “Are there any such philosophers today? Were there ever? Must there not finally be such ones?” (Beyond Good and Evil , §211.)
And so Steiner concludes: “Nietzsche isn’t a thinker in the traditional sense of the word at all. He takes the measure of things on the basis of whether or not and how they promote and unfold life potential. Whatever values might lie in truth is not something he is willing to even set out to find. He writes in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘How
questionable are the results for all from all this hankering after truth. Who is it that’s driving us this way?’” For Rudolf Steiner, inquiring this way existentially into the who behind the what of a matter is the essential impulse of what he characterizes as the directive of the consciousness soul, the sheer conscience of a modern intelligence.
Steiner continues: “Nietzsche takes up the fight against fashion and fable convenue left and right, and fights no holds barred. He fights out of the conviction that he is fighting against mindless and brainwashed tools who have damaged and devalued life in all directions, and he counts them as adversaries. …” The real issue is not measures and values of truth, but values of will. Nietzsche writes: “All this hankering after truth. Why not untruth in its place?” And Steiner replies: “That is an insight bold beyond its season. Fichte and the rest are superficial by comparison. Did Fichte ever even entertain the question of what kinds of truth have been damaging to life?” For Nietzsche, the test of thoughts and thinking lies in whether they unfold individual human potential that each individual is meant to find and bring out.”
How earnestly Rudolf Steiner prized Nietzsche’s moral sense of authentic individuality becomes clear when matched against the essential reservation Steiner could not hold back for the man he otherwise senses the greatest consonance with: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In a letter to Helene Richter (Collected Works, Correspondence Vol. II ) Steiner wrote: “It seems to me that [Goethe’s] complete immersion in the realms of exact phenomena which led him necessarily to such unfettered reverence for nature, left him no room for the idea of individualized emancipation for the human being.” In a nutshell, for all the greatness of his accomplishments, Goethe failed to awaken to the essential calling of our time—where Nietzsche did. And despite Nietzsche’s ultimately tragic failure to carry it to term.
Nietzsche characterizes one awake to the essential calling of an authentic individual living the life of an Übermensch.1 For Steiner, Nietzsche became an individual capable of living out impulses of instinctive goodness. An example is Nietzsche’s answer to why one should want to refrain from activities such as lying, cheating, lusting after the other’s maid? Simple enough for Nietzsche—one
won’t be able to sleep well! And Nietzsche lived this way and succeeded where the conformist sheep failed—he interceded against the beginnings of Nazi hate for Jews and against the man flogging his horse. This example for Steiner serves as a classic illustration of what he characterized as moralische Phantasie 2 in his essential work of philosophy, The Philosophy of Freedom.
Rudolf Steiner shared also with Nietzsche the sense that modern philosophy had ended in a cul de sac of dualism, and the way out was to see through its errors and discover authentic monism.
Steiner agreed with Nietzsche that “the Idealists divided the human being in two, idea and reality. They exalted thinking and ideas and exiled the body to the lowest order. [Nietzsche’s] Zarathustra intervened to say: the only reality there is is the reality the body belongs to. Mind and ideas belong to the body. … Body and spirit are a unity, the body is endowed with powers, to unfold the spirit, in concert with the way the plant flowers.” Nietzsche’s Zarathrustra proclaimed that “behind your thoughts and feelings, brother, stands a powerful deliverer, the unknown wise one, that is the true Self—that resides in your body as your body.” Steiner witnessed Nietzsche reject the dualistic trend in the West that came to the fore in Plato and culminated in the resignations of Kant.
Equally for Steiner, as well as for Aristotle contra Plato, the realm of pure ideas manifests in the world to prove its existence, or remains without existential basis. An amusing anecdote that rises to the form of living poetic truth of this is told in a memoir by Alwin Alfred Rudolf. Rudolf visits Steiner at his residence to recruit him as a faculty member for the Socialist’s Workers School in Berlin in 1899. At one juncture of their exchange when coffee is served, a family member draws attention to a present the poet Ludwig Jacobowski had given to Steiner sometime in the past year, when the two met and became friends: a flawless woven puppet of Steiner that served as the specialty cover for a fine bottle of cognac—as a humorous celebration of the pronouncement Steiner had once made to his poet friend that “the body is indeed all spirit.”
Grasping this consonance with Nietzsche’s monism opens a door to many of the subtlest dimensions of so
2 German: “moral imagination.” —Editor
much that Rudolf Steiner unfolded on his life-path of discovery, in particular, his explorations of the relationship between the realms before and after life to life in the world. At death, a person does not move off into some kind of timeless winged detachment in the clouds, but begins to move backward in time through the earth-life just completed, this time with a vision of how all one’s actions affected others, rippling across the fabric of the world and to the stars, and how the hierarchies were able to receive and build from these or were forced to reject them. One experiences the weave of the hierarchies through all the fabric of the world, its life and history, and how these reverberate through the far reaches of space. Nowhere does an afterlife appear that aims to function anywhere other than in the world of embodiment.
And this to such an the extent that one discovers that even many of the thoughts and impulses in bodily life that one presumed were one’s own came in fact from kindred souls not in the body at the same time one had been. This, because all the forces of the universe tend towards embodiment, and that is monism. Steiner appreciated Kant’s ideal expressed in his words “two things move me above all else—the starry heavens above me and the moral laws within me.” But he has to wait for Kant to step out from dualism and realize that the two are not merely related phenomena, they are equal expressions of one and the same reality. (CW 140.145). The cosmos everywhere is the spirit in motion.
Rudolf Steiner characterized 1899, that year he was recruited to lecture at the Berlin Socialist School, as the final year of his passage through his trial of the age’s abyss. It completed the decade of his philosopher’s brotherhood to Nietzsche, and culminated at the turn of the century in his experience of the Guardian of humanity, which stands behind the words he chose carefully in his autobiography for “having stood in most earnest, most solemn festival of knowledge before the Mystery of Golgotha.” Steiner arrived at that moment in his life the same year Friedrich Nietzsche died. The two had finally met four years earlier, in 1896, but Nietzsche was then already too gravely ill for the two to speak together.
At the turn of the century, the year of the signature spiritual event of his life, Steiner would remember Nietzsche like a brother soldier he had stood shoulder to
shoulder with in combat, who had fallen on the battlefield. That is truly their relationship, and the nature of their common adversary is the key to the bond they shared.
Steiner characterizes in the preface to his Nietzsche book how the adversary of our time sidelined the leading individuals throughout the social and cultural realms, and how Nietzsche stood against the adversary alone: “Nietzsche is able to see through the instincts of his contemporaries, he can see how they have been directed and manipulated to go down this and that path without taking the slightest notice that they have been had. … Whether one is the slave to the whims of a boss, the clergy or the latest fashion of the philosophy club, the result is rubbish—being their yes-man instead of finding out for one-self what is the right thing to do.” For Steiner, the adversary orchestrating this mass deceit is not a composite abstraction, but a spiritual power—the same fallen angel it is said that Martin Luther threw his book against. Rudolf Steiner characterizes this adversary by the same name Nietzsche’s hero Zarathustra did—Aingramanyu or Ahriman.
Steiner characterizes the keynote of Nietzsche’s life as the immense loneliness of one who sees, surrounded by countless others who cannot. Steiner writes that “no one comes to help him, and he is entirely alone in danger, hatred and storms.” Nietzsche dispensed with the unconscious hypocrisies and philosophic errors of his opponents left and right; really everyone who faced him winced before the scathing clarity of his unerringly ac-
curate critiques. He was truly alone, on the battlefield of his time, and in the most esoteric sense of the poetic metaphor, the battlefield was cleared with no one else standing but Nietzsche and the Adversary of the Age. This is truly the way to convey Rudolf Steiner’s sense of compassion and camaraderie with Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was a formidable representative of an awakened individual of the modern age, but his relentless, uncompromising, completely scathing critique of everyone he knew left him bereft of the force of love for all mankind at the moment he existentially could not afford to be without it—in the moment of direct confrontation with the adversary of mankind.
Rudolf Steiner knew this, and he grieved for the failing Nietzsche when he sat at his bedside in Nauenheim. Even as Steiner saw in the spirit that he had lived himself in the Middle Ages as a Dominican, he saw that Nietzsche had lived as a Franciscan flagellant, whose punishing discipline extirpated the last vestige of hope for authentic love and companionship in his next life on earth. The decisive moment of Nietzsche’s present life was tragically also bound up with the near return of that authentic compassion he had lost through mortifications—remarkably, evoked again by the crack of the whip—in Italy, on seeing a brutal master flogging his horse. Nietzsche intervened, breaking down, crying “my friend, my friend” to the horse. The horse won the love that Nietzsche had failed to find in his heart for his fellow men. Nietzsche was essentially institutionalized from that time to his death.
Rudolf Steiner saw that the madness that Nietzsche descended into in his final years was the price of having fallen in single combat with the Antichrist, and indicated that the Adversary directed the author’s pen thereafter in much that he wrote. Nietzsche’s own words from Ecce Homo (“Thus Spake Zarathustra” § 3) for what had befallen him are stunning:
One could superstitiously suppose one has devolved into a mere mouthpiece, a medium of powers one has been conquered by. But such is revelation—being shaken and thrown down, with unspeakable certainty and nuance, by something visible and auditory. You no longer direct your attention, you are forced to listen and
accept without asking who it is that is at work on you. Like a flash of lightening the thought comes to impose itself. I had no choice. An ecstasy, attended by horrible tension, stormed through me... Then a total loss of self came with shudders and pricklings that ran to the toes. The ecstasy was all suffering and gloom, the colors of its overflowing light. … This is my experience of inspiration.
In 1896, Nietzsche was unable to speak and Steiner at his bedside grieved for him. Paul’s words to the Ephesians likely came to mind when Steiner remembered Nietzsche four years later at the time of his own Damascus experience, that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Rudolf Steiner’s mission as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas was to win the battle against the philosopher Avoerres over the spiritual-cultural legacy of Aristotle for the unfolding of Western civilization. Their essential dispute was over whether the spirit of man was to be understood as a uniform mass of intellect, completely identical in the body of every individual, or whether it became individualized for good or evil in the choices and colorings of heart each individual exercised it for. If the former position were true, each person lapses back as a drop of water does returning to the ocean, unchanged and unchangeable from the sojourn in the body. But if the latter should be the truth, then there follows individual destiny as a result of good or bad, artistic or ugly, true or false application of the gifts of intelligence in the body. Aquinas stood for the latter, and a wide swathe of culture came to be built on his legacy. Rudolf Steiner’s core mission was to bring the truths of karma and reincarnation in a form suitable to the modern age, the harvest of that legacy that was its sine qua non: without individuality, there could be no individual consequences of previous actions of previous individuals.
The riddle of human individuality and the return thereof runs deeper. Nietzsche’s accomplishment was indeed a direct triumph over Avoerres, albeit tragic, for lack of authentic social love. In imagination, one returns to the time that Rudolf Steiner was at Nietzsche’s bedside. The Adversary had played his hand against the would-be Zarathustra, and crushed him. But in fact at an unpleasant cost—he had showed his hand in the dreary late after-
noon room to an initiate of individuality with a full heart of love. Four years later, Rudolf Steiner would likewise meet the Adversary on the same empty field, remembering his fallen comrade, and the Adversary paid the price. What followed were twenty-five years of unrelenting losses for the Adversary on the terrain he covets most— unambiguous truths of human destiny unfolding, unhindered by obfuscation and confusion.
Rudolf Steiner took up Friedrich Nietzsche’s work in 1889, the year after his initiation into the mystery of human destiny. In a journal note of 1888, Steiner had jotted down a sentence that came from the just opened door to the mission of his life: “Ahriman is shipwrecked.”
This was the necessary precondition for the purpose of his life to begin. It was the year he realized the culturalhistorical mission of Aquinas for the principle of individuality, the year he realized that the mission of reincarnation and karma on the terms of modernity was his own, and the year he first knew that the entelechy behind the two lives and missions were the same.
From Nietzsche and Steiner to the Present Nietzsche’s life ended tragically, and there would be little more Rudolf Steiner could do in the short term than say no to Nietzsche’s sister’s request for him to tend her brother’s archive and legacy, as she fell deeply under the spell of the growing anti-Semitic movement. The Nazi wave would come with full force in 1933; Rudolf Steiner had hoped for sufficient health to still be on the earth at this time. It was the year the initiate knew would be a doorway for decades to a world-wide etheric-supersensible experience of the true Guardian of humanity, but Europe and the world failed at the threshold to stand down the Nazis. The event went by largely unnoticed in the decisive span from 1933 through 1945 and beyond, though authentic instances emerged on the periphery here and there, in lives such as those of Jacques Lusseyran and George Ritchie.
Nietzsche’s richest narrative tack was significantly his effort to regain the vantage point of an unspoiled and authentic social voice, the voice of the ancient Persian initiate Zarathustra. No Roman see or Jesuit agenda for hatred of the body had come to pillage and exploit the force of that voice in the interim, and it beckoned.
Zarathustra’s narrative was the story of Ahura Mazdao, the primal pure sun power, and the struggle with the power of darkness, Aingramanyu or Ahriman. In a multivalent, nuanced form, that is the spiritual-scientific narrative of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. His initiate research detailed how two millennia ago, at the turning point of time, a human being was born who walked for twelve years in Ahura solar purity in preparation to work a succeeding eighteen years as the vessel for the reincarnated initiate Zarathustra. As a result, the Guardian of humanity was able to to walk the earth for three final further years and plant a potential deep in the earth that, if claimed by all the world, could over time unfold authentic brotherhood. When, and how widely and deeply mankind will eventually tap and unfold that potential, remains to be determined.
Zarathustra’s eighteen years since the turning point of time is a spiritual-scientific organic power in the unfolding of history. 1843/1844 was the zenith of Aingramanyu; eighteen years later Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861. Eighteen years hence, in 1879, the cosmopolitan Michael age began, a time in which creative intelligence and social initiatives could emerge independently of race, creed, and nationality. The Zarathustra harvest was gathered and spent anew. At the turn of the century, Friedrich Nietzsche passed on and Rudolf Steiner took his place, on the same barren landscape where his comrade fell; alone among millions asleep, an initiate left in one-on-one conscious direct combat with Aingramanyu. He prevailed, but not for the full cycle of the twelve plus eighteen plus three years hence. Instead, 1933 was ushered in by the Nazi movement for twelve counterfeit years to 1945.
As a result, so very much of what could have come to pass on the foundation of the culture of Schiller, Goethe, and Novalis in the nineteenth century and Steiner in the twentieth came to be held in abeyance, but asks to be brought and is being brought from the periphery anew in our time. From Joseph Beuys to the initiatives of Yeshayahu Ben Aharon, Peter Selg, and many others, one could go on for hours and hours. But two characteris-
tic examples, one small and humble, one enigmatic and koan -like, may be sufficient to close here with, apropos of every thread of our exposition to the end.
From the periphery of all things European, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is making waves in China, for his defining role in what it means to be human. Oxford don William Carroll writes in the December 11, 2014 issue of the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse : “Thomas Aquinas’s commitment to the importance of reason and its universal role in defining what it means to be human makes him an attractive thinker for contemporary Chinese scholars. The number, depth, and rapidity of changes in Chinese society over the last decade may obscure an unusual change within the academy: a markedly increased interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. … I have just spent one month at four Chinese universities, speaking of the ways in which Thomas’s understanding of the relationship among philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences can be used to disentangle contemporary confusion about the philosophical and theological implications of evolutionary biology and cosmology. In Shanghai, Beijing, and Wuhan, I found receptive, enthusiastic audiences.” A mere niche moment in academe? Then so too Thomas’ own intellectual debate with Avoerres, or Steiner’s with the Weimar arbiters of Goethe’s archive.
A thousand years after his passing, Thomas Aquinas gains traction in lives for the future on the opposite side of the globe. And the significant Dutch Anthroposophist Wilhelm Zeylmans, an accomplished practitioner of Rudolf Steiner’s meditative discipline and friend—who Steiner was forced by ill health to leave behind much sooner than he meant to—fell ill and died in Africa (as reported by Hagen Biesantz at a conference in Chicago in 1991) with the vision of preparing to help bring new social impulses reborn as a third world witch doctor!
Nonsense? Time, and sciences of the future, will tell. Just the shape of the idea opens out new vistas on the significance of lives like those of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Certainly life affords us invitations left and right to work together, relinquishing limiting biases and orthodoxy of every kind in the process of new science and discovery, and to work creatively, in expectation of marvelous surprises—albeit not at hours, places and in fashions of our self centered wishes and casual design.
Who or what is the being of Islam? And what—beyond and beneath the surfaces shown in our contemporary mass media and in popular opinion—is the role of Islam in the cosmic and in the earthly world in our time? The authors of The Impulse of Freedom in Islam , all scholars of certain areas of Arabic language and culture, do not directly ask these questions; yet, as I read this book, these questions arise for me ; and from these questions, others follow. One such question is that of the meaning of “free will”—a will that, for many Islamic thinkers, is set against a background of divine omnipotence and providence.
In the Foreword, referring to what he calls “severe” remarks Rudolf Steiner made on Islam, Abdulwahid van Bommel writes that by Rudolf Steiner’s time “the original freedom impulse in Islam has been snowed under” (p. 15). Van Bommel observes an Islam that for fourteen centuries has undergone a process of progressively new doctrinal formulation, and in the context of this progressive development, van Bommel would look to an “Islamic theology for the future of our children and grandchildren” (p. 7). In the Afterword, Ibrahim Abouleish—perhaps many readers will know him from his foundational work in the community of Sekem in Egypt—writes of freedom as developmentally occurring and experienced in community. For Abouleish, freedom is not, as in dominant Western thinking, a concept of liberation from religion and of overthrowing institutions, but rather is found in the progressive development of human beings’, or rather, of a human society’s relationship to Allah.
The body of the book consists of four parts, written by three different authors. The series of chapters that make up Part I are written by John van Schaik, who in the first of these chapters gives a brief overview of Islam
in history, noting the appearance of Mohammed against a background of wars, of prominent Caliphs and military leaders, and of the unsettling (for some?) presence of various gods in a polytheistic world. In the last chapter of Part I, van Schaik describes the figure of Isa (“Jesus”), Son of Maryam, as he appears in the Koran—not as Son of God, not crucified, and perhaps not resurrected, although van Schaik admits that this latter point on the Resurrection—whether it occurred, and if so, how? — has been the subject of “furious fights over the centuries” (p. 68). And while van Schaik boldly asserts, without elaboration, that Mohammed, in his life, followed the Imitatio Christi (p. 78), in Part I the relevance of Isa to Christ and to human freedom is not made clear in van Schaik’s survey of the events in and attributes of the life of Isa.
In Part IV, the last part of the book, van Schaik returns, to quote and to give critique of Rudolf Steiner’s (for some, harsh) statements on Islam. Steiner states that Islam—he, according to the translation, uses the word, “Mohammedanism”—is a religion of the Father, wherein the Son (of God), who carries the impulse of human freedom, is missing. In the Father realm, physical, natural laws hold sway. This gives Islam what many see as its deterministic and fatalistic character. Yet, van Schaik writes, “It is the academy at Gondishapur [not Mohammedanism] that stimulated the extreme Father God orientation” and promoted the view of “the human being as a purely physical entity” (p. 174). Van Schaik faults Rudolf Steiner for not saying more about how Islam had a moderating effect on the Ahrimanic influences issuing from Gondishapur in the year of the beast and beyond. “It is a pity that Steiner did not specify what it was in Islam that had this tempering effect” (Ibid ). Van Schaik here overlooks what he has quoted earlier: Rudolf Steiner’s statement that Mohammedanism itself is led by “in a certain sense—retarding spiritual powers,” even though these spiritual powers “still have a connection with what has been influenced by the Christ impulse” (p. 166). It seems to me that Rudolf Steiner is most careful with his words, and points to the subtleties of the workings in Mohammedanism of the “retarding spiritual powers”
and also the “spiritual powers [that are] still influenced by the Christ impulse.” That impulse (as van Schaik also admits) is pointed to in the presence of Isa as an aspect of what Rudolf Steiner understands as the “Nathan Jesus” (p. 171). It is Rudolf Steiner who makes a connection between Isa and the Nathan Jesus, and in doing this, Rudolf Steiner has left us with an idea with which we may work. I would also note that in Part IV, van Schaik, in his concern with critiquing Rudolf Steiner, often strays from the book’s purported central concern—namely, the “impulse of freedom” in Islam.
The chapters of Part II are written by Cilia ter Horst. She writes of the promptings toward freedom in the youthful and later grown-up life of Mohammed Abduh (1845-1905), an Egyptian theologian who was a leader at the University of Cairo, traveled in Europe, and eventually turned mystic, one who is said to have re-opened the “gates of ijtihad ” so that (once again?) free interpretation of the Koran may be practiced. In the second and last chapter of Part II, Cilia ter Horst sets out to compare (and contrast) the “impulse of freedom” in the life and work of Abduh and in The Philosophy of Freedom of Rudolf Steiner. Ter Horst calls Abduh a “philosopher of freedom.” Using the term “free will,” Abduh declares ...that divine omnipotence and free will do not exclude each other, but presume and include each other. It is precisely the divine will and providence as laid down in the Koran which can lead to freedom and intellectual independence of action (p. 79).
Ter Horst then cites The Philosophy of Freedom and writes that in that work Rudolf Steiner’s “central thesis is that the human being is free only if he thinks out of the spirit” (Ibid ).
Thus, in ter Horst’s assessment, both Rudolf Steiner and Abduh attribute the existence of freedom to a divine or spiritual source—in one case the Koran, in the other “the spirit.” However, one must inquire further to find what this “spirit” is and whether there is a significant gap between a particular view of spirit (i.e., spiritual activity, the spiritual activity of thinking, where will is brought to bear) and the teachings “laid down” in the Koran. The various points of contrast and similarity between Abduh’s thinking and that of Steiner in The Philosophy of Freedom are sometimes presented in a maze of terms, and it seems that there is a danger to understanding when one cognitive system is overly subjected to another. Yet, perhaps some readers of this chapter may find intriguing or useful
the attempt to find in Abduh’s interpretation of the Koran similarities and contrasts to ideas in The Philosophy of Freedom. In any case, it is significant that against a popular Western perception of Islam as “fatalistic” a thinker such as Abduh appears, grappling with questions of human free will, divine omnipotence and omniscience.
In Part III, Christine Gruwez, whom many readers may know from her work with Manichaeism and human encounters with evil, traces what she sees as an “impulse of freedom” in specifically Iranian philosophy, which, like the practice of philosophy throughout the Islamic world and unlike the practice of philosophy that pre-dominates in the West, is a search for God, a sacred not secular pursuit. Gruwez observes that a tension exists in Iranian philosophical discussion between the concepts of revelation (from an allknowing Allah) and the human capacity for arriving at knowing, a knowing that, in turn, renders human freedom. In Iran this tension works particularly from what Gruwez calls a “wound,” or intervention, two interventions in this case—one in the being and revelation of Zarathustra, the other, later in time, in the human Mohammed. Gruwez outlines several pivotal moments in the thinking of philosophers who became prominent in Iranian history and theology. She traces a development of a thinking about Allah’s omnipotence and free will, to thinking as a path of cognition that leads to the Light of Allah (nur ala nur —“Light upon Light”) as proclaimed in Sutra 24:35 of the Koran. Gruwez traces this development as it proceeds from Avicenna (980-1037) through Molla Sadra (1571-1641) to Mehdi Hairi Yazdi (19231999), while she points to others along the way.
Yazdi, who studied Kant, Hegel, Russell, and Wittgenstein, as well as great Iranian philosophers—Molla Sadra, Avicenna, and others,—is interested in the relationship between knowledge (or forms of cognition) and freedom. Yazdi, who taught philosophy in Canada and the U.S., first develops a theme of discursive thinking, or “knowledge by consensus,” where the subject-object
split, the split between cognizer and cognized, still exists. He further develops a theme of what he calls “knowledge by presence.” “Thinking is presence in spirit.” Presence here is “Light upon Light,” as in the Light Sutra of the Koran (p. 146), referred to above. “Knowledge by presence” transcends the duality of “knowledge by consensus.” “Knowledge by presence” is living in the immediacy of truth” (p. 149). (This brings to mind Christ’s words, “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”) In this experience of “knowledge by presence” no proof of truth is needed, for object is no longer seen as external to subject. A need for proof, as in our ordinary discursive thinking, where subject and object are split, is a need in which we cannot find freedom or the “immediacy of truth.” Not proof, but
...a different criterion [is needed, and that] criterion is inherent in the activity of thinking itself. [In the field of the activity of thinking] cognizer and cognized appear as part of one and the same field” (pp. 149-150). They appear, then, (somewhat paradoxically?) not merely as one, yet not separate one from the other; they appear “as part of one and the same field.” And in this field there is “ liberation from the constraint of having to produce proof” (p. 149, emphasis mine). This field in which they exist together is the “activity of thinking.” “Knowing,” then, here has a triadic character, where cognizer and cognized are brought together through a third element, “the activity of thinking.” Thus, in thinking, a particularly human (and divine) activity, a willing is brought to bear, and this willed-thinking is the agent of freedom.
While Gruwez, like ter Horst, makes comparative statements, works within categories, and also clearly refers to The Philosophy of Freedom in a way of honoring its influence, she does not become entangled in any comparison of Yazdi’s and Steiner’s paths of cognition. Instead, her categories seem to grow out of her own inner path of thinking as it relates to these other writers, and relates to her own thinking activity as it manifests in her work in the world. Instead of overly subjecting the relationships of Yazdi, Steiner, and others to categorical comparisons, she remains well aware of the importance of the principle of “individualization” (related to “I” consciousness and the realization of freedom), and she is also aware of the dangers of “accommodation,” where one’s desire for unity can become an obstacle and lead one to overlook diversity and the radical otherness of the other (p. 112).
This concern with the relationship of self and other
(a relationship that may appear in discursive thinking as subject and object) figures largely, one may gather, in Gruwez’s own understanding of freedom. If one is to know self, this knowing requires seeing self in relation to the radical other in its radicality, without which the self would not exist (Ibid ). If the two—two in the realm of duality—self and other, cognizer and cognized, are brought together by the third element, which is the “activity of thinking,” or the willing of thinking, that willing of thinking forms a field, a potential, for encounter, a place for meeting the so-called “other”.
As she scans the work of Yazdi and his Iranian predecessors, and perhaps as well considers her own work with “otherness” and the confrontation of evil, Gruwez observes that “freedom always appears in context,” in relationship (what Ibrahim Abouleish might call “community”, not only of human beings, but human beings’ or human society’s relationship with Allah). This view of context, Gruwez tells us, is a key for understanding the freedom impulse in Iranian philosophy.
This thought brings me then back to the questions asked at the very beginning of this review: What is the true being of Islam, and what is its role in the world today? This book does not answer my question, nor is it meant to. Yet, the book may help readers bring to consciousness urgent questions about our relationships to Islam (and by implication, to other religions), and this book may give one at least a beginning of a picture of how philosophy might contribute to our progress in contemporary deeds of freedom.
Amid current and ongoing conflicts among warring Islamic groups and warring conflicts between the Islamic East and the North-West, where may we, if at all, find the true manifestation of Islam—the religion, the culture— which has become the “other”?1 Does this manifestation exist in the thinking of those philosophers who search for freedom through teachings in the Koran, and in other thinkers (those cited by Gruwez and ter Horst) who seek conversation with Western thinkers on questions of free will, and its relationship to knowledge—that is, of the self
1 A discussion of political and military policies among nations and tribes is not the aim of this review, but rather the concern here is, in large part, with the nature of human knowing and its relationship to freedom. For a thoughtful presentation of the historical and continuing conflicts between the Anglo-Americans with Western allies and the various Islamic groups in Eastern nations, as well as the related Western conflict with Russia, see Terry Boardman’s “Rhodes, Russia, and the Islamic State” in New View, October 10, 2014 , or online [http://threeman.org/?p=1945]. Boardman is a frequent contributor to New View. Thanks to William (Bill) McCormick for calling my attention to this article.
and the relationship of so-called self and other, subject and object, knower and known, where the need for proof, for dominance of one over the other, fades?
Can we, peoples of the North-West (Occident) and of the East (Islamic Orient), and people of the entire globe, begin to discover, as in a translation of a poem by Rumi, the field (a field of “knowing,” of wisdom) where we, strangers, may meet? Can we, as in activity fostered by the attentive reading of The Philosophy of Freedom, come to a “pure thinking” wherein we are free of limiting perceptions of each other, a thinking that is practical, that informs the willing in our individual, intuitively discovered “moral action”?
I close this review with more questions: What will be, or is, our guiding light, the light that guides our thinking, quickens our feeling, fires our will, as in some reversal of, or mirrored, lightning?
Muslims, if I understand rightly, seek to know nur ala nur, the “Light upon Light” of Allah. So how does the individual (or “the society,” the “community,” in Abouleish’s words) prepare the soul—that is, “polish the mirror,” so that this light of truth may be reflected in it? How does “Jihad,” which, according to Avicenna and other philosophers cited in this book, means the “great inner struggle” (pp. 82-83, 154) avoid falling into the entrapments of “outer aggression” and war? How does the soul become “ready to receive... intuitive capacities of cognition” and become active, lighted by the divine (pp. 154-155)?
Christians have again and again heard the radiant announcement of the “Light of the World” in the Gospels. And so I would ask here, how do we enter the field, or how do we learn the way to cross over into the macrocosm, where our perceptions become imaginations reaching beyond the limits of body sense, geography, heredity, personality, favoritism, and antagonism? How do the imaginations become living (inspired) conceptions, become healing ideas in us, and lead on from there into the capacity for “moral technique” (Steiner in The Philosophy of Freedom), or, in the words of the Gospels, become capable of freely entering the realm of “Thy Will” in my will—the realm of Intuition (“take up your cross and follow me”), thinking in truth, where we no longer “walk in darkness, but have the light of life”—the light manifest, from out of darkness, manifest through multiplicity, yet whole and holy?
Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision by Colin Wilson; The Aquarian Press, 1985, 176 pages
In the wake of two magisterial biographies of Rudolf Steiner, one written by Christoph Lindenberg in 1992 and translated into English by John McAlice in 2012, and the other written by Peter Selg in 2012, it may be of some interest to examine Colin Wilson’s 1985 popularization entitled Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision: An Introduction to the Life and Ideas of the Founder of Anthroposophy
Both Lindenberg’s and (especially) Selg’s biographies have been criticized by some readers as “hagiographies” or “insider” accounts of Rudolf Steiner. No one could accuse Wilson’s book of being an “insider” account, much less a hagiography. Wilson sees Steiner as an ordinary human being possessed of some extraordinary abilities, and approaches him with the insouciance of a British journalist, speculating about his sexual proclivities, and viewing Steiner’s writings and associations with a cold eye on his career ambitions. Nor could this largely impressionistic leapfrogging through the highlights of Steiner’s life be characterized as a scholarly or even an investigative report. Yet in Wilson we do have an experienced writer very sympathetic to many of the points of view of anthroposophy, and one who is well versed in esoteric history. For these reasons, Wilson’s take on Steiner was of interest to me.
Many readers will remember Wilson. He was the enfant terrible who wrote a groundbreaking study of alienation and creativity, The Outsiders, in his early twenties, and awakened the interest of a wide array of skeptical readers with his comprehensive survey The Occult : A History, more than a decade later. Wilson was the blue collar voice—a self-taught, bold, unafraid explorer of the paranormal and the esoteric—who went unapologetically
wherever his instincts took him. He believed passionately that ordinary reality could and should be transcended. He had faith in powers that “slumber within us,” and was convinced that there is a “Faculty X,” an enhanced sense of reality that can extend consciousness to other times and places, and which in theory can be cultivated by most people, if they would only wake up to its potential.
Colin Wilson was approached by a publisher in the mid-1970s and commissioned to write a book on Rudolf Steiner. He accepted, but after a few weeks wrote “a regretful line” saying that even with the best will in the world, he could not go through with it. In large doses, Steiner “simply infuriated” him.
Why? The first off-putter, for Wilson, was Steiner’s style, which he describes as “unappetizing as dry toast.” But that was not what drove Wilson away. The real problem for Wilson was the “content” of certain texts such as Cosmic Memory, and Steiner’s lectures about King Arthur at Tintagel—writings that struck Wilson on first impression as “so outlandish and bizarre that the reader suspects either a hoax or a barefaced confidence trick.”
Roughly half a decade later, Wilson found that he had to consult Steiner again in order to complete a portion of another book. This renewed pursuit of Steiner led him to some of the early works such as Goethe’s World View and The Philosophy of Freedom Wilson discovered, to his surprise, that Steiner was a philosopher and cultural historian “of considerable brilliance.” Even more important for Wilson was his gradual realization that Steiner was a writer with a total lack of artifice, not out to impress anybody, but to communicate as honestly as he could. How was he to reconcile the “two Steiners”?
In Wilson’s estimation, what “went wrong” with Steiner, what turned him from an original and accomplished philosopher and psychologist to (in Wilson’s assessment) an often self-deceived occultist, was his decision “to swallow the doctrines of Theosophy in order to
gain an audience—rather as a poor man might marry an ugly but wealthy widow.” Wilson is convinced that many of Steiner’s clairvoyant revelations were simply delusions that had become a part of his inner landscape and persisted even after Steiner’s break with the Theosophical Society. He sees Steiner’s theosophical legacy as the Goetheanum, what he calls the “visible church of Anthroposophy,” with its “scriptures,” including Cosmic Memory, Karmic Relationships, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rosicrucian Esotericism and The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric. While these “scriptures” may contain some nuggets of insight, they are, in Wilson’s view, peculiar to Steiner, and by virtue of their volume alone constitute a formidable barrier between Steiner and “the intelligent reader.” Steiner’s incandescent energy, and the enormous production of written works that resulted from it, obscured the “clarity and simplicity” of what Wilson takes to be his “basic insight.”
Wilson’s explication of this “basic insight”—that through cultivation of the inner life one can attain “Faculty X”—falls short. For Wilson, Steiner was able to open “the door to the inner universe” through turning his attention toward what Maslow has described as “peak experiences.” But this capacity is essentially not very different from what Wordsworth and Proust experienced. At one point he describes it as a form of “psychometry.” Wilson does not trouble to distinguish between Faculty X and the painstaking process of initiation.
“Faculty X” and the recognition that it could be generally cultivated, for Wilson, was Steiner’s principal contribution to esoteric history. Steiner understood that, through this inner focus, we may become aware that we are the “conductors” of our inner lives. Ordinarily, we are subject to “misery, distress and mental strain,” because we continue to drift into short-sightedness. The cultivation of a deep inner life, of “Faculty X,” will allow us to understand that the problems that typically defeat us are trivialities. Once we have learned to grasp this, we will never forget it. We will find ourselves standing on the threshold of a new spiritual world and developing a power that we never suspected we possessed. “Faculty X” gives us access to reality, rather than the shadow of reality, and also gives us powers, such as the ability to “see” a landscape farther than our unaided senses would allow us, both in time and space. All this is fine. But that is where it stops. Wilson is simply unable to see Steiner in terms beyond the general conceptions that Wilson had held long before he encountered Steiner. He is unable to recognize that what Steiner achieved cannot fit into Wilson’s own pre-
formed categories of experience. He refuses to let Steiner take him anywhere new. In this sense Wilson exhibits the same limitations in grasping Steiner as does Gary Lachman, who for all his breadth of knowledge and insight, reduced Steiner’s clairvoyance to a permutation of something already familiar to him—the hypnagogic state.
Wilson’s biography is disappointing, not so much because of its refusal to treat Steiner as a special case, but because it could have been far more than it is. Wilson’s final assessment of Steiner is positive. He recognizes and celebrates Steiner’s fundamental optimism. He believes that Steiner had discovered an important secret, and that all his books and recorded lectures, even those that Wilson would deem ultra-recondite and partially delusional, contain glimpses of that secret. He admires Steiner for breaking out from the dualistic paradigm of the times. But Wilson himself cannot do the same. Dualism, and its bedfellow, naïve realism, remain central to Wilson’s basic intellectual landscape in his own chase after “Faculty X.” He cannot conceive of, let alone maintain, the distinction between informational content and meditative content, between the literal and the imagistic. He believes that he has the healthy human understanding to grasp esoteric texts without the need to exercise a hygienic development of his consciousness. He celebrates the existence of realms of higher consciousness, but he will not do what it takes to get there. He is fixated upon the results of consciousness rather than the processes of consciousness. He longs for tangible realizations of extraordinary faculties—minor miracles—and when he did not find them in ways that can be expressed in the language of tabloid journalism, he senses failure if not disgrace.
In Wilson’s estimation, Steiner should have stayed with his basic “insight.” Reaching beyond this, using theosophy to propagate his personal vision, becoming a preacher and a spiritual leader, accumulating celebrity and attracting the malice of other celebrities, is what became Steiner’s “tragedy.” The tragedy, I think, is Wilson’s. He speaks passionately of breaking free from the prison of habitual thought, the claustrophobia of reductionism, and while he may escape for a time, he is constantly being brought back to the limited critical perspective of what Owen Barfield calls “an unimaginative man sometime around about the middle of the morning.” While Wilson sees into the promised land, he does not have the wherewithal to get there. He is waiting for transportation when he should have begun the journey on his own two feet.
Persuasion can solidify an adversary by its fervor to effect change. Notice as you speak, eloquent, passionate certainty swirling through words, how the listener’s lip stretches tight across set teeth, eyes fix on someplace other than your face.
You wonder, even as your logic flows like generations from a strong progenitor, if it isn’t God at work with His own ideas, hardening the heart of your audience as He did with the Pharaoh against Moses. Pharaoh, entrenched, heard argument upon reason, only to become, with each, more hell-bent on seeing plagues invested upon him in due time.
Which were the ways of being that made the way for my being here this way?
What are the things I say that preclude the saying of all other things?
Which was the day I rose and strode into that gave rise to all the strivings clinging to it like a string of hand-gripped children playing crack-the-whip?
Have you not, on your opposite journeys passed each other, you and my mother, she getting used to the vastness, you to the confines of matter, she, soul spent, gaining vision in retrospect, burning for all that remained, you keeping your unborn vigil at the gate of pain?
Did you know each other by your ties to me, she who’d once housed my body within hers, you who sought time and permission to enter through mine?
Were there messages, tasks she passed to you, she leaving, you coming to earth, things she’d forgotten to teach me to ease the tight toil of your birth?
What is your mission among us, fine first daughter in a house of men, next link in the great unbroken chain of mothers since our mother earth began?
Note: Photos courtesy of Threefold Educational Center. Black and white images from original construction.
The Threefold Auditorium project is advancing to the design phase, according to Threefold Educational Center Executive Director Rafael (Ray) Manaças.
For months, Ray has been collecting ideas about the future of Threefold Auditorium from stakeholders within the Threefold community and around the country; now, he and architect Michael Scharff have started to translate the results of those interviews into sketches. The sketches will guide the next round of consultation and the development of specific designs.
"The impetus that built Threefold Auditorium in the late 1940s was the need for a summer conference venue, so the original design did not include heat, air-conditioning, or even inside access to the Side Room and Library," Ray said. "Today, preparing the building for its next half-century of service to spiritual and cultural life means, among other things, making the building accessible to all; installing modern heating and cooling systems; updating interior lighting and restoring interior finishes; improving the seating and stage lighting; and renovating the interior to create flexible, accessible, and efficient spaces for research, study,
meeting and teaching. All these changes need to align with our consciously created imagination of what the future is asking of us.”
Preliminary sketches that address those issues and more are now being presented to stakeholders. Developing and refining the design and final budget will be the focus of the next several months of work.
The preliminary phase of the project, which was funded with gifts of nearly $400,000, brought new electric, water, gas and sewer lines to the Auditorium. The utility work, which will be completed in March, will support the installation of air conditioning and an energyefficient heating system.
A major capital campaign to fund the project is now underway. Ray Manaças and Judith Brockway-Aventuro, the new president of the Board of the Threefold Educational Foundation, are leading the campaign. Contact Ray at 845-352-5020 x12 for details, or check online at www.threefold.org/auditorium.
• Enhance human engagement within the Society and with those individuals and organizations working out of anthroposophy.
• Create opportunities to bring visibility to the work of the Class Holders, Section members, and members of the Collegium of the School for Spiritual Science in North America.
• Articulate and implement a collaborative leadership and organizational form that supports initiative and sustainability.
• Clarify the role of the general secretary, the general council, and the leadership team;
• Begin a process of review and reimagination for the regional work, including regional councils;
• Clarify the role and relationship of the Library with the U.S. Society.
• Provide opportunities for members and friends to pursue the study and practice of anthroposophy.
• Increase membership in the U.S. Society.
In the spring 2014 issue of being human (pg. 49), the General Council published a report from their January meeting that included goals set for 2014. Following is a picture of some of the activities undertaken during 2014 to meet these goals.
To transition the library and form partnerships in this project in order to: preserve the collection; help anthroposophy incarnate on this continent as a benefit to members and friends; be a resource for research and study; build communities of learning.
• 2014 began with the library moving from its home in the Carriage House to a church in Philmont, NY, six miles away.
• The Library Steering Committee held a series of virtual town hall meetings to share ideas on how the
library could evolve beyond its physical boundaries and invite those interested into the conversation. More than 200 people participated in these meetings.
• With the move, the library built an expanded corps of volunteers.
• A work/study week with fifteen members of the Youth Section was held over the 4th of July. Rick Spaulding offered workshops on non-violence and a lecture on the Founding Fathers, and participants learned basic book repair and cleaning, igniting a new appreciation for the valuable resource of the library.
• Plans are progressing to digitize fifty-five boxes of anthroposophical journals in English dating back to the 1930s and make them broadly available online.
• Preliminary conversations are being held with individuals who are interested in gifting their research to the library in order to begin building an archive documenting anthroposophic research and activity in North America.
• Initial recordings were made for an oral history project to gather the stories and wisdom of anthroposophy living in North America.
• Conversations are underway with institutions and other English-speaking Societies to form partnerships with the library.
• In January 2015, the General Council named our project manager, Maurice York, as Director of Research and Library Services. Judith Kiely is Head Librarian.
• In January we welcomed our new Director of Development, Deb Abrahams-Dematte. Since then, many members have had the opportunity to meet her and/or speak with her. Deb is a regular contributor to being human and you can follow the evolution of her work here. The first part of the year was spent orienting Deb to our existing systems and processes, and working with her to establish a culture of active engagement with members and friends.
• In her first year, Deb conducted a member survey; established a development committee to help guide her work; re-engaged and expanded the Michael
Support Circle; introduced a planned giving program; helped craft a mission statement to support and guide the work of the Society; and successfully orchestrated two appeals—one for the Rudolf Steiner Library and the end-of-year appeal—both of which surpassed their targeted goals.
• Along with the Threefold Educational Center, the Society co-sponsored the Mystery Drama Festival in August 2014. (See the Fall-Winter 2014/2015 being human for a full report.) In addition to working with Barbara Renold and the core group to plan the event, the Society also stepped into the world of webinars, offering programs to help individuals prepare for the performances. 124 people participated in The Riddle of Destiny, an eleven-part series with Marke Levene. 55 people are currently studying The Portal of Initiation with Barbara Renold.
• A four-part recorded webinar, entitled Engaging with the New Images of the Zodiac, with Mary Stewart Adams, is linked for viewing free of charge on the front page of anthroposophy.org , and a being human webinar was offered with Walter Alexander and John Beck to discuss further the growing phenomena of near-death experiences and how anthroposophy contributes to understanding them.
• The General Council recognized and welcomed two new branches in 2014: Anthroposophy Atlanta, in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Forming Heart Branch in Rhode Island and southeastern New England.
• The continued evolution of being human, adding two new sections, research & reviews and the gallery
• A week-long speaker’s tour by Frederick Amrine in the southeastern area of the country.
• An enthusiastic gathering of 180 people at Rudolf Steiner College for the 2014 AGM. The weekend opened with two circles, one hosted by the General Section for members of the School for Spiritual Science and the other for members new to the Society community. Dennis Klocek and Robert McDermott gave the keynote addresses. These were recorded and are ready to be posted on our website, anthroposophy.org. The conference was followed by a gathering of members of the Youth Section, as well as meetings of the General Council and the Council of Anthroposophical Organizations (CAO).
• Twenty-three people gathered at the Rudolf Steiner House for the first of an on-going series of group and branch retreats to study The Life, Nature, and Cultivation of anthroposophy
• The Central Regional Council is guiding a regional study entitled “Speaking with the Stars” that will culminate with a number of local gatherings at Easter-tide 2015.
Leadership selection and empowerment in order to: have healthy administrative staff able to take initiative; meet the membership; create an understandable administrative structure; have professional strength in carrying our mission forward .
• With two positions filled (Director of Development and Director of Programs), the General Council is now reviewing the role of the General Council and General Secretary in relationship to this new leadership team. In 2015 the Council is also engaging with members in the Eastern Region to review how regionalization has supported work in that region over the past 33 years. By working together, an effort is underway to attempt to perceive what is trying to emerge and clarify what social forms can best support this evolving picture for the next many years.
It has been a busy, active year! Not listed in this report are the many, many extraordinary conferences, workshops, and gatherings that have been created and carried
by members throughout the country. As I review the listings posted on anthroposophy.org, I am grateful to be part of the Anthroposophical Society. Thank you for your continued interest, support, and love for this work we do together!
Transformation. It’s at the heart of human and planetary existence, and whether we embrace or resist, change is inevitable. Anthroposophy gives us the tools for insight and context in the nature and experience of transformations large and small. When we support the Anthroposophical Society through our time, talent, and treasure, we are actively weaving the past and present together, as well as co-creating the future. In our Society and in our work together, anthroposophy comes alive.
I was recently blessed to have the opportunity to sit with branch and group representatives from around the eastern region. We spent time hearing from one another and trying to imagine new and more active ways of communicating and working together. We were a diverse group in terms of age, geography, experience and work
in the world, but as we talked about our experiences and our hopes for the future, it became clear that love and generative intention united us. I felt such gratitude: for all of our members, and for being part of the Society in this transformative moment. There is such a profound sense of possibility and sense of becoming. Thank you all for the many gifts you bring to our Society.
“A breeze carried off some stars. Each became a tiny parachute carrying a bundle, a seed.”
from “The Dandelion’s Cousin”
The Society gratefully acknowledges a recent bequest from the estate of Gertrude Teutsch, a member of the Anthroposophical Society since 1940 and a lifelong anthroposophist. Mrs. Teutsch was the author and illustrator of children’s books including The Dandelion’s Cousin, and also translated Rudolf Steiner’s The Genius of Language – Observations for Teachers. She crossed the threshold in 2009 at the age of 91. Mrs. Teutsch’s thoughtful generosity in including the Society in her will brings inspiration and support to us all.
Here in New England, we are in a time of deep, cold winter. It takes faith and imagination to remember and believe that the snow will melt, the seeds will germinate, and new growth will occur. The Society’s new organizational structure itself continues to emerge, with collaborative leadership, inspiring programs, library expansion, and increased ways to share our stories and connect with like-minded human beings both far and near. The work that we are all doing, individually and collectively, are the star bundles that become the seeds of the future.
And there is much to do! We are grateful for the generous support of our members and friends over the past year. Most recently, our end-of-year appeal raised $19,418! The many gifts you share provide the resources for us to fulfill our purpose together in this time. Many thanks for your participation and your gifts!
It has been one year since I began serving you and the Society as director of development. I’ve been thinking a great deal about the context and content of my work. I continue to strive to authentically perceive our members and our purpose as a Society, and to blend culturally appropriate approaches with best practices for fundraising and resource development. In this way, together, we can steward our resources and fulfill our purpose, and the promise of anthroposophy, in this country and in the world. Blessings on our continued collaboration and success.
As we went to press General Secretary Torin Finser had just participated in the annual Florida Waldorf-Anthroposophy Conference (February 27-March 1 in Winter Park) where he gave two talks: “The Human Encounter and Conscious Community Building” and “Organ-izations as Living Systems: How to Apply the Wisdom of the Body to Develop Healthy Organizations.”
Other recent talks and visits have been in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Washington state. Torin will have visited Denver and gone on to the annual meetings in Switzerland, at the Goetheanum, by the time you read this. Late April will take him to Wisconsin and, into early May, Beijing, China, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Waldorf education in China and appearance of the Chinese translation of his book Organizational Integrity. (Visit the digest in the front of this issue for a note about the translation of another book, School as a Journey.)
Born and raised in Western North Dakota, Micky met anthroposophy during her college years in Moorhead, MN. After graduating college with a degree in Psychology and Religions from Concordia College, she moved to Minneapolis, MN. Here Micky was involved with the Whitsun Institute, and a founding Board member of the City of Lakes Waldorf School, which her daughter, Allyson, attended through the fourth grade.
Micky then moved to Sacramento in the early 1990s to take the Goethean Studies Program. She also taught Christology, Biography and Form drawing in the Weekend Foundation Program at the Rudolf Steiner College. It was at this time that she became interested in Rhythmical Massage and began training in New York in 1997. During this time Micky moved to Santa Fe and trained at the New
Mexico Academy of Healing Arts in Swedish and Medical massage.
Santa Fe has remained Micky’s home. While here she served on the Board of the Santa Fe Waldorf School (2000-2006) during the years when the High School was being formed. This was also the time she met her husband Eduardo Yi, who had moved from Lima, Peru to teach Spanish in the High School. Time has passed and their grandson William is now attending preschool at the Waldorf School.
Today Micky has a Rhythmical massage practice and works privately with a woman with special needs. She has been an active member of the Sangre de Cristo Branch since 1999, working to reenliven the anthroposophical work in the Santa Fe area. She has given courses on Parzival, biography, and basic anthroposophy. For the past nine years Micky and Eduardo have hosted a study group in their home every Tuesday evening.
The lovely campus of Desert Marigold School, an oasis nestled against South Mountain near central Phoenix, provided the setting for the third and final conference on the legend of Parzival entitled: In the Grail I Find Myself. The three days of meetings offered a variety of artistic learning experiences in an effort to approach an understanding of the Grail Mystery from several different angles.
Participants were met on the opening evening by a young knight on horseback who led the procession through the torch-lit grounds to Parzival Hall, where Rachel Schmid and several female faculty members set before us the planetary seals and colors in a stunning eurythmy performance. Kim Snyder Vine movingly spoke the words
of the last scenes from Russell Pooler’s play “Parzival,” and background music was provided by a brass and guitar trio of faculty musicians. All this set the right mood for our journey, which continued the following days with two all-too-brief talks by MariJo Rogers, filled with insight and enthusiasm, focusing, among other things, on the interesting connections between Michelangelo’s Pietà and the story of Sigune and Shionatulander. She inspired us to ask, “What is this thing called the Grail?” and to explore how its pictures can still speak so powerfully to our lives today.
The Parzival Grail story stands between the past age that looked for secrets of the Spirit, and the coming age, that must search for the secrets of matter. The Parzival story is about a central problem of our time— learning to ask the right questions.
A somewhat rambling discussion of this question in a Goethean conversation followed, along with further artistic speech work led by Kim Snyder Vine and two short talks by local group members, then by group improvisation work about how the story of the Grail and Parzival’s lonely search for it might be played out these day. Then, in the evening, Betsy Evans Banks offered us an opportunity to work with colors using pastels to illustrate some aspect of the story we found personally meaningful. A costumed pageant finale on the last (Sunday) morning, led again by the knight on horseback, conducted us through the campus, stopping at various points to enact briefly the last scenes of the story, accompanied by eurythmy performed by everyone. May some of the magic we experienced stimulate new explorations of this profound story for all who attended so appreciatively!
Carolyn M. Barton, Spring Valley, NY; died 12/30/2014
Steve Buscaino, Encino, CA; died 01/03/2014
Edward Hessong, Lancaster, PA; died 12/05/2014
Barry Liebowitz, Saugerties, NY; died 06/17/2013
Peter Smith, Dexter, MI; died 11/29/2014
New Members of the Anthroposophical Society in America, recorded 7/15/2014 to 3/1/2015
Kam Anderson, East Harwich, MA
Roxanne Aurelio, Fair Oaks, CA
Brendan Banister, Nevada City, CA
Carol Beasley, Healdsburg, CA
Kimberly Berg, Los Angeles, CA
Marcianna Beyer, Hardwick, VT
Emily Biffis, Northampton, MA
Helen Brinkel, SPRING, TX
Monique Camp, Sebastopol, CA
Iris Kelly Deborah Candea, Niwot, CO
Kara Carden, Mount Juliet, TN
Megan Durney, Fair Oaks, CA
James Eisenberg, Sebastopol, CA
Barbara Farran, Orchard Park, NY
Edwin Faust, Northfield, NJ
Sally Fox, New York, NY
Caitlin Wallace French, Eugene, OR
David French, Eugene, OR
Jack Gephart, Citrus Heights, CA
Crystal Gibb, Birmingham, AL
William F Gilbert, Fort Oglethorpe, GA
Anne Haendiges, South Hadley, MA
Marietje Halbertsma, Jamaica Plain, MA
Anya Hobley, Soquel, CA
Tierney Jacobson, East Calais, VT
Patrick F Kennedy, Silver Spring, MD
Kelly Kiefer, Campbellsport, WI
Lynne Kliman, Orchard Park, NY
John Kriz, New Canaan, CT
Moira Molloy Krum, East Aurora, NY
Leland Lehrman, Hillsdale, NY
Avi Lev, Hingham, MA
Valerie Lincoln, Lake Ann, MI
Jennifer Locke, Greenfield, NH
Michele Mariscal, Sacramento, CA
Robert Martus, McAdoo, PA
Dianne McGaunn, Topsfield, MA
Timothy McGee, Everett, WA
Nancy Claudia Melton, Grass Valley, CA
Elisabeth Mills, Birmingham, AL
Douglas Moore, New Hudson, MI
April Munroe, Citrus Heights, CA
Rose Reis-Jackson, Spring, TX
Rebecca M Richards, Louisville, KY
Russell Risley, Rancho Cordova, CA
Lynda Rockwell, Sandy Hook, CT
Vincent Roppolo, New York, NY
Jozef Smeele, Copake, NY
Shannon Stevens, Bryn Athyn, PA
Roger Stockham, Burlington, VT
Mary Summers, Ann Arbor, MI
Summer Lee Thomas, Carbondale, CO
Kathleen Tiexiera, Jamestown, RI
Porntip Vidhayavrapat, Chestnut Ridge, NY
Katherine Vode, Cliffside Park, NJ
Gwen Copeland Wahlquist, Houston, TX
Margaret Wernet, Clearwater, FL
Alexander Workman, Amherst, MA
Co-Founder of Michael Fields Agricultual Institute; died 1st April 2014
by Laura LiskaI only knew Martina Mann in person for three weeks. I probably learned more about the essence of healing during that time than at any other time in my life.
I was visiting Germany when a sudden fall left me with broken bones and in no condition to travel. I had just met Christopher and Martina Mann. They took me into their home until I was able to make the trip back to Switzerland where I was living. The care I received in the hands of these two interesting, thoughtful anthroposophists is its own tale. This one is about Martina.
Every day I’d meet Martina’s twinkling blue eyes across the dining room table. She had been recovering for several years from a stroke. Though she was mobile and talkative, she had to work hard at it and she could do very little on her own. But at every meal she had something for me, most often a simple lesson in German. She taught me there are two words for dandelion; I was enchanted. The lesson, as they usually did, ended in helpless fits of laughter as she struggled to pronounce Pusteblume and Löwenzahn for me, and I struggled to mimic her with my poor grasp of the language. She never gave up.
In the bedroom where I slept was a book—the story of Martina’s life. I read it in one sitting, mesmerized by this amazing and complex woman, who struggled so hard to teach me German children’s verses and giggled with me at my mistakes. I wish I had
known her as a younger woman. She had a rich and powerful relationship to her family and an enviable partnership with her husband that spoke of mutual respect and the pursuit of a common mission. I shared her passion for biodynamic agriculture—it had led each of us to choose a path in life. Hers had taken her to America, mine to Europe. We had each been a foreigner in the other’s country. I imagined her falling in love with the English language and speaking it with all the keen wit and warm intelligence that shone out from behind those blue eyes. She was remarkable.
Day after day, I lay on a couch by Martina’s chair, sleeping on and off. Sometimes we spoke. Mostly I just watched her. The days were full of simple routine and effort, and full of visitors. Therapists of all sorts came by: a curative eurythmist, a speech therapist, a massage therapist, others. She had care from five women who took turns staying with her day and night. I watched her moving in and out of all these relationships. You might think Martina was the incapacitated one, the one who needed them, and that they were the healers, bringing help and relief. I saw something else. Each visitor brought something of their own dilemma to bear. One struggled to be patient, another to be kind. Every one of them was challenged by Martina and every one of them was a better person for it. I realized there was nothing passive in her immobility. The very nature of who she was brought out the best in those who came to help her. The healing I was witnessing was not a give and take from them to her, it was what was happening between them, because of her.
“You know”, she whispered once, having just loudly demanded the help
of one of her attendants for the nth time that day, “I’m a spoiled brat.” “You know,” I replied, “I think that’s why I am so fond of you.” She knew who she was. I loved her for that. I think of her every spring when the green fields are covered in little bursts of dazzling yellow which float away on tiny wings of sparkling white.
21st August 1934 – 15th December 2014
by Adrian LocherGeorg Johannes Locher was born in Zurich, Switzerland. His parents, Hans and Tilde Locher, were both early anthroposophists who had encountered Rudolf Steiner and attended his lectures. Hans put Steiner’s ideas on the Threefold Social Order into practice in his family business, Leder-Locher (making and selling leather goods), which still exists today as a chain of shops in several Swiss cities and still gives 25% of its profits to cultural life. Tilde, whose maiden name was Grosse (sister of Rudolf Grosse), worked with her husband as a secretary in the business. She also took shorthand reports of Steiner’s Zurich lectures. Georg was the third of three children. He is survived by his brother Thomas, a geologist, and his sister Angela, a eurythmist.
Georg was born in the sign of Leo. His favorite animal was the lion, which in his youth he used frequently to observe and sketch at Zurich Zoo, and of which there were always numerous pictures in his homes. (Even his password for his computer was “lioncub”!). Interestingly, Leo is connected to the heart, and Georg was born with a heart condition, a “hole” in the heart. This gave his childhood a certain color. He needed a lot of extra care and protection by those around
him, notably his parents and siblings. He was often sickly and needed special food. He was extremely sensitive and had a great love of animals, especially his little Dachshund, from which he was inseparable.
At age seven, when he was ready to start school at the Zurich Waldorf School, he refused to go. He had a real resistance to school, and even when his teacher kindly offered to coach him at home he didn’t want it (an interesting fact for a future teacher!). This went on for almost a year. Then, one day, he was taken to a Mozart concert. The next day he announced he wanted to go to school! Georg used to describe this as the “Mozart effect.”
In his teens Georg was part of the “Wander Vogel” youth movement and, despite his heart condition, often went walking or skiing in the Swiss Alps (though on one occasion he had to make a sudden departure from a climb due to his failing breath).
The picture of his childhood and youth is one of a certain fragility and need of protection. However, his heart condition did excuse him from doing his Swiss army service!
It is interesting to note that this weakness of the heart did not persist in his life, and that his heart appeared to get stronger. In the end, he did not die of heart failure, but of a cancerous condition in the liver; and in his last weeks, when his other organs were shutting down, it was his heart and lungs that persisted the longest! One could say that through his life he made a strength out of an initial weakness, his spiritual Lion heart overcoming the physical weakness through the development of extra strong heart forces.
As the Zurich Waldorf School at that time did not go past the eighth grade, and through the encourage-
ment of a particular much loved English teacher, it was decided that Georg would do his eleventh grade at Michael Hall School in England.
A story Georg liked to tell was that in his early teens he had seen a photo of a girl on horseback in a nature magazine, with the caption: “Girl somewhere in England.” This had for some reason impressed him and stuck in his mind. One can only imagine that, when he arrived at Michael Hall’s boarding hostel in Kidbrooke Mansion, then run by Francis and Elisabeth Edmunds, and first set eyes on their twelve-year-old daughter, Angela, he must have thought: “Here is the girl somewhere in England!” She was, in fact, his future wife and possessed that quality of freedom and natural beauty which he had been drawn to in that photo of the girl on horseback.
It was, indeed, a momentous event for Georg, a life-determining moment of destiny. Not only had he met his future wife, but also his future teacher of Waldorf education, Francis Edmunds, and the school at which he himself would come to teach for so many years. All at the tender age of sixteen! But before he could pick up this life that seemed to have been laid out before him, there was a period of separation. And although Georg and Angela had certainly noticed each other during his time at Michael Hall, with some sweet exchanges of an artistic nature (e.g., a portrait drawn of Angela for the Edmunds), when he left at the end of the eleventh grade, it was to be seven years before they would meet again.
In the years after returning to Zurich, Georg entered a period of life dilemmas. What vocation should he pursue? Was he to follow in his father’s footsteps by entering the family business? To his father’s disappoint-
ment, the answer was no. Should he pursue an academic career and go to University? After two attempts at entrance exams, and two failures, the answer was also clearly no. So then, after three years of trials, he decided to pursue the artist’s way, which clearly suited him best, and which actually he had been pursuing throughout his youth already. But the dilemmas continued. Was it to be painting, sculpture, drama or music? All of these it could have been. But eventually he settled on music and went to study
atoire. For a few years afterwards he lived as a professional touring cellist, playing in orchestras throughout Germany and Switzerland. Photos of him at this time show a deeply sensitive, brooding young man, a real Romantic, living the dream!
But being a professional cellist was not to be his ultimate vocation. During this time in Zurich an interest in anthroposophy had been growing in Georg, as he had been asked to play the cello for numerous anthroposophical festivals and events. Then, on a concert tour of England at the age of 24 with his school friend Peter
Ramm, Georg stopped by at Michael Hall to visit the Edmunds for Christmas. There he met Angela again. By then she was 20 and doing a teacher training at Bognor Regis College. The spark between them was rekindled and two years later they were married. This, together with his growing wish to serve anthroposophy in a practical way, contributed to his decision to join the Waldorf teacher training which Francis Edmunds was running at Michael Hall. And from then onwards he never looked back. He had found his life’s vocation: Waldorf education. Here he could realize the multi-artist that he was, through painting, clay-modelling, drama, and of course, always, music. But he added another art to the list, the art of education, which would bring him ever more deeply into the social realm.
He started teaching at Michael Hall at the age of 26, at first German, religion, and art, and then took over a grade four up to grade eight. After this he completed two sets of grades one to eight. One can certainly say he did his bit of grade teaching! Year after year he prepared for main lessons, put on plays, organized and went on school trips, wrote reports as well as being chairman of college several times. Throughout this time he was also always active as a cellist in school and local concerts and events.
During this time he and Angela were raising their five children: Eunice, Adrian, Rowena, Karin, and, a good deal later, Dominic. Their various homes in Forest Row were hubs of life, particularly the last, Priory Mead, which was right next door to Michael Hall and where he lived for 43 years until his death. In this respect, Georg was a true Englishman: His home was his castle! And he, of course, was the lord of castle! Priory Mead was espe-
cially such a castle for him. Here he created a beautiful music room/study which was not only his retreat from his busy schedule (and bustling family!) but also provided the scene for many a concert, gathering, or celebration. Throughout the years of family life, numerous boarders and friends filled out the Locher household and have remained in touch, fondly remembering their time in this special home.
Alongside his teaching at Michael Hall, two further strands began to develop in his life: the teacher training at Emerson College (part time at first) and annual trips visiting schools in North America. By 1986 he had resigned from Michael Hall and taken up a full-time post at Emerson College, co-running the Education course with John Thompson. His trips to North America increased from once to two or three times a year. He started to live on two continents. He later also became a schools advisor with the Steiner Schools Fellowship, making annual visits to many of the schools in Great Britain, notably Edinburgh, Wynstones, and South West London.
Georg’s connection to North America was strong and somehow symptomatic of a certain deep soul striving. As if England wasn’t west enough for this Swiss man, Georg’s orientation was to go further westwards, where he would find a greater soul freedom than he had found in England. It was noticeable to his friends and family that he would return from his American trips somehow changed, freer and happier. The friendships and colleagueships there seemed somehow easier, with stories of “going out to the movies” or “for ice creams,” things he rarely if ever did in England. Alongside visiting schools, his annual visits included being a visiting teacher at the Waldorf
Teacher Education Programmes at Antioch University New England and the Rudolf Steiner Center, Toronto. For many years he was on the board of the Rudolf Steiner Institute, an annual summer school for anthroposophy in Pennsylvania and then Maine. He was also the inspiring force behind the Renewal Courses for teachers at the Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, New Hampshire, of which he was a board member and where he gave courses for more than a decade. He once said he never wanted to become “dead wood” in an institu-
tion, and both with Michael Hall, and later Emerson, he was quick to move on before this could happen, trusting others to carry on the work. However, with his work in America it was a stroke that stopped him continuing in 2011. This was a great sadness for him in his last years, as he missed the life of friendships and colleagueships he had developed there. It was, therefore, a particular joy when his friend Torin Finser came especially to his bedside in hospital a week before he died with a pile of letters and good wishes from his American friends, expressing gratitude for all he had done for them and how much he had meant to them. A torrent of emails followed, many from former students and teachers he had mentored over the years. Two words stand out particularly from these communications: “mentorship” and “kindness.” The teachers he visited in
21st August 1934 - 15th December 2014 GEORG LOCHER
their schools, many of whom he had formerly taught, felt deeply supported and accompanied by him. He both fully accepted them and encouraged them to develop further as teachers and human beings. He was famous for his “little chats,” where he would take someone aside and point out a short-coming, suggesting a possible new direction they might take. But it was always with the utmost kindness.
In the years after his stroke, when he could no longer travel, Georg turned his attention to his family and home and to enriching the cultural life of the local Sussex Anthroposophical Society. Through his careful management and insistence on high standards the Festivals in Forest Row became beautiful, artistic events which attracted larger numbers of people than usual. He was a master of detail, an artist-soul with a certain particularity much appreciated and enjoyed by those who knew and loved him.
With the support of my colleagues, I was able to fly over to the UK to spend a day with Georg just a week before he crossed the threshold. The visit occurred on December 6th, itself a remarkable “coincidence” as Georg had frequently played the part of St Nick during his lifetime. My brief visit with Georg on that day turned out to be a moving and transformative experience.
He had fallen into a deep sleep the day before I arrived and the family had almost called off my visit. So when I walked into his hospital room I was prepared for a one-way conversation, which is what happened for the first hour. My hands were filled with cards and greetings from friends
all across the USA, some of which I read to the sleeping Georg. In between long periods of silence, I also prayed and sang for him (it seemed his breathing changed during Dona Nobis). After an hour I got up to stretch my legs, feeling that I had done all I could to say goodbye.
I was at the end of a long hallway, looking out a window with many dead trees and one lone pine at the top of the hill, when a nurse came running toward me. “Are you Torin Finser? He is asking for you!”
When I entered his room he was fully awake and mostly his old self. His first words were: “Why are you here? I am not dying!” After some reassurances, he continued more philosophically, “How much time do we have left?”
What followed for the next hour was a most remarkable conversation, rich in memories of mutual friends, teacher training, USA visits, the arts and even cigar smoking. A few details were mixed up, but for the most part there was a clear train of thought for conversation. He said he was not an artist but had tried to show an artistic way of education. Georg lit up when he was given Karine’s card with her painting “Angel Rising” and asked for his glasses. He then said that it was his dying wish that his children would visit Renewal, at which point, all five of them said emphatically “We will.” Georg broke into a joyous smile. (It appears from comments from family members that Georg’s life had really spanned two continents, and that he had in many ways lived two lives— see Adrian’s talk above.) Thus it was especially satisfying for Georg that his children would finally connect with the other part of his life work. After much more conversation, including his role as founding president of the Center for Anthroposophy, he
seemed tired and I told him we would withdraw for a while. He then said, “I need a little break to reflect on my dwindling thoughts.”
We retreated and the nurses came in to do their thing. Fifteen minutes later we returned and he was no longer with us in consciousness. He no longer recognized anyone, and started speaking incoherently, a kind of death march had set in. I felt that he had decided to embrace his approaching death, and was prepared to do it with characteristic determination. I waited another hour, we tried singing (to no avail) and then I rose to say goodbye. As I leaned over him and held his hands, I thought there was once again a flicker of recognition and he said, “Glorious death.” And as I turned to leave the room I heard one more word: “Anthroposophy.”
He lingered in body for one more week (but was never fully conscious again), and after the service in the UK some of his friends gathered in the Garden Room at the Grohs’ in Wilton, New Hampshire on the 28th of December to share memories. The evening opened with cello music, included a reading of Adrian’s speech, my recollections, and many, many contributions from the friends who had gathered. We also sang the same carol that we found on the Forest Row program, “Lo, How a Rose.” The beginning and end of the evening featured the well known verse, in this case dedicated to our dear friend and colleague, Georg Locher.
May love of hearts reach out to love of souls, May warmth of love ray out to Spirit-light. Even so would we draw near to you, Thinking with you Thoughts of Spirit, Feeling in you the Love of Worlds, Consciously at one with you Willing in silent Being.
—Rudolf SteinerFor everyone, however, who has the ability to observe thinking—and with good will every normal human being has this ability—this observation is the most important one he or she could possibly make.... Thinking all too readily leaves us cold in recollection; it is as if the life of the soul had dried out. Yet this is really nothing but the strongly marked shadow of its real nature—warm, luminous, and penetrating deeply into the phenomena of the world. This penetration is brought about by a power flowing through the activity of thinking itself—the power of love in its spiritual form. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom
You say Confucius is confusing
You refuse to start with Sartre
And you just can’t understand Kant.
Mr. Spinoza really throws ya
Schopenhauer is quite sour
These philosophers rave and rant.
Your brain can’t find the room
For Bishop Berkeley, David Hume
And well may you lament,
That though Plato may be great
Oh, God! It’s difficult to state
Precisely what the hell he meant.
You may think a puff of pot’ll
Help you more than Aristotle, Heraclitus is quite dense.
Or you substitute for thinking
Just a touch of social drinking
But still you feel quite tense.
If you think that thoughts will bore you
Someone else will have them for you
And that’s the catch, my friend.
Because from thinking you can’t hide
Or someone else will be your guide
From the beginning to the end.
Through thinking Beauty, Truth, and Good
Can be rightly understood
As light shimm’ring from above.
And when our thinking becomes seeing We experience pure being And our thinking turns to love.
Paul Margulies
reprinted from being human winter 2011
by Maria Ver Eecke, Chestnut Ridge, NY
Paul Margulies gave the best commencement address in memory, at Green Meadow Waldorf School in 1991, a speech still remembered because he told a story. He had discovered that Frank Baum was a theosophist and had written The Wizard of Oz out of spiritual insights. So Paul retold the story of Dorothy as the individual on the path looking for her soul forces: thinking, feeling, will. She meets them in the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion: intelligence, the heart, courage. Dorothy befriends and becomes a guide of these characterized soul forces, as the higher ego must.
Paul suggested that to find one’s way in the world, you trust yourself and just follow your feet! In the original story, Glinda the Good gives Dorothy silver slippers which Hollywood changed to ruby ones. Silver is the metal of the moon and it is moon forces that hold our pre-birth intentions. Every 18.6 years the moon returns to the same cosmic position as at the time of one’s birth; this is called a “moon node” or “lunar return.” The time around this return is good for reflection, for re-awakening one’s intention for this life on earth—a most memorable topic for a commencement speech for 18-year-old graduates! Thanks to Paul, I continue to share this great story.
Did you know?
Making a planned gift doesn’t usually affect a person’s current income.
For more information, contact Deb Abrahams-Dematte at deb@anthroposophy.org
BRING EXPRESSION TO YOUR INTENTION AND LOVE FOR ANTHROPOSOPHY INTO THE FUTURE
April 5, 2015: Verse #1 Easter Mood Oct 4: Verse #27
Apr 12: Verse #2 Oct 11: Verse #28
Apr 19: Verse #3 Oct 18: Verse # 29
Apr 26: Verse #4 Oct 25: Verse #30
May 3: Verse #5 Nov 1: Verse #31
Light from Spirit Depths Light from Spirit Depths
May 10: Verse #6 Nov 8: Verse #32
May 17: Verse #7 Nov 15: Verse #33
Luciferic Temptation
Ahrimanic Deception
May 24: Verse #8 Whitsun Nov 22: Verse #34
May 31: Verse #9 Nov 29: Verse #35
June 7: Verse #10 Dec 6: Verse #36
June 14: Verse #11 Dec 13: Verse #37
June 21: Verse #12 St John’s Mood Dec 20: Verse #38 Christmas Mood
June 28: Verse #13 Dec 27: Verses # 39 + 40
July 5: Verse #14
July 12: Verse #15 Jan 3, 2015: Verse #41
July 19: Verse #16 Jan 10: Verse #42
July 26: Verse #17 Jan 17: Verse #43
Aug 2: Verse #18 Jan 24: Verse #44
Aug 9: Verse #19 Jan 31: Verse #45
Aug 16: Verse #20 Feb 7: Verse #46
Luciferic Temptation
Ahrimanic Deception
Aug 23: Verse #21 Feb 14: Verse #47
Aug 30: Verse #22 Feb 21: Verse #48
Light from Cosmic Widths
Light from Cosmic Heights
Sept 6: Verse #23 Feb 28: Verse #49
Sept 13: Verse #24 Mar 6: Verse #50
Sept 20: Verse #25 Mar 13: Verse #51
Sept 27: Verse #26: Michaelmas Mood Mar 20: Verse #52
Mar 27: Verse #1 Easter Mood
Rudolf Steiner first published the 52 verses we know as the Calendar of the Soul in 1912. The adjusted dates listed here for 2015-2016 are intended as guide for those who follow the practice of beginning a new verse on the Sunday of each week. In keeping with Steiner’s instruction, we start the meditative year with verse # 1 at Easter (April 5, 2015).
Our format matches the way in which the 52 verses appeared in the original 1912-13 edition and it adheres to the seven-day astral rhythm of the soul. In addition, this approach takes into account the seven preparatory verses (Lent) leading up to Easter, and the seven “mirror” verses that follow from Easter to Whitsun.
There are 51 weeks from Easter 2015 through to Easter 2016, but we have 52 verses. This calls for an accommodation, especially if we wish to keep in sync with the major Christian festivals. The solution being proposed here is to work with verses 39 and 40 during the same week, starting on Sunday, December 27, 2015. This gives us the opportunity to concentrate on the subtle shift that occurs from verse 39 to 40 (post-Christmas) and to discover its “polar” opposite in verses 13 and 14 (post-St. John’s).
The cosmic dating of Easter requires the meditant to reset the course through the 52 verses of the Soul Calendar each year, since there are never exactly 52 weeks between one Easter and the next. It becomes an exercise in self-renewal, a kind of yearly tune-up. These mini-mantras become spiritual sign posts along the ever changing path of personal initiation.
Herbert O. Hagens, Princeton, NJ, USA hohagens@aol.comWeek 1:
June 21st to June 26th
The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily: Performing the Story with Marionettes With Joan Almon, Janene Ping, and Debra Spitulnik
The Paths of Intuition: Educating with Insight, Courage, and Joy With Christof Wiechert
The Four Temperaments in the Workplace: Transforming the Way we Work with One Another With Adrian Locher
Laying the Foundation: Teaching Grade 1 With Christopher Sblendorio
Finding the Middle Path: An Exploration of the Landscape of Grade 2 With Kate Golden
Working with the Image of Man at the Heart of Waldorf Education: Teaching Grade 4 With Dennis Demanett
The Golden Age: Grade 5 in a Waldorf School With Patrice Maynard
The Turning Point of Childhood: Teaching Grade 6 With Helena Niiva
The Brave New World of Seventh Grade With Sue Demanett and Louis Bullard
How to Survive the 8th Grade and Come out Smiling! With Darcy Drayton
The Gift of Drawing: Blocks and Blackboard Preparation for the Classroom, Grades 1-8 With Elizabeth Auer
Music in the Morning: Singing and Recorder Playing in the Classroom With David Gable
Foreign Languages in Grades 1, 2, and 3: Kindling the Imagination, Cultivating Understanding, and Practical Language Skills
With Kati Manning and Lorey Johnson
For Waldorf teachers and administrators - along with parents, trustees, artists, and thinkers seeking to deepen their lives through Anthroposophy
Week 2:
June 28th to July 3rd
Healing Aspects to Address Trauma in Childhood, Adolescence, and in Biography With Michaela Gloeckler, MD
Anthroposophy and Buddhism: The Reality and Possibilities of Relationship With Michael D’Aleo
Co-Workers, Sisters, and Friends: Women Students and Spiritual Researchers around Rudolf Steiner With Christopher Bamford
Re-Imagining Mathematics With Jamie York
Nature’s Alphabet: Explore the Relationship between Word and World With Paul Matthews and Patrice Pinette
Roots, Leaves, Flowers, Seeds, and Spirit: The Ancient Art of Healing with Herbs With Deb Soule
Michelangelo for Beginners: Carving in Marble With Daniel O’Connors
The Art of Christianity: A Journey through Art History With David Lowe
Embracing the Darkness With Charles Andrade
Register online at: www.centerforanthroposophy.org
Renewal Courses sponsored by Center for Anthroposophy Wilton, New Hampshire
Karine Munk Finser, Coordinator
603-654-2566 • info@centerforanthroposophy.org
Visit us online for details of our part-time Foundation Studies in Anthroposophy and the Arts
Barbara Richardson, Coordinator Clusters available on demand around the U.S. www.centerforanthroposophy.org
Social and Organizational Issues With John Cunningham, Barbara Richardson, and Torin Finser
Self-Education through Intuitive Thinking and Artistic Perception With Signe Motter, Hugh Renwick, Elizabeth Auer, and Douglas Gerwin
June 28th - July 25th, 2015
Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program Douglas Gerwin, Director Three-summers
Painting by Karine Munk Finser
