being human Spring 2016

Detail of Child’s Room, lazure wall treatment by Robert Logsdon

Week 1:

June 26th to July 1st

The Spiritual Laws of Reincarnation and Destiny and Their Relevance for Health and Illness in Human Biography

With Michaela Gloeckler, MD

The Child Study: A Two-Summer Course for Facilitators With Christof Wiechert

Grade 1: Laying the Foundation With Christopher Sblendorio

Grade 2: Becoming the Knight and Taming the Dragons With Neal Kennerk

Grade 3: Why Leave Paradise? With Darcy Drayton

Grade 4: Stepping Out Into the World With Elizabeth Auer

Grade 5: The Golden Bridge from Childhood to Adolescence, Lower School to Upper Elementary School

With Patrice Maynard

Grade 6: The Turning Point of Childhood With Helena Niiva

Grade 7: A Year of Exploration and Renaissance With Alison Henry

Grade 8: The Crowning of the Waldorf Grade School With Signe Motter

Week 1 Also Featuring: Eurythmy with Cezary Ciaglo

Singing with David Gable

Science with Roberto Trostli

Welcome to Renewal 2016!

For Waldorf teachers and

Week 2:

July 3rd to July 8th

The Human Embryo: A Lifelong Journey in Search of Spirit

With Jaap van der Wal, MD

The Nine Subtle Bodies With Dennis Klocek

Great Spiritual Teachers: Scythianus, Gautama Buddha, Manes, Master Jesus, and Christian Rosenkreutz With Virginia Sease

Pushing the Boundaries of the Imagination through Projective Geometry With Jamie York

Experience Metal Color Light Therapy: A New Initiative With Lisa Edge and Helena Hurrell

Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci: Exploring Individuality in Dark and Light

With Donald Hall and Sylvie Richard

Organizational Integrity With Torin Finser and Leonore Russell

Writing Pictorially: Saunter, Lurch, or Skip? Nibble, Slurp, or Gnaw? With Dorit Winter

Self-Education through Intuitive Thinking and Artistic Perception

With Signe Motter, Douglas Gerwin, Elizabeth Auer and Hugh Renwick

Painting by Karine Munk Finser

ANTHROPOSOPHY NYC

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

WORKSHOPS TALKS STUDY GROUPS CLASSES FESTIVALS EVENTS EXHIBITS

UPCOMING EVENTS & PROGRAMS

TECHNOLOGY’S ROLE IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

workshop: Andrew Linnell, Sat, Apr. 9, 10am-4:30pm

HEALING PLANTS (MONTHLY LECTURE)

Wednesdays 7pm: David T. Anderson, 4/ 13, 5/18, 6/15

EURYTHMY (MONTHLY WORKSHOP)

Mondays 7pm: Linda Larson: 4/11, 5/9, 6/13

WORKSHOP WITH LISA ROMERO

Friday-Sunday, April 15-17

ART EXHIBIT OPENING:

DOUG SAFRANEK & LYNN LOFLIN

Sat, April 23, 6–9pm

WEEKEND WITH JAMES DYSON

Friday-Saturday, May 7–8

WHITSUN-PENTECOST LECTURE

Walter Alexander; Sunday, May 15, 2pm

ST. JOHN’S FESTIVAL & POT-LUCK

Sunday, June 26, 4pm to 7pm

Plus Weekly & Monthly Study Groups

Programs and resources in visual arts eurythmy music drama & poetry Waldorf education self-development spirituality esoteric research evolution of consciousness health & therapies

Biodynamic farming social action economics

Find Christ in a New Way

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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

Marcus Knausenberger

8 being human digest

12 initiative!

12 All the Therapies in One Beautiful Place, by John Beck with RSHC staff

15 Inspired by Moral Imagination: Current Research at Threefold, by Abigail Dancey

16 Paris: Shifting the Heart of the Collective, by Otto Scharmer

19 Nurturing the Beings of the Schools, by Peter Rennick

20 To Be Nine: The Nine Year Change, by Jessica Crawford

21 Paul Scharff Archive, by Harold Ellis Bush

22 arts & ideas

22 A World of Reconciliation in Light of the Second International Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement, by Frederick Amrine

24 Regarding the Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement, and Excerpts from West-East Aphorisms, by Rudolf Steiner

25 Gallery: The art & environments of Robert Logsdon

30 North-South Aphorisms, by Frederick Amrine

31 The Tension between North and South, by Frederick Amrine

35 Reading Steiner, by Jon McAlice

37 Meditation as a Path Towards Becoming Human, by Christine Gruwez

38 research & reviews

38 The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, review by Frederick Dennehy

41 Technology and the Laws of Thoughts, by Gopi Krishna Vijaya

Like Shattered Glass, by Benjamin Butler

48 news for members & friends

by

by Dennis Dietzel

Robert Logsdon: Daffodil Emerging, 2015

The Anthroposophical Society in America

General Council Members

Torin Finser, General Secretary

Dennis Dietzel, Chair (Central Region)

Carla Beebe Comey, Secretary (at large)

John Michael, Treasurer (at large)

Dwight Ebaugh (at large)

Micky Leach (Western Region)

Dave Alsop (at large)

Leadership Team

Marian León, Director of Programs

Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Director of Development

Katherine Thivierge, Director of Operations

being human

is published by the Anthroposophical Society in America

1923 Geddes Avenue

Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797

Tel. 734.662.9355 www.anthroposophy.org

Editor: John H. Beck

Associate Editors:

Fred Dennehy, Elaine Upton

Design and layout: John Beck

Please send submissions, questions, and comments to: editor@anthroposophy.org or to the postal address above, for our next issue by 5/1/2016.

©2016 The Anthroposophical Society in America. Responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

from the editor

Welcome, dear friends! Let me begin by thanking the featured artist of this issue, Robert Logsdon, whose work appears on the cover and in the gallery, along with all our generous authors who have given their time and insight. To their gifts have been added the happy coincidence of many interesting threads running through this issue, among the articles.

The first thread I see, important and difficult, is the challenge of evil in our time. Torin Finser takes this up (p.48) in connection with the new theme which anthroposophists will be considering in the year ahead, and with the great imaginative creations of Shakespeare in Macbeth and Goethe in Faust. Christine Gruwez speaks of the Manichean worldview (p.37) and asks whether meditation is not an action to overcome evil. And Otto Scharmer (p.16) looks at immediate events and invites us to consider “presencing” and “absencing” as two approaches to our existence which produce healing and destruction respectively.

Although there is more to it, I’m inclined to wonder whether simply paying attention, with all our faculties opened, is not the essence of this presencing. If so, is presencing another word for the wonder being created in our profiled medical initiative, the Rudolf Steiner Health Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where all kinds of skills and receptive attention are brought to the care of illness? It is certainly what a teacher is called to bring (p.20) at that age around nine when a child steps out of belonging-to-everything into being oneself, and alone. And perhaps it is what Jon McAlice is getting at (“Reading Steiner,” p.35), or a part of it, in exploring the difficulty of reading Rudolf Steiner’s works. Yes, Dr. Steiner simply asked to be understood, but when we are completely present to his writing or his lectures we are likely to notice that he is speaking to us from an experience of a fully living world, imbued with consciousness.

Essays by Frederick Amrine have graced these pages since our first issue as being human, when the subject was Rudolf Steiner in his 150th birthday year. In this issue he brings us another portrait of Rudolf Steiner as someone embracing the global process of humanity and speaking publicly, to a large audience, about the necessary engagement of Western and Eastern thought, values, and cultures. What Prof. Amrine has seen is how this East-West tension has turned, in just under a century, into a “North-South” challenge. And in a review of an important contemporary book, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, he finds the same thirst for livingness, for real presence, and for heart, in today’s cultural campaign for “the South” as in anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner’s work after the first “world” war. These offerings stretch across pages 22-34 and include in the center a new set of “North-South Aphorisms” which will

HOW TO receive being human, or to comment or contribute

Copies of being human are free to members of the Anthroposophical Society in America (visit anthroposophy.org/join or call 734.662.9355). 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.

delight the reader who takes time to sit with them.

Another group of articles runs from page 41 to 47. The theme is technology. The article by Gopi Krishna Vijaya (p.41) is a breakthrough piece for me, though it only describes a larger, sixty-page booklet by the same author. Getting to the bottom of the human-machine tension that is now getting ever stronger—and which, perhaps, is the major part of the tension between North and South,—Dr. Vijaya points out how human experience was long ago formulated into logic (by Aristotle in the first place), and how in the 19th century and since this human logic has been adapted and limited as a logic suited to the capability of machines—their strength and speed and repetitive endurance. And now we human beings are being held up against this diminished, narrowed, but strong and very rapid logic of machines. And it is we humans who are found wanting!

Benjamin Butler then gives us a review (p.43) of Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book, The Singularity is Near. The merger of the human being with the machine is near. And Kurzweil and many others, “transhumanists,” are cheering on this merger because they value “intelligence” to the exclusion of all other human capacities. And through AI, artifical intelligence, machine intelligence, they expect to become immortal.

As in previous essays, Andrew Linnell counsels us (p.45) to be awake not afraid. As a lecturer around the country, Andrew is eager to lead us into the insights of Rudolf Steiner in this area, too. The encounter and engagement with machines is part of the human destiny and demands awakeness. It is part of an evolutionary path that is ours to follow. Banish all fear of the future: that is the wise advice of Rudolf Steiner.

A final mention: a new book on “The Inklings” has been written. Owen Barfield was probably the farthest seeing of this famous British literary group that included Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Fred Dennehy reviews it on page 38 and finds much to like.

EXPLORE HUMANITY’S PATH

Questions? Contact us at info@anthroposophy.org or 734.662.9355, or visit www.anthroposophy.org

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being human digest

world. I’m pretty sure.” Free Columbia makes good use of its community, the Berkshire region of New York and Massachusetts that has seen the peer social training of ThinkOutWord, the holistic studies of the Nature Institute, and the bedrock of the Hawthorne Valley Association group of initiatives. In March Free Columbia brings one of its “art dispersals” to Anthroposophy NYC.

newARTschool

Fueled by the enthusiasm of alumni now in the USA, Zvi Szir, the Israeli-born co-founder and co-director of the neueKUNSTschule in Basel, Switzerland, gave workshops in the Northeast early in 2016. As “newARTschool,” the nKs plans to offer courses, workshops, and lectures in Germany, Israel, China, and the USA. The first US series offered topics such as “Feeling and Tonality: Painting as Awakening to the Reality of the Contemporary Soul”; “Art and the Mysteries of the Will”; “How Does Technology Affect our Experience of Color?”; “The Mission of Art in a Time of Crisis”; and “The Spiritual Reality of (Post)Modernity: Painting, Thinking and Anthroposophy in Our Evolving Age.” At newartschoolusa.org there are alumni reflections testifying to a significant intersection of art and anthroposophy.

SOCIETY Beyond Wall Street?

RSF Social Finance president Don Shaffer has been writing in their “Reimagine Money” blog about their “decision to walk off Wall Street, and urging others to con

sider doing the same. The obvious question that comes up is, OK, but where do you go? What are the investment and banking options beyond the Wall Street-centric institutions? Can you really get off that grid?

“It’s not easy–we are painfully aware of that–and we can’t give specific investment advice because we are not financial advisors. But yes, you can unplug. ... What that means to you or your organization depends on your goals. Our goal is to transform the way the world works with money, so we approached unplugging with a related set of questions: How can we move from a financial system that’s complex, opaque and anonymous to one that’s direct, transparent and personal?” You can continue reading this particular post at rsfsocialfinance.org (follow the Media/Blog links), or on Don’s Huffington Post page at www.huffingtonpost.com/don-shaffer/.

Researching Community

Camphill Research Network (camphillresearch.com) is “an informal network for anyone interested in research related to Camphill communities and the wider intentional community movement.” A non-profit volunteer initiative, its roots are in the UK but it aims to be a global resource, gathering knowledge of existing research, helping researchers connect, providing a forum, building capacity for research projects and collaborations, and raising the profile and understanding of intentional communities generally.

Unexpectedly the website includes an extensive gallery of the work of Hermann Gross, artist in residence for twenty-five years at Camphill Rudolf Steiner School in Aberdeen, Scotland.

being human digest

EDUCATION

“Waldorf Resources” Site for Teachers

A new website www.waldorf-resources.org has been created as a resource for Waldorf/Steiner teachers by the Education Department (aka, the Pedagogical Section) at the Goetheanum, on behalf of the Hague Circle, an “international forum for Steiner/Waldorf education.” Areas of the site include Foundation, Early Childhood, Teaching Practice, Self Development, and School Management, plus Forums, Events, and a Newsletter. Visitors can read in German, English, or Spanish, and the contributions give a sense of the worldwide movement that has emerged.

New Degree Opportunity at Sunbridge Institute

Sunbridge Institute recently announced a new opportunity for those wishing to earn a master’s degree in Waldorf Education. Students and graduates of Sunbridge’s Waldorf Early Childhood and Elementary Teacher Education Programs who hold a bachelor’s degree from a regionally-accredited institution may now seek to apply their Sunbridge studies toward earning a fully-accredited Master of Education degree (MEd) with a self-designed concentration in Waldorf Education, conferred by Empire State College of the State University of New York. This new partnership is ideal for individuals who wish to complement and expand their Waldorf teacher training with a graduate program that offers a broader context of contemporary academic theories and research. The SUNY Empire coursework is conducted entirely online, making this MEd program especially convenient for working adults. See Sunbridge’s website (www.sunbridge.edu) for details.

MEDICINE

Safer Resistance?

Michaela Glöckler, MD, from Alliance ELIANT (eliant.eu), which works in the public sphere in Europe to defend and support anthroposophical initiatives, wrote recently about growing resistance to antibiotics and how civil society and holistic medicine can contribute. “Excessive use [of antibiotics] over the last few decades has meant that the strains of bacteria for which they were intended are becoming resistant to these antibiotics more quickly than it takes to develop effective new ones. It is estimated that around 25,000 people in Europe die each year from infections that can no longer be treated. ... Legislators and civil society are able to act in situations where the use of antibiotics causes harm to people and animals. Yet their prophylactic use on healthy animals in agriculture presents a particular problem since they are an essential element of the intensive livestock system and also act to a certain extent as growth enhancers. But if the same antibiotics are used on animals as are used to treat people, resistance in human beings can develop indirectly via the consumption of meat with the result that such antibiotics can no longer be used in the treatment of disease.” Dr. Glöckler continues with research trials indicating—“as those involved with integrated and complementary medicine experience on a daily basis—that most acute infections can be treated better and more consistently without antibiotics and hence with less danger of causing side effects. ... With the help of external treatments and medicines of homeopathic and anthroposophic origin, the organism’s self-healing capacities are supported and its immune system acquires the

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For the first time, one can receive a training in Spacial Dynamics with a 2 year part-time program led by Jaimen McMillan in New York or Oregon, and then subsequent courses of specialized interests by certified Level III trainers at locations around North America.

being human digest

power to overcome the infection. Were this approach to become recommended practice, a significant step would be taken towards ensuring that the antibiotics which still remain effective continue to be available for those with the most serious infections. ELIANT along with its alliance partners in medicine and agriculture, is campaigning for the necessary re-thinking to take place within civil society and among the professionals and politicians who are responsible.”

AGRICULTURE

Change of names

Isis Biodynamic flour, mentioned here a few issues ago (and an advertiser, thank you!), is changing its face. “In light of current events we have decided to re-brand. We are in the process of choosing a new name and updating our websites and packaging. Our product will be the same Biodynamic Stone Ground Whole Wheat flour farmed at Kirschenmann Family Farms—nothing changes except the name! Our product can still be purchased direct through Rockwell Organic so please contact us at 203/426-5047 or email: rockwellorganic@aol.com

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Symptomatic Essentials in politics, culture and economy

From the latest Numbers:

Does the German Mission Still Exist?

Thomas Meyer

Overcoming Evil

Charles Kovacs

Shakespeare and Bowie

Terry Boardman

The Angel of Time

Fred Poeppig

America’s Global Voice, The New York Times

Andreas Bracher

Hermann Beckh a Great Pupil of Steiner

Edzard Clemm

Laurence Oliphant - A Victorian Enigma

T.H. Meyer

Rudolf Steiner’s Impulse for Painting

Andrea Hitsch

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IN THIS SECTION:

The idea of a health resort seems natural to Europe, but with anthroposophy’s holistic embrace of the whole person from childhood forward, it’s natural that anthroposophic doctors and therapists would be evolving a model in the middle of the USA.

Another boundary made to be crossed is that between observation and thought, isolated in mainstream science, and our ethical and artistic capacities. “Moral imagination” is the theme of the latest stage of research at Threefold Educational Foundation.

Otto Scharmer grew up with biodynamic farming in Germany and has become a leading future-oriented thought leader. Recent attacks in Paris brought from him clear, deep, and fundamental insights.

Schools should nurture children, but how do you nurture schools?

Joan Treadaway reports from Arizona on schools growing up together.

Nine is an important transition age for a child; Jessica Crawford helps us into that with a poem.

Paul Scharff’s life work continues, now as a rich online archive.

All the Therapies in One Beautiful Place

by

John Beck with RSHC staff

The anthroposophical approach to medicine inspired and developed by Rudolf Steiner considers the entire human being, adding spiritual insight to diagnosis and healing. It takes into account that human beings, nature and the cosmos are interrelated. It is a complementary approach meaning that conventionally trained medical doctors combine orthodox medical treatment with many therapeutic disciplines including homeopathic and herbal remedies, homecare, nursing, artistic therapy, music therapy, hydrotherapy, curative eurythmy (movement), and massage. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, two anthroposophically trained doctors led the creation of a health center to bring all these treatments together in one place, along with a patient organization, health retreats, and youth internships.

“I appreciated how movement, art, and music integrated harmony; massage therapy was very relaxing; compresses and rest. The food and menus were excellent as were the evening educational programs. Color therapy was awesome. All (staff) were friendly, caring, and informative consistently... Timing was perfect because of finishing the last week of radiation and the first week recovering from 35 treatments and burn and fatigue side effects. Spiritual aspect encompassed healing for body, mind, spirit, and soul.” —J.D., cancer patient, 2011

The Physicians and a Therapist

Molly McMullen-Laird, MD, specializes in Internal Medicine with particular interests including weight loss, nutrition, and women’s issues. Quentin McMullen, MD, also specializes in Internal Medicine and with special concerns including Lyme disease, chronic fatigue, and toxin exposure. Both physicians received their medical degrees from Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans. They both have a long connection with anthroposophy. As Margaret Runyon recalled in our spring 2012 issue, they were hosting an anthroposophical study group there in 1983 with environmental scientist Mary Lee Plumb-Mentjes when Inge Elsas, a nurse trained by Dr. Ita Wegman, Rudolf Steiner collaborator in the medical work, found their group. The two doctors completed internship and residency at Reading Hospital in Pennsylvania, and served in U.S. Air Force in Bitburg, Germany. Molly then spent a year working at the Ita Wegman Klinik in Arlesheim, Switzerland, while Quentin trained at Filderklinik in Germany and the Lukas Klinik in Switzerland.

Sara McMullen-Laird, art therapist, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan and has further training in anthroposophical art therapy. She has been art therapist since 2003 and was general manager of the Center 2009-2013. Sara also has a passion for music. She is a past member of the UMS Choral Union and leads the morning singing during many retreat sessions.

Quentin McMullen, MD

Molly McMullen-Laird, MD

Sara McMullen-Laird

Initiatives in Ann Arbor

“Our doctors were inspired to create an inpatient program for chronically ill patients and those with cancer using the modalities they had learned and seen to be so helpful. The practice of anthroposophical medicine is well complemented by the external applications, hydrotherapy, artistic therapies and nutritional support applied through Steiner’s indications. To prepare for that possibility, they organized a two-week session at a retreat center in Michigan and gathered many doctors, nurses, therapists, volunteers, and kitchen helpers to implement the Summer Therapeutic Retreat. This annual session provided the groundwork for a year round program once a facility was obtained in Ann Arbor for that purpose.”

In 1998 the two doctors worked with patients to form a Community Supported Anthroposophic Medicine – Patient Organization (CSAM-PO), on lines similar to the widespread Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups. This non-profit anthroposophical medical practice is designed to accommodate both patients with private insurance paying per visit, and members of a patient organization making monthly payments entitling them to all forms of treatment available from the practice. The goals included a fuller involvement by patients and a freeing of the medical staff from the burdens of a for-profit business.

The Center

“Several attempts were made to buy, build and obtain a building. Eventually, the prior Anna Botsford Bach Home, an elder residence for women, became available and with help from many, many donors and volunteers it was transformed into the Rudolf Steiner Health Center,

a non-profit care facility geared toward helping chronically ill patients with the full palette of anthroposophical therapies and providing a teaching/training facility.”

The Center is environmentally friendly. “We are happy that the building has no sources of modern building materials, which tend to give off gases. We use only biodegradable and perfume free laundry and cleaning agents. The food we purchase is organic or biodynamic and includes as much local produce as we can organize. We have relationships with many of the local farmers and use food that is in season and as fresh as we can find.

“We work very hard to maintain high environmental standards and sustainable practices. Here are some actions we take to do so: rain water collecting, composting, keeping bees, growing our own herbs and some vegetables, making 95% of our meal components from scratch (including yogurt, kvass, hummus and many other items in our kitchen, which saves packaging and transport), making our own cleaning agents, hanging laundry to dry...”

“To experience the Health Center is like stepping into another world of light and caring...” —B.B., retreat participant 2002

The Internship Program

At the Rudolf Steiner Health Center students and young professionals ages 18-30 participate annually in a unique and educational internship program and gain hands-on experience in anthroposophic medical and therapeutic work. The program begins with a three-day introductory conference, introducing participants to the foundations of anthroposophy, anthroposophic and sustainable medicine, nursing care, therapies, nutrition, lifestyle, biodynamic agriculture, and community building.

After this initial training, the internship program then moves into a hands-on portion, where students assist staff members in giving anthroposophic care to patients during the week long Support Retreat where qualifying low-income patients can experience anthroposophic treatment at subsidized rates. Internship participants ap-

Rudolf Steiner Health Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan

ply what they have learned according to their interests and abilities, living at the Center and working closely with staff, patients, and fellow interns as they engage the anthroposophic care concepts. They may enter a career in one of the therapeutic disciplines they experienced or simply carry the wisdom of such an approach with them in their chosen field of work.

Health Retreats

The two-week intensive Life Force retreats offered by the center give participants the opportunity to focus on their physical, spiritual, and emotional health with the help and expertise of anthroposophic doctors, therapists, and nurses. Participants come from all over the country to experience a wonderful healing environment. Along with individualized medical treatment plans, retreats focus on the rhythm of the day, the importance of diet, adequate rest, a supportive community, and how patients may adapt their lifestyle at home towards healing and restoration of inner vitality. The effects of the retreats continue after patients leave, equipped with knowledge and motivation to lead a healthier life, despite the challenges of chronic illness.

“This retreat gave me time to rest and concentrate on getting well.” —K.B, cancer patient and retreat participant in 2010

The next retreat is scheduled for April 25-May 7, 2016. The two-week intensive therapeutic session is designed for ambulatory individuals with a variety of ailments, chronic illnesses, or anyone seeking a restorative regimen. Past patients have suffered chronic fatigue, recovery from chemotherapy, arthritis, stroke, MS, digestive issues, and many other problems. Many receive Viscum Album, an anthroposophical cancer treatment, as well as diverse anthroposophical therapies. Both physicians are happy also to work with patients’ current physician and treatments. People have come from all over North America, and even as far as Japan and Israel to attend retreats.

“Thank you for providing one of the best experiences of my life. It was everything one would only dream an ideal retreat might be—restful, renewing, healing, peaceful, intellectually exciting, fun—and all in a beautiful location.” —retreat participant 2008

Therapies

Just as anthroposophic medicine looks at all dimensions of the human being, so the supporting treatments are wide-ranging. Some therapies in use at the Center include the following:

• Anthroposophic nursing treatments: compresses, footbaths, applications of oils, and therapeutic baths including oil dispersion and over-warming baths.

• Rhythmical massage: a specific form of massage, individually prescribed and performed by specially trained massage therapists.

• Therapeutic eurythmy or Spacial Dynamics: movement therapy used to harmonize and strengthen body and soul.

• Artistic therapy: promotes healing through use of drawing, watercolor painting, and clay modeling.

• Intravenous therapies: depending on the diagnosis, a number of IV therapies may be given during your stay, including high dose Vitamin C, glutathione, Myer’s Cocktail and others.

• Color light therapy: a special color exposure and response therapy developed in Europe.

• Music therapy: harmonizes the activities of inner organs through concentrated listening, singing, and playing of instruments.

“The movement therapists’ joy and humor and good perception were appreciated. The compresses were so soothing, the color sessions enlivening, the painting was joyous, the massage strengthening.” —G.H. retreat participant 2011

“It has been a total joy to be able to be here for two weeks. Everyone is so kind, pleasant, and nonjudgmental. You make us feel totally accepted no matter what we do or say. I have felt like I was in a cocoon of love. I came here very despondent about all my health issues and I am leaving with hope and a new lease on life.” —B.W., 2010

Nursing Care

Anthroposophical nursing goes beyond traditional nursing by addressing the need of patients to be listened to and cared for in their surroundings. The quality of the air, light, heat, textures of bedclothes, fresh water and flowers, appropriate for the illness of the patient, are attended to. Footbaths, bodywork with oil rubbings, and encouragement in all the rhythms of the day are found in the relationship between nurse and patient.

“The staff is extremely caring and there is a lot of individual attention. This is true across the doctors, nurses, chefs, and aides.” —S.S., 2011

Meals, Activities

Three meals per day are served in a beautiful community dining room. All food is organic or biodynamic, with preference given to local produce. Delicious vegetarian meals are based on the therapeutic diet plan of the Lukas Klinik in Arlesheim, Switzerland.

Group activities are an important aspect of the experience. Group singing starts the day (after breakfast), and evening cultural programs are spread throughout the session. There are also weekend outing opportunities, as well as nearby parks available for walking, hiking and plant observation. Ambulatory patients are encouraged to participate in the varied aspects of maintaining gardens, and to walk in the open air. Evening and weekend social events such as musical performances further enhance the sense of community.

“I appreciate and honor that you have created a profound, holistic approach to healing and health in this country in one facility... I liked being with interesting, more like-minded people who, despite having serious health challenges, had a vibrancy and enthusiasm about their health care and their life... I really like singing. Sara is a lovely leader/teacher and I felt free to open my voice and find joy in singing. It felt uplifting to start the day with rhythms and sound. ... This is an impressive program...” —SBL, Cancer patient, 2011

For more information visit steinerhealth.org or email the staff at info@steinerhealth.org

John Beck is editor of being human.

Inspired by Moral Imagination

Current Research at Threefold by Abigail Dancey

From 2008–2013 Threefold Educational Center sponsored a series of symposiums to connect active anthroposophical researchers. The series drew inspiration from Henry Barnes’s 1991 call to anthroposophical institutions, including those with no resources to spare, to “find the way to work for future values (the purpose of all genuine research), while meeting the immediate demands of today, tomorrow and the next day.”

Henry actively helped plan the first Michaelmas Symposium in 2008; he passed away, aged 96, just a week before the conference opened. The symposiums ended in 2013, but research remains central to Threefold’s mission and in spring 2015 twelve people, diverse in profession and age, assembled out of an interest in research and “moral imagination.” Our sense is that what distinguishes spiritual scientific research is acknowledgement that the role of the researcher is as pivotal as the content researched. So practices we develop toward self-knowledge and discernment become central to the research.

Described as ‘the wellspring of the free spirit’ in Rudolf Steiner’s The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, moral imagination forms a triad of capacities with moral intuition and moral technique. Our overarching research question is how these faculties can lift and illuminate both the content of research and researchers themselves. With support from the Henry Barnes Fund our first conference came at the end of September, with a second in early February and a third planned for June. The group will meet three times a year for the next three years, applying these methods to particular areas of concern. We envision connecting with like-minded research groups with concerns such as social justice, economy, and the moral dimensions of art. With people like Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge inspiring new social technologies, thousands are joining the effort to find new solutions to old problems. At Threefold Educational Center we’re asking how Spiritual Science and the work of Rudolf Steiner can add creative methodologies. See www.threefold.org/research for Henry’s essay, developments in our work, and ways to join in. Contact: Rafael Manaças [ rafael@threefold.org ].

Paris: Shifting the Heart of the Collective

by Otto Scharmer

First published 11/18/2015, Huffington Post

The terror attacks in Paris are a stab to our collective heart. The choice of the location for the terror attacks aims at the three core values of Western civilization: liberté, egalité, fraternité. 1

Since November 14, France’s President Hollande has used the word “war” to describe the relationship between his country and the terrorists of the Islamic State (IS) or ISIS and has intensified military strikes in Syria. Although the wisdom of that decision and that word can be questioned, there is definitely a warlike situation in Paris now. But what kind of war is it—between whom and what?

We know that framing this as a religious conflict against Islam would not only be wrong (consider that in Iraq alone more than 10,000 people—many of them Muslim—are killed through mostly IS led acts of terror per year), it would also serve as the perfect recruitment tool for the IS worldwide.

But how much better (and accurate) is it to frame it as a war against the Islamic State? Attempting to destroy ISIS by bombing them in retaliation is both militarily challenging and politically foolhardy because, again, doing so would attract a never-ending stream of ISIS volunteers from the West.

Confronting the Root Cause

Instead of fueling the vicious cycle of violence, why not try to confront the root cause of the conflict? That root cause is not only the catastrophic conditions that the people of Syria and Iraq are suffering, and the personal frustrations and grievances of young Muslims around the world who, like the Paris attackers, are volunteering for ISIS in ever higher numbers; but also the quality of thought, the mind-set, that is being used to address these problems from all sides.

Since September 11, 2001, we have experienced, with increasing frequency, many types of disruption: financial meltdowns, climate destabilization, and terrorist attacks.

We can no longer control this stream of disruptions. They will continue over the coming decade and beyond. It is only a question of time before the next financial meltdown, the next natural disaster, or the next terrorist attack occurs.

So what then can we control?

We can control our response to these disruptions. In struggling to respond to disruptive change and systemic breakdowns, countries and leaders around the world engage in a public discourse of essentially three frames or points of view:

1. Muddling through —basically same old, same old. More meetings. More declarations. More empty words. Examples include most of the climate talks and, to name just one example, the position of Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron on the international refugee crisis. Eloquent talk, high flying rhetoric, but nothing of substance (from a country that played a key role in the Iraq war that laid the groundwork for the rise of the IS). A similar point could me made re the US response: since 2011, the US has accepted little more than 2000 Syrian refugees—less than come to Germany these days on a single morning.

2. Moving apart—Let’s build a huge wall that separates “us” from the “them.” Let’s practice the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity inside these walls, and let’s do the opposite outside of them. In so many words, those are the positions of Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and, to a varying degree, most of the other Republican U.S. presidential candidates and Europe’s right wing politicians.

3. Moving together —Acknowledge our own role in generating the problem, and therefore our responsibility to co-create a solution. Bring the walls down, collapse the separations, and apply our solidarity universally to all human beings, wherever they are. So say Angela Merkel of Germany, Stefan Löfven of Sweden, as well as many citizens and NGOs across Europe and around the world that

1 Words which became the slogan of the French revolution: liberty, equality, brotherhood, and connected by Rudolf Steiner to three distinguishable spheres of life in the organism of society. – Editor

We can no longer control this stream of disruptions.... It is only a question of time before the next financial meltdown, natural disaster, or terrorist attack occurs. So what then can we control? We can control our response to these disruptions.

keep rising to the occasion.

Reality cries out for the third view. The first view tries to deny that the system is broken. The second view says OK, the system is broken, but it has nothing to do with us. “THEY” are the problem, not “us,” so let’s put a wall between us and them. Only the third view offers a viable way forward.

The more you dig into the substantive issues of the refugee situation, climate destabilization, and the terrorist attacks, the more you realize that there is NOTHING any country can do alone, and that the real solutions must include the entire global ecosystem of players in collaborative and cocreative ways. There will not be any solution to the climate crisis without a massive transfer of resources and technologies from industrial to developing countries. There will not be any solution to the refugee crisis in Europe without a massive financial transfer and aid from the EU to Turkey to help the 2 million refugees currently living there. The origins of the refugee and terrorist crises are in the massive direct and structural violence in the Middle East— at which point the circle loops back to the Western countries and their continued complicity in these issues (for example, by buying oil from and selling weapons to state entities such as Saudi Arabia who, through their religious industrial complex, spread the fundamentalist teachings of Wahhabism which then ISIS turns into action through acts of terrorism).

My point is simple: the third view is not only a moral one, but also an economic and political imperative. And: addressing the root cause (rather than the symptoms) of terrorism means to address its spiritual dimension: the underlying

mind-set of fundamentalism.

Clashing Forces

The figure below shows two clashing mind-sets that each give rise to a different dynamic and social field: presencing —that is, the capacity of co-sensing and co-shaping the future by enacting a social architecture of connection; and the field of absencing, that is, the field of “building up walls” by enacting a social architecture of separation.

The real battle of our time is not between religions, and also not between ISIS and Western countries. The real battle of our time is between the forces of “absencing” (economies of fear and destruction), and the forces of “presencing” (economies of courage and creation). It’s a battle that takes place across all levels of systems.

The Bush Administration response to 9/11 was firmly grounded in the cycle of absencing and destruction. Bomb them to hell. The results were nothing short of catastrophic, including the rise of ISIS and the refugee crisis in Europe today.

Even though some military force may be required, at the end of the day ISIS cannot be fought and beaten with strategies of absencing. That’s the exact strategy that created the monster in the first place. The only way to slay the monster is to use strategies that originate with the cycle of presencing and creation. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the civil rights

Two Cycles, two Social Fields: Absencing and Presencing (Source: Theory U )

The more you dig into the substantive issues of the refugee situation, climate destabilization, and the terrorist attacks, the more you realize that the real solutions must include the entire global ecosystem of players in collaborative and cocreative ways.

movement that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall showed us how it’s done.

Resistance of the Heart

It has been often said that in the face of the most destructive forces—such as Hitler and Nazi Germany—it’s not good enough to keep focusing on Gandhian types of nonviolent strategies of conflict transformation. But that is exactly what hundreds of unarmed German women did for a week in February 1943, at the height of the Nazi power in Europe. In Berlin’s Rosenstrasse, they stood toe to toe with machinegun-wielding Gestapo agents, demanding the release of their imprisoned husbands. Charlotte Israel, who was among them, recalled, Without warning, the guards began setting up machine guns. Then they directed them at the crowd and shouted: ‘If you don’t go now, we’ll shoot.’ The movement surged backward. But then, for the first time, we really hollered. Now we couldn’t care less.... Now they’re going to shoot in any case, so now we’ll yell too, we thought. We yelled, ‘Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer.’

(Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, Rutgers University Press, 2001)

The protest by the women from the Rosenstrasse was successful, says the historian Nathan Stoltzfus in his book about the event, because women such as Charlotte Israel were so deeply motivated that they risked their lives. In the end the women’s courage and passion prevailed; the 1,700 Jews who had been locked in at the Rosenstrasse were set free.

It’s that openhearted courage that will transform ISIS and the fundamentalist mindset it represents. That spirit activates the cycle of presencing. Resorting instead to violence and bombing communities in Syria can only lead to amplifying the cycle of absencing—destroying others, and in the process, destroying who we are.

Even though ISIS dominates our headlines and thus our minds, we should not forget the other events in Europe from recent weeks that, a hundred years from now,

may be more historically significant. I’m talking about the rise of citizens, the rise of countless self-organizing groups and communities, the rise of many local politicians, who keep providing help for refugees on a massive scale.

That outpouring of openhearted compassion, seen as people welcomed refugees at the Main Station in Munich, sparked a spirit that since has shifted the collective German response to the issue. It’s an incredible force that, in spite of all the noise from the right wing populist that argue for “moving apart,” is still going strong not only in Germany but in countless communities and cities all across Europe. That is the miracle that deserves our attention today. And that is the spirit that eventually will transform ISIS and the mindset of absencing (aka fundamentalism) that gave rise to it. Quoting Hölderlin:

But where danger is, the saving power also grows.

So, what are the conditions that determine whether a community activates the field of absencing or presencing? Whether we collectively enact a social architecture of separation or connection, whether, for example, the people from Munich and Berlin give rise to a monster like Hitler or whether from the very same places, less than 100 years later, to compassionate help in the face of human vulnerability? In essence, the difference is about a shift of the heart on the level of the individual and the collective. The Paris attacks wounded us collectively, and therefore call on us to rise and catalyze the one shift that now matters most—the shift of the heart.

Otto Scharmer, online at [ www.ottoscharmer.com ] and on Twitter [ www.twitter.com/ottoscharmer1 ], is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. A global action researcher, Otto works with leaders in government, global companies, and NGOs to achieve profound innovation across sectors and cultures. He chairs the MIT IDEAS program for cross-sector leadership capacity building in China and Indonesia. His books include Leading from the Emerging Future: From EgoSystem to Eco System Economies (BK Currents) with Katrin Kaufer, and Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges.

“This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post, in conjunction with the U.N.’s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris (Nov. 30 –Dec. 11), aka the climate change conference. The series will put a spotlight on climate change issues and the conference itself. To view the entire series, visit here.”

The real battle of our time is between the forces of “absencing” (economies of fear and destruction), and the forces of “presencing” (economies of courage and creation). It’s a battle that takes place across all levels of systems.

Nurturing the Beings of the Schools

by Peter Rennick

An important celebration of Waldorf education in America took place October 3, 2015, with the 25th anniversary meeting of the seven schools who make up the Arizona Council for Waldorf Education. Joan Treadaway, President of the Council since its inception, welcomed more than forty people in attendance and opened the meeting with a remembrance of all the founding and pioneering individuals, speaking their names into the circle, and recalling those first efforts to bring Waldorf to Arizona. Often those early meetings saw only a few individuals attending study groups, with only vague ideas about how to get a school established. From the outset the Council offered itself as a central place where all of the burgeoning initiatives, spread out over the several environments within Arizona, would be able to meet together, share experiences and support one another.

Each of the seven schools shared their biography, tracing the developmental challenges through the seven year cycles of their journey. It was like listening to the life stories of unique individual souls, the conditions of their birth, early years garnering interest and enthusiasm, meeting conflicts and disappointments appropriate to each stage of growth, through the identity issues of adolescence and on into the early years of adulthood. In those teenage years each school had to face the question of how to maintain its integrity and faithfulness to the Waldorf pedagogy Rudolf Steiner created, when the option of becoming a charter school or remaining a private and state-independent endeavor became possible. This question created a crisis in some schools, as it did across the Waldorf landscape, where the charter option has been made available. In some of the Arizona schools, longstanding faculty, parents, and board members decided to leave rather than enter into a contract with the state that they felt would compromise important aspects of the Waldorf approach, particularly in the early childhood and elementary years. How this was reflected in the concerns

expressed by AWSNA and its relationship to the schools and to the Alliance for Public Waldorf education formed the background, and sometimes the intensive foreground, for each school’s decision to find its own path and evolving self.

But all through these years of growth, the Council continued to meet three or four times a year, as a forum for any and all issues relevant to Waldorf education in Arizona and the world, and as a spiritual support and professional model for collaborative work, with schools visiting back and forth, sharing training opportunities and putting members in touch with the larger community of Waldorf education of which they are a part. A deep respect for each initiative has grown up among the family of members, despite the fact that some have remained private and others have risked going charter. In Tucson, for example, there is one of each, with no loss of willingness to collaborate together toward the greater good of all.

I was reminded of what Rudolf Steiner had to say about the collaboration that would need to exist between the Platonists and the Aristotelians returning at the end of the century, the ten years either side of which saw the founding of these seven Arizona initiatives. Surely among the several hundred people intimately involved in lighting the flames and maintaining the home fires of these young schools, some of those returning spirits are to be found. Blessings on ACWE and our dear schools, may they continue in good health together for years and years to come!

To Be Nine: The Nine Year Change

by Jessica Crawford

In Waldorf education we speak of three major phases of human development, and of the teacher’s work with children at each of these stages to support their physical, emotional, and spiritual growth. The initial stage of development stretches from birth to age 7, and is marked by the child’s deep connection to the world and by his learning through imitation. The middle phase of development from ages 7 to 14 spans the primary school years

To Be Nine or The Forest and I

Once upon a time...

I heard the wind in the trees as harmony to my heart's melody.

I breathed in sweet pine sap as my life blood.

I watched a leaf flutter as my arms stretched into wings and I flew. I was at one with the rain and the sun. I was me.

I was you. I was the Forest.

Now... I stand straight and tall, alone amongst the trees. The pines sway in the wind. The air smells fresh and ripe. Twigs break under my feet. The Forest is the Forest. I am I.

Now... I long to learn how to live on the Earth.

Now... I plant a seed in the soil, and watch it unfold in the warm sunshine, as I unfold within my soul.

Jessica Crawford

when the child’s innate desire to understand the world blooms, and the seeds of independent thought are sown by the teacher. Learning in this stage of development occurs through experiences and imaginative pictures that speak to the child’s inner life. In the lower grades, the children hear and work with stories such as fairy and folk tales, animal fables, tales of heroes and sages, and mythology. In the middle grades they learn from and write about biographies, world mythology, literature, history, and geography - relayed orally by the teacher in an engaging, lively way. In the third phase of development from ages 14 to 21, the young person’s independent thinking continues to develop toward the capacity for moral judgment and freedom of thought and action. Here, the teacher offers rich material about how the world works, and offers opportunities for the student to discover how he or she can be part of the world in a creative and meaningful way.

In each stage there is a particularly significant and sometimes difficult mini-phase at around the second year

Jessica Crawford: blackboard drawing for the Nine Year Change

mark (at ages 2, 9, and 16). In the middle stage at age 9, there is a powerful awakening—even though the movement away from being one with the universe has slowly been loosening all along. This “Nine Year Change” brings for many children a painful new awareness of being alone in the world, isolated from even those closest to them (their parents). Suddenly, the wind has shifted and the child must stand separately as an unique individuality. In the third grade when this change occurs, Waldorf education provides a beautiful antidote in the stories from the Hebrew bible. Through these stories the children can ponder the experiences of the first human beings as they were cast out of Paradise and began to make their way on Earth. The third grader also spends the year learning about the practical arts of building shelters, making clothing, and growing and preserving food. By learning to care for the Earth and to live in harmony with its gifts, the child learns to care for herself and to develop a sense of morality.

At the beginning of third grade last fall I wrote and recited a poem, To Be Nine or The Forest and I, for the parents in my class. My hope was that this picture in words might help them understand what their child might experience over the coming year. I also encouraged them to look beyond their child’s outward and sometimes challenging behavior during this difficult time, and to continue to offer lots of affection (even when it seems unwanted) and the healthy rhythm of a simple home life.

New book on the Nine-Year Change and Waldorf Third Grade Curriculum

Out of the Garden and into the Desert: The Nine-Year Change Through the Stories of the Third Grade Curriculum by: Neal Kennerk & Jennifer Kennerk is available at amazon.com or by sending an email and ordering directly at threefoldpress@gmail.com. Neal Kennerk will also be teaching a Renewal Course this summer on the third grade at The Center for Anthroposophy [ www.centerforanthroposophy.org ]. Neal is also available for speaking engagements on the nine-year change. He has been speaking to parent groups on this subject for ten years. This is a presentation that brings strength and encouragement to your parent community during this most turbulent adjustment into middle childhood. Please contact him at: nealkennerk@gmail.com.

Paul Scharff Archive

by Harold Ellis Bush, archivist

I began building and editing a digital archive of the work of Paul W. Scharff MD [ paulwscharffarchive.com ] by request of Paul and his family. The volume of work we present is astounding when one considers that Paul also maintained a medical practice, was a founder and leader with his wife Ann of the Fellowship Community, a First Class reader, study group leader, farmer and more.

I first met Paul as a patient in 1972. With my work at the Fellowship in the late 1970’s a friendship, and later, a mentoring evolved. Out of these relationships I took on this work. In my interactions with Paul and working with this material it became clear that when he spoke of spiritual research he did not mean reading and extrapolating, though he was extremely well read, but actually researching spiritually in a manner brought by Rudolf Steiner and Paul’s friend Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. It is out of what Paul refers to as his striving, this lifelong commitment and deep penetration of what was indicated by Rudolf Steiner, that Paul was able to articulate the work we are making available.

This main topics are: Agriculture, Ages of Man, Anthroposophic Medicine & Therapy, Anthroposophy, Community & Care, Drawings, Illustrations & Artwork, Festivals & Seasons, and the Threefold Social Order. Here is an excerpt from Paul’s agriculture commentaries:

Let us turn to the first lecture. For a long time I rather puzzled about the introduction. Rudolf Steiner begins by talking about the being of Anthroposophia. He indicates that what he is giving is actually a gift of this Being. Most think of Anthroposophy as a body of knowledge—not a spiritual being who imparts knowledge. The course thereby seems to be a product of the exchange between Rudolf Steiner and a spiritual being who gives the anthroposophical content out of the spiritual world. So that the first tasks can be to try to pose to oneself, Who is this Being? Who is the Being who carries the wisdom of man, can share this with initiates such as Rudolf Steiner, and then help us to understand the task of working with the earth, enculturating the earth? How can this Being help evolve a new agriculture?

Contact: info@paulwscharffarchive.com

Jessica Crawford ( jesstcrawford@gmail.com) is a Class Teacher at City of Lakes Waldorf School, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

IN THIS SECTION:

Even anthroposophists have trouble appreciating the scope of Rudolf Steiner’s vision and insight. Fred Amrine gives us a sequence here—two essays of his own, a review of an important book, and translations of key excerpts from Rudolf Steiner, which can open our eyes to the necessities of a truly global culture for humanity, both as Steiner saw those almost a century ago, and as seen now by some remarkable contemporaries of ours. The reviewed book by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose call for “feel-thinking” and “feelacting” sounds so very familiar to students of Steiner, might find a place on all our shelves. And Prof. Amrine’s own “NorthSouth Aphorisms” are a two-hop “shout-out” to Steiner and to the poets Goethe and Schiller before.

After the challenging delight of these EastWest/North-South pieces, Jon McAlice’s “Reading Steiner” is a refreshing and not-to-be-forgotten reminder that the founder of anthroposophy was, to put it in another way, thinking in a world where thoughts are alive.

Then Christine Gruwez, visiting again next fall, suggests how meditation is a way to face evil.

A World of Reconciliation in

Light of the Second International Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement

by Frederick Amrine

The Second International Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement, which unfolded before an audience of 2,000 in Vienna over eleven days in June 1922, was the largest public event that the movement undertook during Steiner’s lifetime. It was a sequel to the highly successful First International Congress at Stuttgart of September 1921. Two great intentions animated the program: reaching out to a wider public, and defending anthroposophy against growing attacks by making it more immediately visible within public life.

Vienna’s renowned Musikverein was the venue. Mornings featured lectures by a long list of anthroposophical luminaries: Hahn, Schwebsch, von Heydebrand, Stein, Rittelmeyer, Uehli, Pelikan, Kolisko, Blümel, Baravalle, Leinhas, Husemann, Unger, Heyer, and Schubert. In the mid-afternoon, there were breakout discussions organized by discipline: Chemistry, Education, Medicine, Linguistics. Late afternoons were devoted to the arts, including instrumental music, creative speech (Marie Steiner), singing (Svärdstrom-Werbeck), lectures on the arts (Steffen and Schwebsch), and two performances of eurythmy at the Volksoper. The heart of the event, however, was a series of ten evening lectures by Steiner himself. The audience included many notable artists, scientists, and other thinkers. Steiner boldly addressed the great issues of the day, and at the same time foresaw and addressed some of the greatest issues of our day.

A wealthy member named van Leer offered to cover any financial losses on the sole condition that the Congress be “cosmopolitan.”1 His demand comported with Steiner’s own wishes, and the whole event was suffused with that spirit. Steiner’s notebooks 2 show that he prepared by reading widely in the academic literature of multiple fields, especially the social sciences, so that he would be able to build bridges by speaking about recent research in its own idiom. As Steiner himself would later note, at no point did he speak the word “anthroposophy.”

1 weltmännisch

The main themes that ran through Steiner’s lectures were the historical evolution of consciousness, the transformation of abstract, “scientific” consciousness into higher modes of cognition, and social renewal. ... Who are the thinkers, and what are the burning issues Steiner would address today?

Arguably the axes have rotated 90° since 1922...

2 GA 83; Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit: Wege zu ihrer Verständigung durch Anthroposophie [The Tension between West and East: Paths toward Reconciliation through Anthroposophy] (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981), pp. 314-37.

Musikverein, interior. Photo Hans Weingartz, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The main themes that ran through Steiner’s lectures were the historical evolution of consciousness from East to West, the transformation of abstract, “scientific” consciousness into higher modes of cognition, and social renewal. To speak so affirmatively of the East was daring in a way it is hard for us to imagine today. But Steiner’s lectures were radical, and still feel radical to us today, for other reasons besides. Chief among them is the critique of capitalism from within the heart of Europe, which would have required courage in any case, but was downright brazen given the subaltern status to which the defeated Central Europeans had been reduced. Steiner certainly sought to reconcile East and West, but he did so while simultaneously criticizing both of them from a “Southern” perspective 3 within the subjugated Middle. In place of nineteenth-century capitalism, he held up a vision of a “threefold social order” that is oriented toward the future, but has deep roots in wisdom traditions that still understood human nature itself as triune: body, soul, and spirit.

Steiner’s ten lectures became volume 83 of the Collected Works (GA). They are currently available in English as The Tension between East and West, 4 a translation originally published in 1963 by the appropriately “mainstream” press Hodder & Stoughton, with a fine introduction by Owen Barfield. Given that it summarizes a wide swath of anthroposophy so brilliantly, captures a great moment in the early history of the movement (Marie Steiner called it the “highlight”), and delivers concepts central to the threefold social order, it is a strangely neglected book. The cycle deserves attention in any case, but all the more so in that it is a model for the presentation of anthroposophy to the public.

Who are the thinkers, and what are the burning issues Steiner would address today? Arguably the axes have rotated 90 degrees since 1922; in many ways the East has succumbed to the West; we live more in a tension between North and South. Hence I believe Steiner would want to address critics of Eurocentrism and unreconstructed capitalism such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, author of

3 More on this below.

4 Reprinted by the Anthroposophic Press/SteinerBooks in 1983; available for $5 on Kindle. An earlier translation (East and West: Contrasting Worlds, 1930) is out of print.

the challenging study Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide 5 Let them converse; let us begin their virtual conversation. To that end, I review Santos’ book with some discussion of the larger “post-colonial” and “subaltern” movements of which it is an epitome below (“The Tension Between North and South”). But Steiner will have the first word: I have selected and translated key excerpts from Steiner’s own condensed summaries of the Congress, a distillation of his distillations, as it were. They follow immediately below.

I am sure you will agree that the result is a potent elixir. Steiner’s “Report” on the Congress, together with a series of “West-East Aphorisms,” 6 both penned shortly after he returned to Dornach, are included in GA 83, but not in the only translation still in print, which is unfortunate. Both are surprising documents, not least because they mount a powerful critique of Eurocentrism, and hence provide a powerful counterargument against specious accusations that anthroposophy is Eurocentric and even racist. Steiner was a prescient and a radical critic of Eurocentrism decades ahead of the curve. My own “North-South Aphorisms,” rotated 90 degrees, are offered in the same spirit.

But most surprising of all is to realize that here, in June 1922, we already get inklings, subtle foreshadowings, of The Foundation Stone. At the heart of the Congress lies an extraordinary paradox that, as is so often the case, points at a deeper truth: Steiner’s distillations of the movement’s most public moment foreshadow the revelation of its most esoteric Mystery. The heart of that Mystery, and also of the Second Congress, is a Michaelic message of cosmopolitan inclusiveness.

Lasset vom Osten befeuern, Was durch den Westen sich formet

Let this be fired from the East And through the West be formèd.

5 Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2014.

6 The odd locution “West-East” signifies immediately to cultivated Germanspeakers as an allusion to Goethe’s late cycle of poems in emulation of the medieval Persian Sufi poet Hafiz. A sensitive English translation of Goethe’s text has been published by Martin Bidney: West-East Divan: Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010).

Regarding the Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement

by Rudolf Steiner

Excerpts from his June 18, 1922 Report in Dornach 7

. . . We called it the “West-East Congress,” after all. That decision was motivated by our conviction that this is a moment when Western civilization—and I say this now with a view to the prevailing spiritual undercurrents8 simply must arrive at an understanding of the world’s other cultures.

What Eastern culture experiences as the maya of the sensory world is experienced as autonomous reality by the cultures of the West. What Westerners experience as an ideological construct is experienced as self­ creating reality in the East.

I once pointed out here in Dornach also how a British colonial administrator had rightly said that the vantage point from which to regard world affairs was currently shifting from the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean over to the Pacific Ocean. It is fair to say—and it is of immense importance: Earlier it was Europe and Europe’s connection with America that was determinative. It has been determinative since the 15th century, when Europe was more or less cut off from Asia by the incursion of the Turks. At that time a great cultural upheaval took place, and the cultural life of modernity [358/359] became essentially a culture oriented toward the West. Now that the vantage point of outer cultural life has shifted towards the Pacific, a process has begun whereby the whole Earth must become cosmopolitan,9 and all cultural issues must be dealt with inclusively.10 But since people who wish to interact in any way at all must understand and even trust one another, cooperation ultimately presupposes understanding at a spiritual level.11

. . . Now of course a great deal is still needed in order

7 GA 83, pp. 356-60. Translated by Frederick Amrine.

8 vorzüglich aus geistigen Untergründen

9 ein großes Gebiet

10 einheitlich in Bezug auf alle Kulturfragen

11 auf geistigem Gebiete

to build the spiritual foundations that are necessary for such an understanding. Today the economic situation is such that it places extraordinary pressure on us to collaborate. But even though it might occasionally appear otherwise, we can’t allow ourselves to hope that the restructuring12 of these economic relationships can create anything more than a temporary surrogate. That surrogate will continue to wait for something definitive13 until new spiritual relationships have called forth mutual understandings that penetrate to the center of our hearts.14

Excerpts from “West-East Aphorisms” 15

by Rudolf Steiner

[The Tension between East and West in Light of the Evolution of Consciousness] 16

.

. . What Eastern culture experiences as the maya of the sensory world is experienced as autonomous reality by the cultures of the West. What Westerners experience as an ideological construct is experienced as self-creating reality in the East. If the contemporary East were to find within the Spirit it perceives as real the power to grant maya the strength of existence,17 and if the West were to take from its experience of Nature enough life to see the living Spirit at work within what it dismisses as ideology, then mutual understanding would arise between East and West.

The East enjoyed a spiritual experience of religion, art, and science as completely unified … Westward flowed the great wave of Wisdom that was the beautiful light of the Spirit, and that inspired piety among peoples who were filled with an enthusiasm fired by the arts. Then religion gradually crafted its own, separate existence;18 now only Beauty remained bound to Wisdom … Later, Wis-

12 Ordnung

13 ein Definitivum

14 ins Innere des Menschenwesens

15 GA 83, pp. 361-70. Translated by Frederick Amrine, indebted to a version published as a freestanding booklet by Mercury Press (date and translator unknown).

16 These rubrics were devised and interpolated by F.A.; they are not in the original.

17 die Seinsstärke geben

18 erbildete sich ihr Eigenwesen

Gallery: The art & environments of Robert Logsdon

Schools, community halls, medical offices, private homes and more are resplendent with “lazure,” the engaging and everchanging color treatment pioneered in North America by Robert Logsdon. The cover, this page, and the next show samples of Robert’s environment making, on Maui and at Camphill Triform; pages 27-28 show a few of his paintings in acrylic, watercolor, and beeswax. Many other beautiful earlier works can be viewed at lazurebylogsdon.com.

dom was given over to thinking; it became knowledge. Art was transferred into a world of its own. Religion, the source of all, became the heritage of the East; art became the monument of the epoch during which the Central Region reigned supreme; knowledge became the autonomous imperatrice of its own field. Thus did the intellectual life of the West come into existence.

[Tasks for Reconciliation in the Spiritual-Cultural Sphere]

Out of the wholeness of his own nature, Goethe discovered the world of Spirit that had plunged down into knowledge. But he longed to see the Truth of knowledge reflected in the Beauty of art. This drove him toward the South.19 Whoever follows him in spirit can find a religiously fervent mode of cognition 20 that struggles to attain artistic revelation 21 within Beauty.

… To the peoples of the West a science of nature was given when Copernicus and Galileo rose up among them.22 They had to seek the Spirit by looking inward. There the Spirit still concealed itself from them, and they saw only drives and instincts. But those were merely the ghosts of matter that presented themselves to the eye of the soul, because that eye was not oriented toward the Spirit yet. As soon as the reorientation toward the Spirit commences, the inner ghosts will vanish, and we shall gaze upon the Spirit through the lens of our own human nature, just as the peoples of the ancient East gazed upon the Spirit through the lens of Nature. By way of our inner ghosts shall the spirit of the West arrive at the Spirit … and in this way the bridge shall be built between East and West. … Should the peoples of the East ever begin to feel the rays of the Sun within their shimmering Moon of Wisdom, 23 and should the peoples of the West ever begin to experience within the rays of the Will-Sun 24 the Shimmer-of-the-Moon-of-Wisdom,25 then the West-Will shall lend strength unto the East-Thought; then the WestThought shall redeem 26 the East-Will.

19 i.e., toward Italy

20 ein religiös inniges Wissen. Note that religiös is the adverb here: Goethe was religious in his fervor rather than fervently religious—a distinction that makes a profound difference!

21 Offenbarung, “revelation” in the strong theological sense

22 ihm [dem Westmenschen] erstanden

23 Weisheitsmond

24 Willenssonne

25 Weisheit-Mondesschimmer, the strongest of five neologisms in quick succession here!

26 erlösen, a verb with the same religious valences as “redeem” in English.

[Tasks for Reconciliation in the Sphere of Rights]

… In the ancient Orient, human beings labored within a theocratically imposed 27 social order. In that sense, one was either a master or a worker.28 As cultural life moved westward, the relationships between individual human beings started to become conscious. The labor that one person performs for another became intertwined with other such issues. The concept of the value of labor intruded upon nascent legal thought. A great deal of Roman history recounts how the concepts of labor and justice gradually coalesced. As culture pressed on further towards the West, economic life assumed ever more complicated forms. It pulled labor into its sphere, and the inherited legal forms could not keep pace with the demands imposed by the new economic structures. Concepts of labor and justice fell into disharmony. Restoring that harmony is the great social problem of the West. The heart of the issue is figuring out how labor can find the right forms within the sphere of rights without being torn out of that context by the demands of the economic sphere.

As culture pressed on further towards the West, economic life ... It pulled labor into its sphere, and the inherited legal forms could not keep pace with the demands imposed by the new economic structures. Concepts of labor and justice fell into disharmony. Restoring that harmony is the great social problem of the West.

[Tasks for Reconciliation in the Economic Sphere]

… The emergence of the industrial complex calls for the creation of associative connections that are structured according to the demands of economic life itself. Such associations should give people confidence that their needs will be met within the physical constraints that are present. Discovering the right kind of associative life is the task of the West. Should the West prove up to that task, then the East will say:

Once our lives ran their course in solidarity, 29 but now that has disappeared; “human progress” has taken it away from us. The West will make it blossom forth again out of associative economics. Our lost faith in humanity has been restored. …

North-South Aphorisms

by Frederick Amrine

1. The idiom in which anthroposophy was given is not and cannot be the idiom in which it will ultimately spread . We are now a worldwide movement

2. Only by confronting the ghosts of materialism shall the West be freed of its inner demons.

3. All anthroposophists should make a mental pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives. Go via Sufism and avoid the crowds. Let Hafiz and Rumi be your guides.

4. “New situations demand new magic.” [E. E. EvansPritchard]

5. Recall that, for all their faults, Theosophists were early critics of Eurocentrism and leaders of the drive for Indian independence.

6. As Ed Sarath has taught us, jazz is Africa’s grand philosophy of freedom that lives perpetually in the creative moment of its own improvisation.

7. Gilles Deleuze lived off the Cartesian grid as a spiritual nomad. He understood that the cultures of the North are deterritorialized songlines.

8. Modern tourism grew directly out of the Grand Tour. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Italy was Europe’s epistemology of the South. It was in Italy that Goethe discovered the archetypal plant and the concept of metamorphosis; Italy is where he was reborn as a phoenix. No Italy, no Faust

9. A Goetheanum of the South might not be a building—or indeed any kind of visible structure.

10. Inclusiveness is a profoundly and genuinely Michaelic ideal.

11. Fatal attraction of the North: the Protestant Ethic seduces the Spirit of Capitalism.

12. Escape Herod by fleeing to Egypt.

13. The great Canal joining East and West—lies near

in the South. The great Canal joining North and South—lies in the Near East. The canals of Venice were long the gateways to the East and South. The English Channel— der Kanal —and the canals of Amsterdam are receding into the distance at great speed.

14. Plot your trajectory in the higher geometry of the Complex Plane. The Real runs from west to east, but the Imaginary is even more powerful, and it runs from south to north. The heart lies south of the head.

15. The Northern Hemisphere is of the earth, earthy; the Southern Hemisphere is oceanic.

16. Gauguin traveled to Tahiti. Van Gogh and Cezanne gravitated to the South of France. Klee made a pilgrimage to Tunisia. Picasso, Kandinsky, and Marc took their inspiration from Africa and Oceania. High modern art was born as an epistemology of the South.

17. Steiner’s claim that the division of labor inevitably will lead to altruism is one of his most difficult—and beautiful—ideas. The acme of divided labor is original spiritual research. Genuine spiritual research can be done only for the sake of others.

18. The vanguard waits patiently at the apex of Kandinsky’s ascending triangle, looking to receive the descending “spiritual Moses.” Anthroposophy embraces this task gladly and unapologetically.

19. The coyote is infinitely wise. Trickster, white magician, psychopomp. The shaman’s animal helper. Commune with him. Felix Koguzski and Joseph Beuys were shamans.

20. Black Elk’s initiation is healing Medicine for the West from the South. Old like the hills and the stars, the ancestors are having a council behind a rainbow door, and dancing helpers fly to our aid from all four quarters of the world. “They are appearing, may you behold!”

21. “The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South: / May human beings hear it!” [Rudolf Steiner, The Foundation Stone]

The Tension between North and South

A review of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), xi, 240 pp.

by Frederick Amrine

As I argue above, in “A World of Reconciliation,” it is easy to imagine the radical sociologist and legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos as just the kind of interlocutor Steiner would have sought to engage today. Santos’ radical, interdisciplinary “sociology of absence” and his evocation of “the South within the North” map onto the first half of Steiner’s lectures in Vienna, while his focus on the neglected “rights” and “spiritual-cultural” spheres complements Steiner’s own preoccupations in the “sociological” second half of the lecture cycle. Epistemologies of the South resonates powerfully with many of the most liberating aspects of anthroposophy, but it also challenges us to realize the transformative potentials of Steiner’s work even more fully and adequately. Although Santos doesn’t address anthroposophy directly, his work can be a stimulus and a guide to thinking through some deep issues that beset the Anthroposophical Society and movement.

Santos’ Argument in Outline

“The epistemology of the South” is a generic name for many different kinds of peasant, lay, popular, and indigenous knowledges that remain invisible because they are construed as the “other” of an “abyssal thinking” that sees only modern, instrumental science and ignorance.30 It entails a recognition that “the understanding of the world far exceeds the Western understanding of the world,” and that “emancipatory transformations” may follow “grammars and scripts” very different from those developed even by Eurocentric critical theory (237).

Across the line drawn by abyssal thinking lies only absence, a “state of nature” outside any social contract: “Beyond the equator there are no sins.” “The primitive,” “the traditional,” “the unproductive,” “the premodern, the simple, the obsolete, and the underdeveloped” are

30 I see in this account of an abyssal line with no center some intimations of the anthroposophical account of evil: on the one side of the line, only Luciferic seduction; on the other side, only Ahrimanic fear. Santos is better on the Ahrimanic temptation, e.g., where he describes science as a set of options with no root in the past, only in the future.

only of a few of the many names we have for these “modes of nonexistence” (173-174). Without an epistemological break, this abyssal monoculture will continue to reproduce itself endlessly until the ecology of subaltern knowledges is destroyed.

All knowledges have both internal and external limits. The “learned ignorance” that should be our epistemological ideal is keenly aware of both, but hegemonic knowledges are oblivious to their external limits, beyond which they see nothing (207). Abyssal thinkers fail to understand that “what we do not know is the product of our ignorance and not of ignorance in general” (209).31

Opposing this, “the utopia of interknowledge consists of learning new and less familiar knowledges without necessarily having to forget the old ones and one’s own” (188). The ultimate goal is a different quality of knowledge that doesn’t try to control nature or people; Santos calls this “knowledge-as-solidarity.” It’s what Barfield, explicating Steiner, calls “participation.”

Santos envisions an open-ended dialogue among these knowledges, in which the emancipatory will is guided by many compasses (210).32 “Polyphonic” and “prismatic,” these disparate knowledges will coexist in the “radical copresence” (191) of a restored “ecology of knowledges.” The ultimate goal is buen vivir, “living well,” which means living with dignity, for all the peoples of the Earth.

Other Anthroposophical Resonances

What Steiner and Santos both understand clearly (but Marxists generally do not) is that social healing waits

31 Anthroposophy is also a victim of this abyssal thinking that suppresses all minority reports and hence an outstanding but unnamed exemplar of the “South” within the North.

32 Cf. Steiner’s radiant evocation of this ideal in GA 151, Human and Cosmic Thought (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2000).

upon epistemological transformation: hence Santos’ call for “self-reflection” leading to “a new epistemology” (69). At its heart, this book is a profound critique of what Owen Barfield, following Rudolf Steiner, termed “onlooker consciousness”: modern science adopts the stance of a spectator, then forgets the perspectivity of its view, conflating reflection with reality (145). In economics, this “small scale” scientism reduces us to homo economicus, “docile bodies and strangers” (152). Hence it is no surprise that new theories have become “new idols replacing old ones and demanding of citizens the same kind of submission as before” (7/9).33

Santos calls upon us to “feelthink” and “feelact,” because “to think without passion is to make coffins for ideas,” and “to act without passion is to fill the coffins.”

Passively reproduced ideologies fail because they remain closed to “surprise and wonder,” which awaken new emancipatory energies and capacities.

Like Steiner, Santos calls for a new kind of “heart thinking”: “If life could make distinctions, it would make many, but certainly not this one between affections and reason, lest it deny itself as life. This is particularly true of the life of transformative action in which the reality consists of giving life to what does not yet exist and can only come about by reasonable affections and affectionate reasons” (5/7). With characteristic rhetorical flair, Santos calls upon us to “feelthink” and “feelact,” because “to think without passion is to make coffins for ideas,” and “to act without passion is to fill the coffins” (10). What we need is “an affective-intellectual horizon” that overcomes “linearity, simplicity, unity, totality, and determination” (13). Passively reproduced ideologies fail because they remain closed to “surprise and wonder,” which awaken new emancipatory energies and capacities (88). To combat this danger, Santos confronts his own opening “manifesto” with a self-ironic “counterpoint” that he calls his “minifesto,” printed on facing pages.34

In these ways and many more, Epistemologies of the

33 Schiller makes the same argument in his essay On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), which was one of the main inspirations for Steiner’s Threefold Social Order. 34 Some anthroposophists might find food for thought here as they work through perceived dilemmas in the relationship between “the Society” and “the movement.”

South is a philosophy of freedom, which Santos calls “knowledge-as-self-emancipation” (176). Santos echoes Steiner in lamenting the lack of will in our thinking, a failure of desire which cannot imagine new forms of emancipation, but only alternate forms of regulation (71). For Santos, becoming a “competent rebel” requires the development of an energetic “living thinking” as a direct experience of the spirit; of moral technique, moral tact, and above all moral imagination: “in order to be efficient, powerful interrogations must be like monograms of the spirit engraved upon things. They must irrupt by the intensity and concentration of the internal energy that they carry within themselves. Under the conditions of the present time, such irruption will only occur if powerful interrogations translate themselves into destabilizing images” (89). Participating in the ecology of knowledges strengthens the will by expanding awareness of human possibility, and “thus permits one to ground an imagination of the will that is incomprehensible to the conventional understanding of modern science” (210).

Without ever referring to Steiner, Santos provides many confirmations of ideas central to the Threefold Social Order.35 Both saw “Marxist problems without Marxist solutions,” due to Marxism’s tragic epistemological and spiritual bankruptcy: because it deprived the proletariat of emancipatory spirituality (22), Marxism failed to liberate, becoming instead “the double of regulation” (71). Like Steiner, Santos dismisses party politics as “the unproductive Northern binary of left or right” (41). In his companion volume Another Knowledge is Possible, Santos implicitly recognizes the threefold nature of a just social order by insisting on both diversity (Steiner’s “spiritualcultural” sphere) and equality (the sphere of politics and rights), because “universalistic presuppositions” lead to denial of identities, while difference without equality opens the door to exclusion and oppression.36 As one might expect, Santos is especially adept at envisioning new legal forms, including a new social contract with “the earth, nature, and future generations” (93). Above all, he echoes Steiner in his call for an economics of altruism, asking pointedly for example, “Why is the economy of reciprocity and cooperation not a credible alternative to the economy of greed and competition?” (23).

35 See also the related collection edited by Corinne Kumar, Asking, we walk: the south as new political imaginary, vol. 2 (Bangalore: Streelekha, 2007), pp. 379-382.

36 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (London: Verso, 2007), p. xlvii.

Challenges and Inspirations

Over and above these many echoes of Steiner’s work, Epistemologies of the South unfolds many dimensions that have the potential to challenge us as anthroposophists, and to help us actualize anthroposophy’s full potential. Let me give just three examples.

One of the most inspiring aspects of this book is its immense conceptual creativity and fertility. If Gilles Deleuze is right (as I believe he is) that the task of the philosopher is to create concepts, then Santos is a philosopher of the first order, as witnessed by the many striking coinages quoted throughout this review. Santos is exemplary in his powerful exercise of conceptual freedom.

I also find Santos tremendously helpful in trying to understand Steiner’s characterization of the age we have recently entered as “Michaelic.” Steiner’s hints about the need to overcome Eurocentrism at the East/West Congress are multiplied a thousandfold here. Santos calls upon us to create “the new transnational political culture called for in the new century and the new millennium” (68), a new “insurgent cosmopolitanism” (90), a “centrifugal consciousness” that would overcome Northern hegemony (93) by gathering up the “meteoric” remnants of the damaged ecology of knowledges (171). Or, as Santos puts it in a language that may sound more alien initially, but needs to be mastered if we would engage in a dialogue with much other progressive social science today: What cannot be said, or said clearly, in one language or culture may be said, and said clearly, in another language or culture. Acknowledging other kinds of knowledge and other partners in conversation for other kinds of conversation opens the field for infinite discursive and nondiscursive exchanges with unfathomable codifications and horizontalities (15).

And finally, Santos has gone a long way towards discovering the Holy Grail of the evolution of consciousness: the concept of “participated time” adumbrated in the concluding chapters of Barfield’s Saving the Appearanc-

es. 37 Santos rightly identifies the linear time of “onlooker consciousness” as an idol in Barfield’s sense; in its place, we need to cultivate a rich ecology of temporalities, an “intertemporality” (177) that includes circular time, glacial time, cyclical time, “the rich soteriological idea that used to link the multiplicity of worlds (salvation, redemption, reincarnation, or metempsychosis)” (169); the living time that pulses with “durations, rhythms, sequences, tempos, synchronies, and nonsynchronies” (150). Modernism’s definition of history as progress has weakened our wills through endless deferral of expectation into the future (72); it has compressed the present to an evanescent instant, within which there is no space for social experimentation (175) or even mindfulness as such. Instead, we need to enlarge the present and contract the future, so that the present is decelerated, “giving it a denser, more substantive content than the fleeting instant between the past and the future to which proleptic reason condemned it. Instead of a final stage, they propose a constant ethical vigilance over the unfolding of possibilities, aided by such basic emotions as … wonder feeding hope” (186). But the most breathtaking innovation here is Santos’ evocation of the transformative power of the past through colloquy with “the nonconforming dead” (75). Modern thought—even the most progressive modern social thought— devalued the past and allowed the future to hypertrophy: “The past was seen as past, hence, as incapable of erupting in the present. By the same token, the power of revelation and fulguration was wholly transposed into the future” (73). Hence “we no longer know how to envision the past in an enabling way” (74); in Ahrimanic “onlooker time,” the past is always a mere report, and never a resource that could irrupt into the present at a moment of danger as a source of nonconformity.

Steiner’s hints about the need to overcome Eurocentrism are multiplied a thousandfold here. Santos calls upon us to create “the new transnational political culture called for in the new century and the new millennium,” a new “insurgent cosmopolitanism,” a “centrifugal consciousness” that would overcome Northern hegemony by gathering up the “meteoric” remnants of the damaged ecology of knowledges.

37 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (London: Faber, 1957; rpt. 2nd edn. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1988).

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

One of the volume’s greatest attractions is that it functions as a gateway to much other important work. It is important in itself, but it is also the epitome of a large movement with many dimensions, within which Santos is a leading figure.

And finally, one of the volume’s greatest attractions is that it functions as a gateway to much other important work. Santos’ bibliography alone is worth the price of admission. The Epistemology of the South is important in itself, but it is also the epitome of a large movement with many dimensions, within which Santos is a leading figure. One can set out from this volume to explore African “sage philosophy” and other non-Western modes of social thought such as the Hindu concept of dharma , the Islamic umma , the South American culture of Pachamama , Gandhi’s Satyagraha , or the clauses in the Ecuadorian constitution establishing “the rights of nature” (23) “new social movements” that are actually very old in some cases, and all part of an “ecology of knowledges” that needs to be preserved against the onslaughts of Western scientism. Unequal exchanges bring with them the danger of the “epistemicide” invoked in Santos’ subtitle, a vast “wasting” of social knowledge and experience (102).

One especially intriguing “epistemology of the South” is the southern African concept of Ubuntu (which might well be translated “being human”!), especially as implemented by the late Nelson Mandela, and by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his Truth and Reconciliation Commission.38

The key tenets of Ubuntu are generosity, affirmation, respect, community, reciprocity, compassion, dignity, mediation, and resolution of conflict. In the spirit of Ubuntu , Nelson Mandela introduced his former jailers as “honored guests” at his inauguration. This shining concept actually resonates with Steiner’s call for reconciliation through truth in the aftermath of World War One, rather than the retributive justice that the Allies imposed, with disastrous consequences.

Some Criticisms

In the context of this review, the most fundamental shortcoming of Epistemologies of the South is its neglect of Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy with its many languages is itself an “ecology of knowledges” that would have con-

38 In light of the interest that such concepts have aroused, the radical sociologists Jean and John Comaroff have gone so far as to write a book entitled Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Towards Africa (Boulder: Paradigm, 2012).

tributed vastly more to Santos’ argument than his three prime exemplars of the “South” within the West: Lucian of Samosata, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pascal.

More specifically, Steiner’s sophisticated epistemology would have helped Santos to avoid the fallacy of imagining effective communal action as arising directly out of communal thinking.39 The main consequence of this mistake is Santos’ repeated, highly rhetorical call to demote the intellectual “vanguard” to a “rearguard.” At its best, anthroposophy is immune to this kind of regressive anti-intellectualism. As Santos himself is well aware, it is more than a little ironic that this demand issues from a highly trained academic holding positions at prestigious Western institutions including the University of Wisconsin’s Law School. Santos seeks to excuse himself by invoking the need to embrace “enabling contradictions,” but the problem is deeper than that. His failure of imagination in this regard is just as “abyssal” as his opponents’: he is incapable of envisioning a “vanguard consciousness” that would transcend “onlooker consciousness”; he cannot see that “feelthinking” is possible at a high intellectual level. Kandinsky’s ascending spiritual triangle is a much better model—and one inspired directly by Steiner.40

This fallacy is related to another major deficit: Santos lacks Steiner’s fully developed notion of the evolution of consciousness (although he hits on some key aspects through inspired intuitions). As just one example of many that could be adduced, he sees the acme of materialism in the mid-nineteenth century as a historical “accident” that could easily have been reversed (139). Hence we are ultimately led to wonder whether Santos appreciates sufficiently the all-important difference between original and final participation. Steiner overtrumps Santos with even more radical senses of cultural space, time, and identity. Anthroposophy is the ultimate “sociology of absence.”

39 Cf. Gandhi on Satyagraha: “In actual practice the secret of Satyagraha is not understood by all, and many are apt unintelligently to follow the few…I do not know any historical example of pure mass Satyagraha” (M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1954), p. 188.

40 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977).

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.

Reading Steiner

by Jon McAlice

There are many people who feel Rudolf Steiner is difficult to read. They find his language heavy, too Germanic, dated. He neglects to use conventional terminology in a conventional manner. “I now know what anthroposophy is,” said one young woman in a fit of exasperation. “It’s when you take all the ideas you thought you understood, mix them up until they no longer have any relationship to one another or what they once meant, then spew them out again!” She was in her second year of a Waldorf teacher training and had already completed a full course of studies at a German university. She was intelligent, very idealistic, and had just made a significant discovery about Rudolf Steiner’s work. She later confessed the source of her frustration:

Until I seriously began to read Steiner, even the most challenging philosophical writings had been easy for me to understand and interpret. Their conceptual frame of reference was conventional; I could interpret their writings based on my own conventional education. Steiner’s frame of reference is not conventional. His ideas don’t stand still. They don’t let themselves be stored in neat boxes, which can later be compared with one another. Unless I think his thoughts with him, they don’t make sense.

Steiner said much the same thing about his work: It is often overlooked that anthroposophy is not an abstract theory, but must be truly alive. True life is the essence of anthroposophy’s being; if it is forced to be theoretical, it is not a better but rather a worse theory than the others. Anthroposophy only becomes theoretical when one makes it into a theory, when one kills it. This is not taken often enough into consideration: Anthroposophy is not only different from other world views, it must be taken in differently. One first recognizes and experiences this difference through the different way of assimilating it.1

He would return to this theme repeatedly during the last year of his life, emphasizing 1) that anthroposophy was in its essence a living reality and, 2) that the way one became acquainted with, embraced and allowed this path to live within one was a key factor in coming to an experience of this living essence.

1 Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts

Without a sense of the living nature of the anthroposophical path and how the way you journey along this path can either allow its teachings to come to life within your being or leaves them lying cold and dormant within the intellect, reading Steiner can indeed be unbearable.

Unless, of course you are content to let his work accompany you through life like a casual acquaintance who is able at times to call your attention to things you would not have otherwise noticed. You can then read him at your ease, gleaning those thoughts which appeal to you as you might glean chestnuts in autumn from an Italian mountainside. These can be stored away and shared with friends when they come to visit.

Anyone who embarks on a serious reading of Steiner’s work soon discovers that he is in a class by himself. He asks of the reader what few other writers require. You cannot read Steiner the way you might approach Noam Chomsky, for instance. Chomsky will look at a social or political phenomenon, use examples to illustrate what from his perspective are essential aspects of it, develop an argument based on these illustrations, then draw a conclusion based on his arguments. In the end, you can choose to agree with him or not, depending on whether you hold his premises to be valid and his argument logically conclusive.

Reading Chomsky is an exhilarating intellectual endeavor. Reading Steiner, the intellect is but the springboard to a completely new experience of reality. As with every human experience, it can only have meaning if the individual is fully present in the experienced encounter.

A critical scholarly approach to Chomsky’s work provides insight into the philosophical foundations of his logical arguments, the sociological underpinning of his world view, and the ethics of his conclusions. When Steiner’s work is approached from this perspective, you only achieve what Steiner warned against: a theoretical analysis of anthroposophy; the dead shadow of a living reality. Autopsies can only be performed on corpses.

There is, however, a growing corpus of literature exploring the parallels between Steiner’s work, that of his contemporaries, and that of those who came after him. There are studies tracing the roots of his thinking back to the work of his predecessors, primarily Goethe and the German idealists. There is unquestionably a place for this kind of comparative historical commentary. Rudolf Steiner was after all a real person, who lived during a specific period of time and as such his work represents one facet in the historicity of human thinking.

A butterfly is only a being of light as long as it is free

Jon McAlice

to live in the movement of the light-filled air. When captured and pinned in a box, it may remain a thing of beauty, but it loses the very qualities that made it so enchanting. Anthroposophy too loses its essential vitality when it becomes the mere object of academic examination.

Steiner cannot be read from a safe distance. He expects his readers to, as it were, pack their bags, lace up their boots, and be prepared to embark on a journey from which they will not return unchanged. It is a journey that challenges the travelers to question everything they have been taught to be true. It will lead them into the depths of their own souls; they will awaken anew to the world around them and, if their courage does not fail them, they will experience the spiritual reality that permeates both themselves and the world coming to expression within them.

Steiner demands not only active readers, but readers who are committed to becoming more intimately involved in their own inner development. At the core of every fruit is the seed of new life. The art of reading Steiner is the path to an experience of your own seed within the fruits of Steiner’s esoteric path. He offers his readers guidance in forging their own paths.

The thinking reader, following as it were in Steiner’s footsteps, is led by the experience of his own thinking activity to recognition of the validity of Steiner’s description. This experience of validity rooted in the activity of your own thinking allows you to trust Steiner’s presentations even though you are not yet able to experience directly what he describes.

His commitment to engaging the basic common sense and thinking capacities of his readers and listeners makes Steiner unique among modern esoteric writers. He took upon himself the challenge of presenting his experiences in and of the spiritual in a way that would make sense to anyone who made the effort to think them through. The thinking reader, following as it were in Steiner’s footsteps, is led by the experience of his own thinking activity to recognition of the validity of Steiner’s description. This experience of validity rooted in the activity of your own thinking allows you to trust Steiner’s presentations even though you are not yet able to experience directly what he describes.

He was seeking neither adoration nor blind devotion; he hoped only that he would be understood.

If one is actively present in the moment when reading Steiner, one finds that he is also present. This may

appear to be a strange statement on the surface: Steiner died in 1925, already 90 years ago. Yet think, for example, of the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday, April 15, 1864, three years after Rudolf Steiner was born. It is almost impossible, however, to read this short address without experiencing Lincoln as he moved across the ravaged, one-time battlefield, seeing in his heart the valor and suffering of the young men who had fought and died there. His words are so deeply permeated by his experience of the sacrifices brought willingly by so many during the Civil War that this experience lives on in them as a permanent presence; yet at no time does he call attention to the personal dimension of the experience out of which his words were born.

Steiner presents us with a similar problem. One often wishes he would be a bit more human, giving his readers more insight into the minutiae of his life as an initiate. But he doesn’t. Instead he chooses to share only those moments of his life that have a bearing on the development of his anthroposophical work. In this way, the majority of his writings are similar to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: they transcend the personal and, by doing so, become the gateway to a purely individual experience of what lives on in them.

Freeing one’s words from their personal bonds is an act of selflessness. It frees what is said or written from the historical limitations of space, culture, and time. In this sense, the act of overcoming the personal self imbues one’s words with a quality of transcendence. Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg raised the personal pain and valor of the dead and wounded to a place where the conflict between good and evil, where the principles of freedom and democracy command the final sacrifice. His was an emotive transcendence, which allowed him to grasp and articulate eternal principles at work in the drama of the moment. One cannot hear the words of the Gettysburg Address without experiencing the tragic presence of this gaunt and haggard figure, his face etched with the burden of sorrow, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on what he was able to conceive of the eternal.

Steiner’s presence in the active reading of his works is of a different nature. The dramatic moment takes place not on the battlefield or in the clash of opposing principles. It takes place where the human soul is shaken by the inexplicable presence of the eternal within the narrow confines of its own self, where the human I awakens to the paradox of its innate polarity. This is his Gettysburg. Where Lincoln objectified the personal, Steiner shifts the locus of personal experience to the realm of the experience ideal, then goes on to articulate a path towards an existential encounter with the living forces of those ideals.

Lincoln’s presence has the iconic nature of the individual who is able to focus the vortex of historical forces; Steiner’s presence is neither historical nor iconic. His work is imbued with the presence of his spiritual becoming. Reading him is a dialogue between one’s own emerging spirituality and the source of his becoming.

Jon McAlice, a freelance designer and consultant focusing on the creative use of time and space, is co-founder of the Center for Contextual Studies, author of Engaged Community: The Challenge of Self-Governance in Waldorf Education and A Path of Encounter: Meditation, Practice, and the Art of Sensing , and translator of Rudolf Steiner, A Biography, by Christoph Lindenberg.

Meditation as a Path Towards Becoming Human

by Christine Gruwez

The world, in an ever accelerating pace, is shaken by violence and destruction whereas there is an increasing sense of despair and helplessness. What to do? Can something be done? How to face this outburst of the evil forces? Is there a safe place where to hide?

Meditation, as Rudolf Steiner has developed it, could very well be the only realistic answer to this questioning.

First of all meditation is not only a deed but as Rudolf Steiner put it once in a conference: the only free deed possible for human being in this era so far.

Then, indeed meditation can offer a ‘safe place’ to each of us. But not to hide away, but in order to truly come in contact with oneself, with the other and with the world. To become present! Meditation teaches us about what it means to become human.

And last but not least, meditation opens a new realm

of perceiving and understanding how the spiritual and the human are interwoven. It is a path of listening with the heart to the pain of mankind, wounded in its being human and to hear what is asked of each of us.

This is where the Manichaean impulse, as Rudolf Steiner has spoken of it, enters. Only through this inner work of meditation can we develop an organ to listen to what needs to be done. In the words of the Dutch anthroposophist Bernard Lievegoed: “More and more people will find methods to help others in the most surprising ways. To put yourself in the service of the difficulties of another person, that is what meditation is about!”

Christine Gruwez studied philosophy and linguistics at the KU Leuven, the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium. She met Anthroposophy through the Waldorf school in Antwerp, which her four children attended, and where she taught from 1976 to 1986. She also taught for a decade in the Waldorf Education Training Program. Since 1997, Christine has led seminars and conferences at Emerson College, at the Goetheanum, in Europe, Asia and the US.

A note from Spyros Papadimas: “Christine shares her research into the practical aspects of meditation in connection with Rudolf Steiner’s teachings, the contemporary human, and current world happenings, on October 7-9, 2016, at the Waldorf School of Baltimore (4801 Tamarind Rd, Baltimore, MD 21209).

“In 2003, I approached Christine to introduce this topic in Athens, Greece, and this resulted in a series of seminars still on-going. The workshop is anticipated to be affordable; travelling costs will be divided between our group and Spring Valley, NY where Christine will also offer a workshop. Do not hesitate to contact me if you are interested: spyridon.papadimas@gmail.com , 513.739.6568.”

Painting (acrylic) by Robert Logsdon

research & reviews

IN THIS SECTION:

A small group of artists or researchers or thinkers or activists can form a creative vortex in which each member’s work gains power. Owen Barfield, perhaps the leading anthroposophical thinker who worked in English, was part of such a group, “The Inklings.” Their story is now told from a morethan-literary perspective.

Three essays follow which focus on the intensifying engagement of humans with machines. In the first a young physicist and anthroposophist gets down to the root of the problem: that human thinking power, formalized in “logic,” was shrunk down to fit machines; now it has been turned around to become the dominant force in humanity’s thought environment.

“Trans-humanism” is a result, and the next essay reviews Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Finally we are taken gently into this future-information and shown both what it already means to us humanly, and how much more challenging we can expect it to become, based on Rudolf Steiner’s research and insights. Is it time for anthroposophists, Americans especially, to engage with energy this field of inquiry?

The Fellowship

The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams , by Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski (Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 2015) 644 pages

review by Fred Dennehy

If, as Virginia Woolf wrote provocatively, “on or about December 1910, human character changed,” the transformation caught C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield on the threshold of puberty. But the adult literary output of both men, as well as the works of a number of the colleagues with whom they were to become closely associated, may be seen in large part as their response to that identified change.

Virginia Woolf was of course referring to the advent of Modernism, sensed not only in the visual arts, music and literature, but in the way you reacted to the most ordinary events, and in the questions you asked. In Britain, the Edwardian interlude of the early twentieth century was giving way to something as yet without a name—fractious, vaguely defiant, and, most discomfiting, seeming to arise from within.

Old traditions were devolving into sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

Less than four years later the Great War began. It revealed the sunken consciousness of the British social order. For instance, the British advance in the battle of the Somme in 1916, an attack on a larger scale than anything before in military history, was ordered by General Haig to commence at exactly 7:30 a.m., when the British always attacked. And Haig, thinking that it would somehow promote discipline, ordered his men to walk, not run, to the enemy position as if the attack were a training exercise. It was an utter catastrophe. The battle of the Somme, and the Great War itself, played themselves out in a kind of grotesque somnambulism that mimed the underlying falsehoods of an era. What ensued was the collapse of a culture, Ezra Pound’s “old bitch gone in the teeth a botched civilization.”

Yet at the same time in the arts there would come to be a kind of aesthetic embrace, in Modernism, of the horrific experience of the ordinary soldier in the trenches—the estrangement, the emptiness of meaning and the void of any real authority.

But the time after the Great War was not simply a reflexive turning away from tradition. There is a remarkable book by Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, which shows that there remained in many of the British survivors of the worst horrors of the War a longing to reclaim the old idyll of truth, beauty and goodness, to take it to a new place where it could not betray them again. And in some of the very men who had imbibed for years the trenches’ stench of “sweat, blood, vomit, excrement, cordite and putrescence,” who had grown used to the continuous and indifferent presence of death, there gathered a whitehot desire to redeem the time. It was exemplified in one way by the British war veterans in the early nineteen-twenties who climbed the North Face of Everest in tweed jackets and hob-nailed boots to a height of more than 28,000 feet. These were men who had been “eye-deep in hell” and were ready to endure it all again, but this time for their own reasons and on their own terms.

In literary circles too, there were those who resisted the fashionable ironies and pessimism of Modernism, and looked back to an older tradition with a keener, and at the same time, more

Owen Barfield, c. 1922

Young C.S. “Jack” Lewis

imaginative eye. Chief among them, in England, in the mid twentieth century, were a group of eminently gifted and educated writers who were to become known as the “Inklings.” They were (or were to become) Christians, but not Christian proselytizers. They bristled against what they saw as the rootlessness of most contemporary writing, and they celebrated instead the medieval, the arcane, the mythic, and the imaginative.

The Inklings were an informal group that met periodically from the thirties through the fifties in C.S. Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College and at the Eagle and Child Pub (known as the Bird and Baby) in Oxford. The Fellowship focuses on four of them: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. In addition to these four, the group loosely included others such as Hugo Dyson, Bede Griffiths, Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, John Wain, Lewis’s brother Warnie, and Tolkien’s son Christopher. Dorothy Sayers, the fine mystery writer and translator of Dante, was closely associated with them, but, as a woman in an old boys’ network, she was never a part of the inner sanctum.

Philip and Carol Zaleski have written the best book yet on the Inklings; readable, scholarly, drawing from a vast array of sources (the Notes and Bibliography consume nearly 100 pages) and wonderfully vivid. Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings and Gareth Knight’s The Magical World of the Inklings are worthy predecessors, but they provide neither the historical context nor the breadth of vision that the Zaleskis give us. You can feel the camaraderie, at once affectionate and unsparing, as Tolkien, Lewis, and others would read aloud to the group from drafts of their works, opening themselves to anything— applause, impulsive raillery (“my God, Tolkien, not another fucking elf . . .”) and shrewd constructive critiques that would permanently change their texts. For decades the gathering was a literary school, a support group, a drinking club and a haven of friendship. The magnet, the unequivocal tone-setter, was Lewis, his sonorous voice booming out praise, censure, and invitation to debate, letting no objection go unremarked and no member go undervalued.

Questions abound. When does a fellowship degrade

into a clan? Wouldn’t the Inklings have been better served by a more than occasional visit from one of Oxford’s academic majority of skeptics? And when does preference pass over into prejudice? Were the Inklings impervious to the genius in Modernism—to the fiction of Joyce, Kafka, and Mann, to the poetry of Eliot, Stevens, and Rilke? Why did Owen Barfield, when approached for intellectual and spiritual guidance by the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, so casually dismiss his fiction? And the exclusive men’s club atmosphere—though it doubtless put them at their ease, didn’t it deprive the Inklings of so much of the life of the world? Parenthetically, every one of the four principals of this book lived for the greater part of his life in bizarre, cold or otherwise disappointing relationships with women.

The genius was there. “The Inklings’ work,” as the authors note, “has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalization of Christian intellectual and imaginative life.”

They were “twentieth-century Romantics” who championed (for different reasons) “a medieval model as an answer to modern confusion and anomie; yet they were for the most part Romantics without rebellion, fantasists who prized reason, and for whom Faërie was a habitat for the virtues and literature a sanctuary for faith.”

Tolkien is largely responsible for the mythic reawakening in the twentieth century, if not for a tectonic shift in the incidence of fantasy as a literary genre and cinematic in the twenty-first century. His reclamation of the old order came through the stunningly elaborate and detailed fantasy world he created. It was Christianity (actually Catholicism for Tolkien) played out against a backdrop of the wondrous, the arcane, the numinous and the unknown. The Zaleskis, I think, are right in seeing his fantasy landscapes as distant images of The Kingdom, and in hearing, behind the archaic music of his language, “the voice of faith.” Lewis, through the force of his language and his personality, almost singlehandedly provoked a mid-century Christian recovery. The Narnia Chronicles and the Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) point to the miraculousness of Providence and the unfathomable cosmic stakes in the

Below, L-R: Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, Williams

research & reviews

contest between good and evil.

Yet for both Tolkien and Lewis, imagination, though a gorgeous embrocation, was, after all, a story. And a story was not to be conflated with truth. Lewis the Christian apologist, the beef and ale apostle of the ordinary man, would never have tolerated a view of his own fantasy writings as somehow generating a separate reality. There was fiction—delightful and inspiring though it may be—and there was fact. There was a gulf between them. To confuse them, or worse, to attempt to merge them, was not only fallacious but playing at the threshold of idolatry, an occasion of sin.

Charles Williams was a superb medieval scholar, a Christian fantasy/suspense novelist and a stunningly charismatic speaker. His words now echo only intermittently along the corridors of time. Imagination was something more for Williams than for either Tolkien or Lewis. It had a metaphysical dimension. As a theologian, he is arguably the most radical of the four. His theory (and attempt at a personal practice) of substitution, exchange, and co-inherence is at once consoling and frightening in the way they can carve open our concepts of love and self. Substitution refers to Williams’s understanding that each of us may, in a lesser mode, repeat the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross by bearing one another’s burdens, literally removing them from another and taking them on oneself. Exchange is similar; it is a practice of humility in which we offer up our time, comfort, security, and self-esteem for the sake of someone else. Most important is co-inherence. Just as the three Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) of the Trinity co-inhere in one Godhead, so are we parts of one another, co-inhering through our shared humanity in the Mystical Body of Christ. A Williams novel has the capacity to atomize the Cartesian notion of the self.

Barfield remains the anomaly. The Zaleskis are not sure what to do with him. They know he was brilliant. They understand that he was Lewis’s most important friend. They are aware that, in the “Great War” between Lewis and Barfield, Barfield was the more successful combatant. They comprehend, too, the profound and subtle meaning of imagination, myth, and metaphor that he developed, and the significance of his understanding of the evolution of consciousness. If they undervalue his poetry and fiction, they fully appreciate his eminence as a Coleridge scholar.

But Barfield was an anthroposophist, and therefore an occultist. “Like other esoteric accounts of the world,” the Zaleskis tell us, “Barfield’s spins in its own orbit, at-

tracting the occasional adventurer into its eccentric field of influence but having little or no effect upon the masses.” Or on the other Inklings. Or on the authors.

Barfield’s fate in The Fellowship is not very different from his fate when he was alive. His views are neatly summarized. His devotion to anthroposophy, if not well understood, is not caricatured. The sinew of his forensics is deeply admired. His consistency is readily acknowledged. And, like Steiner in the academy, there is no concerted effort to refute him. But the full implications of what he states explicitly in luminously clear prose are not taken seriously. His deepest convictions are left severely alone. The message to the readers of The Inklings is plain. “This is simply too much. If you even start to credit it, look out for what happens to all the rest of what you know.”

Why? Maybe it is the realization at some level that Barfield’s understanding of imagination shakes everything to its foundations. Taken at face value, it forces us to “unthink” the conventional distinctions between subject and object, between self and other. It relegates the very fundament of logic, the Law of Contradiction, to a “parochial interlude” in the history of philosophy. The imaginal statements Barfield prizes refuse to be fixed and are apt to change into each other through a process of evolution. Their “syntax,” as Barfield once put it, “is one of metamorphosis rather than of sequence and aggregation.” All this is hard—hard not only in what it asks us to accept, but in what it demands that we give up.

Finally, there is the immense responsibility that imagination thrusts upon us. As Georg Kühlewind has observed, we are at the end of the seventh day of creation, the end of the day of rest. From now on, the future of the world is no longer independent of human volition. There are choices to be made and consequences to be borne. The world depends on us.

There should be no surprise here. To follow Barfield, as to follow Steiner, you have to stop clinging to your past and leave very much of what you deemed essential about yourself behind. It is not an easy path. But no one promised that it would be.

Fred Dennehy is an attorney in practice in New Jersey, serving as General Counsel to a large law firm and specializing in professional responsibility. He earned a PhD in English and in recent years has performed in more than a dozen Shakespeare plays. He is a classholder in the School for Spiritual Science and editor for reviews in being human.

Technology and the Laws of Thought

by Gopi Krishna Vijaya, PhD

Editor’s note: Some months ago we received a very clear and readable document which traces how the logic used in and essential to today’s computers and mechanization branched off from the fuller logic of human experience. Though it offers only a restricted subset of human capacities, machine logic has become the measure even for human development. Dr. Vijaya’s sixty-page book is too long for us to publish, so we asked him to share a summary of his research and insights. A PDF document of the full text is available on request; e-mail editor@anthroposophy.org for a copy.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Henry David Thoreau

There has been such a massive emphasis on technology around us that in its glare the condition of man is like a deer caught in the headlights. In this condition, understanding the very nature of technology, particularly computing technology, appears quite tricky—especially when there is a natural antipathy generated in almost everybody who has a wholesome human sense for things. Yet, in one way or another, it is absolutely essential to get to the bottom of it. My booklet Technology and the Laws of Thought is an attempt at doing precisely that. The work arose due to graduate research where the author had to tackle several problems in theoretical physics utilizing computer programs and hardware-software interfaces. The question “What is a computer, really?” began to stand right at the forefront as the research progressed. Conventional technical approaches simply take the logic of computing for granted, and delve right into the details of the working computer. Any reader would quickly get lost in the forest of algorithms, logical circuits, language syntax, and calculation times, even with very basic level computing. On the other hand, while reading the history of development of the subject, it appeared clear that almost no one looked at the history of computing thought symptomatically. Nowadays, most analyses of the subject restrict themselves to simply outlining the development of concepts which took place in the past, such as the invention of binary number system, calculators, and computers, without paying adequate attention to how those concepts came to be developed—and more impor-

tantly, whether those concepts fit reality or not. Therefore it was inevitable that, even with such detailed historical books like Turing’s Cathedral and Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators, which give an almost blow-by-blow account of the development of computing ideas, there existed no real motif that answers the essential question: “Why did it take this particular route?” It was the old story of having a name for every bend of the river but having no name for the river. Moreover, historical books take the existing development for granted, as if that was the only possible way things could have evolved, and more importantly, they do not challenge the concepts used by the pioneers and inventors, nor take human development into account. So this line of investigation reached a dead end: there was way too much detail, and way too little in terms of coherent overarching human concepts.

Following this dead end, anthroposophical literature was analyzed. Several works address this subject head on. Gondishapur to Silicon Valley by Paul Emberson indicated not only the overall development of ideas, but also several references from Rudolf Steiner’s work mentioning the nature of computing technology in terms of spiritual science. Steve Talbott’s excellent work, such as Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in the Age of Machines, indicated the social effect of computing technology very well, drawing on his own computing background. In addition, several ways of

Conventional approaches take the logic of computing for granted, and delve right into the details of the working computer. Any reader would quickly get lost in the forest of algorithms, logical circuits, language syntax, and calculation times...

offsetting the effects of computers were also described. In these works, the essential concepts were tackled by themselves, especially as they relate to the human being. Yet a clear bridge was not present to connect the already welldeveloped theories of computing to the kind of thinking activity developed in, for example, the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, even though Carl Unger’s work had pushed that thinking forward tremendously. What was necessary was to balance general concepts derived from anthroposophical spiritual science against the excessive detail given in traditional books on computing, so that the path to the human can be derived from the study of the logic itself.

It was with David Black’s work Computer and the Incarnation of Ahriman that this bridge first became visible. It was an indispensible masterpiece, where the relation of the logic of thought to the logic of computers (Boolean algebra) was discussed, freely using concepts from anthroposophy. This pushed open the door, and the next step was to assemble a picture of the very core development of the computing process. Building that bridge was the key purpose of Technology and the Laws of Thought.

My approach has been to observe the thinking process closely. This was done to identify different qualities that the process necessarily has in itself, such as the feeling-element and the willingelement, as directly indicated by life experience. It became clear that the development of mechanical aids to thought was mainly related to the will-power, or strength, of the thinking process. Using the analogy between physical strength and mental strength, a place is created for the concept of will to be considered in thought as well, on par with well known factors like the structure of the brain and chemistry. This will factor has been largely ignored in conventional understanding, as it is not readily suited to cast in a logical form. Examining will-power in thought also led the way into the past, where it was shown that the nature of experience guided logic, and hence it is important to come to terms with experience based on which the logic was derived. It is one thing to talk about algorithms and logical connections, and quite another to examine how those arise from basic life experience.

With the door to the past being opened with these ideas, a systematic development is followed, starting from early Renaissance and Enlightenment ideas of mechanics and computing (by the likes of Leibniz, Bacon, and Descartes) to the results of the modern day (Boole, Frege, and von Neumann). Boolean algebra is treated in some detail, showing how the algebra works and how it matches up to normal experience. This point was necessary since it lies at the heart of all computing technology. On the way, the crisis that occurred at the middle of the 19th century is described, and the form of logic and mathematics created at this pinnacle of the Industrial Era is analyzed. A lot of ideas that came to the fore in this time period were basically a re-invention of the logic of Ancient Greece, but cast into a modern mechanical mold. Seeing this enabled direct parallels between Aristotelian logic and Boolean algebra, and the precise changes introduced in order to suit the logic to mechanization. In other words, the fork in the road was found, where one path led to increasing mechanization, the other to an increase of human capacities.

Now it was evident that the origin of computing does not lie in a natural development moving forward from earlier results in logic, but is actually a restriction of the domain of logic to that which can be mechanized

It was also found that mathematics and logic took this route mainly because many concepts held as true for two thousand years (such as Euclidean Geometry) were coming into question at that time, bringing uncertainty into the very foundations of mathematics and logic. Putting it plainly, the mathematicians freaked out. Yet, instead of starting afresh with a new path for tackling logic, the very opposite route was taken, marking the birth of computing technology. These were the findings of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and other such pioneers. Instead of facing the paradoxes generated by using traditional logic and moving ahead, as was done for example by Hegel, the paradoxes were shunned by seeking refuge in a restricted form of logic—but the same problems inevitably recurred once more in a different form! This confirmed the insights from spiritual science that there is more to life than just thinking, and that thinking, feeling, and willing all have to be included to tackle the questions properly.

As a direct consequence of the choices made, human thinking also faced several obstacles by being tied to mechanical ideas alone. I highlight the repercussions of continuing to adhere to the mechanized form of logic. The refusal to understand these principles as well as a lack of exercise of will-power of thought are seen to lie at the root

Identifying qualities that the thinking process has in itself, such as the feelingelement and the willing­ element, it became clear that the development of mechanical aids to thought was mainly related to the willpower, or strength, of the thinking process.

of all problems facing thinking and concentration today. The alternative that has been missed, which can restore the creative and constructive capacity to human thought, is described: it is possible to reconnect thinking capacity to human potential directly, instead of taking the bypass through the machine, and this makes it possible to offset the effects of technology on the mind . The correct identification of the will-element in thought also shows the ways it can be developed independently by anyone interested in doing so, and I show the paths pursued by a couple of people in this direction during the past century. Finally, some effects of a misdirected application of the mechanized logic are touched upon (its effect on human relationships, for example), indicating the boundaries within which mechanized logic is useful. This enables the reader to appreciate the development of modern

technology from the inside, so that education and selfdevelopment can restore creativity to its rightful place alongside the arts and crafts. It is only when the head and the limbs work in sync, that the heart can find a place in life as well.

It is hoped that this work will be beneficial to anyone who is willing to tackle the question of computing at its very root. Just as the bridge to the supersensible was built by spiritual science through the study of philosophy, a bridge to right use of technology has been attempted by the study of the “laws of thought.”

Gopi Krishna Vijaya has a background in Physics. He has obtained his Master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and his PhD (on the topic of improving efficiencies in solar cells) from the University of Houston. He is a member of the Anthroposophical Society. The paper described here is available as a PDF file on request to editor@anthroposophy.org

Like Shattered Glass

A review of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology; (2005). Viking Penguin: New York.

by Benjamin Butler

For

Verena Buob

It is important that light is shed on this book and its clever author, Ray Kurzweil. Anthroposophists in particular should be aware of Kurzweil’s predictions and technological research especially because of the nature of the thoughts presented. I became interested in Kurzweil through discussions with friends about the dark aspects of transhumanism, the movement to augment people with technology. Author Daniel Pinchbeck has also been a great source of inspiration.1

Ray Kurzweil (b. 1948) is an American inventor, author, and futurist. He is currently the Director of Engineering at Google, working with them closely on robotics, AI (artificial intelligence), and natural language recognition. Google is one sponsor of his Singularity University. At the time of this book, he was on the Army Science Advisory Group. He has invented scanners and text-tospeech technology utilized by the blind. His other books include The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and How to Create a Mind (2012).

I offer that the central key to understanding what underpins this book and the methods used to arrive at the

1 See his work 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006), pp. 152-160, 103-106.

conclusions presented in it, is summed up in Kurzweil’s proclamation that intelligence supersedes cosmology.2 The Singularity is Near takes intelligence to an extreme at the expense of everything else including the cosmos itself. Ultimately, the human being and cosmos are reduced to machines for intelligent computation.

Ray Kurzweil foresees a future in which each organ of the human being is gradually replaced by intelligent nanobots or otherwise synthetic materials. The heart and brain are seen as flawed in design, badly in need of an upgrade, because they are run by outdated biological programming.3 Kurzweil describes his discomfort with his physical body, thus he seeks to radically “reprogram” it by taking 250 pills a day so as to completely change his metabolic processes.4 He does this so he can live for further biotechnological innovations which he foresees will allow humans within a few decades to become immortal by uploading their consciousness into computers. He sees the “nonbiological” intelligence increasingly taking over inside augmented human beings as biotechnology comes

2 p. 364.

3 pp. 306, 198-199.

4 p. 211.

I became interested in Kurzweil through discussions with friends about the dark aspects of transhumanism, the movement to augment people with technology.

research & reviews

to actually replace their biological brain.

Kurzweil believes that in the 21st century “strong AI” will emerge: an inherently uncontrollable super-intelligence. Because he holds intelligence as the highest value, his vision culminates with swarms of nanobots blasting out into the cosmos, saturating “dumb matter” with intelligence, while using the stars and planets, including the sun, as computational substrates.5 His description of the ultimate cold computer and the possible computational potential of black holes really show the dark extreme of thought here presented.6

cloned animal meat, manipulation of bacteria’s limbs and the destruction of their metabolisms, increasing stiffness in computer systems so as to reduce thermal effects, and an appreciation of straight lines over curves for their efficiency.8 All stem from a worldview striving to exhaust technology in an empty cosmos.

Kurzweil believes that in the 21st century “strong AI” will emerge: an inherently uncontrollable super­intelligence...

In coming decades he foresees virtual reality taking over basically every domain of human activity.

In coming decades Kurzweil foresees virtual reality taking over basically every domain of human activity. The various senses will be augmented for virtual reality (including touch) and people will project different virtual bodies for different audiences. Kurzweil appeals to the pleasure-seeking impulse in people when he describes the possibilities virtual reality (VR) offers regarding sex. He claims that along with humans meeting in VR, artificially intelligent programs will fulfill sexual desires. This discussion of sex in VR is revealed in one of the many end-of-chapter sections where Kurzweil has characters discuss aspects of the singularity among other characters and himself. It all has a very odd quality when his invented “Molly 2004” character talks to “Molly 2104” and “Ray” about nanobot bodies and digital sex.7 The critical point is that the boundary between real and virtual reality will disintegrate just like the boundary between the biological and new, “nonbiological” parts of the human being, as Kurzweil sees it.

Kurzweil’s thinking leads him to see nothing else in the world except information patterns ; believing the cosmos to be empty he seeks to imbue it with the intelligence he feels it to be so badly lacking. Technology is his bridge between the “I” and the world . The details could fill themselves in: nanobots in the blood, nonfluid nutrient delivery systems in the body, “reprogramming” cells, human cloning (“weak immortality” as he refers to it),

5 pp. 349, 434-435.

6 p. 362.

7 pp. 319, 203.

The individual with this worldview seeks preservation at any cost. Kurzweil and other transhumanists wish to evade death and become immortal. Although this is his aim, The Singularity is Near reads like it constantly seeks to displace living life, one could say in anthroposophical terms “the etheric,” with death.9 It is a book about death: death of what makes human beings true feeling beings and warm-blooded active beings. Kurzweil calls religion “deathist rationalization” and urges his followers to hold strong, looking forward to the singularity, an event which supposedly will allow the transhumanists to conquer death.10 This goal of uploading human beings into computers could be seen as nothing less than putting people into the ahrimanic “preserving jars” described by Rudolf Steiner.11

Rudolf Steiner shared that Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and The AntiChrist were actually written by Ahriman,12 the supersensible being who wants to divert humanity from any spiritual understanding, diverting them especially through dense materialism. He is the ossified intelligence, the opponent of the light, and we live in an era when the “ahrimanic” forces are especially active. I believe this book by Kurzweil to be inspired by Ahriman. The predominance of illusion, deception, frozen intellect, and technological dominance, at the expense of beauty, art, and warmth is indicative of the inspiration behind this work. It is not

8 pp. 254, 306, 221, 224, 236, 238, 181.

9 Kurzweil foresees respiration, digestion, and reproductive systems eventually becoming unnecessary.

10 p. 372.

11 In Lecture 1 of the cycle entitled Lucifer and Ahriman, given in Dornach November 1, 1919.

12 Karmic Relationships Volume 3, Lecture 11.

an accident that Kurzweil brings up Nietzsche, citing his concern that man balances on a “rope over an abyss” with regards to technology use and the future, and then slyly encourages readers that humanity is in no such position, that the path to the singularity goes up and not down into the abyss.13

Of interest to anthroposophists is Kurzweil’s honest statement that he doesn’t understand why his (mind) “pattern” is continually attached to and perceives the feelings and experiences of the one person called “Ray Kurzweil.”14 Questions arise for his outlook: how is it that consciousness arises in the body? Why isn’t his specific information pattern inside a different body? It all appears

13 pp. 373-374. See also the article: “Rudolf Steiner’s Meeting of Destiny with Friedrich Nietzsche and the Adversary of Our Age” by C.T. Roszell in being human Spring Issue 2015

14 p. 381.

random, accidental. Without any knowledge of the relation of body, soul, and spirit, or of reincarnation, this baffles him. I appreciate that he included this comment; it reveals a riddle which eludes his sharp thinking.

The ideas and aims of individuals like Ray Kurzweil should be given careful attention and permeated with insights from anthroposophical spiritual science; they serve as a clear warning of the times. We must see the onesidedness of such viewpoints. We are tasked with facing what comes with the firm conviction that we know the spirit in the human being and in the cosmos. We must love what we create and what we see ourselves becoming.

Benjamin Butler (bnbutlr722@icloud.com) holds a Masters in Sociology from the University of North Texas. “Thank you for reading this essay. Please reach out if you have comments or are conducting similar research. Thank you to Steven Usher, Andrew Linnell, and all my friends who supported this essay and provided helpful insights.”

Facing a Future with Machines

by Andrew Linnell

If your son had an accident and lost a limb and was then outfitted with a prosthetic limb, would you still love your son? Of course you would. What if he lost two limbs? Three? How much of one’s body would need to be replaced by a machine before one would toss in the towel and say I can no longer love this person? Early in the 20th century, the merging of Mankind with Machines began. Many of our loved ones already have pace makers, dialysis, or hearing aids. Many more “mergings” are in the works.

I have not done any survey but I suspect most people today can accept the machine as a prosthetic limb replacing a damaged natural limb or bionic aids augmenting a damaged sense organ, but when it comes to internal organs, I believe we enter a squeamish territory. Replacing the will-related body parts does not raise the warning flag about impacting our humanity as does replacing internal organs. What happens to our humanity when the operation of a liver is being largely conducted by an embedded machine? How much of the functioning of our heart can be done by a sophisticated “intelligent” pace maker? Does the one with an embedded machine change in any way? Replacing the thinking-related body parts seems to cause the most concern about de-humanizing our future.

Ray Kurzweil and much of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community agree that the ultimate human organ is

the brain. This camp would say we can replace all the other organs and body parts and we still have a human being. They would argue that the essence of the human being is its mind and this is found in the “software” of the brain. Thus, according to this camp, if one can migrate the software that represents the mind from a biological brain to an equivalent non-biological brain, then that mind will have achieved immortality.15

Early in the 20th century, the merging of Mankind with Machines began. Many of our loved ones already have pace makers, dialysis, or hearing aids. Many more “mergings” are in the works.

Perhaps we do not truly understand mortality and its role with the human being. Moreover, people who receive organ transplants find that they have new memories that apparently come with the new organ.16 Could our memories be outside of our brain? If so, where are our memories? What are our memories? When I think of a person or place from my past, typically more than a mere picture arises. Other sensory impressions from that past event arise too. And an emotional memory commonly fills our soul. When one sees a photograph taken in youth, more than visual

15 2045 Initiative, Dmitry Itskov [ 2045.com ]

16 Pearsall, Paul, The Heart’s Code, Broadway Books, 1999

memory attributes can fill one’s soul. Where is this memory content being kept and being experienced? If we lost our memory content, how would that affect our sense of a solid foundation to life and to a sense of “who I am”?

It was well established in the first century CE that the human being was a tripartite of body, soul, and spirit. In the 9th century, Western humanity had largely lost this knowledge and reduced the human to body and soul. As the 20th century dawned in the West, the concept of soul had been largely lost and the concept of body had been reduced to its chemical components. With humanity’s creative focus fixed on the mineral kingdom, great and powerful machinery arose that could move mountains. Humans became able to move their bodies quickly from one place to another, over land, over sea, or through the air and even through space to the moon. We became adept at extending our senses to explore ocean depths or the outer bands of the solar system or the inner dynamics of a molecule or an embryo.

AI theorists deem the brain to be engineered by natural selection... With mutations over millions of years, today’s brain has evolved... AI believes that the next step in the brain’s evolution will come from mankind and be given to robots...

In the 19th century, a man and his horse were considered to become as one and “carriages were an extension of a person, like their clothes.”17 Today, when one gets behind the wheel of a car, one is within a machine. As we drive this car, something in us merges with it as we get a feel for its functioning, its ability to respond to brake pressure, steering wheel adjustments, and the like. And as we drive on the highways, we can experience the mood of drivers about us, the aggressiveness of the driver on the road next to us, for example. Something of us permeates the vehicle. Is it soul?

When I make a phone call to a dear friend, my voice is digitized right in the phone itself. This digital signal makes its way through the internet, yes that same internet, eventually coming to my dear friend where the digital signal representing my voice is reconstituted to a facsimile of my voice—close enough that my friend recognizes it as my voice. Although we are not physically in the same room, we can have a conversation that has many of the same attributes as an in-the-same-room conversation. We can be emotional. We can be motivated. We

17 Transportation Past, Present, and Future [ www.thehenryford.org/ education/erb/TransportationPastPresentAndFuture.pdf ]

can feel our soul engaged. We find that our soul is not so bound by spatial obstacles. And our soul can deal with electrical transmission of voice facsimile as it can with artificial limbs and sensory organs. It can permeate bodily extensions such as an automobile.

The AI community, lacking a concept of soul, believes that we will eventually reverse-engineer the brain. Reverse engineering is done when one takes apart some man-made object to see how it was constructed. One discovers the object’s inner workings and then can grasp the original engineering. Once that has been accomplished, one can devise improvements. The brain is deemed by AI theorists to be engineered by—well, by natural selection, with each improvement coming from a mutation. With mutations over millions of years, today’s brain has evolved. Is the brain’s evolution complete? AI believes that the next step in the brain’s evolution will come from mankind and be given to robots into which we each will pour our mind.

Reverse engineering works with man-made objects because our mind can grasp the concepts that are “built in” to a man-made object. Such concepts are within the realm of the ponderable. But this begs the question, does the human brain (and body for that matter) arise from the ponderable or the imponderable? If imponderable, will we grasp enough to make a human-like brain?

As we have already done with sensory organs, many in the AI community expect brain augmentation to come before a fully reverse-engineered brain is ready for humanity. This would be some sort of implant that would enable us to perform “context switching” from our human mind to an augmented computational capability. For example, one might need to perform some arithmetic operation such as adding the prices of the items in one’s shopping cart. This AI future would enable the person to visually scan the prices, pass this information to the embedded computer and receive back the result. This is similar to how we conceive today of the context switching that happens within the brain from the functioning of the right hemisphere to the left. The expectation is that, just we became adept at driving cars, we will become adept at such context switching.

As these AI scientists and brain engineers research this, I believe that they will “discover consciousness” just as the quantum physicists did. The “hard problem” of consciousness18 will show the fallacy of this brain research. While we wish we would not need to waste so

18 [ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness ]

much money pursuing this goal, we do need more “proof” that consciousness exists outside of the body. Near-death research19 may help to achieve this understanding. I expect this research will prove that consciousness does not require a functioning brain.

While many in our anthroposophical community may have the hair on their backs stand up in fear when they hear about the vision of the future seen by Ray Kurzweil and others, I want to remind us of this well-known verse by Rudolf Steiner entitled “Facing the Future”: We must eradicate from the soul all fear and terror of what comes towards Mankind, out of the future. We must look forward with absolute equanimity to whatever comes, and we must think only that whatever comes is given us by a world direction full of wisdom. It is part of what we must learn during this age, namely to act out of pure trust in the ever present help of the spiritual world; truly nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us. Therefore let us discipline our will, and let us seek the awakening from within ourselves, every morning and every evening.

We are in a time of great change. The world has seen great changes before such as the Ice Age, the end of Atlantis, the ending of the ancient mysteries, the entering into Earth evolution of the Christ, and the Renaissance. Our age begins the merging of Mankind and Machine. Once people thought that a human riding in a train at a speed of 20 miles per hour would suffer dreadfully in their nerves while the people nearby the passing train would suffer concussions.20 Steiner says that this assessment was actually correct for those times but that since then our nerves have adjusted.

What science was saying was, in effect, that human beings would not be able to tolerate the demands made on their physical body via the astral body if the astral body, the animal part of the human being, did not constantly receive a correction, a therapy, through that which rays back up to the surface of the earth from the absorbed cometary substances, exercising a balancing effect on human capacities.

Are we today receiving cosmic forces into our astral body to cause new adjustments? Might this explain generational differences towards this subject?

19 Bush, Nancy Evans, foreword by Greyson, Richard, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences, 2012; and Fenwick, Peter, and Fenwick, Elizabeth, The Art of Dying, Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. See also Greyson video [ youtu.be/Rtk644N2DDs ] and the Near Death Experience Network with Robert Mays [ nhneneardeath.ning.com/profile/RobertMays ]

20 Steiner, Rudolf, Book of Revelation, Lecture 16, GA 346

Perhaps the greatest “adjustment” humanity will need to make in the coming millennia is what to do about the growing infertility in women. Steiner claims that we will need to work with the fallen angels of darkness:

Not later than the seventh millennium in earth evolution women will grow infertile, and reproduction will no longer be possible. If matters went entirely according to the normal Angelic spirits in the blood, human reproduction would not even continue for as long as this; it would only continue until the sixth millennium, or the sixth post-Atlantean period of civilization; according to the wisdom of light, the impulse for reproduction would not continue beyond this time in the seven periods of civilization in this post-Atlantean age. However, it will go on beyond this, into the seventh millennium and possibly a little beyond. The reason will be that those cast-down Angels will be in charge and will give the impulses for reproduction.21

Is this the cause for our merging of man and machine as a training period for mankind to be able to build bodies that allow for continued incarnation? If we use a roughly 700-year incarnation cycle, then we have only about six more incarnations to complete the fulfillment of our karma and prepare these new vehicles.

The world has seen great changes before ... the Ice Age, the end of Atlantis, the ending of the Ancient Mysteries, the entering into Earth evolution of the Christ, and the Renaissance. Our age begins the merging of Mankind and Machine.

What happens after that? That would be after the “War of All Against All” when we enter the Sixth Epoch, when the Astral world “descends” into human life. Today, in the Fifth Epoch (which includes the Post-Atlantean cultural epochs), we are in the time of the descent of the etheric. The battle of our time is not about what will come but about how it will come. Who will make the call how new technologies are introduced into society and human life? It comes down to a battle for the Etheric Realm.22 It is a personal struggle to find the Etheric Christ.

Linnell

jandrewlinnell@yahoo.com

Andrew

(

), a 40-year veteran of the field of computers and related technologies, has served as president of the Anthroposophical Society in Greater Boston.

21 Steiner, Rudolf, Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, Lecture 14, GA 177 22 Thomas, Nick, The Battle for the Etheric, Temple Lodge Press, 2006

news for members & friends

of the Anthroposophical Society in America

From Macbeth to Faust

The Experience of Evil in the Age of the Consciousness Soul (and in relation to the theme of the year 2016)

by Torin M. Finser

Recently students at the Monadnock Waldorf High School in Keene, NH, offered several performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I had the good fortune of attending two of them! In this remarkable drama of betrayal, murder, sinister witches, human despair, and layer upon layer of evil, Shakespeare speaks to themes that resonate today more than ever. In 2016 we have different actors on the world stage, but the encounter with evil persists with devastating regularity, and the anguished question in Shakespeare’s drama remains seemingly unanswered: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?

Macbeth, V.iii.40-45

Despite heroic efforts over centuries, “that perilous stuff” still weighs upon the heart of mankind. Why is evil so intricately bound up with the human condition? Are we at a crisis point? How can anthroposophy help us go beyond the platitudes and hand wringing on the evening news?

In Macbeth, Shakespeare continues along a path of distinctive seven-year periods that led him to early success with his comedies and then a cathartic moment at age 35 when he lost a good friend and patron. What followed were the tragedies

Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. These dramas were composed at a time in his life we call the “consciousness soul,” and one aspect involves the human encounter with Self in all its dimensions. Perhaps no other art form is better suited to portray the forces of catharsis in the human soul as is possible in drama and the spoken word.

The human connection to the spiritual world in Macbeth is tenuous at best, and then only in the form of prophecy and the sinister words of the three witches. They can be seen as three counter forms of unredeemed aspects of the human soul, and their leader, Hecate, the counter form of the human ego, as suggested by Friedrich Hiebel. The prophecies that Macbeth takes so literally (Birnham wood, and “not of women born”) turn out other than he expected. The abstract idea becomes, through lived experience, a painful awakener of consciousness: “To know my deed, ‘twere best not to know myself.” Through death, first Lady Macbeth and then Macbeth himself find release from inner torment. A death process is part of the awakening of the consciousness soul—if not for Macbeth then at least for a comprehending audience.

In a lecture given on October 26, 1918, Rudolf Steiner speaks of two great mysteries connected with the development of the consciousness soul: “The Mystery of Death and the Mystery of Evil” (From Symptom to Reality in Modern History p.114). The death forces otherwise active in the universe are now available to mankind, in part to help us “think precisely in matters of importance” (p.115). There is so much error in common thinking today that it is hard to penetrate the real causes of events we hear of in the news, for example. The way forward is developing new clarity of thinking which will make it possible to receive the forces of Spirit Self, Life Spirit, and Spirit Man. And to do this in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the human being must “fully unite his being with the forces of death.” (p.117)

Likewise with evil, we cannot just fixate on evil all around us but need to look at evil tendencies within each of us. “Basically, all human evil proceeds from what we call

William Blake’s “Pity” (1795), inspired by a line from Macbeth: “And pity, like a naked new-born babe...“

egotism.” (Evil: Selected Lectures, p.25). In fact, Rudolf Steiner is quite emphatic that these tendencies are “present in all men” (p.118). Evil action is of course another matter, and much has occurred on the world stage due to what has been “perverted by the social order” (p.118). But once again, these forces of evil are there to help mankind “break through to the life of the spirit at the level of the Consciousness Soul” (p.118).

I have taken up some of these indications as I watch CNN or read of the latest atrocities portrayed in newspapers or on the internet. After the customary reactions of disbelief, anguish and shock, I have tried to look for evidence of this awakening to the life of the spirit. It is not easy at first. But when taking a walk later in the day, and particularly when one carries an issue over a few nights of sleep, something can start to happen in the life of the soul. One starts to ask: what is happening to humanity? Why are we bombarded with so many experiences of death, and often also evil? Why have so many people stopped being human? This then led me to wonder about conscience.

There may be many who can speak to this topic more eloquently, but for me conscience has to do with the inner compass, that point within where one can weigh and evaluate actions (and our thoughts and feelings). Even a young child will often show a remarkable ability to speak out of this place of conscience, such as “Mommy, I am so sorry I broke your favorite coffee mug.” If a three-year-old can listen to this inner voice, why can’t we?

It is easy, perhaps, to just turn off the news and leave the newspaper on the doorstep. But it is for some reason that I am on this earth at this particular time and I feel an inner obligation to stay connected, even affirm that I too am part of this world, and as such I have some responsibility for the state of humanity. If I am connected, then what happens in Missouri and in Paris is part of me. I am inwardly revolted at the all too many instances of racism that are still evident today (and not only on some college campuses). I am speechless at the frequent and wanton acts of terrorism around the world, mystified by the fundamentalist tilt in world religions...

My heart aches when friends and neighbors suffer loss due to drugs and addiction. And out of this struggle something emerges that we can call the voice of conscience.

One of the reasons I entered the teaching profession many years ago, and have continued as a faculty member in the Education Department at Antioch University New England, is that education in all its dimensions is needed more than ever. Learning is all about seeing other perspectives, looking for layers of meaning and developing understanding. It is good to be passionate about something, but that passion needs to be tempered (or enhanced) with knowledge. This is what is so often lacking in anti-social behavior today.

Is it not puzzling that over time acts of violence, even wars, have been perpetrated in the name of one religion or another? Fundamentalism has been with humankind for a long time, but somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten that the voice of God can also be heard in the stirrings of human conscience.

It seems humanity is being challenged to wake up and see that we are all in this together. Every time we judge someone else (something also known to students of anthroposophy), we are embarking on a path that can lead downhill... Instead, we need to reach out to the many, many others on this earth who are also convinced there must be a better way. We need to come together and be willing to hear the voices of those who are different and have different views from our own. Tolerance is but a first step, necessary but not sufficient. For being human means stretching ourselves to see the universal, the eternal in others. We need to engage at a different level, including non-violent solutions to shared challenges. And we need to talk less and listen more, including the deep listening that opens doors for the tender voice of conscience.

And so at the end of the above-cited lecture in From Symptom to Reality, Rudolf Steiner gives us a few very practical, yet deeply significant steps forward toward creating a new, more humane culture on this earth:

• We can work to develop the capacity to comprehend a human

The August 1-5, 2016 Goetheanum Faust conference offers simultaneous English translation of the entire drama by speech artists, as well as lectures and groups in English or translated. See www.anthroposophy.org/calendar for full details.

being symbolically. We need to learn to perceive the archetype of a person through his or her picture-nature, a warm appreciation of the other.

• We need to develop a new sense for language and the capacity to feel, to sense our neighbor through the spoken word. It will not be the exact words that matter, but rather the sensing of the region of soul from whence they come, the colors of words. Thus a new capacity for listening will emerge.

• Then one can work on sensing the emotional reactions of others to such a degree that respiration will change, one will breathe differently when in contact with one person than with another.

• Finally, and most difficult to understand, is the indication that in the realm of the will one will be able to “digest” the deeds of others, process them in a way that awakens new comprehension of the other human being. (pp.124-126)

One could summarize by saying that in the development of the consciousness soul human beings will learn to experience one another through warmth, the color of language, through respiration, and through digestion of will impulses.

This is precisely what was prophetically present in so many of Shakespeare’s plays, and what has unfolded again and again in the 400 years since his death on April 23, 1616! It is the modern dilemma: How can we continue to evolve toward greater and greater consciousness of our universal humanity? Death and even the presence of evil on this earth are in fact wise teachers that awaken the human conscience, and help us on the path toward being human.

Even though we err throughout life, our striving in the end can lift us up again:

Mephistopheles:

You’ll lose him yet! I offer bet and tally, Provided that your Honor gives Me leave to lead him gently up my alley!

The Lord:

So long as on the earth he lives,

So long it shall not be forbidden.

Man ever errs the while he strives.

— From Goethe’s Faust, “The Prologue in Heaven”

Torin Finser is General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America.

Mark Your Calendars!

Upcoming Programs through the Society

by Marian León

Offers from the Traveling Speakers Program

The Traveling Speakers Program (TSP) is a member enrichment initiative founded several years ago by the General Council. Since its inception, the program has been wonderfully developed and carried on a voluntary basis by Margaret Shipman, a member in Los Angeles.

Sometimes a community has burning questions and would like to take these up with someone for whom the subject has been a “red thread”—a topic lived with and studied earnestly over time. The TSP connects communities with speakers. There is no formal list of speakers or topics. Rather, the whole program is a work in progress, reflecting the striving in communities across the country. While continuing to support other questions living in communities, in 2016 TSP will offer two special topics in connection with initiatives from the Goetheanum:

• 2016/2017 Theme of the Year.

To support our work with the theme, self-knowledge and the experience of evil today, we offer biography workshops. Biography practitioner Leah Walker has pointed out that Rudolf Steiner gave “biography work” as a tool for social renewal. “The consciousness soul imparts the characteristic of shutting oneself off from the rest of humankind, of living more in isolation. Hence, there are greater difficulties in getting to know the other person, and in getting to trust one another; a detailed process of getting to know one another is necessary.” (How to Meet the Soul Needs of Our Time, Zurich, Oct. 10, 1916).

• International Faust Conference.

To support the summer international conference on Faust at the Goetheanum August 1–5, TSP is offering workshops on this most suitable subject for our time! Whether one attends the conference or not, the drama’s themes of temptation and striving live in our world today. What can we understand by bringing the insights of anthroposophy to the pictures presented in the drama?

How does the TSP work? It is possible to have a full weekend conference (Friday evening through Sunday noon), with talk on core anthroposophy, an artistic activity, and time for conversation. The national society pays the speaker’s honorarium and travel expenses and $50 to -

wards an artistic activity. The host community is asked to make all necessary meeting arrangements and take care of the speaker’s needs during his or her stay.

You may request a weekend for this year or next even if you have had a visiting speaker in the past. For more information, please contact Margaret Shipman at 323462-7703 (Pacific Time) or shipman2005@sbcglobal.net including your phone number.

2016 Fall Conference & Members’ Meeting

This year’s annual conference and AGM will be held October 6–9 at Threefold Educational Center in Chestnut Ridge, NY. The core planning group, Barbara Renold, Abigail Dancey, Laurie Portocarrero, Ray Manacas, Virginia Hermann, Torin Finser, and Marian León, began meeting in December to talk about themes and intentions for this year’s conference. Several threads are being carried as the program comes into expression:

• The evolution of consciousness as expressed in drama.

Under Barbara’s direction, speech artists and eurythmists are rehearsing scenes from Oedipus Rex, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and The Soul’s Awakening, and these will be performed throughout the conference. Thank you to Creative Speech North America for a grant to help fund this work!

• Self-knowledge and the experience of evil today. Presentations will work with this Theme of the Year as we strive to birth the consciousness soul individually and within our communities.

• An integrated weekend experience. Finding a way to integrate the members’ meeting within the entire weekend experience by placing the various reports within the context of the conference rather than as a separate event.

And how these threads can support our conversations on the life and cultivation of anthroposophy within the Anthroposophical Society in America.

Virginia Sease and Joan Sleigh will join us, and we will have the opportunity to thank Torin Finser for his years of service and welcome the new General Secretary.

The planning group invites you to participate with us in our study preparation. We are currently working with Lecture 3 in Michaelmas and the Soul Forces of Man. Watch your email for announcements to meet by phone or online to share in the preparation for this fall event!

Annual Group & Branch Retreat

September 16–18 is the date for the third annual group and branch retreat on “The Life, Nature, and Cultivation of Anthroposophy.” This year we will be working with Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts. The retreat will be held at Rudolf Steiner House in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Marian León (marian@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Programs.

Collaborative Leadership for the Anthroposophical Society by Torin M. Finser

As reported several times over the past three years, in being human , at our AGM meetings, and even in the recent New Year’s letter, our Society has taken steps toward implementing a leadership team to better direct and serve the US Society, our membership, and the needs of our time. Having gone through an extensive search process, a refinement of job descriptions and other preparations, the individuals are now in place and ready to take up the responsibilities of the Society in a new way. Thanks to a special grant from the Council of Anthroposophical Organizations (CAO), Katherine, Marian, Deb, and Torin

ASA Leadership Team, Jan. 2016: L-R, Katherine Thivierge, Marian León, Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Torin Finser

were able to meet in Ann Arbor for several days in January to orient, organize, and plan for the 2016 year ahead.

The picture that has motivated the General Council in establishing such a team is that of collaborative leadership. Rather than relying on a single individual or two working in concert with our dedicated volunteers serving on the General Council, the new imagination empowers individuals with very specific areas of expertise who will work closely together as a group in leading the day-to-day life of the organization. Long ago we identified programing, development, and operations as three key areas of focus, as well as the representation of the Society, both nationally and internationally, that is made possible through the efforts of the General Secretary. The cycle of meetings for the three directors will be weekly by phone and bimonthly in person, again made possible by the CAO grant. Once a month the leadership team will join with the chair of the General Council and the General Secretary in a meeting of the executive committee to plan agendas of the Council and address specific issues as needed. The Council in turn will continue to meet once a month by phone but only twice a year in person due to budget constraints. As stated before, the Council thus hopes to become more strategic and less operational.

In the meetings of the leadership team held recently at the Rudolf Steiner House, we began by looking at our own experiences of group work in the past and the characteristics of successful collaborative teams. We then had a candid conversation regarding the strengths and challenges we each bring to this work. We began looking at the difference between management and leadership, and then went on to focus on how the LT will work internally (agenda planning, communicating, decision making, working with differences, etc.). We spent time on reporting expectations, both to the Council and the membership, and then looked at goals for 2016, both for the individual areas of responsibility and as a leadership group. Finally, we spent time crafting a mandate for the LT that will be presented to the Council for adoption in February, so that the LT has both the responsibility and the authority to set direction, carry out tasks, make decisions, and act on behalf of the Society within the confines of policy, budget, and mission. We looked at accountability and a cycle of regular review as well as yearly evaluations. The conversations were detailed and at times expansive, candid, and supportive. This was possible due to the level of mutual respect members of the LT carry for one another, as well as their incredible dedication and passion for the work of the Society.

We are still in a period of seriously limited resources, but that has not stopped the Society from evolving its leadership forms and preparing to meet the future. It is a strong hope that in the years to come the membership will increasingly benefit from the work of these dedicated individuals who have agreed to serve on this collaborative leadership team. Through this work we also hope to open more and more opportunities for those who have not yet found the Society and help them connect with the many resources available to humanity through anthroposophy. As with all those active in groups and branches around the country, we strive to practice servant leadership and model new ways of working together in a world longing for fresh social impulses.

General Secretary Search & New Council Members

In a December 15th letter to all ASA members, Chair of the General Council Dennis Dietzel advised that a search process is underway for an individual to succeed Torin Finser as General Secretary:

“As many will remember, Torin Finser was asked to serve as General Secretary in the summer of 2007 and is now nearing the end of his third term. He has asked that 2016 be a transition year so that there is time to not only select the next person but also for him to advise and support the new person in the months leading up to the formal transition at the AGM in October.

“The General Secretary is often seen as the face of the Society, representing anthroposophy to members and to the world, but of particular interest in this selection process is to find a candidate who can work well with the General Council as well as with the three ASA directors: Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Director of Development; Marian Leon, Director of Programs; Katherine Thivierge, Director of Operations.

“Following the agreed upon process used in 2007, a General Secretary nominating committee has been established. The Nominating Committee consists of one member at large from each region selected by their representative regional council and two members of the General Council, one of whom is a regional representative. In the absence of an Eastern Regional Council, the General Council selected the representative from this region. The following individuals have agreed to serve: Carla Comey

– General Council Member at Large; David Howerton –Central Regional Representative; Rudiger Janisch – Eastern Regional Representative; Micky Leach – Regional General Council Member; Jannebeth Röell – Western Regional Representative.”

The new General Secretary’s initial term is four years beginning at the October 2016 Annual General Meeting. In regard to changes in the General Council Dennis writes:

“We would like to give a heart-felt thank-you to Joan Treadaway and Virginia McWilliam for their service to the General Council (GC) of the Anthroposophical Society in America. We also give a hearty welcome to Dwight Ebaugh, Micky Leach, and Dave Alsop.

“In group work we all have had the experience of getting stuck in difficult issues with our co-workers, and this happens on occasion with the Council. Virginia has a way of bringing an imagination at such moments that helped lift our thoughts out of the rut and shed light that allowed us to move forward. We are also grateful for Virginia’s tireless efforts to help evolve the Society library. We wish her well in her new chapter as a grandma!

“Joan served many years as Western Region representative on the GC. She brings a deep commitment to anthroposophy and a beautiful sensitivity to all who cross her path. Through her connections with so many human beings she helped the Council navigate difficult situations with grace. Micky Leach, who introduced as a member of the Western Region Council in a recent issue of being human, replaces Joan as its GC representative.

“Along with Micky, we welcome Dwight Ebaugh and Dave Alsop to the Council. Dwight has served on the Council for about a year and before that on the Finance Committee, and has been instrumental in helping us through difficult financial times. Dave’s service began a few months ago and we look forward to his organizational and human insights. Please see below for short biographies of these two individuals and join me in thanking them for taking up this work.”

Dwight Ebaugh joined the Council in January 2015. He is 70 years old, married, and lives in Ann Arbor. He and his wife each have three grown children from previous marriages. Dwight holds degrees from Michigan State University (B.S. Psychology 1967 and M.A. Economics 1970) and George Washington University (J.D. 1976). During graduate school, he taught introductory

economics in a community college. After Army service (Oklahoma and Vietnam), he worked as an economist for 5 years at the Federal Reserve Board. From 1976 until he retired at the end of 2012, he was in the private practice of law in Lansing, Michigan. For ten years he was a true general practitioner with a small law firm, then for 26 years in a large firm he specialized in commercial loan documentation, real estate, and business matters.

Around 1990, Donald Melcer introduced Dwight to Rudolf Steiner and his life changed. Without knowing that it existed, he had been searching for anthroposophy since high school. He met Ernst and Katherine Katz in 1994 and participated in study groups with Ernst until his death. Dwight joined the Board of the Great Lakes Branch in 2000 and he has been active ever since. He is responsible for the Branch’s First Tuesday lecture series, and he occasionally lectures at Rudolf Steiner House on basic anthroposophical topics.

Since retiring at the end of 2012, Dwight devotes most of his time to anthroposophy: personal study, group study, First Class, Branch work and Society work. He enjoys being in nature and photography. As a member of the General Council, Dwight’s work has been focused on budget matters and, recently, the Rudolf Steiner Library. Dwight welcomes comments and questions from members at dwight.ebaugh@gmail.com.

Dave Alsop: On completion of the Waldorf Teacher Training program at Emerson College in England in 1974, Dave began his Waldorf career as a class teacher and Administrative Chairman at the Sacramento Waldorf School. In 1988 he became Development Director of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA). Shortly thereafter, in 1990, Dave was appointed Chairman of AWSNA, and he served in that capacity for eleven years. Following that, he established the Online Waldorf Library website, worked at RSF Social Finance and the San Francisco Waldorf School, and currently is the Assistant Director at the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training. Dave has served on the Waldorf Schools Fund since 1984, and is also a Trustee of the Waldorf Educational Founda-

Micky Leach

Dwight Ebaugh

Dave Alsop

tion and the member-at-large of the AWSNA Teacher Education Network. He teaches the Threefold Nature of Social Life and Philosophy of Freedom courses at BACWTT. Dave became a member of the Anthroposophical Society in 1977 and joined the First Class in 1984.

Change, and love, and loving change

by Deb Abrahams-Dematte

I’ve been thinking a great deal about change lately. How we tend to resist it. And how it happens anyway. It’s so hard sometimes to relax into change and be open to what the future brings, but really, what choice do we have? In my view, it’s worthwhile to try to move through together, as gracefully and kindly as we can manage.

The Anthroposophical Society is in a period of intense change. And our times cry out for the knowledge and action coming from Rudolf Steiner’s insights. So how we engage with and move through that change will make all the difference in the world.

Leaving a Legacy of Will

We are blessed, for Steiner gives us many clues and assures us of much support: For everywhere out of the spiritual content of the Anthroposophical Movement warmth comes to give us courage, warmth which can be capable of bringing to life countless seeds for the spiritual life of the future… (Opening lecture of the Christmas conference, 12/24/1923)

Then there’s the quality of love. It weaves through our intentions and our actions, but it also comes up against fear: of change, of loss, of the unknown. Again, what choice do we have but to face that with open hearts and open minds? In the same lecture, Steiner addresses this: The Anthroposophical Society will only endure if within ourselves we make of the anthroposophical movement the profoundest concern of our heart. If we fail, the Society will not endure.

It has been a challenging year in the life of the Society, one that has demanded flexibility, open-mindedness, and new ways of thinking and doing for everyone. It is a chance for us to remind ourselves and one another about the loving impulse which underlies our common work.

Our work together as a human community provides the connections, wisdom, and momentum we need to bring love and healing to the Society and the world. With your support and participation in the life of the Society, you are joining with others and helping to pave a path forward.

We feel much love for and from our members, and response to the end of year appeal exceeded expectations, with 275 gifts totaling over $35,000. We are grateful for the generosity and encouragement of those who contributed. The sustainability of the Society depends on healthy rhythm and results of membership and fundraising efforts.

Gifts to the Society provide needed support as well as inner and outer momentum, inviting the spiritual world to collaborate with us in our striving. In this way, we are building a healthy organization that is able to fulfill Rudolf Steiner’s vision for the Society.

Challenge Grant: As we go to press, your contributions have brought us very close to qualifying for the $25,000 challenge grant offered by Rudolf Steiner Charitable Trust. Thank you all, and thanks to the Trust!

We appreciate the thoughtful concern, deep interest, care, and support of all kinds which flow from you, our members and friends. As together we face change with love and knowledge, we will grow in healthy and unexpected ways, fulfilling our destinies and serving the world.

Deb Abrahams-Dematte (deb@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Development.

Winter Journey to Fairbanks, Alaska!

by Karine Munk Finser

The unexpected and profound may be met in unusual places. Torin and I flew in a small propeller airplane over darkened earth dappled with white snow and beauteous mountain tops, following a pink horizon that was strangely comforting in this stark contrast. The sun was slowly rising before it would slowly set, and the light was therefore far more precious, a friend to accompany us into a remote place, in the Arctic North: Fairbanks, Alaska.

There is a silence in such a vast place, where people live in homes and cabins tucked away behind frosty hills, and roads are lined with thousands of birches and black spruces, and the eye is freed to see into far distances of space, not into blues but into blacks, nuanced by different degrees of dark, and the white snow reflecting any light source, both by day and by night.

So it was that we discovered that also here anthroposophy lives, if not in great numbers certainly in real depth. We were scheduled to meet some members in the Florence Bates Memorial Library for tea and conversation. Our host Karl Hough drove us through the afternoon darkness, down icy hills and around nearly invisible white corners, then through permafrosted forest where the mountain hinders the sun’s passage. A left turn into a narrow driveway where snow-clad trees bent down to us, and there we saw the luminaries, little candle-lit vessels, leading us deeper into the woods to the library. There, a small cabin door opened and warm faces and a scrumptious spread welcomed us. Inside, we met with Karl joined by Tal Harlan, Chelsi Espinosa, Stephanie Graf,

and Deborah Bennett (joined by Cassie Jackson in the center photos.) Hundreds of anthroposophical books lined the walls around this small circle where we heard of the work of this group and the tremendous things shared in this small cabin in the North.

Recently they had met here, every evening of the Holy Nights, to study The Gospel of Luke according to Rudolf Steiner, and here they had welcomed many friends including Sergei Prokofieff. And many had traveled to conferences and taken courses and degrees to deepen their capacities, preparing for bringing a carefully nurtured Waldorf impulse to Fairbanks.

We were moved by this group of people and the evening was unforgettable. We ended with Torin speaking of the Theme of the Year, and we said goodbye with heartfelt wishes to return again one day to this library so full of light and warmth in the middle of such great outer darkness.

Karine Munk Finser is an artist and coordinator of the Renewal Courses at the Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, New Hampshire. She is pictured with her husband Torin Finser at left.

Library Reopens; Circle of Friends Hard at Work!

Librarian Judith Kiely and assistant Nadia Bedard reported on the Rudolf Steiner Library reopening on the library’s blog ( library.anthroposophy.org), and Margaret Rosenthaler of the new Rudolf Steiner Library Circle of Friends has provided a background report on their work. Please read and lend your support! – Editor

December 8, 2015: We’re back!

Although we are still unpacking, we are ready to fill new requests for library materials, and receive materials you wish to return. You may also renew items you have checked out unless another borrower has requested them. Just phone, email, or text us:

(518) 944-7007 (voice & text) rsteinerlibrary@gmail.com

Hours: Thu-Fri-Sat: 10am-3pm

Mail library materials to be returned to: Rudolf Steiner Library

351 Fairview Avenue, Suite 610 Hudson NY 12534-1259

Because members were enthusiastic about borrowing books for a full year when we closed in 2013, we will continue this practice. Materials can also be renewed for 6 months. One exception: materials will be subject to recall after 3 months if requested by another borrower.

We had hoped to offer free mail-order lending in the coming year, but are unable to do so. Mail borrowers will need to continue to pay the round-trip postage fees for mailorders. Library rates range from $2.59 for 1 pound to $6.91 for 10 pounds. Most orders are within the 1–10 lb. range. We are in the process of updating our PayPal account to accept postage reimbursements, but you may still pay for postage by mailing us a check or stamps. Research services will be available as time permits. The first half-hour of research is free to members, and thereafter is $30/ hour with a $15 minimum charge.

Due to the substantial reduction to the 2016 Anthroposophical Society in America budget, we are in straitened financial circumstances. Please donate what you can. [Online use the “Library Donation” link on the right side of the Library page.]

Our new Rudolf Steiner Library Circle of Friends is working to obtain tax-exempt status. Charitable donations to the Friends will directly support library services and programs, along with facility, equipment, and materials collection needs. We’ll keep you updated on the Friends’ progress.

January 11th: Volunteers in Action

… Yes, our library is back. And we couldn’t have done it without the generous and capable support of all our volunteers. In the six weeks from when we moved into our new location in Hudson, NY on November 10, 2015 until the Christmas holidays, nineteen volunteers from the community worked to get the library up and running. We started tracking volunteer hours with the free online program Track It Forward, and the total hours people contributed over those six weeks was 120!

Thank you to all of our volunteers: Ann Finucane, Raimond Flynn, William Furse, Branko Furst, Caroline Gordon, Karin Haldeman, Mary Haley, Mary Linda Harrington, Seth Jordan, Tom Jordan, Emma Kiely, PatRick Kiely, Martin Miller, Tommy Moore, Christina Porkert, Maggie Paholak, Tim Paholak, Nathaniel Williams, and Jen Zimberg.

The 120 hours does not include all the time that the Friends have been working to get established so they can raise funds to supplement the $60,000 budget allocated for the library in 2016. Thanks to the Friends for their diligent labors: Harold Bush, Raimond Flynn, Joyce Gallardo, Karin Haldeman, Martin Miller, Robert Oelhaf, Christina Porkert, Margaret Rosenthaler, Douglas Sloan, and Nathaniel Williams. Thanks also to General Council member Dwight Ebaugh and Director of Operations Katherine Thivierge for their careful work as the Council’s new library committee.

Volunteers Martin Miller and PatRick Kiely hang our sign.

Library ass’t Nadia Bedard checks out a book; Martin Miller sands the service desk.

Volunteer Tommy Moore sorting new periodicals.

Volunteer Tim Paholak re-shelving pamphlets.

The work continues, and we still need you. If you’d like to volunteer, contact the library or fill out our online application form [click “Volunteering” at the top of the Library blog page at library.anthroposophy.org ]. There’s a variety of jobs you can help with.

— Judith Kiely and Nadia Bedard

News from the Rudolf Steiner Library Circle of Friends

After two years of tribulations and trials since the Library moved out of the Carriage House in Harlemville, it finally re-opened in a dry, environmentally appropriate facility in Hudson, NY on November 28th, 2015.

The transition was a rocky one. There were even those who questioned if the collection could be saved given the effects of poor storage conditions at the carriage house. After the move to the temporary Philmont location in 2014, staff and volunteers made significant progress in preserving the collection by cleaning and repairing damaged books, binding hundreds of pamphlets, refoldering thousands of typescripts, and reboxing hundreds of periodicals. Library staff continues to test materials for mold, and they still find items that need to be removed or replaced. Due to financial constraints, the preservation/book repair project has not been finished. When the first location to which the library moved proved inadequate, the books spent another year in storage. Much volunteer time was spent in the search for a second location as the requirements of that space shifted.

Members in the local area met in November to review the process as well as our interactions with the Council of the Anthroposophical Society around matters concerning the Library. Dwight Ebaugh, current Council member, Marian Leon, and Maurice York also attended the meeting.

At present, the financial challenge of the Society threatens to make the continuation of the Library’s work unsustainable. The budgeted amount for the library has been decreased from $150,000 to $60,000 for 2016. And as a result, the librarian’s position (Judith Kiely) has been reduced from fulltime to 15 hours per week, which allows her an assistant for routine tasks for part of the year. The director’s position (Maurice York) has been eliminated.

To support the present and future operations of the library, the Rudolf Steiner Library Circle of Friends has formed and has been meeting regularly since September 2015. The first priority is to fund-raise directly for the Library — particularly to make up the difference for the librarian’s salary, but ultimately to put library finances on a stable footing. We are currently working with the General Council to determine the details.

Although the group is mostly from the local area at the moment, we see ourselves as a small slice of a larger group from across the country joining together to support the Rudolf Steiner Library, this important resource which is indispensable to the life and mission of anthroposophy in North America.

— Margaret Rosenthaler

Reimagining America: A Threefold Working Conference

Almost a century has passed since Rudolf Steiner presented ideas on the threefold nature of our society, and it is almost thirty years since the Chicago conference with Manfred Schmidt-Brabandt which initiated Social Sciences Section work in North America. What can a threefold, spiritual perspective offer the issues of our time? The established order is based on the dominance of economic interests which have captured politics and culture through an ideology of materialism and power. Yet a new order is emerging. The Social Sciences Section and the Council

of Anthroposophic Organizations invite those who are ready to co-create in the spirit of renewal to a conference in Kimberton, PA, July 8-10, 2016. A prior understanding of social threefolding concepts will be necessary. In small groups and sessions we will formulate responses to burning questions of our time. Gerald Häfner, co-leader of the Section for Social Sciences at the Goetheanum and former European Parliament member, will join us. Contact Claus Sproll (claus@sproll.net) or Chris Schaefer (christopherschaefer7@gmail.com) for more information.

Unpacking and shelving with lazuring lighting up the walls behind.

Martin Miller troubleshooting the computers.

Encountering Our Humanity

Arie van Ameringen

A major conference, Encountering our Humanity: From Knowledge to Conscious Action, to be held in Ottawa August 7–14, is the initiative of Arie van Ameringen, General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Canada. He answered questions from Michel Dongois.

Threefold objective

First of all, this event is an attempt to tighten what have become rather loose connections between the Anthroposophical Society and the initiatives inspired by anthroposophy. Second, we shall underline what anthroposophy has accomplished in nearly one hundred years of existence. Finally, and most importantly, we shall explore how we can prepare for the future. How can the anthroposophical— the universal human—impulse be experienced and put into practice in daily life? Can we together find answers that traditional ways of thinking can no longer supply? Can we bring a humanizing (spiritual) quality to the various fields of daily activity?

These questions are fundamental if human evolution is to lead to a renewed connection with the spiritual world. The ability to enter so deeply into the soul of another human being and to feel that I actually suffer his or her pain—this is a quality belonging to the future sixth epoch; and yet I can already begin to prepare myself for this eventuality by cultivating a rich inner life. If I am able to transform myself, I shall be better equipped to help another human being—to begin with by simply learning to accept that being as he or she is. Rudolf Steiner refers to this in the fourth and fifth lectures of his cycle From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (GA 185), stating that in our present age of the consciousness soul, life must become penetrated through and through with ideas that have their origin in the spiritual world.

What our Michaelic era demands

That we move from knowledge into the realm of conscious activity! Information about anthroposophy is widely available today, and as anthroposophists we have

certainly quoted Steiner profusely during the course of the 20th century! Now that we have amassed this wisdom, what do we do with this legacy? We must do more than remain content with the knowing: we must experiment with anthroposophy in our lives and see how it can inspire us in our deeds. Here we enter into the how, and this always carries with it the danger inherent in the how of acting according to prescribed formulas. For example, if I choose to work as a Waldorf teacher or an anthroposophical doctor, I must ask myself whether I have really made the necessary effort to connect with the living source of anthroposophy, or am I merely a technician applying a prescribed methodology. Is my activity still relevant and does it respond to the needs of our epoch?

We must bring anthroposophy into a new phase, a phase of conscious activity. Act with discernment and sensitivity, and you will soon see whether or not your deed was morally just. You may have to make adjustments as you go along, being aware that you are bound to the consequences of the deeds you perform. This means finding the morally right path through heart-connected thinking rather than by responding to outer imperatives. Extensive examples of this are to be found in The Philosophy of Freedom, and the exercises contained in the Foundation Stone Meditation can also be of great help.

The conference place in a series of events

Things are coming together in a time-space convergence. As far as space is concerned, consider the actual location. Ottawa is the capital city of a country that is officially bilingual, and historically Ottawa is a meeting point on the North American continent. For centuries First Nations Peoples have held a small island in the Ottawa River to be a sacred meeting place. The city itself is the result of a compromise directly connected with the history of Canada—a capital situated midway between Montreal, the French city, and Toronto, the English city. Something of the intellectual soul is still living in North America due to the French influence. The very history of Ottawa, with its diversity of influences, seems to point towards the possibility of building a community of the future. As far as convergence in time is concerned: 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the writer whose plays most vividly depict the multiple facets

Arie van Ameringen

of the human being, and the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz was published four centuries ago. The year will also see Goethe’s Faust performed at the Goetheanum, where a Michaelmas conference will be held as well. Faust: contemporary man’s confrontation with evil. All of this prompts us to strengthen, within ourselves and also with the help of others, that “awareness of our humanity” which is the unique contribution anthroposophy brings to the world and to evolution.

Conference Information

Encountering our Humanity will be held at the Cité Collégiale in Ottawa from August 7th to 14th, 2016. The event is planned to correspond with the rhythm of the week: Sunday, words of welcome and opening lecture; Monday, biography and karma; Tuesday, pedagogy; Wednesday, medicine; Thursday, our earth and the sciences; Friday, the arts and architecture; Saturday, community building; Sunday, religion, spirituality, meditation. Woven through the week will be study relating to the General Anthroposophical Section and artistic workshops.

Six members of the leadership at the Goetheanum will be among the keynote speakers: Bodo von Plato, Paul McKay, Seija Zimmermann, Constanza Kaliks, Joan Sleigh, and Marianne Schubert. There will also be several contributors from North America. Detailed information is on the conference sites: www.encounteringourhumanity.ca & www.alarencontredenotrehumanité.ca

Youth Section

The Youth Section in North America plans to interweave its work with the larger conference program. It will be an international opportunity to gather and explore spiritual questions and demands of our time. Themes we

are working with include technology, the criminal justice system, and love. We are in planning and welcome participation on all levels! Contact Ariel-Paul Saunders [ aripaulster@gmail.com ] with interest and questions!

A Call for Participant Research

“This is indeed written in the karma of every single anthroposophist: Be a person of initiative… This should stand written in golden letters, constantly before the soul of the anthroposophist….

Rudolf Steiner August 4, 1924

These words inspired many to undertake anthroposophical work. Encountering Our Humanity will include daily afternoon sessions where members may present personal research initiatives, to be shared and heard by anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists alike.

Criteria: Research must have an anthroposophical foundation, and should include an organized rationale which expresses a research subject and its significance to anthroposophy and/or society in general. The sections of the Anthroposophical Society serve as a good guideline for research topics. Research topics from the various sections include but are not limited to anthroposophic medicine, education, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, General Section studies, art, medicine, and architecture.

Presentations will last a total of twenty minutes in length, with the last five minutes as a question and answer period. Presentations can take any form deemed suitable for the subject. For example, a eurythmy presentation could include audience participation in eurythmy, or a presentation on architecture could include a slide show with various types of architectural motifs. For more information or to receive a participant research application form, please contact John Bach [ jbbach1@yahoo.ca ].

New Members of the Anthroposophical Society in America, recorded 8/17/2015 to 2/22/2016

Alina Acevedo, Austin, TX

Tiffany Aguilera, Tucson, AZ

Michael S Alberts, Albuquerque, NM

Lynzie A Allyn, San Diego, CA

Steve Andrews, Los Angeles, CA

Koronado S Apuzen Jr., San Jose, CA

R. Gary Bakelaar, Allendale, NJ

Katelynn Benvenuti, Oakland, CA

Tia Black, Arlington, TX

Rachel E Bleicken, Woodbridge, VA

Alex C Boshell, Evanston, IL

Thomas Brantley, Cheyenne, WY

Cathryn R Bump, Richmond, VA

Dana Burns, Eagle, WI

Linn Rayna Casey, Olympia, WA

Larry Chasin, Summit, NJ

Marissa Chin, Chestnut Ridge, NY

Christopher B Coffey, Arden, NC

Gary Comstock, Clinton, NY

Kate Cotton, Franklin, TN

Lori Daniels, Denver, CO

Harold Jack Danner, Auburn, WA

Heidi Davidson-Drexel, Portland, ME

Elizabeth A De Lorimier, Ashland, OR

Christian Michael DiVittorio, Ashfield, MA

Alecia Dodge, Goleta, CA

Suzanne Drinen, Anchorage, AK

Dan Dugan, San Francisco, CA

Jeffrey Duke, Essex Junction, VT

Kathleen Eagan, Corrales, NM

Jessica Eicher, San Francisco, CA

Jose J Esparza, Sacramento, CA

Maria Magdalena Bisarello Esposito, Ranchita, CA

Kelly Riney Feary, Arnold, MO

Carrie Fitz, Worcester, VT

Rana Fowlie, Victorville, CA

Noelle Frerichs, West Bloomfield, MI

Debra Gambrell, Sebastopol, CA

Kristen Garnett, Saint John, NB

Jessica E Gebhardt, Yarmouth, ME

Paul Gebhardt, Yarmouth, ME

Jan Roman Gerhard, Copake, NY

Philip Michael Goldsmith, San Anselmo, CA

Eleonora Gomez Maugere, Fairfax, CA

Judith Graff, Kensington, MD

Jennifer Gruenhagen, Cincinnati, OH

Isabela Guardia-Ferragutti, San Jose, CA

Joiline Hardman, Pasadena, CA

Jennivieve K Harper, Aptos, CA

Shenandoah Herda, Anchorage, AK

Morgan Elizabeth Heringer, Fair Oaks, CA

Elena Hirsu, Spring Valley, NY

Lindy A Hoeft, South Charleston, WV

Jennifer Hudziec, Stoddard, NH

Jennifer Janota, Ashland, OR

Ryan Morgan Keisling, Cazadero, CA

Jennifer Kennerk, Fryeburg, ME

Neal Kennerk, Fryeburg, ME

Matt E Kenyon, Pasadena, CA

Julia M Kerr, Keene, NH

Laura Kohlhaas, Longmont, CO

Lori Kulik, Lincolnwood, IL

Claudia Kunz, Austin, TX

Steven G. Kvinlaug, Kvinesdal, Vest-Agder

Peter Gerard Lemire, Sandwich, MA

Rachel Loshak, Kingston, NY

Lisa Lynde, New Orleans, LA

Stefanie Mancia, Rego Park, NY

Andrea Renae Marrapodi, Goleta, CA

Linda Mathes, Stevens Point, WI

Kaylin McCarthy, Hardwick, VT

Patrick J McCarthy, Hardwick, VT

Dawn McCoy, Charlottesville, VA

TreeAnne McEnery, Moscow, PA

Lisa T McManus, Belmont, MA

Kristin Swain Mellen, Marblehead, MA

David Merchant, North San Juan, CA

Jillian S Michelsen, Levittown, NY

Jo Mitchell, Boulder, CO

Jane L. Moore, Phoenixville, PA

Tommi S Morgan, Langley, WA

Dennis Lee Morrissey, Long Beach, CA

M Mueller, Williamsburg, VA

Jan Nelson, Fargo, ND

Monika S Nenko, El Sobrante, CA

Maya D Neumann, Portland, OR

Chelsea Niehaus, Vincennes, IN

Kristen Owenby, Knoxville, TN

Linda Park, High Falls, NY

Joyce A. Parker, Center Valley, PA

Carrie Patterson-Burchett, Akron, OH

Lee E Pearson, Milwaukie, OR

Rising S Percey, Oakland, CA

Will Pflanze, Knoxville, TN

Sacha Picerno, Reno, NV

Kevin Pinson, San Jose, CA

Lucas Plumb, Santa Rosa, CA

R. Thomas Poppe, Louisville, KY

Timothy C Price, Keene, NH

Diana M Ramirez, Saint Louis, MO

Elizabeth O. Rich, Salem, VA

Elizabeth Riungu, West Kingston, RI

Matthew L Robertson, Lexington, KY

Bonnie Reinhard Rogers, Knoxville, TN

Deborah Rogers, Chicago, IL

Jessica Rolph, BOISE, ID

Sarit Ronen, Copake, NY

Pat Rossi, Winchester, NH

Ralph Rossi, Winchester, NH

Marin Runje, Irvine, CA

Jeffrey M Saarman, San Francisco, CA

Rubeena K Sandhu, Vernon, BC

Jennifer E Santos, Titusville, NJ

Vanessa Santos, Almada, Almada

Anna Scalera, Marblehead, MA

Aletha M Schulz, Driftwood, TX

AJ Scialfa, Bellingham, WA

Gina A Shannon, Sedro Woolley, WA

Matthew C Shannon, Sedro Woolley, WA

Christine Shaw, Belchertown, MA

Anna K Silber, Chestnut Ridge, NY

Lilian C De Carvalho Andrad Simões, San Rafael, CA

Baruch J. Simon, Carbondale, CO

Brenda Wolf Smith, Baltimore, MD

Raj Solanki, Colorado Springs, CO

Carol Spindler, Keene, NH

Valerie St. John, Cambridge, MA

Joellyn St. Pierre, Virginia Beach, VA

Joshua H Stevens, Scott AFB, IL

Nadya Thompson, Santa Fe, NM

Alexander Tuchman, Floyd, VA

Laura Tucker, Riverdale, NY

Andrea Vander Pluym, Berkeley, CA

Vasilica Vascu Hall, Oakland, CA

Shahada S Vianzon, Sylmar, CA

Rebecca A Vollmer, San Rafael, CA

Rachael Wassenaar, Eugene, OR

Francis Weatherly, Gresham, OR

Sheila West, Crownsville, MD

Nathan Wilcox, La Mesa, CA

Mark Wildermann, Stamford, CT

Jennifer Yanover, West Bloomfield, MI

Petra Zinniker, Elkhorn, WI

Joan de Ris Allen

January 20, 1931 – August 3, 2015

written & compiled by David Adams for the Arts Section newsletter

With friends around and windows open to the stars, architect Joan de Ris Allen passed in peace last August 3rd at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Pennsylvania. Joan was the oldest child of George de Ris, himself an American anthroposophical architect and ecclesiastical designer, and his first wife Enid. Joan is survived by her two children, George Morven and Angela Temora, as well as a sister Arva and brothers Owen, John, and Raymond (Raym, who provided information on Joan’s early years).

Members Who Have Died

Liane Anastas, Northridge, CA; died 03/07/2015

Peter Clemm, Peterborough, NH; died 11/28/2015

Dolores Rose Dauenhauer, Seattle, WA; died 12/17/2015

Alan H. Drake, Augusta, GA; died 08/19/2015

Bruce L. Henry, San Antonio, TX; died 01/04/2016

Susan E. Junge, Camden, ME; died 10/16/2015

Jane Martindale, Santa Barbara, CA; died 01/20/2016

Virginia Micetich, Sun City, AZ; died 01/28/2016

Robert Patterson, Chatham, NY; died 10/26/2015

Cheryl L. Sanders-Sardello, Benson, NC; died 11/21/2015

Nihelene Slater, Spring Valley, NY; died 10/16/2015

Hermes H. Vannak, Ann Arbor, MI; died 10/14/2015

Ann B. Willcutt, Santa Fe, NM; died 05/06/2014

Because her parents’ first marriage did not last, Joan was primarily raised by her grandmother, Emily Marie Ris, living until 1945 in a house in Mahwah, New Jersey, that her father had built in the Depression. Joan finished her elementary education at Rudolf Steiner School in New York City. After more than a year at High Mowing School in New Hampshire, Joan transferred to the Sanford School in Hockessin, Delaware, that her father discovered during a stained glass commission there. She found it an appealing place with very clear values that helped her develop a more directed and serious approach to life.

Joan spent her first two years of college at Adelphi University in Garden City, Long Island, where she was inspired to study geometric drawing and related mathematical topics with anthroposophist Hermann von Baravalle, who became her mentor. Joan then decided to become an architect, enrolling in the Architecture School at Columbia University in 1949, one of the few woman in a large architectural department. Her class was able to experience a weekend seminar taught by Frank Lloyd Wright. Her thesis was the design of a stained glass studio, in a somewhat Wright-influenced style. She was also influenced by the interior and exterior design of Alvar Aalto. In 1956 Joan graduated at the top of her class of forty-seven men and three women. Among other awards, she won a fellowship to spend at least six months traveling abroad.

While at Columbia Joan became very interested in the Christian Community congregation in New York, recently founded in 1949. She volunteered to act in the Oberufer Christmas Plays there and in the process met multi-talented and accomplished anthroposophist Paul Marshall Allen,

eighteen years older, a founding member of the congregation who knew her father. They married in 1952 and spent seven months traveling the US on Paul’s 1953 lecture tour for the Anthroposophical Society, also visiting architectural work by Sullivan, Wright, and Richard Neutra (whom Joan met at his Los Angeles house). From July 1956 they traveled another seven months throughout Europe on her fellowship, buying a VW Beetle in England and viewing art and architecture from Norway to Italy, including three stops at the Goetheanum. In 1953 the couple had settled in Englewood, New Jersey, living in

“The Ark,” the large home of Joan’s remarried father and siblings, while she completed her internship with the New York firm Adams and Woodbridge, undertaking projects for ecclesiastical buildings and a small skyscraper. In 1960 the couple purchased acreage in western Massachusetts near Great Barrington from her parents. There in South Egremont they built a small house and then a studio building, in which Paul began St. George Book Service. Joan began an independent architectural practice, including houses for the new Camphill community in Copake, New York. In 1962 they met Karl König there, who told them they should join Camphill. In

Joan de Ris Allen and Paul Marshall Allen in California 1953

1966 they moved to Montvale, New Jersey, so their children could attend nearby Green Meadow Waldorf School, where Paul also taught. Joan continued her practice there, and they spent summers in South Egremont.

During this part of her career Joan designed a number of impressive buildings for the American Camphill Villages, with whom she developed many connections. After designing the first family home “Rock Crystal” for Camphill Special Schools, Beaver Run, near Glenmoore, Pennsylvania, in 1966 she was awarded the commission for the woodenshingled Rainbow Hall, the first Camphill community hall in America. She worked closely with Carlo Pietzner, who during these years, she later wrote, in a “dynamic yet harmonious, ever-patient way” “helped to develop and deepen her architectural creativity.”

Rainbow Hall provided a 150-person auditorium with stage, a chapel for Sunday services, an innovative colored-light-therapy setting (with cathedral glass donated by her father), and a variety of rooms for classes, eurythmy, therapy, and meetings. The auditorium of this striking two-story building is shaped on plan as a regular pentagon and is constructed around five large, curving laminated wood beams joined in the center. Along with several interesting houses at the same location, she later designed the Karl König School House in 1974-75, a wood-shingled building for a K-8 school for children with special needs.

Perhaps the most significant American building designed by Joan (and my own favorite American

building) is Fountain Hall at Camphill Village in Copake, for which Joan won a design competition. It consists of an auditorium and meeting hall, dressing rooms, basement chapel, and library. It was designed in 1968-1969 with the execution supervised by Walter Leicht 1969-1970 and several important details executed by Hans Kunz (including the concrete casting of the angular top of the bell tower). The many-angled exterior includes, by my count, twenty-two

distinct wall planes rising approximately two stories high with a large balustraded balcony and attached bell tower. The exterior is primarily finished in deep red stucco. Numerous irregularly angled windows, doors, volumes, niches, stairway openings, etc., are seen throughout the exterior and interior of the building. The large auditorium is irregular in shape, but basically pentagonal on plan. The foyer, balcony, rear stage, and chapel each include striking abstract and figural stained glass windows designed by Carlo Pietzner and executed together with Carl Wolff about 1970. The entrance to the impressive chapel below the auditorium is flanked by two broad, attached triangular pillars with freely sculpted capitals. From 1963 to the late 1980s Joan also designed eight or nine residences and several workshops at this location.

In July 1969 Joan and Paul with their two young children (born 1961 and 1964) moved by ship to Botton Village in Yorkshire, UK, where she co-founded the Camphill Architects firm with an ailing Gabor Talló. From then onward she was actively involved with the design of numerous Camphill buildings throughout Europe, also South Africa and further work in the United States. In 1976-78 she designed a large hall for Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, poetically named Rose Hall (or The Hall of Dawn and Twilight). Joan participated in numerous projects of the thriving Camphill Architects 1970-1989: the Chapel addition to Phoenix Hall at Camphill Newton Dee near Aberdeen (also the later Mi-

Joan de Ris Allen (Camphill Architects) Three Kings Hall 1978-80, Ochil Tower School, Scotland

Fountain Hall, Camphill Village, Copake, NY designed 1968-1969

Interior, Rainbow Hall,Camphill Special Schools, Beaver Run, Glenmoore, PA 1966-67

chael Chapel); the Chapel at Sheiling Schools in Hampshire; Tourmaline Hall at Camphill Grange/Oaklands; the Community Center at Botton; Three Kings Hall at Ochil Tower School in Scotland; Kristofferhallen at Camphill Vidaräsen Landsby in Norway; and Dawn Hall in Mourne Grange Village in Northern Ireland.

Joan performed a great service for all lovers of anthroposophical architecture by compiling in her well-illustrated 1990 book Living Buildings: An Expression of Fifty Years of Camphill, a documentation of all Camphill halls and chapels designed from the original Camphill Hall near Aberdeen in 1961-62 up through the end of the 1980s. With her husband Paul, Joan also co-authored a succession of three other valuable books later in the 1990s, The Time Is at Hand! The Rosicrucian Nature of Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily and The Mystery Dramas of Rudolf Steiner (1995), Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures: A Modern Spiritual Path (1996), and Fingal’s Cave, the Poems of Ossian, and Celtic Christianity (1999), as well as her editing the translation of the significant 2007 SteinerBooks publication, Rosicrucianism Renewed: The Theosophical Congress of Whitsun 1907

After Botton, Joan and Paul lived at Camphill Newton Dee near Aberdeen, Scotland, 1975-1987; then in Norway, then Ireland, then Scotland again. After the death of Paul in 1998, two years in Norway, and her return to the U.S. in 2002, Joan joined Camphill Kimberton Hills and continued to work on the design of new buildings in various locations, including her collaborative work with Camphill Architects on the 2007 Christian Community Chapel in Hillsdale, New York. At Kimberton Hills she worked with

the local firm Carnevale Eustis Architects and designed Serena House, the Casper Hauser Center, and Erika von Asten’s house, as well as several building renovations and addition of new colors to interior and exterior spaces including many curtains she sewed herself. Joan also supported the Art Section newsletter.

Joan and Camphill Architects were involved in the early planning of the Camphill Ghent buildings in Chatham, New York. In January 2012 Joan was one of the first residents to move in. Executive Director Deborah

the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Camphill Association of North America for her architectural and other contributions to the Camphill movement over more than fifty years (and twenty-some years as a “house mother” in European Camphill Villages). David Schwartz recorded Joan’s response to the tributes: “She told us that she was truly humbled to have been able to contribute as much as she was able to do. After her words, an impression was left in the room. One could experience the flame of anthroposophy that was alive in Joan and was a gift to all of us during her many years in Camphill.”

Grace recalls, “Joan remained connected through involvement with the colors of the buildings both inside and out, and also with the creation of the art gallery that now bears her name. And she gathered many beautiful works of art that grace the walls.

“Once she came to live here, Joan permeated every inch of Camphill Ghent with her refined consciousness and sense of beauty. And being a masterful social architect, she wove the threads of her light-filled intention throughout the entire social fabric of our community, and we feel and are blessed by her presence every day.”

On April 6, 2015, shortly before her death, Joan was presented with

Joan moved out of Camphill Ghent in the early spring of 2015 to live with her daughter and be near her son and their families in western Massachusetts; when her need for care grew too great, she spent the last three months of her life back in Camphill Kimberton Hills, in a room in Serena House that she had designed. While staying at her daughter’s house her son-in-law Don Adams, a carpenter, was constructing her well-crafted pine coffin in his basement workshop, an situation that gave rise to frequent humor. During her husband Paul’s funeral in 1998 in Aberdeen a tremendous thunderstorm had broken out, but, as the people were leaving, it blew over and gave way to a large rainbow. British artist David Newbatt made a painting of this striking moment and gave it to Joan. While on her sickbed at Kimberton Hills seventeen years later, he arrived to visit her just as they were beginning to hang this painting over her bed. So he hung it there for her. Joan’s life seemed to be full of such striking “coincidences” and correspondences. More details about it can be found in the book on Paul, A Rosicrucian Soul by Russell Pooler.

Joan Allen in her room at Camphill Ghent holding her book on the architecture of the Camphill movement, Living Buildings

ALKION CENTER SUMMER INTENSIVE COURSES 2016

Week I - June 19 - 24

Evolution of Human Consciousness through Art w/ Patrick Stolfo

An Introduction to Waldorf Early Childhood Ed.

Veil Painting | Eurythmy Modeling the Human Head in Clay

Week II - June 26 - July 1

Bringing History to Life - and Its Role in the Waldorf Curriculum w/ Karl Schurman

Creative Writing | History Seminar Nature Stories & Eurythmy for Young Children

Metalworking | Painting | Sculpture

Week III - July 3 - 8

Leading with Spirit: The Art of Administration and Leadership in Waldorf Schools, Session III - Admin. Roles and Practices w/ Marti Stewart, Mara White, Christopher Schaefer

RUDOLF STEINER | The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner

Mantric Sayings Meditations 1903-1925 (cw 268), isbn 978-0-88010-630-6, paperback, 438 pages

Reimagining Academic Studies Science · Philosophy · Theology · Education · Social Science ·

Theory of Language (cw 81), isbn 978-1-62148-126-3, paperback, 256 pages

WILLEM FREDERIK VELTMAN

SteinerBooks

www.steinerbooks.org

703-661-1594

More Than a Play of Fancy Spirit in the Works of William Shakespeare isbn 978-1-62148-141-6, paperback, 256 pages

DOUGLAS SLOAN

The Redemption of the Animals Their Evolution, Their Inner Life, and Our Future Together, isbn 978-1-58420-194-6, paperback, 352 pages