being human summer-fall 2018 by Anthroposophical Society in America

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being human personal and cultural renewal in the 21st century

Division of Labor & Artificial Intelligence (p.14) Orchestral Eurythmy: “Storms of Silence” (p.17) Introducing Waldorf, Threefolding to Indian Non-Profits in the US (p.23) The (Mirror-)Image of Thought (p.28) Art & Humanity in Metamorphosis (p.32) And the Earth Becomes a Sun (p.42) Swan’s Wings (p.44) Piercing Through the Veil of Karma (p.47) The Concord School of Philosophy (p.51) Fall Conference: New Orleans! You’re Invited! (p.52)

a quarterly publication of the Anthroposophical Society in America summer-fall issue 2018 “Threefold Being” by Michael Howard (2016) acrylic on canvas (see Gallery, page 31)

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had to decide on the typeface, paper, and binding. We met in the offices of Opero Publishing—more precisely, with Ric cardo Pinali, one of the two partners. This is where the production is based, and where it is followed step by step from the pagination to binding. We quickly agreed on all of the most important decisions, as evidently our tastes came from similar dispositions. The font we selected was Caslon 540 (used here), derived from the Linotype cut of 1902, in a special version modified by me to increase the legibility in this size and content and to get closer to the original letterpress look. We believe that the color of the Munken Pure paper (slightly off-white creme) helps with readability and has a more pleasant surface. It will be used in three different weights, depending on the number of pages in each book, so that the spines are all of similar width. Our extensive experience with special bindings led to the selection, for

the “trade edition” leather-spine bind and a light slipcas hand-numbered e the binding will be a hand-gilt top o fine, stiff, cloth-co leather is blue cal stamping on the s gold leaf. All of thi by hand at one of Ruggero Rigoldi. Initially, produ to begin at the en work on the new t ing, and naming a Thomas O’Keefe, the schedule. Now started, and all co are working to pu books on the newly

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Contents 8 10 14

from the editors book notes, podcasts, articles on the internet from the general secretary: “Division of Labor & Artificial Intelligence”

initiative!

16 17 19 20 21 23 25 25 26 27

arts & ideas

28 32 33 41

research & reviews

Seeking a Shift: Report from the North American Collegium, by Sherry Wildfeuer Storms of Silence: Interviewing Marke Levene & Barbara Richardson on orchestral eurythmy Sun Studio, Crestone, Colorado, by Jennifer Thomson Future Mysteries, by the Threefold Preparatory Group Kaspar Hauser Goes West, part 2, by Deborah Grace, Camphill Ghent Introducing Waldorf, Threefolding to Indian Non-Profits in the US, by Gopi Krishna Vijaya Announcing the Economics Group Anthroposophic Psychology Health Professions Advancing, by Adam Blanning, MD Rudolf Steiner Health Center: Flint Healing Initiative The (Mirror-)Image of Thought, by Frederick Amrine, PhD Art & Humanity in Metamorphosis, by Michael Howard Gallery: Sculpture & Painting of Michael Howard ART/capital Residency

42 And the Earth Becomes a Sun, by Sergei O. Prokofieff, review by Stephen E. Usher, PhD 44 Swan’s Wings: A Spiritual Autobiography, Part I, by Judith von Halle, review by Michael Vode 48 Piercing Through the Veil of Karma, part 1, by Luigi Morelli 51 The Story of the Concord School, by Stuart-Sinclair Weeks

news for members & friends

52 54 55 56 56 57 57 58 59 60 61 62 63-64

You Are Invited! 2018 Fall Conference in New Orleans Tuned to the “Spirit of the Time” by Deb Abrahams-Dematte Welcome to “The Anthroposopher” by Laura Scappaticci Notes from Katherine Thivierge New Members of the Anthroposophical Society in America Members Who Have Died Christopher Michael Mann Erika Asten Jane Martindale Mary Rubach Bill Toole Thomas H. Forman Here & Now—ASA Fall Conference, New Orleans, LA, October 4-5-6-7, 2018 summer-fall issue 2018 • 7

from the editors Dear Friends,

The Anthroposophical Society in America General Council John Bloom, General Secretary & President Dave Alsop, Chair (at large) John Michael, Treasurer (at large) Dwight Ebaugh, Secretary (at large) Micky Leach (Western Region) Marianne Fieber-Dhara (Central Region) David Mansur (Eastern Region) Joshua Kelberman (at large) Nathaniel Williams (at large) Leadership Team Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Director of Development Katherine Thivierge, Director of Operations Laura Scappaticci, Director of Programs

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 Proofreader: Cynthia Chelius Layout: John Beck Please send submissions, questions, and comments to: editor@anthroposophy.org or to the postal address above, for our next issue by 12/15/2018. being human is free to members of the Society (visit anthroposophy.org/join). Sample copies are sent to friends who call, write, or email us at the address above. ©2018 The Anthroposophical Society in America. Responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

Our world becomes richer and stranger every year. As someone born just barely “in the first half of the last century,” I’m sure I would be baffled and perhaps angered by much of the change if I did not have the big pictures of Rudolf Steiner’s research. These work their magic by being both large enough (back to “before time can really be spoken about”), and intimate enough (what or who is tugging at my feeling and thought all the time?), and many sided. As an unsparing observer and seemingly untiring advocate of a worthy future for human individuals and humanity as a whole, Steiner has kept things meaningful for me. It is all a chance to grow, I realize. As someone involved in a movement to reconnect with true sources of meaning and purpose—with the spirit of humanity and of the cosmos,—I’m heartened to see my fellow anthroposophists engaging the new. Concerns for the social life (for which we trot out the odd word “threefolding”) are crucial when we stop to think that human beings are, together or apart, creating our first planetary civilization. We know how to dominate, suppress, and crush each other; will we learn how to empower, liberate, and elevate each other? And technology! Soon it will be hard to know whether one is speaking with a human being or exchanging sounds with a massively data-driven computer simulation. Perhaps Steiner already got to the essential point here, too, when he advised that work on one level of reality and consciousness—in this case the level of the “self” and the new “pseudo-self”—must be approached from the next higher level. Not an easy prescription, but one that makes sense and leads us forward and upward. This issue as usual has many good and challenging things to share. Even before John Bloom’s thoughts on page 14 we have notices of books and articles and podcasts (!) including Nicanor Perlas’ forthcoming Last Stand. The initiative! section shares about our School for Spiritual Science, a new orchestral eurythmy tour taking shape, another great effort to stage those revealing mystery dramas by Steiner, plus Kaspar Hauser, art in the Rockies, how to share Waldorf and threefolding, and progress in economics, health, and psychology. (If there are still way too few of us aware of anthroposophy, there are an astounding number of clear, purposeful efforts born of it.) The arts & ideas section leads with another deep dive by Fred Amrine (page 28). If you worked through David Adams’ review of Ben-Aharon’s latest work in the last issue, you will be challenged again by the assertion that the way we currently “know” and “perceive” reality is just a stage in our evolution, and that freeing ourselves from the fixity of it (you might also say, from our “crucifixion” on it) will take us onto that higher level where our right relationship with “artificial intelligence”—and with each other—is clear. This is the bedrock of Steiner’s work. On page 32 Michael Howard shares his focus on the intertwined change processes (metamorphosis) of art and humanity. This is both essay and art gallery, and it ends with his work on a game where there are no winners and losers. Only, perhaps, co-evolvers?

After our two fine reviews, described by Fred Dennehy below, Luigi Morelli (page 47) walks us through “Rudolf Steiner’s path to the microcosm”—that is, into the depths of our own souls—in order to “pierce the veil of karma.” It is liberating to know in principle that we are not just this one lifetime, but spiritual beings who grow through the playing of repeated roles; Luigi wants to help us actually experience this reality. Finally, page 52 and the back and inside-back covers make the wonderful invitation to gather again in October, in New Orleans this time. Here & Now: Transforming Ourselves, Transforming Our World offers the ultimate esoteric: being with each other, wakefully.

Leaving a Legacy of Will

John Beck reviews The two books reviewed in this issue are each studies in Christian esotericism. The late Sergei Prokofieff’s And The Earth Becomes A Sun; The Mystery of the Resurrection is reviewed by Stephen Usher, whose reading of it occasioned a “spiritual transformation” in him, bringing him “a step closer to the essence of Christianity.” Prokofieff’s magisterial study follows the paths of Christ’s blood and body from the event of the Crucifixion, and conveys his understanding of that process in terms of three esoteric streams: the Grail, the Rosicrucian and the Manichean. Michael Vode reviews “Swan’s Wings: A Spiritual Autobiography, Part I: Childhood and Youth, by Judith von Halle, which has not yet been translated from the German. The book traces Ms. von Halle’s early personal esoteric experiences up to the time of her early adulthood, when she met the writings of Rudolf Steiner and finally felt “confirmed in her innermost life.” Judith Von Halle has received the stigmata, and she eats little or nothing. Her personal experiences accordingly bear some relation to the subject matter of Sergei Prokofieff’s review. Prokofieff, however, would not have approved of von Halle’s work, as he opposed both her writings on Steiner and the significance accorded to her experiences while he was alive, and the controversy continues to this day. We bring you both works.

The Anthroposophical Society in America announces the forming of the

Legacy Circle

Legacy giving offers the opportunity to make a gift which brings expression to your intention and love for anthroposophy into the future. Thank you to our 27 founding members, who support the Society’s future through a bequest or planned gift, and to those (next page) who have made bequests in recent years. www.anthroposophy.org/legacy

Fred Dennehy summer-fall issue 2018 • 9

www.anthroposophy.org/legacy

The Anthroposopher Podcasts from the Anthroposophical Society! Love is Greater than Loss, with Linda Bergh Is Anthroposophy Funny? with Ronald Koetzsch The Voice of Steiner, with Dale Brunsvold Search “Anthroposopher” on iPhone under the purple podcast icon, on Android phones with the SoundCloud app, or on PC www.anthroposophy.org/podcast

Rudolf Steiner Library Contact Information Rudolf Steiner Library of the Anthroposophical Society in America, 351 Fairview Avenue Suite 610, Hudson, NY 12534-1259 (518) 944-7007 (voice & text) E-mail: rsteinerlibrary@gmail.com Hours: Wed–Fri, 10am–3pm. Home page: www.anthroposophy.org/rsl Library catalog: rsl.scoolaid.net

Legacy Circle

Many thoughtful and caring members have provided legacy gifts for the Anthroposophical Society in America through their estate planning. We are humbled and deeply grateful for the gifts of these dear friends since 1992: J. Leonard Benson Susannah Berlin Hiram Anthony Bingham Virginia Blutau Iana Questara Boyce Marion Bruce Helen Ann Dinklage Irmgard Dodegge Raymond Elliot Lotte K. Emde Marie S. Fetzer Linda C. Folsom Hazel Furguson Gerda Gaertner Ruth H. Geiger Harriet S. Gilliam Agnes B. Grunberg Bruce L. Henry Ruth Heuscher Ernst Katz Anna Lord Seymour Lubin Gregg Martens Ralph Neuman Norman Pritchard Paul Riesen Ray Schlieben Lillian C. Scott Fairchild Smith Doris E. Stitzer Gertrude O. Teutsch Contact Deb Abrahams-Dematte at deb@anthroposophy.org or (603) 801-6584 for information about the Legacy Circle. 10 • being human

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Book Notes Space does not permit us to review more than a few books in each issue. This page is meant to acknowledge a few of the many others that come to our attention. Except as specified, notes are from the publishers. – Editor

SteinerBooks steiner.presswarehouse.com Music: Mystery, Art, and the Human Being; by Rudolf Steiner, translated by Matthew Barton, introduction by Michael Kurtz; 196 pp. “‘Our neurosensory system is inwardly configured music, and we experience music as an artistic quality to the degree that a piece of music is in tune with the mystery of our own musical structure.’ —Rudolf Steiner. “What is music? Steiner regards the essence of music as spiritual and inaudible to the senses. The world of tones, carried on vibrations of air, is not the essence. ‘The true nature of music, the spiritual element in music,’ he says, ‘is found between the tones, in the intervals as an inaudible quality.’ “Rudolf Steiner spoke repeatedly of music as inherent in the cosmos and in human beings. It played an important role in many forms of ritual and worship, and people once perceived a link between music and starry realm, which was seen as the home of the gods. In this unique anthology of texts, Steiner describes the realm of spiritually resonating harmonies of the spheres and our intrinsic connection to that cosmic music. He also explores the phenomenon of musical listening and experience, as well as Goethe’s approach to music.” Human Hearing and the Reality of Music; by Armin J. Husemann MD; 136 pp. “Music is not simply something we hear. We experience it and love it; it is a primal human need. If, as the pianist Alfred Brendel put it, that we are able to “take music at its word,” we confront questions that also moved the author since his adolescent years: What takes hold of me when I experience music? What reality touches me when music is playing? What happens physiologically in the human body when we experience and make music?” The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone; by Rudolf Steiner, edited by Alice Wulsin, translated by Maria St. Goar; 108pp. “‘A tone is at the foundation of everything in the physical world.’ This is one of many astonishing statements made by Rudolf Steiner in this collection of seven lectures on the inner realities of music. These lectures are an unusual treasure, since they are the only

two groups of lectures that Steiner gave primarily on music, other than the lecture cycle for the tone eurythmy course, Eurythmy as Visible Music. In the first group of three lectures, given in 1906, Steiner explains why music affects the human soul so powerfully. Music has always held a special position among the arts because it is the only art form whose archetype, or source, lies not in the physical world, as with architecture, sculpture, and painting, but purely in the spiritual world-the soul’s true home. Music thus directly expresses through tones the innermost essence of the cosmos, and our sense of well-being when we hear music comes from a recognition of our soul’s experience in the spiritual world. In the remaining lectures, given in 1922 and 1923, Steiner discusses our experience of musical intervals and shows how it has undergone profound changes during the course of evolution. The religious effects of music in ancient times and the union of music with speech are considered, as well as the origin of musical instruments out of imaginations that accompanied singing. New insights are offered on the nature of the major and minor modes and on future directions of musical development.” Education for Nonviolence: The Waldorf Way; by Torin M. Finser; 158 pp. “Education for Nonviolence describes how we can actually do something about our increasingly violent world. Few in the media draw a clear connection between the all-too-frequent tragedies we hear and read about in the news each day and the way as parents and teachers we raise and educate our children. Abstract concepts, rote learning, and standardized tests cannot develop the emotional and social intelligence our children need later in life to build relationships, contribute to society, and succeed in the workplace. The author describes how Waldorf independent and charter schools provide much-needed pathways toward wholeness—sensory and naturebased education; the arts; character education; community building; traditions of hospitality; meeting the needs of boys... to name just a few of the topics covered in this book. Waldorf schools are founded on the social ideals grounded in an abiding belief that our schools can make a crucial difference in building a future society that is less violent, more just, and truly compassionate. May this book help us rededicate ourselves to our social mission as we celebrate a century of Waldorf education in 2019.”

summer-fall issue 2018 • 11

Book Notes Other publishers Humanity’s Last Stand: Spiritual Science in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Nicanor Perlas; Temple Lodge (available late summer 2018) N IC AN OR PE R L AS “Well researched and deeply passionate, this book embodies a care for humanity that has its wellsprings in knowledge of the spiritual as well as scientific. Perlas shows that these two threads are not in conflict, as is often assumed, but rather in confluence when seen in the light of the evoluHUMANITY’S LAST STAND tion of human consciousness and new findings in the mainstream sciences. This book awakens and guides us how artificial intelligence, instead of suppressing humanity, can be a part of our healthy evolution.” —John Bloom General Secretary, Anthroposophical Society in America “Nicanor Perlas’ new book, Humanity’s Last Stand, is the most important book I have read in the past decade. With clarity and rigor, Nicanor lays out the existential threat that the current trajectory of Artificial Intelligence poses, then offers the work of Rudolf Steiner as a crucial way forward to avert the impending catastrophe. For me, the mark of a brilliant book is the impact it leaves on me. When I finished the book, I took a few deep breaths, gathered myself, then asked myself, ‘Now that I know this, how do I best live my life?’ Please, everyone, read this book, ask yourself the same question, and together, with the guidance Nicanor provides, let us build the new world we all know is possible.” —Thomas Cowan, MD, physician and author The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence

A Spiritual-Scientific Response

Expect Great Things: the Life & Search of Henry David Thoreau; by Kevin Dann; Penguin, 387 pp. “‘The stars awaken a certain reverence,’ Thoreau’s friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Nature, ‘because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.’ On Dann’s reading, Thoreau was consistently drawn to such elemental forces, present but forever inaccessible, leading him to experience, rather than reduce, the mysteries of nature. ‘Antebellum science,’ Dann writes by contrast, ‘sought to expunge ‘secrecy’—in the sense of the quiet cultivation of a mysterious sacramental relation to nature—from its practices and feelings.’ This is Dann at his most insightful. Thoreau’s life and 12 • being human

writings stood against the current of scientism that prevailed in his time and that continues to define our intellectual culture. In 1849, the year that Thoreau began his habit of taking afternoon walks, he anticipates this trend, writing: ‘Science applies a finite rule to the infinite—& is what you can weigh & measure & bring away. Its sun no longer dazzles us and fills the universe with light.’” John Kaag, New York Times Train a Dog, But Raise the Child: A Practical Primer; by Dorit Winter; 220 pp., available at amazon.com “Of course, the ultimate goals in training a dog and raising a child are different. The dog trainer wants a well-behaved, obedient dog. The parent and teacher hope that the child will develop into a compassionate, empathetic, and moral person who is able to decide out of freedom how to behave in the world. In the final chapter, Winter writes passionately about what she sees as the primary, current threat to the development of children into free, compassionate, and moral human beings. It is the erosion of the human capacity for ‘attention,’ occasioned by the kidnapping of consciousness by modern technology.” —Ronald Koetzsch, Renewal Free, Equal and Mutual: Rebalancing Society for the Common Good; Martin Large & Steve Briault, editors; Hawthorne Press “The brutal implementation of market fundamentalism generates massive human insecurity and inequality. People feel precarious and angry—afraid for their jobs, pensions, homes, children, health, wellbeing and identity. Left/right pendulum politics swings from ‘more market’ to ‘more state’. Rudolf Steiner (1863–1925) saw the dangers of this unstable ‘market/state’ duopoly. He proposed the radical alternative of healthily rebalancing society by respecting the distinctive development conditions and three-way dynamics of politics, economy and culture, respectively. Simply put, a business has a different dynamic to either a government office or a school. Including two alternative Nobel prize winners –the Sekem development in Egypt, and Nicanor Perlas; a Filipino biodynamic farmer and former presidential candidate – this anthology of 18 inspiring, practical chapters draws upon and extends Steiner’s social ‘threefolding’ thinking.”

The Greatest Gift Ever Given: A Living Spiritual Mystery: Studies in Esoteric Christianity; by Michael S. Ridenour; Temple Lodge “Michael Ridenour is a long time Waldorf high school and middle school teacher whose life interest in Goethean science and Darwin has recently led him to complete a book entitled The Greatest Gift Ever Given... As a child of a nonreligious family, Michael Ridenour found a Bible one day and began reading. Initially excited by its lively stories, he paused at the New Testament, faced with a baffling inner question: Where in the world is Christ today? An unexpected answer came during his teenage years with a spontaneous experience of the Christ being, but this only led to more questions. Later, he discovered the work of Rudolf Steiner and found the authentic vision and language needed to clarify and better comprehend his own experiences, but the questions kept coming. This book is the fruit of Ridenour’s life-long search for answers—a book that is deeply thoughtful, humorous, philosophical, and poetic.” Traveling Light, Walking the Cancer Path; by William Ward William Ward majored in English literature as an undergraduate at Columbia University before studying elementary education at the Waldorf Institute of Adelphi University. He was a Waldorf class teacher for twenty-five years at Hawthorne Valley School in Harlemville, New York. He crossed the threshold October 5, 2008, at the age of sixty-one. “William Ward has written a personal account of his encounter with brain cancer. By the skill of his craft, he has turned the personal into the universal. Since William has spent nearly thirty years as a Waldorf teacher at the Hawthorne Valley School in Harlemville, New York, he approaches cancer as a teacher would. As a teacher, he is open to learning vital life lessons from cancer. William also battles cancer, as a warrior would defend himself against an enemy that is trying to kill him. His out-of-body experience during surgery included a spiritual epiphany. That experience is the essence of William’s journey and survival. After his brain surgery he retained an indelible mark on his soul—he had been saved for a reason. William received the grace to live and tell his story. All his readers are the beneficiaries of that graceful year he had to write his story.” —Neill Reilly

Collision; by Siegfried Finser; Xlibris.com “Collision is entirely fiction. Anyone can read it purely as a novel and never have to recognize the thousands of clues hidden in the text. You and I, of course, will pick them up in the accidents, coincidences, unexplained meetings and relationships. You will no doubt recognize in Armand Dillon the cold and heartless exponent of the intellect and Lucinda Brahms as the beautiful, warm representative of the heart. The story is about their conflict and the young couple drawn into the drama through their connections. Many of you have watched me try to express the spiritual truths of anthroposophy in story form. All of my books are filled with them. My lectures were mostly composed of stories to describe the truths in living today. In stories I could most accurately reveal the three great powers at work on all of us today. I have written more than fifty such unpublished short stories: www.siegfriedfinser.com.” Why the World around You Isn’t as It Appears: A Study of Owen Barfield; by Albert Linderman “Empirical knowledge is only one side of ‘reality.’ Empirical knowledge is all about the ‘outside,’ the surfaces of objects, the matter we can see and touch. It does not speak to the ‘insides,’ the unconscious inner reality, subjectivity, feelings, and meaning that humans contribute to the world of objects we experience in our day-to-day lives. The New Enlightenment looks at the inside from that place phenomenologist Edmund Husserl termed ‘the great world of the interiority of consciousness.’ Using the insights of Owen Barfield (1898–1997) as his starting point, Linderman investigates the nature of consciousness, the Enlightenment, scientific thinking, belief, and the power of imagination. This book is for those who appreciate the insights of alternative thinkers, but feel at the mercy of an engineer neighbor, an amateur “science buff” friend, or skeptical relatives. They confidently present clear, reasoned, scientific arguments to discredit, or, at least, bring considerable doubt to the veracity of the claims of the alternative thinkers you find compelling. For you to explain why you find some alternative writers so helpful, you need to be able to articulate succinctly the theory of knowledge that undergirds them. Likely, you struggle to do so now. You should find help in this book.” summer-fall issue 2018 • 13

from the general secretary

Division of Labor & Artificial Intelligence by John Bloom In the spirit of reconsidering many aspects of economic life, questioning underlying assumptions, and finding ways of reimagining the next economy, the division of labor has received little attention. It is certainly hard-wired into the current capital-driven market economy that seeks to maximize profit. While an awareness of the consequences of this profit-seeking economy is growing, the nature of work and how to organize it lags behind even in the social enterprise world. The division of labor in its many expressions has both a natural origin and a more mechanistic application. So, it is not the concept itself that is here under examination but rather how it has been applied and, more recently, what might be considered an unintentional consequence. Since the beginning of civilization, people have engaged the world of natural resources to meet their and others’ material needs. In other words, they have created an economy. Some people have been ingenious at working with and transforming natural resources, others in organizing that work for efficiency, effectiveness, and broader distribution.1 The division of labor is an inevitable presence in both these streams and is one of those bedrock economic concepts so prevalent that one can hardly question its axiomatic function. All human beings have their own particular capacities of mind, body, and soul and thus their own relationship to other human beings and to nature. The idea of mutuality, of shared responsibility in community and the relevance and application of those capacities, is the essential foundation of economic life. Historically, there have been two primary aspects of thought regarding the division of labor. One subscribes to the inevitable efficiency of production that results from the division and specialization of labor in the service of capital. The second identifies the dehumanizing effect of 1 In his 1922 lecture cycle now titled Rethinking Economics, Rudolf Steiner spoke about two streams of value creation in the economy. Stream one is the direct application of labor to land (natural resources). Stream two is the application of intelligence in organizing labor. The development of value, while important in economic thinking, is not a central consideration in this essay, but the two streams have direct relevance for the division of labor. 14 • being human

such specialization based on the notion that the developing human being wants to learn and be whole and, thus, needs to engage in a range of activities to maintain interest in life and nourish the soul. Plato actually speaks to both streams in Republic; specialization is necessary to leverage individual capacities, but this necessity runs counter to the inherent holistic impulse of learning about the world and self. One can find elements of this argument with Adam Smith (industrialization) and Émile Durkheim (The Division of Labor in Society) as well as Karl Marx (alienation) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance). Economists have to cross paths with the human and social reality of the division of labor in understanding economic life—if they want economic thinking to be practical rather than theoretical and see labor as something other than a commodity. Such division is a natural result of how we organize work by self-governed social processes through which individual and organizational strengths are recognized in producing the material goods we need or want. Contrast this with a more extreme product-centric example of an imposed division of labor, the assembly line. Specialization and more granularity mark the progression toward singularly focused knowledge, limited activity, and the sacrifice of human creativity—all sparked by the relentless drive for efficiency. In some professions such as medicine, deep but narrow specializations have led to a kind of efficiency and effectiveness of practice that can border on the miraculous in what they can accomplish. This statement might seem to contradict an earlier one, but in the US, for example, doctors also operate in a medical-economic system that has favored these kinds of specialization and subspecialization. In a certain sense, this approach, while celebrating research and professionalism, is still organized within a mechanistic imagination. The drive for efficiency also correlates with the needs, desires, or avarice we express in the production of capital. This is the modern condition of capitalism. It has genius and sorrow. Genius is in specificity—in the ability to replace a hip or heart effectively or store vast amounts of data in ever smaller real estate. Sorrow comes in the competitive drive for profits that plays host to all this innovation with little regard for the consequences to the human beings producing it. Capital seeks its own increase even as I experience gratitude for what capital has made possible. And people are used up or replaced in capital-producing work and rarely share in the capital that accrues to the one who has the idea and organizes the labor to produce it. Here there does seem to be what I would call a disconnect that shows

itself in the ascent of intellectual property— a monetizing and extractive factor of modern industry through which a fictive claim of ownership is made on what is essentially spiritual, the idea. Just as nature does, consciousness is in constant metamorphosis and evolution. Look at the invention and constant advancement of say an item such as a laptop. It is an expression of applied intelligence over time, each stage learning from the last. Thus, to commodify one part of this developmental process is a moral breach as well as a self-interested and false claim of rights. Division of labor is a completely organic emergence in the production of goods. Within a community of work, everyone has capacities that serve economic life. For example, some are good at growing vegetables, some at making clothes, some at building. The community can recognize these strengths quickly and organize activities around them. It makes the highest and best use of skills and time, and such economic participation leads to a sense of satisfaction in the form of right livelihood. Karl Marx made an important distinction in two qualities of the division of labor: one is social and derives from mutual community agreements, the other is imposed by the needs of manufacturers and the owners of the means of production. The former is, of course, human and organic in origin; the latter is system-centered and oppressive in nature, and reduces labor to a commodity. What has yet to be addressed is a generative connection between the division of labor and the evolution of artificial intelligence, especially as applied to the production of goods and services. This is a further extension of dehumanizing labor in the service of capital. The imagination here is the movement from increasingly refined divisions or specializations to an even more reductive micro division of labor into sequences of binary (on-off) switches. Then those switches are programmed to produce mechanistic activity that imitates thought-free human actions—although, of course, it is amoral. This is a division of labor that translates thoughts—the collective memory of the history of human work—into parts devoid of feeling. What is replaced, and what is displaced? The imitation, no matter how sophisticated, is still the result of someone’s programming, although computers can now learn and program themselves accordingly as their algorithms respond to new data. In a limited way, human intelligence can be mapped, and that map can be turned into a topography of something that looks like thinking. Given the speed of computation and the management of complexity, many nearly simultaneous alternative pathways could ap-

pear intuitive. It will certainly be marketed that way, as the underlying drive is still essentially commercial—improving efficiency during the production of capital. One result of automated labor is to free people from the consequences of redundant manufacturing tasks like those that Charlie Chaplin so wonderfully characterized in his classic film Modern Times. So, there are some positive but socially challenging aspects to the application of basic artificial intelligence. The second historical aspect of the division of labor, the question of the human qualities, resurfaces as phenomenally important. If the workforce labor as we know it is replaced or transformed, what is the function of education in the context of human development? The sense of self and purpose that has come to be shaped in modern society is primarily defined by or comes as a result of what a person does rather than who a person is. This is what the existentialists were telling us back in the last century. But if this modern condition is no longer to be the case, understanding human beings and how to support them in the self- directed striving toward becoming human is a relatively new task for education. This begs a new question: Will the surplus capital generated by the economic efficiencies be made available both for this new education and for some form of real basic income to support those people who are freed from mechanistic labor? What I am really putting forward, in the spirit of opening a new dialogue at closing time, is the idea that the redemption of the long arc of the division of labor and its adverse consequences for human beings will be the liberation of capital itself. It will be liberated in service to the elimination of suffering and the further evolution of humanity. This will signify a radical transformation of capital, our economic relationships and I would say, consciousness itself. It was visionary to imagine the division of labor, to imagine that a motorcar could be mass manufactured. It was visionary to imagine that a computer could replicate aspects of human labor. There is a line of service to culture and moral intention in these visions even though they have made some people enormously wealthy and some others impoverished. With the recognition that the assembly line has been dehumanizing, and that computers are amoral, we have to rediscover our moral nature if we are to thrive beyond the artifice of intelligence. And, I do not believe there is an algorithm for that. John Bloom (john.bloom@anthroposophy.org) is General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America and vice president for corporate culture of RSF Social Finance in San Francisco. summer-fall issue 2018 • 15

initiative! IN THIS SECTION: The North American Collegium of the School for Spiritual Science— what is behind that impressive name? Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in eurythmy—goosebumps already! Sun Studio, Creston, Colorado—colors at play?! Steiner’s four “mystery dramas”—will they all come together again? A 19th-century European enigma finds a persistent place in the heart of Camphill. Why not just explain Waldorf and Threefolding ideas to dozens of smart volunteers? The Economics Group comes to the USA. Anthroposophic Psychology begins its fascinating trainings. Anthroposophic Medicine is connecting and serving.

16 • being human

Seeking a Shift

Report from the North American Collegium of the School for Spiritual Science by Sherry Wildfeuer After the re-founding of the Anthroposophical Society at Christmas 1923, Rudolf Steiner inaugurated the Letters to the Members and the Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, seeking to form “a unity and organic wholeness of the work of the Society” out of “a chaos of separate groups.” When the North American Collegium of the School for Spiritual Science met in April 2018, we realized that we have unwittingly re-created just such a fragmented configuration as Rudolf Steiner was trying to overcome. The body of Osiris has been dismembered and scattered in various groups of earnestly striving members who are trying to responsibly provide leadership. How can we help to create a unity of flow and organic wholeness in the work of the Society? And, in the spirit of the Christmas Conference in which the Society was re-founded, how can we shift our focus to welcome a new generation of active members and foster a society of initiative, whereby the insights and practices born out of anthroposophy can be made more accessible and become integrated into public life? The idea and the wish have been expressed by the Collegium to collaborate with the members of the Society and the School for Spiritual Science, the circle of Class Holders in Canada and the US, the Councils of the Canadian and US Societies, and the Council of Anthroposophical Organizations (CAO), as well as with the leadership at the Goetheanum. Various attempts have been made over the years in this direction. Now, however, with the impetus from the Youth Section, we are making a concerted effort to connect with our colleagues to create a more unified movement. As older members prepare to step back, the criteria of those who will replace them were reviewed and newly articulated in order to guide the Section Councils in selecting people who will be able to carry a more public orientation in addition to the inner work of the School. The Collegium is composed of the General Secretaries of the US and Canadian Societies and a member of the Goetheanum leadership group as part of the representation for the General Anthroposophical Section, representatives from the Sections for Medicine, Pedagogy, Agriculture, Science, Social Science, Visual Arts, Literary Arts and Humanities, Performing Arts, and the Striving of Youth. Since its inception, the work of the Collegium has been to develop a full picture of the School for Spiritual Science, which includes but is not limited to the lessons of the First Class. A small but important pamphlet called A Way of Serving, written by Penelope Baring and Rudiger Janisch and published by Mercury Press, is one fruit of this work as an orientation to the General Anthroposophical Section. The Collegium has decided to re-publish this pamphlet and make it available to all members of the School as well as those who are interested in learning about the School. At the heart of the School are the lessons of the First Class given by Rudolf Steiner to those who have become members through their own need to become more inwardly active in a common meditative path as a basis for representing anthroposophy in the world, and who have been recognized by a representative of the School in their area (known as Class Holders) as well as by the leadership at the Goetheanum. The mantras of the School were given to the members. Now they have been made available on the internet and in print to those who have not made the free decision to join the School. As such, however, these mantras are still exoteric as long as they remain mere words on a page. What makes them esoteric is the inner step of commitment to joining the School as the heart of the Anthroposophical Society, the activity of the individual in bringing the words to life within the soul in preparation for a lesson, and their sounding from one human being to another in a space in which, through

common striving, the presence of Michael can be felt. Several years ago, Virginia Sease encouraged us as a Collegium to take up as a subject of research Rudolf Steiner’s statement that each of the ancient Mysteries has been transformed through the Mystery of Golgotha and that anthroposophy is a renewal of these Mysteries. We resolved to take up this theme and encouraged others to do the same. I certainly felt called by this challenge and occupied myself in a concentrated way with the Demeter/ Persephone Mysteries and published the fruits of this engagement in the 2018 Stella Natura biodynamic planting calendar. Other Collegium members have also occupied themselves deeply with other Mystery streams, and we continue to recommend it as a fruitful avenue to learn how anthroposophy lives within the larger evolution of human consciousness and culture. Yet we realized at our recent meeting that such research is by nature individual and has its own rate of maturation with each person, so

we have let go of the expectation that we as Collegium members would produce finished results of our work according to any prearranged timeline. We will mention these individual research projects in our reports and correspondences as they emerge. Our next meeting in October will focus on preparing for the centenary celebration of the re-founding of the Anthroposophical Society, not as a remembrance, but as the culmination of 3 x 33 1/3 year cycles and the beginning of a new century of life and activity of anthroposophy. A new momentum towards unification of our movement has entered the Collegium’s work as we build on the foundation of the last 21 years and prepare for future initiatives. Sherry Wildfeuer () represents the Agriculture Section on the North American Collegium of the School for Spiritual Science. She came as a co-worker to Camphill Village Kimberton Hills in 1973, and edits the Stella Natura Biodynamic Planting Calendar (www.stellanatura.com).

Storms of Silence Interview with Barbara Richardson & Marke Levene We’ve heard about ambitious efforts to bring performance arts inspired by Rudolf Steiner to the public globally. What form is that taking?

Lemniscate Arts has been working for seven years on projects which are just coming to fulfillment. Our original intention, arising from the new mystery drama The Working of the Spirit, was to create festivals around the world. We realized that it would be wiser to bring productions forward as they were ready, and create festivals at a later time. The first step, begun two years ago, has become the first worldwide (five continents) full orchestral eurythmy performance, Storms of Silence, featuring Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and the first movement of Arvo Pärt’s 4th Symphony, with speech eurythmy on works by Dylan Thomas and D.H. Lawrence. Along the journey of creating the mystery play, a new play has come into existence written for Lemniscate Arts by the internationally recognized playwright Peter Oswald. This is a stage play, STEINER, the biography of Rudolf Steiner.

musicians. The eurythmists and speakers come from eighteen different countries around the world. The artistic direction combines the imaginative forces of directors from Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dornach, Berlin, London, and Spring Valley, NY. The leadership of the orchestra comes from Switzerland, Russian, and Italy. The driving imagination for the production as a whole comes from the USA, with strong elements from England. Where are you planning to go? What help will you need both for the whole effort and at each location?

At www.stormsofsilence.org the tour as a whole can be seen. We include much of Europe, North and South

Who is participating artistically in these projects?

In the eurythmy tour company are twentyfour eurythmists, two speakers, and forty-three summer-fall issue 2018 • 17

initiative! America, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, and Israel. A major question is asking every anthroposophical initiative, institution, group, and interested individual to spread the word. Get the dates when we are in your area or close enough to travel to, and put them on the local calendar. One unusual major question in every location is finding a commercial kitchen we can use. Lemniscate Arts and its forerunner Portal Productions have brought our own cook on our tours to help maintain the best conditions for the artists for such a demanding journey. Finding a kitchen in each place is a challenge. We also anticipate local workshops and in some locations master classes with Carina Schmid and Benedict Zweiful. Telling the world Rudolf Steiner’s life story seems very worthwhile. What are the challenges there?

The artistic challenge was to bring his life story into a stage quality not just a lecture. The great breakthrough for Peter Oswald was when he realized he could not write words for Rudolf Steiner but had to find from Steiner’s own words that which would keep the narrative moving forward as a stage play. The play has been rewritten 15 times so far and we are sure will further develop once rehearsals begin in 2019. There was great success for a symphonic eurythmy tour some years ago. What were the most important achievements and challenges of that tour, and how will this one be different?

In 2005, the biggest challenge was to find an orchestra in each venue with time for rehearsal with the eurythmists of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. We had to find big halls to accommodate a full orchestra and that meant finding much larger audiences to fill those halls. On this tour we plan to have our own orchestra accompany us which will raise the level of artistry for our two symphonic works. The New World Symphony tour had 20+ performances in 17 cities in North America and in Dornach. With Storms of Silence we plan 40+ performances in about 34 US cities. The tour overall is 80+ performances. This tour held auditions last fall for eurythmists; 156 applied to audition, 56 were invited, and 24 were chosen. For this tour we have the possibility to build on that previous experience. One Waldorf student said he didn’t really appreciate eurythmy when he was a student, but then some years later he saw the New World Symphony and realized eurythmy as a performing art was far more beautiful and powerful than he ever thought possible. In the next few years, we wish to follow on with the 18 • being human

Host, Daniel Marston, with Matthijs Dijkstra and Marke Levene at the Goetheanum in April.

two plays mentioned before, as well as another eurythmy tour coming on the heels of this one. We hope to build audiences for these arts of eurythmy, speech, and drama, as well as inspire future artists. A scholarship fund, The Thyme Arts Fund, has been started at RSF Social Finance to help with tuition (www.rsfsocialfinance.org). We have the benefit of experience, and are better funded this time, to make sure our publicity can achieve our target audience levels. An important feature will be that our ticket pricing will be middle of the road for a production with 70 performing artists. We are hopeful that people will start to work now to build support in their communities so that anyone who wants to come will be able to purchase a ticket. This will only be the third time since eurythmy was created over a century ago that it has been performed at this level locally in the USA. For those who are uncertain about affordability, especially in the USA, put $1.00 away each week from now until next March when our tour begins, and you will have enough. If that still is not possible, perhaps local groups and branches can help their members make the experience. What haven’t I asked that people should know at this point?

As fine as pedagogical eurythmy, or healing as curative eurythmy, or hopefully inspiring as artistic eurythmy can be by local groups, if you have never see orchestral eurythmy there is another dimension to the art that is a joy to behold. Rudolf Steiner said that Waldorf parents would need to see the full artistic breadth of eurythmy in performance in order to understand fully its role in the Waldorf curriculum. More information is available at www.stormsofsilence.org or email info@lemniscatearts.org.

Sun Studio, Crestone, Colorado by Jennifer Thomson Twelve years ago, Philip Incao and I moved from Denver to Crestone, Colorado, a small mountain town up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with various spiritual centers and lots of wild life where nature is stark. The weather is unpredictable but with lots of sunshine. Every August I present an art retreat to share color and the art of painting. This venture also opens doorways to art for the local community. Some local artists are helping develop an evening presentation on a chosen artist; we’re scheduled to present the chosen artist in a small nearby town, and in the Shumei spiritual center in Crestone. Her retreats renew my soul and spirit. Jennifer guides us to see in new ways, deepening our connection to nature and to our perceptions of life. —Lois Hartman

It takes two days before students begin to feel quiet and turn inward to listen to the colors. On the third day, one hears only the sound of brushes on paper. I spend months preparing the material for the retreats by creating exercises that lift the heart forces. I am not a therapist, nor do I judge a student’s work. I look at the art only and see where there is too much flow or hardness in order to find a balance. Balance is the key. I enjoy studying a new master artist and a different color theme each year. I leave newly inspired to continue my artistic work at home. —Kim Youngblood

Participants may be professional artists looking for something different, teachers, people going through an illness or life change, or who just want an art experience. Beginners are great; they shake up us old-timers. I love leading others through an artistic process, then watching them find their own path. Working with color in a living way nurtures a person’s life. Developing a feeling

for the artistic process brings one to a deeper understanding of life and death. We strive to create a setting and a mood in which a student feels inspired to enter, courageously, into a process of making the unseen visible. Art awakens the creative forces in our souls and penetrates our life in all areas, giving us more confidence and flexibility. So much more! In both retreats there is an evening presentation in which Philip Incao talks about the parallels between the healing process and the artistic process. The learning environment is gentle, encouraging, and deep. We are supported to work from within ourselves with kindness and clarity. —Susan Fey

The Landscape Painting Retreat has been in process for five years. My love for nature inspired this program. Viewing nature through art stimulates an awareness of the depth in nature. This year’s theme, “Art & Nature,” explores the texture of sand, patterns, and paint. Katie Schwerin will give a presentation on “Color Shadows.” In these retreats, I wanted to create art programs that speak to everyone. Especially near these mountains where the elementals thrive and the environment is unspoiled. It is my way of giving back what I love most—art and nature. Two years ago I told everyone, “I came because my wife asked me to. I’m just a ‘doodler.’” Last year I attended again to learn more and advance my art. I love the landscapes that emerge in my work, and the inspired training! —Bill Whyte Jennifer Thomson (sunstudio.thomson1@gmail.com) grew up in rural Tennessee, studied in Switzerland with Beppe Assenza, and led a painting training for 11 years in Hudson, NY. She has written An Artist’s Workbook with 45 painting exercises distilled from many years’ experience. Her week-long retreats are in August of each year. summer-fall issue 2018 • 19

initiative!

Future Mysteries by the Threefold Preparatory Group Inspired by the imagination of the stage as an altar for the new mysteries, a small group has gathered at the Threefold Educational Center in Spring Valley, NY, to explore the possibility of again staging Rudolf Steiner’s Four Mystery Dramas within a festival from August 13-22, 2021. The festival that took place in August of 2014 was a profound experience for many and confirmed the relevance of the dramas for our lives today. One participant commented: Participating [in 2014] gave me a much clearer sense of the practical human dimensions of anthroposophy and Steiner’s mission: people striving forward, people patiently waiting. I saw many very different types of people working to integrate higher vision and its insights into their lives, no one in a “perfect” way and even the seer finding the limits of his vision. And I got to know quite a few people very much better than I could otherwise, sharing with them the struggle to understand and to make real on stage both the uplifting and challenging consequences.

What can we do to encourage the sprouting of those seeds that were planted in 2014? The 2014 festival was not a “cozy retrospect” of the plays, but an attempt to illuminate the karma of the anthroposophical movement, and this upcoming festival is not meant to reproduce what happened then, but to build on that experience, making it more conscious. Shall we strive to become ever more awake to our spiritual experiences? Can the plays help us to become aware of ourselves as a community of spiritually striving brothers and sisters? What significance can the dramas have as we approach the centenaries of the Christian Community (2022), the Christmas Foundation Meeting (2023/24) and the School for Spiritual Science—the earthly Micha-el School (2024)? The altar, as a place of encountering the threshold of the spiritual world, through sacrifice and transformation, is a leading theme and inspiration for this festival. Our imagination is that the performances of the dramas will 20 • being human

Rehearsal, 2013 mystery drama production (photo: BillDay)

be accompanied by experiences of the Act of Consecration of Man and Lessons of the First Class of the School Spiritual Science. The idea of an interweaving youth conference has also been sounded. In the 21st century, what is the role of an event that takes place in physical space and time and happens from ‘mouth to ear’? Given the enormous mobilization of will and resources that this festival would take, is it justified at this time? The predominant human experience now is often expressed as being overwhelmed by life, feeling there is no time, and experiencing deep isolation from ourselves, others, and the world. The potential for enhanced human encounter, potentized inspiration, and heightened awareness that this festival might give—is it worth the colossal effort? We trust that, if this impulse is true, the right forces will free themselves to allow this festival to incarnate. For questions, comments, interest, or if you would like to offer help—we may well need actors!—please contact us at mysterydrama@threefold.org. The Threefold preparatory group: Virginia Hermann, Christa Lynch, Rafael Manaças, Barbara Renold, Eric Silber.

Kaspar Hauser Goes West, part 2 by Deborah Grace, Camphill Ghent Something is quickening in America; people are seeking deeper understanding for why Kaspar Hauser’s life and death matter in our time. The first North American Kaspar Hauser Festival with Eckart Böhmer, director of the Kaspar Hauser Research Circle, and Richard Steel, co-founder of the Karl König Institute, was held in Camphill California at Michaelmas 2016. In Berlin the Kaspar Hauser Research Circle became part of the Karl König Institute, while in 2016 and 2017 Richard Steel gave a series of talks in Camphill Ghent exploring Kaspar Hauser’s enigmatic destiny. This prepared the ground for a festival in upstate New York in November 2017, hosted by four local Camphill communities. Several hundred people participated through lectures, artistic encounters, and conversations. This statement of Rudolf Steiner was like a leading theme: If Kaspar Hauser had not lived and died as he did, contact between the earth and the spiritual world would have been completely severed.

Glen Williamson’s play on the first evening, Kaspar Hauser, the Open Secret of the Foundling Prince, is described as an epic fairy tale; it is clearly derived from imagination, scientific research, and spiritual understanding. In his introduction, Glen spoke of how for the first time in history, with the founding of the Kaspar Hauser Research Circle and its uniting with the Karl König Institute, there is now a strong ring of support around the mission of Kaspar Hauser. On the first morning, Eckart Böhmer spontaneously sang an Iroquois healing song that resounded throughout Camphill Copake’s Fountain Hall, aligning the festival with the Native American stream and the destiny of America, and grounding it in the earth. Gathered in a large circle, participants then shared responses to this inquiry, “What is your connection to Kaspar Hauser?” Inspiring personal experiences of waking up through encounters with Kaspar flew like sparks of light around the circle, and this light-filled quality of conversation continued throughout in the festival groups. David Andrew Schwartz spoke on the theme, “Herman Melville and Kaspar Hauser: Vulnerability in a Time Dominated by Intelligence and Power.” David explored

connections between the destiny of Kaspar Hauser and what lives as the true mission and spirit of America. That evening was All Souls’ Day and the focus was, “Kaspar Hauser and the Living Connection to Those Who Have Died.” Karl König’s “Also...A Christmas Story” was introduced and read by Richard Steel and framed by instrumental music from Camphill Triform. The story describes an experience of Karl König one Christmas Eve, a mystical walk in “the land of truth and life” which the soul enters after death. There souls who recognized in one another a common bond with Kaspar Hauser began to form, across the threshold, a ring of brother-sisterhood as a home for Kaspar’s being and tasks in the world. After a heart-reaching rendering of Suzanne Vega’s “Wooden Horse (Kaspar Hauser Song),” Richard Steel’s lecture, “Kaspar Hauser, Karl König, and Today,” showed how threads from König’s life closely interwove his being with the being of Kaspar Hauser. From that evening Suzanne Vega’s words “and what was wood became alive” were weaving like an inner thread through our work. Carlo Pietzner’s play, “And from the night, Kaspar…” was performed the second evening, produced by Stephen Steen from Camphill Triform with actors from the Camphill communities and support from Jeanne Simon MacDonald, who portrayed Kaspar’s higher being in eurythmy. In Carlo Pietzner’s words, Kaspar’s destiny is the mythology for the battle of consciousness in the service of the individual spirit. Thus we partake in it and in his mysterious life and mysterious death. We all spontaneously partake in it, for we feel his destiny to also be our destiny.

Eckart Böhmer gave two lectures the next day, “The Unfulfilled Mission of the Hereditary Prince” and “The Fulfilled Mission of Kaspar Hauser.” He spoke potently in English from translations by Helen Lubin. The first laid before people a vast overview of the complex worldhistorical forces impacting the life and death of Kaspar Hauser—how the opposing forces thwarted the mighty social-political transformation of Middle Europe which should have been Kaspar Hauser’s mission on earth. Although the dark powers cruelly imprisoned Kaspar during his childhood and ultimately brought about his murder, they could not prevent him from bringing redemptive healing into the world. For Kaspar’s soul shone summer-fall issue 2018 • 21

initiative! with Christ-like radiance to those around him, and the purity of his noble qualities of truthfulness, innocence, goodness, kindness, compassion, wonder, and forgiveness was experienced by his contemporaries with awe. The second lecture laid bare the twisted web of dark powers that conspired to bury Kaspar Hauser’s soul alive and thus annihilate his spirit, and the immense grace for humankind that these forces did not succeed in destroying Kaspar’s timeless, eternal being. The helping spiritual beings, out of their great love for humanity, worked so that Kaspar Hauser did fulfill his spiritual mission—and therefore, the connection of human beings to the spiritual world was not severed! Eckart called on people to internalize this mighty reality, to meditate upon it. He ended by quoting Kaspar’s teacher, Georg Friedrich Daumer: Shortly after Kaspar Hauser appeared in the world, he once asked why, if Christ arose from death, human beings could not also arise again. When it was answered that this was because Christ was not just a human being but was also God, he said that people should also learn so much that they become God.

I wonder if these words could be understood as a kind of call from Kaspar towards the future. Each day of the festival, one of the Camphill communities offered original artistic presentations: “Portraits of Us” and poetry from Camphill Hudson; a chorus written by Channa Seidenberg and puppet theatre from students in Camphill Copake; instrumental music and a rendition of Suzanne Vega’s “Wooden Horse” from Camphill Triform; and lyre music from Camphill Ghent’s ensemble. The four Camphill communities of Columbia County also collaborated in hosting the festival; meals and refreshment breaks became enlivening, community-building social times. A number of people remarked that they felt the warmth offered by Camphill become like a sheath that held the gathering and everyone in it. The last morning, Kaspar’s presence came forward livingly through original poetry shared by Eckart, Richard, and Stephen Steen. Pianist Gili Melamed-Lev, the Camphill Ghent lyre group, and Camphill Copake’s 22 • being human

choir framed the poetry. In the plenum conversation that closed the festival, people spoke of ways their hearts and minds had been kindled. Appreciation and thanks were expressed to Eckart and Richard and for the work of the Kaspar Hauser Research Circle. And the question was voiced by many, “What now? How will this go forward?” In answer, two more Kaspar Hauser Festivals are already planned—in California in the fall of 2018, and in upstate New York at All Souls 2019. Information and ways to support and be engaged will be on the Kaspar Hauser Research Circle website: www.kaspar-hauser.net/en/ I would like to close with words from Carlo Pietzner’s play, in which Kaspar Hauser describes a profound, prophetic dream which can live as an inspiration for souls who feel called by the mystery Kaspar describes: For I beheld that all and everything in all its manifoldness was at one and the same time One; all of mankind together with all nature, but in such a manner that it was in truth mankind that made it into One. I saw this in the image of a tree whose branches moved and formed all manner of signs and figures. They were transparently clear in their meaning. Opposing branches moved into one another and through this interpenetration, other wholeness was created. The tree itself stood upon a base which was solid and from below to its top reached something like an innermost pole on the very tip of which was a crown so slender with a red berry in it – which was the chief aspect of the whole image. In its power I was to assemble around me such men and women who would be able to read the signs of the branches and who would thus themselves become branches of a new order. They would flower with the radiance of freedom in their thoughts, each live with equal acceptance of one another and pulsing with the fraternal blood of the brotherhood to which I was called. I remember it, my brothers, I begin to remember… Deborah Grace (deborahpilargrace@gmail.com) is formerly executive director of Camphill Ghent.

Introducing Waldorf, Threefolding to Indian Non-Profits in the US by Gopi Krishna Vijaya It is very important to communicate the fruitful and practical ideas gained with the help of spiritual science to the world whenever possible. Hence, there was an attempt recently to expose a major non-profit called Asha for Education to the ideas of Waldorf education and Threefolding of the Social Organism, on the occasion of the organization’s 25-year jubilee conference.

Asha for Education Conference Asha (meaning “hope” in Hindi) was established in California in 1991, as a 501c(3) non-profit to raise funds for underprivileged children in India. It has grown to more than 50 chapters spread across the US, India, Europe, and Canada. Asha is entirely volunteer-driven, with all volunteers contributing their efforts outside of their regular jobs. Volunteers hence take personal interest in identifying educationrelated projects in India, and supporting them through funds and other means. The projects involve a variety of cultural initiatives: supporting girls’ education, people with disabilities, children caught in war-torn areas in Kashmir, small independent schools, vocational education etc. Over the years, Asha has disbursed over $30 million to more than 400 independent projects across India. The organization’s bi-annual conference was organized in Seattle, WA, on July 29-30, 2017. On the occasion of having completed 25 years, the organizers were looking for a different direction and new ideas to carry forward the work. They invited the founders of the organization to give talks about its history, and also invited several other Indian non-profits (Vibha, CRY, AIM for

Seva, Sikshana, AID, and BSPES) to Seattle to figure out ways to collaborate with them in order to help on-theground projects more.

Context for New Ideas The traditional non-profit approach of most of these organizations including Asha was mainly to enable the schools to grow large enough to be handed over to the government education, or public school system. This was mostly seen to be a successful end result of nurturing the project. In addition, assessment of the impact of a project was mainly with regard to results achieved in standardized tests or jobs obtained by students after completing their education. As for the choice of projects, the decisions are taken by the volunteers at a chapter level, and there is usually a lack of knowledge about the merits and demerits of different types of education, especially the introduction of tech devices in schools, remote teaching, etc. It was therefore felt, by me as well as my wife Snetu, who was part of the organizing team, that there was a crucial need to provide alternate ideas in these areas. It is quite well known that Waldorf education was founded by the desire to show by example how a school system free of state influence can work, to educate free individuals in harmony with their developing abilities. Since Waldorf arose after the failure of the Threefolding impulse during World War I, it is important to also know how it was a practical application of Threefolding principles. Both these topics had to be introduced to Asha. To speak on these issues, Paul Gierlach and Gary Lamb were invited as speakers. Paul has been a Waldorf teacher for nearly forty years, with experiences as a class teacher in San Francisco, Detroit, China, and Japan. Gary summer-fall issue 2018 • 23

initiative! is the co-director of the Hawthorne Valley Center for Social Research and project coordinator of the Avalon Initiative, an education think tank, both located in upstate New York. He has been involved with Waldorf education for over 35 years as an economics teacher, administrator, parent, and grandparent, with special focus on curbing the improper use of artificial intelligence and screen technology in the field of education. Both kindly agreed to join us for the ride.

the audience through the experience of education’s sevenyear developmental phases. He highlighted the fact that children have to be helped to enter their bodies fully and engage with the world in the early years, and any disturbance in that process was bound to have long-lasting effects. His emphasis was on showing the role of education in creating a free individual, who can then contribute freely to the society. Gary Lamb continued the flow of Paul’s talk by highlighting the role Conference Outline of education as a social activity, in its The conference spanned two days, connection to state (government) and at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, economics. He distinguished between Washington. On the first day, the a healthy independent activity of three founders of Asha described the history spheres—culture and education, state, of the organization, and one of them, and economics—and an unhealthy Sandeep Pandey, strongly advocated one that is present today where the for the introduction of common-core economic force dominates the entire public education in India. A long-time society. Asha is a fund-raising organiAsha Fellow and partner, Mahesh PanPaul Gierlach, making a point about Waldorf pedagogy zation, and Gary described alternative dey, described the travails of operating routes of funding education instead of the standard metha school for children of migrant laborers in rural northern od of using tax money through government, for example, India. This was followed by discussions with two other direct donations to schools and enabling tax-credit for nonprofits, one of which tackled the issues with educatthese donations. He highlighted the role of the teacher, ing girls (BSPES). The other (Sikshana) works to enable whose central imporstudents to receive lestance can be masked by sons through computers, profit-driven and comtreating the student “as a puter-based alternatives. customer.” Afternoon sessions After lunch, atwere dedicated to panel tendees split into braindiscussion between sevstorming groups on eral non-profits, as well individual topics, such as the discussion within as volunteer retention, Asha regarding their donor management, etc. internal dynamics and The discussions on the operating methods. The topic “Paths Forward” conference closed with were particularly spiran inspiring talk on ited, with a lot of heat Skype by a French-Caabout whether or not The imbalance in today’s systems (right) from Gary Lamb’s presentation nadian volunteer, MaAsha must take part in thieu Fortier, who had moved to India to set up a musicpolitical activism. The day closed with talks by experiand-dance school, solely due to his deep interest in Indian enced volunteers and project partners. culture and its growth. Day 2 opened with a talk on Waldorf education by Paul Gierlach, attended also by some interested people from Seattle. His topic was “What is Education? The Real Metrics,” and he proceeded to systematically take 24 • being human

Effects of the Talks

Gary and Paul, as the only non-Indians present at the conference, were able to give a different perspective to the

organization, which was received with enthusiasm by several attendees. However, it also confused a good number of the attendees, due to the novelty of the ideas. It was admittedly very hard for the majority of the participants to imagine the reality of the “cultural organ” of the threefold society, in spite of the fact that Asha was directly involved in nurturing the cultural life in India, because of the history of public education in India. However, both speakers made clear that an organization like Asha, with its wide reach and engaged volunteers, can create a big impact if it considers the importance of education as an independent activity, as opposed to being an appendix of political or economic forces. The ideas provided in the conference are continuing to be discussed in different contexts in the internal talks of Asha. As an experience, it was very educational to see the urgency of applying threefolding by clarifying it to as many people as possible: a small change in policy impacts the lives of thousands of people immediately at the grassroots level. The prevailing atmosphere regarding the excessive and unthinking use of technology at all educational levels was also something that had to be tackled, and a beginning was made to accomplish that here as well. The coming months will tell whether these efforts will actually bear fruit or not. Overall, the entire experience has been an eye-opener in every sense of the word. It underlined the fact that what is needed most of all is to

communicate anthroposophy in as many circles as possible, in plain everyday language, in a way that can actually be grasped and applied. Bridge-builders are indeed the need of the hour. Gopi Krishna Vijaya, PhD, is a physicist active in understanding technology and consciousness, and a participant in recent Natural Science Section conferences. Asha Conference videos are available at ashanet.org/asha-26

Economics Group

of the Anthroposophical Society in America The Economics Group of the Anthroposophical Society in America has been formed by eight members of the Economics Conference of the Goetheanum. The group has been established as a Subject Group whose activity is devoted to the study of economics based on Rudolf Steiner’s Economics Course (1922) and to the support of researchers in this field. Meg Freeling is the contact person and can be reached at megfreeling (at) gmail.com

Anthroposophic Psychology Ever wonder what it would feel like to go through the world as if squished between two planes of glass? Or, what the world feels like when one yo-yos between the depths of despair and the heights of bliss in a matter of seconds? The three-part Personality and Personality Disorder graduate program of the Association for Anthroposophic Psychology (anthroposophicpsychology.org) allowed counselors of body, soul, and spirit to explore these and other expressions of personality disorders through the three planes of space, an area researched by founder William Bento, PhD. Difficult expressions of personality development were explored, going beyond symptomatology to connect each disorder to a higher ideal and a variety of healing modalities. Participants observed gesture and idiosyncratic movements and explored the twelve personality disorders through spacial dynamics, the zodiac, eurythmy, the twelve virtues, skits and plays, re-enactment of significant AAP Graduating Cohort, Sebastapol CA, April 2018: Left to right, back row: Kathleen Baiocchi, Susan Christine Huston, Sue Gimpel, David Tresemer; middle: Mary Fonte, Kathleen Thompson, art, and applying elements of biography to each personal- Overhauser, Linda Delman, Laurie Schmiesing, Karen Guitman, Roberta Nelson, Tonya Stoddard, Pam Engler; front row: James Dyson, Cindy Taylor, Glen Williamson, Christina Sophia, Lillith Dupuis, Emily Thunberg ity grouping. — Emily Thunberg, Salt Lake City, Utah summer-fall issue 2018 • 25

initiative!

Health Professions Advancing by Adam Blanning MD Medical and therapeutic work in North America has been rich over the last year, moving in many directions. For the first time ever, presentations on Anthroposophic Medicine and Nursing were included at the conferences of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine (San Diego), American Holistic Nursing Association (Niagara Falls), and Academic Consortium of Integrative Medicine (Baltimore). This kind of broader outreach builds bridges, yet also asks for an inward self-consciousness to clearly communicate what we do and why. A similar outward-and-inward breath has been working as the process for physician certification in Anthroposophic Medicine becomes standardized worldwide. Doctors must now complete a one thousand-hour curriculum of course work, independent study, mentoring, and scholarly work. The dialogue leading up to these decisions involved trainers from all parts of the world with the (Dornach) meetings held in English! Similarly, one full day of last September’s International Meeting of the Medical Section was conducted in English (with German translation). This is a lucky step for native English speakers, but it really addresses the fact that so many colleagues from different continents use English as a second language, and our work is really becoming a global movement. On this continent, the annual intensive training week for Anthroposophic Medicine and Nursing (the IPMT) moved to Chestnut Ridge, NY after ten years in California. The move East brought new participants and new perspectives. Instead of observing a Sacramento plant already lush, large, and fragrantly blooming in late April, this year’s late New England Spring brought more much intimate, but no less dynamic, observation of plants just sprouting and pushing out of the earth at the same time of year. The IPMT course had several special guest faculty, including Dr. Georg Soldner, Deputy

Participants at the recent big medical training conference, the IPMT, held this year in Chestnut Ridge, NY.

26 • being human

Head of the Medical Section, teaching on how to avoid physician burnout; Dr. Marion Debus, oncologist, teaching about integrative cancer treatment and mistletoe use; and Rolf Heine RN, who helped examine and graduate six Anthroposophic Nurse Specialists (ANS), the largest group to date anywhere in the world for this recognition of advanced nursing training and practice. Elizabeth Sustick RN, who faithfully inaugurated the nursing training work on this continent over the last decade, is also making a shift, and passed on direction of those programs to Susan Moss RN and Laurie Schmiesing RN. About the same time as the IPMT, PAAM’s two-year webinar course in “Working Constitutionally with Children” finished. This distance learning course included participants from the US, Canada, Australia, and Thailand. There is clearly hunger for collaborative teaching and study in the English language! In August, 2018, the biennial medical meeting for all anthroposophic therapies will consider “Transforming Chronic Pain: A Spiritual Task for Our Time.” The conference will feature presentations from Dr. Matthias Girke (Head of the Medical Section), Dr. David McGavin, who works with chronic pain in challenged, low-income patients in London, and Dr. Stefan Schmidt-Troschke, who leads a growing, dynamic patient organization in Germany. A post-conference meeting with Dr. Steven Johnson will look at the possibilities for new collaboration around questions of public health in this country. Additional “seedling” impulses include the development of an American training course in mistletoe use, an expanding group of doctors and nurses working to bring anthroposophic practices into hospice and palliative care settings, and next Spring’s IPMT, which will have a special focus on women’s health. Adam Blanning MD is board president of AAMTA, an umbrella organization for anthroposophic medicine and therapies.

Rudolf Steiner Health Center Flint Healing Initiative In June 2017, six enthusiastic interns arrived in Ann Throughout the day we offered a variety of other theraArbor, Michigan for an immersive program on anthropopies to Flint residents: liver compresses, detox teas, art and sophical medical care. This was the seventh summer of movement therapy, toxicity testing, and first aid. Learn-Work-Share, at the RuDuring the art sessions, dolf Steiner Health Center, an the interns led the participants inpatient anthroposophic mediin form drawing, black and cal center. The interns came white sketching, and clay modto learn about anthroposophic eling. Liver compresses were medicine, therapies, agriculdone each day in the pews of ture, and community building the Asbury Church. Many of during the “learn” portion of the participants have suffered the ten-day LWS program. health problems due to the conDuring the next week the taminated water exposure. Parsix interns, two doctors, and a ticipating in the therapies was Students give liver detox compresses at Camp Promise, Flint, Michigan therapist traveled daily to Flint, a beneficial break from the exMichigan, to help people aftreme stress Flint residents have fected by the Flint water crisis experienced for the past several [a disaster in which money-savyears. We did over twenty hair ing steps by government agenanalyses which allowed us to cies turned the water supply of test for lead and other toxins. a whole city toxic—Ed.]. The First aid and medical care was therapeutic “work” and “share” provided to those in need. part of the program was done We also offered group biat Asbury Methodist Church ography work during which the and Camp Promise (www.faceFlint residents and the interns book.com/CampPromiseFlint/) a Liver detox compresses applied on the pews at Asbury Church in Flint shared experiences from imporcommunity “resistance” movetant times in their lives. It was ment in Kearsley Park. an enlightening activity for all In past years, the interninvolved and the student interns ship was conducted at RSHC learned about the backgrounds as a one-week version of its twoof a population quite different week life force intensive health from themselves. retreats. The program offered The 2017 LWS program in patients in medical and finanFlint was a meaningful expericial need an affordable way to ence for us all. One intern, a access anthroposophic inpatient pre-med student, said, “I felt viDr Molly McMullen-Laird explains steam inhalations, medicinal teas at Asbury Church medicinal support. The Flint brant and alive the entire time… Healing took that model a step further and brought the The week really lit a fire under me.” medical care directly to those in need. The eighth annual Learn, Work, Share program is In Flint the student interns began each day with group at RSHC June 15-24, 2018. For more information about singing and spatial dynamics, a great way to encourage this and other important programs please contact us onpeople of all ages to join in, including reluctant teenagers. line at www.steinerhealth.org. summer-fall issue 2018 • 27

arts & ideas IN THIS SECTION: Rudolf Steiner commented concisely on the whole history of philosophy to his time. After his death the French took on an acute role for the rest of the 20th century. Just where did they get to? Fred Amrine looks at Gilles Deleuze. Art has much to do with feeling, and feeling may one day stand higher than thinking. Michael Howard is an artist and thinker who follows the forms of change. How can art best live in the world? How can it be retrieved from its role as an investment and returned to its place as moral and spiritual capital? Free Columbia and friends are working on that.

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The (Mirror-)Image of Thought by Frederick Amrine, PhD Editor’s Note: As lovely and reassuring as we may find the pastel colors and felt toys of a Waldorf kindergarten, Rudolf Steiner reported that it is in those years, and the even earlier years of infancy, when we human beings do the most powerful thinking of which we are capable. Our “helpless” infancy is when a lively and intuitive thinking knows the world for the first time, matching the raw data of the new physical senses to concepts living in the adult care-givers around us, even before we have words. All too soon this fresh, original experiencing becomes a mere habit for almost all of us. Philosophers who deal with the basic question of “how do we know anything” (their term for this is epistemology) fight their way back, in effect, toward this first stage of cognition, of knowing, in order to try to experience thinking itself. Almost all of us, however, pass our days mistaking thinking for its product, thoughts, and experiencing those thoughts mostly as familiar, recalled, habitual, not newly met. We are just managing old thought-pictures, and dismissing thought itself. In fall 2011 being human published a lecture by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon who pointed to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as someone striving toward the living reality of thinking. In the spring 2012 issue Frederick Amrine followed with an essay “Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Freedom”; it opened with words of Michel Foucault, read at his funeral by Deleuze: “There are times in life when the question of knowing whether one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.“ To know and to perceive differently are essential, evolutionary challenges for humanity. Rudolf Steiner showed us how much is possible along this path. So despite the difficulty and strangeness of pushing back at what has become utterly normal and habitual, we will now drop in again, as it seems, to a graduate seminar of Prof. Amrine, confused at first by odd terminology and unfamiliar references, to try to regain a sense for that other world of knowing that is possible...

I want to focus on a text that Deleuze himself identified as central to his work: chapter III of Difference and Repetition, “The Image of Thought.” Nearly the whole history of modern philosophy has fallen into this delusion, this trap, mistaking the “image of thought” for thinking itself, which has a fundamentally different nature. The problem begins with Descartes at the latest: “This is the meaning of the Cogito as a beginning: it expresses the unity of all the faculties in the subject; it thereby expresses the possibility that all the faculties will relate to a form of object which reflects the subjective identity.” Another name for this reflected thought is doxa: “namely, the model itself (harmony of the faculties grounded in the supposedly universal thinking subject and exercised upon the unspecified object). The image of thought is only the figure in which doxa is universalized by being elevated to the rational level.” Propositions such as that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two right angles are merely hypothetical, “since they presuppose all that is in question and are incapable of giving birth in thought to the act of thinking.” Sense is what is expressed by a proposition, but what do we mean by expressed? We cannot reduce that which is expressed either to the lived experience of the knower or to the object. Deleuze calls this false image of thinking recognition, and his critique of it is scathing: “Recognition is a sign of the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which thought ‘rediscovers’ the State, rediscovers ‘the Church’ and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object.” Because recognition sanctions only the recognizable and the recognized, it can never call forth anything but conformities. All the thinking faculties may be entirely taken up with its objects, “but such employment and such activity have nothing to do with thinking. Thought is thereby filled with no more than an image of itself, one in which it recognizes itself the more it recognizes things.” Can we really believe that the destiny of thinking itself it captured by this reflected image? Is mere recognition actually thinking? Surely thought should “seek its models among stranger and more compromising adventures.” Such a stance is actually a “hindrance” to real philosophizing; “this image does not betray the very essence of thought as pure thought.” We must transcend this mere image of thought, which presupposes the act of thinking itself. This act of thinking is the sense, and sense is the genesis even of the true. “Truth is only the empirical result of sense.” We begin to overcome this false image of thought when we realize that “something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of fundamental encounter. … its

primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.” Actual thought is accessed through transcendental empiricism, which is fundamentally different from sensory empiricism. It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible [insensible]. … Sensibility, in the presence of that which can only be sensed (and is at the same time imperceptible) finds itself before its own limit, the sign, and raises itself to the level of a transcendental exercise: to the ‘nth ’ power. Our experience is no longer one of recognition. We enter a ground of pure thinking that is in constant metamorphosis, and the sign that we have accessed it is an experience of intensity: “it is always by means of an intensity that thought comes to us. The privilege of sensibility as origin appears in the fact that, in an encounter, what forces sensation and that which can only be sensed are one and the same thing, whereas in other cases the two instances are distinct.” Another sign that we have attained real thinking is that it is invariably paradoxical: “a philosophical obstinacy with no ally but paradox, one which would have to renounce both the form of representation and the element of common sense. As though thought could begin to think, and continually begin again, only when liberated from the Image and its postulates.” It is the coexistence of contraries that signifies the beginning of that which forces thought, which is always movement between the poles of a polarity. The result is a problem, but not of the kind that has an analytic answer. These problems are the actual Ideas: “Not only is sense ideal [what Kant would call the a priori], but problems are Ideas themselves.” “Problems are the differential elements in thought, the generic elements in the true.” It is this movement of thought, insensibly, in the problem, that engenders difference. Again, these insights are not achieved with analytic or discursive thought. Rather, they are the object of what Fichte called “intellectual intuition.” This is what Deleuze means by “transcendental empiricism”: “That is why the transcendental [‘this properly transcendental empiricism’] is answerable to a superior empiricism which alone is capable of exploring its domain and its regions.” These intuitions are subtle. “Underneath the large noisy events lie the small events of silence, just as underneath the natural light there are little glimmers of the Idea.” These intuitions are also universal. Paradoxically, Deleuze calls these Urphänomene (for that is what they

are) singularities. Singularities are generative; they are Goethe’s “pregnant points.” They are not the universality of empty, formal abstraction, but rather, they are rich with particularities; they are more like matrices ever giving birth. Deleuze expresses this insight by saying that “problematic Ideas are not simple essences, but multiplicities or complexes of relations and corresponding singularities.” As such, they lie in the infinite unconscious: “Every proposition of consciousness implies an unconscious of pure thought which constitutes the sphere of sense in which there is infinite regress.” “For the new—in other words, difference—calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita.” Ideas are problems. But in wrestling with these problems, our faculties attain “their superior exercise.” We want to access not thoughts, but rather “forces in thought.” This exercise of the faculties is the energy that can generate new ways of seeing—indeed, new organs of perception: “It may turn out … that new faculties arise, faculties which were repressed by that form of common sense.” “Considered in this light, Ideas, far from having as their milieu a good sense or a common sense, refer to a para-sense which determines only the communication between disjointed faculties. Neither are they illuminated by a natural light: rather, they shine like differential flashes which leap and metamorphose.” Discursive logic gives way to Imagination: “The Logos breaks up into hieroglyphics, each one of which speaks the transcendent language of a faculty.” It’s not normal consciousness, “not figures already mediated and related to representation” that is “capable of carrying the faculties to their respective limits.” We must transcend normal consciousness altogether. Then we access “free or untamed states of difference in itself. … This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself.” It is “the being of the intelligible as though this were both the final power of thought and the unthinkable.” “What we encounter are the demons, the sign-bearers: powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant; powers which only cover difference with more difference.” 1 Deleuze’s radical argument reminds me very much of Rudolf Steiner, especially his late philosophy. Let us focus on three texts: two lectures Steiner gave in Bologna in 1911, and the last chapter of The Riddles of Philosophy, published in 1914. Steiner’s vocabulary is different from summer-fall issue 2018 • 29

arts & ideas Deleuze’s, but the underlying thought is remarkably close. The crude Positivists among Steiner’s contemporaries had mistaken the “image of thought” for an ultimate, while the Neo-Kantians mistakenly concluded that “difference’s” absence from immediate experience was proof it lay outside any possible experience. The latter does not follow, because it ignores the possibility that a meditatively intensified thinking might render it phenomenal. That had been precisely Fichte’s experience, for which he felt he needed to coin an entirely new term, Tathandlung—literally a “made fact.” Hence the title of Steiner’s first lecture in Bologna, which refers to “Certain Psychologically Possible Facts.” Boldly, Steiner begins his first lecture in Bologna with a meta-philosophical description of ascent by way of meditative exercises. Here we intuit that all objects of knowledge are correlative to a consciousness, that perception is always already suffused with thinking. It follows that strengthened thinking will lead to expanded perception. Meditative work lifts us up to a direct experience of objectively real potentials—what Deleuze calls real thinking, as opposed to the mere “image of thought.” This strengthened thinking has to be taken in hand and suffused with our wills; it needs to become a force one can encounter. It needs to become a self-metamorphosing ground. Meditative work is imaginative in that we are ultimately the artists of our own cognitional life, which allows us to intervene actively in the world as moral agents. Hence Steiner calls this expanded intuitive faculty “moral imagination.” The holistic integration of thinking as an activity into every aspect of our experience of the world is so hard to see, because it becomes apparent only when we cease doing it; when we step back as it were to contemplate the results. But once it becomes conscious upon the ladder of inner work, the holism that had made this newly discoverable participation initially invisible becomes “the very stamp upon its passport to utility.” New faculties arise out of this inner labor. What is new in the Bologna lectures vis-à-vis Steiner’s earlier philosophical writings is the idea that this metaphilosophy is limitless. It is a dynamic and evolutionary process. Steiner: “Based on indubitable phenomena of the inner life, spiritual science considers it reasonable to assert that knowledge is not ‘finished’ and complete as such, but rather fluid and able to evolve.” As we climb ever higher on the ladder, eventually we realize that the seeming limits are only a horizon, and “that over the horizon of normal consciousness , there is another level of consciousness into which human beings can penetrate.” 30 • being human

Over and over again, Steiner returns in the first Bologna lecture to the idea of life and living thinking. As Steiner says: “In this process, concepts do not act as cognitional elements but as real forces”; “such images should not be considered for their value as facts in an ordinary sense; they should be seen in terms of their effectiveness as real forces in the soul. … A spiritual scientist does not attribute value to the meaning of the images used for psychological exercises, but to the soul’s experience of their effects.” Rather than eat the spiritual seeds by converting them into unreal signifiers, we plant them, and they germinate as nascent organs of cognition. Steiner again: “The more alive the symbol appears as an image and the more saturated with meaning, the better it is. Under these conditions, the symbol affects the mind so that, after a certain time ... the inner life processes themselves are felt to be stronger, more flexible, and mutually illuminating.” Through meditative practice, we become the sculptors of our own higher nature; our cognitional life itself calls forth “living form.” It is, after all, only a living organism that can grow and evolve. “True spiritual research involves the whole mental apparatus of logic and self-aware contemplation when it seeks to transpose consciousness from the sensory to the supersensible sphere,” Steiner writes. “It cannot be accused, therefore, of disregarding the rational element of knowledge ... in passing out of the sensory world, it always carries and retains the rational element—like a skeleton of the supersensible experience—as an integrating aspect of all supersensible perception.” In our newly evolved cognitive bodies, there is no longer a physical organism or a realm of sensory phenomena to provide means of external support. We will need an endoskeleton, and that function will be performed by the exoskeleton of the ladder that we climbed, turned outside-in. The Bologna lectures end with “a few rather aphoristic observations” that underscore the differences between “spiritual science” and all “the various contemporary trends in epistemology,” which Steiner then proceeds to describe with unqualified praise as “immeasurably great” and “subtle.” This turn in his argument would surprise us greatly if we understood Steiner as a philosopher among philosophers, staking out his own philosophical position in opposition to incorrect views. But now he clearly feels no need to contend with these epistemologies, all of which are brilliant in their own way, because he has climbed up and out of that whole arena. He has left the “image of thought” behind once and for all.

Steiner begins the last chapter of The Riddles of Philosophy by situating the great questions of “philosophy proper” we have been pursuing within the meta-philosophical context of the evolution of consciousness. Evolution rooted out the “original participation” described by Steiner’s contemporaries Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl so that the mind could attain self-consciousness; paradoxically, only if human thinking becomes maya can it become free. Now spiritual anthropology trumps philosophy. But that same anthropological fact has an immediate and profound philosophical consequence: it follows that “the riddles of the soul” cannot be solved out of ordinary consciousness in principle. If “normal consciousness” in modern times is insubstantial, then the sources of normal consciousness must necessarily lie outside of normal consciousness. Here Steiner recalls his second lecture in Bologna, specifically his concluding analogy of modern human thought to an image reflected in a mirror. The point of logical thought-structures—insubstantial, tautologous, valid but untrue—is precisely that of a mirror image: to enable self-consciousness. Real thinking is like light, invisible until it is reflected from a body. But real thinking remains invisible to normal consciousness for an even profounder reason: it is because we are actually not separate from it. Our higher selves live entirely within this living thinking, outside of normal consciousness. It remains unconscious for the same reason we cannot see our own face: it is because we are our own face; we can’t stand apart from it and confront it as an object. We become conscious of our own activity—self-conscious—only by viewing it in a mirror. Except we have become so accustomed to the mirror-image that we mistake it for real. And now we realize that the whole project of The Riddles of Philosophy was one long reductio ad absurdum. Despite their “immeasurably great” and “subtle” epistemologies (Bologna), one brilliant philosopher after another fails utterly, as fail they must. It’s not that they have chosen the wrong concepts, or put them together in the wrong sequence, Steiner claims; it’s that they have remained within a consciousness that was devised for the purpose of cutting them off from reality. The unreal thoughtas-reflection (what Deleuze calls “the image of thought”) has succeeded brilliantly in calling forth “onlooker consciousness.” And the image of thought cannot solve the riddles of philosophy in principle because its very nature and “mission” is to create the very problem we are trying to solve. It is only because the image of thought has been so thoroughly successful, and because we lack any sense of

the evolution of consciousness, that we mistake our innate “prejudice” for the way things really are. We begin to see The Riddles of Philosophy for what it is: a feast of paradoxes. Nobody, not even Nietzsche, has managed to escape the trap, because they haven’t climbed up and out of the problem. The unsolved “riddles” are meant to send a message, but they also function like Zen koans. For example, Steiner likens spiritual knowledge to “a memory of something one hasn’t experienced yet.” The riddles are nuts that logic just can’t crack; instead, logic breaks itself upon them, and we break out of the tautologous circle of rational thought. While “philosophy proper” keeps searching for the highest trump card, wisdom sees that the only way to win is by changing the game, which is why Steiner concludes his account by asserting that “[f]rom one certain point of view this last chapter no longer belongs to the history of philosophy.” Kant may have been wrong about many things, but on my reading of The Riddles of Philosophy, the whole point is that the same fundamental criticism can be leveled against every single thinker since the advent of Nominalism in the High Middle Ages. Modern philosophy keeps trying to heal patients by performing surgery on the reflected images of their bodies. No amount of training, dexterity, or inventiveness can solve this problem short of realizing that we have been trying to operate on an illusory patient. Rightly understood, The Riddles of Philosophy leads us up to a genuine threshold experience, a seeming limit that turns into a frontier. After climbing the upper rungs of the ladder through the meditative efforts described in the Bologna lectures, eventually we generate new forces of such vitality and strength that they lift us right off the ladder: as Steiner says, “the soul feels as though lifted out of the physical organism.” The deadened reflections that had previously been directed outward have now been reoriented inward, and “as a result of the exercises, the soul feels imbued by an experience of itself.” The result is an immediate intuition, a spiritual viewing, of a thinking that is substantive activity. Here the seeds of thinking are not consumed, but allowed to germinate. Here the forces of life overcome the deadening of abstract thought. Our thinking becomes Deleuze’s “powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive, and the instant.” Frederick Amrine teaches literature, philosophy, and intellectual history at the University of Michigan where he is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in German Studies. He is a frequent contributor and former editor of this publication.

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arts & ideas

Art & Humanity in Metamorphosis by Michael Howard Prelude Welcome to my space. It is a little chaotic right now with everything in process and nothing really finished. But if you are interested, I am happy to show you what I am working on. Some people feel uncomfortable when looking at works of art because they are not sure what they are supposed to think or feel. This discomfort can be compounded by the presence of the artist. I try to be sensitive to this, but perhaps you can imagine the insecurity an artist like myself can feel not knowing what people think and feel about their work. I hope any discomfort we may share can awaken empathic interest in each other’s perspectives and experience. From my side, I am actively interested in what you think and feel about my artwork. However, to be clear, I am not so interested in whether you like it or not. I hope it puts you at ease to know I am not looking for compliments, nor will I be offended if you tell me you have difficulty connecting to my art. I can easily imagine the challenges my artwork may pose. For that very reason, I want to better understand those difficulties so I can take them into account in my future work. Artistic freedom does not mean for me that I am at liberty to say and do whatever I like. I do not assume that you the viewer bear the full burden of understanding and appreciating my artwork. I see my art as a service in the way teachers serve their students, and doctors serve their patients. Teachers try to serve their students’ need to learn. And if they have difficulties, a good teacher does not blame them but looks for more effective approaches to their subject. Likewise, doctors try to serve their patients’ health. A good doctor does not take it as a personal affront if a patient does not respond to a certain therapy but instead looks for another therapy that may work better. It is natural and meaningful for me to ask: What is the human need that I am trying to serve as an artist? Through the years, one thing has become clear: there are no simple and quick answers to this question; if anything, it only spawns more questions. While any final 32 • being human

answer continues to elude me, I am not disheartened. In fact, there is nothing I prefer to ponder and work at. One thing most people are clear about with works of art, and much else, is what pleases or displeases them. Reacting to a work of art with some degree of sympathy or antipathy comes so naturally to us that we think nothing of it. And yet, when I said earlier that I am not particularly interested in whether you like or dislike my artwork, I had this common reaction in mind. To simply like or dislike a work of art seems to me an inadequate response because it says more about you the viewer than the work of art itself. If we are interested in the artwork and, by extension, all that the artist thought and felt in shaping the artwork, then our personal sympathy or antipathy does not help us, it actually gets in the way. To fully experience and, in that sense, truly know a work of art, we must find another approach. Most people think that artists make things—drawings, paintings, and sculptures—in order to satisfy a deep need to express themselves. And it is generally assumed that they hope to achieve some degree of recognition, if not fame and fortune, through exhibiting and selling their work. While this view may apply to some artists, it is a caricature that masks the deeper motivations inspiring many artists. Most artists draw, paint, and sculpt because of their need to engage in a creative process more than to produce an art object. The art object is the by-product of creative activity. For example, I paint to explore the mystery of

Gallery: sculpture & painting of Michael Howard

“Call to Courage”—from top: 2018 acrylic on wood panel 24”x72”; 2015 acrylic on wood panel 24”x96”; 2015 plaster 16”x48”; 2016 acrylic on wood panel 24”x72”

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arts & ideas color and how it is formed on a two-dimensional surface. And I sculpt to explore the mystery of form and how material substances like clay or wood take on three-dimensional form. I do not paint and sculpt to express myself, but rather to let color and form speak to me. On that basis, I aspire to enter into an inner dialogue with color and form. I share the outer results of my inner activity with color and form—my paintings and sculptures—to give others an opportunity to let color and form speak to them, so they might also enter into an inner dialogue with color and form. For me, this is the spiritual service of my art. There is no denying that I draw, paint, and sculpt for my own enrichment. But that in no way contradicts my aspiration to serve others. I know of no better way to help others deepen their experience of color and form than through deepening my own experience. In that sense, I am like a scout simply blazing a trail that others might follow. My starting point and the foundation of my artistic activity is the cultivation of a way of observing that leads to a deeper experience of color and form. Through teaching art to children and adults, I have come to see the value this way of seeing has, not only for artists creating works of art, but for all human beings in all spheres of life. I am an artist, but I am not shy in acknowledging that I do not fully understand what it means to be an artist. I regard this not as a shortcoming but as a positive quality. It seems to me essential for an artist today to wrestle on a daily basis with the question: what am I trying to serve through my art? Compared to doing what I feel like doing, I find it more meaningful to strive to serve my contemporaries. Above and beyond our physical needs, each of us has inner or spiritual needs. I see my task as an artist is to discover ways that art—color and form—are able to serve the spiritual needs of humankind today. Likewise, I am a human being, but I do not know what it means to be fully human. But it is meaningful, and I believe essential that I wrestle each day with the question: what does it mean to be fully human? It is clear that art is always evolving, but when I enter my studio each day, I do not know exactly what I will do, or where my work will take me in a week, a month, or a year. I do not know what it means to be an artist because my art, and art in general, are in metamorphosis. We all know that humankind and human society have changed continually throughout history. But when we wake up each morning we do not know what will happen to us today, and how that will change us in a week, a 34 • being human

year, or in decades. We do not know what it means to be fully human because our humanity is in metamorphosis. Art and humanity are in metamorphosis. My question is: what is the relationship between the metamorphosis of art and the metamorphosis of our humanity? If these questions are as compelling for you as they are for me, then it would seem we have begun a journey of inquiry.

Enlivening the School for Spiritual Science The Portland anthroposophical community is to be commended for its intention to enliven the work of the School for Spiritual Science and its Sections. I am honored to be part of this effort. In my preparations, I have found myself approaching this task from two directions. On the one hand, I am revisiting and reflecting upon statements made by Rudolf Steiner about the School and Sections. On the other hand, I am reflecting on my own experience as a member of the School and the Visual Art Section. The first approach offers objective insight, but can seem abstract and remote to actual experience. Focusing on my personal experience is meaningful to myself, but may lack universal resonance. I am hoping that some combination of both will strike the right balance between objective knowledge and enlivening experience. The following is meant only to indicate some of the directions I hope to take up with you in person. As a founding member of the Visual Art Section in North America, I gave much time and effort to organizing Art Section meetings and conferences so that artists could gather to deepen their understanding and experience of the creative process. Over the years, our work took many forms but at the heart of everything we did was the question: What does it mean as an artist to work with and out of spiritual science in serving the cultural needs of our time? It is always meaningful to spend a few days with artist colleagues working with such questions through conversation and practical artistic activity. But there is another dimension to my relationship to the Art Section that has little to do with working with fellow artists in meetings and conferences. As much as I value working with colleagues, I feel most deeply and intimately active as a member of the Visual Art Section when I am working alone in my studio. In spite of the outer aloneness, when I am painting and sculpting in my studio I do not inwardly feel alone, I feel integrated

Above: “Evolutionary Metamorphosis,” 2018, acrylic on wood panel, 12”x60” Below: “Rhapsody,” 2014, plaster, 16”x32”; bottom: 2009, acrylic on canvas, 18”x36”

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arts & ideas within a community. This feeling of community is certainly based in part on the connections I have with artists around the globe, whose work may be outwardly different from my own, but with whom I share a mutual striving to serve the spiritual needs of the 21st century through art. When I enter my studio I am grateful for the outer space I have to work in. However, when I enter the physical space of my studio, but also when I find myself in other physical spaces where I might be teaching for a few days, I am aware of entering an inner space as I begin to work. This space is a soul-spiritual space, but it is no less real than a physical space, because it surrounds my artistic efforts in meaning and purpose. I think of this inner space as the Visual Art Section of the School precisely because it is a soul-spiritual space. It is in this space that I feel myself within a community that includes my fellow artists, but is more than these earthly colleagues. The other feature of my artistic activity that brings me into this inner space of the Art Section is the spirit of inquiry that underlies most of what I do as an artist. It has always been evident to me that Rudolf Steiner’s art impulse—the anthroposophical or spiritual-scientific stream of art—has little if anything to do with painting spiritual content, in a particular outer style received from Steiner or anyone else. It is a fair question to ask: what is anthroposophical art? But any simple or quick response cannot lead to any real answer. A true and fruitful answer comes through learning to live with, carry, and work at one’s question for weeks, months, years, and perhaps a lifetime. For example, my whole being is identified with questions such as the following: How might the spiritual needs of contemporary human beings be better served through art?

the abstract, I will spend some time describing a few areas that I have explored and, in that sense, researched as an artist. For example, I will share an excerpt from a lecture Steiner gave to eurythmists where he describes how the human form arises through the formative gesture of the sounds of speech as we know them through eurythmy. This awoke in me the thought that if the human form arises through the interweaving of all the vowels and consonants, what other forms arise through one or two-orthree sounds of speech? Little did I know as I read these thoughts in my mid-twenties that I was beginning an artistic journey that has become part of my life’s work that I continue to this day. What does an ‘M’ look like compared to a ‘K’? Such simple questions opened a lifetime of creative activity that then led me to other artistic but human questions such as: What is metamorphosis?

How might engaging with the arts, both as artist and viewer of art, awaken new ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and willing?

How can an artistic experience of metamorphosis awaken new insight and practical capacities for working with the living laws of metamorphosis, not only for artists, but also for all human beings in all spheres of human life? Bringing you into my artistic questions and how I approached them may be of interest in itself for some. But my main reason for sharing my artistic research efforts is to help others discover their potential for soul-spiritual inquiry. It is understandable and appropriate that we feel a certain reservation about speaking about spiritualscientific research being applicable to anyone but Rudolf Steiner. However, there is reason to believe that Rudolf Steiner himself had the highest expectations that students of spiritual science would follow in his footsteps by striving to become spiritual scientific researchers themselves. This expectation is most succinctly articulated in the ninth of the founding statutes or principles for the Anthroposophical Society:

How might art awaken new faculties and capacities that allow human beings to better meet the earthly needs of human life, and at the same time spiritualize human consciousness towards a living relationship with the spiritual worlds? Such questions are the foundation of my life’s work. That means a spirit of inquiry permeates my way of life, my way of working. In the workshop in May, I look forward to sharing how this spirit of inquiry led me to see my artistic work as a form of spiritual-scientific research. To avoid speaking about spiritual-scientific research in

Article 9: The purpose of the Anthroposophical Society will be the furtherance of spiritual research; that of the School of Spiritual Science will be this research itself. A dogmatic stand in any field whatsoever is to be excluded from the Anthroposophical Society. — Statutes/Principles of the Anthroposophical Society, Christmas Conference 1924 Without watering down the highest level of spiritual-scientific research as modeled by Rudolf Steiner, it is possible to see a spectrum of research activity that begins the moment we are moved to work at our inner questions

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• 37 “Turning Point”: above: 2014, plaster, 20”x30”; below: 2015, acrylic on wood panel, 36”x48”

arts & ideas whether related to our station in life or simply being a human being at this time in human evolution. There is no end to studying the results of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-scientific research, but our own development, and more significantly, the development of spiritual science as a cultural force for metamorphosing a dying civilization—depends on more individuals becoming spiritual researchers. In this respect, it is crucial that spiritual science becomes more than our personal worldview that enriches and gives meaning to our lives. The future of human evolution depends on human beings becoming spiritual scientists and researchers in the same way that our present civilization is built on our becoming natural scientists and researchers. This is what the Ninth Statute is pointing to when it says the purpose of the School of Spiritual Science is the actual practice of spiritual research. That suggests that the full meaning of becoming a member of the School for Spiritual Science is to develop the capacity to be a spiritual-scientific researcher. The special or vocational sections of the School are clearly intended as the outer and inner spaces where individuals can collaborate with colleagues to support each other in developing the faculties and methods for doing spiritual scientific research in their particular field. The same applies no less for the General Section, however in this case, there is much less research activity because its tasks are less well understood. The General Section is where the lessons of the First Class have their place within the spiritual architecture of the School. In addition to the Class lessons, the General Section is where all subjects of a universally human nature— karma and reincarnation, meditation, Christology and similar subjects—can be taken up, not simply for study, but as spheres of research. When the General Section is seen to be a place like all the Sections, where colleagues engage in spiritual research, new light is shed on the lessons and mantras of the First Class. They belong to the path of developing the faculties and capacities of spiritual-scientific researchers. The lessons and mantras would be worked with in a different manner and spirit when taken up by a community of striving spiritual researchers. As the spirit of inquiry and research permeates all the Sections, including the General Section and the Class lessons, the School for Spiritual Science, as well as the Anthroposophical Society, will find new purpose and creative life as it fulfills its task of bringing the spiritual and cultural renewal so desperately needed in our time. 38 • being human

The Story of CoQuest “The human being only plays when fully human, and he is fully human only when he plays.” Friedrich Schiller In the spring of 1979, I was playing chess with a friend when I found myself becoming uncomfortable with the fact that only one of us could win and the other must necessarily lose. Ever since, I have lived with the questions: Is competition essential to a good game? Why can’t a good game require collaboration? For almost 40 years, I have been exploring how to create just such a game where collaboration, rather than competition, is the primary dynamic. All the great games played for centuries depend on some form of competition to make them challenging and exciting to play. The primary motivation for playing is the prospect of winning. In team sports—as well as in business, politics and warfare—there is an odd mix of collaboration and competitiveness where each team exercises a high level of collaboration among themselves in order to be more effective in defeating the other team. This begs the question: Why do we compete with some people and co-operate with others? Is there a reason why we don’t co-operate with all people, all the time? Competing is not easy, but collaborating is far more challenging because it means finding strategies that serve the progress of all the players, not just one’s own. The fact that self-interest is so dominant and destructive in today’s world is no reason to accept it as unavoidable. This is the very reason we must intensify our efforts to foster collaboration as an essential social capacity. We cannot eradicate self-interest entirely, but we can strive to balance and harmonize our self-interest with the legitimate self-interest of others by fostering empathy and compassion. If all competitive games are, in effect, “conquest” games, I have coined the name “CoQuest” to describe games based on the challenges of collaboration. In most “conquest” games, like chess and Go, players find themselves in the polarizing context of “black versus white.” In CoQuest, the Dark and Light Demons are the common adversaries of all players. Can the players work together to outsmart the Dark and Light Demons so that all 12 Questors reach a Seat at the Round Table where they will

Above: “Resurrection Song,” 2018, acrylic on wood panel, 36”x36” Below: “Dare the Dark Demonic Deep,” 2018, acrylic on canvas, 12”x24”

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arts & ideas be crowned with a StarStone? CoQuest is more than a game. The high art of Coquest is the way we battle our demons together. While it can be played simply for the fun of it, playing CoQuest can support individuals and groups interested in developing the capacity to balance individual self-interest with social harmony and unity. CoQuest is usually played by two or four players, but it can be played by one person. Solitaire CoQuest is especially suited for individuals looking for a contemplative practice that fosters inner focus and creative renewal. Visit coquest.org to learn more.

“Untitled,” 2018, 16”x20”, acrylic on wood panel

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Michael Howard (livingformstudio@gmail.com) was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1946. He began sculpting at the age of fifteen, studied sculpture at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and received a BFA from Eastern Michigan University, and a MA in Fine Arts from Columbia Pacific University in CA. He met the work of Rudolf Steiner in 1969 attending Emerson College in England. “Since then Rudolf Steiner’s worldview has informed my striving as an artist, a teacher and an evolving human being. For forty-five years I have explored the qualitative relationship between the sounds of speech and sculptural form. For the last ten years I have expanded my exploration to creating visible music as well. I have also developed the medium of rice drawing as a way to school social artistic capacities.” He edited and introduced a collection of lectures on art by Rudolf Steiner entitled Art as Spiritual Activity: Rudolf Steiner’s Contribution to the Visual Arts, and wrote a book on the role of art in education called Educating the Will. He lives and works in Amherst, MA. His website is: livingformstudio.org

ART/capital Residency Hidden worlds in form and color, wings of the soul, stars, wind and water, community and capital, social and individual, paint, sculpture, and Free Culture… In January, the Free Columbia initiative in Philmont, NY, began collaborating with Lightforms-Art and Spirit, an arts center in neighboring Hudson, to offer Free Culture residencies to selected artists near and far. Free Columbia and Lightforms will make studio space, practical support, and an annual fund of $8000 available to nurture creativity in and for community. Artists bear inner riches like seeds in search of gardens, in search of sun and rain and nurture. We need these seeds today as we need nature, as we need connection to sky and earth, and to each other. But art has become money, and money art; art is a product in the market, for those who can afford to make and sell it. Art needs capital, but no less does capital need art: capital needs creativity, or it becomes a dead money. In the words of Joseph Beuys, capital is human dignity and creativity, capital is art. Free Columbia events and classes are accessible to anyone, regardless of income: no set price or tuition. This does not mean the offerings don’t need currency... An event that comes to fruition has of necessity received this energy through past gifts, or it could not come into existence. The event is a gift. If you experience this gift, and wish to make a gift like it accessible to future audiences and students, your capital can do it.

The Artists and their Projects Zoltán Döbröntei comes October 9-30 to create paintings in dialogue with local sites. “The eternal task of art is to make visible how the destiny of the individual relates to the destiny of others, and of the community...” He founded Napút (“Sunway”) Academy in Hungary. Martina Angela Müller’s project Towards a Star will be installed once Lightforms has a permanent site in

Hudson. Martina has been working with the imagery of wings of the soul and stars for the light of consciousness, incorporating the script of nature as we find it in clouds, water, sand. She is on the Alkion Center and Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School faculties. Jason Healy will spend this summer painting in Philmont in a residency with Free Columbia. Jason worked as a Waldorf teacher, carpenter, cook, journalist, and gardener; he studied classical painting and anthroposophical art therapy; earned a degree in social work and practices as a psychotherapist and art therapist.

Free Columbia: Elements of Painting Free Columbia will offer four week-long intensives with Laura Summer in the basic lawfulness of color and composition, to explore and exercise capacities in the quality realm. “If you are interested in painting and wonder how to take your work beyond your own expression and into conversation with the elements of two dimensions, you are so welcome to apply. If you’ve painted for years and long for enlivening dialogue with other painters, or if you’re a beginner fascinated and committed to this work of learning through artistic process, you are so welcome to apply.” 2018-2019 sessions will be in November, February, April and July. There will be individual work to do between sessions and the studio at Free Columbia will be available during the year: www.freecolumbia.org

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research & reviews IN THIS SECTION: The late Sergei Prokofieff entered the whole world opened by Rudolf Steiner and refined and extended the work for decades. Steve Usher reviews his book on the titanic metamorphosis of our Earth becoming a Sun. Michael Vode reviews a book not yet in English, the first part of the biography of Judith von Halle. Before she began her mature researches, how did a spiritually awake and gifted girl and young woman endure the oblivion of modern culture? Luigi Morelli has carefully organized for us the process of become aware of our cosmic existence. First of two parts. Steiner said he would have based his work on Emerson in America; Stuart Weeks has been raising consciousness about that...

And the Earth Becomes a Sun And the Earth Becomes a Sun, The Mystery of the Resurrection, by Sergei O. Prokofieff (Wynstones Press, 2014, 569 pages, ISBN 9780 946206 773)

Review by Stephen E. Usher, PhD This is an important work, to my mind the most important literary accomplishment of my late friend Sergei O. Prokofieff. By the time I had finished reading, I felt I had undergone a spiritual transformation; I had inwardly come a step closer to the essence of Christianity. A short review of such a mighty work can hardly do it justice, or survey its many themes, but a few can be mentioned. Quite significant is the manner in which the book traces the paths of Christ’s blood and Christ’s body from the time of the Crucifixion. The direction taken by Christ’s blood can be described as follows. While Christ still lives, it flows from the cross and soaks the earth. It also enters the air where, captured by angels, it etherizes. After Christ dies, it flows, mingling with water, from the lance wound of Longinus, and it also flows into the cup of Joseph of Arimathea. The author pictures three streams taken by the Sacred Blood. The first is the stream derived mainly from the two upper wounds, the stream that enters the elements of fire and air. Second, the stream flowing from the wound in the side enters the elements of water and fire. Third is the stream associated with earth and fire, derived mainly from the lower two wounds. (p. 164) By Easter Saturday, all of the blood had been etherized, making the connection with fire. The mystery of Christ’s Sacred Blood was the focus of study and service for the Knights of the Grail. The author explores the role of the etherized blood of Christ in the spiritual process that ultimately leads to the Earth’s becoming a Sun. (Chapter 3, “The Blood of the Grail and its Esoteric Significance.”) The path of Christ’s body is the mystery at the center of the Rosicrucians’ work. Their secret, spiritual-scientific research explored the “primal matter.” Of this, Rudolf Steiner said: “Let us look at the boundary between physical and etheric substance. What lies between physical and etheric substances is like nothing else in the world... It is something that cannot be compared with any other physical substance, yet it is the essence of all of them. It is a substance that is contained in every other physical substance, so that the other physical substances can be considered as modifications of this one substance.” (pp. 182-183) The Rosicrucians used what they had discovered about the primal matter to penetrate the mystery of the Holy Body, which was taken into the earth on Good Friday from the sepulcher, when the earth opened to receive it and then closed again. In connection with the primal matter, the particles of the Holy Simone dei Crocifissi, “The Virgin’s Dream” (1365)

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Body spread, in homeopathic fashion, throughout the entire earth. (p. 183) To understand the mystery of Holy Body, the idea of the human phantom must also be considered. The phantom is the spiritual archetype of the human body, which was damaged by the Fall of Man. Christ had restored the phantom of Jesus of Nazareth to its pristine form by the time of Golgotha. The particles of the Holy Body have a connection with the restored phantom of Jesus. Through this the particles of the Holy Body have become what the author refers to as a “spiritual ferment” for the future transformation of the earth. In this connection Rudolf Steiner is quoted (p. 181), “Christ was led to Golgotha in order that He might raise matter again to spiritual heights,” and Sergei Prokofieff adds, “this is, gradually to spiritualize it.” Steiner is quoted again on the same page, “Of what has the earth consisted since the Christ spirit permeated it? Of life—right down to the atom! An atom has a value, and can be understood, only in so far as you regard it as a sheath that encompasses a spiritual essence, and this spiritual essence is a part of Christ.” Through these thoughts, one begins to have an inkling of the path to total spiritualization of the Earth—the path to a Sun condition.

The third great Christian esoteric stream after the Grail and Rosicrucian is the Manichean. Its focus is the transformation of evil. From the Manichean perspective, the purpose of evil is to strengthen the good that must grow and develop by overcoming the evil. In contrast, the primary objective of evil is to prevent the spiritualization of the Earth and the Earth’s eventual metamorphosis into a Sun, as is explained in the lengthy sixth chapter, “The World Destiny of Evil.” Of particular importance is the author’s study of the four streams of evil: the Lucifer stream, the Ahriman stream, the Asura stream, and the stream of Sorat. Those who succumb to the terrible Sorat stream become black magicians; “...under the influence of Moon forces”, in the words of Rudolf Steiner, they will “commit prostitution with matter [itself]... which takes place between man and the hardening process of matter... [a] misalliance between man and the forces of degraded matter.” (p. 314-315) Chapter 6 also considers the ways humanity can defend itself against evil. Knowledge of this defense was part of the Esoteric School of Paul, which was led by Paul’s pupil, Dionysius. The author observes that what was known in Paul’s secret esoteric school is reflected, in a diluted way, in the sixth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. The teaching is summarized in two ideas, which should become ideals. One is called, “The Armor of God,” (p. 353) and the other is characterized in these words, “What it comes to in the end is this: let the mighty strength of His power flow through those who want to serve the Lord.” Meditation on this sentence is a step in the defense against evil. (p. 347) In addition to studying these three great Christian esoteric streams—the Grail stream, the Rosicrucian stream, and the Manichean stream—Sergei O. Prokofieff addresses many other related topics. These include: Christ’s descent to the core of the Earth between Good Friday and Easter Sunday and His mighty struggle there with death, and of how, by His victory, Christ broke through from the Earth’s core to the Kingdom of the Father. The deep mystery of how Christ defeated Sorat in this battle at the core of the earth.

Friedrich Herlin, “The Eucharistic Man of Sorrows” (1469)

How Christ saved the phantoms of the dead from destruction in the eighth sub-ring of the Earth, which lies just before the core, the ring known as the “Fragmenter.” (Chapter 5, “The Appearance of the Dead in the Gospel of St. Matthew”) summer-fall issue 2018 • 43

research & reviews

Swan’s Wings Swan’s Wings: A Spiritual Autobiography; Part I, Childhood and Youth; by Judith von Halle (not yet translated from the German)

Review by Michael Vode

Margarita Woloschin, The Resurrected”

How the Last Supper leads to the eventual transformation of the Earth to Sun through the mystery of bread and the juice of the vine in connection with the path of the Holy Body and Sacred Blood. (Chapter 2, “The Sun Mystery of the Last Supper”) Before closing, it should be mentioned that the book contains many wonderful full color reproductions of Christian and anthroposophic art, which serve the presentation of ideas very well. The frontispiece, for example, is Margarita Woloschin’s The Resurrected (above). As stated at the beginning, reading this work was truly transformative for me, and I commend it most highly. Stephen E. Usher, PhD (seusher@sbcglobal.net) is an an economist with expertise in money, banking, and financial markets. He was for eight years managing director of Anthroposophic Press, and has lectured and written widely on anthroposophical topics.

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During Passiontide of 2005, Judith von Halle received the stigmata and has since composed approximately twenty meditative texts, many devolving on previously unresearched, Christ-ensouled, historical phenomena. Since she has revealed very little of her private life, this book comes as a surprise. The experiences cover an inner and outer life, and despite trials and tribulations, they reveal glimpses into a continuously ardent and searching soul-life, except for two painful periods of interruption. Her honesty and powers of discernment convey spiritual subtleties and distinctions that invite extended contemplation on the part of the reader. The discrete sections, not divided into chapters, interweave to convey the continuity of a lifespan. This preview of a four-hundred-page book will offer a decidedly partial overview of Judith von Halle’s experiences and insights. The book opens dramatically. While at her grandparent’s house, the two-year-old is startled when a man bursts into the house to tell of raging fire across town. The shock awakens her not only to her earthly personality, but to the reality of a higher I-consciousness. She recognizes that the fire that distresses her is not the present one, and she also recognizes that her higher consciousness has the knowledge that she currently cannot access. This early experience begins her quest to answer this burning question. As a young girl, Judith already perceived the etheric in the plant world as well as the etheric and astral bodies of humans. As a child she coined the word “Lebens zauberkraft” for the etheric, a word which evoked the divine power of the emanation she perceived. When in her twenties she came across Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy, she realized that his term “etheric body” corresponded to her coined word. She felt nourished by the pure beauty of this kingdom—in contrast to so much of the artificial, man-made world around her. She was disturbed by the monstrous astral apparition that accompanied a loss of temper, but uplifted by the beauteous aura of an adult she sometimes beheld who cultivated a life of restraint and

magnanimity. She regretted the absence of such a person close to her in her own life. Even as a small child Judith realized that no one she knew had experiences similar to her own. The true “world of reality” she had come to prize—as opposed to the “day-theatre-world” of ordinary perception—was perceived by others as sheer fantasy. As a consequence, she had to endure conflicts with oblivious adult authority. Fortunately, the discovery of classical music at this time opened up “a land of unlimited possibility, comfort, good fortune, and a bit of home.” Music was a bridge to the supersensible world’s creative majesty. As an eight-year-old she listened on a Walkman to a range of music from the medieval through the Romantic period. Her immersion impelled her to research the relevant historical periods, and the research enhanced both her enjoyment and understanding. At the age of ten she had a revelation. Wide awake just past the threshold of sleep, she was aware of an exalted spiritual presence. She “knew with certainty” that this Being was “Christus” (a Greek word she had never heard). She felt a reality outside of time: the simultaneity of all questions and answers, with all desires and wishes stilled. In heart-consciousness she immediately grasped Alpha and Omega, the meaning of the Beginning and the End. The Ground of Being drew close, centering on a concealed question embedded in her everyday consciousness, but corresponding to a trace of memory that the core of her being had at one time “known.” But her understanding of it would be as if for the first time. In this indescribably stately sphere, the Son of God directed her gaze to an image: gathered around “Him” were a large band of other human beings, and she stood among these, “His” many children. He remained at one with them, “protecting under us, above us, and with us” in a way “as can be among human beings.” In this moment, she received the blessed quietus of all longing and privation. She realized that every human being is unconditionally regarded with utmost selfless devotion in a way that far transcends human love, all of them mattering equally and all with the potential to awaken to this reality. She saw that all are meant to develop a higher I-consciousness so that they may begin to contribute to the emergence of a universal brotherhood-sisterhood. Throughout her youth no one spoke of a similar

experience. But as an adult she became convinced that everyone has received, however subtly, a potentially lifealtering spiritual gift. When she attended a Christian school for her later grammar school years, she was disappointed in the religious instruction. With the German cultural, spiritual heritage of “Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, or Hegel,” she wondered whether what is most essential in their work is lost with a denial of the spiritual world in our day. This position calls to mind two other insights about the modern world voiced in other parts of the book: 1) the near total loss of poetic imagination in a leisure-less western society that has denied its need for the beautiful; 2) the two “ground evils” of our day: the ridicule of and scorn for acquiring spiritual knowledge and for cultivating ethical impulses. A year or two after her first nighttime encounter, she had a kind of follow-up, nighttime experience that evolved into a years-long schooling. Just past the threshold of sleep, she was faced by hideous creatures, and the shock returned her to ordinary consciousness. After a few nights, however, she confronted these creatures, and as a result her consciousness expanded. She realized the deformed figures embodied her own weaknesses that were lodged in her etheric and astral bodies. After the initial distress, she soon accepted that she had work on herself to do. On a subsequent night, she felt a spiritual entity waiting for her attention. The cognition of this angelic presence was feeling-drenched, and its feeling was steeped in thought. It rayed out a patient, loving solicitude, an altruistic warmth and wisdom. The name she gave for her guardian angel was “the honorworthy Light.” Her angel discerned her thoughts and feelings without intruding on her innermost life. It called for a re-orientation of her thinking and feeling and for a new form of communication through “innermost turning to oneself” that she called “heart speaking.” On some nights her angel was accompanied by helpers who enabled her to reach a higher level of consciousness. She was joyously astonished when her teacher revealed higher beings who knew her from previous ages. She received instruction on “the complex Mysterium of the human being, the history and seemingly inexhaustible coherences of the world, and the relationship of the human being to the earth and to the spiritual world.” Sometimes she was encouraged to experience for herself the lesson to be learned, and aftersummer-fall issue 2018 • 45

research & reviews wards she was questioned as to its meaning. She learned to know “the inner principle of the world or reality, the structure of the Spirit-organism.” She came to understand that whatever she learned represented only a part of the whole divine perspective, that the “world of reality” was membered in “high and wide spheres.” Each night was a kind of probation. If she was not properly attentive, her spiritual gaze was turned away although the forbearance of her angel never diminished. The guided experience entailed “an intuitive, higher thinking.” Without the good fortune of a confidante, Judith kept a notebook of her inner life, and although she eventually disposed of most of the notebooks, she includes revealing excerpts. In mid-adolescence, she felt oppressed by contemporary mores and culture, with little in common with classmates. The rock music her peers adored seemed “blasphemous” to her. While she longed for “nourishment, creativity, and exchange,” with a “heart full of joy, compassion, piety, and love,” “despair over the ignorance of humans regarding the world of reality overwhelmed her,” and her childhood religiosity vanished. At night, she would often curl up in a corner and weep, questioning why God had opened her eyes to beauty and reality when no one else seemed to value them. But attendance in a semester-long foreign exchange program in America enabled her to gain perspective. At a German-American school she found the atmosphere welcoming and students and teachers engaging. Immersed in Goethe’s William Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, she felt Goethe alongside her, as if dueling with him over what she perceived as a missing spiritual component in this work. In Goethe’s Faust, however, she found “the true Meister.” Her supersensible capacity revived, and throughout her seventeenth to twenty-first years, her earthly thinking united with her spiritual striving. Asked to give an overview of a major philosopher, she felt drawn to Aristotle, and reading his Metaphysics she experienced a remarkable phenomenon: an ascent to “the timeless sphere” in which the concepts arose before their presentation in a discursive mode. She discerned in Shakespeare’s plays “a master of higher psychology,” while the sonnets disclosed “the English Sprachgeist” or spirit of language. With the onset of her thirteenth year of school, however, the course of her life became threatened by a cloud of uncertainty and eventually of near despair. The architecture school that she attended was a “huge disappointment.” Her fellow students seemed satisfied with a status quo entirely lacking in an imagination for “a creative, al46 • being human

ternative lifestyle” or “artistic-aesthetic ideals.” She began to question why she even had an inner life guided by an angel. Her will became stunted. She found herself stewing in the front of a television, numbed by the banality of “talk shows, scripted reality shows, family sitcoms” and the like. Who had contrived this “abyss of horror”? She lost touch with her lifelong aspiration to live in unison with other human I-Beings and came to abhor the world, oblivious to her own fall into it. She lay in bed awaiting death from a broken heart. One night, however, she summoned a power of concentration that enabled her to identify the hidden cause of her lapse. She looked beyond her “despair and bitterness” toward “the blindness and crudeness of the world” to “a power that wanted to estrange her from the world, with its cold claw” that gripped her heart—to a cynical power that reduced the earth to a dead realm of abstract laws devoid of soul and spirit. It had prevented her from clear thinking in tandem with creative will-impulses. With the vestige of will remaining in her, however, she said to herself, “If you do not gather yourself, you will never be free. Not only will your body and soul die, but you will also kill your spirit! The life of your true being that God lovingly wrought and abundantly blessed will wither.” She would enact a new resolve. The world came to meet her. At another school she found the approach “unconventional, spontaneous, creative, and incredibly stimulating.” She identified strongly with the “joy of devotion” of one of her professors and they developed a rapport. One day she came across a mantra from the Calendar of the Soul and felt transported into its world of trust. Her professor eventually introduced her to Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy, Occult Science, and The Philosophy of Freedom. They were immediately accessible to her. Although she realized that Steiner’s experiences far transcended her own, she at long last felt confirmed in her innermost life. She had found a spiritual path she could wholeheartedly embrace. In the book’s afterword, the author speaks of various reasons for publishing a book that lays bare crucial facets of a “personal, intimate inner life.” Receptive readers will find that there is much to glean between the lines of this spiritual autobiography. Judith von Halle has taken great pains, and gratefulness for the considerable risks taken seems more than fitting. Michael Vode is a teacher in New York City. Active in the New York Branch, he is a member of the School for Spiritual Science.

Piercing Through the Veil of Karma

Rudolf Steiner’s Path to the Microcosm, Pt. 1 by Luigi Morelli The following article addresses what could be called the anthroposophical path to the microcosm, which corresponds to what Steiner calls “spirit recollection” in the Foundation Stone Meditation. The article will be divided and presented over two issues of being human. In the first part, we will look at the archetypal social phenomenon and what are its implications for the modern human being’s understanding of the forces of karma. We will then look at exercises that Steiner gave us towards the later part of his lecturing activity, which allow us to create imaginations of self and others and enable us to understand the forces at work in our biographies. Finally, we will look at what can be characterized as the path to the microcosm that allows us to pierce through the veil of karma. In the second part of this article, in the next issue of being human, we will contrast the path to the microcosm, which pierces through the veil of karma, with the better-known path to the macrocosm, which pierces through the veil of the senses. It is through deepening the path to the microcosm of the soul that we can have an overall view, understanding of, and ability to recognize our incarnational journey in the present, and backwards in time. In the present this means acquiring familiarity with the forces of destiny as they manifest in our biography and therefore being able to take fuller responsibility for our life. Another threshold lies in a further level of objectivity, which means recognizing parts of our incarnational history, our karmic past. This is the path that Steiner mapped out in his karmic exercises (of which more below), the path that he himself followed in order to offer us the karmic biographies in the last two years of his life. The path that Steiner inaugurated has been made available to all of humanity. We will first explore in depth this path of the journey into the soul—the microcosm—in four stages. We will then contrast this path with the more familiar path into the macrocosm, the path of study of outer phenomena as it can be pursued in the study of biology, geology, physics, anthropology, social sciences, etc. The first one leads us past the veil of karma; the second one pierces through the veil of the senses.

The Archetypal Social Phenomenon Toward the last years of his life, particularly from 1918 to 1924, Steiner repeatedly called the attention of members of the Anthroposophical Society to the importance of coming to know oneself in the encounter. In 1918, he introduced the idea of the archetypal social phenomenon, which is central to our exploration. This states: A perpetual struggle and opposition to falling asleep in social relationships is also present. If you meet a person you are continuously standing in a conflict situation in the following way: because you meet him, the tendency to sleep always develops in you so that you may experience your relationship to him in sleep. But, at the same time, there is aroused in you the counterforce to keep yourself awake. This always happens in the meeting between people – a tendency to fall asleep, a tendency to keep awake. In this situation a tendency to keep awake has an anti-social character, the assertion of one’s individuality, of one’s personality, in opposition to the social structure of society.1

Let us approach this central phenomenon of the social path more closely. We sleep into the other person in listening, and awaken to ourselves in speaking. This means that our social impulses are strongest in our sleep, when we are least conscious. In the same lecture Steiner adds: Only that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions is active as a social impulse in ordinary waking consciousness . . . Thus there exists a permanent disposition to fall asleep precisely in order to build up the social structure of humanity”2 (emphasis added).

We will be concerned precisely about that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions in what comes next. In sleep, in our astral body we find ourselves together with all the other people in our lives, but we are not con1 Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being (lecture of December 12, 1918, GA 186). 2 Ibid. summer-fall issue 2018 • 47

research & reviews scious of it. In the life after death, in kamaloka, we actually awaken in the perception of the world of the other person. Social processes are thus “death processes,” that render possible the kamaloka experience before death; hence, they are processes that we normally resist. To overcome our natural anti-social tendencies in the encounter with others, we must move away from our natural inclination to form concepts about the being of the other, and move toward developing images.3 Through imaginations, we will acquire a deeper faculty of empathy. Developing imaginations is in fact the way to carry “that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions.” When we meet another person, a picture should arise from the other person. “But this requires of course the heightened interest that I have often described to you as the foundation of social life, in which each person should take in the other person.”4 It is here that we must find the social impulses. As to how this could be done, an answer appears in the same lecture, where he spoke of what is now known as the “after-image.” To let the after-image reach us “it is most important of all that the instinct shall be implanted in people to look back more frequently during this life; but in the right way. To do that, we need to immerse ourselves with real love in the other person. This has such a germinating power over us that we really acquire the imaginative forces necessary to confront the contemporary human being in such a way that in him, something is manifest that appears to us only after many years in our backward survey of those figures with whom we have lived together.”5 (emphasis added) This intention to look back and immerse ourselves with deep interest in the other person, gaining new imaginative forces, acquires full dimension in a series of exercises that Steiner devised, that I am calling “karma exercises.” These exercises pave the way for the awakening of a perception of ourselves, and of other human beings, allowing us gradually to pierce through the veil of karma that hides the true nature of human relationships.

Steiner’s Karma Exercises In the last twenty-three years of his life, Steiner struggled to bring a living understanding of the ideas of karma and reincarnation. In line with his intention, and central to this attempt, were the exercises that can awaken a sense 3 Ibid. 4 Steiner, The Challenge of the Times, December 7, 1918 lecture. 5 Ibid. 48 • being human

for individual recognition of the forces of destiny in our biography, and ultimately the reawakening of memories of previous lives. Steiner’s effort never received the consecration or ultimate form that the path of thinking finds in Philosophy of Freedom. The reason for this could be that Steiner barely managed to complete laying out important building blocks of this edifice in the last year of his life. Nevertheless, a whole coherent direction emerges once we look at some of these exercises, arranging them from the most immediate to the most demanding. They form in fact a phenomenological approach to the microcosm, to the world of the soul, parallel to all that we know in the anthroposophical study of the macrocosm, e.g., when we rise from a Goethean to a spiritual-scientific understanding of mineral, plant, animal, and outer phenomena. It was through the following exercises and similar ones that Steiner pierced through the veil of karma and delivered the fruits of his karmic research. This path is open to all of us, at least potentially. It is the quintessential social path. The following review is far from exhaustive; it is merely indicative of the breadth of Steiner’s work in the matter. A fuller review, including additional exercises and variations, can be found in the book Karl Julius Schröer and Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophy and the Teachings of Karma and Reincarnation.6 Some of the names given to the exercises are the author’s choice.

Karma Exercise I: Rückschau The most basic, but quintessential, activity of Spirit Recollection is illustrated in the practice of looking back [German Rückschau] on our day in reverse order, and possibly, even in reverse motion. This is the perfect equivalent and polar opposite to the pencil exercise [Steiner’s suggested concentration exercise]. Whereas in observing an object belonging to the macrocosm—the pencil—we have to exclude everything of an inner nature (personal events, feelings, impulses of will) in doing the Rückschau we focus on the reflection in our lives of everything that lived in personal events, with their feelings and impulses of will—the external result of these inner activities. We bring to awareness everything that would otherwise remain under the surface of our awareness, and allow for more consciousness of what lives in feelings and impulses of will. The practice of the exercise is the very basis of the activity of recollection that will extend its breadth in the following exercises. 6 See chapter 4, heading “Steiner’s Karma exercises” available at http://millenniumculmination.net/Steiners-Karma-Exercises.pdf

Karma Exercise II: Gratitude Recollection A first exercise that forms a prelude to the series that we will examine is designed to awaken gratitude and a sense of perspective concerning our personal achievements.7 In it Steiner asks us to turn back to an overview of our life and see what part other people have played in it, by detecting how much we owe to our parents, relatives, friends, teachers, colleagues, and so forth. To be effective with this exercise we need to devote successive attempts to every single individual. The exercise should lead to the realization of how much in our life we owe to others. Repeated over time, it allows us to develop an imagination for those people who play an important part in our life, an imagination that points to their deeper being. We should be able to develop an objective sense of our indebtedness. This sense of perspective and gratitude will develop further in the ability to “relate ourselves imaginatively to those we meet in the present.”

Karma Exercise III: Phase of Life Recollection An exercise that anticipates the so-called Lesser Karma Exercise is the one Steiner described in the same lecture quoted above as a complement to the first. Whereas in the exercise above we are seeking to develop an object00ive and imaginative perception of others, here the same is true about ourselves. In this instance, we will refer to a particular stage of our lives, and immerse ourselves objectively into that time, as if we were spectators to ourselves. In so doing, we are freeing the perception of ourselves in the present from the images that bind us to the past, and that lead us to identify our ego with our life experiences, rather than with the intimations of our higher self. We thus develop an imaginative picture of ourselves, and lessen the effects of the egoism that naturally develops in our age of the consciousness soul. None of this can be achieved without repeated effort.

Karma Exercise IV: Lesser Karma Exercise The next exercise, the “Lesser Karma Exercise,” consists of looking back to one single event in our life, one that we wish would not have happened. Steiner spoke of 7 Steiner, Inner Aspect of the Social Question, February 4, 1919 lecture.

this exercise in more than one place.8 The example that Steiner offers is that of a shingle falling from a roof onto our head. He asks us to imagine the deed of the “second person in us” who loosens the shingle from the roof just in time for it to fall on our heads when we pass under it. In other words, he wants us to picture that we have planned our lives before our birth in such a way as to come to certain critical turning points on earth. When we enter the exercise for the first few times, this second person is clearly seen as an invention, something artificially conjured up. However, he grows and evolves in us to the point that we cannot escape the feeling that he really is within us, accompanied with the growing realization that we have really wanted these events to come to pass. The memory of the fact that we have wanted these events has been all but erased from our consciousness; and the exercise, repeated over many life events, serves to awaken it. We can thus deepen an inner conviction and feeling for our karmic biography. Cultivating this feeling bestows deep inner strength, and modifies our attitude toward events we may have previously confronted with fear. We acquire a certain peacefulness and acceptance, together with the feeling that everything in our life has a purpose. Something else becomes apparent: we start taking responsibility for our destiny, and stop blaming parents, friends, enemies, or random events for those things that cause us unhappiness.

Karma Exercise V: Greater Karma Exercise A final exercise is the so-called four days/three nights exercise or the “Greater Karma Exercise.” 9 Here it is a matter of bringing back to memory an event from daily life that may or may not involve another person. It is a matter of depicting it inwardly, or “painting it spiritually,” as Steiner puts it, by recreating in greatest detail all the impressions received by our senses. If the memory includes a person, one re-creates inwardly the way in which she moved; the quality, pitch, and tone of her voice; words used, gestures, and so forth. This experience is taken into the night and repeated the following two days. The image is first given shape by the astral body in the external ether. From there, the next morning the image is impressed into 8 Steiner, Karma and Reincarnation, January 30, 1912 lecture. See also: January 29, 1912 and February 8, 1912 lectures in Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz. 9 Steiner, Karmic Relationships, Volume 2, May 9, 1924 lecture. summer-fall issue 2018 • 49

research & reviews the etheric body. One awakens with definite feelings and the impression that the image wants something from us. It grows real in us. The etheric body continues to work on the image. On the third day, the image is impressed into the physical body. There it is spiritualized. Steiner describes the experience of the day as a cloud in which the person moves. It gives rise to the feeling of being part of an emerging picture. At first we feel part of the picture, but with our will paralyzed, frozen, so to speak. This experience then evolves and becomes sight, an objective image. This will be the image of the event of the previous life that is related to the event in the present incarnation. An experience of this kind will most likely not arise until the exercise is carried out a great number of times.

Reviewing the Exercises We can graphically present the evolution of Steiner’s exercises of Spirit Recollection in Table 1. All of these imply a strengthening of our powers of observation, and of our memory. The quintessential exercise that forms the foundation and prelude for all of them is the Rückschau. The activity of the Rückschau is one of pure review, deprived of evaluation. As we move towards the other exercises, review is mixed with as objective as possible an evaluation element (e. g. in looking back at a phase in our life we may recall our predominant moods). At the second stage, we educate ourselves to an overcoming of the element of sympathy and antipathy when we approach another human being. True interest, overcoming likes and dislikes, offers the possibility of creating imaginations of others and of ourselves, rather than limiting concepts. The pivotal stage reached through the Lesser Karma Exercise leads us to realize that we are, in greater measure than we usually realize, the architects of our lives. We learn to take responsibility for our biography. And finally, the Greater Karma Exercise offers us the possibility of getting to know our deeper karmic being as it has developed over many incarnations. Exercise I Rückschau

Exertion of the will, through repeated practice of the karma exercises, forms the foundation for this path up to the Lesser Karma exercise. Deeper spiritual knowledge, however, acquires greater importance once we want to move to the root causes of events in our biography in previous lives, as in the Greater Karma exercise. All of these exercises ask us to look back in time, whether they apply to ourselves or another person. They ask us to render objective that which lives unconscious in our will. It is the path that we will recognize in the second part of the article as the path of Spirit Recollection, in accordance with the terminology used in the Foundation Stone Meditation. In the next issue we will explore how the path into the soul—microcosm—stands in relation to the more familiar path into the macrocosm. In terms of the Foundation Stone Meditation we will contrast the Path of Spirit Recollection (also called Spirit Remembering) with the path of Spirit Beholding (also called Spirit Vision)—the first and the third panels of the Foundation Stone Meditation respectively. Luigi Morelli has a passion for social change from a cultural perspective, and has extensive experience working with the social therapeutic impulse in Camphill, in L’Arche communities, and presently within Ecovillage Ithaca where he lives, with an emphasis on Nonviolent Communication and participatory facilitation. Luigi has written books including Karl Julius Schröer and Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophy and the Teachings of Karma and Reincarnation and Aristotelians and Platonists: A Convergence of the Michaelic Streams in Our Time. To see these writings (available for donation or for free) and explore more see www.millenniumculmination.net

Exercise II-III Exercise IV Gratitude Lesser Karma Recollection Exercise Review of daily events in Developing Taking reverse order. Imaginative responsibility for pictures of self our lives. and others. Table 1: Exercises of Spirit Recollection 50 • being human

Exercise V Greater Karma Exercise Perceiving the origin of present events in events of a previous life

The Story of the Concord School of Philosophy & Literature 1879-1888, Deus Anni by Stuart-Sinclair Weeks Editor’s Note: Now at www.concordium.us and for over thirty years, Stuart Weeks has been drawing attention to the forgotten bloom of America’s first anthroposophists, though the name they used was Transcendentalists. Rudolf Steiner never came to our continent, and was asked very little about it, so the roots prepared here for his work are neglected. Following is a short excerpt from Stuart’s proposal for reawakening an understanding and connection with this “Concord School of Philosophy & Literature.”

At the time when Germany itself is overpowered by the influence of Mill, Spencer, and Darwin, and the genius of materialism is getting so strong a hold everywhere, it is significant to find that the Concord School reasserts with breadth and penetration the supremacy of the mind. Harpers Magazine, August 19, 1881

One could fill a small library with the books written both by, and about, Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Concord’s authors, and the Transcendentalists. In contrast, there is not a single book on the culmination of the Transcendentalists’ labors: “The Concord School of Philosophy & Literature.” The Concord School, or Hillside Chapel, as it was fondly referred to, can not only be seen as the blossoming of Transcendentalism. But, it brought together kindred streams from the fount of American culture, including the Neo-Platonists from Illinois and the Hegelians/Aristotelians from St. Louis, along with other fluent tributaries. There is a story to be told here, a remarkable one, as noted in the opening passage from Harper’s Magazine and its reference to the “genius of materialism.” That story provides a veritable foundation here on our shores for the further evolution of the physical, natural, social, and cognitive sciences, civilization itself .... toward a fully-realized spiritual science, or—in Emerson’s words and fellow speakers at the Concord School—a science of reason/the spirit, in and for our time. The reason why the world lacks unity and lies broken and in heaps is because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the

demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand as perception.... Deep calls upon deep, but in actual life the marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding. But, when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation. Emerson, Nature

The Concord School of Philosophy & Literature opened its doors in 1879, during the Indian Summer of Transcendentalism, and closed them with its “Dean” Amos Bronson Alcott’s memorial service in the summer of 1888. In between, Emerson, one of the founders, gave two addresses and, following his death in 1882, a session was devoted to his life and genius. The actors in the “drama” of the Concord School—a veritable Michael School on our shores—totaled 85, Concordians as well as colleagues from New England, our United States, and overseas. The speakers ranged from Alcott and his co-founders Emerson and Franklin Sanborn, through Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Peabody, and Edna Cheney, to Harvard’s celebrated mathematician Benjamin Pierce and philosopher William James, the leader of the Neo-Platonist school William Torrey Harris, the head of the Hegelian/Aristotelian school (and soon to be America’s second Commissioner of Education), as well as the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Wisconsin... Alcott presided over the sessions—in Emerson’s words, “the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of the time.” 6/11/2018

The Presenters / Actors in the Drama - Concordium

http://www.concordium.us/presenters-actors-drama/

Stuart-Sinclair Weeks is the founder of the Center for American Studies at Concord (www.concordium.us). summer-fall issue 2018 • 51

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news for members & friends

of the Anthroposophical Society in America

You are Invited! 2018 Fall Conference “Here and Now: Transforming Ourselves, Transforming Our World” The Central Regional Council warmly invites you to join us for the Anthroposophical Society in America’s 2018 Annual Conference and Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 5th to 7th, with pre-conference gatherings on Thursday, October 4th. 2018 marks the 300th anniversary of New Orleans, and we are delighted that this national event will be in the very south of our region, on the delta of the Mississippi River whose watershed is the region’s defining feature. There has also been tremendous growth in anthroposophical work in New Orleans from a study group, Waldorf School, biodynamic activities, and now a curative school. Over the years, the CRC has met and worked in New Orleans through our studies of spiritual geography and the Mississippi River. Following Hurricane Katrina, an international group of members and friends made a healing pilgrimage from St. Louis to New Orleans and Mississippi. We were joined then by Orland Bishop, the late Johannes Matthiessen (“visual artist, social artist and an artist of the earth”), as well as Robert Karp, Bart Eddy, Mary Adams and many others. Together we worked to support the desperately needed healing forces through work in deconstruction, community kitchens, and gardens, and by spraying biodynamic preparations in the Lower Ninth Ward and City Park. We met with those working out of anthroposophy in the city and are humbled by their continuous striving. There is a vibrancy in New Orleans and the work engaged there flows upward along the river with far-reaching impact on the whole of our continent. Songtrails and pageants are often a part of our central region work and we will bring both to New Orleans in October (see below). They are collaborative rituals and celebrations arising out of our research into what it means to be a human being on this earth, weaving the influences of time and space and story. The venue for Here and Now is First Grace United Methodist Church in the heart of the Mid-City neighbor52 • being human

hood. This church itself went through a transformation following Hurricane Katrina. Two churches merged, uniting First UMC, a historically white congregation, with Grace UMC, a historically black c on g r e g a t ion . They are stronger now together and welcoming to all. The location is divine. The Canal Street streetcar drops you off right in front, and Jefferson Davis Parkway with its large old oak trees provides a luscious green space in the middle of the city. City Park less than a mile away is home to a stunning outdoor sculpture garden. Here and Now: Transforming Ourselves, Transforming Our World is a fitting title and theme for this event and location. Please join us as we gather with colleagues from across the world to meet and inspire one another. For the Central Regional Council: Marianne Fieber-Dhara, Hazel Archer Ginsberg, Lisa Dalton, David Howerton, Alberto Loya

Bayou St. John Songtrail Pre-conference activity, Friday, October 5, 7:45–9:30 am

A Songtrail is the weaving of songs, verses and stories from the land while walking along a chosen path. Attention is given to the qualities we see in the landscape and the Beings of nature and elemental worlds. It honors the stories held in a place, the sacredness of all places, and gives an opportunity to connect with the Spirit of Place. The Bayou St. John Songtrail is our chosen path for this conference. We will gather in City Park under the ancient McDonough Oak. Beneath its graceful arching

branches, we will open with songs, honor the four directions, and share history before heading to the bayou just a block away. On our mile and a half journey along Bayou St. John we will stop at the historic portage which helped “land” this new place back in the 1700s and hear about the beginning of New Orleans 300 years ago. We will continue along the magnificent Jefferson Davis Parkway to Canal Street and First Grace Methodist Church. Stopping along the way we will sing, share, and hear more about this place we are in. Songtrails are participatory; wear comfortable walking shoes and remember to bring a hat and water! — Songtrail creator: Marianne Fieber-Dhara

Confluence of Karma A Pageant of Devoted Service This pageant will share a story for Here & Now, this time we are living in. It was conceived of years ago and has now found the right time and place to be shared. This is a story about Helga Ingeborg (Friedlander) Elsas who lived in New Orleans from 1941 until she crossed the threshold in 2012 at the age of 96. Inge was a devoted servant to many causes and in particular to children with special needs and the elderly. She was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1915 and only discovered she was Jewish at the age of nine. Europe and the world were changing, and young Inge seemed to stay just a step ahead of the destructive forces, which claimed her family, through her drive to care for children. She was accepted into a beginner’s training course at the Sonnenhof in Arlesheim in 1933. There she began a course of study into the fundamentals of anthroposophy, curative therapies, and nursing children in a program designed by Dr. Ita Wegman.

Inge (Friedlander) Elsas (second from left, standing in white) in Arlesheim, Switzerland, 1930s

The years Inge spent in Arlesheim (1933-1937) were dramatic years for Dr. Wegman, her clinics and the Anthroposophical Society. Inge’s life was a remarkable series of employments, travel and devotion. Ita Wegman’s life was also a remarkable series of work, travel and devotion in service to healing, Spiritual Science and the vision she shared with Rudolf Steiner regarding medicine and the mysteries. Both of these women lived against a backdrop of unimaginable circumstances. Both embodied immense dedication to their paths of healing, transforming themselves to transform our world. For a few short years, they were in the same place, with little direct contact. For Inge, the time in Switzerland saved and influenced the rest of her life. There is much written about the rift in the Society in 1935. This wound remained open for decades and Inge’s decision finally to join the Anthroposophical Society in 2012 was a healing deed. And we can all celebrate what occurred in Dornach at Easter time 2018: Ita Wegman, Elizabeth Vreede were re-instated to their historic place as members of the Vorstand of the Society. This pageant is a humble effort with many details of this remarkable confluence of two individuals left unspoken. I offer the images and ideas found in this pageant through, and with, the support of colleagues in the Central Region and Margaret Runyon, a close personal friend of Inge Elsas. Our pageants are imagined to be participatory; few choose to just watch the events unfold. For this pageant, however, we do not have a full day to create together. It will be performed Saturday evening. There will be opportunities earlier in the conference to rehearse for our celebration; never perfect but always magical! I am excited to bring this story about these women and their gifts to those assembled in New Orleans for Here & Now: Transforming Ourselves, Transforming —Marianne Fieber-Dhara, pageant creator Our World. Central Regional Council representative to the General Council

Inge Elsas (front, in magenta) with New Orleans members and friends and CRC, February 2011 summer-fall issue 2018 • 53

by Deb Abrahams-Dematte Hearken all, the time has come When all the world at last the truth shall hear...

When thinking about the being of Michael, the spirit of the time, I often recall this song, which we sang together as a community every year at my children’s Waldorf school during Michaelmas time. All the children would perform in the pageant; different grades taking different parts and the younger ones eagerly anticipating the year they would be the actors, and maybe even get to be part of the dragon! In the large and attentive crowd, dressed in red and holding our song sheets, we could feel the hopefulness and joy of the moment. The message came through so clearly that although there is darkness, the qualities of firm intention, striving, and action can bring the truth of peace, of sister- and brother-hood to humanity. Michael guides us to turn our will toward that which we wish to see in the world. Then the lion shall lie down with the lamb Our lances shall be turned to reaping hooks Swords and guns be cast as plough shares Nations shall live in lasting peace All men unite as brothers

In this present time, many of us are seeking inspiration, hope, and a way to put our will forces into action toward a harmonious and peaceful future. The being of Michael, with a cosmic task to “live in the human souls in which the thoughts are formed,” is the inspiration and guiding force for the Anthroposophical Society. The Michael Support Circle was established in 2009 by author and physics professor Ernst Katz and then-General Secretary Torin Finser. Their vision, along with that of the founding members, was to create a stronger base for the financial and spiritual growth of the Society, and an inspiration for others to commit time and resources to our work together. The Michael Support Circle offers an opportunity to bring will to one’s intention of manifesting anthroposophy more fully in the world. The Michael Support Circle now includes 70 donors—individuals, couples and organizations—who have made a commitment of $500 or more for five or more years as an unrestricted gift to the ASA, in addition to 54 • being human

their annual membership contribution and other gifts they may choose to make. We are so grateful for their generous and on-going support. Why become part of the Michael Support Circle? In the words of MSC members: » The Society is part of my inner community. I contribute to ensure it is here for me and for the world. » Anthroposophy changed my life, so I feel it is important for this organization to remain in existence and be active in the world. » I believe that it is important for anthroposophy to be made available to those who are seeking to find this in their lifetime. I also have a desire to be one who support what Steiner brought for the evolution of human beings and world. As Rudolf Steiner described it, The Age of Michael has dawned. Hearts are beginning to have thoughts; spiritual fervor is now proceeding, not merely from mystical obscurity but from souls clarified by thought.

Gifts from Michael Support Circle members provide major support for the work of the ASA and our collective efforts to bring Rudolf Steiner’s vision more fully into the world, for the future of the world. If you’re considering joining this group and would like more information, please contact Deb at deb@anthroposophy.org Spring Appeal Update Thank you to all our members and friends who contributed so generously to our spring appeal. Your gifts help to being anthroposophy more fully in to the world today through thought-provoking and timely programs, print and online editions of being human, our new sister websites anthroposophy.org and rudolfsteiner.org, and so much more. We’ve received more than 77 gifts totaling over $11,000. With your help we will continue to bring content that weaves the deep insights of Rudolf Steiner with the pressing questions and challenges of our time. Deb Abrahams-Dematte (deb@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Development

Michaelmas drawing by Helen-Ann Ireland

Tuned to the “Spirit of the Time”

The ASA invites you to join the

Michael Support Circle our major donor circle.

THANK YOU to the 47 individual members, and to these organizations, whose gifts provide generous and on-going support to bring Rudolf Steiner’s vision more fully into the world, for the future of the world. Anthroposophical Society of Cape Ann Anthroposophy NYC Association of Waldorf Schools of North America Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training Biodynamic Association Camphill Special School – Beaver Run Cedarwood Waldorf School Center for Anthroposophy in NH Council of Anthroposophical Organizations Elderberries Café GRADALIS Waldorf Consulting & Services Great Lakes Branch Heartbeet Lifesharing High Mowing School House of Peace Monadnock Waldorf School Oakwood Lifesharing Research Institute for Waldorf Education RSF Social Finance Rudolf Steiner College Rudolf Steiner Fellowship Foundation Shining Mountain Waldorf School SteinerBooks Michael Support Circle members pledge gifts of between $500 and $5000 per year for five or more years. They help the Society to grow in capacity and viability— the basis for increased membership, new learning opportunities, and greater community engagement. To learn more about how you can support the strength and sustainability of our movement, contact Deb at deb@anthroposophy.org or visit online at www.anthroposophy.org/msc

Welcome to “The Anthroposopher” by Laura Scappaticci A whole new medium for “talk radio” and conversation has taken hold in modern culture: podcasting. With over 500,000 podcast on iTunes alone, people are accessing information, entertainment, and education in a personal way everyday. As a busy working mom, I love listening while driving or doing the dishes. I mostly tune into shows on storytelling, politics, and the pressing issues of our time. For me, it’s a great way to get news and inspiration in an easy to access, mobile format. About five years ago, our little study group in PA took up the term “anthroposopher” to describe someone exploring and connecting to anthroposophy—a solution to what we felt was the fixed “ist’ suffix we so often hear. “Am I an anthroposophist? Nah. I’m an anthroposopher!” Since that time I’ve heard the word anthroposopher pop up in conversations across the country. It seemed like the perfect title for our podcast. For the last three years, even before my work with the ASA, it has been my hope to create a podcast for those curious about anthroposophy, and those in the movement. The Anthroposopher’s first installments have included interviews with Nancy Poer and Joan Sleigh, as well as: Love is Greater than Loss, with Linda Bergh Is Anthroposophy Funny? with Ronald Koetzsch The Voice of Steiner, with Dale Brunsvold of Rudolf Steiner Audio. Upcoming episodes will include more interviews and discussions with our friends across the country and the world. You can subscribe to have new episodes pop up on your phone as we release them. We’re still refining the format, editing, and content, but we’re glad to join the podcasting community! You can find us on your iPhone under the purple podcast icon, and on Android phones by way of the SoundCloud app; just search for The Anthroposopher. You can also listen on your PC or tablet—get quick links at www.anthroposophy.org/podcast—and please email me with podcast ideas at laura@anthroposophy.org! summer-fall issue 2018 • 55

Notes from Katherine Our relationship management database provider is vigilant to keep us up to date with security best practices. A part of that was their requirement that we upgrade our 2012 QuickBooks software which we have done with a nonprofit discount from TechSoup.org. As this issue goes to press, we are in the process of preparing for the audit of the 2017 fiscal year with an on-site visit by our Certified Public Accountant’s team in mid-July. They spend 3-4 days in the office examining our business records, policies, and procedures to determine whether our financial statements fairly state the financial position of the Anthroposophical Society in America, and to insure that adequate procedures and controls are in place. The audit report is the CPA’s opinion on these questions. The CPA also prepares our annual non-profit tax return. The final audit report will be available in September or October. “Spring” varies widely for our members. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, at Rudolf Steiner House, it came rather late this year. The garden out front is a small gift to budding Goethean scientists with its diversity of plants; inside, the staff loves when we can bring in a few peony and lilac blossoms to perfume the atmosphere. Katherine Thivierge, Director of Operations

56 • being human

New Members

of the Anthroposophical Society in America 2/15/2018 to 6/10/2018 Louis Aventuro, Chestnut Ridge NY Richard L Baker, Reno NV Daisy E Barnard, Santa Fe NM Alda Blanes, Salt Spring Island BC Heidi L Boucher, Fair Oaks CA Deborah E Boyer, Detroit MI Lauren Lee Brightwell, Laredo TX Stephen G Brown, Tucson AZ Joyce Caro, Alachua FL Kerry Clements, Marietta PA Courtney Cooke, Clinton WA Kendra M Cooley, Olympia WA Diana Cosma, Malibu CA Sarah Cronick, Brattelboro VT Gloria DeCater, Covelo CA John Stephen DeCater, Covelo CA Jill DeSantis, Oregon City OR John William Duey, Johnstown OH Elizabeth Falcon, Tucson AZ Tim D Forcum, Los Angeles CA Bob Friedman, Sherman Oaks CA Sharda D Geer, Garden City Park NY Ginger Gelber, Pasadena CA Melinda Haselton, New Canaan CT Maggie Hegney, Glenmoore PA Jacob S Hundt, Viroqua WI Eliza J Kendall, Harwich MA Timothy Kennedy, Portland OR Ines Katharina Kinchen, Asheville NC JoEllen Koerner, Sioux Falls SD Susan Korsnick, York PA Martha Lietz, Evanston IL Septimbor Dawn Lim, Candler NC Tim Long, Northglenn CO William Lyon, Evergreen Park IL Efrain Martinez Zuviria, Sauk Centre MN Allan McDaniel, Duvall WA Robert McKay, Toronto ON

Thomas, Mether, Hermitage TN Alicia M Miller, Fremont CA Nancy Missel, Arlington TX Joyce M Moore, Lilburn GA Dianna Mwaka, Raleigh NC Joshua D Myrvaagnes, Somerville MA Sarah J Nasto, New Orleans LA Ana Carolina Pires McGinn, St Louis MO Janice Reid, Aubigny MB Katherine B Rowell, Keene NH Coleen Ann Ryan, Salem MA Christopher Scappaticci, Placerville CA Jerry M Schwartz, Honolulu HI Timothy Shotmeyer, Marblehead MA Tina Michelle Sims, Fredericksburg VA Thaddeus Sipe, Loudonville NY Sarah Ariel Smith-Simon, Brentwood MO Bonnie E Stack, Salt Lake City UT Sanda Irina Stafie, Calgary AB Marta Stemberger, Chestnut Ridge NY Kelly Sundstrom, Dahlonega GA Johanna M Sutherland, Tujunga CA Jasper J Van Brakel, Chestnut Ridge NY Gila B Varis, Los Angeles CA Chad Louis Weber, Pekin IN Tammy D Wright, Columbus GA Karina Yazima, Fair Oaks CA Robert Zima, Slingerlands NY

Christopher Michael Mann

Members Who Have Died Erika V. Asten Kimberton PA joined 1968 died 05/05/2018 Lucille Clemm Peterborough NH joined 1967 died 04/11/2018 Maria Gracanin Cincinnati OH joined 1965 died 02/28/2018 Ilse Grunwald Spring Valley NY joined 1986 died 01/28/2018 Christopher Mann East Troy WI joined 1959 died 02/07/2018 Wilhelm Muller Eugene OR joined 1972 died 02/16/2018 Dorothea Nusbaum San Francisco CA joined 1969 died January 2018 Mary A. Rubach Forest Row, East Sussex, UK joined 1955 died 09/22/2017 Natalia Strattman Cutler Bay FL joined 2012 died 04/02/2018 Catherina Vanden Broek Chestnut Ridge NY joined 1984 died April 2018 Natasha Wood Asheville NC joined 2006 died January 2018

November 13, 1930—February 7, 2018

by Roswitha Spence (sister) Christopher Michael Mann was born in London. He was a dreamy child, happy and contented and when 4 years old he was presented with a sister. The two siblings grew up in a strong family bond. They lived in Streatham, South London, close to Michael Hall School where Liselotte taught eurythmy and William led a class and taught many other subjects. With the outbreak of World War II, Michael Hall evacuated to Minehead, Somerset where a beautiful property housed the school and the Mann family found accommodation in the converted grain loft above the woodwork classroom. There Chris learned from his father many practical skills essential in later life. Christopher’s early dreaminess developed into an inner gaze to distant horizons, a yearning to explore and break boundaries, growing ever stronger through his life, deepening as his total commitment to anthroposophy enriched his every action. At the war’s end, Michael Hall moved to Forest Row, East Sussex, where Chris, now in his teens, went for more adventures: art trips to Italy, sailing on the Broads, walking in Lapland, and many others. For his final year of school he went to Stuttgart, Germany, staying to take an apprenticeship in chemical engraving. Life took Chris to America and Canada, but sadly he had to return home due to illness. So once again he found himself in Forest Row where in the meantime there was a teacher training course founded by Francis Edmunds. Chris enrolled and then took a class through all eight years. At Michael Hall he married his

wonderful life’s companion Martina and had a beautiful little daughter Sonja. However, new horizons beckoned and the family moved to Dornach, Switzerland where Chris took on the task of promoting eurythmy.

He organized tours in America, first Else Klink with the Stuttgart stage group, then Marguerite Lungren and the London stage group. These tours introduced him to many areas in America and awoke what he felt would become his true calling— bringing culture and biodynamics to “The New World.” So it was that Christopher and Martina searched for a place that could open up possibilities for development and found themselves in Wisconsin in the small town of East Troy. Here Chris together with Martina created the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, building a beautiful barn with a concert/lecture hall

summer-fall issue 2018 • 57

upstairs, offices, catering facilities and above all laboratory space for biodynamic research. They purchased a farm with others to follow, found farmers to convert the land to biodynamic agriculture, created a bakery, a farm shop, a day-care centre, ecohousing and other initiatives. Chris’s central striving was not just to see the potential in people, or land, but to help it be realized, assisting countless individuals to further their work with counselling or funds. He was tireless in wanting to help. However, Martina and Chris continued a strong connection to Europe, to Germany where Sonja now had her own family, and to Forest Row where there were family and friends. “Hopping across the pond” was a regular event for many years. The enterprises continued to grow, interspersed with travel. Then age issues came to restrict movement, first with Martina’s stroke and after her death, Chris’s Parkinson’s. This created great frustration for him as his mind was as active as ever, full of new ideas he wanted to make happen. One special achievement he did still manage: the completing of a film on biodynamics, The Alchemist, which has been seen by a vast number of people. Now Christopher’s life at 87 has reached fulfilment, his tasks completed, and after a brief spell in hospital, surrounded by friends he died peacefully at the home he and Martina had built together near East Troy. He lived to receive the Last Rights and very soon after passed away, leaving in style, ever in a hurry to move forward. The funeral took place February 11th in the Michael Fields beautiful Concert/Lecture room at East Troy, with many friends and colleagues came to celebrate him. —12 February 2018, NSW, Australia 58 • being human

Erika Asten May 17, 1928—May 5, 2018

Erika’s mother attended a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin and met many progressive young people who congregated at Berlin’s protestant church around Friedrich Rittelmeyer founder of the Christian Community, a movement for religious renewal. “During World War II my mother studied Steiner’s lectures secretly and later hid her anthroposophical books, except some duplicates, before Nazis came to confiscate them.” “As the province of Saxony and with it the Erzgebirge disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, I was prevented from attending college simply because I was the daughter of an academically trained capitalist who had served as an officer in the Germany navy.” Erika escaped to West Berlin in 1948 where she found a pianist living just outside West Berlin who accepted East German marks as tuition payment (at a time when the exchange rate of East and West marks was 12 to 1). “A couple of weeks prior to the conclusion of my piano studies the East German and Russian authorities confiscated our factory and every member of my family was jailed, leaving me with no home to return to. East Germans were allowed to stay in West Berlin only for educational purposes.” Erika turned to the Free University for scholarship aid and entered a PhD program in music history. In 1954 her mother was freed from prison and until 1960 mother and daughter ran a conservatory of music. “Confined to the island of West Berlin for twelve years, I flew to West Germany looking for a job in broadcasting or journalism, careers that were completely male-dominated. Upon my return after an unsuc-

cessful job hunt, I found a public notice on my desk inviting German graduates from Berlin institutions of higher learning to apply for postgraduate work in England, France, or the United States, financed by

the Berlin Airlift Memorial Scholarship Fund. I applied for post-graduate communications work in the United States and was accepted into the program. In the middle of August 1961, making my farewell rounds in Berlin, the first barbed wires were thrown up that were quickly fortified to become the infamous Wall. I was still in the city and stood among the thousands to hear President Kennedy’s famous words, ‘I am a Berliner.’ “Two weeks later I arrived in New York City. Having only a limited academic knowledge of the English language, my first stop was the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society in America and the church of the Christian Community on the upper west side of New York. To make communication easier, the majority of people in both places switched to German with the result that I avoided these German speaking islands.” Erika lived in New York for the next two years and then took a job with WGBH, the educational television station in Boston. There she

met her husband who a year later was transferred to Philadelphia. Asking at New York headquarters for addresses of resident anthroposophists in the Philadelphia area, she was given the name of Dietrich Asten, a corporate executive, General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, who had moved to Phoenixville so that his children could attend the Waldorf School in Kimberton. Erika became connected to the school through Joanna van Vliet, who taught eurythmy at the school. In 1969 after her first husband’s death, her broadcasting career came to an end and Erika moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she became a class teacher after two years of administrative work. She guided these children to the end of their grade and began another chapter of her life by returning to the Philadelphia area and becoming the wife of Dietrich Asten. Dietrich was deeply engaged with the Kimberton Waldorf School, helping to pave the way for the high school. He was a member of the board for many years prior to his untimely death in 1984. With little or no experience, Erika was thrust into the position of having to fill a number of big shoes, among them the role of president of the Asten Group. She held this position until a new leadership team could be formed. The company which manufactured fabrics needed to transport the initially very liquid paper stock through the paper machines until a self-supporting sheet of paper is produced, still exists. Erika moved to Camphill Village Kimberton Hills in later life, maintaining connections to anthroposophy, Waldorf education, music, and the Christian Community. —Contributed by Donna Sturgis (ldsturgis@gmail.com).

Jane Martindale January 23, 1918—January 11, 2016

by Liane Martindale Jane Martindale left this world much as she entered it—quietly, with a deep impact on all who knew her. Surrounded by friends and family, she took her last breath on January 11, 2016. On her 18th birthday, before the Second World War and while most of the founding members of the Anthroposophical Society were still living, Jane joined. For eighty years including the last weeks of her life, she participated in anthroposophical events. Jane served as leader of the Helen Hecker Group, as the Santa Barbara group became known. It was established in 1920 and was one of three groups that “agreed to unite in a national society within the international society in accordance with an incentive we received from the delegates’ meeting in Dornach,” according to Henry B. Monges, first General Secretary in America. Four decades later, Jane took over leading the group. In the weekly meetings at her house, she wanted all who had a serious interest in anthroposophy to attend; there was no requirement of membership in the Society. She organized and hosted lectures, conferences and workshops for international speakers in Santa Barbara that enriched the community. René Querido, Alan Howard, and Robert Gorter were three of the many who came to Santa Barbara. Many events were held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, or the Central Library, where those unfamiliar with anthroposophy came and asked questions. While anthroposophy informed all aspects of her life, Jane’s love was art. She began her study at Scripps College in Claremont while enrolled

in a liberal studies program. Her meticulous attention to detail, avantgarde sense of style, and fluid line were all evident from these early drawings. As her ambitions and focus grew, she moved to Manhattan to study at the

Art Students League of New York. There she was mentored by George Grosz, a leading member of the Dada movement who emigrated in protest of the rise of German militarism. After the death of her husband in World War II, she used the backdrop of Paris, the South Pacific, and Brazil to inspire her artistic aspirations. She married again but split from her husband soon after giving birth to me, her only daughter, in Australia. She returned to Santa Barbara and worked her way up to become a senior planner for Santa Barbara County. After retiring, she resumed travelling, painting, and her study of anthroposophy. She was always up for an adventure and despite her quiet nature would talk to anyone she met. She wanted to know their life stories and was a consummate listener. In the evening, she would invariably jot down notes on those whom she had met. When I became a journalist in summer-fall issue 2018 • 59

the Balkans, she wanted to know every detail and bought a computer to correspond with me via email. After the war in Kosovo, she was the first to visit me in the capital Pristina, two years after NATO forces had arrived in the province. Despite a US travel warning, Jane travelled with me from Kosovo to the spectacular Montenegrin coastline. While the officials were reluctant to give me a tourist visa because of my critical reporting, we were ultimately successful. I smiled as I overheard two officials discuss our case: “How much can a woman in her eighties do?” The trip to the sea was magical, and Jane would later remark how much she enjoyed it. In keeping with anthroposophical custom, we held a three-day wake in her home with recommendations from Nancy Poer and her wonderful guide, Living into Dying. Friends, anthroposophists, neighbors, artists all came by and brought food, flowers, candles, and memories of Jane to share. We sang, read, laughed, and celebrated a life full of joy and meaning.

Mary Rubach February 3, 1924—September 22, 2017

by Katherine Beaven & Christoph Rubach Mary was born in London, the first of three children of Ernest and Dorothy Pigott, he a sales representative for Watermans Pens and she a dance teacher. The family were not well off but fortunately inherited a house in Bournemouth. Attending Queens Mount on scholarship, Mary was hailed as the school’s first student to have ever successfully passed the High School Certificate. Mary was also quite sporty, becoming captain in the field hockey team. She was a good swimmer and learnt life-saving skills, which were 60 • being human

soon put to use when, as a fourteenyear old, she saved a drowning girl at sea. Mary frequently attended a Spiritualist Church with her mother. At a time when girls of her class did not go to university, Mary did, studying geography and history at Exeter. The family was little touched by the war, though her father did serve in Africa. She was part of the land army during her summer holidays which meant picking fruit and digging potatoes. At twenty-one, with a degree and teaching diploma, Mary got a job at a boys’ school. Later she moved to a school closer to home where her help was needed: her father, suffering from depression, was given a leukotomy operation, which led to a life in a wheelchair. Mary struggled to maintain discipline in her classes and after four years she gave up teaching, feeling like she had failed and not knowing what to do next. She volunteered in London at the Bermondsey Settlement, which offered social, health and educational services to the poor of its neighborhood, and had a particular focus on music and dance. This was the beginning of a lifetime thread which found Mary working with people on the fringes of society. After a year, she trained as a probation officer and social worker and worked with delinquent children, and then assisted in school medical examinations. This was her first experience of feeling capable in a job. In 1953, at a Fabian Society meeting, she was told of a conference at Bedford College with Dr. Ernst Lehrs. This led to regular visits to Rudolf Steiner House for lectures, eurythmy, and painting classes. At twenty-nine she went to Dornach for the Mystery Dramas and met Hermann Rubach, eighteen years her senior. He was Ger-

man but had been living in the US for twenty-nine years. They were married by Rev. Heidenreich and sailed on the Queen Mary for New York, settling in Berkeley. He became a life-insurance agent, she trained in social work.

Christoph was born in 1959 and Katherine in 1963. Mary was a thoroughly dedicated mother, alongside supporting her husband in the Anthroposophical Society; he became a class reader the Society’s West Coast representative. The Rubachs held a weekly study group at their house on the hill through which many people passed. They advertised these at the UC Berkeley campus, home of radical thinking. Mary played an important part in the founding of the Christian Community in San Francisco, and was seen performing her namesake in the Oberufer Christmas plays. She enjoyed watercolor, studied approaches including Liane Collot d’Herbois, and gave classes in her home. The couple often hosted visiting lecturers and thus they met Francis Edmunds, leading to a year’s sabbatical at Emerson in 1971. Mary helped found the local Rudolf Steiner School (too late for her own children) and taught aspects of the “Extra Lesson” by Audrey McAllen. She tried in various ways to introduce aspects of Waldorf curriculum into the schools her own children attended, often as a storyteller. For twelve years

she volunteered at The Creative Living Centre, where people could go who had recently been discharged from a mental hospital, offering eurythmy, art appreciation and drama. Mary described how after working with anthroposophy for thirtythree years, she began to question its role in her life. She wished to make a difference in the lives of people who were suffering. Mary’s concern for the disadvantaged led her to seek ways of helping the homeless. She co-founded and led a drop-in centre for homeless women and children, enriched by the arts and crafts she encouraged. Iscador had often been of help in the family. Herman had paid for his cousin Gisela to receive treatment in Arlesheim; she lived another forty years cancer-free. Mary’s mother lived for twenty years after treatment. Now Herman was diagnosed with prostate and advanced bone cancer. He made a complete recovery and regained his vitality but suffered multiple small strokes losing his speech and mobility. Mary nursed him until his death in 1992. After this trying period Mary was suddenly free to pursue new interests. She travelled to the UK and Germany and made cultural trips to Greece, Ireland, and the US Southwest. She attended the anthroposophical schooling course at the Centre for Social Development in Sussex and hosted the English Eurythmy Theatre on their US tours. She did storytelling and enjoyed clowning. During this time she began to work for prisoners, both writing to and visiting them. She worked for a small organization called California Prison Focus defending rights of prisoners who were regularly mistreated in the prison system. With this work she experienced that she had found a real task in life, and she dedicated

much time and effort to it over a twelve-year period, travelling to San Francisco to work in the CPF office two to three times a week, as well as working from home. She used her car to drive small groups to Pelican Bay, a super max high security prison where prisoners’ rights were clearly being violated. This was a day’s travel and Mary was eighty. They interviewed and supported prisoners. Through CPF prisoners voices could be heard, and the law regarding confinement of the mentally ill was changed because of it. Mary’s children sadly had to encourage her to give up this work in 2007, bringing her to England, but she remained connected and continued to write to prisoners she had come to know. Prisoners clearly felt deeply grateful and continued to write even when she could no longer reply. Mary moved into the annex of her daughter’s house in Forest Row, and immediately became active in the anthroposophic community. She attended study groups and went regularly to lectures and conferences. She tried to connect with the prison system here to visit prisoners, but this proved not possible. She will be remembered by some for her clowning, which brought out a side of her that longed to be on stage. Mary had always supported multiple charities with small donations; this continued in England. Most were connected to human rights, animal rights and agriculture. Mary’s memory became increasingly weak. She lived in the moment, but could still say things that were very to the point. In 2014 she had a bad fall. She remained active until the end, taking regular walks and enjoying the company of friends and family and even attending lectures. Three days before she crossed the threshold

she came down with a chest infection and cast off her earthly garments on September 22nd as dawn broke. Her contentment with life, and the gratitude expressed to those around her was inspiring to many. People spoke of her uniqueness, her humor, her straightforward way of expressing her thoughts, her generosity and selflessness. They frequently expressed how lucky they felt to have known her. Mary has left behind her two children, Christoph and Katherine, and four grandchildren, Amanda and Simeon Rubach and Daniel and Brendan Beaven. Peace be with her.

Bill Toole September 14, 1951—February 24, 2017

Bill Toole was a dedicated teacher, guide and administrator of the Austin Waldorf School for 35 years. His careful, measured manner was spiced with a quick wit and observant sense of humor. Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, his love of nature emerged on patches of undeveloped land despite his urban surroundings. Still, science was his first love and he became a ham radio operator in his early teens, studying electricity and setting up equipment in his basement with the help of his father. By high school, he discovered the world of literature along with his own facility with language that he used throughout his career, writing articles for Renewal magazine, plays and poetry for his classes, and countless correspondence letters for Austin Waldorf School. He entered the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as an engineering major, but worried that a one-sided science career would neglect nascent and necessary parts of his character. He switched to English, though warned that all he could do with an English degree was teach. summer-fall issue 2018 • 61

During college, a yoga class taken as a PE requirement led him to spend five years in a kundalini yoga ashram where he learned and taught the language of the Sikh scriptures. There he married his wife, Carol. At 27, he was in crisis, wanting to find a meaningful career that would use and develop his talents. Yet what to pursue: humanities, science? After a chance encounter, Carol planned to enroll at the Waldorf Early Childhood program at Mercy College of Detroit. Bill went along, deciding to enroll in the Elementary Education program. It became clear that his well-roundness would make him the perfect Waldorf teacher. His gifts in math, history, and all subjects brought the two-year-old Austin Waldorf School to court him as a teacher; he began in 1982. He took two classes from grade one to eight, a third from grade four to eight, and then became middle school math and science teacher and mentor to newer teachers. His classes, lively and full of humor, sparked a love for math, science, and language in many a student. When the school began administrative restructuring, his deep knowledge of the Waldorf curriculum, experience, and leadership qualities led him to take on the position of 62 • being human

pedagogical leader. All the while Bill selflessly served the greater Waldorf school movement by teaching blocks, mentoring, and giving public lectures at fledgling schools. He taught summer courses for teachers and regular classes in the Foundation Studies and Pleiades Teacher Training in Austin. Throughout the country, Waldorf classes have performed his plays. In May of 2016, Bill began a struggle with brain cancer. This was a time for the community to rally and give back to this remarkable man. He was humbled by the love and appreciation that poured in from all those who were touched by him. This love came in the form of letters,

music performances, food, funds, visits, and prayers. Words cannot express the family’s thanks for all gestures, large and small, that helped ease a painful journey. Bill passed surrounded by family on February 24, 2017. He will be missed by his wife Carol, his grown children Magdalen and Galen, their spouses Michael Marrone and Amanda Toole, granddaughter Addyson, family, friends and colleagues. He leaves behind a strong and thriving Waldorf community, a homestead with land cleared and structures finely crafted by his own hand, and students who are better people for his example. — austinwaldorf.org

Thomas H. Forman July 13, 1919—February 8, 2018

Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Thomas’ family was forced to leave by the Nazi occupation. He was reunited with his parents and future bride, Monica Kurtz, in New York. An accomplished engineer, Tom retired as principal design engineer at AVCO/Textron Corporation. A man of deep social conscience informed by his study of anthroposophy, he had a love of the outdoors—walking, skiing, hiking, playing tennis. He and Monica traveled to Europe and shared their heritage generously with family and friends. Tom was admired for his ingenuity and reflective spirit, as well as his sense of humor. An engineer by profession perhaps, but his soul was that of a philosopher and poet. He is survived by his beloved wife Monica, children Nicolette (Wellington), Vivien (Grainger) and Anthony; four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. From Alice Groh: Tom was an active Society member in Boston;

after his and Monica’s move to New Hampshire in the 1990’s he continued studies and conversations mostly through a loving and lively friendship with Trauger and Alice Groh. Tom was always ready and eager to discuss anthroposophy and its importance to the world with anyone, even the rather unsuspecting members of his retirement community or church group. He has always been a relentless asker of world questions, a seeker for truth, and quite the poet. His fiery spirit has long been admired and loved in several circles in southern New Hampshire. Blessings on Tom!

Here & Now Annual Conference & Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in America

Transforming Ourselves, Transforming Our World

Keynotes, Workshops, Artistic Opportunities, and Meaningful Connections all in beautiful New Orleans, LA • Keynotes with Orland Bishop and Joan Sleigh • Interactive workshops with Patrick Kennedy, Lisa Romero, Bart Eddy and more! • Youth Conference and National Branch Gathering Thursday, October 4

Thursday, October 4 Youth Conference: Explore your inner work and outer path with youth from around the country National Branch Gathering: Share best practices, look towards the future, and engage with friends from across the country Evening Central Region Gathering

Friday, October 5 Bayou St. John Songtrail Class Lesson with Joan Sleigh Keynote discussion with Orland Bishop and interactive workshops, panels, and ritual

Saturday, October 6 Keynote discussion with Joan Sleigh, participant research sharing, youth led panel discussion, and evening pageant

Sunday, October 7 Artistic Group Activities, Closing Plenum, and more!

At First Grace Methodist Church 3401 Canal Street, New Orleans, LA, 70119 Registration Opens June 24 at: www.anthroposophy.org/neworleans

Annual Conference and Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in America

Here & Now Transforming Ourselves, Transforming Our World New Orleans, LA October 5, 6, 7

on Ols i r a K rk by Ar two

Registration Opens June 24 at: www.anthroposophy.org/neworleans

being human summer-fall 2018

Articles inside

Piercing Through the Veil of Karma

Swan’s Wings

And the Earth Becomes a Sun

Art & Humanity in Metamorphosis

The (Mirror-)Image of Thought

Anthroposophic Psychology

Introducing Waldorf, Threefolding to Indian Non-Profits in the US

Kaspar Hauser Goes West, part 2

Sun Studio, Crestone, Colorado

Division of Labor — and Artificial Intelligence