4 minute read
Truth & Knowledge — and Life
by Russell Arnold, PhD
—Rudolf Steiner, Truth and Knowledge
I encountered Rudolf Steiner’s Truth and Knowledge when I was nineteen and a half, at a pivot point in my life. My relationship to sensory life had slipped. It began the previous year when I was faced with themes of life and death, learning that my mom was going to have open-heart surgery. This sparked questions about the significance of being human—or lack thereof, as I started from as a teen steeped in materialistic ideas—and where we come from. I searched in many diverse conceptual directions, from popular physics and cosmology to Jungian psychology and even astrology. The most fruitful component of this pursuit however, was my personal experiences. And no drugs were involved in anything I’m talking about here.
I spent the summer I turned nineteen in small-town Wisconsin near Lake Michigan. One night I went out alone around 2 a.m. into the bay by which I was staying. I lay naked on the sandy bottom in the shallows, looking up at the stars with longing, and sensing the longing of the lukewarm night water. I perceived unambiguously a presence stretched out above me, that I was seen by the congregation of celestial lights, and even recognized. It became clear that my consciousness belonged to the far reaches of the universe.
As beautiful as the above experience sounds, and was, what followed was the unbearable sense that my skull was a prison from which I desperately wanted to escape—to expand into a rarified space, on a scale befitting my nature, several orders of magnitude larger than my head. (At this time I had not read The Virgin of the World or been exposed to Hermetic ideas, beyond the psychological subjectivism of Jung.) I began to get increasingly sluggish and ill, recalling a sensation of lake water in the night. At times I experienced something like a metal balloon expanding in my head, and at others that my consciousness escaped my embattled head—which became numb like an arm which has been “laid on funny” and gone to sleep— only to be turned back at the boundary of my extremities. Nothing of the concepts I was familiar with helped, so I sought answers in pagan groups and philosophy, especially that of Leibniz, who identified reality as being comprised of “monads”: fundamental units of consciousness which evolve, beyond individual lives, through varying degrees of “apperception” or perception of perception.
How I ended up Google-searching Rudolf Steiner and finding Truth and Knowledge remains murky in my memory, though it was a distinct reversal of my pre-teen rebellion against the Waldorf education I had received. The insights obtained therein as to the nature of knowledge and its limitlessness allowed me to objectively evaluate the depths of my own experiences, and opened me to human knowledge from different ages and forms of consciousness than I was used to, like the Pentateuch (Torah), which I had previously dismissed as being outmoded, of sociological and historical interest only.
Nevertheless, it would require a very one-sided and even fanatical embrace of strength, beauty, and health in the sensory world via discipleship of Friedrich Nietzsche before I could re-approach the original question, and ultimately to look towards the mysterious infusion of spiritual rejuvenation in the death phase of the cycles of life, as discussed, for example, in Steiner’s Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment and Outline of Esoteric Science, or indicated in Wagner’s Parsifal , or the Christian mystery in general.
Further steps in my seeking over the past nine years have seen me through many experiences, concepts, and struggles of spiritual and interpersonal significance. Many spiritual friendships and mentorships have come and gone according to what I needed or was ready for. In parallel, I have completed doctoral studies in mathematics which is converging with my spiritual pursuits via a job I am starting at the Math and Astronomy Section at the Goetheanum. I believe that what has been, and can be, achieved in the domain of projective geometry within the anthroposophical movement is understated; it is seen as too technical for the average “spiritual person,” and too spiritual for the average “technical person.” Therefore I aim in this coming geometric work to contribute creatively to spiritual-human self understanding, as well as scientific innovation, from a corner that most new-age and learned people, respectively, aren’t expecting.
Russell Arnold (russfromstates@gmail.com) received his PhD in 2022 from the University of North Carolina.
