Report on the World Goetheanum Conference of Michaelmas 2023 John Bloom Spiritual Science and co-facilitated in some cases by those working afar in the practical fields. Topics included: On earth we want to live; Health for humans and the planet; Living with technology; Meditation!; Equal and different: How to contribute to the search for the ‘I’; Follow the science!?; Anthroposophy and public debate; How do we build peace?; Biosphere-based economy; The presence of anthroposophy; Transformation through art; Transforming leadership. One goal of these thematic forums was to create active working groups that will take up some of the tasks identified during the sessions. The afternoon was filled with topical and practical workshops including a full spectrum from the three domains of threefolding. Each of the workshops was conducted in a multilingual environment, so that participants could begin to feel a kind of world presence and to sense how to navigate in that kind of environment. Here are few examples of the workshops: Dyeing with plants; KATRINA HOVEN
Sold out! That’s what the website said about the World Goetheanum Conference held at the Goetheanum and surroundings September 27– October 1, 2023. About 1,000 people from fifty countries gathered to take up the question of “Reshaping a World Movement.” It was a well-orchestrated collaborative inquiry that included celebrating nearly one hundred years of the Christmas Conference, sharing how anthroposophical activity has found its expression around the world, and asking the question, “What is the future asking of anthroposophy?” This broad scope of topics all centered on the imagination of a worldwide Society, especially given that the conference was held in the space and spaciousness of the Goetheanum, where the movement was birthed and the School of Spiritual Science has its center. It was a living question of how to move through the natural tension between center and periphery, and even of how to recognize the challenge of questioning that metaphor as a way of thinking about the work of the Society in the world. The three-and-a-half days were framed on the architecture and imagination of the Foundation Stone Meditation. Day 1: Earth and incarnation; Day 2: Plurality and being together in diversity; Day 3: Knowledge and insight; Day 4: The good and how we work with heart and thought. Each of the keynote speakers addressed these topics directly in their relation to the theme of the conference and to the call to the human soul found in each of the panels of the Meditation itself. Each was rich; all were beautifully woven together. There would not be enough space to recount or do them justice here. Maybe one highlight from Michaelmas Day, spoken by Christine Gruwez, will suffice. She spoke of three kinds of courage: courage to live with the fragment; courage to be vulnerable; courage to be awake in and to the world and to remain awake. Without over-interpreting, she used “fragment” in the sense that at any given moment we have only a piece of the whole. The structure of the conference, following the keynotes from the morning speakers, was an attempt to respond to current worldwide issues by scheduling thematic forums cohosted by cross-sections of the School of
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