JOURNAL FNTHPSY MEDITATION in EAST and WEST Johannes Schneider PETER PAN and the PRODIGAL SON Alan Howard a KEY to the RECONCILI
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MEDITATION FORANTHROPOSOPHYJOURNAL IN EAST AND WEST Johannes Schneider PETER PAN AND THE PRODIGAL SON Alan Howard A KEY TO THE RECONCILIATION OF PEOPLES Albert Steffen BASIL, LEMON BALM AND PEPPERMINT Wilhelm Pelikan THE WARMTH ORGANISM OF THE EARTH Theodor Schwenk Also reviews of Unfinished Animal by Roszak, The Experience of Knowledge by Gardner, and poems by Rudolf Steiner, Rex Raab, L. Francis Edmunds, Danilla Rettig, and Eda Bunce. NUMBER 23 SPRING, 1976 The task of true occult science today is to impart results of spiritual investigation in a form permeated with thought content. Thus through the power of thought they will be comprehensible to the man who is not clairvoyant. Dangers will immediately arise if people develop clairvoyant powers and do not see to it that their thinking, and more especially their perception and discernment, are at the same time strengthened and enhanced through their own inner conscious activity. Those who are clear thinkers and those who are not will have very different experiences in the spiritual world.... The thinking clairvoyant can at once discriminate and know whether what he perceives is illusion or reality . whether it is merely his own desires objectified, or objective reality. Clear thought is thinking that can survey wide vistas, not the thinking that occupies itself with analysis. Rudolf Steiner from The Tasks and Aims of Spiritual Science Journal for Anthroposophy. Number 23, Spring, 1976 © 1976 The Anthroposophical Society in America, Inc. Meditation in East and West: * Zen and Anthroposophy JOHANNES W. SCHNEIDER When eastern and western methods of meditation are com pared, it is often pointed out that the differences lie in the construction of the meditative exercises themselves, and in the different kinds of results to which they lead. How do these basic principles differ, and how can they be stated with a certain logical consistency? This article will attempt to com pare six characteristics of the meditation indicated by Anthro posophy with those of the Zen training. Zen Buddhism is well suited to such a comparison because it is concerned with the outer world, and so stands closer to Anthroposophy than do many other eastern paths of training, and also because it has only reached its present form in modern times. Despite these parallels, the fundamental differences will become apparent. 1. Too little attention has been given to the fact that spiritual training does not begin with the first exercise, but much earlier with the inner attitude toward the nature of meditative exercise. But why should a man involve himself in such labors and struggles at all? Anyone who, out of curiosity or desire for success, follows first one exercise and then another, is certainly not yet on the path of authentic spiritual training. The Zen-master is therefore very strict in seeing to it that whoever applies to him be sufficiently ripe for spiritual training. “A man must feel dissatisfied with the life he has been leading. Only where there is a sense of urgency can *Reprinted with kind permission from Mitteilungen, Stuttgart, Ger many. The footnotes, referring to books printed in Germany, may be obtained upon request from the Editor. 1 spiritual exercise be grasped as a necessity, and be fruitfully carried through.”1 He who wishes to go the way of Zen must have experienced that his usual self- and object-consciousness have not brought him any closer to truth, but rather have removed him further and further from it. “The path of man into his own being — this adventurous as well as dangerous road — has shown itself to be precipitous and hazardous.”2 The student must be prepared to turn away from the experi ence of the self in which he has had such confidence; indeed he must feel this turnabout on his path to be his greatest inner concern. The path of knowledge cultivated through Anthroposophy also begins with the insight that one’s accustomed manner of experiencing has not been sufficient to win through to a true knowledge of Man and the World. This insight, however, does not lead one to seek in a different direction (as the Zen Bud dhist does), but rather, when one comes to the boundaries of sensory experience to ask, ever more intensively and wakefully, questions that lead to spiritual-scientific knowledge. “Hence, only they can be Anthroposophists who feel certain questions about the nature of Man and the Universe to be an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst,” (First “Lead ing Thought,” Rudolf Steiner.) It is the earnestness of such questions which gives one a secure orientation on the anthro posophical path of knowledge, which leads a man further in the direction that he has already blazed in the development of his thinking and of his consciousness of self, whereas the Zen Buddhist chooses, in his inner right-about-face, an altogether contrary point of departure for his training. 2. The Zen student, once he has resolved to undergo train ing, trusts himself unconditionally to his teacher, “who as the embodiment of life is the sole and absolute authority for the student. Submission to this authority is an expression of that freedom which arises from this unrestricted commitment to transcendence, and grows with it day by day.”3 The intensity of the surrender works directly on the awakening of the stu dent’s own cognitive faculties. This is described most percep tively by Gusty L. Herrigel in her report on the method by 2 which she learned the Japanese art of flower arranging — at first by the outward imitation of her teacher until step by step she became aware of perceiving the inner attitude of her master, and finally the spirit of the flower-arrangement it self.”4 Rudolf Steiner gave the lecture cycle, At the Gate of The osophy, in 1906, and from then on continued to emphasize that an essential difference between eastern and western spiritual training lay in the relationship of the student to the teacher. In the Rosicrucian training, the teacher has become a friend only, who gives advice to the student, “for by training his reason, the pupil trains the best guru for himself.” When the control of the exercises is given over to the student him self, then instead of his former surrender to the guidance of the master, he must now acquire a new capacity, that of the strictest honesty in confronting himself — for otherwise he would soon be lost in illusions of his imagined progress. Therefore the cultivation of the individuality, which the Zen Buddhist would like to overcome, is precisely the prerequisite necessary for the spiritual-scientific way of knowledge. 3. This becomes still clearer when we examine the attitude of the meditator toward his own thought-content. For the Zen adherent, meditation is “passive in character.”6 It becomes a matter of losing all interest in the thought-content during his exercises, and therefore of detaching himself completely from it. For thought about things is for him an expression of the dualistic world-view, which must be overcome before the world can be perceived in its true form. And that happens in satori, sudden enlightenment. This detachment from one’s thought-life stands opposed to the exercise in the anthroposophical way of knowledge in which one concentrates on a self-chosen thought-content. It is indeed obvious that with each successful exercise in concentra tion, the ego is more deeply and powerfully incarnated into the waking day-consciousness. And here perhaps it is most clearly shown that eastern and western training methods do not allow themselves to be combined: for in spiritual scientific meditation, precisely those soul-forces are strengthened which 3 the Zen student wishes to free himself of, and in Zen the very soul-forces are weakened or obliterated which the Anthro posophist needs for his path of knowledge. 4. The Asiatic differs from the European not only in his relationship to his ego, but also in the relationship to his body. For him the body is not the expression of the soul in the sense that it is for us, but each attitude or gesture is in itself the directly manifested life of the whole individuality. He often feels how little the soul permeates the gestures of a European. “From the standpoint of Zen... it is a great error to distinguish between spirit and body, and to consider them as irrevocably distinct from one another... It is a goal of the Zen training to do away with the dualistic conception of body and spirit.”7 “The truth is that no matter exists outside of spirit, and no spirit without matter, and that concern for the one also implies concern for the other.”8 Therefore it is natural for the Japanese Zen student to consider the training of the breath and of body positions, especially the sitting posi tions, to be the basis of meditation. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, pursues the path along which western consciousness evolves, and on which the life of the soul becomes freed more and more from its connection with the body. In anthroposophical meditative exercise, the point is to forget the body and to direct one’s whole attention to that which is most consciously taking place in the soul. For the powers needed in occult training must not be drawn from the divinely established harmony between the members of man’s being, but must flow instead from the direct commu nion of the Ego with the Hierarchies.9 5. Just as the basic hypothesis and method of meditation differ in East and West, so also does the goal.