MEDITATION FORANTHROPOSOPHYJOURNAL IN EAST AND WEST Johannes Schneider PETER PAN AND THE PRODIGAL SON Alan Howard A KEY TO THE RECONCILIATION OF PEOPLES BASIL, LEMON BALM AND PEPPERMINT THE WARMTH ORGANISM OF THE EARTH Also reviews of Unfinished Animal by Roszak, The Experience of Knowledge by Gardner, and poems by , Rex Raab, L. , 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 . Number 23, Spring, 1976 © 1976 The 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, , 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. “Zen teaches us to go beyond the dualistic distinctions of our ordinary con­ sciousness, and to become actually and immediately united with the true being of nature.”10 This “true being of nature” as well as the true being of man, so the Zen Buddhist feels, lie within the primal source out of which the world has devel­ oped. Whosoever wishes to arrive at knowledge of the truth through meditation must therefore learn to regard things “as 4 though this world were still uncreated.”11 It is a matter of restoring the state of consciousness which, to express it in Christian terms, existed before the Fall. Thus it is the task of the teacher to tear away from the student all those supports which his consciousness “has continually relied upon ever since he first appeared upon this earth.”12 What Zen Buddhism lacks is realization of the fact that truth does not remain the same for all time, but that it has grown and changed, above all through the earthly life of Christ. The Zen Buddhist is therefore not seeking that truth which becomes individualized through the deeds and destiny of each separate human being — whereas this is precisely the aim of the spiritual-scientific path of knowledge, as Rudolf Steiner has set it forth in his book, Theosophy. In that feeling for the truth which unfolds during the first stage of this path of knowledge (with the study of anthroposophical literature), what we once knew during the existence we shared with the Hierarchies between death and rebirth, about the being of man and of the universe, now enters into our consciousness. And this knowledge is the special possession of our higher Ego, which could not have been won without the experiences of our previous earth lives. At this point — but, however, only here — on the anthroposophical path of knowledge the door is opened to the life before birth. Otherwise, the path into the spiritual world passes through another door, through that of death. Again and again Rudolf Steiner speaks of the fact that the student of the spirit will experience in advance what other people will go through only after death, or in a later incarna­ tion. On this path he is allowed to take the fruits of his earlier stages of development with him, but, in an indi­ vidualized form, worked through and assimilated by the Ego. By the end of the earth evolution he must also have won a quite different condition of consciousness from that which he possessed at the time of his creation in Paradise. This is the goal of the Michaelic leadership of mankind, as opposed to the luciferic temptation, which again today wants to wrest from western man the selfhood he has struggled so hard to attain. An example of this at the moment is the overwhelming 5 predominance of eastern meditative practices, in which to be sure the connection of man with his divine origin is preserved, but where the achievements of earthly existence are surren­ dered, and the goal of earth evolution is therefore lost sight of altogether. 6. It is also logical that a man’s connection with his destiny is not the same on the anthroposophical and Zen paths of knowledge. It is a goal of Zen training that a man may learn to experience and to behave in a quite natural way again, that he let his course of action be determined wholly out of the moment, and not out of thoughts of past or future. “According to this conception, if your spirit works actively together with nature, and is no longer disturbed by the dual­ istic concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, worth and worthlessness, heaven and hell, but works as inevitably as fire burns and water drenches, you are not responsible for your deeds, which are of the same nature, and therefore as a result have no karma.”14 This statement should not be construed as indicating a flight from reality, for the strict demand prevails, “that the Zen monk who strives for enlightenment is bound (it is the solemn vow of the Bodhisattva) not to enter into his own bliss before all beings are redeemed.”15 But this bliss is not the fruit of a path of destiny on the earth, but rather is attained through being released from the web of destiny. How one can experience this loss of one’s past in a sudden burst of illumination is described by Gerda Ital in the report of her sojourn in a Zen temple. “In this (my) state of inner stillness, within the vast surrounding stillness, something happened which can probably most aptly be described as an explosion: I was suddenly in my own primal state. Within the whole. In unity. Now speech fails... But perhaps I can still express something about the outcome: I have become lighter. That is, I have no more past. What I have lived through has become weightless, as though it were a strip of film which one can look at — or not. It does not concern me any longer. Only now do I know that this is the ultimate liberation.”16 In contrast, Rudolf Steiner emphasizes that, on the anthro­ posophical path of knowledge, the conscious connection with 6 one’s own destiny is an important step. “When a man has passed through the gate of death, he reaches a point at which this or that is done for him in the spiritual world; but he learns to do something out of himself in the spiritual world, only to the extent that he identifies himself with his own destiny.”17 It is the ultimate goal of the anthroposophical path that a man may learn to become spiritually active, in connec­ tion with the Hierarchies. And in the whole development of mankind, this is something new. Insofar as a man entrusts himself to the leadership of Michael, he learns to withstand the luciferic temptation, which wants to lead him back to a condition of heavenly bliss — to Paradise. When Rudolf Steiner devoted a good portion of his life’s work to the task of making the course of historical development understandable, he surely did so because he wanted to offer help to his pupils, so that they could learn to love the goals of the gods for the evolution of our earth. In contrast, the fading awareness of history’s significance which is prevalent today may well provide the gate through which the invasion will come, the invasion of the above-described luci­ feric temptation. In these decades when the assaults of Ahriman grow in­ creasingly obvious, one forgets all too easily about the ac­ tivities of the other adversary — today likewise on the increase — which first loosen a man’s connection with the good powers and so make easy prey of him for Ahriman. Through the Michaelic act of turning toward the future, a man can gradually come to the point of “identifying himself with his own destiny.” And then destiny does not remain simply the Law, under which he is obliged to enter again into each of his lives on earth, but rather comes to be a wholly integrated principle in the life of his Ego. And as a man immerses himself through the activity of his own will in this weaving of destiny, so does he unite himself with the Christ, the Lord of Karma.

Translation by Fred Paddock andJeanne Bergen. Peter Pan and the Prodigal Son

ALAN HOWARD

One of the phenomena of our time, which probably every reader of this journal must have remarked upon at some time or the other, is the widespread interest being taken in the spiritual life of India. It seems on the face of it to be foreign to our western way of life and education; and yet not only is Indian esoteric and religious literature being widely read and absorbed, but thousands of young people are taking up Indian practices of meditation and religious discipline, and are either already following a guru or are looking for one to follow. Why is this? The most obvious reason is that it is just a reaction to the arid intellectualism and materialism of our culture. And that may well be; but sexual permissiveness, bizarre fashions of dress and rock music sessions are also reactions to our culture, and yet they have little or nothing to do either with spiritu­ ality or India. Reaction alone doesn’t explain why this reaction should be spiritual; or why its content should be taken from a people so ethnically different from ourselves, and whose spiritual traditions stem from a time which antedates our own by some four or five thousand years. We shall have to look for an explanation in some other direction. But first of all let us be quite clear about one thing: In India we have the unique situation of a people still largely conditioned not only by spiritual culture, but by a spiritual culture of hoary and venerable antiquity. There is nothing else like it in the course of history. But if we add to this the fact that ancient India was not only the starting place, but the starting point in time of our 8 post-Atlantean epoch of civilization, we notice something else: First, a movement of civilization westward from India through the Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, European and American cultures; and second, a diminution of this spir­ ituality contemporaneous with this movement westward, until all traces of it finally disappear in modern America. Modern America is the polar opposite of India spiritually, as India is of America technologically and economically. With the possi­ ble exception of Mohammed, those outstanding spiritual fig­ ures of the past like Krishna, Zarathustra, Hermes, Moses and Buddha come to a stop at Palestine two thousand years ago. While there have been great human personalities after these men of course, they were rather the propagators of what those others initiated, rather than the initiators themselves of great spiritual impulses; and even they diminish in stature the nearer we come to the West and our own time. Our more recent times have not only failed to give rise to such figures; but our intense preoccupation with the How and What of the material world would probably have made it impossible for us to recognize them if they had appeared. They don’t quite belong to our way of life; and if what they represented still has any relevance to us at all, it can only be to what happens to us after we are dead — and who really knows anything about that? Modern man is wholly immersed in this life. Our age has nothing in common with the Krishnas and the Buddhas. Or so it seemed until about twenty or thirty years ago; and then quite quickly it all changed. The wisdom of the East suddenly became the answer to the problems of the West; gurus and masters began to visit Europe and America to show us all where we had gone wrong, and to bring us back onto the path of heavenly peace and goodness. And they have achieved some spectacular results, giving purpose and meaning to thousands who might otherwise have dissipated their lives and talents in the inanities — or worse — of our time. One could be quite pragmatic about this, and could even be tempted to concede that there is some very 9 practical value in acknowledging that this or that guru is the Lord of the Universe, if he is able to bring about such signifi­ cant changes in the lives of people. But let us look at the whole thing from a different perspec­ tive . If we ignore for the moment the fact that the development of the post-Atlantean epoch of civilization over the last six or seven thousand years has involved untold millions of separate human lives, and one race group after another; and if we imagine it instead in terms of one man, of Man, then there is a striking similarity in this development from ancient India to modern America to what takes place in the growth of a child from childhood to, say, later adolescence or early man­ hood. But first we must be quite clear about in what sense it is that we speak of childhood, or something of that contempt and superiority might be inferred which is all too common when speaking of an earlier age in terms of childhood. A child is not something less than a man simply because he is not yet a man. A child is rather a special form of manhood — manhood in reserve, in preparation. The child is man, in child form, and as such can, as we all know, often exhibit a purer and more elevated “manhood” than ever we can attain subsequently. Indeed, in a certain sense we grow down rather than up to become man. How many of our poets have not touched on this — Wordsworth particularly in his inspired Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, Traherne, too, per­ haps more explicitly; and even Thomas Hood’s nostalgic and somewhat sentimental, I remember, I remember, none the less tells the same tale. No, childhood is not a state to be con­ descended to, nor most definitely is it one to be idealized, or to wish to remain in like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Childhood, in spite of all its glory and charm, is to be lived through, so that the unique qualities of childhood become the transformed qualities of adult life. That is what education is all about; and as the educator accepts the fact that the child grows, so we must accept the fact that Man grows too. In the education of Man as a whole, however, he lives repeated lives, as it

10 were, in the various epochs of civilization, each of which has its childhood time as well as its maturity and old age, so that we can speak of a childhood of Man at the beginning of our epoch without offending those adults who comprised that “childhood,” or implying any denigration of childhood as such. It is in this sense, then, that we speak here of the be­ ginning of our epoch in ancient India, and point to that won­ derful spirituality with which it began as the childhood stage in this present epochal “life” of Man. The fact that so many adult Indians of today of unques­ tioned maturity can still steep themselves in the teachings and practices of their ancient wisdom, and bring both to a won­ derful resurgence in their lives, does not contradict the point I am trying to make. They are Indian, and this ancient spiri­ tuality is part of their blood and heritage at any stage in life. They can, if they will, recapture it; but even so is it not re­ markable that in doing so their countenances are so often stamped with that delicacy, refinement, transparency almost, which we otherwise only find in childhood? And incidentally, is it not even more noteworthy that the one guru who has made such an impact on the West that thousands have flocked after him, the Maharaj Ji, really made it on the strength of being a child guru! But that is by the way. The point is that in ancient India there was not only something in this ancient spirituality of a caliber that the world has not seen since, but something which none the less has the ineffable quality of childhood about it. The point we have to consider now is: Do we want to re­ establish this in the West? Should we try to reestablish it? Should we not be better if we all sought out an Indian guru who still has this quality in him, and transformed our lives by the power which he can undoubtedly exercise? Must what Wordsworth — speaking of his own childhood it is true, but also of what belongs to childhood generally — called the “vision splendid” belong only to childhood, which the man has to see “die away and fade into the light of common day”; Must this “vision splendid” of our epoch’s childhood also die away? Of course not. But have we — can we, indeed — 11 return to childhood in order to see it? It’s as simple as that. The “vision” has not died away, but we have grown up. We are very different, both from the ancient Indian and the In­ dian of today; and we have to seek that vision in a way that conforms to our nature and our time. Now if there is anything in this idea that I am trying to develop: that Man has grown up in the course of our epoch, and that there must be therefore a changed relationship to the spirituality that surrounded him in the past, although the essence of that spirituality itself hasn’t changed, then it should be possible to see in what was really active then, what we also have to look for today in a different way. And Rudolf Steiner in his lectures on the Bhagavad-Gita in Relation to the Epis­ tles of St. Paul has something significant to say on this very point. He states there that the inner reality of this ancient wisdom — which, incidentally, even then could only be ac­ quired in its purity by those few (and they were few) who could go through the rigorous training to do so — was sub­ stantially no different from what is now given out as anthro­ posophical spiritual science, and which can be obtained by modern man, if he will, by his present-day power of thought. There is our cue. What then was it which lay behind all those fascinating yoga practices which have so captured the imagination of the West? What were those who practised them trying to achieve? It was nothing but a lofty, exalted philosophy of the purest thought, which could only be acquired by those who could by those practices put themselves so much in advance of their time, that they were able to take this up into a prematurely developed thinking. As a result they were so changed by it that they could give it out in those wonderful imaginations of the gods, in which the ordinary people of that time could intuit — as any teacher knows a child can do today when he is told a real story in a real way — the spiritual essence within it. That was what yoga really was: The highest, purest wisdom of pure thought, which enabled those who were able to reach it to teach and guide their fellow-men.

12 Paul Brunton, who in his In Search of Secret India and his In Search of Secret Egypt did much to bring the attention of the West to the ancient spiritual practices, also alienated many of his followers because in his later books he made it quite clear that what was so important about ancient India was not the yoga practices and the miraculous things the mas­ ters of those arts could do, but the profound philosophy be­ hind them. That was the real yoga. That was the Everest of those spiritual Himalayas which only very few could reach. Sri Aurobindo, an Indian contemporary of Rudolf Steiner, educated in England, where he had a brilliant intellectual ca­ reer, who spent the best part of his life immersed in the an­ cient wisdom, the real yoga, expounds this ancient philosophy for the benefit of western readers in his The Life Divine. Anyone who works through the thousand pages of this volume will find no instructions on yoga practices, but will be obliged to bring the full force of his unaided intellect to bear with utmost concentration if he is to understand them. It is only now that men are able to approach by themselves, with the thought capacity that the last four or five thousand years has matured, the essence of what lived in ancient Indian spirituality, and even now it demands unremitting devotion and work. The power of the spirit which lived in those won­ derful pictures of the gods has lost its impact — so too man’s intuitive sense for what lay behind those myths and legends. Although they survive in the annals of ancient literature, they survive as literature only. It is very rare that someone in our day, like William Thompson for instance in his On the Edge of History, can detect what those ancient myths and legends im­ plied, and speak of them as “the detritus of a forgotten sci­ ence." Most of his contemporaries would repudiate such a judgment with scorn. “Science!” they would say; “How can anyone speak of science further back than the last two or three centuries?” and in so far as modern natural science is the culmination of the work of men like Galileo and Newton, they are probably right. Science in so far as it rests on the gradual development of exact observation and logical thought, however, did not begin with Galileo and Newton. It has been 13 developing, admittedly very slowly at first, ever since our epoch of civilization began; and as it did so man gradually lost that “participatory” communion with the spirit in Nature of which speaks, and became all unknowingly spiritually active in the object Nature. This is a point that is often overlooked. We have not be­ come less spiritually active as the centuries have gone by, but spiritually active in matter, and it is no wonder that we cease to see the “vision splendid” of the spirit that the ancient In­ dian saw. But we have also sharpened in thought a two-edged instrument which can now probe both matter and spirit. The spirituality that lives in India can still remind us of what man once experienced; we can, if we will, still pore over it as one does in recollecting childhood experiences — but that still does not mean we have to take up those same practices again, to seek out some guru to lead us, in order to find the spirit for the twentieth century. We cannot experience childhood twice in the same lifetime, whether in the lifetime of our individual selves or in the epochal lifetime of Man. We have to accept the fact that we grow, and, growing, mature other capacities for the experience of truth. The truth may be the same, but the way we have to experience it changes, and it is not for nothing that we live in western bodies with western minds, even though they seem ill-adapted for experiencing a spirituality such as the Indian can experience. These are the bodies we have to use; these are the minds we have to exer­ cise; here is the environment where we can best do it. The urge toward spirituality in our time is something that Rudolf Steiner often drew attention to. He was second to none in his appreciation — and knowledge — of what once lived in ancient India. He often described it in inspired word-pictures as the highest point of spiritual awareness man could reach in that way; but he never once suggested that we had to return to that way in order to experience the spirit in our time. He not only explained the development that had to take place dur­ ing this epoch, and how it is prepared in the spiritual world; but he pointed out how it was known in the spiritual world, long before it happened, that the ancient spirituality had to 14 give way to a spiritual activity in matter, in order that man might equip himself to discover the spirit on the plane of pure thought in independent self-consciousness. That time is now. Steiner has stated this unequivocally, and so many of our young people today have an urge toward the spirit, not be­ cause they are just reacting to the conditions of our time, but because they carry subconsciously in their souls the awareness of this. They are, as it were, fresh from those mighty councils in the spiritual world where these things were known and pre­ pared. They know instinctively that a change, a real spiritual change, has to take place in human culture, and they know they have to do something about it. But what they — and we — have yet to discover is how to bring that change about. We shall not find it in copying something which belonged to an ancient time. That may excite and satisfy for a while. It may bring about marvelous transformations in personal lives and relationships, which many of us of my generation must confess that, with all our preoccupation with the spirit, we haven’t been able to do much about yet. But the fact re­ mains, that that still doesn’t make something which belongs to the past the impulse for the future. With all one’s enthusiasm for the proper spiritual renewal of our time, one is only too aware of one’s inability to do much about it. But we have to live with that, until that ability comes. There can be no going back to ancient practices, and the tutelage of a saintly guru, in the hope of acquiring that spirituality more quickly than we otherwise can. We are growing up, and growing up, as any young person knows, is often a lonely, difficult, frustrating, painful time. Of course, the state of childhood looks — and was — wonderful and beautiful by comparison. “Heaven” did indeed “lie about us in our infancy”; but what one of us is there who, looking back with honest self-knowl- edge from the standpoint of maturer years, cannot echo those words of Hood:

15 But now ’tis little joy, To know I’m farther off from heaven Than when I was a boy. However, it is sufficient for the time being that we, like Hood, can at least know that there is still a Heaven, and the knowledge of our distance from it could be one of the most valuable pieces of self-knowledge we have to absorb. At least we are left with no illusions about what we have to do if we want to get there! I think if ever I were tempted to try and write a work of imagination I should choose as my subject the journey home of the prodigal son, spoken of in the New Testament. Every­ body must know the story of that boy who lived in idyllic hap­ piness with his supremely wise and good father, until the time came when he decided to go out and see the world for him­ self. His father gave him his inheritance, and the boy jour­ neyed off into a “far country,” where, after “wasting his sub­ stance in riotous living,” he was reduced to filling “his belly with the husks that the swine did eat.” He had become a man, and everything had changed. He was no longer a child. His environment was vastly different from everything that had shone around his childhood, and the memory of what he had once had must have taunted his desolation. But one thing he retained, one thing, indeed, that his subsequent experiences had, if anything, intensifed for him: the awareness that as a child he had experienced something which was the real es­ sence of life. And so he decided to return to it. But not as a child. That was impossible, but whatever his status would be now that he was grown up, it would be infinitely more worth­ while to find that again than the unreality he had to endure now. And so, “When he came to himself' — how significant are those words — he started off. We are told little or nothing about that journey. We can be pretty sure, however, that it was neither short nor easy. He was physically and spiritually an impoverished man. That journey must have been full of frustration and disappoint­ ment; there must have been scores of temptations and delu­ 16 sions on the way; and when he did arrive, he was probably more dead than alive. But arrive he did. As we say so appro­ priately in the idiom of our time, “He made it;” and made it on his own. There is a wonderful story lurking in the brief indication of that journey — a wonderful parable, too, for our time. Here was a “going back” with a difference; for it was a return not to a state which had passed, but to a relationship which en­ dures. Childhood was over, but he was still a son. The rela­ tionship of a son never changes. It can ascend to ever higher and higher levels of intimacy, but it never ceases to be what it essentially is, and it can be experienced anew at whatever stage of life we have reached. But if it is to be experienced anew, it must be from the stage we have reached; and if what has transpired in the interim has changed both us and our way of living, it is from that basis that the renewed experience must be sought. At the risk of concluding this article like an old-fashioned evangelical preacher — We are that prodigal son. He is evolv­ ing Man. We have spent the whole wealth of our spiritual in­ heritance in building up this amazing civilization of ours, and we are beginning to wonder what we have to show for it. We need renewal. In comparison with what the ancient Indian had as spiritual nourishment, we too seem to be eating the “husks that the swine did eat.” In that case there is only one thing to do. The source of that spiritual nourishment still exists, and as we “come to ourselves” we shall find the will to seek it again. But we can’t get it by proxy. We have to go and fetch it at the source, and that is a long and arduous way off for modern man. We too have to make a journey, but it is a journey which takes us as “son,” the spirit in ourselves, to the “father,” the spirit in the universe, which for modern man is a way of knowledge.

17 Two Poems by Rudolf Steiner Stars spoke of old to men; Their muteness is cosmic fate. Perception of this muteness Can quicken pain in earthly man. Yet within the muted stillness ripens What men speak to the stars. Perception of this speech Can quicken strength in spirit man.

To the Berlin Friends Man looks out With the world-engendered eye, And what he sees thus, binds him To world delight and world despair; It binds him unto all That springs to life there, but not less To all that plunges there Into the dark abyss. But man beholds With the spirit-entrusted eye; What he beholds thus, binds him To spirit hope and spirit’s upholding power. It binds him unto all That roots within eternity And bears within eternity its fruits.

18 Yet man can only then behold When he feels the inner eye Itself as God-given spirit organ, Which, at the focus of the soul, Within the temple of man’s body, Fulfills the deeds of gods. Mankind is in forgetfulness Of the Godhead’s innermost. We, though, will raise it and take it Into our consciousness, flooded with light, And then bear it over dust and ashes — The divine flame in the human heart. So may the lightning shatter into dust Our sense-built houses; We will erect instead soul houses Built on knowledge, Upon its iron-firm, light-woven web. And downfall of the outer Shall become uprise Of the soul’s own innermost. For pain presses upon us, From powers of material force. But hope illumines Even when darkness enshrouds us, And it will one day Emerge within our memory When at length, after the darkness, We may live again in light. We do not want this clear illumining To be in future brightnesses denied us Because we have not now, In pain, implanted it within our souls. Translation by Arvia Ege

19 A Key to the Reconciliation of Peoples*

ALBERT STEFFEN

On Michaelmas Day, 1928, three and a half years after the death of Rudolf Steiner, an observer inside the great domed hall at the inauguration ceremony of the new , viewing the numberless visitors, might have asked: What has brought these people here, and what is it that binds them together? All those present, whether as givers or receivers, had of their own volition made their way here. No inner or outer compulsion bound them to the place. They came out of devo­ tion to its cause. In this regard they could call themselves free individuals. All were seeking community in the experience of the gifts of the spirit which Rudolf Steiner had made available to man­ kind. They wished to participate in such scientific, artistic and religious impulses as were here at work; they wished as free individuals to experience community. They were seeking a spiritual home. So long as the first Goetheanum was in existence, they possessed such a home. As soon as they had entered one of its doors, they were in their own house. Whether they were

*After a lecture for the opening of the second Goetheanum, “Das Goethe­ anum als geistige Heimat,” reprinted in translation from Geistesschulung und Gemeinschafts-Bildung (Spiritual Schooling and Community Building) by Albert Steffen, edited by Hans Brons-Michaelis; Verlag fuer Schoene Wissen­ schaften, Dornach, Switzerland, with the kind permission of the Albert Steffen Stiftung.

20 Italian, French, English, German or Russian, or belonged to any other small or large nation, whether they sprang from this or that race — their souls always sensed, when they gazed in­ tensely upon this Building, how they were embedded in the being of mankind. They had only to become absorbed in the architectural, sculptural and painted forms, to know how they must work upon themselves in order to find the way forward. When Rudolf Steiner spoke from the lectern, everyone, from whatever land he hailed, said to himself: Yes, there is a home for the spirit on earth. The house of the Word, appointed to unite people of all tongues, was taken from us, and its creator left us. Rudolf Steiner could still give us, before he died, the model for the new Building. The people who seek here their spiritual home find no longer the harmonious multiplicity that delighted us in the Old Goetheanum. Henceforth they must themselves fashion such.... The work begins on oneself. In future each must develop in himself the forces which the earlier building itself could lend; in his own soul must the forms of this or that capital be carved; the colors that he beheld there in wonderful flowing curves must light up in himself. He must rise above his own nation and feel within him the other nations, equal in rights, joined together in roundelay. . . . Self-Knowledge as a Key to Knowledge of the Peoples Often Rudolf Steiner has said: Self-knowledge is world- knowledge. World-knowledge is self-knowledge. In order to understand this saying, a man must first learn to face himself and the world in a free manner. To know himself, he must observe himself, must stand outside himself, must free himself. And this demands work upon himself. There is no other way than to become himself the instrument with which he studies his own being. The young person, living primarily in his feelings, connects himself, in the course of such work, with historical person­

21 alities whose passions have been transformed into devotion, men capable both of a holy anger and of gentleness. Early on the way he discovers something of Francis of Assisi’s ardor within himself. At this point, however, he may not rest, but should strive onward. With advancing age, reason is the means of self­ cognition. Men like Pascal or Moliere enter his sphere of vision. His consciousness becomes wider and more compre­ hensive, but also cooler. Let us regard the way that his soul has traveled. He has worked upon his soul, and in the process has moved ever further outside himself. His way has led him to Italy, France, and England. And who has not experienced that a certain revolution in his life (toward good or evil) has had a Russian character! A demon or angel was waiting there. Indeed, when a man works on his being’s sheaths, he makes journeys — into spiritual Europe and beyond. A certain maturity, reached through the practice of particular qualities, suddenly makes accessible to us a sympathy for foreign cultures which otherwise — even if we were to travel there — would remain indifferent to us. In earlier epochs, a man who aspired to initiation had to travel. And he encountered, upon crossing the frontiers of his homeland, not as now customs officials who examine him, but supersensible powers, giant scorpions and suchlike, that he had to overcome, of which, for instance, the Gilgamesh Epos tells. Today it is necessary, before trying to understand other nations or races, to transform one’s own inner life. Russia, for instance, cannot be grasped in the right spirit as long as one is incapable of directing with the ego the movement of think­ ing. And it would be fatal to try to establish reforms in China or India before achieving a metamorphosis in the life of one’s will. For a European, the problems of the Far East are only to be comprehended when he is able to cross the threshold which

22 exists in his consciousness. (I remember how Max Scheler, in a lecture, rightly rejected certain music-theorists with natural- scientific leanings, who psychologized about Indian motifs.) Here it is needful, as guardian of the threshold, to call to mind the living spiritual science which tells a man what hin­ drances he bears in himself, in the way of personal, national and racial characteristics. These must be overcome before an experience of humanity itself can be had, from which stand­ point alone one may justly evaluate any particular folk. Thus, through a right self-knowledge, one may learn to know the inhabitants of the earth. The most abstract picture of the earth is given to us by the geographic charts, specialized to show the distribution of land and sea, wind and weather, nations, races, religions and so on. We find in such an atlas: mountains, plains, rivers, lakes and oceans, gulf-stream and trade winds, depicted as if in a microscopic version of what the senses perceive, as if an air­ man with a photographic camera had filmed the earth’s surface from a sufficient height, ignoring all human experi­ ence. Man is not included. For when this or that territory is colored red or blue, when particular racial or religious areas are marked by lines or dots, this is merely a system for conveying information and has nothing to do with the sensory- ethical effects of color. For a child, strangely enough, the experience is different. These towns, for example, marked by smaller or larger blobs according to the number of their inhabitants, make the most variegated impressions upon him. Even the name written beside them calls up an atmosphere. It arises without any effort on the part of the teacher. It is like an awakening in the childish soul to a knowledge based on prenatal memories. It is like an inkling, yes: before the spirit-soul of a child is born, it lived in the cosmos. From there it sought out its own place. Stemming from the stars, it approached the earth to integrate itself in the sequence of the generations. It cooper­ ated with the races, nations and families, with father and mother, to build itself a suitable body. Beholding, it created,

23 but it saw the earth otherwise than our charts show it to children. Until the soul reached the place toward which it had long been approaching, circling over oceans and continents, the star-spheres held sway, the elemental powers, the dark and light forces within history, the family ancestors, the spiritus loci. Drawing nearer through long periods of time, it experi­ enced nature and history mutually interwoven as “lessons” imparted by spirit-soul beings. As Plato tells us, all this awakens softly in the child, all the more clearly, the more the teacher who is giving him the lessons is an Aristotelian, that is, one who seeks the spirit in that which is sense-perceptible on the earth. So long as his body is still growing, the child’s soul is not yet quite inside the physical organism, and therefore he has these concrete inklings connected with the earth-regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, America. He still has a sense for the variations in the elements when he looks at the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on the map, although here as there the water- surfaces are colored the same. If allowed to paint the folk-souls “out of the color,” he would, as his mood prompted, choose quite other shades than those in the atlas. He can feel their taste on his lips — this yellow for England, that blue for Russia. Our geographic maps are vandalized pictures of heavenly influences. These abstract pictures of the earth’s surface show how little sense-perception and intellect can reach the essence of the world of which the child is still able to dream. The eye, as used by the natural-scientific investigator (especially when he brings the magnifying glass “to its aid”), belongs to the outer world, and thus cannot do other than regard the organism of a man as part of the outer world, in the same way as a stone, plant or animal. As little can we use concepts — in so far as they are mere dry representations — as instruments of knowledge. As such, they are based on mirrored sense-perceptions and provide only images.

24 The Kingdoms of Nature as Ego Experience True thinking, however, rises above the organism, even though it may be stimulated by the outer world. At first it is interlaced with feeling and will which are bound to the body. It must therefore, before it can be used as an unerring instru­ ment for cognition, be freed from the influences of the body. It must be body-free. When is this achieved? At the moment when it is ruled by the pure ego itself. The ego may be wholly imprisoned in the physical. It sleeps in the digestive system, as will. It dreams in the rhythmic system, as feeling. It awakens in thinking. It is the ego that can make thinking (and in the case of higher development, feeling and will also) into an instrument of cognition. From this point of view the attempt shall be made, at least aphoristically, to comprehend the world, not by means of the senses, as is done in natural science, but through the ego as such. One thing is evident: a man who speaks the word “I” wit­ nesses at that moment that he is neither outer world, as the senses perceive it, nor thinking, feeling and willing as these are bound within his own organism — although of course he is able to attach himself to these capacities (I think, I feel, I will). Independent of thinking, feeling and will impulses, one is capable of saying “I.” Even in a mood of self-abnegation, it is possible (as freest deed) to acknowledge the ego. “I” ...Should a man deny this word, which may sound only out of his inner human center, it would mean the de­ struction of his humanity kat’exochen. In the words “I am ,” existence lives in the first person singular. In it the ego grasps no other content than that of existence. But as soon as the ego that says “I am” connects it­ self with a thought, a feeling and a will impulse, then a con­ tent is there which the ego itself can contemplate. When a man speaks freely “I am — a thinking, a feeling, a willing person,” then he is capable of knowing how he is foolish or clever, cold or warm of feeling, good or ill of will and so on.

25 Even the most naive person feels, as soon as he has grasped his innermost being in this manner, what it is that rises up out of his organism and groups itself around his ego. He dis­ covers in himself the impulses that belong to the race of human beings, the feelings that stem from particular folk- groups, his own thoughts — what he has suffered and learnt, his own experience, his limitations. Self-cognition begins; and first he makes the quite general discovery that his thinking, when abstracted from feeling and willing, is lifeless like the mineral world, his feeling is related to the plants, his willing to the animals. He finds the realm of nature in himself. From this sure standpoint where he says to himself “I am,” a man can approach the outer world. On the one hand he himself stands as a being that has no other content than the “I am” (no thought, no feeling and no will-impulse), and on the other hand stretches the realm of nature: stone, plant, animal, transmitted to him through the senses, which as physical observing-apparatus belong to the outer world and therefore produce correct pictures of it. A man may say: “I am — mineral.” To make this sentence true, he must identify himself with gravitation, with the lifeless, with the dead. Were this possible, then he would have no choice than to say to himself: I am what I shall be when my body disintegrates and itself becomes earth. The ego-man, however, who unites himself with the mineral world, becomes conscious that he is more than the stone, namely, the system of forces that works in opposition to gravity and makes the body upright. Man has within himself a power that prevents his falling. This power is shown when he says, “I am — earth,” and then investigates what he is over and above the mineral, as the power o f uprightness. This bears the human organism as a whole upright over the earth. But there are also forces at work (of a highly differentiated kind) in the particular organs, and these are, insofar as con­ cerns their own life, of an animal nature. He learns to know that, as a man who can say “I am,” one is distinguished from the dead earth by the ability, as a com­ 26 plete organism, to stand erect, thus raising up from the ground all the animal nature contained within him. He unites in himself the animal kingdom widely spread over the earth, and raises it up by achieving the upright stance. The beasts, however, that he has within him, are always trying to cause the ego-man to fall. This he notices more especially when a single organ emancipates itself and takes on independence. And now the ego-man may identify himself with the plant. He may say: “I am — a plant that sprouts, grows and withers, that bears fruit. I am transformation without develop­ ment.” The ego-man, saying this, knows immediately what it is that distinguishes him from the vegetative processes of the plant. I am a plant, and as such a sleeping being that goes through an ever similar cycle. But looking back at myself I must say that into me as plant-like being something penetrates that is continually awakening. Something in me, till now un­ conscious, is always calling me to rise above the plant-life. Out of this sleep-state that I bear within me, I am raised by means of speech to human feeling. A man who says “I am” and identifies himself with plant-life sees at once that tone, speech-sound and word, language, free him from the second kingdom of nature. And when a man who has found the “I am” identifies himself with the animal kingdom and says: “I am — a beast,” then he has spoken a judgment. What is more — a moral judgment. He arouses himself to an ethical idea. For he cannot allow himself to remain a beast. He must overcome the beast in himself. And he recognizes that it is thinking which redeems him from the dream-existence of the beast within him. The ego-man learns from the earth-realm that something rules in him which overcomes death: the cosmic builder of his body. And from the plant-realm, that something lives in him which lends him the capacity for speech: the cosmic Word. And from the animal realm he learns of a spiritual capacity exhorting him to grasp hold of the cosmic thoughts. Thus do the realms of nature complement themselves in 27 him. The stone with divine builders. The plant with the harmonies of the spheres. The beast with world-conceptions. Is it possible to arrive at the experience of these three progressive steps or realms, as one does at the experience of the hard mineral, of the plant, and animal, so that the heavenly names no longer remain empty word-husks?

The Rainbow as Ego Experience To this end it would be necessary to bring the ego-experi- ence into conjunction with the consciousness of divine spiritual beings. We will choose as point of departure the sensory- ethical effects of color, seen in their most beautiful manifesta­ tion, where in nature they appear in perfect purity and have the most immediate influence on the human soul: in the rain­ bow. Let us try, then, to experience the rainbow in such a way that the colors are raised up into the consciousness-sphere of the ego-man. We have the color sequence: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. Green, which is in the center, holds the balance between the cool and the warm colors. When we allow ourselves to enter the sphere of this color, we feel relaxed, we are not compelled to go here or there. As long as we identify ourselves with this color, we are completely free. From this hypomochlion we are justified in starting out, for from here we can comprehend every step. To depart from the green needs a decision. The ego-man can remain here without going further. If he would depart from it to rise into the blue, or descend into the yellow, he must seek the aid of new soul-faculties; he must say: I think, then his consciousness moves into the cooler colors, or: I desire, then the warmer colors grasp hold of his consciousness. Now there are, a fact that is well-known to physics, chemical effects at the negative pole of the spectrum and heat effects at the positive pole. This means that toward the violet disintegration processes set in and toward the red, growth

28 processes. When light-effects merge on the one side into heat effects and on the other into chemical effects, then we have to do with the formation and dissolution of matter. We enter through thinking into decay, and through desire into growth. But there is a third way that we can take, on leaving the green color. It is this: that we do indeed call up thinking and willing, the forces that lead to the cold and the hot poles, but — once aroused — we preserve them within us, that is: think, but take the thought into ourselves; desire, but not follow its dictates; do these simultaneously so that thinking and willing ever remain in balance, and at last in highest potency are united; then we create in ourselves a faculty that is ethically the same as is for the senses the purest ruby magenta, and this force now extinguishes the green. Into the place of green, the “dead image of life,”* steps an impression which portrays the synthesis of the soul-faculties, the “living image o f soul,” as Rudolf Steiner calls it: peach-blossom color. Here, however, we reach the ego of a supersensible power. A higher being than we looks through the ethical effects of colors into our soul-life. Instead of the colors, we perceive the harmonies or discords of our virtues or vices. After what we have now described, it is clear that the spec­ trum, experienced by the ego-man, reaches into his soul- spiritual organization — the cool colors toward his head, the warm toward the metabolic-limb organism — indeed that the colors from within are even able to work upon the physical body. Beyond the violet and the red, sense-perceptions cease. But effects are still there. Could we achieve a higher grade of per­ ception, the spectrum would be extended and we would see the forces at work which produce chemical and heat effects. These we are unable to perceive because we are repelled by a hidden fear of looking upon decay. And in the heat effects we experience the ego so strongly that it can no longer cognize, but only feel. We feel the forces of the blood, urge and desire, overpoweringly, in such a way that they wipe out our *See Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on color.

29 consciousness. The working of forces that are ever rebuilding our body escapes us in similar manner. Let us suppose that a man who bears the rainbow in his mind’s eye concentrates on the ethical influence which the color-harmony has had upon him and enhances this to a suf­ ficiently strong potency, then the more he intensifies this spiritual process, the more deeply he comes to grips with the physical. He perceives more intimately what lies at the basis of heat and chemical effects. He discovers that death and birth penetrate into his living organism. And this inner discovery he can confirm by consideration of the air, as he breathes in and out. For the potentized experience of the ethical effects of colors gives him the knowledge that the air he breathes is the thought-bearer. Should a man who is trained like this by the colors of the rainbow think something coarse, then he feels it inwardly connected with a bad smell. Thus does the saying “in bad odor” when he means “of ill repute” show the spiritual origin of words. When even an ordinary person with little trouble can perceive a joy in inhaling and a disenchantment in exhaling, then may he who causes the deeds and sufferings of light, the colors, to become virtues in his spirit, experi­ encing in breathing as a revelation and out-breathing as a confession. In his breathing he feels not only his own experi­ ence, but that of a higher being, with whom he comes into relation through the ethically experienced breathing process, a being who feels joy and sorrow, according to its value, over this soul that he touches. He shares in the life of a heavenly being who rules in the circumference of the earth, in the air. Rudolf Steiner said in his lecture-cycle, The Mission of Folk-Souls, that the folk-spirits work in the earth’s circumfer­ ence in such a way that together they devote themselves in complete accord to their missions as in a harmonious dance. We may turn to Goethe’s theory of color as a point of departure for a reconciliation of peoples. The breath, bearer of thoughts, also affects the blood; it reaches by way of the liquid element in the human body into the digestion. It enlivens or debilitates the lymph, it refines or

30 coarsens the vessels, it models right into the physical tissues. It is well known that the human experience of race is intimately connected with the blood. From ancient times, particular social habits were anchored in the blood. Taking a look, from this point of view, at peoples of hot and of temperate climes, one may understand and agree with Julius Robert Mayer’s discovery that in the tropics the venous blood is redder than elsewhere. Warmer blood is more transfused with spirituality than cooler. But the spirituality is instinctive. For this reason the Indian, for example, needs breathing exercises for meditation in order to grasp the spirituality in himself. The community in which he lives is founded on a culture of the breath which reaches into the blood and frees his ego from the blood-bound qualities. But it is men of brain who are striving to build European community.

Gandhi and Lenin: From this viewpoint let us regard the efforts of two social reformers of our time, whose will it was to change human relations and organizations — Gandhi and Lenin. Gandhi regards the abolition of castes as the first deed necessary for the freeing of his race. Not until the Pariah is valued equally with the Brahmin as a human being is his people worthy of independence from England. He is a proclaimer of that unbounded love which Tolstoy in his teach­ ing, “Withstand not evil,” made his own. He says, for instance: “Non-cooperation, as I understand it, must be non-violent and may therefore not issue from a desire to punish or avenge, out of angry feelings, ill-will or hate... What makes our move­ ment into a non-violent struggle is the law of love upon which we base it...” When his compatriots commit some unlawful act, he fasts. That means, he takes upon himself the atone­ ment. He reinstitutes the ancient hand-weaving. He would return to the old simplicity of life, to the primitive economic

31 system of the folk — therefore his resuscitation of the old veneration for the cow. Gandhi’s non-cooperation has for his own people, insofar as it is permeated by ancient religious tradition, still a great significance; but he is obliged, in order to keep his people under control so that they may not drift into excesses, to lead an ascetic life which weakens his own physical body. How noble and at the same time how moving it is, when this man has to be carried onto the podium at popular meetings, so sick is his body; and there he calms tens of thousands of people through his mere presence. In this case a godly striving remains stuck in a peasant economy and is incapable of reaching forth into a world economy, which already (though in its worst sense) has spread over the whole earth in order to transform it. We see, at the opposite extreme, Lenin, seeking to create a machine-paradise; the great propagandist of the dynamo, which he wanted to implant among his people right across the enormous Russian plains into Asia. In a posthumous fragment by Lenin on the subject of dia­ lectics, we find, alongside interesting notes on Heraclitus, Aristotle, Philonus and Hegel, a kind of tabular grouping of sciences in their relation to the dialectic struggle of opposites: Dialectic appears in mathematics as plus and minus, differential and integral values: in mechanics as action and reaction, in physics as positive and negative electricity, in chemistry as association and dissolution of atoms, in social science as class warfare. Lenin moves in trains of thought that no longer have the pulse of life in them, in theories abstracted from the human, in concepts that juggle with earth’s values. He weaves his dia­ lectic net, centered on himself, over the whole earth and takes into account that he has to do with men and not with mario­ nettes. He has to use terrorism in order to further his ends.

32 When he dies his body is embalmed. How typical an exhibition is this — the holding fast of the soulless form. That which according to physical laws must disintegrate — his body — shall not be permitted dissolution. Why? Because the cosmic forces, which are already renewing the elements of which the body consists, are not recognized. The Bolshevist cannot get beyond the disintegrating effects in which his thinking is imprisoned to reach spirit formative forces; he denies the power of the dead. Had Lenin’s spirit been able to comprehend the sphere beyond chemical reactions, he would have found the laws that lie at the basis of decay, which have their origin outside the physical and yet work down into the physical; he would have discovered that these supersensible forces (based now not on the blood but on the spirit) can also work in a positive community-forming manner. He would have comprehended the sound-ether. Then he would have been horrified over those words which he spoke to Gorky: I know nothing more beautiful than the Appas- sionata; I could listen to it daily. It is an astonish­ ingly super-earthly music. With pride and perhaps childish naivety, I think, every time I hear those tones, how wonderful is that which men are capable of producing. But I cannot listen to music often; it gets on my nerves. I feel like saying kind foolish­ nesses and stroking these people’s heads, who in the midst of a filthy hell can create such beauty. But this is not the time for stroking people’s heads; today hands descend on heads to split skulls, merci­ lessly to split them, although the fight against all violence is our final idea — that is a hellishly dif­ ficult job. . . Why can such antitheses as Gandhi and Lenin not under­ stand each other? Why cannot the one reach the other so that they may confer about the salvation of mankind? What are the reasons that neither corrects himself by the other, al­

33 though the one-sidedness of both becomes so obvious when they are thus confronted? Because they cannot understand that the threshold to the spiritual world must be crossed before the Western man can understand and supplement the Eastern, and the Eastern the Western. It is more than a simile when we say that men like Gandhi live at that pole of the spectrum where it passes over into the infra-red, where heat effects appear, where a certain religious­ ness holds sway in the economic sphere of the folk, where hand-weaving is still an art. These are remains of an ancient spirituality. There once arose out of this spirituality, which is wholly anchored in the race, temple buildings, cults and laws that gave order to the life of the community. The castes mirrored particular grada­ tions of the spiritual world. The spectrum, which now disappears for the physical eye into the infra-red, remained, in earlier times further visible, so that at the place where heat merges into air and where air condenses to fluid, a man could have an inkling of the power of divine beings who guarded his blood community. And with his atavistic clairvoyance he was able to perceive these beings; he raised buildings, celebrated rituals and ordered his life according to such visions. In him and through him worked the various hierarchies. But those people did not build out of an ego that was free, as ego-men. They did so just as little as does the beaver con­ structing his hut. That epoch is irrevocably past. Men began to use the intellect and lost their clairvoyance. And today, when the intellect becomes ever more abstract, even the life of the senses loses its color. We spin theories and these are grey; we stray into the darkness. At the pole where heat-energies are, there now live people who love brilliant colors. But where chemical effects take place, there arise social forms entirely abstracted from the human: industrial concerns, trade companies, trusts, the whole Western eco­ nomic system, a devil’s masque in the eyes of the Easterner, in which up-swirled high-piled clouds simulate good investments.

34 Those are satanic rituals for the wise men of India. Sooner or later the avenger angel will blow his trumpet into this ghostly business and drive it asunder, thinks the Oriental.

The Full Spectrum And we Europeans? What salvation do we see: Few wish to look the dilemma in the face. As a first step, physics should become an ethical matter. That is: Goethe’s theory of color should be accepted, especially in Middle Europe, in all schools. In social questions a soul-alchemy of mutual giving and receiving, a shouldering of guilt and a “digesting” of mistakes should begin. Biology should be ennobled to a sacrament, so that the bread of life may be eaten in brotherly manner by the whole of mankind. But when we look around to see to which forces we should devote ourselves in order to re-ensoul the life that fades from us in theories, in desolation, in death — to remold it and to bring it to rebirth, then do we find none but those which can be awakened in us through Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner gave us the exercises through which these forces can be attained — exercises relating to stone, plant and animal. (In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.) They exist so that the spectrum which is visible to our senses may be extended into the divine spiritual regions on the one hand, and into the realms of nature on the other, in order to win us a loving and free relationship to all beings of the world. This path was artistically depicted in the first Goetheanum: There the color-spectrum was extended into painting, archi­ trave and capital, to the sequence of the pillars, into the whole architecture. The Building was an extension of artistic experience into the realm of spirit, leading to the beings who cleanse, mold and rebuild mankind. The painting, sculpture

35 and architecture of the first Goetheanum showed the path that leads through art to the creative gods who bear us through death and birth. There is a Being Who comprehends the whole spectrum, who extends aloft into the gradations of divine forms and downward into the realms of nature, so that above He over­ comes death, and below brings about rebirth: the Being that passed through death on Golgotha and rose again. This Being Rudolf Steiner depicted in the central statue for the Building. We behold the Divine Spectrum of which our color spectrum is only a small cross-section, yet large enough that from it the way may rightly be taken down into the realms of nature, as well as up into the realms of the Hierarchies, in such manner that we never lose our egohood. Every man has the possibility of saying I am, and thereby to take his place in a free and loving manner in creation, to further it. For this, our model is the great thinker, artist and bene­ factor of mankind, who sacrificed his forces in order to create a Society in which everyone may find his spiritual home. May each, as well as he can, take part in building this community, for then its founder, Rudolf Steiner, will ever in spirit be in our midst.

I am more than the stone-dead rock, for the Father as world Creator has given upright stance to my body.

36 I am more than the sleeping plant, for the Son as Word of the world dwells in my heart. I am more than the dreaming beast, for the Spirit as Thought of the world illumines my head. I am Man, builder of the society of free beings, co-redeemer of all the creatures, through verity, through love-filled words, through deeds that are strong. Translation by Virginia Brett

37 [Image: shaded line drawing of butterfly, sun & plant by] jean zay

38 Behold the Plant by Rudolf Steiner Behold the plant! It is the butterfly Held prisoner by the earth. Behold the butterfly! It is the plant By the whole cosmos freed. Translator unknown

Basil, Lemon Balm and Peppermint * WILHELM PELIKAN

Ocimum basilicum, sweet basil: This plant from India, with broad, fleshy leaves, stressing very much the herbal aspect, comes from a warmer, but also damper, climate than the labiates we have been discussing so far. To the warming note of marjoram is added a fiery, clove­ like nuance. The leaf shoots end in slim, spiculate inflor­ escences consisting of pseudo-whorls, one piled on top of the other; the flowers are white and full of nectar. This plant, sacred to the ancients, was used for the stimulating warmth it gave to the digestive organs, for its action of cleansing the uterus, promoting birth and lactation, and for an aphrodisiac effect. It was also used in catarrhal disorders and inflamma­ tions of the mucosa in the urogenital tract. Once again a calming effect is present, and the plant relieves the pain of spasms. *Translation from the German of the third chapter of the author’s Heilpflanzenkunde (Medicinal Botany) Vol. 1; published with the kind permission of the author and of the publishers, Philosophisch- Anthroposophischer Verlag am Goetheanum/Dornach, Switzerland. Translator: R. E. K. Meuss, F. I. L. 39 Melissa officinalis, balm, lemon balm: I should like to point out briefly how many of the Labiatae bear the specific name officinalis, an indication that they have been known in medicine and to chemists for centuries. This graceful perennial herb, nettle-like in its growth, expresses its essential nature particularly in its foliage. Instead of the needle-like, contracted leaves of the “fiery labiates,” we now have broad, well-formed leaves, pair following pair in rhythmic sequence, with no particular change in form as they pile up. The fiery scent of the labiates we have been considering so far is now moderated into a mild, refreshing lemon scent. Pseudo-whorls of a few white flowers, rich in nectar, arise in the leaf axils of the upper nodes. This is another important bee-plant, its Greek name being the same as that of the bee (melissa). Corresponding to its external form, this plant loves a milder warmth, more moisture and even some shade — especially in its native region of the Mediter­ ranean and the Orient. Warming, refreshing, enlivening is the action of Melissa, directed less at metabolic and more at rhythmic processes, as one would expect from its rhythmical, leafy nature. It promotes the menses and conception, subdues states of sexual excitation, and also has stimulating and calm­ ing effects on the digestive tract, is antispasmodic and carmina­ tive, ameliorating nausea and vomiting; but on the whole its action extends more in the direction of the rhythmic system than that of the labiates discussed so far. Palpitations, cardiac neurosis, even pectanginous states are within its sphere. Sleep­ lessness, hysteria, melancholia, and attacks of faintness often accompany those conditions and will also respond to Melissa. Carmelite Water has a distillation of balm as its chief ingre­ dient. Marrubium vulgare, white horehound, common horehound: Even more than with Melissa, the shoot with its rhythmical sequence of leaves, node following node, is the chief organ; from the leaf axil of each node arise the almost spherical, small white pseudo-whorls with their tiny flowers. The plant is 40 found throughout Europe, right down into Asia; it loves rubbish heaps, dry, bare, but warm places. The egg-shaped leaves are contracted into wrinkles, only slightly aromatic but very bitter; they also contain tannin. Even more than with Melissa, the medicinal action is directed at the rhythmic system. It is not so much a plant of warmth, and more one of rhythm. Marrubium also helps catarrhal gastritis and enteritis, stimulates hepatic function and promotes menstruation; but what is much more important is its action in mucous congestion of the bronchi, chronic bronchitis, whooping cough, and senile asthma; it stimulates the circulatory system and regulates the beating of the heart. It also reduces excessive salivation, especially in cases of mercury poisoning. Leonurus cardiaca, motherwort, lion’s tail: This European and Asiatic plant which grows on waste land, in village lanes, dry pastures and along fences and hedges, also intermingles leaf and flower formation, drawing the inflorescence down into the region of leafy rhythm; the pseudo-whorls of pinkish labiate flowers sit in the leaf axils of the tall pile of nodes. Not only is the leaf rhythm more strongly emphasized in this plant, but the shape of the leaf itself is modelled out in more detail than in most of the Labiatae; it is divided and arranged in triangular lappets. The plant is only faintly aromatic, with a musty and slightly repellent scent, and the taste is very bitter. Corresponding to the nature thus expressed, the medicinal action has largely shifted from the metabolic to the rhythmic region. Amenor­ rhea, dysmenorrhea, sterility and climacteric symptoms also benefit, but the accent lies on the help this plant gives in the case of palpitations, anxiety, dyspnea, weak cardiac function with intermittent pulse, angina pectoris; oppression of the heart from the metabolism, Roemheld’s syndrome.

41 Lycopus virginicus, bugleweed: This slim, narrow perennial also shows an overdeveloped leaf rhythm in a numerous succession of leaf nodes, with circlets of tiny white flowers drawn into the axils. The inflor­ escence is spread over and distributed throughout this rhyth­ mic leaf region. It is completely subjected to it. Like those of the last species, the leaves are deeply incised and feathery. Lycopus grows near slowly flowing waters in the Atlantic coastal regions of North America. In this species, the labiate type must therefore come to terms with water. The power to form etheric oils is accordingly subdued, but the formation of tannin and bitter substances increases. Even more than with Leonurus, the medicinal action has shifted from the metabolic to the rhythmic system. Here we have a good cardiac stimulant; it has been successfully prescribed for weakness of the heart after overexertion, dilatation of the heart accom­ panied by anxiety, and for tachycardia in conjunction with Basedow’s disease. On the other hand, Lycopus also acts on the blood process itself; it has been used to treat icterus, hemorrhoidal bleeding, and pulmonary hemorrhages in pa­ tients with diseases of the lung. Mentha piperita, peppermint: This species prefers the more temperate warmth of our latitudes, with much light, and damp peaty soil. The broad lanceolate leaves follow each other closely along a stem up to two feet high, and continue all the way up to the pointed pseudo-spicule of violet summer flowers. In this plant the warmth-principle of the labiates fights with the damp and cool element, and this makes it stimulating and warming, relieving congestion in the digestive system, spasms and flatu­ lence, strengthening menses and potency, relaxing uterine spasms. On the other hand, it also has vitalizing, calming and refreshing properties, relieving palpitations and cardiac anxi­ ety. And just this warmth- and water-related plant particularly stimulates the organ in which fluid organization and warmth organization interact with each other, namely the liver.

42 Words for Whitsun L. Francis Edmunds

They sat all silent in the Upper Room, Soul-benumbed and sorrow-laden, Memories surging up within them, Seeing, they had not seen, Hearing, they had not heard, Living in His light, They yet had groped in shadow, And in the hour of darkest perfidy, They all had fled. * They sat all silent in the Upper Room. The world was still Save for the tumult in their anguished hearts. Memories wrenched a channel through their souls. He, the Risen One, had been with them, Had walked and talked with them, Had broken bread with them, Had taught them, charged them, Had brought them light and Life and Love renewing, Measure beyond measure, And then had vanished. * They sat all silent in the Upper Room, Bereaved, benighted, knowing not whence nor whither, Torn with grief, adread with expectation, Yet tender with the Light and Love new-given. They sat all silent Watching, waiting . . . waiting,

43 Sudden the heavens broke upon them, And seven-fold lightning flashed, A whirlwind swept all darks asunder, And tongues of flame descended on them. Baptised they were with Fire and the Holy Spirit. The Word of Christ was born in them. And so they rose And went out to the multitude, Desciples of Christ — His Life, His Death, His Life beyond Death — Bearers of the Word to all mankind

Poem Danilla Rettig

In each deep-hearted rose A melody lies hidden. Through the curve and spiral of its leaves The intervals intone — From the open, closing, breathing, growing, dying of its bloom, Scent and fragrance linger after like a child.

44 The Warmth Organism of the Earth*

THEODOR SCHWENK

The last part of this article will be of particular interest to all who are concerned with the implications of expanding tech­ nology and with the forces that can offset or heal its destruc­ tive effects. The first portion is an invaluable source for teachers and those of a natural-scientific bent. It may also be stimulating to less specialized readers, who, in any case, are urged not to miss the last pages, should the first present dif­ ficulties. The Editor

If we want to develop a better understanding of the earth’s warmth organism we do well to start by reminding ourselves of some of warmth’s special qualities and of the way it inter­ acts with matter. We know that the earth is made up of solid, liquid and gaseous elements, of land masses, bodies of water and a mantle of air. Warmth is looked upon as a further, fourth element. We rank it above the other three because of its unique ability to permeate them. In no other case can two bodies occupy the same space simultaneously. But warmth can do this. And in achieving this spatial permeation, warmth shows itself to a great extent free of spatial restrictions. Or we can put it another way and say that it makes its appearance

*Based on a lecture to Anthroposophical physicians given at the head­ quarters of , Inc. in June, 1974. The footnotes, referring largely to books printed in Germany, may be obtained upon request from the Editor. 45 at the borderline of the physical-spatial, now entering space, now withdrawing from it. It makes three kinds of connections with the physical world: Heat — conduction is a phenomenon occurring mainly in connection with solid bodies. Heat — convection takes place through the agency of air and water currents; they carry heat with them in the direction of their streaming. Heat — radiation is something we experience in na­ ture at the hand of burning or glowing substances or when the sun shines on snow-covered surfaces. In­ deed, snow is a very special case in point, for its heat-absorption and radiation reach almost the same radiation-maximum as do black objects. The sun is the foremost source of heat, supplying 99.98% of the earth’s total heat resources. When the air is dry the temperature in lower strata of the atmosphere falls approxi­ mately one degree Centigrade for every upward rise of one hundred meters, while it rises on an average of three degrees Centigrade for every one-hundred meter descent through the solid earth, except where there are special features like volcanoes. Water plays a decisive role in the functioning of the earth’s warmth organism, for its thermal properties make it the great climate- and weather-regulator. One thinks in this connection of water’s huge capacity for storing warmth and of the anomaly of its achieving greatest density, not at the freezing point, but at four degrees Centigrade, a fact of such far- reaching importance for every phase of life on earth that life could not exist were conditions otherwise. Thanks to the detailed descriptions made by Rudolf Steiner on the physics of heat, its true nature can be read from pro­ cesses in the atmosphere, where it finds reflection. For this atmosphere is indeed the very realm where all thermodynamic processes take place. We know them by names 46 like isotherms, isobars, adiabatic changes,* isochors, and so on, using these terms to denote changes that occur in the air when temperature, pressure, entropy, and volume remain con­ stant. We have the most striking direct experience of the ever- changing play of such warmth processes as these in meteoro­ logical happenings. Patterns in Space: Now let us turn our attention for a moment to the spatial differentiation into continents (lithosphere), seas (hydrosphere), and air mantle (atmosphere) of the earth’s organism, noting that it applies equally to warmth. At first glance this spatial arrangement may seem purely accidental. But a closer look makes us realize that there is order in it. Quite aside from the fact that water and land masses are so distributed as to make for a water-hemisphere to southward and a land-hemisphere to northward, the shape and placement of the continents themselves cannot be looked upon as due to change. Rudolf Steiner described the conti­ nents to us as formed by the fixed stars, and he added that they float as it were on plastic-fluid bases, — a statement borne out increasingly by recent research. This calls our atten­ tion to a fact often lost sight of: the tilting of the earth’s axis in relation to the plane of its orbit, a constant through the changing seasons. Year-in, year-out it maintains its alignment with the north pole of the heavens as a still point. This can only be taken as evidence that the earth is “fixed-star” ori­ ented. This position, together with the earth’s rotation around its axis, determines the way the continental land masses are dis­ tributed. And the possibility of their displacement, as a result of man’s interference, is also being talked of these days — a displacement brought about by an irresponsible technology that is already effecting marked changes of climate all over the earth such as could lead to the melting of the polar ice caps and thus cause massive dislocations. Since these would *Temperature changes that take place without addition or loss of heat to or from the surroundings. 47 take place at a rate of change so much faster than that measured by geological ages, they would lead to corresponding speedy changes in the orientation of the earth’s axis, which would bring it into a different orientation to the fixed stars and the sun’s path. There is a further spatial patterning of the earth’s warmth organism between the poles and the equator wherein we dis­ tinguish tropics, subtropics, temperate and polar zones. This configuration is due to the spherical form of the earth and to the tilting of its axis. One can have an experience of the same patterning in a far smaller area, vertically rather than hori­ zontally by, for instance, climbing 6,000-meter-high Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa. The climatic zones through which one would be passing in the 10,000-kilometer stretch from the equator to the poles are the same as those one traverses climb­ ing to a height of only 6 kilometers. Here we see a striking heightening of vertical intensity over that of the horizontal between poles and equator. The atmosphere in still higher zones changes to very low temperatures, which increase once more to a warmth layer of approximately 0°C. at a height of about 50 kilometers. Then the temperature falls again to circa minus 80°C., only to rise with renewed vigor at yet higher levels. The uppermost layer (at circa 80-500 kilometers) is called earth’s thermosphere. Thus we find that the warmth organism of the earth is similar to that of all living creatures in that it possesses a variety of sheaths, including an outermost warmth-sheath within which life is able to develop. The vertical and horizontal patterning encountered thus over the entire earth is repeated with a great many variations in smaller features of the landscape: in woods, fields and cropland, rivers and lakes, all of which are separate warmth organisms and have their own individual warmth differentia­ tions. Vegetation is the creator of these smaller warmth organisms. Areas where there is none turn into deserts subject to violent extremes of temperature, with burning days and bitterly cold nights.

48 Patterns in Time: After this brief glance at spatial aspects of the earth’s warmth organism, let us turn our attention to warmth pro­ cesses that run their course in time, for it is especially these that are bound up with our concept of all life. All sorts of time patterns are to be found here — rhythms encompassing both the longest and the shortest time-spans. Yearly and daily rhythms are the most familiar. We know them from the standpoint of many of their qualities, such as light and darkness, windiness and stillness, dry and wet periods, rising and falling motions. But they are all warmth- related as well and may therefore also be termed warmth- rhythms. They are meteorological and geophysical rhythms, which are often synchronized in turn with astronomical rhythms. Since, as time-patterns, they are a natural part of the same picture as spatial patternings, let us go on to study the interaction of these time- and space-aspects of the earth’s warmth organism: 1) The “breathing of the continents.” This refers to the great stationary high- and low-pressure areas which coincide to a considerable degree with the continents and oceans and which rise and fall in seasonal rhythms. The well-known Asiatic High is a prototypal stationary high. In winter it generates the Siberian cold air masses brought over to Europe by sharp east winds. By summer it has declined and become a pronounced low-pressure area, sucking up masses of moist air that cross the Himalayas and bring India its longed-for mon­ soon rains. European weather is determined by the stationary high over the Azores and by the Icelandic Low. 2) The arctic continents, consisting largely of ice, pulsate in tune with an annual rhythm: in March the sea-ice of Antarctica covers a surface 2.5 million kilometers square, which grows by September to an area of 19 million square kilometers, a 760% increase. If we enquire into the cause of this breathing, this pulsa­ tion of the continents, we find it thus in seasonal rhythms which are themselves products of the earth’s tilted axis. If it were not for this tilting, if, for example, the planet’s axis were 49 vertical to the plane of its orbit, there would be no such thing as changing seasons. The days, instead of varying in length, would all be of the same duration. Any change in the position of earth’s axis would cause considerable instability in the yearly rhythms. The fact that it is “fixed-star” oriented and that the distribution of the seas and continents is fairly con­ stant means that the rhythm of the year achieves that living balance which makes an “organism” of the yearly cycle. 3) An open mind can receive the impression that there is an underlying building plan behind these phenomena, which are in turn linked with further phenomena of a meteorological nature resembling organs and organic functions built into the earth’s warmth organism. At special points in the sun’s course, such as its highest and lowest position at St. Johnstide and Christmas respectively, as also at the spring and autumn equinoxes, air pressure exhibits tendencies known as “reflec­ tions” of its curves. Let us take as example the air pressure curve of a given locality a few weeks before St. John’s Day and keep on observing it for the same period of weeks beyond that date. We often find that such curves reflect each other. The second curve might also be called retrograde (cf. K. Stumpff, A. Schmauss). Reflecting movements of this kind are well-known to musi­ cians, for they are sometimes found in compositions of the great masters, such as J.S. Bach. There they provide a struc­ tural element, built up as though out of a higher system of laws into earthly time. Rudolf Steiner often called attention to the fact that spiritual laws work in a direction counter to the earthly time-stream. Structural concepts and laws of composi­ tion of a higher order than the earthly work into our world here, and we can discover and even measure them physically in annual rhythms such as those referred to. 4) What we thus encounter, particularly in annual heat and pressure rhythms, is met with again in the smaller compass of hourly and daily rhythms and much smaller spaces. I am referring here to something for which we might use a phrase borrowed from the yearly cycle, describing it as “the breathing of a landscape” in a single day’s course. This 50 breathing finds expression in a host of rhythms, such as, for example, the double rise and fall of atmospheric pressure, or in striking regular changes in the wind’s force and direction along the seacoast or in mountain areas. We notice the wind coming from the valleys early in the day, from the peaks at evening, and speak of morning on-shore and evening off-shore breezes. Marked temperature changes often accompany these alternations. Now what accounts for such rhythmic changes? Here again we come across large-scale causation: the rotation of the earth around its axis, which explains sunrise, high noon and sunset and includes the whole range of thermodynamic phenomena in which we ourselves and all of nature participate, into which we are woven (we refer our readers here to Guenther Wach- smuth’s very complete depicting of “the breathing of the earth”).* 5) Turning now to a survey of the various major and minor thermodynamic processes involved in the behavior of the weather, we will hardly be able to keep on speaking of anything as regular as a rhythm except in the sense of seeing it as the product of overarching rhythms of warmth and cold in summertime and winter. However, this very changeability in the weather is the basis upon which the constancy of the earth-planet’s warmth economy is built — a constancy essential to the preservation of all life on earth, every aspect of which depends upon it. Indeed, the living earth is itself involved in what happens in the weather, in that it is a biosphere affect­ ing such meteorological processes as take place in the interre­ lationship of woodlands, cloud formation and precipitation. . . 6) Closer attention to what is happening in the weather discovers a law-abidingness there that is related to high- and low-pressure areas passing above us. We all know about the old rules and sayings that go to make up the farmer’s calendar, and we may have heard too of the “key-dates,” that have been recognized from centuries of observation on the part of people whose work connects them more intimately with nature. Experienced meteorologists recognize them too, though *Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man by G. Wachsmuth. 51 they use different terms and speak of singular happenings dur­ ing the year’s course that occur in meteorological elements such as temperature, air pressure, moisture content, wind di­ rection and velocity, and so on, all of which are linked in a living interplay. Many of these may be likened to processes taking place in organisms, and many a meteorologist schooled by outdoor weather observation draws such parallels. P. Raethjen, for example, says in his “Dynamics of Cyclones” that a cyclone has a typical life history with character­ istic beginning, developing and ageing phases. It re­ produces itself .. . like a living creature in the sense that a young frontal cyclone’ is born out of the womb of an adult ‘central cyclone’.... Cyclones have a metabolic process without which they could not exist, for they constantly draw fresh air masses into their vortices and excrete other masses in their outward spirallings. We must not forget that this 'dying and becoming’ is an absolutely basic characteristic of cyclones. . . . Since the atmosphere behaves like a living creature, we see it truly only when we regard it and treat it as a totality. Phenomena which cannot be under­ stood separately must be looked at in context as harmonizing aspects of a single whole. August Schmauss has discovered in the year’s course certain law-abiding principles, leading to the conclusion that the earth has a regulated warmth organism. He conceives the “dynamic year” as embracing the activity of meteorological elements: air pressure, temperature, and so on — shaping weather events in such an area as that between the western extremity of Brittany and the Shetland Islands to the north of Great Britain. This area is like a door through which Europe’s weather blows in from the Atlantic Ocean. Schmauss uses the daily difference in air pressure between the two points as a re­ liable indicator. He takes the average of many (50) years’

52 findings on these dynamics of the atmosphere and comes up, contrary to all expectation, not with an irregular, haphazard line, but with a characteristic curve, which he interprets as follows: The ‘dynamic year, ’ as we might call it, usually begins on the 29th of September with a bottom low along the pressure gradient from St. Mathieu to Lerwick and with a minimal atmospheric activity familiar to many as a phenomenon of Indian Summer. From this point on, the gradient — and the zonal circula­ tion with it — increases in a series of waves until it reaches the winter high, falling on the average on January 9th. The waves ... are the expression of a battle between summer and winter, from which deep winter emerges victorious. But the culmination of its activity is also the turning point in the battle. Here winter begins its retreat with a series of rear­ guard actions that show up in wave-forms in the meteorological curves. Activity decreases until it reaches the annual low-point, which occurs on the average during the period from May 22nd to the 6th of June. This stretch of days quite often brings the first heat wave, for there is not much movement in the air, and as the sun approaches its zenith it can therefore make its radiation fully felt. At the beginning of June this period of especially pleasant weather often ends quite suddenly. So- called summer monsoon weather starts ... with heightening atmospheric activity. Cooler west winds pour in, frequently bringing with them along the wide front thunderstorms like those of India, classic land of monsoons. The gradient remains high, though with wave-like weakenings, until September 16th. Then there is a sudden plunge to the autum­ nal minimum, matching in pace the swift upward climb from the spring minimum. The calendar of events is thus by no means a matter of chance; in- 53 stead, it actually deserves to be called a collective timetable. ... A meteorologist familiar with these facts sees in this scheduled taking-of-turns by bodies of air something in the nature of an orchestral score that indicates where an instrument comes in — though on occasion it may miss its cue. Even so, it is a great pleasure to be familiar with the score ...... Our knowledge is quite equal to defining the type 'low,’ but that is a collective term. Single lows are individuals, evidencing variations often brought about by very slight changes in the prevailing cir­ cumstances. We might, borrowing a musical term, call them variations on a theme. We marvel at the ingenuity of a Bach or Reger who could write any number of such at will. Our atmosphere is certainly a master at this too; it need not surprise us that meteorologists marvel as they encounter ever fresh variations of a ‘low.’ ... Perspectives in the direction of structural re­ search open up here; there is reason to believe that we are dealing with something very similar to musi­ cal harmony in atmospheric events. Here we have a meteorologist talking of musical form- elements in weather such as we also came upon as we familiarized ourselves with reflecting points in the year’s unfolding. We are led here, quite without our doing, to see a “design” in this “structure of the dynamic year,” that of the pre-Chris­ tian and Christian festivals: Michaelmas, falling on September 29th, the day on which the impulse toward a climbing dyna­ mic, starting from the minimum, sets in; the Christmas festival of earlier times, celebrated on the 6th of January (in the dynamic year, January 9th); Whitsuntide, from May 22nd to the 6th of June, a “movable” feast because it depends on when Easter falls — and finally we see this same design in the reflecting points of the four chief seasonal festivals, which we have already talked about. 54 And now we find ourselves able to speak not merely of a design in time, but in space as well. The dynamic year “un­ folds” in low- or high-pressure vortices along the physical boundaries of the climatic zones, referred to at the beginning of this essay, between the wind or warmth zones. These are the so-called shear-zones, “sensitive” formations such as occur everywhere in nature and are built even into the organs of all living creatures. An example is man’s inner ear, where the spiral pattern of the cochlea provides a sensitive receptor for musical and speech sounds. Formations of this kind are in every case zones where the slightest impact strikes upon “sensi­ tive membranes” where cosmic forces can take hold. For the differentiated living being, earth, needs a corresponding world around it, as all living organisms do if they are to maintain their life. This world, for the earth, is the universe in its totality. The earth’s “sensitive membranes” serve as entry ports for the forces of the sun and planets, which are able to pro­ ject their ordering influences through them. The tilted angle of the earth’s axis gives it its “fixed-star” orientation. And this in turn makes it a sense organ with an unchanging focus in contrast to the ever-changing play of sun and planets. We now understand what Schmauss means when he speaks of the possibility of lows which are due to make their appearance at a given moment in the dynamic year missing their cue and failing to enter. This can happen when certain planetary positions bear down too heavily on the dyna­ mics of the year’s course. Now let us make a brief summary of the findings we have arrived at thus far: The stationary high- and low-pressure areas are built up and dispersed again by the way land masses and oceans are distributed and by the climatic zones which form a belt around the earth with their lines of contact. They are, in last analysis, the product of the tilting and fixed-star orientation of the axis of the earth.

55 The dynamic year is the outcome of processes tak­ ing place where climatic zones border upon one another in contact areas that are the product of the tilted position of the earth’s axis, and are also the product of the path the earth takes in a year’s course and of the influence of planetary movements. (A thorough-going study of the phenomenon of the “jet-streams” of the higher atmosphere would fully confirm and supplement this statement). Order in Space, Time and Matter: It is clear from even so brief a summing up that the earth’s warmth organism cannot be explored and characterized purely from an earthly standpoint, but must be looked at in closest possible conjunction with the solar system as a whole. Now let us go a little more deeply into the matter of the tilted position of the earth’s axis. We will take as a guideline for our own investigation a view held by Goethe and often fruitfully applied by scientists: No amount of effort enables us to succeed in fathoming the true nature of a human being. But if we observe his ac­ tual deeds, what he is “making happen,” his character is im­ mediately obvious. Inquiring in this sense into the nature of earth’s warmth organism, into what happens as a result of the tilting of earth’s axis and of earth’s motion in relation to the sun, we find that just these simple facts alone are enough to demon­ strate that we are dealing here with a dynamic filled with real wisdom, a dynamic without which none of these facts — in­ cluding the distribution of the seas and continents — could not have become a reality. A more thorough investigation of these facts will yield still more insights into processes of the earth’s organism. We can feel it to be a pressing question whether this wise dynamic is not the underlying idea at work within the three factors already mentioned: the earth’s tilted axis, its fixed-star orientation, and its rotation. We must ask whether there does not have to be a composer — the creator of the “score” and the time-patterning — to account also for 56 the spatial ordering through which the time-pattern is real­ ized. The sun takes four steps as it travels its full yearly round at an angle vertical to its path through the zodiac: From the low-point on December 21st to the Equa­ tor on March 21st 23°27’ from the Equator on March 21st to the Tropic of Cancer on June 21st 23°27’ from the Tropic of Cancer on June 21st to the Equator on September 23rd 23°27’ from the Equator on September 23rd to the Tropic of Capricorn on December 21st 23°27’ Put another way, every 90° advance along its orbit cor­ responds to a vertical step of 23°27’. Thus two components are involved in its motion whose relative lengths are approximately 4:1 (90:23.5 — 3.84:1). Thus the 23°27’ tilt of the earth’s axis has a threefold outcome: 1) A division of the year into four seasons; 2) a spatial division with a 4:1 or 1:4 ratio or rela­ tionship measured by the number of degrees in the angle; 3) a velocity scale in the same ratio of 4:1 as the ratio between the median orbital speed and the median speed of components involved in the as­ cending and descending phases of motion. In other words, the median orbital speed is approxi­ mately four times that of the annual vertical rise and fall. So in the course of a year we can see a threefold configur­ ation in time, space and velocity, in which, according to the tilting of the earth’s axis, the ratio of approximately 4:1 crops up three times. May we take the fact that the earth oscillates in about the same basic 1:4 ratio as that governing man’s rhythmic organi­ zation in the relationship of breathing to the heart-beat as evi­ 57 dence that the earth is a living organism? Does there not seem to be a similar design underlying both — a design in the dynamic year’s course that we also saw reflected in the Christian festivals celebrated at the principal points of the four seasons? We are obviously encountering here the same being that works as the ordering agency in time and space and that has been looked upon throughout the ages as the architect of the universe, the master of all harmonious propor­ tion. For it is the degree of the angle of the earth’s tilted axis that establishes the life-supporting relationship of earth and sun and has brought about the resulting arrangement of the seas and continents. If these questions are justified and fit the case, the archi­ tectural laws involved must apply to every aspect large and small, — as holds true of every living organism. Put another way, a fact of this kind should be ascertainable right down to the level of material composition, and we will offer evidence that this is so: The speed at which sound waves pass through water is ap­ proximately 1400 m/s (meters per second), while the speed of their passage through the air is about 340 m/s. Here again we find the same 4:1 ratio. If we take into consideration the fact that the rate at which sound waves travel through a body de­ pends upon its density, elasticity and specific warmth, it becomes obvious that this rate of travel depends upon its material make-up and structure. Where, as in the case of the ratio between air and water, the 1:4 ratio turns up, it is an indication that this ratio also applies to the way the innermost aspects of matter are interrelated. Almost every property of water thus shows itself, in its relationship to warmth, as maximally suited to support the life of earth and its creatures. In this respect water is unequalled, as Henderson has shown: the temperature anomaly, as a result of which water reaches its greatest density at 4°C and grows lighter again at the freezing point, is the reason why solid ice does not sink, but floats, thus keeping the earth from becoming a totally lifeless block of ice. Water’s extremely great warmth-capacity is a chief factor 58 in the origin of ocean currents as it is of all meteorological and biological processes. Warmth-capacity shows a dependence upon temperature as illustrated by the fact that at 37°C water requires the least amount of warmth to become one degree warmer. At the surface of the earth the sunlight is trans­ formed into warmth. The water vapor and carbonic acid which are dissolved in the atmosphere possess a material com­ position that allows the sun’s light rays to pass freely through them onto the earth, but keeps the warmth reflected from the earth from radiating back out into cosmic space. This charac­ teristic has often occasioned the earth’s atmosphere being likened to a “greenhouse” within whose protective sheathing (earth’s air, vapor and carbonic acid) life can flourish. Interrelationships in Man, Nature, and Cosmos: We can scarcely fail to notice that the human organism also embodies the same numerical ratio found, on the one hand, in cosmic and planetary interrelationships, and in those of substances in nature on the other. That this is a fact can be demonstrated in numerous examples. We will present some of them here, though they are not all taken from the thermodynamic field. The 1:4 ratio so often met with in the design of the earth’s organism reappears in man in the basic relationship of breath to heart beat. We breathe about eighteen times a minute to the heart’s seventy-two pulsations. As we contemplate the fact that man’s airy and fluid organizations are founded on this pair of rhythms, it strikes us that the velocity of the sound- rhythm’s passage through air and water is again approximately 1:4. This relationship is based on the innermost constitution of these life-substances (compressibility, density, specific warmth). To take the case of water’s specific warmth — in other words, of its warmth-capacity — we find that 37°C is its minimum — that this is the temperature at which water can most easily be heated. The correspondence here to the normal temperature of human blood — 37°C. — is obvious. Focusing our attention for the moment on the temperature 37°C. itself, we find it occupying almost exactly the Golden 59 Section position on the temperature range between the freez­ ing and the boiling points. (The Golden Section makes its cut at 38% and 62% respectively of the distance between the two ends of a line or figure.) Can it be mere chance that the human form is likewise built on the Golden Section, — that the architectural idea embodied in it manifests this ever-recur- ring proportion — and that man’s body is composed very largely of water and in accordance with this law? The human breathing rhythm is a reflection of a macro- cosmic rhythm, that of the “Platonic Year,” which spans 25.920 earth-years. For we breathe on the average 25,920 times in a day’s course, and 25,920 is the number of days in a lifetime 72 years long. If we equate one day in the life of a human being with one indrawn and expelled breath, 25,920 such breaths will be breathed in a 72-year lifetime. Taking each earth-year as a single breath in the Platonic year, again 25.920 breaths will have been drawn in that period. The Platonic year covers the number of earth-years it takes for the vernal point to make a complete circuit of the zodiac. Thus we may say that solar laws, too, are to be discovered in our breathing. The correspondence between man’s and the earth- organism’s design and physiological processes permits us to see that both are based upon the same idea, right down into the very make-up of the materials of which they are composed. It is clear that man and earth are both products of a conden­ sation process out of elemental warmth. Men of earlier times were aware of this correspondence, and for that reason called the earth “Adam Cadmon.” Warmth as a Threshold Phenomenon: Since warmth always makes its appearance coupled with matter in a solid, fluid or gaseous state, no independent being is ascribed to it. However, great quantities of heat are required to bring a solid body into the fluid or the gaseous state. This is simply to say that a “body” is the closer to pure warmth the further it progresses beyond the gaseous condition. This also means, of course, that its hardness and shape, its solidity and structure, have disappeared and “gone up” in 60 heat. Or we can just as well put the statement the other way around and say that a solid body is one that has gone through a condensing process out of heat, passing through gaseous and fluid stages. This is a process observable in the evolution of spiral nebulae, fixed stars and planets as stages of increasing condensation. Warmth thus comes to be recognized as having indepen­ dent being and occupying a borderline position where the realm of the as yet immaterial — subject to spiritual ordering, structure and ideas — passes over into the physically percep­ tible world. The opposite obviously also holds true: Warmth, as the fourth element, stands at the transition point from the physical-material world over into the realm of ideas. And since man and world both bear the stamp of the same “struc­ tural concepts” — concepts of which man can develop aware­ ness — the question naturally arises as to how the two relate to one another, what their effects on each other are, including modern environmental problems. The relationship and the problems it gives rise to are so obvious as to require our developing an understanding of the earth’s warmth organism. As we proceed to investigate man’s interaction with the world around him it will be clear that the great environmental problems can really only be solved by man’s re-connecting himself with the structural idea on which both the world and he himself are built, — re-connecting himself, in other words, with that being from whom both once issued. This means acting in harmony with earth’s building-plan. Then what he does in serving the earth will further his own potentiality for a healthy higher development. Dis-ordering Tendencies in Technology: An extremely important thermodynamic concept, one that plays a decisive role in technology’s dead world, is that of “entropy.” Entropy is a measurable degree or level in a condition found in irreversible thermodynamic processes, but because it has to do with the relationship of energy to temper­ ature it is not easy to imagine. According to the second law of 61 thermodynamics every irreversible process is accompanied by an increase of entropy. When heat is used to generate electricity and to drive machinery, some heat is always lost; there is no such thing as 100% efficiency. Thus an increase in “waste heat” is always taking place — a situation adequately described by the term “entropy.” Practically speaking, almost every technological process is accompanied by an increase in entropy. As it goes on accumulating, it approaches a final value, a state of equilibrium no longer subject to change. All technological processes, then, run at an energy gradient, and entropy characterizes the reduction of an ordered state within a system to a less ordered one. Or, as Hagen puts it, Entropy is the accumulating of a useless by-product made in the process of converting a system’s energy or material components. We could also couch it in statistical terms and say that an increase in entropy results from progressing from an ordered to a less ordered state, from the improbable to the probable. An example may serve to bring out the point of this dis­ cussion of entropy: Every irreversible process, left to itself, takes place in one direction only. Everyday experience demon­ strates this. Molecules of a perfume dispersed in the air never go back of their own accord into the open perfume bottle.... They are always in favor of dividing up a big estate, but they will never will­ ingly agree to accumulate a large estate for the benefit of a single favored individual, in this case the perfume bottle. (R.W. Pohl, Thermodynam­ ics) Order-creating Forces in Man and Universe: Since, nowadays, such technological-scientific concepts as these are frequently imposed on the social structure, and every realm of life receives their imprint, the laws of breakdown, in the sense of ever-increasing entropy, have made themselves widely felt within the whole social structure of mankind. We 62 see their life-destroying effects everywhere about us in the living environment. And now, at this point, the opposite question immediately suggests itself: What happens when spiritual entities or human beings join forces to carry out some statistically unlikely action, — an ethical one, perhaps, one in which there is a building up of order instead of breakdown? In such cases, laws of death, decomposition processes, structure-destroying functions are overcome. The opposite of entropy sets in, negative entropy, to be termed accordingly negentropy. Is not a new kind of questioning indicated here — whether, for example, there exist realms in which lifeless laws like that of the preservation of power, energy, matter, the logical conclu­ sion of which had to be the concept of entropy, are no longer fully valid? That such questions are being raised by biologists and researchers in the thermodynamic field is attested by the presence, in recent professional literature, of reports like those of Riedl or Hagen. They discuss especially the work of Morowitz, Forester-Meadows and Glansdorf-Prigogine. The beginnings of this work date back to the Forties, when Prigogine started concerning himself with thermodynamic questions about bio­ logical systems. A picture very different from that obtained in the first half of the present century has come of this. Riedl says: ... The overall functioning of the biosphere pro­ motes an increase of entropy, a quite extravagant one, at the cost of the flow into cosmic space of solar energy. However, local processes can create ordered patterns, such as are found in rotifers, in sonnets, or in Mona Lisa’s smile... One can call a living system a reservoir or storage place for nega­ tive entropy of wholly unimaginable proportions. When, nowadays, someone speaks in such connections of “the sun as the source of an in-streaming energy-flow and as the fountainhead of negative entropy,” this must necessarily lead in consequence to new “revolutions in the physicists’ con­ ceiving of the world” and in the whole field of biology during 63 the course of the next few decades. Let us keep firmly in mind that Entropy indicates the degree of disorder existing in a physical system. . . . (Riedl). Where orderly patterns are built up, entropy decreases and energy is stored, as for example in biological systems on the most varied levels. But this means finding oneself in the realm where the laws of life obtain — and on sociological terrain. The concept of negentropy as a standard of measurement for degrees of order has been fully accepted in thermo­ dynamics, although for a long time it met with doubt and opposition. During the last decade, however, it finally crossed over into the field of biology, where its application is particularly important (Riedl). Developments of this kind in modern science have yielded fruits of insight proffered by Steiner more than half a century ago as products of spiritual research. The “opposition” they met with among the scientists of the period was intense indeed... Steiner spoke in numerous published lectures of a place where the doctrine of the preservation of power, energy and matter — which gave rise to the concept of entropy — no longer applies, namely in man himself. He states that matter is destroyed in man. Nutritive substances disappear and new matter is created, coming into being again out of the warmth that took them up, and this the more decisively the more enthusiastically a person cherishes moral ideals and an ethical ordering of life.... Here we have the essence of negentropy, expressed in somewhat different terms. For enthusiasm and active support of ideas, of ideals — in other words, of a creative “order” — are the opposite of decline, of entropy, which rules in the dead world of machinery. So we may say that negentropy enters the picture wherever order is created out of chaos, as in creative thinking, in man himself. Of course our thought-content is drawn from the 64 world outside us. But in the way we connect and order thoughts we are not abiding by the dead laws of physics, — we are free. Matter comes freshly into being in man’s organism, in harmony with the formative forces of his pattern­ ing. These are characterized by Steiner as forces of buoyancy, not of a declining potential. The laws of the “sun-space” (“fountainhead of negentropy...”!) reign here, where, accord­ ing to Steiner, there is no matter, only negative space, whence order-creating moral forces work out into the planetary system to make it an organism. And this is true also of earth’s warmth organism as we experience it directly in the patterning and “score” of the dynamic year. If man and earth are built on a pattern with a common basis, must there not also be places in the earth’s warmth organism that harbor negative entropy? These would have to be areas governed by sun-laws, since the sun is the source of negentropy. And the answer to this question is affirmative: 1) We have such places in the earth’s warmth organism plainly in view during every thunderstorm. Recent investiga­ tion of the origin of lightning has uncovered the fact that there is a place within the earth-realm ruled by sun-conditions; there is even talk of the possibility of anti-matter being gener­ ated there. We are told by the spiritual investigator that the highest hierarchies of spiritual beings are at work in the phe­ nomenon of lightning. Here, then, is a realm of order-creating beings manifesting themselves in “cleansing and clarifying” thunderstorms. The findings of spiritual science and natural science could converge here. Even though modern thermo­ dynamics has not as yet included man in its research, the findings and concepts of thermodynamicists and biologists are already touching upon the secret of sun-space, described by Steiner as negative contrasted with terrestrial space and regarded today as a source not only of energy but of neg­ entropy as well. Steiner does include man in the picture, speaking of the fact that while thoughts are being formed — in the process wherein the will rays from the warmth realm into that of thought — “lightning is really flashing on a microcosmic scale." 65 There are three spheres in which man creates negentropy: in knowledge created by will’s activity in the thought-realm; in art through the creating of ordered patterns in music, painting, and so on; in moral ideas possessing the power to create social order. These realms are found to be those involved in the three areas of developing human culture: truth, beauty, goodness — in other words, in science, art and religion. 2) Negentropy in the biosphere: Ordering forces, called by Anthroposophy formative forces, are at work in every plant, in every organism, even in the tiniest animal. In Steiner’s spiritual science these forces are not merely named, each is exhaustively described in its unique characteristics and way of working. The earth’s plant cover represents a realm, a level, where negentropy reigns, and a process similar to the play of lightning in thunderstorms or to man’s thought-activity takes place when plants are pollinated (Steiner). So negentropy, a living system of laws stemming from order-creating elements in space and time, is to be found in the warmth organism of the earth; in the year’s course with its procession of Christian festivals and in the thermodynamic processes that take place in thunderstorms; in man: in the “striking in” of ordering ideas into the forming of thoughts out of the warmth element; in everything organic, and most especially in the plant cover and each single plant. Perhaps we may quote a saying of Friedrich Schiller that draws its illumination from the realm we are presently dis­ cussing:

66 If you seek the greatest and highest The plant can instruct you: What it is, will-less, Be that yourself with a will. That’s the key! It is clear from the foregoing that the force at work in what takes place in these three realms is the same order- creating sun-nature that is active in the orchestration of the dynamic year and in earth’s warmth organism. As we contemplated the design of the warmth organism described above, we enquired into the spiritual being that found expression in it. It is pertinent, in view of the breakdown taking place everywhere about us nowadays, to en­ quire into the nature of the causative agent here as well. To find the answer to this question is also to discover solu­ tions to problems of planetary extent that have arisen for the first time in the history of technological developments. For despite the tremendous contributions which technology has made to human culture, man has reached a point in his advances in it which permits him both to rule over nature and to plunge it into chaos and confusion. There is no question that far-reaching changes in the earth’s warmth organism have been brought about which are already showing up in drought disasters and shiftings of climate. Air pollution, extending far up into the high atmosphere, has been increasingly cutting down the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. Vapor and combustion products emitted by jet planes have built up curtains of ice particles several meters high which are hanging in the upper atmosphere over the Atlantic and probably over other regions also; they continue building up every minute of the day and night. “Civilized” areas of every continent are covered by inconceivable amounts of smog which are being added to without let-up. Rivers, lakes and oceans are being similarly befouled. And here we are witnessing the start of a new episode in the human drama: the heating of bodies of water by the waste heat discharged from nuclear power plants. The question was, what lies behind a technology based 67 almost exclusively on an increase in entropy, — governed, that is, by the laws of death? What happens in consequence in nature and the human race? Let us listen to the comments of some of the scientists on this point: If we apply this definition as an adequate standard of measurement for energy and entropy, the analogy to money suggests itself in relation to the concept of energy. In relation to the concept of entropy, characterized as it is by a disorganizing tendency to achieve a state of equilibrium no longer capable of change, the analogy to environmental pollution suggests itself. . . . (Hagen) As we know, our power to destroy negentropy in larger complexes has been put to use thus far only experimentally, but we are constantly destroying smaller entities. Oftentimes we become aware of the existence of some orderly pattern of relationships only when it has been annihilated.... Too dense and demanding population centers are the main cause of the chaos that is being wrought in such localities by over-use of energy.... What is lost to the biosphere is not energy — more can be gen­ erated — but the never-to-be restored larger envi­ ronmental entities or biotopes that have been reduced to chaos.... And the growing use of energy is sweeping this order away at a constantly accelerating pace. . . . (Riedl) We see that counter-forces are at work here on the warmth organism of the earth. After what has been said thus far on the subject of earth’s warmth organism, we can take it as almost symptomatic that technology and the economy interwoven with it have brought things to a point that can perhaps be described as a zeroing in on the sensitive spot in that organism. Geologists talk of climatic changes causing such a displacement of ice masses in the polar regions as a result of technological developments and 68 over-use of energy that there is a distinct possibility of the earth’s axis shifting in the foreseeable future. And if we take the warnings of responsible thermodynamicists and geologists quoted here as symptoms of the path which is being traveled by present-day humanity, we will have to say that the perspec­ tive Steiner saw ahead of us decades ago has unfortunately become actual fact, as he said it might when he was speaking about order being destroyed and civilization plunging into an abyss unless new spiritual impulses were taken up and put into practice, and science, technology and business reconsidered their ways. Man, Caretaker or Destroyer of the Environment: In providing access to the formative ideas underlying the design of man and earth, Steiner also laid the foundation for rescuing the warmth organism of the earth and of man him­ self — foundations which are of vital importance for our time. For it has become possible for man not only to turn nature into a dead technological device but to be so affected by the environment he has built up around himself as himself to be transformed by it, and this in line with the system of laws governing decline and the dissolution of created order. Having been given insight into the idea on which both he and the universe are founded, he is in a position to become himself the caretaker of the earth’s organism. In Steiner’s teaching about the formative life-forces he provided indica­ tions for a technology of order. For these forces are order- creating in the sense of negentropy, being related to the sun which is the latter’s source. Steiner spoke of enthusiasm for moral ideals, which have their origin in our warmth organism and the soul — ideals related in their spiritual substance to the sun-space, for spatial separation does not apply in this realm of spiritual patterning. Steiner speaks on this theme in lectures given in December, 1920: ... Just think how our sense of responsibility is heightened by a realization that if there were no one on earth with a heart fired with enthusiasm for true morality, for spiritual ethics, we could not con­ 69 tribute to our world’s continuance. This shining light which we generate on earth radiates effects out into the universe. We do not presently perceive how human morality rays out from the earth. . . . This radiance goes out for a certain distance only and is then reflected back again, so that we have here on earth the reflection of what man has thus rayed out. Initiates of every period have looked upon this reflection as the sun. For as I have often said, the sun is not a physical entity. What astron­ omy sees as a fiery ball of gas is simply the reflec­ tion of a spiritual element that makes a physical impression. . . . With modern thermodynamics beginning to speak of the sun as the source of negentropy — in other words, as the source of order-creating forces — and with the question arising as to how thermodynamicists and biologists conceive a therapeutic approach to the present situation, let us hear what one of them is saying: The existing order has to be protected. For order builds on a foundation of order. And we must go on vigorously creating further order. And we are well acquainted with the cultural variants of nega­ tive entropy: humaneness and social order, science and justice, the arts and research. . . . (Riedl) But where will we get the forces and knowledge with which to create this new order, since — in the last analysis — the situation now confronting us was brought about by applying the science thus far available to us? Is it not high time that we dealt seriously with facts learned from the science of spiritual ordering forces? If the sun is the source of negen­ tropy, the final step in knowledge and action should be taken with courage and consequence: it is we ourselves who make our destiny. For the enthusiasm we engender in the pursuit of art, science and religion is the same element that rays back to us reflected from the sun, the fountainhead from which man’s and the earth’s warmth organisms draw their nutriment. 70 Now that we have had an entropy-oriented technology for a century, we should turn our attention to the order-creating forces of negative entropy, of the sun’s living system of laws, both out there in the universe and in our moral impulses. There is reason indeed for enthusiasm and gratitude to Rudolf Steiner and his life-work, which becomes of ever more decisive importance. And there is reason too to be grateful to many courageous modern scientists who have turned, in the face of opposition and skepticism, to new, creative ideas for the preservation of life upon the earth. We must hope that the consequences of their insight will be drawn by many others and that the concrete contributions of spiritual science to a new order will be understood and applied. Decisions of will rather than of knowledge are what is essential now, for the knowledge is already there. So it remains for every man’s free will to choose the forces with which he will ally himself, — those of entropy in the sense of decline or those of redemp­ tion in the sense of negative entropy, negentropy, ascent. Translation by

Whitsuntide 1975 Rex Raab Everywhere a flower grows and is seen by human eyes —- daisy, daffodil or rose — is a part of Paradise. It is shielded from the Snake, it is fended from the Fall by a secret crystal lake and a fiery golden wall. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but a blossom, leaf and stem, rooted in the light, shall stay in the New Jerusalem. 71 THE EXPERIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE, Essays on Ameri- can Education, by John Fentress Gardner, 222 pp., Waldorf Press Publishers, 1975, hard cover $8.95; paperback $4.50. There is hardly a week in which the mass media do not report on some kind of disturbing news concerning schools, teachers, or students, and at all levels of education. The December 8, 1975, issue of Newsweek, for example, devoted its cover story to the pressing question of “Why Johnny can’t write,” and matter-of-factly stated, “Willy-nilly, the U.S. educational system is spawning a generation of semiliterates.” The article, based on statistical evidence gathered nationwide, accurately describes symptoms, and quotes numerous experts, but has little to offer in terms of real and meaningful remedies beyond adding its voice to the ever louder chorus calling for “back to basics.” What are the underlying reasons for the instability of educational methods in 20th-century America? “Who, or what, can we believe is really to blame that the accent upon academic learning (traditional methods) should prove so devas­ tating to the human spirit, and the accent upon emotional response (progressive methods) and creativeness so outra­ geous?” John Gardner points out that “blame cannot be ascribed to the motives .... of teachers and parents [motives] which have periodically brought about drastic reversals in the methods of education. ... Blame must go to certain ideas which have dominated schools for several generations. Though traditional­ ists and progressives may believe they are pursuing opposite goals, both usually take for granted, start from and employ throughout, the same ideas. They work from very similar conceptions of the nature of man and of the world he lives in. These concepts they adopt from the culture of our times.” He summarizes today’s dilemma by stating, “Probably a majority of teachers at the present time, whether or not they have thought the matter through, take pretty much for granted that they are dealing with human animals within the context of a world machine. Looking to the self, they see a 72 biological organism; looking to the world, they see a cosmic mechanism. To the souls of children who long to know what human organism and world mechanism have essentially to do with one another, beyond purely chance happenings or meaningless cause and effect sequences, they have nothing to say.” The answer lies in a spiritualized world conception, in the development of a “new theory of knowledge that will support new insights into both world and self.” As far as John Gardner is concerned, “the epistemology, the scientific meth­ od, of Rudolf Steiner satisfies this requirement,” and he proceeds to trace in the following essays the historic develop­ ments which led to the loss of the spirit, including relevant quotations from proponents of “third force” psychology in appendices which make most worthwhile reading. He then points out that the currently held view of man, of what he is, what he wants and what he can know, leads to the very somber conclusion that “each is doomed by his own organism to solitary confinement for life. There is an insurmountable barrier between every man and his brother” unless thinking is brought back to life, is freed from its ties to the organism that dooms cognitive life to an almost entirely subjective role. That this can be done has been demonstrated by Waldorf teachers for more than half a century — there are now more than one hundred schools throughout the free world. How they do it is the content of Part Two of this book, which includes the con­ cise and yet so very practical essay “The Experience of Knowl­ edge.” To quote from the book: “We have to realize concerning thought that there are many levels of cognition. If our thought is superficial, it will give us a superficial picture of the world; if our thought be deeper, it will give us a deeper picture of the world. As much as we put into the act of knowing, that much we shall get out of the reality known. If we fully understand this axiom, we shall understand why it is absolutely necessary, even from the viewpoint of a complete and correct science, for the artistic sense of a person, for his moral sense as well — for his whole will and feeling — to be used in the experience of knowledge.” “To find God once again both in the soul of man and in the 73 processes of nature requires a further evolution of thought-capac­ ity that carries cognition beyond the limits ordinary knowledge has justifiably set for itself.... We shall have found the basis for a new education when we come to appreciate that thinking, in its essential content, transcends both subject and object.... To know a thing intuitively is to be that thing.... Thought is truly what unites us within a common world. As Rudolf Steiner observed in his Philosophy of Freedom: ‘In the idea lies the true communion of man.’” “When we realize that humble, loving thought has power actually to participate in all the beings, events, and processes of the world around us.... the art created, and the activities set in motion, on the basis of such a knowing will be human through and through. From them our social life can take new hope.” The social implications of an education void of true experi­ ences of knowledge are only too evident everywhere. “An upsurge of the irrational — whether mystical, revolutionary, psychotic, or criminal” is the consequence of an “overdose of rationalism.” Or put differently, “Moral irresponsibility in adult life is a consequence of psychological unresponsiveness in student days.” In Part Three, John Gardner addresses himself to goals and steps which modern society must take to reverse the destructive, paralyzing and demoralizing trend of con­ temporary public education. He deals in a lucid and compas­ sionate way with such diverse topics as genius, self-discipline, authority, freedom for parents and teachers, the responsibil­ ities of teachers, and unionism, and finally offers suggestions as to how the freedom of independent schools could be secured and financed. And even though the picture of present-day American “homogenized” culture is bleak, John Gardner ends his book on a hopeful note, provided that we “in America will decide that what ought to happen for the benefit of all mankind, can happen.” The Experience of Knowledge is a book written with per­ suasive clarity and ought to receive the widest possible circula­ tion throughout the entire nation. Erika V. Asten 74 UNFINISHED ANIMAL by Theodore Roszak, 270 pp., Harper and Row, 1975, $10.00. Hard on the heels of ’s latest novel, H um boldt’s Gift, comes Theodore Roszak’s Unfinished Animal. Both of these books may well be the beginning of what can be ex­ pected more and more as times goes on — the recognition by outstanding contemporary figures of Steiner’s place in modern thought, and their own involvement with it; and that is something to write about. The “unfinished animal” of Roszak’s book is, briefly, you and me — Man. His theme is evolution — the evolution of human consciousness, any other concept of evolution being subordinate to this. “The history that counts,” he says, “is the history of consciousness. It is only in consciousness that the world can be mirrored and given understanding. The history of the universe is conditioned by the shape of our conscious­ ness.” He is concerned that we should become aware of this, so that we might cooperate in the unfolding of its infinite poten­ tial. Evolution is not something happening outside of us. It is in us; for “as evolution passes over to the level of conscious­ ness, our understanding of evolution in itself becomes an evolutionary factor.” A new age is therefore dawning for mankind. Roszak calls it the Aquarian Age. After centuries of enslavement to the dogmas of theology, and in the face of growing disillusion­ ment with technology, people everywhere are ransacking the old, new and even fraudulent repositories of spiritual knowl­ edge for a more worthy motivation for life. He castigates the egotism and lust for power that inspires some freakish sects and cults, but none the less contends unequivocally that all down through history man has been led by a “hidden wisdom,” which only now is coming out into the open. “It is spiritual intelligence the moment demands of us,” he declares; for this hidden wisdom is nothing but the knowledge of man as a spiritual being of divine origin, “with a whole and healthy nature at the core of us; not an original sin, but 75 an original splendour which aspires to transcendence.” That is the real nature of man as “unfinished animal,” who is “charged with a task of self-perfection that troubles the mind with images of godhood.” He claims that in every age there have been those who, by reason of more highly evolved spiritual powers, have been the real leaders and initiators of culture and civilization. He calls them the “Few,” who have pointed unequivocally to the eternal spirit inherent in man, and have sought to give it a goal appropriate to the evolutionary possibilities the age demanded. He comments on three outstanding examples that have emerged in our time: Mme. H.P. Blavatsky, George Gurdjieff, and Rudolf Steiner. While there is no doubt of his own appreciation of Steiner’s work, a too-sensitive anthroposophist might wince a little at the way he speaks of him in places. But then Roszak is not an anthroposophist, and therefore looks at Steiner more critically and objectively, though not necessarily more correctly, than many of us who are. For example, he describes Steiner’s “mighty spiritual panorama” as an “evolutionary extravaganza no less complex than H.P.B.’s (Blavatsky’s) and even more dif­ ficult to delineate, especially given Steiner’s densely obscure style — an awkward mixture of heavy Teutonic system-build- ing and German romantic Schwaermerei”! Of more importance from this reviewer’s point of view, however, are, first, that he says little or nothing about Steiner’s earlier epistemological work, which was the basis of the “method” by which one proceeds from knowledge of nature to the beings and facts behind nature; and, second, that he will insist that Steiner’s conception of Christianity is of a “glaringly parochial charac­ ter,” and an “ethnocentric reversion.” This last is so incon­ sistent with Steiner’s whole conception of evolution, however, which, in turn, is so closely bound up with his theory of knowledge, that a word or two must be said about both. Whatever we — Theodore Roszak included — may say about spirit being at the center of man and the world, all we do say is itself nothing but “Schwaermerei” unless we can find 76 in ourselves a sphere of experience where spirit as such can be known, and known by those same criteria of knowledge by which anything at all can be said to be known. That sphere is Thought; more precisely the activity of thinking; for in think­ ing we live and move in a supersensible reality by which alone knowledge of anything is possible — even knowledge of Thought itself! But we don’t only live and move in this activ­ ity, we have our being in it, too; for after we have stripped off all the sense-perceptible categories of our physical and personal self, and, knowing ourselves only as I, we experience the reality or our own concept as being. This, too, is the undifferentiated essence of all human beings. This is what Roszak speaks to and relies on in this book in which he himself discloses what, as a thinking being, he has grasped in the world of thought accessible to all men. This being so, it must follow that we not only share a unity of activity in thinking, but a unity of being, too. All our separate thinkings find their source at least in the cosmic or universal thinking — that “All-One being,” of whom Steiner speaks, “that pervades everything.” Therefore, all our separate beings, our separate “I am’s,” find their center in a universal or cosmic Thought-being, the cosmic “I am”; and this without losing their separateness, for it is of the essence of the concept that it is both one (cosmic) and individual (the multiplicity), as the one image can be reflected in the thousand fragments of a broken mirror. Now it is an essential feature of Steiner’s “evolutionary extravaganza” that the whole world of nature and of man arose through the outpouring of cosmic being; first in the physical form, then in life, then sentience, then thought-con- sciousness, until last of all it embodied itself in human I-consciousness. But owing to the fact that this creation “downwards,” as it were, developed a character of its own, it lost its original and cosmic self-consciousness. It forgot itself in the separateness of the personal. That had to be restored if this loss was not to perpetuate itself. It became necessary, therefore, for the I of all mankind, the cosmic I, to enter historically and phenomenally into what had been created, so 77 that a new momentum might be given to what could take place in the separate and personal of all men in the future. The cosmic I, therefore, became Man, a man, for that to happen. And this, claims Steiner, happened when a m an, Jesus, the reincarnated form of a great initiate-leader of man­ kind, was overshadowed by that cosmic I, and was later completely imbued with it from the baptism in Jordan on. This cosmic I, the Word, the Logos, “became flesh and dwelt among us.” And this, says Steiner, is a “mystical fact,” accessible to supersensible research. If then this is so — and let us not forget that the whole of what Steiner has to say about earthly evolution stands or falls on it — then this is the only fact that really matters. All contributory facts — that the human being to whom this happened was a Jew; that it happened in Palestine two thou­ sand years ago; that Western man has taken it over and made an orthodox religion of it; all these are beside the point in the light of that one fact. Moreover if this was a fact, then it obviously had to happen to some man; somewhere, at some time. I f it had happened to someone else, at some other place, at some other time, it would still have been the fact of what happened that really mattered, and not the accompanying racial, geograph­ ical and cultural features. But it happened, according to Steiner, in the way tradition says it did; and Roszak’s implication that just because Steiner himself was born and grew up in that tradition, and that it made him a mere mouthpiece of that tradition is neither con­ sistent with Steiner’s declared premise, nor flattering to his intellectual integrity. It is Roszak not Steiner who is parochial and ethnocentric; for Roszak is so hidebound himself by the conventional form of Christianity that he cannot imagine that that form might well conceal, from Christians as well as others, the real facts of what took place. The whole challenge of Steiner’s “Christianity” is, first: Can we speak of such a being as a cosmic I at all? If so, then: Did he take part as man in the evolution of the world as Steiner claims? If the answers Steiner gives are correct, then all talk of parochialism 78 falls away; and it should be no more difficult for a Brahmin or a Zen Buddhist, or even Theodore Roszak himself, to accept it as a matter of objective human knowledge, provided it complies with the epistemological standards such knowledge demands. It is not a matter of whether Steiner’s views are western or eastern, but whether he is sufficiently true to his own scientific principles that he can have no ‘view’ at all except what the facts reveal. If his scientific principles are proven wrong, then everything he says becomes suspect; but until that happens, what he says should only be judged on that basis. It has been necessary, by reason of the journal for which this is written, to comment at such length on what Roszak has to say about this most important aspect of Steiner’s teaching. It should not and must not, however, deter anyone from read­ ing what is a most comprehensive and sympathetic survey of the spiritual struggle in our time, by one who is wholly “on the side of the angels.” Alan Howard

For the Impatient Eda Bunce

If the shell crack or matrix tear before the embryo’s prepared for sight and sound, would not the merest murmur deafen, the kindest light destroy? In the holy womb of night the soul enlarges, strengthened, self by Self, until full term is reached, then, thrust without, the cosmic labor ended, finds joy in thunder roaring and unharmed, turns raptured gaze upon the sun.

79 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE JOHANNES W. SCHNEIDER — Former teacher, Waldorf School, Engelberg, Germany; lecturer; active at Cultural Center, Dortmund. • ALAN HOWARD — Retired Waldorf teacher who has lectured widely on Rudolf Steiner and his work. • RUDOLF STEINER — Inaugu- rator of Anthroposophy and the School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. • ALBERT STEFFEN — Swiss poet, dramatist, essayist. President of the Anthroposophical society 1924-63. • JEAN ZAY — Former class teacher, Rudolf Steiner School, New York City; presently at Pumpkin Hollow School, Great Barrington, Mass. • WILHELM PELIKAN — Botanist and pharma- cognocist, author, Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. • THEODOR SCHWENK — Mechanical and hydraulic engineer. Founder and direc­ tor Institut fuer Stromungswissenschaften, Herrischried, Germany; author Sensitive Chaos, Introduction by Jaques Cousteau, Rudolf Steiner Press, London. • REX RAAB — Architect, poet, translator. • L. FRANCIS EDMUNDS — Lecturer throughout the United Kingdom and U.S.A.; founder and Director, Emerson College, , Sussex, England. • DANILLA RETTIG — Eurythmist, poet, Wal­ dorf class teacher, formerly of the Rudolf Steiner School, New York, now at Pine Hill, Wilton, N.H. • ERIKA ASTEN - Ph.D. in Musi­ cology, Berlin; ten years in Public Broadcasting; former class teacher, Detroit Waldorf School. • EDA BUNCE — Teacher at Umpque Community College, Oregon; organizer Hidden Talents Workshop; first award Oregon Poetry Association 1972.

80 The Journal for Anthroposophy is published twice a year by the Anthroposophical Society of America. Editor, Christy Barnes. Subscription $4.00 per year. Back numbers may be obtained upon request from Journal for Anthroposophy, 211 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Title design by W alter Roggenkamp. [Backcover:blank]