Journal for ANTHROPOSOPHY

NUMBER[Image: acrylicpainting"Summertime"byRebeccaThomson] 60 SPRING 1995 A t the Ringing

o f the Bells

To wonder at beauty, Stand guard over truth, L o o ku p to the noble, Decide fo r the good: Leads man on his journey To goals fo r his life, To right in his doing, To peace in his feeling, To light in his thought, A nd teaches him trust In the guidance o f God In all that there is: In the w orld-w ide A ll, In the soul's deep soil.

— Rudolf Steiner

NUMBER 60 • SPRING 1995 ISSN-0021-8235

Front Cover: Rebecca Thomson Sum m ertim e Acrylic 3'x6'

EDITOR Hilmar Moore MANAGING EDITOR C lare M oore

The Journal for Anthroposophy is published twice a year by the Anthroposophical Society in America. Subscription is $12.00 per year (domestic); $15.00 per year (foreign). Authors' opinions do not neces­ sarily reflect those of the Anthroposophical Society or of the editor. Manuscripts (double-spaced, typed), poetry, artwork, and advertising can be mailed to the editor. For information on sending manuscripts on disc, contact the editor. Back issues can be obtained for $5.00 ea. plus postage. An index for all issues is $3-00. All correspondence should be sent to:

Journal for Anthroposophy 3700 South Ranch Road 12 Dripping Springs, TX 78620

Journal for Anthroposophy, Number 60, Spring 1995 © 1995, The Anthroposophical Society in America

Printed in the United States of America at Morgan Printing, Austin, Texas Printed on Recycled Paper CONTENTS

5 Anthroposophy and Nonviolence BY MARK R. SMITH 15 Searching for Integrity — A Conversation with Alan York BY HILMAR MOORE 33 A Meditation on Inner and Outer Peace BY RAPHAEL GROSSE KLEINMANN 38 Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul BY WILLIAM BENTO 51 Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as Rudolf Steiner’s Final “Riddle of Philosophy” TOM MELLETT 64 A Meditation on the Meeting of the Technological and the Traditional Eastern Mind: On the Way to Scientific Maturity BY JOHN LANGE 72 Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy BY MICHAEL LIPSON

POEMS 37 The Path of the Rose BY BRIAN WRIGHT

BOOK REVIEWS 83 The Inner Path Seven Lectures by Karl König BY KARL KÖNIG • Reviewed by Gary Lachman 86 The Battle of the Soul BY BERNARD LIEVEGOED [Note: nextpage(4)wasblankandisomittedhere] • Reviewed by Gary Lachman ANTHROPOSOPHY AND NONVIOLENCE

BY MARK E. SMITH

his century has witnessed the emergence of a new way of looking Tat conflict and conflict resolution. The new outlook first articu­ lated by Leo Tolstoy, was actually used in practice and developed further by Mahatma Gandhi, and has since been brought forward and applied to more modern situations by numerous western thinkers and practitioners. It is this author’s intent to demonstrate that the impulse behind the Nonviolence Movement is in some respects complemen­ tary to those spiritual influences behind Anthroposophy, and that the possibility exists of the two streams working together to further the positive evolution of humanity. The ability of the Anthroposophical Movement to recognize sister streams in the evolutionary process becomes increasingly important as we approach that point in time identified by Rudolf Steiner as critical in the development of mankind: the end of the 20th century.1 Appropriate bridges must be built between our movement and those others in which we see demonstrated behavioral characteristics symp­ tomatic of the emergence of the Spirit Self. Anthroposophy can then provide to these impulses a perspective and understanding crucial to their proper interplay in mankind’s destiny.

The Development of Nonviolent Theory Leo Tolstoy was the true father of the Nonviolence Movement. Rudolf Steiner tells us that Tolstoy understood the evolution of mankind and recognized how wide and universal was the extent to which the great and pure religious impulses of humanity had degenerated.2 He developed an absolute conviction in the

5 6 • Mark E. Smith fundamental good and decency of each individual human being. For Tolstoy, the words “the kingdom of God is within you” expanded into a deep, significant certainty that man may reach the heights, that he may know the Holy of Holies. We see in Tolstoy a strong faith in the inner man, and a firm belief that through this faith the outward results must eventually be good.3 Anthroposophy teaches that fresh spiritual impulses usually mani­ fest in ways that are in direct contrast to their surroundings. These impulses, which have been ripening for centuries, burst onto the physical scene with a primal force, and must be in great contrast to the surrounding world. The individuals who embody these impulses are usually inclined to disregard their environment entirely. Seen from a spiritual standpoint, Tolstoy was such a personality; one in whom the Christian impulse was manifest.4 The Tolstoy impulse can be metaphorically characterized as one of the emerging buds of the Spirit Self which will blossom fully in the 6th Post-Atlantean Epoch. Tolstoy’s understanding of the true nature of the Christ impulse, and his criticisms of that which ap­ peared in the guise of Christianity bespoke his true nature. He de­ voted himself to the cultivation of the spiritual or higher self which lives eternally.5 Tolstoy’s teachings have been carried forward and developed into a philosophy that demonstrates that peace is a by­ product of characteristics inherent within the Consciousness Soul and the nascent Spirit Self, chief of which are mutual trust and a strong sense of the unity of mankind. These underlying attitudes can be stimulated to grow. Their growth can, and indeed must, be begun unilaterally.6 Individual effort directed towards the development and cultivation of these qualities, when accomplished effectively on a broad scale, will lead toward harmony for mankind. Gandhi’s technique of “Satyagraha”7 requires of its practitioner a searching consideration of the relationship between attack and de­ fense. Gandhi proposes that the best relation of all between these two energies is not one of opposition but of resolution, integration and sublimation. The practitioner thus enables both sides to win, and conquers both his own possible short-sightedness of aim as well as his enemy’s. The result is not a triumphant victor on the one side and a despondent, repressed vanquished on the other. Both sides are happy in the joint victory of their better selves and the common defeat of their mistakes. Anthroposophy and Nonviolence • 7

The nonviolent attitude prescribed by Richard Gregg for progress today is described this way: “Kindness and friendliness induce a desire in the opponent’s mind and heart to get rid of the defect or difficulty. Human progress through these stages of development has brought the shrewdest men to realize that the earlier and cruder expressions of pugnacity and anger are not what the human being, on the whole, wants. What a person really wants is the richest and fullest possible expression of his energy. To attain this completely, there must be an equally rich and full expression of energy by all other persons.”8 Does his description not remind the reader of the coming unity and brotherhood of the 6th Epoch foretold by Rudolf Steiner? He describes that period as one in which “men will possess a common wisdom in a very much greater degree than at present; they will be immersed in a common wisdom. It will be a Manas-culture when more and more the sources of truth are experienced within the strengthened human individuality, within the human personality, and when, at the same time, there is an agreement between what differ­ ent people experience as higher reality, just as now there is an agreement between what they experience as the truths of mathemat­ ics. In respect of other truths, men currently disagree because they have not yet reached the point of recognizing and fighting down the personal sympathy and antipathy that divides them. The reality that will be discovered in one soul will coincide exactly with that in another, and there will be no more strife. That is the guarantee for true peace and true brotherhood, because there is but one reality.”9

Soul Characteristics Anthroposophy’s path to spiritual growth is a challenging one. It demands utmost adherence to truth, constant centeredness in love, and the persistent exercise of discipline and self-sacrifice. Proper practice of the techniques of nonviolence demand nothing less. Rudolf Steiner repeatedly emphasized the proper attitude of soul. This fundamental attitude supplants in importance an overabundance of intellect. A similar (although not complete) de-emphasis of material thinking is evident in the literature on nonviolence, where inner attitude and emotional understanding and control are stressed as being infinitely more important than intellectual ability or worldly experience. The hypothesis of nonviolent resisters is that the stron­ 8 • Mark E. Smith gest factor in human beings, in the long run, is their unity—that they have more in common as a human family than as separate individuals. Their basic assumption is that their opponents are at bottom decent and have in their hearts at least a spark of good will which can eventually be aroused and strengthened into action. This belief pre­ supposes the very gradual evolution of mankind, and the willingness to make personal sacrifice in an effort to further that evolution. The nonviolent perspective toward the gradual evolution of man­ kind is also evinced in its attitude toward discipline: “The instinctive or reflex elements in war are capable of further alteration and disci­ pline. But is not human nature too weak for this new discipline? Doesn’t this discipline make too heavy a drain on the resources of idealism, sentiment, emotion and moral character of ordinary man­ kind? It is said to take four years to make a good private soldier. New habits take time to become firm. This is as true of the control or discipline of anger as it is of the discipline of fear.”10 Anthroposophy and the Nonviolence Movement are also consis­ tent with respect to their insistence on adherence to truth and open­ ness. The techniques practiced by Gandhi demonstrated the highest regard for the truth. He never tolerated secrecy of any sort. He always invited the police to meetings, answered all their questions fully, always notified the authorities amply in advance of any action he planned to take which might affect them, and was frank about his beliefs and position. According to the movement, there are other advantages to such action as notifying the adversary in advance of what you are planning to do. It shows a special kind of non-threat- ening courage. It is a demonstration to the opponent and the public that you are truthful even when it is risky, and that you adhere to the truth and trust it even at personal sacrifice or when it does not seem at first to be to the advantage of your cause. Therefore, it suggests that you are trustworthy. It gives notice that you will not engage in deceit nor take any unfair advantage, and will not try to evade the consequences of your actions— that is, that you accept responsibil­ ity. It indicates poise and confidence in the soundness of your cause. It is a hint that you think your opponent has in him something fine and just to appeal to. It is a suggestion that your aim is not a con­ quest but persuasion, an appeal to moral qualities. The most striking and important likeness between the Anthroposophical and Nonviolence Movements is the emphasis of Anthroposophy and Nonviolence • 9 both upon self-sacrifice. Gandhi did not envisage a tactical nonviolence confined to one area of life or to an isolated moment. His nonviolence is a creed which requires sacrifice in all areas of life.11 Rudolf Steiner points to the life of the Christ as the example of supreme sacrifice, and as the archetype of the life of the Initiate. In fact, Steiner’s own life followed that archetypal pattern.12 Adherence to the path of nonviolence calls upon the practitioner to be willing to sacrifice his own life for the greater good. The movement’s theory is that total losses will be much less where one party to a conflict is willing to exhibit vulnerability and to sacrifice, even to the point of accepting death. Where death occurs, the cause for which the individual died may triumph in spite of his death or even because of it. The test of nonviolence is not only whether it can achieve success for its cause, but also whether it can achieve it with less destruction of life, physical injury or destruction of property than when violence is used. On both these points (so claims the movement) nonviolent resistance wins, provided the discipline, understanding and leadership are sound.13

The Issue of Duality One of the great challenges of the Anthroposophical path is to understand and to deal with duality.14 How often Rudolf Steiner demands this of us as he gives us multitudinous descriptions of the spiritual world! We must, however, persist: “The concepts of spiritual science cannot be as closely defined as can those of the physical plane. That is why malevolent or narrow-minded people can easily discover contradictions in the concepts of spiritual science. The concepts are alive, and what is alive is mobile.”15 According to Anthroposophy, life is not a one-sided affair. Life is many-toned, and can be appreciated in all its richness only when the great contrasts are fully understood. The picture is not accurate and complete when the various colors and tones are not seen as parts of an artistic whole.16 These contrasts are a part of the necessity that governs world history and evolution. For in the mission of one element or another is included the fact that things develop which must develop. And the adversary, the opposite, pole must also exist: namely, something that resists whatever it is that wants to come about. This other must also exist. Just as there can never be positive without 10 • Mark E. Smith negative electricity, where opposites work on one another with varying intentions—so it is also in the events of human history.17 Because the practice of true nonviolence requires of the practitio­ ner the manifestation of an impulse that will not ripen until the 6th Epoch, these “opposite poles” may cause the individual to experi­ ence inner turmoil. Tolstoy was hounded by the contradictions that he encountered in life. In later life, after he had become the great moral writer, he said: “The endeavor to portray a character ideally and soulfully created, yet in harmony with reality, has cost me un­ told misery, and I know that many of my contemporaries have had the same experience.” It troubled him that such contradiction ex­ isted between that which he recognized as the great ideal and that which he actually experienced. He felt that order and peace should reign in the world, and this disturbed him as long as he was artisti­ cally active.18 Tolstoy’s writings were directed towards describing things as they truly existed, and of doing so in a way as to impress us with their horror. Gandhi and Martin Luther King also wrestled with the funda­ mental questions and reality of oppression—both from the perspec­ tive of the party being oppressed. To this author’s knowledge, there is no discussion within the body of literature on nonviolence that adequately addresses the position that America now finds itself in, that is, of being a sole super-power holding enormous military capa­ bility with which to aid those who are oppressed. We seem now to routinely find ourselves faced with two unpalatable choices in places such as Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia: 1) Using violence to help avoid slaughter; or 2) Doing nothing and allowing a slaughter. Our experi­ ence in Vietnam hovers in the background as an additional influ­ ence. We are now confronted by the next level of duality in the military sphere. (Either of the above choices could, of course, be combined with other nonviolent courses of action. They do, how­ ever, stand before us as the two stark choices— the duality—of the military sphere.) The phenomenon of the increasing globalization of the world economy has, additionally, taken the practitioner of nonviolence to a new, higher level of duality in the economic sphere. According to Gandhi, genuine nonviolence means not only non-cooperation with glaring social evils, but also the renunciation of benefits and privilege that are implicitly guaranteed by forces which conscience cannot Anthroposophy and Nonviolence • 11 accept.19 The emergence of the new “world economy”, and its blurring of distinct lines of economic demarcation, makes adherence to Gandhi’s guidelines all the more difficult.

New Directions for the Nonviolence Movement The Nonviolence Movement must recognize the need for duality and deal more effectively with it. It can look to the example of Christ as expressive of this need. Christ taught the use of nonviolence in his Sermon on the Mount, but then used a whip to cleanse the temple.20 His actions are illustrative of the fact that different situations demand different responses. This realization, coupled with another fact re­ vealed by Anthroposophy, begins to point to a new direction for the theory of nonviolence. Significant evolutionary changes are accomplished initially by an advanced individuality.21 In most cases, that individuality is an Initiate; in the ultimate case, it was the Christ. Once the “trail has been blazed” by such an individuality, the mass of humanity may begin to follow, albeit haltingly at first. Until an individual actually forges the trail in full consciousness, there can be no hope for all of mankind to acquire similar capabilities. This understanding throws new light upon the impulses manifested in the individualities of Tolstoy, Gandhi and King. These impulses were necessary in order that mankind might begin to move toward the 6th Epoch. However, it is this author’s opinion that— at this point in our evolutionary process— mankind must rely upon a broader range of solutions than absolute reliance upon radical nonviolence. It is my belief that there is a significant moral difference between violence that is maliciously invoked and that which is invoked in the name of defense or some similar higher cause (e.g., protection of the inno­ cent from slaughter). This difference is accentuated when, in the latter case, violent actions are accompanied by a genuine and true attempt to love and to understand the enemy. Regardless, it is my feeling that the karmic consequences between the latter and a posi­ tion of total pacifism are different because of the complete, utter selflessness required of pacifism. So, while violence in the cause of defense may be justifiable from one perspective, movement toward the all-embracing love foreseen in the 6th Epoch will require a com­ plete renunciation of violence, regardless of the immediate physical 12 • Mark E. Smith consequences. Unfortunately, we are simply not yet to the point where this is possible for most human beings. The entire picture is further complicated by the reverence required by Anthroposophy for individual free-will. While one can demand of oneself a strict personal code concerning nonviolence, one does not have the right to deny to another individual the right to choose his own path, particularly when such a choice might require his subjec­ tion to personal physical harm or oppression. By extension, since any group is comprised of individuals who must be afforded the indi­ vidual right of choice in this matter, no respecter of the right of self- determination and free-will can expect a group to adhere to a policy of nonviolence so long as one person within that group advocates violence as a defense against unprovoked attack. Thus, a dichotomy arises between the individual and group paths— a dichotomy that is unavoidable because of the existence of duality. On the one hand, we must recognize and be grateful for evidence of the impulses toward pure love and selflessness that will provide a gateway for mankind. On the other, we must realize that mankind, as a whole, is not yet prepared to move through that gateway, and that a variety of responses to violence are still needed.

Anthroposophy, Nonviolence and World Evolution The combining of Anthroposophical insights with the tremendous strength of will found in the Nonviolence Movement can do much to further human evolution toward the 6th Epoch. The fusing together of such complementary streams will not occur unless and until Anthroposophists begin to actively seek them out and to build bridges into them. The Nonviolence Movement presents just such an opportu­ nity to Anthroposophy. Theories of human behavior based on materialistic world concep­ tions (which still form the basis of many of the theoretical and philo­ sophical underpinnings of nonviolence) must be replaced by an understanding of the truth about human evolution. This truth, when understood, will illuminate and energize the traits which are begin­ ning to emerge as those that make the very progress towards non­ violence a possibility. Furthermore, many of the explanations of­ fered by western advocates of nonviolence of the “suffering of the Anthroposophy and Nonviolence • 13 innocent” are based on a too materialistic viewpoint. The injection into these explanations of the reality of karma and its laws is sorely needed. Many of these explanations already indicate an underlying understanding of the law of karma, but they need to be clearly articulated as such. Anthroposophy is capable of performing these functions while at the same time providing impetus for the migration of the Nonviolence Movement back toward the spiritual roots pro­ vided for it by Tolstoy. Anthroposophy can bring to the Nonviolence Movement an abil­ ity to deal creatively and effectively with duality (especially in the new forms in which Americans must face it); it can assist the nonvio­ lent practitioner in finding the mean, so that he is neither “crushed by the wheels of life” nor “torn away from his connection” to the world.22 The correct understanding of human evolution will give the practitioner of nonviolence a new appreciation for unseen impulses that seemingly work at cross-purposes, but which, in reality, are necessary opposites. It will also afford that practitioner the ability to more effectively work with civilization as he finds it in any particular earthly incarnation. Finally, Anthroposophists must learn to recognize and appreciate the extraordinary soul characteristics demonstrated by those who are true practitioners of nonviolence. The willingness of these individuals to practice love and self-sacrifice under the most adverse of human conditions can serve as inspiration and example to our Movement.

NOTES

1. Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships, Vol. VI, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1989, p. 160. 2. Rudolf Steiner, Carnegie and Tolstoy, November 6, 1908, H. Collison, 1930, p. 12. 3. Ibid, p. 24 - 25. 4. Ibid, p. 32. 5. Ibid, p. 23 - 24. 6. Richard B. Gregg, The Power of Nonviolence, Schocken Books, New York, 1971, p. 105. 7. Joan V. Bondurant, Conflict: Violence And Nonviolence, Aldine Atherton, Chicago, 1971, p. 122 - 123- 14 • Mark E. Smith

8. Op Cit, Gregg, p. 65. 9. Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel o f St. John, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1940. 10. Op Cit, Gregg, p. 68. 11. Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Nonviolence, New Directions Publishing Corp., New York City, 1964, p. 51. 12. See Sergei Prokofieff, Rudolf Steiner And The Founding Of The New Mysteries, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1986, Chapters 1, 2, & 3- 13. Op Cit, Gregg, P. 70. 14. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Foundation of Morality, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, Lecture III. 15. Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume II, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1992, p. l6l. 16. Op Cit, Rudolf Steiner, Carnegie and Tolstoy, p. 35-36. 17. Op Cit, Rudolf Steiner, The Karma o f Untruthfulness, Volume II, p. 123. 18. Op Cit, Rudolf Steiner, Carnegie and Tolstoy, p. 11-12. 19. Op Cit, Thomas Merton, p. 51. 20. John 2, 13 - 17. 21. For example, see Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel o f St. Luke, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1988, p. 109 - 110. 22. Op Cit, Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Foundation o f Morality, p. 21. Searching for Integrity — A Conversation with Alan York

Alan York was born in Texas in 1952 and grew up in Morgan City, Louisiana. He ran away from home and went to southern California when he was seventeen. He worked as head gardener at the Round Valley Garden Project in Covelo, California, was co-direc­ tor of the Gardening Program and designed the gardens at the Waldorf Institute in Michigan, and was horticultural director o f the Gasconade Farm in Missouri. He currently operates Anderson Creek Farm in Boonville, California, a 79 acre high-density biodynamic orchard which produces high quality apples, pears, and raspberries. He is active in a variety o f consultation work. For the past seven years Alan has served with distinction as president of the Biodynamic Farm ing Association.

How did you find out about biodynamics?

I was eighteen. Initially, I had economic needs as a student at Santa Barbara City College and saw a job notice for yard work at $3-50 an hour. When I was a little kid I had a lawn-mowing service so I took the job cutting grass, building little stone walls and so forth. I really enjoyed the physical labor because I’d always been very high- strung— lots of physical energy— and gardening made me feel very relaxed at the end of the day. (Laughs) I loved the way it made me feel. It gave me something toward which to direct my energy. I quit college and got more and more jobs as my reputation as a hard worker grew. I liked gardening a lot better than college and it gave me flexible hours. I was only attending college to keep from getting drafted. When I was drafted I applied for an exemption as a conscientious objector, which was granted. I was required to work for

15 16 • Hilmar Moore photograph[Image:ofAlanYork]

two years for a non-profit organization and found work to satisfy my c.o. requirements through a friend who was head gardener for the Santa Barbara Community Council. They were very actively recycling (this was back in 1970!) and into solar energy, and they had a “bio­ intensive mini-garden.” I learned the basics of good, solid horticulture — fertilization, cultivation, propagation, and irrigation. I soon realized that gardening was what I wanted to do as a career. I knew I didn’t want to pursue the academic side; I wanted to practice it. I learned about the work of Alan Chadwick1 who was invited to speak by the Community Council and the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1972 in a lecture series called “How Will We Feed the World?” They had people from many different fields to speak— the Green Revolution and other things. The extremes were the super-scientific, genetic-engineering, chemical approach of the Green Revolution folks and Alan Chadwick! I was very taken by Alan’s lecture, and especially by him! I decided that I would go to Covelo to work with him. I was there for three years. Gardening was how I liked to spend my time, and I wanted to ensure that if I was going to do what I enjoyed all day, every day, I Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 17 needed further training in order to make a living at it. It was really very simple— I had simple needs: I’ve always valued my time above everything else.

How did you go from gardening and loving the physical work, to the soul aspect and to a biological approach?

Chadwick’s style of gardening came from a combination of sev­ eral influences. One was the French Intensive system that was devel­ oped in the market gardens outside of Paris in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the primary transportation was horses, which pro­ vided lots of manure. They would take the vegetables into the city in wagons and bring a load of manure back. So there was an abun­ dance of high-value organic matter and a very intensive style of growing because the proximity to a large population made land very expensive and they had small plots to work. Alan was wealthy and grew up in England. He was exposed to the estate-style of garden­ ing, which was heavily influenced by Gertrude Jeckyll. In some way which is still unclear to this day, Alan came across Rudolf Steiner’s ideas about biodynamic agriculture. He took those three streams and it was as if he made a soup from his own recipe— it was really unique. He had his own version of biodynamics, his own version of the English landscape garden and French Intensive gardening. That was what he practiced. Wherever he was, he practiced the same style! He really superimposed it whether he was in California, Virginia, or Africa. It wasn’t that adaptable to different areas, but it was horticulture, where you can grow plants that aren’t native to the area, depending on your technical skill. An appropriate agriculture is one that is adapted to the soils and climate of an area. But he was building a garden, and the nature of a garden is that it is separate and distinct from its surroundings. It’s an area of intensive culture. Alan Chadwick’s emphasis on the artistic side, of making an area beautiful as well as productive— I took to that like a duck to water. That ideally suited my constitution. The aesthetics of it was the real food for me. Alan was creating the environment that nourished me. If I placed my highest value on my time, and I was going to spend that time in the context I wanted to be in, then I would create that environment by an aesthetic approach to the garden. So the soul 18 • Hilmar Moore component was the nourishment to me; the physical part was the work. People often think of growing food, but food is a by-product of taking responsibility for transforming an area into a beautiful, life- enhancing place.

You had gotten to the soul part of gardening through the aesthetic of creating a beautiful environment in which to live and work. How did you get to the spiritual side in nature and in yourself?

At this point I had been gardening for four or five years, and I’d been familiar with biodynamics since I was eighteen. I had detected that there was something more involved in it than I had penetrated, but I didn’t really know what it was. You know how you can get an uncomfortable feeling, something kind of eats at you? I felt that there was something more to biodynamics than I had been exposed to, greater than my understanding was. But I didn’t quite know what that was; there was just an uneasiness, that there was more than the physical component, and more than the soul element, which came to me as Alan’s aesthetic philosophy. Then, when we were in Covelo working with Alan, I met you, and you invited René Querido to come up and give that series of lectures on “The Mysteries of the Holy Grail.” He told the story of Parsifal. For me, the uneasiness, that quest for what was the missing element in me, was revealed in the search for the Holy Grail. That really completed it for me. I realized that this was going to be my life’s work and that I would spend the rest of my life pursuing it: finding out how these three components fit together—the physical, soul, and spiritual; what the practical implications of that would be; and how that would be represented in an agricultural enterprise. At that time it was all gardening. That was my reference point from which I saw the world: small-scale gardening, creating the ultimate environ­ ment on a small, contained scale.

The ultimate environment, physical, aesthetical, and spiritual?

All that, yeah. Creating a space where you would be able to experi­ ence yourself at one with nature, which would be the marriage of Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 19

human culture and agri-culture. That’s how I saw it at that point, and it was nebulous, too, as some people would say, “a warm, fuzzy feeling.” But I felt that at that point I had connected with my destiny. Parsifal’s life is a journey, the whole story is a journey from total naivete to being present and unconscious, to becoming conscious and not present, to meeting his own inner self, and then coming back into the world again, to find there what he had found in this other world. I found (and still see it to this day, because I am equally intrigued with it now) that this was a description of the modern processes of initiation. As I see the world we live in, this story explains the schizophrenia that people experience in the world, because life requires that we live in two worlds simultaneously: our inner world which has its own set of laws and environment, and the outer world we live in. We have to function in both of them, and until we go through initiation this can be a devastating experience. I see that humanity at large struggles with this, and a lot of the difficulty of interacting with others is deeply seated in that, because we have problems interacting with each other as human beings. We prefer to interact with them as professionals, friends, lovers, males, females—our interactions are always defined by such categories. I have a professional relation with one person, I have an intimate relationship with another; we don’t meet others as human beings, because for the most part we haven’t met ourselves yet, and we must do that before we can meet another person as a person, instead of as their title, which we define ou rself by, too. My personal experience was quite dramatic with this, because I was so tied up with what I did. If I wasn’t doing it, I was extremely uncomfortable, because I had developed nothing else.

I’ll never forget going out to the garden in Detroit one Sunday morn­ ing. The ground was hard-frozen, and you were sitting by the glass­ house. You were in such a grumpy mood and I couldn’t figure out why. I asked you the next day and you said it was because you couldn’t work.

That’s all there was for me! In mythology that component of initia­ tion is called the Royal Marriage of the king and queen. A story often begins with a description of the king, then the health of the king- 20 • Hilmar Moore dom, and then his relationship with the queen. When the royal marriage takes place and the king and queen come together, you have the union of what is known as “complementary opposites” that make the whole. Then the kingdom is healed. From my own experi­ ences and those of several close friends, that’s pretty much what’s taking place— coming to terms with one’s inner life and one’s outer life. The king always conquers the outer world and the queen is the ruler of the inner world. When they marry, the kingdom is made whole. That’s where we struggle these days and it’s not until one goes through this initiation that we can really take the necessary steps toward individualization. This is the problem that we have when there’s a premature development of individualization— or spiri­ tual development— before coming to terms with one’s personal de­ velopment. When that happens, an adjustment will take place. (Laughs) I think the divorce rate is a direct reflection of that adjustment, because I don’t feel that we as individuals have made this royal marriage, and without this marriage in us as individuals, it’s impossible to have one with another person. If you look at what takes place around divorce— whether it’s an individual life splitting up or a couple— look at what choice you have. You can seize the opportunity to take responsibility for your own contribution toward why the marriage did not work, or you can focus on what the other person did to harm the marriage. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about the other person’s participation. The only thing you can do something about is what you did. So, which one of these approaches you choose will determine what path you’ll take in your next relationship. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if your focus was on the other person, the chances are very good that the next time, you’ll find yourself in a very similar situation. If you decide to make changes in yourself and take responsibility for what you do, then you will find yourself in completely different relation­ ships with all the people you encounter afterward. That’s a fact of life. You also will find that more relationships will come to an end than the one with your spouse, because you have changed and your interactions with people will be different. The old relationships were predicated upon you being a certain way, and when you change it Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 21 makes many people feel uncomfortable, so more relationships than one may end.

When you first came across the myth of the Holy Grail, where were you concerning the spirit of the earth? How did that come into your life and work?

That’s when that whole aspect came into my understanding of the role of agriculture. By 1975 it didn’t make much sense to me that it was just about organic agriculture. It’s definitely going in the right direction to replace synthetic products with organic inputs, it left me with this nagging feeling that there must be something else involved. It wasn’t just a matter of synthetic or organic, it had to do with a living entity. That was the source of the nebulous feeling and the question that arose out of it. For me, one of the reasons I embraced this myth of Parsifal is because it is pictorial. I think it’s still appropriate when one is describ­ ing the invisible world that it comes through stories and pictures, because that world does not have the sharp, hard definition that the physical world has. In one’s imagination you don’t encounter those physical restrictions of form— it is much more formless and suits that pictorial consciousness which is more fluid. I felt then, and do now, that imagination is the appropriate method of penetrating and dis­ cussing the invisible world, because that is what is difficult, right? What’s difficult is to talk about it because you don’t have the criteria that you have in the physical world to describe things. You have to describe the living world in different terms. That really penetrates to the heart of the issue we face today in agriculture: in order to interact with nature in an appropriate way, we must use a different consciousness than the analytical, scientific one. The scientific consciousness views what we are doing as if we were driving a car looking in the rear-view mirror. You’re seeing what is past but have no idea of where you are heading in the future. There’s a wonderful saying: the future is where you will spend the rest of your life. Scientifically, we have no way of know­ ing where we are going, and our system of monitoring only tells us where we have been. So we can find what is required to interact 22 • Hilmar Moore with nature in a way that is healing and life-giving in this pictorial consciousness where we can see wholes and not only pieces. My son, August, gets puzzles, for example a puzzle of a farmyard. For him— he’s six years old— the puzzle might have twenty pieces, and they are pretty big so you can get a good idea of what the picture will be from the pieces. When you put two pieces together, you get a much better idea. One piece may be a pig, not a pig’s foot. If you get an adult puzzle with thousands of tiny pieces, you have no idea where one piece fits into the whole. That’s the manner in which we approach agriculture, as if we have these tiny pieces and they will give us the complete picture. We actually have to approach it the other way around. You have to see the totality in order to know how what you do will affect the rest of it. We must work in the opposite direction of how we work now. That’s what we mean when we say that alternative agriculture is “process- oriented.” If we talk about the mineral cycle, we are not speaking of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium; we are speaking of a living, cyclical activity of the minerals. You can’t freeze it in time and talk only about the minerals in the organic residue that’s lying on top of the ground. If you get a snapshot, it’s only a momentary picture, and that gives you no idea of the activity that’s always in motion. Nature is in constant motion, and until you are able to envision the full cycle, the cyclical nature of it, you don’t understand what the process is. You have only a part, which merely represents a moment in time. By the time you examine this moment and get back to the actual activity, it is different than it was at that moment. The way our brains work actually requires us to break things down into segments. We can only hold so many facts in our head at one time. So we can then talk about the water cycle, the mineral cycle, successions of growth, and energy flow as if they were independent activities and not dependent upon each other. In nature is there any such thing as the water cycle independent of the mineral cycle’s successions of energy flow? How could there be? It is not even possible. It is only in our mind that it could be that way. It cannot take place in nature. If we approach nature in the analytical way in which our minds work, the result will be fragmentation and loss of integrity of the living entity. Pictorial consciousness, which is process-oriented, allows us to approach nature holistically in our management practices. If we ap­ Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 23 proach nature in its wholeness and we maintain the integrity of the living system, then you have a much better idea of the ripples you create. When you throw a rock into a pond, the impact is not only where you throw the rock; it ripples through the entire pond. If you see it pictorially, you will be able to perceive the implications of your insertion into the living entity. Then you can with a remarkable degree of accuracy know what effect you are going to have. Until we achieve that ability— to think about agriculture and to participate with nature with that type of consciousness— we won’t see the kinds of changes we want to see.

How did you get to where you could say what you’ve said?

That’s not an easy question. I always have been intrigued with anthroposophy. It always made the most sense in providing a world view that was satisfactory to me— the evolution of human develop­ ment and of the earth and our participation in it—that our participa­ tion with the spiritual hierarchies is necessary for the planet to de­ velop. Just as aesthetic was my soul nourishment, anthroposophy was the nourishment for my spirit. It suited my constitution! I looked at many world views, but none of them satisfied me, because they didn’t have the perspective of the importance of the planet parallel to our individual development, and I see that as one of the central problems of the culture we live in. If you do not have a world view that incorporates reincarnation and the idea that our development is connected with the earth, then how would one ever come to a responsible management of the earth? If we are just going to die and go to heaven or wherever, then why would anyone be concerned about what happens to the planet? What difference would it make? That’s a fundamental question and anthroposophy provided me with a perspective that linked up what I was experiencing work­ ing with the earth and what I was experiencing developing as an individual human being. But I became disappointed with some “anthroposophists.” That may have been naivete on my part, but they didn’t seem to embody anthroposophy as I’d hoped it would be represented in them. I experienced a certain amount of disillusionment. It made me realize 24 • Hilmar Moore that my work was “in the world” and I would not ally myself with any particular institution. I think this is a personal matter and I’m not saying that for others this may not be the right path. I want to develop as an individual human being and not be totally identified with any label, whether that is a “doctor” or an anthroposophist. A label can be a handicap in getting in touch with who you are as a person so that you can address the things that are lacking in you. The danger, not just with anthroposophists but with any path of spiritual development, is to jump over the personal development and go right into spiritual development. My experience is that personal development is the springboard for spiritual development. If one ignores personal development and pursues spiritual development, you run into trouble. I became uncomfortable with that.

Does that relate to Steiner’s statement that one should take several steps in the moral arena for every step on the spiritual path?

Very often those are exactly the kind of statements that are the most profound, and everyone agrees with them conceptually. Who could disagree? But when it comes to practice, it’s so much more glamorous to pursue the spiritual component of it, because pursuing the moral element is extremely painful. You have to pursue your own demons, shadows, your double. That’s the heart of the issue. To become moral, you have to accept the responsibility to take on your own inner failings, and that’s a very unpleasant prospect. I don’t know if anyone does that willingly. My experience is that life circumstances present you with the opportunity to do it, through crises like divorce or death— whatever it is— that put you in contact with that very uncomfortable part of yourself which is the real limit­ ing factor as you proceed. In the past, whenever I had a problem, I would just work a little harder and keep my mind off of it by becoming so physically ex­ hausted that I could go to sleep, wake up and get right back to work. It wasn’t until I hit the wall, so to say, professionally, that this way of doing things wouldn’t work any longer. Then I had a problem I’d never had before, which was that I could no longer use my work as my smokescreen. I had to reassess myself. The one thing I’d always had going for me was that I had this burning, unquenchable desire Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 25

to work. People were always amazed at how long and hard I could work, but it was easy for me. Not that I didn’t get tired or that it wasn’t hard, or that I didn’t have to push myself—I had to do all those things. But it was easy. Like a professional musician: every­ body has to put their time in, to practice six or eight hours a day to master their instrument. The difference is, it’s easier for some people to practice six or eight hours a day because they’re so passionate about what they’re doing. That’s how I was! When, due to my circumstances, I could no longer work, I had lost my greatest asset. I was in serious trouble! I completely lost my desire to work. It was a very uncomfortable place, where I felt empty, completely adrift, and there was nothing I could latch on to. I had this image that was very real to me. I could lie in bed and feel that I was falling, but there was no bottom. As I fell, I would reach out as if I was falling out of a tree, to grab a limb— the things that had provided certainty for me—but every time I caught one, it broke away. I kept falling into a void. It was an extremely uncomfortable period. I came to feel like I really had to change my life in order to move forward. I had a choice at that point. I could coast on what I had already done, and I felt that I’d already had a full lifetime’s experience in gardening, and I had achieved a certain level of proficiency and expertise that few people had in that small arena. But if I wanted to go on to new ground, then the changes would have to come from inside me. At that point my interest in mythology resurfaced. Fourteen years had passed from my first interest in it to this point. It’s like going into a new country, you don’t know the customs and you try various things. You finally come to things that speak to you, that suit your constitu­ tion. I got interested in Jungian psychology, particularly the work Carl Jung did with archetypes. I started reading myths from the Jungian perspective. I felt nourished again, that this was addressing what I needed for my inner life. For a couple of years I consumed everything I could find, and went into a very intense inner assessment of what I needed to face in myself. For the first time in my life I became comfortable with not doing anything, which had been the point of tension in my younger years. Gardening had been something I really liked to do to distract myself away from myself. And I pursued that with a vengeance. But for the first time I could read a book or just sit there and not feel like I had to 26 • Hilmar Moore do something. That was very encouraging, that I could experience an inner comfort with myself. Then I reached a new plateau professionally. I started looking at trees differently and hit upon the archetypal tree—what the archetypal tree would look like. The archetypal plant doesn’t exist in the physical world but it does exist in my imagination in its full potentiality. As soon as this archetype comes into the physical world, you have physical forces that work on it that give it endless variations of shapes, but in its potentiality you have no forces to give it a particular form. I kept asking myself what would it look like if a tree was able to grow under ideal circumstances without forces that would distort this ideal entity. I finally figured out what this would be by going out and looking at plants in the wild. Up to this point I had pursued culture, culture, culture. Now my search took me out into nature and I began to look at abandoned trees in orchards, paying particular attention to volunteer plants along hedgerows that had never been pruned. But I’d always find that ice had broken them or deer had nibbled them, so there was always some distortion. But they were different than cultured plants in an orchard. Finally, I came up with the archetypal tree idea and it completely changed my participation in agriculture. I went from the high-end culture of British horticulture to a naturalized form of grow­ ing that is different from Fukuoka’s idea, which is doing nothing.2 But that’s not agriculture as far as I’m concerned. Nature is not perfect by a long shot. The yields from nature are unsatisfactory and the fluctuations are immense. You couldn’t have a business that way, but I could see that there was something of real significance there. It was almost a Zen approach—that it’s not so much what I did (and before it was all what I did!), but now it’s more what I don’t do, and I intercede when it begins to go too wild and bring the tree back into culture. At that point, in my mind I’m still gardening but the scale is getting larger and larger and it’s not holding together, because the garden is the intensive culture of a small spot, and you provide the integrity that weaves and holds it together in a living entity. When you go to a larger scale, you are no longer gardening and you can’t put the intensive kind of management into it that you put into a garden. So while I was still gardening in my mind, the outer scale was getting much bigger and my operation was starting to unravel. The edges are beginning to fray like a rug. It became too labor­ Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 27

intensive. Looking for savings in labor, I also experienced fertility problems in the soil. Seeking to solve that problem, I began looking at the integration of animals into the horticultural enterprise. That’s where I am presently. I began to see that after all these years of working in biodynamics, but as a gardener, I didn’t understand that to realize the true benefits of biodynamics, one must build up a farm entity on the model of a true farm individuality that is self-contained but is integrated into a larger context. The boundaries of this entity are like our skin— if forms a boundary that is permeable that allows a breathing to take place between what is outside and what is inside it. I saw that to realize this potential, I had to move into farming. This was the men­ tal transition I had to make. It was extremely difficult because I had always been a gardener and I didn’t know anything about farming. You can’t fully realize biodynamics in gardening because you need a fully operating farm which is self-contained as much as pos­ sible, which requires animals for economic and ecological reasons. Animals reduce your labor input enormously. Farming is a low- input, sustainable entity, in which you minimize what comes in from the outside, so that the fertility needs to be self-generating— this requires animals, livestock. You’re not talking about high-value crops, which are the province of horticulture. So, how do you inte­ grate animals into an orchard? Today, high-value crops come from high-value ground. At a holis­ tic management seminar, I met people who have 5,000-acre ranches that have the same economic value that I have on 87 acres, because I grow high-value crops. I was handling the same amount of money on this small acreage as these people were on a scale 50 times larger. So I had to learn how to manage a high-value, intensive horticultural operation economically, in the context of a low-input, sustainable farm. Now, the intensive culture takes place on the high­ est valued portion of the property, but all the edges are managed in a low-input, sustainable manner in which you use your livestock to keep your costs down and your fertility up. As the population con­ tinues to increase and you have urban encroachment coming in, these are the type of enterprises which have the greatest potential to succeed. We see an inkling of that in the CSA operations.3 In 1993, the entire organic market in the U.S. was about $1,500,000,000. California made up one-third of that market. The San 28 • Hilmar Moore

Francisco Bay area had 10% of the total U.S. market. In 1994, the Bay area market was $200,000,000. By the year 2000, the organic market will be at ten billion dollars. So the organic market is at a 20-27% rate of increase annually. Around 2000, the market will begin to flatten. This huge growth period will justify the increased cost of organic operations. Once the market flattens out, and it has already begun to do so, the organic growers will face the same economic problems that chemical growers face now. In other words, the organic growers are still following the industrial model of high-inputs. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still a high-input form of agriculture. As soon as the economics don’t allow that to continue, organic farming will be in the same shape as chemical agriculture is now. If biodynamic agriculture can look at the problems that aren’t being addressed— the high-input end of it— and address them, then by 2000, biodynamics could be in a position to be the form of agriculture that can provide the crucial answers. That’s where we find ourselves to­ day. In this short time of opportunity, we must find the decisiveness to identify the problems and to start pragmatically to address them to provide legitimate solutions. My concern is that we are not doing it and that the greatest opportunity that will ever present itself will pass us by.

Why may we let this moment pass the biodynamic movement by? Why does biodynamics have the answers that farmers need?

Because the model of biodynamics that Rudolf Steiner gave pro­ vides them. In his agriculture course4 he described the “farm indi­ viduality.” Every activity we pursue in life is based on a model that gives us the parameters in which we function—our boundaries, our rules, and how we are to interact within the activity. His description of the farm individuality is the most clearly defined production sys­ tem in the world. Steiner states very clearly how one functions in this living entity. Our present scientific model is an industrial entity which describes a manufacturing facility. You bring in the raw products from outside and assemble those products which are sold. The biodynamic model is a self-contained entity which generates inter­ nally, to the greatest degree possible, so that it is self-sustaining and Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 29 no longer dependent on bringing in raw products. It provides a sustainable system of production that has no time limits and self- generates the fertility necessary to grow highly nutritious produce forever with no environmental degradation.

What is missing?

Unfortunately the biodynamic movement in the U.S. pretty well stalled out with Pfeiffer.5 In the past there have been individuals that make things happen. Now, it appears that what is we need is a cooperative effort involving more people, because the effort required is so much greater and we need to be able to view things from as many angles as possible to get a large enough picture. One person can’t provide the perspective we need. So it takes the cooperation and participation of a group. Today, unless the board of directors of the Biodynamic Association realizes the shortcomings in its view of biodynamics, we will not see significant changes taking place in its policies and long term direction. In order to be effective you need a clear idea where you want to go. Without a clearly defined goal of what you want to achieve, you never know whether you are even headed in the right direction. If we had this clearly defined goal and time frame, we could work back from it to see how we can achieve our goal in this time frame and how effectively we are doing it. Let’s say we have 50 certified farmers now and want to have 2,000 by the end of the century. Then we could try to achieve it and monitor our progress. But we do not have such a goal. We are doing very poor long-range planning. We also need to decide how to participate in the marketplace, to get biodynamic produce into the marketplaces so consumers can see, taste, smell, and touch it and discover how it is different. Now the biggest thing we have are the CSA places, and I don’t mean to belittle them, but that is addressing a very small sector of the market, and we need to reach the commercial sector. We do not have presently the technical expertise to help the commercial growers convert to biodynamic methods, and the research we are funding does not ad­ dress commercial-scale growers. 30 • Hilmar Moore

What about language? Biodynamics, through anthroposophy, has evolved a certain way to talk about things that is not the way that our scientists and farmers usually speak.

I rarely use anthroposophical language in my descriptions. I find that it is alien to most people and often is not even necessary. The world has changed so much in the last decade that it is common today to speak of the world as a living organism. Ten years years ago you would have been considered a fool to do so. We do not have to use only the language that has evolved out of anthroposophy to talk about soul or spirit— these are much more common terms now. So the anthroposophical language is more of a hindrance than a help in the public arena. The more we learn to describe things in the terms that people are familiar with, the less our descriptions will seem closed and mysterious, and the more they will achieve the clarity that biodynamics can give. To the public, anthroposophical terms can cloud things. That is an essential point: Is our true motive that we want someone to understand, or do we want to impress them with what we know? If we want to impress them, we will use a different language than we’ll use if we truly want them to under­ stand it. We need to evaluate our purpose. Is biodynamics trying to impress people with what we know, or is biodynamics trying to clarify agricultural situations that are not clear now?

Do you have a last word for us?

The major trend now is simply to substitute organic sprays for chemical sprays, organic fertilizers for chemicals. But the thinking behind it hasn’t really changed. Yet that’s still very positive: the detri­ mental effects are less because the substitution of substances is from synthetic to biodegradable. But it’s still expensive and it is an outside input. It’s viable as long as the price covers the expense. When the price comes down, you’ve still helped the ecological problem, but the economic problems grow larger. With the Delaney Clause, there is zero-tolerance for chemical resi­ due on produce. The hardest hit will be fungicides. This will really affect the cosmetic quality, the visual aspect of produce. This may be a significant opening. We know that when one has a truly diversified Searching for Integrity— A Conversation with Alan York • 31 and enhanced microbial activity in the soil, we have fewer problems with disease. But it’s going to take a long time for farmers to get the soils healthy again. Our window of opportunity is compost-making and compost teas for plant sprays to increase soil and plant health. Farmers won’t be easily able to bite the whole bullet of converting to biological methods. That’s where the B.D. Association has its great­ est opportunity. If we would do research and development with Will Brinton at Woods End Laboratory to develop a product which we could license and sell to producers, we could put ourselves in a position of authority on how to convert farms, and there could be a large economic windfall from it. It would bring biodynamics into the public eye, giving us a springboard to speak about it in the context of proper farming, because what this time demands is the reintro­ duction of animals into our growing practices, a high level of soil and crop integrity, and a much closer contact between the consumer and farmer. We could very easily position ourselves to be there with the answers when the present wave of organic agriculture starts to flatten out. Woods End Lab has the technical expertise in compost making and soil science. The B.D. Association has as its greatest asset the unquestionable integrity of its name. When it comes to the final product, biodynamic produce is internationally recognized as the very highest quality, for which the certification cannot be bought; you must earn it.6 If we could go to a dairy farmer and say, “I can show you how to set up a composting operation which can allow you to produce the highest quality products such as soil amend­ ments or compost teas, and we will give you an internationally known certification for it,” what would that mean in the market­ place? And the Association would get a royalty. Then we can say, “Not only can I help you, but we can give you the technical exper­ tise, a farm model, a market, etc.” There would be a true service in this that fits into the current agricultural and economic situations, and meets the environmental concerns of consumers.

Interviewed by Hilmar Moore November 10, 1994 32 • Hilmar Moore

NOTES

1. Alan Chadwick (1909-1980) was a British actor and horticulturist who estab­ lished horticulture projects at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Saratoga, and Covelo in California, and in Virginia. He had previously re­ stored the Admiralty Gardens in Capetown, South Africa. He was a charis­ matic and inspirational figure; his influence lives on through his former students, his lectures (available on tape from U.C. Santa Cruz), and several publications. He emphasized hand-work, compost making, and creating gardens as part of a gorgeous landscaping design. His work has touched thousands of people; through him many heard of raised beds, biodynamics, and Rudolf Steiner for the first time. 2. Masanobu Fukuoka is a Japanese grower whose books advocate trying to achieve a “natural” system of gardening. 3. Community-supported associations allow the consumers of produce to play a key economic role in the farm or market garden. For more information, contact the Biodynamic Farming Assn., P.O. Box 550, Kimberton, PA 19942. 4. Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture (available at the above address). 5. A scientist and lecturer. See H.H. Koepf, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (Biodynamic Farming Assn., 1991). 6. Biodynamic produce is certified and sold under the trademark “Demeter.” A Meditation on Inner and Outer Peace*

BY RAPHAEL GROSSE KLEINMANN

ometimes I find peace disturbing. Or, to put it more accurately, I Sfind myself disturbed by sudden attacks of peacefulness. Picture this: I am sitting at my bureau, struggling to work out a statistical lab exercise. The dedication to the goal that I have set for myself transforms my scattered thoughts into a well-coordinated le­ gion. They are marching in one direction, tackling the given subject with ultimate efficiency, and they will keep going until the final conclusion of my analysis in seedling growth experiments is won. That is how it goes . . . if it goes. But I told you, sometimes I suffer from peace-aches. An unpremeditated glance out of the window can be enough to trigger a catastrophe. A young oak tree stands there, beautiful as ever, as never before in this moment, and infinitely more important to me than the Plant Science analysis that is going on in my head. I try to fight the intrusion into my realm of efficiency. I turn back to my figures and concentrate on my work. Impossible! What used to be lines of uniformed thoughts is now melting into painted drops each of which reflects a gleam of the evening sun. My eyes seem to perceive the sunlight itself rather than its effect in the colors and contours of the material surfaces that resist and reflect its path. My ears open and I can not help listening to the chickadee. So I surrender to what I would call the powerful emergence of peace in everyday life. I say thank you to the sun and the tree and

______*This paper won the Dorothy Clarke Wilson Peace Essay contest in October 1994. It appeared previously in the University of Maine campus magazine.

33 34 • Raphael Grosse Kleinmann chickadee. But the peace is fleeting. It has just looked into my eyes and now it is gone to where I can not follow yet. Oh tree, could I keep growing upright as you do! Oh sun, could you teach me to radiate with light and life! Our human thoughts can be bright and vivid for ourselves but can we shine with universal light? Peace may come another time to visit me; will I be ready to host her? From Saint John’s Gospel she is known as Eirene. Her Latin name P ax does not really fit. It makes her but a derivative of a political treaty like the ones the ancient Romans created so many times: When the war is over the winner can dictate the terms of peace. So I do not call her Pax. I call her Eirene. By using the Germanic name something else resounds: Friede is a relative of Freedom. I need an inner freedom in order to share peace with my contemporaries. All too often this is just what I am missing: My speech is governed by stereotypes even when I try to argue for peace in a political discussion. Yet when the sun shines through our actions, when we love what we do because we follow our own ethical intuition, when we respect others to follow theirs: That is when peace is set free. At this point peace is to be thought of as plural. In Russian Mir means both “world” and “peace”, it is an all encompassing concept. Journalists have commented on the imperialistic abuse of this word with its double meaning, by Stalin and on the occasion of the Rus­ sian spacecraft named Mir. But friends from Russia have taught me that the ideal of Mir originated in the peasant community: Mir used to be the village with its common ground and local jurisdiction. It was an island of democracy within the Tsarist regime. Facing the hardships of life in a remote wilderness the settlers knew that coop­ eration and respect were indispensable for survival. The Mir was their peaceful little world. (I imagine that Alexander Solzhenitsyn must have found some­ thing similar in the spirit of New England pioneer settlements. In fact, in his manifesto for a grassroot democracy in Russia he mentions the 19th century M ir community along with the tradition of self- government and cooperatives in Vermont). Today the concept of Mir has grown beyond the extent of a home village—just as our concept of politics has come to comprise much more than the inner affairs of a Greek polis. Yet it is only as global as A Meditation on Inner and Outer Peace • 35

our social consciousness can expand without falling prey to shadowy abstractions; and it is a living Mir only when we share it with every animate being and with the earth itself. It was through the “natural resources”: the water of life, the salt of the earth, the grapevine, the fish and the sheep that Christ conveyed a sense of the living spirit. Can we expect to understand his logos-language if we do not care where our drinking water comes from and whether cows are fed with grass or with hormones? Garden work also honors the Old Testament: It makes me feel like a little creator within creation, both humble and proud to be the image of god. It is not easy to overcome with mere intellectual arguments the fashionable, cynical view of humankind as a species that is inherently destructive to the rest of nature. Working the earth “in the sweat of my brow”, however, enables me to trust a more optimistic anthropology. I think that the movement for organic farming and gardening is a prime peacemaker in these times of social strife. Where people grow beets and beans the respect for life itself is growing. In community Supported Agriculture the organic way of thinking reaches out into social life. The model of a market mechanism driven by the selfish impulses of all participants gives way to a cooperative social organism nurtured by a mutual feeling of responsibility for the health of human­ ity and the earth itself. Sustainable peace comes from understanding. Understanding is when I recognize inside of me that which used to be but an external object of my thoughts and actions. It seems to me that many of the political leaders and public servants involved in peacemaking efforts assume to know what is good for their contemporaries without even trying to understand them. Their diplomatic achievements become a source of new trouble. Some plans are very well constructed— but you cannot construct un­ derstanding. Granted that most heads of state and their legions of ambassadors honestly want peace. The way they set forth their inten­ tions seems to fall short of any courage to question their own back­ ground of values and opinions. Could you imagine a president or chancellor transcending his own cultural boundaries through expo­ sure to the lifestyle of Serbs or Arabs? The former secretary of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjoeld, revealed in his diaries how he became more and more uneasy with 36 • Raphael Grosse Kleinmann merely administrative attempts to settle ethnic and national conflicts. In his premonitory poems written shortly before his mysterious death in 1961, he spoke of an ever stronger inner light. If you share Dag Hammarskjoeld’s religious background you might call it a mystical Christ-experience; other people might name it differently. It seems important to me, though, that an awareness of resurrection gave him the courage for distinct political action: Facing the resistance and hypocrisy of the powers that be and working for an understanding of what each human culture and actually each single human being could contribute to the “garden” earth. In the rays of the Christ, peace transforms from a global plan devised by select “think-tanks” into a process that lives in the hearts and minds of actual human beings. It resembles an organism rather than a mechanism. It is as close to the sunlight as human effort can grow. The Path of the Rose

A rose blossoms at the end of thorns. It blossoms with the color of blood. Its pedals reach up to the heavens, and out into the world.

A child is born of it’s mother’s labor. It takes its first breath covered with blood. Its cries reach up into the heavens, and out into the world.

An elder dies after a long, hard life. She no longer breathes from the force of her blood. Her soul reaches up into the heavens, and out into the world.

A seed sprouts in the springtime. It nourishes itself from the harshness of winter. Tiny stems shoot towards the heavens from the earth of the elder’s grave.

A rose is cut from its thorny bush, and the stem drips with clear blood. Its thorns pierce the hand of the gardener as he captures its beauty to share with the world.

A man gives a woman a rose. And the rose seals their bond with love. Their love reaches up into the heavens, and together they go out into the world. Brian Wright

37 Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul

BY WILLIAM BENTO

brief survey of the profusion of psychological texts and articles Apublished in the last decade will surely lead one to conclude that a new paradigm is being explored. A search for the underpinnings of a new world view that can give rise to a conception of the human soul and its innate, inextricable relationship to the world soul is underway. The term “spiritual psychology” is being raised as a banner to identify this movement of awareness in our culture. It aligns its roots with Jungian psychology and stretches beyond the incipience of archetypal psychology into the realm of the metaphysical. This modern quest to rediscover the wisdom of the soul is a long awaited joy for those adherents of the spiritual sciences, whether from Eastern or Western traditions. Yet the joy is confounded by the suffering of the present state of humanity. Although the principles and dynamics that contribute to soul suffering remain universal, the particular features of the human soul’s struggle is quite new in its appearance. Herein lies the task at hand. How can one do more than give voice to the soul’s longing to reclaim its lost wisdom? What pathways provide a spiritual scientific methodology to accurately explain the landscape of the modern human soul with all its trials and potential transformations? Lectures given by Rudolf Steiner from November 1-4, 1910, in Berlin, offered me a starting point to answer the above questions. Within these lectures he described an approach to the human soul based upon Anthroposophical insight and training. What I intend to convey in this article is not definitive results of my research and

38 Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul • 39

contemplation, but a spirit of inquiry that opens up possibilities for further exploration.

The Soul and Space Within our century the incarnating soul has been increasingly sub­ jected to a drastic disorientation in its relationship to space. Decade after decade the natural surroundings of our landscape have changed from wood to concrete to plastic and synthetic materials, i.e., from nature to subnature. In our world of technopoly it is not the merely visible structures in which we find ourselves inhabiting that impair our sensibilities, but also the invisible electromagnetic grids that inter­ lock and penetrate through us that present obstacles to us. We are veritably engulfed, if not encapsulated, in an unnatural world. Imagine the soul of the infant receiving its first impressions of the world. It is not unusual that the infant’s formative senses of perception will be assaulted by the synthetic environment. The first touch beyond mother’s arms is often an object of plastic or synthetic material; and at times, it is this type of touch experience that will predominate as the parents’ attention is called away from the child and into the world of countless demands. Child care centers throughout the nation are re­ plete with environments constructed out of synthetics; not to mention the clothing which so many infants and children are innocently made to wear. This is but one primary sense which is given an illusion instead of a natural reality. Think of the countless moving images upon the screens of television, computers, cinema, etc. that falsify a sense of life; or the mechanical movements of battery operated toys and machines; or the level of noise pollution that surrounds children. It is through these four basic senses— touch, life, movement and balance— that the soul within the physical body seeks to orient itself in space. The ramifications of this situation for the incarnating soul are pro­ found and deeply disturbing. Without a natural environment the child’s innate sense of learning about the world through imitation will be fraught with difficulties. The child will be left to imitate that which is unnatural to his or her own being. Without the healthy protection, development and coordination of the four primary senses, then the soul’s capacity for learning via the higher senses of hearing, speech, thinking and discerning ego presence will be significantly debilitated. What some recent sociological studies have asserted is, in fact, the 40 • William Bento result of this insidious attack upon the senses. These studies point to the rise in special educational needs in children, as well as the in­ crease in juvenile delinquency. The extreme characterization of this phenomenon is children who lack the attention necessary to listen, speak nonintelligibly, display an incapacity to think, and seem to have no sense of ego awareness. An associated factor to this disorientation in space is the soul’s disappointment in not finding the virtues of life being upheld by others in their environment. This issue addresses the etheric realm, wherein the memories of life’s source and wisdom is to be found. The incarnating soul longs to experience through others the reverence of the mystery of birth and life on earth. It rejoices in the confirmation of the spiritual world’s blessing— a blessing that can be experienced in the virtue that the world is good and all its relations are bonded by love. How many children experience this etheric reality in their early encounters with parents and relations? Where there is a vacuum left by goodness and love, other forces, counter forces, are liable to stream in. These forces feed on the shock of the soul, on the broken trust and lead tragically to premature encounters with evil in the world. Child neglect and abuse in its many forms are examples of how rampant this situation is in our time. Through this disorientation in space, the incarnating soul is im­ printed with a primal rage; for the foundation of its life (the physical and etheric body) is robbed of its vitality through the lie, the illusion of what is real and what is alive. Like all theft, the issue is one of unlawful possession. With regard to the soul and the expression of rage and evil, we are confronted with daunting challenge to come to our senses for health’s sake. The human soul is no longer guaranteed soul care by the world soul (once referred to as Natura), for it has become possessed by the power of an enchanting technopoly. Hence, any form of psychology which does not free the world soul, as Robert Sardello so aptly calls us to do, will not be able to adequately diag­ nose, treat or heal the illness that grips the modern human soul.

The Soul and Time The incarnating soul is compressed by an acceleration of time. This is not merely a subjective experience to which many of us can attest; it is an objective fact of nature and human development. Global assessment of the atmosphere and the depletion of the ozone layer, Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul • 41 the loss of the vital vegetation and animal species, the eruption of natural catastrophes in the form of floods, storms and earthquakes are but a few of the signs indicating the disturbance of nature’s own rhythmic cycles. Weather patterns have become more unpredictable than in any other period of recorded history. These earth changes have an effect upon the incarnating soul’s capacity to breathe within the seasons of the year and to take into itself the geographical forces it requires. The result is once again disorientation. Statistical reports compiled by the Scandinavian governments re­ garding children’s growth from 1909 to 1989 yield the following re­ sults: height has increased ¾" per decade; weight has increased 2½ lbs. per decade; and female’s menarche increased from 17 years old to 12 years old on the average. If these figures are taken as representa­ tive of modern children in western civilization, we are struck with alarming growth rates. Even half of the increase in height, weight, and menarche time period must be accepted as significant. The whole process of growth has progressively accelerated. To attribute this phenomenon to matters of nutrition alone would be superficial. The contributing factors must be sought for by looking at all aspects of the growing child’s environment. The developmental milestones of walking, speaking and thinking which normally took place in the first three years of life now seem to take place within the first two years of life. The wonder of childhood, with its innocence and imaginative play which was evident until the nine-ten year old changes in physiology and expressive affect, now seems to end prior to the change of teeth at seven years old. Adoles­ cence, once a period of life that extended into the twenty-first year, also seems to be shortened in duration by at least four to five years. These effects may be traced back to the rate of acceleration in our modern culture as a whole. Just think for a moment how the ever maddening speeds of transportation, communication, and scientific innovations impact our capacities to walk, speak and think in the twentieth century. More than any other single factor contributing to this acceleration of developmental processes in the child, the modern form of abstract intellectual education must be considered the most crucial. Rudolf Steiner pointed to the consequences of such an education in many lecture cycles throughout his career. “If we over-stimulate the memory, we cause the human being to grow bigger, taller . . . and 42 • William Bento we evoke soul forces of antipathy.”1 The method of remembering facts and information so as to perform well upon tests is all too well known to make further comment. It is precisely this demand upon children that casts dark shadows within their soul life— facts and figures moving within their soul without any purposeful meaning to their life. An adjunctive factor to this phenomenon of time being acceler­ ated is the incarnating soul’s inability to meet the world of beauty; for it is pushed too fast to be sufficiently at peace to truly perceive. Nor does the soul necessarily find parents and adults who exemplify an enthusiasm for life. The art of living has become routinized into forms of boredom, despair and hopelessness—creating in the soul a kind of disrespect and insanity of behavior which disregards both the law of development, as well as the concerns of the ethical and moral codes of conduct.

The Soul and Consciousness The incarnating soul receives its seeds for consciousness by en­ countering the images of the world—most particularly the images of the human being. This encounter at first is not a conscious one, but rather an experience more akin to a dreamer being surrounded by dream images over which he or she has no controls. Yet the impres­ sions of these images can inscribe deep metaphors—metaphors that guide the soul into longings for identification. The soul seems to be driven with passions to form identification before it has reached a state of self-reflection. Given our current attraction to images of the mechanized and sexualized human being, we may venture to sur­ mise that such identifications are bound to be fatal in the long run. Within a century and a half the image of the human being has fallen from a Darwinian/Marxist pseudo-identification with the animal— albeit an intelligent and adaptable species—to an image of the “terminator”, i.e., a totally mechanical, robotic construction in the likeness of a human being. A computer for a brain, a camera with telescopic lens for eyes, a CD-Rom for audio sound to give voice to the creation, a digital clock to replace the ticking and pumping of the heart, hydraulically pumped steel to give the limbs its power, and synthetic skin to enclose it and give it the appearance of being human! Although this description shows a change in form, the idea is the same. The human being’s evolutionary purpose is made out to be a Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul • 43

conqueror of the Earth and its kingdoms. Yet, the reality is he has become a destroyer even unto himself. If the above image is not disconcerting enough, our media is more than capable of creating dozens of equally striking mutations of what a human being maybe in the next century. From Star Trek variations to Bart Simpson-like caricatures, the human being’s image is being altered; and with it, the sense of significance is being diminished. So much of what faces us today about the image of the human being is devoid of any spirituality. This alone has a devastating effect upon the soul; for when the soul does attain its power of self-reflection, it undergoes another blow of disorientation. The very images which have surrounded the incarnating soul with the idols of materialism do not offer signs toward becoming human; in fact, they create walls of imprisonment. How is the soul to relate to its pre-earthly intentions, its divinely imaged sense of being human if there has been no confirmation of the spiritual in life? Protecting the incarnating soul from the distorted and destructive images of the human being in our time is a difficult process. We are all subject to it. The only salvation is to limit such exposure and to provide imaginations with the true ideal images of the human being. The need to instill capacities for free thinking are essential. Unless this capacity is fostered, the incarnating soul will be deluged with infor­ mation and images that weight it down into identification with the materialism of our age. In the soul, forces of doubt will reign and within this form of paralysis, hallucinations will sedate the longing of the soul for the spirit. And for the soul, the earthly existence will be a homeless one, a wandering through what T. S. Eliot termed “the wasteland”. These indications of the incarnating soul’s relationship to space, time and consciousness are by no means exhaustive. They do, how­ ever, present a picture of the landscape which predominates and primarily shapes the modern soul’s condition. Phenomenological studies of our culture are not secondary footnotes to a reappraisal of the nature of the soul, but must be regarded as an absolute necessity within the context of any genuine approach to know the mysteries of the soul. Such an endeavor requires an acknowledgment that the stream of evolution is not static and, therefore, will always demand an attentiveness to the changing appearances of the culture we inhabit. 44 • William Bento

Rudolf Steiner has given us a fine example of the type of observation and cognition one must exercise to understand the dimensions of the soul as reflected in our culture. He has also given us the bold prophetic proclamation that humanity is crossing the threshold of the spiritual world. What is really implied by this statement? It is surely not a mystical mirage which offers the weary soul a refuge from the harsh realities of the twentieth century. Steiner spoke frequently of this phenomenon as a crucial disorientation that could evoke numerous forms of psychosis and sociopathology. And, so, how are we to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon? As already indicated in this article, the idea of the spiritual world is not an assumption we can make without inviting a realm of the fantastic filled with illusions. Nor is the idea of threshold necessarily a common conception. For the purposes of this article, let us define and explore the idea of the threshold as it relates to the everyday experi­ ences of the soul. A standard definition of the word “threshold” describes a place where boundaries meet, i.e., entrance way, doorway, portal . . . as well as an activity that suggests being on the brink, the verge, the edge, the beginning, the end of something. If we extend these defini­ tions into the context of the soul, we shall find new and subtle nuances to the world. The first discovery we find is two portals, not one. In the sense of two vertical planes, the soul’s threshold from above can be described as the spiritual world; whereas from below, it is the physical world. Are we to assume that humanity is crossing the threshold to the spiritual world, but not the physical world? Do we not see a great deal of evidence in the extraordinary uses of electricity, magnetism and nuclear forces that suggest humanity has crossed the boundaries of the natural world into the subnatural? If we accept the idea that the soul is involved in two threshold crossings of significance, then we can broaden our perspective of Rudolf Steiner’s indications regarding the phenomena of the twenti­ eth century. From these two thresholds the soul is pressed and pulled upon, continually being kept in a state of imbalance. The aim of a healthy soul life is to find a means to achieve a balance between these two thresholds. Casting this situation into the imagery of the soul as a cosmic battlefield upon which the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings wage war is a very helpful picture; yet it does not necessarily Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul • 45 give us the view of the soul that is capable of being healthy in and of itself. Such a picture requires us to go beyond the idea of the soul as a passive, receptive cup of experiences, both spiritual and physical. The soul must be conceived, creatively, as an active realm wherein forces stream from it across the thresholds of spirit and nature. This can be envisioned by examining the thresholds of consciousness the soul experiences on a daily basis.

The Threshold of Sleep One of the most commonplace activities of every human being is to sleep. It is an activity that occupies one-third of our individual lives. Interestingly enough, few of us inquire into the whereabouts of the consciousness we call “I” during sleep. Although modern scientific research has attempted to measure brain waves and physiological changes, it does not address the fundamental question, nor has psy­ chological speculation yielded any consistent idea of the whereabouts of the “I” consciousness. Many of us are left either to postulate reli­ gious and metaphysical constructs or to abandon the pursuit alto­ gether as being meaningless. Anthroposophical insights in this realm are quite essential for they define and describe the separation of the ego consciousness from the body and its ascent into the worlds of spirit. In this process, the soul, too, crosses into the threshold and experiences its active forces of thinking, feeling and willing in quite a different way. Rudolf Steiner describes this process in great detail in his lectures entitled Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology, published by the Anthroposophic Press, 1990. While on the waking side of the thresh­ old, the healthy “I” consciousness regulates a mutual interaction between thinking, feeling and willing; whereas during sleep these soul forces separate. In both cases, health is sustained when these soul forces do not merge. The merging of these soul forces is, in fact, the source of so many of today’s soul illnesses.

In the sphere of feelings, human beings cannot liberate them­ selves from their connection with the spiritual world. When they free themselves in the realm of the intellect in this materialistic age, they enter the world of feeling with inadequate concepts and consequently must become ill. 46 • William Bento

What then is the only remedy to really restore people to health? They must be guided to concepts that reach out to include the world of feelings; that is to say, modern people must again be told of the spiritual world in the most comprehensive sense.2

During sleep we pass through states of intensification of our thinking, feeling and willing processes in a sequential way. It is like passing through three realms. The first is connected to our nerve- sense system’s intake of impressions and the thinking or lack of thinking which accompanied it. What is experienced is a sea of images unconfined by forms. All that has been spatially conceived now becomes dynamically mobile. The sense of “floating above a great abyss and all the time in the greatest danger of being sucked into it”3 grips the soul with fear. Immersion into multiple individual entities characterizes the sec­ ond realm. The impressions imprinted into the processes of breathing and blood circulation, linked to the feeling life, take on manifold expressions. The joys and sorrows of the day move through us with a power. The dream images not only unfold in a manner that defies laws of space and time; it conveys messages begging us to find relationships to its deeper meaning. The third realm reveals the metabolic-limb system’s activities dur­ ing the day. It exposes the willing forces in its intentions and its consequences. In this context we might say it is the realm wherein morality is experienced. These brief descriptions of the realms of sleep can give us a basis for understanding one of today’s widespread illnesses. It strikes more than 50% of our population in varying degrees— sleep disorder. One need only think of the continuous bombardment of sense impressions we receive throughout a day. Not only has the quantity increased each decade, but the qualitative nature has decreased, i.e., we are subject to more synthetic images, sounds and sensations than natural unadulterated images, sounds and sensations. The overstimulation of the senses and the inability to digest the multitude of impressions in the day creates a bodily exhaustion quite different in nature than the exhaustion created from a hard day’s labor in nature. The majority of work today does not engage the whole body, but strains the nerve-sense system. It remains active even when the body experiences tiredness; often throbbing in the head as an ache or Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul • 47

tension. If we add to this fact the amount of materialistic thinking that is prevalent today, we have a picture of a consciousness that cannot let go of sense impressions. The symptoms are obvious, but the cause is not so easily accepted. From a spiritual, scientific point of view, it is fear, particularly a fear of death— for sleep is but a mini-death. Regardless of the modern stance of consciousness, the soul maintains a wisdom of knowing the spiritual world; albeit, unconsciously. The anxiety of becoming conscious of the spiritual world inevitably leads to a fear of paralysis, a fear of being judged by spiritual beings in the realm of sleep. This is the result of a loss of faith in God, yet not being able to overcome the truth of God’s existence. Ancient humanity maintained a healthy fear of God, for it knew it’s day’s deeds would be judged for its morality during the night’s sleep. Today we have deluded ourselves with a denial of God, thereby reasoning we have no fear of God; yet we we cannot escape the experience of a fear of the unknown, so magnified by the prospect of death. This neurasthenic condition found in sleep disorders can be dealt with only when we carry a true image of the soul crossing the threshold of sleep. The healthy antidotes can be found in balancing our synthetic sense impressions with time spent in devoted observa­ tion of nature; balancing out the materialistic context of our lives with daily contemplations of spiritual science; and taking the cour­ age to face the fear of not knowing how our deeds will be judged by the spiritual beings.

The Threshold of Waking Once again, we are brought to an experience that occurs daily within our lives—waking from sleep. Observing this phenomenon with a certain impartiality will also lead us to ponder the mystery of the “I” consciousness. How does it return to the world of sense with any degree of continuity? Is it not a matter of self-definition, i.e., continuity is one of the essential features of the “I” consciousness? Memory provides us with this sense of continuity. However, it is not merely the memory of what one has experienced in day waking consciousness that should concern us but the experiences of the sleep realms as well. Dreams offer us a clue to what has been experienced in the sleep realm, but it does not reveal the whole experience. It gives us fragments of experience. The sense of wholeness is not 48 • William Bento found in the dream images, nor in the artistic beholding of the dream’s apparent story; but in the mood the soul finds itself in upon recollec­ tion or awakening. The mood, whether it be sad, pensive, joyful or frightful, encapsulates the soul with a quality of morality. The mood is the judgment by the spiritual beings of the previous day’s deeds. Subtle as this may be, the waking mood sets the tone of con­ sciousness for the day. The subtlety in the tone is actually the dim memory of having heard the spiritual true beings’ conversation with the soul. It is their cosmic speaking which impresses into our soul the true image of who we are becoming through our deeds. This phenomena has tremendous bearing upon one of today’s widespread illnesses, i.e., the wounded child, the loss of self-esteem, the soul angst of living in shame. Freud’s attempt at reducing soul disturbances to a feeling of guilt has gone a step further in modern psychological theory. It is now an issue of shame, which translates into “you did not just make a mis­ take—you are a mistake.” Sound helping professionals and educators will attempt to avoid this pitfall at all costs— the faulty identification with an act of behavior rather than with the whole being. However, the phenomenon is quite deeply rooted and very pervasive in our culture. Why is this so? Deeper examination into the wisdom of the soul will reveal that we are dealing with a truth that is being utilized improperly and thereby creating illness. During sleep one does become visible to the spiritual beings through one’s deeds; and so if the deed is a mistake, that is what you are becoming in the eyes of the spiritual world. Due to the transparency of the threshold of the spiritual world, it is be­ coming more and more understandable that the mood of awakening retains this judgment. Not only is it of the deeds, but also of the intentions we carry into our lives. Most crucial to the latter is whether or not our intentions include service to the spiritual worlds as well as the physical world. The universal shame of humanity, expressed in the original concept of sin, at one time motivated the soul to find its salvation in a path of knowledge that aimed at the attainment of the ideal human being. Victimization in its countless forms can be traced to this subtle mood of soul that experiences shame. When it is brought from the sleep state and projected into waking consciousness, the truth be­ comes a lie; for we are free each waking moment to become what Psycho-Sophia: Seeking the Wisdom of the Soul • 49 we will, not bound to repeat what we have been. Herein lies one of the keys to transforming this illness into health in the soul, i.e., the task to rediscover hope; to be able to envision a future that is not bound to a past. The illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, with its accompanying debilitating depression, is a type of cry in the soul to break down the routine of the day’s activities. In order to stop the endless wheel of insignificance, the soul loses its breath and slows down to a halt, thereby giving the needed time to re-think the values of life, the truth of the dignity of human life.

The Threshold of the Unexpected Much has been spoken and written about concerning the polari­ ties of sleeping and waking. The change of consciousness is quite evident. Commanding our attention in ever more increasing and dramatic episodes is what I would like to call the threshold of the unexpected. It is taking place at a global level through cultural, political and economic situations that defy predictability— or even manageability. It is happening in every single individual’s life. The degree of conscious recognition of this phenomena varies, but the fact that it is occurring and will continue to increase in its occur­ rences is undeniable. The unexpected occurs in the encounters in which we have not planned nor have the ability to control. It is the situation wherein we, for no reason at all, decide to depart from our habitual course of action and lo and behold an entirely new dimension confronts us, challenges us to see ourselves in a new and and not always so pleas­ ant manner. This could be an encounter with someone we’ve at­ tempted to avoid, or a situation which exposes our shadow side, or an accident that shows us our consciousness may not be in the here and now as it should be. In a culture which thrives on the propaganda that everyone should aspire to attain self mastery and complete independence, the unex­ pected is not so welcome. Such events only accentuate the reality that, try as we might, we are not in total control of our lives. It invades the self's delusionary ivory tower, built on a materialistic world outlook and dissolves the walls of separation. As it does so, the soul must pass through a state of discomfort that can actually reach outbursts of rage. The insidious form of self-love encouraged and reinforced by our culture easily becomes a form of hate projected upon others who 50 • William Bento threatened to disturb the reign of tyranny that is held by the self-centered ego. The outcome of this is a force which seems to be breeding upon itself in the world, i.e., evil. Only a world view that acknowledges the spiritual world, humanity's interdependence upon one another, and the facts of karma and reincarnation can instill the soul with the equanimity it needs to face the times we are living in now. This word view alone is capable of fostering the understanding of love so needed in the world today. This must be able to unite with a new faith in the existence of the spiritual world and a new hope in the development of human free­ dom. Love and its meaning in the world must come to light and illuminate the way for the soul of present day humanity.

When, through love, we have found the path to wisdom, we reach wisdom through the increasing power of self-conquest, through selfless love. Thus does man become a free personality. The evil was the subsoil into which the light of love was able to shine; but it is love that enables us to grasp the meaning and place of evil in the world. The darkness has enabled the light into our ken.4

In the spirit of the last sentence, we can say it is the suffering of the soul illnesses of our time that will enable the light of spiritual science to activate the wisdom of the soul once again.

NOTES 1. Deeper Insights into Education by Rudolf Steiner, Lectures October 15-16, 1923, p. 24. 2. Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology by Rudolf Steiner, Lecture II, Nov. 11, 1917, pp. 70-71. 3. Sleep by Miles, 4 lectures series, Feb. 20-March 1 3 , 1989, in Kelowna Waldorf School, Canada, p. 14. 4. Love and Its Meaning in the World by Rudolf Steiner, Lecture, Dec. 17, 1912, in Zurich, Switzerland, p. 27, Rudolf Steiner Press, London. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as Rudolf Steiner’s Final “Riddle of Philosophy”

BY TOM MELLETT

nsofar as man considers himself within the world of natural I things and events, he will find it impossible to escape the conclusions of [Einstein’sl theory of relativity. But if he does not want to lose himself in mere relativities, in what may be called an impotence of his inner life, if he wants to experience his own entity, he must not seek what is ‘substantial in itself' in the realm of Nature, but in [the realm] transcending Nature, in the realm of the spirit. It will not be possible to evade this theory of relativity for the physical world, but precisely this fact will drive us to a knowledge of the spirit. What is significant about the theory of relativity is the fact that it proves the necessity of a science of the spirit that is to be sought in spiritual ways, independent of observation in nature. That the theory of relativity forces us to think in this way constitutes its value within the development of world conception. — Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles o f Philosophy, p. 444*

In his monumental work, The Riddles o f Philosophy, published in 1923, Rudolf Steiner traces the evolution of Western philosophical thought from its birth in ancient Greece to its deathbed in our cen­ tury. The book is not an encyclopedic recounting of philosophers

______*All page numbers refer to Steiner, Rudolf, The Riddles o f Philosophy, Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1973.

51 52 • Tom Mellett and their ideas, but rather an organic survey of the evolving se­ quence of thought riddles faced by various philosophers over the last 25 centuries. What questions did they wrestle with at what time and why? If philosophy is an ocean, then Steiner dives underwater to evaluate the undercurrents and sources of philosophical questions, whereas the traditional academic treatment of the history of philoso­ phy only catalogues the sequential passage of philosophers as con­ ceptual sailors piloting their noetic vessels on the ocean surface. While academic philosophy collects only the manifest list of passen­ gers and cargo, Steiner is interested in the actual experience of the many voyages, so that the reader may experience philosophy not as a dry, abstract scheme, but as a living organism that is born, grows up, matures and dies over twenty-five centuries of human existence. To Rudolf Steiner’s way of thinking, the concept of Hindu philoso­ phy, or Buddhist philosophy, or any Oriental philosophy is actually a contradiction in terms. Philosophy as such is a specific Western Euro­ pean phenomenon which only came into existence in the sixth or seventh Century before Christ in the locale of Greece. The word itself means “love of wisdom,” and to the Greek mind, the very need to love something was a tacit admission that the something was missing, and loving it was searching to regain it. What was the “lost wisdom?” Whatever it was, it was not lost by the Hindus, Buddhists or other Oriental people. Since there was nothing lost, there was nothing to be regained, and hence no need to invent such a thing as philosophy, thereby making the concept of Oriental philosophy a contradiction in terms. As Steiner puts it at the beginning of The Riddles o f Philosophy:

All attempts to find [that] philosophical thought life devel­ oped in preGreek times fail upon closer inspection. Genuine philosophy cannot be dated earlier than the Greek civilization. What may at first glance seem to resemble the element of thought in Oriental or Egyptian world contemplation proves, on closer inspection to be not real thought, but parabolic, symbolic con­ ception. (p.6)

The “lost wisdom” was a direct picture consciousness wherein world and cosmic phenomena were perceived without any need to “think about” them. There was no separation between human beings and the phenomena they perceived because there was no ego Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity • 53 consciousness confined to the “prison” of the physical body as we experience it today. Ancient ego-consciousness and thinking were essentially infinite: unbounded in space, eternal in time and thoroughly devoid of our modern mechanistic concept of causality, which requires independent self-consciousness for its conception. The ancient human self was felt to be entirely dependent, like living cells in a higher organism, on greater spiritual beings who “caused and effected” all phenomena. Humans could picture these beings, as myths, sagas and legends from all ancient cultures attest, but they were powerless to withstand such “primary causality” except by earnest sacrifice and abject supplication of their “gods.” The raw, majestic figures of Greek mythology can give us clues to this ancient picture consciousness: Ouranos, meaning “Heaven,” the sky god, castrated by his son Chronos meaning “Time,” who in turn ate many of his own infant children, one of whom was Zeus meaning “Law,” saved by his mother Rhea meaning “Flow,” as she wrapped a stone instead of baby Zeus in swaddling clothes as the next morsel for her cannibalistic husband. Then a new generation arose as Zeus the lawgiver, while finding so many mortal women irresistible, also raged at Prometheus, meaning “Forethought,” and chained him to the moun­ tain rock for stealing the divine fire and giving it to such undeserving creatures as mortal human beings. In Greek myth as well as in other creation myths, there is a progres­ sion from higher gods or beings down to lesser ones, and finally, specific human tribes make their appearance as the “fallen ones.” The humble earth is seen as a “dumping ground” of misery and suffering, while “paradise lost” is some stupendous realm beyond the earthly, which human beings have a deep memory of losing, and long to regain. As Rudolf Steiner describes it, the ancient Hindus, for ex­ ample, were “homesick” in the physical world and sought ways to return to the nirvana of their original spiritual state. But in the region of Greece, in the 7th century B.C. there was to be yet another “fall” for humankind— this time, the extinction of that ancient clairvoyant pic­ ture consciousness and its replacement by a new faculty of soul we modern people would recognize as independent thinking. Steiner indicates the positive reason for this extinction:

As long as the human soul conceives world [and cosmic] phenomena through pictures, it feels itself intimately bound up 54 • Tom Mellett

with them. The soul feels itself in this phase to be a member of the world [and cosmic] organism; it does not think of itself as an independent entity separated from this organism. As pure pictureless thought awakens in the human soul, the soul begins to feel its separation from the world [and universe]. Thought becomes the soul’s educator for independence, (p.6)

As human thought begins to separate out from its cosmic mytho­ logical source and philosophy is born to gain it back, the first in­ klings of an independent egoconsciousness also form. It is interest­ ing to note how this spiritual impulse is permeating other cultures at this time, circa 600 B.C. In India, Gautam a Buddha is teaching the ways of compassion and how to quench the desire for incarnation. So why should he bother with philosophy, which would lead to an even deeper entrapment in the physical world of “Maya,” or illusion? To the Hindu, it was bad enough to be physically incarnated in this world of illusion; to fall even further by m entally incarnating as well was too much for Eastern spirituality to bear. But over in Israel, the Hebrews with their god Jehovah, whose name means the “I am,” were about to come out of the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Daniel had just initiated the Magi, who would seek the “Golden Star,” i.e. the reincarnated Zarathustra in the Solomon Jesus of the Matthew Gospel. And the Mosaic Law continued its development of individual responsibility for moral actions in those Hebrews who tried to follow the dictates of the Torah, including the Ten Commandments. The Greeks and Hebrews both placed a great value on existence in the physical world, while their Eastern counter­ parts did not. In this light, then, the birth of philosophy cannot be separated from the birth of Christianity in that both “organisms” focus on the world of Becoming: metamorphoses of the soul, transforma­ tions of the spirit, evolution in both mental and moral consciousness, while Eastern religious conceptions remain satisfied with the static, unchanging world of spiritual Being. Over the 25 century life-span of philosophy, Rudolf Steiner characterises four distinct phases of development in time periods lasting approximately 6 or 7 centuries. Each phase shows a kind of tandem relationship between thought and ego-consciousness, and because there are two contrasting figures of Greek mythology who express this relationship so well, I wish to characterize them before delineating the four periods of philosophy. The two figures appear Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity • 55 in Aeschylus’ play “Prometheus Bound,” and they are: Prometheus and Io. Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” or “he who thinks ahead,” is a figure whom Steiner refers to as the Greek Lucifer. Prometheus awakened a consciousness in humans that was too dan­ gerous in the eyes of Zeus, so Zeus had Prometheus chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains. But Prometheus is patient, for he knows a secret that is not known to Zeus. In the future, Zeus will lie with a mortal woman, Io, and she will give birth to a son, who will start a line of descent leading to the birth of Hercules or Heracles, meaning “he who is called by Hera.” This great hero, whom Steiner indicates is a portent of Christ Jesus, will grow up to succeed Zeus in his position of authority as Law-giver in the heavens. Heracles will also kill the vulture that eats Prometheus’ liver, and then liberate the great Greek Lucifer. In Aeschylus’ tragedy, Io is under a terrible curse from Hera (Juno) and has been wandering over the earth when she suddenly comes upon the chained Prometheus. Her name “Io” is a possible dialectical form of the Greek word “ego!” So here we have “thought” meeting “ego” in the figures of Prometheus and Io. And it will be instructive to keep them in mind when contemplating the distinctions between thought and ego-consciousness as Steiner describes the four periods of philosophy. For example, Prometheus is male, a god, punished by Zeus, chained to a rock; Io is female, a mortal, punished by Hera (Juno), the jealous wife of Zeus (Jupiter). Io is free to roam the earth but she is relentlessly pursued and stung by the “thousand-eyed gad­ fly,” a wonderful though wincing description of the pricks and pangs of modern selfconsciousness. Here then are the four phases of the organism we call philosophy. The time boundaries of each period are very approximate and some­ what arbitrary, both because there is so much overlap and the “give or take” factor is probably at least a half a century.

I. (600 B.C. to 100 A.D.) Awakening Pictureless Thought as the Harbinger of Ego-Consciousness.

This period reaches its zenith in the “Golden Age” of Greece, with Plato, Aristotle, et al. and recedes until it ends in the time of early 56 • Tom Mellett

Christianity. Thoughts were perceived in external nature like we perceive colors or tones today; there was no sense of man producing thoughts, but rather receiving them from outside. Ego-consciousness is still spread out over nature, but is being felt as moving inward and growing dark, a frightening prospect to many. (Prometheus bids Io godspeed as she begins her arduous journey).

II. (100 A.D. to 900 A.D.) Awakening Ego-Consciousness as Thought Incubates in Religious Conceptions.

With the decline of Greece and the ascendancy of Roman culture, the individual ego appears proudly as the Roman “citizen.” But this is self-consciousness experienced as semi-conscious feeling, not fully conscious thought. Man begins to feel that he produces his own thoughts, but in a dream-like way. There is still great fear of the inner world, so the rest of the thought universe “outside” acts to shelter this budding inner thought organism in majestic religious conceptions. A notable figure of this time is St. Augustine, who longs to live forever in his “City of God.” Gnostics and Manichaeans, with their cosmic con­ ceptions of Christ, flourish briefly but are then snuffed out. (Io is wandering alone, dreaming her future, gaining strength to go on, while Prometheus awaits his future liberation in noble confident si­ lence. Thought has faith in ego). m. (900 A.D. to 1500 A.D.) Strengthening Ego-Consciousness Awakens Doubts about the Reality of the Inner Thought Life.

In 869, the 5th Ecumenical Council reduced the essence of the human being from a trinity of body-soul-spirit to a dualism of body- soul. The 10th Century sees the epic of Parsifal and the Holy Grail becomes an ideal. Inner thought life becomes so strong that man actually begins to question its ability to comprehend truth. The struggle between Nominalism and Realism engages Scholastics like Thomas Aquinas and Anselm of Canterbury. Arabic scholars develop algebra and other fields of mathematics that will be used so Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity • 57 powerfully to develop the natural science of the next and final period. (Prometheus doubts his liberation as Io reaches the end of her wanderings and is fructified by Zeus in Egypt).

IV. (1 5 0 0 A.D.to 21 0 0 A.D.) The Merging of Independent Ego-Consciousness and Fully Subjective Thought.

No one better expresses this “merger” than Rene Descartes in his dictum of 1640: “I think; therefore, I am.” Thought has become con­ centrated so deeply in the soul that thought can now dictate the very reality of ego-consciousness! Kant determines that the “I am” can only “photograph” the external world with its mental “camera.” The Newtonian universe becomes the perfect creation of an external God who has become Machine, but 20th Century physics and artificial computer intelligence turn this view upside down: the human being is the machine that has created the illusion of the Newtonian universe and, by strong implication, God! (Prometheus oscillates between manic gloating and depressive loathing; he knows that Io’s mission is complete and Zeus will be overthrown, but he still must wait 13 generations before Heracles is born). In 1995 A.D., we are at the point when Prometheus is still chained to the rock and the curse of Hera on Io needs to be lifted so that she, Io, (Ego) may become the Divine Sophia, or Anthroposophia. Steiner did not live long enough to write the second volume of Riddles o f Philosophy, but he mentioned its goal:

. . . to show at the end how philosophical evolution leads the soul to aspects toward a future human life in cognition. Through this, the soul should be able to develop a world picture out of its own self-consciousness in which its true being can be conceived simultaneously with the picture of Nature that is the result of modern scientific development, (p. 11)

This is quite a challenge. How can we now begin to fathom the true being of the inner soul with a self-consciousness that sits locked in its self-created prison of subjective illusion, and therefore can only view the soul as some kind of ghost-like epiphenomenon of material chemical processes? And even more, how can we now begin to 58 • Tom Mellett correct the picture of external nature developed by modern science which, while it is consistent, sophisticated, true and exact, is nonetheless a glorified autopsy report on the corpse of Mother Nature? Perhaps we might start by asking the questions: when did Mother Nature die? And why? And, no pun intended, was it natural death, or was it “naturicide?” According to Rudolf Steiner in the opening quote of this article, it took Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to make us realize that indeed Mother Nature was dead, and hence the spirit could no longer be found there, but had to be sought for in a realm beyond her corpse. One might say that Mother Nature was first infected with her fatal “illness” when philosophy was born 25 centuries ago, but if I were to pinpoint an event that would correspond to the first “blood­ letting” in the death of Mother Nature, it would be Nicholas Copernicus placing the human mental representation of the sun at the center of the new anthropocentric universe in 1542. Mother Na­ ture became the “sacrificial lamb” who was slain, not for our sins, but rather for the sake of our respective individual self- consciousnesses. In the final chapter of The Riddles o f Philosophy, called “Outline of an Approach to Anthroposophy,” Rudolf Steiner points out the dilemma posed by ego-consciousness and a true knowledge of Mother Nature:

. . . [man] must give a provisional form to his ego in order to suppress from his consciousness the forces that unite him with the world. If these forces exerted their influences in his con­ sciousness without interruption, he would never have developed a strong, independent self-consciousness. He would be inca­ pable of experiencing himself as a self-conscious ego. The devel­ opment of self-consciousness therefore actually depends on the fact that the mind is given the opportunity to perceive the world without that part of reality that is extinguished by the self-con­ scious ego prior to an act of cognition. The [universal] forces belonging to this part of reality with­ draw into obscurity in order to allow the self-conscious ego to shine forth in full power. The ego must realize that it owes its self-knowledge to a fact that spreads a veil over the knowledge of the world (or universe). . . . everything that stimulated the soul to a vigorous energetic experience of the ego, conceals at the same time the deeper foundations in which this ego has its roots. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity • 59

All knowledge acquired by the ordinary consciousness tends to strengthen the self-conscious ego. (pp. 450-451)

We are now ready to consider the anthroposophical importance of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity for the evolution of thought, ego- consciousness and beyond. Compare the following passage to the one above in the light of what Steiner said about the knowledge gained by ordinary consciousness:

. . . for many thinkers a science of nature was previously considered to be something that [could] be mathematically demonstrated, [but] one finds in [Einstein’s] theory of relativity nothing less than an attempt to declare any real science of nature null and void. For just this was regarded as the scientific nature of mathematics that it could determine the laws of space and time without reference to the observation of nature! Contrary to this view, it is now maintained that the things and processes of nature themselves determine the relations of space and time. . . According to this view, every thought of an essential reality that manifests itself in Nature is precluded. Everything is only in relation to something else. (p. 444)

In the 4th period of philosophy, the Newtonian world view had used the mathematics of algebra, calculus and Euclidean geometry as “tools” and “scaffolding” that were not themselves part of the edifice being constructed. But now Einstein comes along and makes the “scaffolding” of geometry itself a central plan and building material! For Einstein, the presence of matter in the physical universe creates the geometry of space-time which in turn creates the matter of the physical universe! Moreover, matter itself is equivalent to energy. All four previously separate categories of space, time, matter and energy now suffer a “meltdown.” They coalesce into a universal ocean of mutually inter-dependent relationships. And indeed, to a Greek mind such as Plato, the mechanistic Newtonian world view would be seen as an expression of the “dry” Earth element, while the new Einsteinian world view expresses the “moist” element of Water. “Dry” refers to the mutual exclusion of categories, while “moist” indicates their mutual inclusion and interrelationship. To express these two world views in terms of a renewal of ancient Greek picture consciousness, the stories of “Prometheus Bound” and 60 • Tom Mellett

“Tantalus condemned” are apropos. Prometheus is modern ego- consciousness chained to the “rock” of the physical mineral body as thought is “chained” to the brain. Prometheus expresses for ordinary consciousness knowledge of the deterministic Newtonian universe wherein space is the infinite stage upon which the three actors: time, matter and energy play their separate parts. Prometheus was condemned by the Law, Zeus, for stealing fire, or spirit from the divine. On the other hand, Tantalus was condemned for stealing not fire from the gods, but rather ambrosia and nectar, divine food and drink. Tantalus is “chained,” not to a rock, but is stuck in the middle of a river up to his chest. He lives in eternal longing for food and drink, but when he bends down to drink the river water, it recedes from his open mouth; if he reaches up to grasp the fruit of the tree branches above him, they recede as well. Tantalus can only live in the water of life with longing, a picture of spaceless time, the eternal duration of the present moment never fulfilled, while Prometheus waits patiently in timeless space, knowing his future destiny as well as his past. The longing of Tantalus is a picture of ordinary consciousness trying to grasp the etheric realm of life, growth and metamorphosis of form. It also expresses very well the situation described by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. If desolate non-living space is the infinite stage to Prometheus-Newton, the living richness of time is forever forbidden to Tantalus-Einstein by the insurmountable bar­ rier of the finite speed of light. Such a speed can never be achieved by any being or material object in our known universe. In fact, the more an object approaches the limiting speed of light, the more difficult it becomes to go a little faster because the object’s mass increases, a fact that requires more and more energy to propel the object any faster, until the energy need becomes infinite. At that point, the object’s mass would increase beyond the mass of the entire universe, space would contract to infinitesimal thinness, while time would dilate into eternal duration. Now it is the goal of physics to seek the general laws that explain the phenomena of Nature. This is the function of the inorganic sci­ ences as explained by Rudolf Steiner in his book The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World View. When these laws can finally describe the entire universe, then the inorganic sciences be­ come the organic sciences and they then explain phenomena di­ rectly out of the archetype and not the law. This transition is not the Albert Einstein ’s Theory of Relativity • 61 abolition of the physical laws but rather their fulfillment. It is exactly the situation St. Paul writes about in his epistle to the Galatians. Paul explains that rigid adherence the Mosaic Law, including the 10 Com­ mandments, cannot justify us before God. The Law was given not as a code of conduct for humans to follow, but rather to convince humans that it was impossible to follow the law and therefore justifi­ cation had to come through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, who came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. When the Pharisees, the rigid followers and keepers of the Mosaic Law, tried to trap Christ Jesus for blaspheming their Law, Christ replied: “Before Abraham came to be, I am.” Later He spoke of the two new commandments: (1) Love God and (2) Love thy neighbor. These two new commandments are phrased in a positive way, not as negative “thou shalt nots.” Therefore, the two new love commandments re­ quire an active faculty of moral imagination in order to follow them. There is a freedom to picture there that did not exist in the negative sanctions of the old law. It took no faculty of active imagination to be under the iron Necessity of the old law. One could be completely blind in imagination and still try to follow the law. To return to Einstein and Tantalus, where is the old law of the Greeks? It is the figure of Zeus, the Lawgiver. It was Zeus who condemned Prometheus to the rock and Tantalus to the river. And for Einstein, the law dictated the barrier of the finite speed of light measured by all observers in this universe. But the law was not dictated by light itself but rather by human measurement of that light. For light, in its unmeasured essence, a state physicists call “virtual,” is everywhere all at once. The “virtual photon” as it is so prosaically called, has no mass; it exists in some realm outside of our space and time. Thus for such an essence the concept of a “speed of light” is an absurdity, quite possibly the greatest oxymoron of the 20th Century! For unmeasured light is not a noun-like object; it is a verb! It is the activity of seeing, not a passive thing seen! But when light is made into an object by the human act of measurement, the light is completely annihilated and the shattered remnants of its corpse are registered by precise instrumentation to have a finite speed of 186,282 miles per second in a vacuum. Is it possible to overcome this barrier? No, it must be recognized and respected for what it is. That is the great legacy of Albert Einstein. His theory of relativity forces us to recognize this insurmountable 62 • Tom Mellett

barrier of Tantalus. And to help explain this to both anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists alike, I would like to put forth a thought experiment that was inspired by the great English physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, who in 1919, experimentally verified Einstein’s predic­ tion of the bending of star light by the mass of the sun. Sir Arthur pictured the scientist as a fisherman who cast his net into the ocean and caught a lot of large fish, while the smaller fish escaped through the netting. Just as the fisherman would go home with his catch and forget about the little fish, so the scientist builds his science only on the basis of the phenomena he catches in his measurement net. But what if the scientist decided to catch the smaller fish? He would then build a finer and finer net and catch smaller and smaller fish. Extend­ ing this thought to its logical conclusion, what if the fisherman built a net so fine, that nothing) not even watery could get through? Then it would cease to be a net and become instead a barrier, and the fisherman would cease being a fisherman and become an observer of the fish in their habitat. The barrier would then be merely a convenient way to focus his observational activity. He might still catch fish in order to eat, but he wouldn’t build a whole science on his catching activity alone. What Albert Einstein showed us was the finite barrier to our per­ ceptions, not the infinite essence of our being. He really pointed out the illusion of the external world created by our “I am” conscious­ ness in trying to measure infinite light. When Rudolf Steiner speaks of Albert Einstein forcing us to look for the spirit in a “realm tran­ scending Nature,” he is telling us to develop a higher form of “per­ ceiving in thinking and thinking in perceiving,” a path of knowledge that leads not to the abolition of the ego-consciousness, but rather the fulfillment of ego-consciousness. From now on, Western human­ ity can refill the emptiness of desolate Promethean space with the substance of true imaginations, a fulfillment of the old mythological picture consciousness. And the longing of Tantalus can be fulfilled by a direct perception of the living essence of time in true metamor­ phosis and morphology— or the entire universe as a living organism. We inherit the finished work of creation as the Rosicrucian saying goes: “Ex Deo nascimur” (out of God we are born). Albert Einstein became a pioneer or prophet of the second: “In Christo morimur” (in Christ we die), since we can no longer find the original spirit in Nature. Finally, we must fulfill the third: “Per Spiritum Sanctum Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity • 63 reviviscimus” (through the Holy Spirit we are resurrected). In a Pentecost lecture, Rudolf Steiner identified the Holy Spirit as the transformed or redeemed Lucifer. He also identified Prometheus as the Greek Lucifer. It is then up to all of us with our strong ego- consciousnesses to liberate Prometheus-Lucifer from his chains and to resurrect our way to the realm of the spirit transcending Nature. A Meditation on the Meeting of the Technological and the Traditional Eastern Mind: On The Way To Scientific Maturity

BY JOHN LANGE

eideigger (1977) has portrayed the historical accomplishment of H the particularly Western scientific and technological conscious­ ness, techne, as inextricably linked to our separation and progressive estrangement from the ground of Being here in the West. Throughout the world, now including China and the East, this Western conscious­ ness is beckoning and threatening a usurpation of traditional spiritual orient-ations with its occidental nihilistic will-to-power in the guise of global economic and technological development. At this historical moment when some in the West have come to see the great danger of our unbridled technological enthusiasm to the entire planetary eco­ system, traditional cultures are beginning to be seen as repositories of deep wisdom whose stores may help lead us to wise solutions to the extraordinary problems we face. The spiritual, philosophical, and psychological disciplines developed in the East are likely to be among the richest of these traditional stores of wisdom. Traditional Chinese thought, with its central focus of living in har­ mony with nature and the cosmos seems particularly suited to provid­ ing a rich soil for a more deeply rooted and profound development of an ecological consciousness sufficient to provide redress for our planet’s wounded state. At the end of his forward to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The I Ching, Carl Jung wrote:

64 Meeting of the Technological and the Traditional Eastern Mind • 65

Like a part of nature, . . . ( The I Ching) waits until it is discovered. It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom—if there be such—it seems to be the right book. To one person its spirit appears as clear as day; to another, shadowy as twilight; to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it is not obliged to find it true. Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning, (p. xxxix)

Jung’s characterization of The I Ching as “like a part of nature . . . offer(ing) neither facts nor power” is in clear opposition to the West­ ern technological/scientific modus operandi in which mountains of facts are manipulated in the service of gaining power over an adver­ sary, whether that adversary is a competing company, political state, or nature herself. Jung’s characterization of the range of enlighten­ ment experienced by readers of The I Ching as “clear as day . . . shadowy as twilight; (and) dark as night” recalls not only Kirkegaard’s dictum that “truth is subjectivity”, but also that truth is revelatory and not a judgment made by our mind. In William Barrett’s explication of Heidegger’s thought, he develops the idea that a fun­ damental consequence of the Western accomplishment of the scien­ tific frame of reference and making the entire natural world an ob­ ject of study and manipulation is the loss of the ability to experience the more profound truth that is revealed when one is not cut off from the natural world but is in harmony with the Tao. Barrett wrote:

The Greeks detached beings from the vast environing ground of Being. This act of detachment was accompanied by a momentous shift in the meaning of truth for the Greeks, a shift which Heidegger pinpoints as taking place in a single passage in Plato’s Republic, . . . the allegory of the cave. The quality of unhiddenness had been considered the mark of truth; but with Plato in that passage truth came to be defined . . . as the correct­ ness of an intellectual judgment. Truth henceforth resided in the human intellect insofar as that intellect judged truly about things. By adopting this meaning of truth as the primary and essential one, the Greeks were able to develop science, the unique and distinguishing characteristic of Western civilization . . . The great historical parting of the ways between Western and Eastern man 66 • John Lange

came about because each made a different decision as to what truth is. (p. 230-231)

Thinking about these issues, I took The I Ching and, in the paradox (to the Western mind) of meaningful chance which centrally serves as the way in which its wisdom is delivered, opened to K’un/The Receptive. The judgment of this hexagram reads:

The receptive brings about sublime success, furthering through the perseverance of a mare. If the superior man under­ takes something and tries to lead, he goes astray; but if he follows, he finds guidance.

Feminists in general and eco-feminists in particular have argued that our world’s environmental degradation, pervasive militarism, and the extreme social and economic inequality both within and between modern nation states are all a function of the male-dominant, pater­ nalistic consciousness in technologically advanced societies. The femi­ nists’ remedy for this panoply of social and environmental ills is the same as that counselled by the oracle of The I Ching-.

The receptive brings about sublime success, Furthering through the perseverance of a mare.

This suggests that yin, receptivity, and a strong femininity evoked by the image of the mare needs to be integrated into the overly yang and masculine technological consciousness. The counsel of The I Ching suggests that this greater receptivity and feminization of our Western scientific and technological consciousness is a foundational prerequi­ site for ecological, political, and social healing. Heidegger’s (1966) thought— that the greatest danger to the planet is that we will become unable to think in any other than a calculative, representational man­ ner and that we will forget how to think meditatively, receptively, prayerfully— is also affirmed by this particular counsel. I asked The I Ching more formally, using the coin oracle:

How can this integration of these ancient stores of wisdom into the modern scientific frame of reference take place? Meeting of the Technological and the Traditional Eastern Mind • 67

The I Ching answered with Ch’ien/The Creative with a changing line in the fourth place. This hexagram, as contrasted with K’un/The Receptive discussed aboved, is made up solely of yang, or mascu­ line, lines. It seems here that The I Ching is offering a paradoxical counsel — that the way to bring about an integration of the feminine and receptive into modern technological consciousness is through the full development of the archetypal male spirit. But this apparent paradox is actually in keeping with an essential precept of The I Ching that the full development of all processes in both the natural and human world engender its opposite, as the full development of day brings night, the full development of winter brings summer, or in this case, the full development of the masculine brings about the feminine. In the commentary on this hexagram Ch’ien/The Creative, The I Ching says:

When all the lines are nines (meaning that the male energies working in every aspect of the issue at hand are fully mature), it means: There appears a flight of dragons without heads. Good fortune. When all the lines are nines, it means that the whole hexagram is in motion and changes into the hexagram K’un, The Receptive, whose character is devotion. The strength of the Cre­ ative and the mildness of the Receptive unite. Strength is indi­ cated by the flight of dragons, mildness by the fact that their heads are hidden. This means that mildness in action joined to strength of decision bring good fortune.

The changing line in the fourth place offers additional insight in meeting our present historical challenge:

Wavering flight over the depths. No blame. A place of transi­ tion has been reached, and free choice can enter in. A twofold possibility is presented to the great man: he can soar to the heights and play an important part in the world, or he can withdraw into solitude and develop himself. He can go the way of the hero or that of the holy sage who seeks seclusion. There is no general law to say which of the two is the right way. Each one in this situation must make a free choice according to the inner law of his being. If the individual acts consistently and is true to 68 • John Lange

himself, he will find the way that is appropriate for him. This way is right for him and without blame.

Rudolf Steiner felt that the very danger of the Western spiritless scientific and technological thinking contained within it as an inextri­ cable aspect of its dangerousness the new possibility of human free­ dom, that the very bifurcation and alienation of the human being from nature allowed the possibility of freedom for the human being to emerge. Steiner’s vision that the deeper gift to humankind engen­ dered by the emergence of scientific thinking in the West —this new greater possibility of human freedom— is strikingly affirmed by The I Ching’s response that, for our Western scientific frame of reference, “a place of transition has been reached, and free choice can enter in”. In one of his lectures Steiner said:

In the beginning of earth evolution divine spiritual beings provided for us; they incorporated into the earth’s organization the soil, the climate, finally even the cultural life .... The gods had provided for mankind everything that was at hand in good order. This has essentially vanished in our time .... The cata­ strophic character of our age is connected with this dissipation of the primeval, divine content and the creation of a new content by human beings on their own. (p. 224)

The I Ching counsel— “Wavering flight over the depths . . . A place of transition has been reached and free choice can enter in”—is also consistent with Steiner’s thinking in an earlier lecture (p. 185)— “Men­ tal life must emerge out of the chaotic substrata of man’s individual­ ity.” That is, the “wavering” and implicitly the choice in our “flight over the depths” is a metaphor for our spiritual life’s and our emanci­ pated ego’s emerging ability to choose whether or not to descend into the depths of the chaotic substrata, the archetypal unconscious source of our individuality. The I Chings advice in the fourth changing line in the first hexagram continues:

A twofold possibility is presented to the great man: he can soar to the heights and play an important part in the world, or he can withdraw into solitude and develop himself. Meeting of the Technological and the Traditional Eastern Mind • 69

This counsel suggests that the spirit of the division of the Buddhist spiritual stream into the Theravada and Mahayana schools is not fundamentally a schism or disagreement about which contains the truer essence of Buddha’s teachings, but more of a presaging and preparation for our present spiritual challenge when individual hu­ man beings, conforming to the advice of The I Ching, “must make a free choice according to the inner law of his being”, a choice that is independent of one’s geographical and cultural residence. It is possible to envision that the awareness of this spiritual freedom of choice might bring about an extraordinary affirmation of cultural, ethnic and spiritual diversity in place of the world’s long history of ethnic-based spiritual animosities, since a greater diversity of spiritual paths would bring about a greater freedom of spiritual choice for everyone. In a long meditation on the meaning of technological thinking, Heidegger (1977) returned again and again to a stanza in one of Hölderin’s poems: “Where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Perhaps one healing seed already starting to take root in the soil of our dangerous confrontation with the essence of technology is this spiritual tolerance based on a new autochthony, rooted not in the soil of our native land and ethnic identity, but in the compassionate un­ derstanding that the very existence of a variety of spiritual paths is a treasure enabling all of us greater freedom to develop our own unique individuality. The traditional Eastern spiritual streams continue flow­ ing, and I feel grateful that I have been given the opportunity to drink and be led to some greater understanding by the spirit of the Tao coursing through The I Ching. Heidegger (1971) wrote:

The word “way” probably is an ancient primary word that speaks to the reflective mind of man. The key word in Laotse’s poetic thinking is Tao, which “properly speaking” means way. But because we are prone to think of “way” superficially as a stretch connecting two places, our word “way” has all too rashly been considered unfit to name what Tao says. Tao is then trans­ lated as reason, mind, raison, meaning, logos.

Yet Tao could be the way that gives all ways, the very source of our power to think what reason, mind, meaning, logos properly mean to say—properly, by their proper nature. Perhaps 70 • John Lange

the mystery of mysteries of thoughtful saying conceals itself in the word “way,” Tao, if only we will let these names return to what they leave unspoken, if only we are capable of this, to allow them to do so. Perhaps the enigmatic power of today’s reign of method also, and indeed preeminently, stems from the fact that the methods, not withstanding their efficiency, are after all merely the runoff of a great hidden stream which moves all things along and makes way for everything. All is way. (p.92)

If the hubris presently aligned with technological thinking could be fettered by an acknowledgement like this one from Heidegger that its methods “are merely the runoff of a great hidden stream which moves all things along”, that its wellspring and source is a mystery beyond words and concepts which Eastern sages have called Tao, Nirvana, Atman, Brahman —then technological thinking could drink again and renew itself from its source which is, following Heidegger (1968), a thinking that is simultaneously and originarily a thanking. If this could happen, technological thinking might as enthusiastically search for its proper limits and use as it now seeks to expand its scope and enhance its power. This tempered technological thinking could again create tools that serve us, like the hearth and the plow, rather than the present situation in which it has no sense of its proper limits and attempts to press human beings in the service of its own unbound will-to-power. How can we bridle technological thinking so that its power and method are harnessed to human designs? The I Ching counsels a completion of this powerfully yang, archetypally masculine impulse which inquires into all aspects of the physical world. As Odysseus’ last challenge was returning home, this maturing hero called science needs to turn the rigor and power of its examination lens in on itself, onto its foundational frames of reference. Under this examination, the objectivity of science may be seen not as fact, but as belief. This illusion of objectivity has had a heuristic value for the enterprise of science itself in that its promise of an objective method which eventually reveals all the secrets of the universe has secured many adepts exercising their central human longing for timeless and immutable truths. The illusion of scientific objectivity has enabled all who believe in it a measure of a feeling of immortality, but at a cost of damping or cutting off the desire for authentic religious experience. And yet the fact that the scientific method knows no cultural or Meeting of the Technological and the Traditional Eastern Mind • 71 geographic boundaries may allow itself to serve as a prototype of a world religion whose ideology is vibrant and clear in every corner of the globe. As the objectivity of science is seen as illusory, those who surrendered their culture-bound spiritual rootedness for this faith in the scientific method as the ultimate arbiter of reality may be seen as having made a sacrifice that is redemptive. Perhaps this sacrifice—the suffering of their spiritual alienation— has engendered an even greater freedom for the individual human being to choose a religious discipline that “accords to the inner law of his being”, a choice that now— because of the spiritual sacrifice of all “believers” in science who uprooted their ethnic-grounded spiritual connectedness— is no longer bound by geographical, cultural, or historical residence. Once freed from Faustian inflation brought about by the projection of immortality-longings onto the body of science by believers in its ultimate objectivity, technological thinking will again become a ser­ vant of humanity and able to create contemporary versions of life-affirming tools such as the plow and the hearth appropriate for our present historical situation.

NOTES Barrett, William. Irrational Man, Doubleday & Co; 1958. Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking, Harper & Row; 1966. Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking?, Harper & Row; 1968. Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language, Harper & Row; 1971. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, Harper & Row, 1977. Steiner, Rudolf. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986. The I Ching, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1967. Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy *

BY MICHAEL LIPSON

nthroposophy and psychoanalysis derive from the life work of Atwo Austrian near-contemporaries, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) and Sigmund Freud (1859-1938), and the movements they founded remain inescapably tied to the two men. Both attempted to reconcile the non-rational foundations of human consciousness with Western natural science. Both regarded human society and individuals at the turn of the century as psychically sick, and both proposed cures particularly apt, they thought, for the people of our time to embrace. The work of both, in its aim at self-conscious and self-directed lib­ eration of each individual, was persecuted by followers of another 20th century Austrian, Adolf Hitler. Freud’s legacy has enjoyed an unparalleled cultural ascendancy since his death, so that all biography, literature, philosophy and psy­ chology bear to some degree the stamp of the psychoanalytic world view. Steiner lamented as early as in his lectures of the 19-teens on psychoanalysis that the time is over when a young girl can kiss her father without its being taken as a sexual event, (c.f. Steiner, Psycho­ analysis and Spiritual Psychology, Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1990). Steiner’s work and the fruits of the Anthroposophical movement have remained far less known, less culturally nameable, less obviously pervasive. Something has changed fundamentally be­ cause Steiner developed Anthroposophy, but it has not succeeded as the cultural movement he intended it to be.

______*Revised by the author from a talk given in Great Barrington, MA, September 1994.

72 Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy • 73

Psychoanalysis has been largely supplanted, in the world of psychotherapy, by many other schools, yet it retains a special status as their common technical ancestor and in its pretension to explain the whole of human functioning and cultural history. Steiner’s .critique of psychoanalysis in the ‘teens still applies, with much validity, not only to today’s psychoanalysis but to the range of cognitive-behavioral, body-centered, and even “transpersonal” therapies of our time. By comparing anthroposophy to psychoanalysis, I am also comparing it to all psychologies in their fallen state—even to anthroposophy. Freud started from dream. His 1899 Interpretation of Dreams, especially its dense seventh chapter, contains in embryo the whole of his later works. The dream, for Freud, is only partly known. In the morning, we recall the “manifest” dream, and must guess our way back to the “latent” dream—itself never directly available to waking consciousness—through our interpretation of the dream’s images. When we do so, we find that the dream always expresses a wish, to which it (partially) accords the satisfaction denied in waking life. For the wishes are often sexual or aggressive—at any rate, they run counter to social or personal norms. The remembered dream allows for partial release of a drive, a biologically rooted impulse, whose operations have been pushed out of consciousness because they are unacceptable. The work of psychoanalysis is to allow fully into wak­ ing consciousness the conceptual contents, though, as we said, never the direct current experience, contained in the dream. Steiner takes his start not from dream, but from thinking. In his 1894 Philosophy of Freedom, he focuses not on a finished content from the recent psychic past— such as the daytime psychic events, pushed out of awareness, that give rise to the Freudian dream— but rather on the current, active process of thinking itself. Thinking is not a memory of something that happened (cf. Freud in Studies on Hyste­ ria, 1899): “Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences”, but something we are currently creating. His earliest works are an episte- mological series taking their sustenance (not their source) from the scientific writings of Goethe that Steiner was called on to edit while still in his early twenties. While Freud began as a medical doctor facing quasi-physical ail­ ments in patients who were to be named, in the psychoanalytic litera­ ture, only by confidential pseudonyms (e.g., “Anna von O”), Steiner 74 • Michael Lipson

began with the philosophy and science of the German speaking world’s most exemplary, most nameable thinker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and with the healthy formation of ideas. Since Freud’s work began with the treatment of illness, the dream was theorized on the model of a psychoneurotic symptom. It was always and essentially conflictual, representing a final outcome of the battle between (utlimately) the body’s wishes and our parent’s commands. Steiner, by contrast, was concerned to describe the nature of healthy thinking and perceiving, a “conflict-free” sphere, as the generation of Ego Psychologists would have called it. Even more: when he focused on thinking, it was not ordinary thinking which Steiner celebrated, but a healthy (and therefore highly abnormal) thinking— a “living” thinking that stands in relation to our normal waking life and our normal (e.g., scientific) thinking as this stands in relation to dreaming (see in this connection Otto Palmer, Rudolf Steiner on his Book, The Philosophy o f Freedom, 1975). For Freud, there is no higher rationality than that of scientific thinking, and this is itself a mixed blessing, being won at the cost of our more real earthier selves. The psychoanalytic method Freud developed (with Breuer and their creative patient Bertha von Pappenheim) attempted to replicate the state of dreaming. The patient was to state what came to mind freely, relaxing the censorship of socially unacceptable contents, and so be led by the ever invisible unconscious to areas of conflict, there to work them through and out by this very act of verbalizing and rendering them conscious— also rendering them interpersonal, as later analysts would note. The recumbent attitude on the psychoanalytic couch, a holdover from mesmerist practices, was meant to encourage a prelogical relaxation of conscious mental control. The dreamer’s translation of primitive emotional contents into verbal and imagistic expression in the dream corresponds to the recumbent patient’s inten­ tionally relaxed, “freely associative” speech on the couch. As the manifest dream had to be interpreted back to its original latent form, so the associative chain of the patient’s speech had to be interpreted back to its instinctual or conflictive roots. Steiner’s methods lead in the exactly opposite direction, away from dreaming toward heightened waking. The clarity, self-direction, and cogency that characterize waking thought, as compared with dream-thought, are redoubled in that activity he calls, with misleading, insistent phenomenological simplicity, “thinking.” In psychoanalytic Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy • 75 theory, waking thought appears as something like an evasion of the truer reality that is sublogical, biological, primitive, sexual and aggressive; anthroposophical research finds normal waking thought to be the lowest derivative of a truer reality that is logical, spiritual, creative, uncreated and loving. The “attention” in Steiner is an infin­ itely directible, teachable faculty. It is who we are, and through it we are, potentially, everything. In Freud, the attention appears under a different name as “libido,” and attaches primarily to the physical body. We could follow these comparisons even into myth—though of course their expression in myth does not increase their legitimacy. For example, whereas Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival throws down his reins on the neck of the Grailsteed to be led by this divine beast to the scene of the Grail, Freud has the ego, the puny waking self, throw down its reins on the neck of the stallion of its own biological life to find its proper way (the image can be found in Freud’s 1923 The Ego and the Id). The key difference here is not easy to see. For it is not only a different inner agent, but a different kind of agent and gesture altogether. Freud and Jung alike advocate a lowering of the mental level to attain a truer self; in Steiner, what corresponds to throwing one’s reins onto the Grailsteed’s neck actu­ ally entails an unusually constituted increase in the level of cognitive clarity and strength of will. Steiner’s orientation is always toward a future state perceived as good, while Freud wants to emphasize a past state that may well be unsavory by adult Western standards. The “future” and “past” being referred to here are both individual/cognitive and anthropological/ historical. They did very different things with the same Darwin and Haeckel. Steiner was interested in the benevolent future of the human species as being, in principle, of unlimited potential for transformation and creativity. And this “future” is potentially available and present to each person in each act of cognition, of knowing. The future will represent return with a difference: the spiritual worlds, in which we lived as infants and as an infant species, and from which we benefited without knowing of them, we will reinvent and reinhabit. For Freud, the “past” of the species, when we were more openly hostile and sexual, is also the past of any individual, who recapitulates it in infancy and only gradually submits to the structure of society. The development of the Freudian adult, then, is also return with a difference: toward relaxed censorship of “primitive,” earthy drives 76 • Michael Lipson

and toward their integration into adaptive social functioning. Both thinkers look to a final state that recapitulates the originary, but with an increase in individual self-awareness. Steiner noted that our ordinary life of thought is like a field of corpses, and the healthy response at seeing this is to seek the actual life of thinking from which these corpses have been sundered. The corpses (our finished thoughts of the normal kind) have already become; they are of the past in this sense; they are dead. The life-in-thinking (or perceiving, etc.) that one seeks is not of the past, nor even of the present, but ultimately of the currently-experienced future. To live it is therefore to step outside the ordinary flow of time. Psychoanalysis knows nothing of this kind of past or this kind of future. When Steiner criticized psychoanalysis, he tellingly included Jung with Freud, though Jung had already broken with Freud at the time. For Steiner, the essential problem with Freud was the inadequate cognitive means by which very real areas of human life are addressed. Jung’s archetypes and symbols stem from no higher cognitive level than Freud’s “neuroses,” as a close reading of his Memories, Dreams and Reflections makes clear. If anything, the sense for the real is weaker in Jung. For it is not the apparent content of our insights that matters, but rather the quality, the intensity, of our involvement. “Our science is a substitute for our religion,” remarked T. S. Eliot, “and so is our reli­ gion.” What matters is not whether we say “phallic stage,” (Freud) or “anima,” (Jung) or “etheric body,” (Steiner), but the level of cognition we bring to bear. We do not understand a life by arranging it in seven year cycles, any more than we understand it by linking adult to childhood psychosexual conflicts. A person’s real life is the life expe­ rienced meditatively, or recalled meditatively— in other words, as Emerson pointed out, “a very few moments.” Steiner was far from considering sexuality unimportant, nor was he squeamish about it. But its essential reduction to animality and lust, the assumption that we know what it is and need either simply to celebrate it or catalogue our evasions from it— this psychoanalytic style was very far from Steiner’s. There was no allowance in Freud, nor is there in most of the schools of psychology today, for the idea that sexuality might be much more than we imagine or can perceive with normal consciousness. Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy • 77

Freud became increasingly pessimistic, over the years, as to the curative potential of psychoanalysis; Steiner always maintained that every human being (not just the “analyzable” or higher functioning ones) has the potential, with time and work, to transform themselves radically. In a famous passage in the early Studies on Hysteria, Freud grimly claims that “much will have been achieved” if a patient’s “neu­ rotic misery” can be changed into “ordinary unhappiness.” Here is Steiner in Knowledge o f the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Chap­ ter 10: “It is given to us to perfect ourselves, in time to transform ourselves utterly. But this transformation must take place in our inner­ most nature, in our life of thought.” We could go on contrasting aspects of Freud with aspects of Steiner, but I would like to pause and consider just how similar they are from a certain standpoint. At the beginning of this century, both men founded movements that sought, with great ambition, to ex­ plain the whole of human life, accounting for not only local, mod­ ern, Western history, but for human being as such. Their totalizing systems have tended to attract fervent followers who cannot, of their own experience, confirm what the Master said but who preach the truths they have received. Both were eager for humans to change themselves on the basis of individual insight, an outrageous project by the standards of earlier civilizations. Freud’s letters have revealed that he was quite fascinated by psychic experience, even in such areas as precognition, but he always stayed away from them in his written works, aiming as he did at scientific respectability. Here and there, for example, in his letters to his friend Fliess, in his repeated flirtation with psychic phenomena, and at moments in his published works (e.g. in Civilization and its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion, Moses and Monotheism), we glimpse his yearning for a transcendence he feels compelled to deny. We can also recall the anecdote in Jung’s memoirs in which he reports Freud as saying that the sexual etiology of neurosis is the only defense against the “black tide of mud” of occultism. Looking at their affinity from the other direction, we can notice that, though Steiner often referred favorably to the world’s religions present and past while Freud analyzed, the better to dismiss them, Steiner actually was thoroughly modern, even post-modern, in his rejection of received religious dogma. His early works, especially the scorching “Egotism and Philosophy” of 1899, attempt to root out the 78 • Michael Lipson reliance on any extra-human source of certainty, authority or truth. Like Freud, then, Steiner participated in the very 20th Century notion, close to the heart of the best Western science, that it is up to each contemporary soul to achieve its own understanding and to base its actions accordingly. Yet— and here we come back to contrasts— Steiner and Freud dif­ fered fundamentally on the question of the nature of the reality to be sought and the conditions of its knowing. Freud, like the natural scientists of his day and our own, was thoroughly Kantian. That is, he based his theories on the idea that we cannot know directly the source of our world, nor of our own consciousness. In Freud, the sources for dreams, symptoms, and all the more so for art and creativ­ ity, lie in the realm of the to-be guessed-at, the to-be-deduced. We look at clues, follow a trail, and may triumphantly declare that we have found the perpetrator of our mental life: a quasi-physical “drive” or its “derivatives.” For Steiner there is, in principle, nothing hidden. He says of himself in The Course Of My Zz/ethat at a certain period he made sure not be influenced by harmful forces, “not even uncon­ sciously.” In the post-Freudian world we have to wonder how he can be sure of that. If we thought anyone really could be sure, it would present a far greater challenge to our world view than anything in psychoanalysis or the entire range of psychotherapies that exist today. According to the anthroposophical view, we can meet everything and any being directly if we will only transform our cognitive powers adequately. The Kantian stance foregoes this intimacy but gains in fixity: I may not be able directly to experience the ground of my world, the source of the qualities familiar to me, but at least I know they are fixed and there—unalterably present whether I perceive them or not. In the Steinerian view, a view to which science and philosophy are gradually, though only superficially, acceding, there is no “outer reality.” We have rather a world of meanings in which we ourselves participate. Both thinkers were shocking in their day for declaring that the familiar psychic world actually conceals a world that is much more eloquent, that speaks, that has significance in every part. This is reflected for example in the (little) psychoanalytic joke: one analyst passes a colleague on the street; the colleague says, “Hi, how are you?” and afterwards the first analyst mutters to himself, “I wonder what he meant by that?” Freud was well aware that he saw meaning Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy • 79 where others saw insignificant jokes, meaningless errors, or chance acts. For Freud, every utterance, indeed every human activity, is sig­ nificant. The meanings in question, as we have seen, tend to be relatively unacceptable socially, relatively primitive, relatively earthy or biologically based. When he quoted the Scholastic motto, saxa loquuntur, “the stones speak,” he meant that the apparently inert symptoms of hysteria, for example, could be made to submit to analy­ sis and yield a fruit of “meaning”: e.g., that a young woman secretly wished her ill father dead. Steiner’s “meanings” are of a different order. Where a symptom means something else, for Freud, something at which we must guess, to Steiner a tree or a stone means itself. As we first see it, it is the misunderstood aspect of a sacred meaning. Its very physicality is such a meaning, not an outward “thing,” other than and foreign to us. Freud would have us ignore the physical world and debunk the social world, rendering them more and more profane; Steiner’s training in cognition would have us know these worlds as holy and make more. In psychoanalysis, which has at times had pretensions to being a general psychology, there is remarkably little to be said about the physical world. Its understanding is presumed to come from natural science as currently constituted. In anthroposophy, there is the asser­ tion that we do not really know the physical world at all, unless we develop our cognitive capacities in a profound and unaccustomed way. What we then find is not, as for natural science, inferential knowledge of smaller and smaller things out there (atoms, particles, forces) but deeper and deeper meanings in which we ourselves are intimately implicated. This intimacy of cognition in Steiner— and cog­ nition of the world, of every pebble, blade of grass, owl and human— has as its impoverished correlative in Freud only a suspicion of states of “merger” as primitive if not pathological. And yet, while my list of contrasts to the advantage of anthroposophy threatens to grow infinite (we could, for example, add the importance of the analyst to Freud’s patients as a source of insight and relationship, and set against it Steiner’s warnings—with respect to psychoanalysis itself and adult schooling generally—that the student’s own efforts and non-professional relationships are the decisive factor) there is at least one great benefit from psychoanalysis that is perhaps less salient in anthroposophy. I am thinking of actual effort to transform speech. Where Anthroposophists may talk about the results 80 • Michael Lipson

of spiritual scientific research, Freudians and their therapeutic descendants actually engage in the “research” of psychotherapy. There is therefore an emphasis on continual current practice of the highest forms of interpersonal knowing available. The psychoanalytic forms are certainly inadequate, but on the other hand they are continually changing. Anthroposophy has tended to follow gradually after Steiner’s “indi­ cations” in a number of fields, rarely or never claiming to attain the summit, or even the lower foothills, of his cognitive achievements. Psychoanalysts have perhaps been emboldened by the relative humbleness of their own Sage’s achievements, for all these are overglorified, and so they have not only actually practiced his meth­ ods, but made so bold as continually to improve them. Thus, the original Freudian detective hunt for repressed memories of trauma, the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey matching of symptoms to their antecedents or assumed “meanings,” has given way to a myriad of techniques and styles in current psychoanalysis. The emphasis on developing a real and supportive relationship with the analyst, which would have shocked first or second generation analysts, is now com­ monplace, as is the view that it is the interactive process, not the insight into “contents,” that is curative. The idea of analysis as verbal play, leading to spontaneity and creativity, has emerged and flour­ ished in part as a result of the innovations of D. W. Winnicott in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. Feminist psychoanalysis has questioned and rewritten many of the basic tenets of early Freudianism, attempting to undo some of its power relations, chauvinism, and epistemological naivete. In all this, psychoanalysis has moved with the cultural cur­ rents of our century. Dare Anthroposophy point to Steiner’s mistakes and show how it has moved beyond them? Or is it still prey to hero-worship, timidity, traditionalism, lack of exercise? The possible anthroposophical objection here, that after all Freud’s achievements can be surveyed, and therefore improved upon, while Steiner’s continue to lie outside our range of perception, is only partially valid. The anthroposophical movement has perhaps been misled by the wealth of its legacy from Steiner. We have so many directions to pursue, in agriculture, in education, in arts, in social development, in inner work. We have Steiner’s writings and thou­ sands of lectures. We have the work of many great anthroposophists. Perhaps we therefore forget what is most important for growth: our Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy • 81 moment-to-moment poverty (though this alone is the condition for attainment, celebrated in the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount). At least the psychoanalytic world view, world-weary and suspicious of easy consolation, remains close to the poverty of twentieth century experience, a stark experience of the cruelty, uselessness, repetitive­ ness, selfishness and ignorance that characterize so much of our lives. Having less august goals and less rosy hopes, psychoanalysis tends to confront people with the meanness of life, and in the right hands this can become a spur to action. They are the right hands when, in spite of a materialist world view, an analyst manages to bring the patient’s awareness to a higher pitch of intensity, and so to bring forth that which recognizes the meanness and so is other than it. As Keats wrote in “What the Thrush Said,” “He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, and he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.” We can note, in this connection, the striking passage in the traditional psychoanalyst I. H. Paul’s Letters to Simon (1972), in his description of the practice of “impassive listening”: “. . . it gave the sessions a quality they didn’t have before; it generally made a significant difference in the way my patient spoke. He still spoke to me (and when I felt he didn’t I was quick to comment on that), but at the same time he also spoke to himself. At times, it was as if part of him was listening in the same way that I was listening. At such times, there was an almost uncanny sense that there were two of us in the room.” Anthroposophy, with its killingly good answers to fundamental questions, its totalizing view, its great master, and its spiritual worlds waiting for our participation, in the wrong hands can tend to cast a spun-sugar curtain over our necessary experience of emptiness, and cast up another Kantian otherness just when we need to undo the old one. By the “wrong hands,” I mean my own hands—or anyone’s at those (perhaps inevitable) moments when we forget that the spiritual worlds are ours to create, not ours to have. To advance on the path of spiritual research is to advance, to experience, to go through something and know we are doing so. For this to happen we must also make moral advances, and really see ourselves in our maculate variety. How much effort is really put into seeing our interpersonal foibles, our heldover angers, pettiness, jeal­ ousy, pride and lust? Yet these unglamorous, essential lessons are staples of psychoanalytic practice, whose practitioners have also striven to avoid moralistic shaming of the patient. 82 • Michael Lipson

In his early Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (1904/5), Steiner conjures up the image of the Guardian of the Threshhold, part of whose mission is to confront us with our failings and incompletenesses. While anthroposophists await the stunning vision of this awesome entity, perhaps eager to endure a salutary and interesting trial, psychoanalysts may prompt their patients actually to achieve key aspects of the encounter. For its meaning is not primarily, “I saw a spiritual being!” but rather (in part), “I am jealous, selfish, deceitful, vengeful, stupid, proud,” (and, we must add) “etc.” Some years ago, the educator David Spangler, at a conference on the nature of evil, listened patiently to an account of the ornate spiritual healing technique a participant described and then he remarked, “The spiritual worlds are very forgiving. They will fill pretty well any form we care to put them in.” We must ask our selves whether in psychoanalysis and other epistemologically insufficient psychologies (Gestalt, Jungian, Transpersonal, Bodywork, Eriksonian, Cognitive-Behavioral, Rational-Emotive) some of the spiritual development foregone by anthroposophy has in fact taken place. Why did Dante put the Inferno before the Purgatorio and the Paradiso? The answer to this question also clarifies the usefulness of psychoanalytic issues being fully, repeatedly, even demeaningly brought home— even if our true home lies in a country unknown to psychoanalysis. The Inner Path: Seven Lectures by Karl König

by Karl König

(Camphill Press)

Review by Gary Lachman

One of the most difficult, yet crucial ideas to grasp in self-development is the notion of the inner path. This slim volume of lectures by an authoritative voice in spiritual science is a very readable and practical guide through the difficulties of this thorny subject. Much writing on inner work, whether anthroposophical or otherwise, obscures its fundamental aspects. Karl König’s lectures strip away misleading rhetoric, and present the realities of inner work in clean, hard outlines. The result is a description of meditation and inner development that is as powerful as it is simple and straightforward. Karl König is best known for his lifelong work with the handi­ capped, and for starting the Camphill Rudolf Steiner Schools for chil­ dren in need of special care. The Camphill Movement began in Scotland in 1939, and later expanded to include adolescents and adults, with numerous Camphill schools, colleges, and village com­ munities throughout Europe. König, an accomplished author and lec­ turer, died in 1966. Several themes emerge in these short lectures; most central is König’s emphasis on how one engages in meditation and the inner path. König makes much of Christian Morgenstern’s remark that “Those who walk toward the spirit, walk alone.” He is critical of students who claim to follow an inner path, but whose ‘work’ con­ sists of endless discussion and group reading of anthroposophical meditations. Although group work and discussion are valuable, the inner path is something we encounter on our own. No one can walk it with us. Also, one of the most powerful means of developing the inner world is to keep silent about our experiences there. König points out that individuals who chatter about their spiritual develop­ ment are furthest from doing any actual inner work. Again the em­ phasis is on how. As König said to his audience in 1960, “Only if we

83 84 • Gary Lachman prepare the ground may we place a jewel into the centre of a group of people.” Especially important for König is the correct use of mantrams, meditational verses designed to lead the student into states of mind and soul conducive to experiencing spiritual truths. He emphasizes that mere intellectual repetition of a mantram is useless; we must bring our whole soul life to it. “Our soul must burn, become hot and cold, weave in the experience of joy and sorrow, so that the creative power of the world can live within us once again.” Equally indispensable is the Rückschau, the backward view of each day’s events. Rudolf Steiner taught that we live in two streams of time: the everyday stream that runs from past to future, and a different stream, that runs from future to past. Practicing the Rückschau, we learn to live in this second stream. Doing this consciously, we do some of the work otherwise performed by sleep, and thus open ourselves to absorb more from our nightly experiences in the spirit world. Connecting his remarks on the Rückschau to Steiner’s teaching on the “mood of prayer,” König tells us that if we truly contemplate our past, and try to understand how the choices we have made have led to who we are, “it will engender a warmth of soul that we have never experienced before.” Likewise an attitude of trust and accep­ tance toward the unknowable future—which casts its shadow before it in our fears and anxieties— will lead to an experience of light. We then learn to accept the future with “the knowledge that what is to come is justified.” The lectures are filled with aphorisms that can themselves be used as focuses for meditation. “We work inwardly to keep alive the tiny flame of our humanity.” “We should try ever and again to turn duty into joy, outer necessity into inner need.” Others bring us to important truths about ourselves. “Mankind is becoming autistic.” “We are meant to undergo an inner development in utmost truthfulness to one’s self.” And, most important to König’s theme: “Anything connected with the inner path can only be experienced in silence.” König himself, thankfully, is not absolutely silent about his own experiences. His descriptions of how certain dreams may be a call to the inner path have a convincing power and beauty. The force of the inner call, he remarks, can strike one like an illness, although, König hastens to tell us, this is not to say it is an illness, or that every illness is a call. As each of us have individual responses to illness, so too do we Book Reviews • 85 receive the call in our own way. The initial encounter can be devastating, awakening us to a world outside our ordinary experience. After that it is up to us to keep the call alive. And we cannot always do this. König’s thoughts on the silence of the call, the drying up of our inner life, are especially moving and helpful. Framing his remarks around the motifs of the service of the mass and the seasonal path of inner work, König leads his audience from bracing chastisement, to practical instruction, to a deep reverence for the serious committment to self-work that accepting the inner call demands. He eschews pseudo-spiritual teachings and, with the sharp eye of the practiced teacher, brings the essentials into focus. For beginners on inner work or for seasoned meditators, these lectures are an important contribution to understanding a subtle and delicate facet of spiritual development. Anyone wishing to pursue the inner path will receive helpful guidance and warm encouragement from reading them. Battle for the Soul

by B ern ard Lievegoed (Hawthorn Press) $16.50

Review by Gary Lachman

Bernard Lievegoed’s T h e B attle fo r th e S ou l is a unique work, the last will and testament of a fulfilled and dedicated man. At 87, ailing, and too weak to write, Lievegoed held a series of conversations with his friend Jell van der Meulen, about the past, present and future of the spiritual path. These were tape-recorded; ten days later Lievegoed died. The urgency of his own fate, as well as that of mankind, can be felt in the last words of one of Anthroposophy’s leading lights. His body failing, his mind alert, Lievegoed struggled through this work so that students of spiritual science would be prepared for the massive socio-historical events coming in the near future, the first stirrings of which he saw in much of contemporary culture. Hopeful, yet grimly realistic, Lievegoed believed that many of the developments associ­ ated with Ahriman, and which Rudolf Steiner set in a much more distant future, would arrive soon after the turn of the century, within, that is, the lifetimes of many of his readers. As van der Meulen writes in his moving introduction, “Lievegoed saw like few others that the coming years would be crucial.” At their essence these conversations are a call to look beyond our personal tragedies and successes, to see our lives as part of a great cosmic drama. Lievegoed knew many of the central figures in the history of Anthroposophy; in the first part of the book he reminisces about Ita Wegman, Walter Johannes Stein, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, Eugen Kolisko, Ernst Lehrs, Herbert Hahn, Willem Zeylmans and others. Relating conversations with them, Lievegoed sketches an unusual picture of Rudolf Steiner himself, as the patient mentor of a young Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, or the chiding sage whose often ironic remarks filled the notebooks of a studious Walter Stein. But it is Steiner’s karmic relationship with Ita Wegman that forms a large portion of Lievegoed’s central message: the need for understanding between the various branches of the Anthroposophical movement, and the necessity for true collaboration in the struggles ahead. Lievegoed does not shy

86 Book Reviews • 87 from discussing the darker side of the movement’s history, its damaging in-fighting and loss of purpose. In understanding and clarifying the complications arising after Rudolf Steiner’s death, Lievegoed hopes to overcome these by seeing them as part of a vast stream of spiritual evolution. He poses an ambitious question: who were the greatest leaders of mankind, and what were their central contributions? His answer? Rudolf Steiner, Christian Rozenkreutz, and Manu. In drawing out the essence and influence of these three remarkable individuals, Lievegoed takes his readers on a karmic journey ranging form the epic of Gilgamesh, to the works of AIDS hospices. For way of insight, of transformation, and the middle path of the soul, representing, for Lievegoed, three different streams in Anthroposophy. It is the third way, represented by the work of Manu in his many incarnations, that Lievegoed sees as most important for us today. To counter the dead­ ening influence of Ahriman, we must begin to reach beyond our personal aims, and work together in true communities, sharing living goals. To achieve this, to work towards it, is, in Lievegoed’s words, to enter the spiritual stream of Manu. His last chapter, in which he speaks of the possible darkness looming not-too-distantly ahead, is at times chilling. Having lived through National Socialism, Lievegoed knows the mass forms evil can take. We may not agree with his vision; [Note:nextpage(88)wasblankandisomittedhere] but as a last testament it is inspiring. Notes on Contributors

William Bento is a psychotherapist, lecturer, and a researcher in astrosophy (new star wisdom). He has contributed several articles to the Journal. Address: 182 N. High St., Sebastopol, CA 95472.

Gary Lachman is pursuing doctoral studies in the English depart­ ment at the University of Southern California. His work has appeared in the journal, Revisions, and in the Journal for Anthroposophy #57. Address: 526 N. Sycamore, Los Angeles, CA 90036. E-mail: [email protected].

John Lange works as a school psychologist in New York City, and has a private psychotherapy practice in Brooklyn and Philmont, NY. His three children attent the Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School. Ad­ dress: P.O. Box 882, Philmont, NY 12565.

Michael Lipson, Ph.D. is a psychologist with a private practice for adults in New York City. He also works in the Pediatric AIDS Team of Harlem hospital and teaches at City University of New York and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. His translation of Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom will be published by Anthroposophic Press in 1995.

Raphael Grosse Kleinmann has pursued work in biodynamic gar­ dening and orcharding. He was a visiting student in environmental and outdoor education at the University of Maine last year. He also studies singing and is 28 years old. After completing Waldorf teacher training, he will begin doctoral studies at the University of Darmstadt on “landscape gardening and sound.” He says he may teach some day in the U.S. Address: Sandbuschweg 3a, 34132 Kassel, Germany.

89 90 • Contributors

Tom Mellett works as a physics lab coordinator at Austin Community College. He has a degree in Classical Greek from the University of Texas at Austin and has contributed several articles to the Journal. Address: 1907 Cottonwood Lane, Austin, TX 78746.

Mark E. Smith works as a logistics manager. He formerly lived in Houston, Texas, where he was a member of the Rudolf Steiner study group. Address: 2403 Newton Road, Wilmington, DE 19810.

Brian Wright is a freelance writer and multi-media producer. He has spent the past thirteen years as a sound technician for records, televi­ sion, and film. Address: 2641 Fremont Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55408. [Advertisement:] Serve Practically Sunbridge College Now Offering ♦ Expanded Business and Community Development Program ♦ Orientation Year in anthroposophical studies ♦ Early Childhood Education Program ♦ Teacher Training Program (Master's Degree option) ♦ Speech and Drama Program

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