Journal for anthroposophy [Image: paintingbyPhilipNelson]NUMBER 57 FALL 19 9 3 Between two worlds life hovers like a star, 'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge: H ow little do we know that which we are! H ow less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'dfrom the foam o f ages; while the graves O f Empires heave but like some passing waves. L ord Byron NUMBER 57 • FALL 1993 ISSN-0021-8235 Front Cover: PHILIP NELSON OHNE TITEL ( Without Title) 1988 Gouache, acrylic, grated minerals and quartz sand on canvas, 120 cm x 90 cm EDITOR Hilmar Moore MANAGING EDITOR Clare 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). 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 512/858-1699 512/858-4080 Fax Journal for Anthroposophy, Number 57 - Fall 1993 © 1993, The Anthroposophical Society in America Printed in the United States of America at Morgan Printing, Austin, Texas Printed on Recycled Paper CONTENTS 5 Earthly Person, Personal Earth BY TYSON ANDERSON 19 From the Cradle to the Grave BY RICHARD LEVITON 28 Love in Action through Interest, Empathy, Caring and Kindness BY DAVID PELLEGRINO 32 Celebrating the Chemical Wedding JOEL MORROW 47 The Black Madonna and the Mysteries of Dionysos BY DENNIS KLOCEK 65 The Dark Goddess and Anthroposophia BY SALLY SMITH 72 Who Is John and Why Are Fairy Tales So Often Named after Him? BY STEPHEN SPITALNY 80 Solving the Geosophical Riddle of the Sphinx on Mars BY TOM MELLETT POEMS 18 Graveyard, Flatonia, Texas BY ALBERT HUFFSTICKLER 44 Moon in Cancer BY BRUCE DONEHOWER 46 The Eyes of Women BY BRUCE DONEHOWER 79 The Fourth Kingdom AMOS FRANCESCHELLI BOOK REVIEW 86 Mind and Matter: Imaginative Participation in Science BY STEPHEN EDELGLASS, GEORG MAIER, HANS GEBERT AND JOHN DAVY [Note: thenextpage(4)wasblankandisomittedhere] • Reviewed by Arthur Zajonc EARTHLY PERSON, PERSONAL EARTH BY TYSON ANDERSON I n his 1936 preface to An Inquiry into the Good, entitled “Upon Resetting the Type,” Kitaro Nishida wrote as follows: Gustave Fechner said that one morning, while relaxing in a chair in the Rosenthal in Leipzig, he gazed in the bright sunlight at a spring meadow with fragrant flowers, singing birds, and flitting butterflies and became engrossed in what he called the perspec­ tive of the daytime, in which truth is things just as they are, as opposed to the colorless and soundless night found in the natural sciences .... [Since long ago I have had the idea that true reality must be actuality just as it is and that the so-called material world is something conceptualized and abstracted out of it.1 This passage from Nishida presents the problem which I wish to highlight, namely, the relation between persons and the earth. There is something fundamentally wrong with our relation to nature— and to the earth in particular— and we who live after the development of quantitative natural science suspect that this problem even infects our scientific knowing. So, before turning to issues of the “daylight," I would like to begin with some remarks about our “night.” I think there is a religious root to the problem, namely, what the traditions call original sin or av id y a. We are not only unknowing of our true selves but we are, somewhat strangely, a tta c h e d to this “macro-prejudice.”2 Both Buddhism and Christianity recognize the se­ verity of this problem of clinging to error. Buddhism from the very A paper delivered at the Fourth International Buddhist-Christian Dialogue Conference, August, 1992. 5 6 • Tyson Anderson start stressed the noble truth of the origin of suffering in ta n h a , and John Calvin asserted that “the whole man is overwhelmed— as by a deluge— from head to foot, so that no part is immune from sin and all that proceeds from him is to be imputed to sin.”3 As Rudolf Steiner noted, this kind of error is not simply a mistake of thought; it is an experience: “we ourselves are the error.”4 Yoshifumi Ueda has put it well in speaking of our “refusing to let go of our egocentric perspec­ tive on the world.”5 This refusing, I might add, is an experiential fact: as almost anyone engaged in a spiritual discipline can testify, the resistance to change is considerable, even daunting. Now, this egocentricity is not “earth neutral,” for insofar as we are in a condition of a v id y a we are, so to say, split away not only from our own true being but also from the world and the earth in their true being. As Steiner said near the end of the last century: It is we ourselves who break away from the bosom of nature and contrast ourselves as / with the world......... We must find the way back to her, and a simple reflection will point the way.... [W]e must have retained something of her in our being. This essence of nature within us we must discover.. We can only find the nature that is outside us, when we first have learnt to know her within us. What is akin to her in our inner being must be our guide.6 This brings us to the question of the nature of our inner being, and at this point I would like to turn to some ideas from Daniel Walsh and Sallie King. Robert Imperato has rightly called attention to the impor­ tance of Walsh’s work on the person.7 Walsh is perhaps better known for his influence on Thomas Merton, but his ideas are of interest in their own right. Listen to what Walsh has to say about the person. The person is a relationship to God which is transcendental. So there is a natural relationship to God (by which) we are necessarily related to God in being .... The person is neither born nor does the person die .... The person is a transcendental relation, which means an eternal relation to God which God establishes before everything else. Then he brings the physical order into being, says, “Let it be . .” The person is not contin­ gent. The person is the necessary emanation of God’s love.8 Earthly Person, Personal Earth • 7 Now this is a truly lofty notion of the person, saying, as it does, that the existence of persons follows necessarily from God’s existing, before any physical creation. This is reminiscent of Meister Eckhart’s idea that there is something in a human being— "M ensch —such that if the person were wholly this, she “would be completely uncreated and uncreatable.”9 And in our own era, toward the end of the last century William James suggested that “one’s finite, mundane con­ sciousness [might] be an extract from one’s larger, true personality, the latter having even now some sort of reality behind the scenes.”10 To indicate the possible vastness of this reality James em­ ployed the striking metaphor of the “mother sea” for our true, higher nature.11 Of course, James, that great American individualist, is think­ ing m a n y “mother seas,” such that “a sort of polytheism [might] return upon us.”12 What is at the core of this being that is neither born nor dies, this “mother sea”? Perhaps a kind of experiential knowing. In Eckhart’s words again: When I was situated in my first cause, here I had no God, and here I was the cause of myself. I wanted nothing, I desired nothing, here I was an empty “to be” and a knower of myself in the enjoyment of truth. Here I wanted myself and I wanted noth­ ing else; what I wanted I was and what I was I wanted, and here I stood empty of God and of all things. Whoever comes to know this [reality], knows wherein bless­ edness lies. It has neither before nor after, and it waits for nothing to be added, for it can neither win nor lose.13 There is, I believe, a very strong temptation when considering such ideas to take a negative attitude toward human individuality and histo­ ricity. Thus Walsh says: The individual is a separation, is self-created, made himself. When Adam separated himself from God, he became an indi­ vidual in the true sense of separation. So an individual is some­ one separated from the unity in which he has the fruition of his being. Matter is the principle of this, so God created matter as something which would provide for man’s restoration.14 8 • Tyson Anderson As Imperato observes, “[t]he other worldliness of this view is undeniable, as is the deprecation of individuality.”15 From the side of Buddhist thought there is a similar problem. A link with Walsh’s Christian concerns is established by Sallie King in her study of the Buddha Nature Treatise, when she observes that “the question of the human being is the question par excellence with which the Buddhist tradition as a whole struggles.”16 King makes it clear that Buddhism has its own lofty vision of persons: “Each person is a Buddha, not only potentially but actually.”17 Every person can come to the realization of Buddha nature as “the Thusness revealed by the twin emptiness of persons and things.”18 But the great majority of human beings is deluded.