the Mystery of Evil - in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount -by Joel A.

Wendt

In the moist dark of the Earth, ancient sacred powers rest and then pour forth. The Mother lives there in a circle with the wise, and all that is of earthly dark or wrong bows before Shes which cannot themselves be tamed. She lives and rules there, the true Mistress of the Uncreated, the Formless, from which the Son of Light Itself was/is born, out of Intercourse with the Father, who then gave Himself in seed to All, so that each part has as its secret/sacred heart a piece of Him and Her This the very Stars sing in remembered Glory. But still She seeks for unity, throughout Eternity - to be folded once more in the Arms of Her Lover/Our Father, bringing Peace to all just by Her presence. That is the Promise ... that all the seeds all the Children - would once more come to rest in the Holy Womb of the Mother, wrapped about with the Arms of Grace of the Father, holding and surrounding All, forever and ever and ever. Amen introduction The word Mystery" here means Sacred Rite of Transformation. The Mystery of Evil then is another name for the period of time (or Age) humanity now enters, where the human Being must confront the true Beast from the Abyss, which is his/her own unredeemed and unmastered nature. Having Choice, we determine - we become responsible for what is. If we give into the darker urges that is what will manifest. If we struggle for the light, that too will manifest. This Rite of Choice in the Modern Age of Life on the Earth is the Mystery of Evil - a sacred encounter, in the World Temple that is the Earth, in which that which is Above and that which is Below, as these appear in and through the human Being, learn to understand each other. This should be kept in mind. There is no right Choice. There are no rules that must be followed. There are just the consequences of the choices we make, and for which we are responsible. This booklet is meant to help the reader with coming to a deeper understanding of the underlying questions, both in their macrocosmic and microcosmic aspects. This booklet is also a companion for the book: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything . In this latter book a general view of our human situation is elaborated, in the form of a scientific theory. The whys and wherefores are laid out in that work, and a few aspects of the present discussion are there presented amidst a deeper context. But the book - The Art of God - did not have space, or time, for the more intimate aspects of the question of the meaning of Evil, which then had to have its own presentation here. * * *

Language, particularly as regards the meaning of a word, has a certain flexibility - this the poet teaches, as well as the philosopher. Their work is often creative of new meaning from the old words of a language - the new in language/meaning often comes to us from their songs, sometimes even new words. After which the genius of meaning/language descends from its natural heaven in the higher regions of human thought, down to the more earthly realms where the passions of human beings takes possession of language and meaning and often sheds the higher meanings in order to express what only appears to be the coarse and the mundane. Words can have a dictionary or lexical meaning, but the speaker has the freedom to mean only what he or she intends to mean and is not bound to any convention - social or dictionary or otherwise. Take for example the word fuck. To utter this word in many public forums is to bring down the ire of censorship, although often the persons urging censorship will hypocritically use fuck frequently in their private language when among friends. This goes for a lot of language (meanings) as well, thus we have had to invent the term politically correct to give a label to the public social-censorship that erupts when language and meaning is used in a way that inspires critics of that use to blow their noses on someone elses speech. Meanings often also have different functions in different contexts and as well vary according to the way the speaker will emphasize by tone of voice a word in speech. Fuck is a perfect example of this kind of word, that has such a variety of purposes in human speech as to be almost capable of transcending its dictionary meaning altogether. We can use that expression to mean anything from the act of sex to the abuse a boss weathers upon one of their workers. When your boss fucks you, he is not usually engaged in sex, but rather seemingly trying to ruin your life. Im going to fuck up your face says the thug to his victim. Hes a fucking son-of-a-bitch says the father about his son-in-law. This same word also has, in different regions of the earth, its own often varied peculiar gesture, using the arm, the hand, and sometimes certain fingers. This word is often used when expressing surprise: Well, fuck me!. The word has transcended its dictionary meaning as regards the act of sex, and become a word denoting strong emphasis concerning almost anything: Thats a fucking good looking woman!. It remains often socially incorrect - in the sense of speech in polite company, although among some groups it is used so frequently as to be the principle adjective and adverb by which emphasis is given to most nouns. The comedian George Carlin sometimes used it hundreds of times in a single hourlong comedy set-piece. Most people know when to use it, and when not, given the social context in which they are speaking.
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Some people would say that to use such a word is to be or do evil. Fuck does on occasion have an easy time being used in a context in which something more than a moral judgment is implied, while the word evil almost exclusively seems to involve a moral evaluation of some kind or another. Evil entered the forecourt of political language with Reagans the evil empire and then George W. Bushs the axis of evil. Not being a verb, it doesnt have the flexibility of fuck, however. We dont evil. We maybe are evil, or do evil, but evil remains mostly a noun, and once in a while an adjective. In a way evil, as a moral evaluation, seems to need to refer to something so base and degenerate that it is hard for many to not think in terms of evil and hell. Those who do evil are condemned in many religions to whatever that religion considers the worst aspect of the afterlife: some kind of hell. Creatures from hellish regions, often called demons, are axiomatically doers of evil. The Horror Movie, as a genre, has explored all kinds of visual and dramatic and traditional forms of evil, as do those TV dramas involving the law enforcement profilers that chase serial killers. Pornography and sexually explicit materials are to some considered evil, although the word obscene is more frequently used. A famous Supreme Court Justice remarked that while he cant define the obscene he knows it when he sees it. There is something in this that we should recognize as we momentarily pass it by: politically incorrect speech, swear words, that which is evil, and that which is obscene are most often known (or at least judged) by the reaction of human beings to something. Like the Justice, we feel (as in believe) we know it when we see it or hear it. There is an important warning here, however. We create a problem when we take our individual point of view and believe it should be universal - that is apply to all, not just to our personal judgments. At the same time paradoxes abound. For many the violence and blood splatter in modern films and television is far more obscene than depictions of the act of sex. For many seeing someone fuck is not as bad or evil as seeing someones head get chopped off, with copious amounts of blood conspicuously spurting from the neck. On the other hand, in lots of places in the world there is a tradition of erotic art, and ages ago even the earthly aspects of physical love were celebrated in Temples as sacred. Modern people are also well aware of the various places in the world where female genitals are mutilated for seeming religious purposes. The Victorian era of recent English history has entered our language such that certain public negative attitudes towards sex are called: Victorian. Some assert that until that time, there was no pornography, only various coarser versions of erotic art. Note also that there are different rules regarding the way women dress that vary over the whole world. In some regions of tribal Africa women do not hide their breasts. Where certain forms of Islam predominate, the whole female form is covered except for the eyes. Violating prohibitions against the exposing of skin can lead to death by stoning. The rape of a daughter so disturbs family honor in some places that the victim is killed. Nude (clothing optional) beaches exist in many places. Emphasis on the female form in Western cultures has become so outrageous (or free, depending upon your point of view) that certain television shows and movies are built around the way they display tits and ass. The length of skirts seems to rise and fall according to the dictates of the so-called fashion industry, as well as how much skin is exposed. Most recently the female belly (and more and more the young female belly) has come to be exposed. Cleavage exposure varies according to taste(?). Women wear all manner of clothes in the West, frequently designed by men, that are uncomfortable and often harmful (the spike heel on shoes, for example). A ballerina destroys her feet for her art, and the binding of the feet of little girls still can be found in parts of Asia. Depending upon ones taste or moral values, much is okay and much is not-okay. Everyone has a point of view, and there is clearly no universal agreement. Is something merely tasteless or obscene or ultimately evil? The pseudo-philosopher Sam Harris thinks that science can teach us true and objective moral values. In the recent debate Harris had with the philosophy professor William Lane Craig, both, although on opposite sides as regards Gods interests and existence, seemed to agree that whether via science or the teachings of God, one could find absolute rules of what is or is not moral - or what is or is not good and what is or is not evil. Right and wrong can be grasped as certainties - both seemed to assert. Contrast that point of view with the spiritual teacher (the Magic Path) Franz Bardon, who said: there is nothing unclean in the whole creation ; and that: evil is a human conception. Catherine MacCoun, in her book On Becoming An Alchemist, writes that no one sets out to do evil, but rather everyone believes what they do is a good. At the same time, the folk wisdom is: the road to hell is paved with good intentions; and, there is this saying of Christ in the Gospels: Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. Is it possible to reconcile all these varied points of view? To endeavor to answer that question is the purpose of this small book. An important caveat: the authors experience is that true research on Evil can only be done by facing these impulses in ones own soul, for there they can be most intimately known. To look to others, as if we can see Evil there, is to already make an unjustifiable presumption. Heres Christ from the Sermon on the Mount: Dont judge, so that you wont be judged; you will be sentenced to the same sentence that you sentence others, and by whatever standard you measure you will be measured. Why do you look at the splinter in your brothers eye but dont notice the log in your own eye? And how can you say to your brother, Let me get that splinter out of your eye, with that log there in your own eye? You fake, first get the log out of your own eye, and then you can see about getting the splinter out of your brothers eye! Victorias Real Secret A main problem with understanding Evil is our arrogant self-ignorance - no surprise there. We easily see it in others (or so we believe), but seldom are willing to admit to it ourselves. The most significant modern social process working deeply with that problem is Alcoholics Anonymous and its progeny, which has begun to socially replace the confessional of the Catholic Church, with a community and semi-public confessional. No longer do we hide our so-called sin in a curtained box where only a priest is to know of it, but we admit our this weakness in a very special public place - a place where anonymity is promised as a core social value. Even the idea of God is different in AA, than in the Church, as it is intentionally connected to our personal freedom - we admit things to God as we understand Him in AA, not as a religious institution defines Him. Not only that, but in AA we are not forgiven for a privately confessed sin, and given some prayers as penance. Rather we are helped to go to those we have harmed and seek to repair what was done by finding a way to make amends. Here we see a fault line, as it were, between the way the the Past - the Church - handled the molestation crisis, and the way those in AA (the Present and Future) deal with what appears to be their moral errors.
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As we know the Church was able for decades to keep hidden (and thus allow their continuance) these crimes, by hiding them in the confessional. And even this hiding is now understood itself as a major contributor to the fundamental problem. In AA we enter into a group awareness of our misdeeds, and get help from others who share our failings. Who better to help us overcome them. Only an already semi-publicly confessed alcoholic can help us deal with our own similar failings. When it is hidden, and then protected by a social institution, the failing is never resolved because we - the selfconfessed doer of evil - have never faced it squarely. What Christ spoke of, as the problem of hypocrisy in the Sermon on the Mount, is overcome when the flaw is made semi-public among a group who share our flaws, because no other group is also able to help us, given that they too have dealt already with that particular beam in their own eye, before seeking to help us with the related mote in ours. The institution (the Church) preserved Itself at the expense of many future victims. AA is not any kind of institution, given that each meeting is an independent social process in itself, there being no priests or any hierarchy defining what is to be done or not done. Only someone actually practiced at being in recovery (usually the sponsor), can help someone needing to enter recovery. The Priest in the confessional often lacks the life experience to really appreciate the deeper psychological elements living in the person with their flaw. Religious and sentimental pieties dont work as well as practical knowledge of the real struggles for genuine self-transformation. Granted AA is criticized by many, but all that really shows is that this kind of work is not so easy as some would hope. The Church (offered here mostly for contrast, not so much to pick on it) is weighed down by its past, and the fact that in many ways it has never understood what Christ really taught in the first place. In the authentic recovery disciplines of AA, Christs teaching lives as a practice in a way the Church only really had in its beginnings (or in the religious orders), before it was joined to the failing Roman Empire in the fourth Century ... recall the last phrases of the Sermon on the Mount: So anyone who hears these words from me and does them will become like a sensible man who built his house on bedrock, and the rain came down and the floods came and the winds hurled themselves at the house, and it didnt fall because it was grounded on the rock. And anyone who hears these words from me and doesnt do them, will become like a stupid man who built his house on sand, and the rain came down and the floods came and the winds beat at the house, and it fell, and its down fall was tremendous. The institutional Church built its house on sand (no real practice), and when the discovery of the decades of hidden abuse (the rain, and floods and winds) came, this institutional Church fell (see my essay on the Third Fatima Prophecy for details: Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church). the True Nature of the House of the Soul The very deep and wise philosopher-seer, Rudolf Steiner, in his lectures collected under the title: From Symptom to Reality in Modern History , briefly discussed the Mystery of Evil in this metaphorical way - here I have paraphrased his thoughts: Imagine a train running on some tracks. The train - its engines and cars - has a point or purpose as it were. There is goodness inherent in its comings and goings. Human perception, being human, notices mostly the wearing out of the rails, caused by the travels of the train, and thinks of this wearing out as evil or sin. Consider for the moment that the house that can be built on rock or sand is our own inner organism - our own soul-spirit/being/essence-nature. We need to keep in mind while we do this just how complicated human beings are, especially inwardly. This is so regardless of modern brain sciences, which have basically assumed the mind (soul-spirit/being/essence-nature of the human being) is only a function of the material brain, and that there is no spirit at all. Deconstructing the erroneous thinking of science in that regard was one of the purposes of my The Art of God. There is an ancient idea from the Cultural East concerning seven energy centers that are thought to be some of the dynamic aspects of the house of the soul - the inner core of the human organism. These tradition calls: Lotus Flowers or the Chakras: (the crown chakra; the eyebrow chakra; the throat chakra; the heart chakra; and solar plexus chakra; the reproductive chakra and the base - or the spine - chakra). While conventional materialistic science doesnt like these ideas, that prejudice doesnt make them untrue - just not observed. In Steiners metaphor above, these energy centers are the trains - the engines and the cars. If, for example, we didnt have the desire/drive for procreation, no new human beings would be born. If we didnt have hunger, we would starve and the physical body would die. If we dont care about each other - via the heart, we suffer as well. What we observe is that the carnal body and as well our social communities (such as families) suffer when there is an excess of some kind related to these psychic (soulful) energy drivers in our existence. The carnal body and our social communities are the rails - we see the harm from the excesses and this we have learned over time to culturally call: evil or sin. Another example, this time regarding the mind (something very complicated as well): If we dont discipline our mind we can become obsessed, and thus arises, for example, the social phenomena we call: the stalker. If for various reasons we cant control our thoughts (such as in certain so-called mental illnesses), we also loose our way. Since the Age of Science began, humanity has been trying to pin down the imagined causes of human defects, but our labors have been largely in vain because we mostly dont consider human beings to be anything other than matter. Since we are objectively far more than solely matter, the absence of that understanding disables our thinking when we try to solve social issues connected to human defects and flaws. At the same time, this confusion over whether or not human beings are both spirit and matter is a quite complicated problem, such that the reader here will have to go to the above mentioned book: The Art of God: and actual theory of Everything, for the solution to those wider questions. Here, in our seeking to better understand The Mystery of Evil, we face more practical problems, and it is toward those issues that we need to go next. Immediately above I just wanted to point toward the house of our soul - our own inner organism - suggesting that what we tend to call evil is an indirect effect of other purposes, and that there is significant human meaning to be yet discovered.

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This house of the soul is quite complicated, and major portions of it are not visible to the eye (such as the traditional energy centers). At the same time, these not visible to the eye aspects of our nature are visible to our own introspection. I can learn to see in myself something I dont well see in others - the existence of my beam is apparent to my own inward perceptions. What Christ promised in the Sermon on the Mount was that if (and only if) I learn to master my own beam will I discover how to help someone with their mote. Now some might think that AA mentioned above is only valuable if one is an alcoholic or addict etc. The fact is AA is the social model for a whole new community social process by which anyone can work on their self observed flaws. After all, we first have to admit to ourselves we are flawed and need help, and this is often a dynamic social processes that is difficult to face, having acquired in AA the name: hitting bottom. Most people dont want to admit to flaws at all (witness the many politicians and celebrities whose flaws become public), and we call this refusal to admit to flaws: denial. We continue to refuse to admit to flaws until life hits us upside the head over and over again, and our self destructive behaviors have gotten so flagrant that we no longer can pretend they do not exist. That these impulses flow over to the members of our own community and family is also something we deny. The dry-drunk (not actively drinking) still behaves according to his addictive psychology - frequently angry and dominating, and never able to admit to his own responsibilities or flaws. If fact, in the Al-anon movement a whole necessary secondary social process has been discovered. How do people live with personalities who will not admit (continue to deny) their self destructive flaws that also harm others? If we have an addict in our family, we dont have to remain the passive victims of their addictive behaviors, but we still need to find those who share our dilemmas if we wish to learn what to do. There are practical arts here, such that our incapacity to live with or among others with such obvious flaws is itself a flaw. We need help to learn the best ways to live with an alcoholic, and if we dont we become enablers of their addictions. Anti-social flaws require social solutions - everyone is involved. The simple truth is we cant fix the person with the flaw (with the mote). Only they can fix themselves, and until we simultaneously learn to work on our own beams, we will not really understand how to help them fix themselves. If your head is starting to spin around a little bit here, good. We are complicated, we human beings, and so are our social arrangements. The teaching of Christ is simple to state: learn not to judge. The doing of that in practice is not so simple. We are only beginning to appreciate what is latent in the vocabulary of recovery, for many of our social ills are not even recognized as needing something like AA or Al-anon to help. Consider the greed driving the current financial problems of the world. Is that not an addiction? What about the will-to-power of the many political leaders? Is that too not an addiction? What does a people do when their leaders in finance and politics live in denial of their addictions to wealth and power? How do we enable them with our own weaknesses, or the false belief that we have no choice but to end up as helpless victims of the excesses of others? The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount reach quite far. Who or What am I, that I too am Flawed We are all human beings. That said, just what is a human being? The main scientific paradigm is that the human being is an accidental consequence of random events in a vast uncaring cosmos. This is what the Theory of Evolution and the Theory of the Big Bang teach. Science - at least at this stage of its development, in this sense, has it very wrong. To lay out the details of the underlying philosophical and scientific problems, I had to write a whole book, mentioned above: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything. In that book, I suggested that the truth will turn out to be that a human being is an immortal spirit, experiencing multiple lives over eons of time in order to learn. Existence is a divinely authored school, of a remarkable and detailed intricacy and intimacy. What I had little time to deal with in that book, was the more intimate aspects of the nature of the double, or the doppleganger or the shadow. I could hint, but not do justice to the main facts regarding the nature of Evil and how the individual human being contributes to that aspect of our shared existence. Here in this booklet I am trying to provide more detail. In a couple of other books of mine [the Way of the Fool, and American Anthroposophy], I put this symbolic diagram: Christ Jesus Guardian Angel i-AM [sense world < soul (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) soul > spiritual world] human double (asuras) the Divine Mother ... out of which I separate for emphasis, this sub-diagram: i-AM (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) [human (d)] This is not an accurate picture, so much as it is a thematic schematic of some structural relationships. It is therefore a very poorly drawn abstract of a whole set of maps, none of which describe the actual territory. Here in this booklet I am going to tell you how to study the territory, based upon several decades of personal experience of such study.

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Lets start with the terms: soul and spirit. We could also use the terms: consciousness and self-consciousness and be speaking of the same things. There is that-which-experiences (self-consciousness, or spirit) and the content of those experiences (the field of consciousness, or soul). For example, you are presently reading some text upon a page. You, in this example, are a self-consciousness experiencer, and the content of your experience includes (but is not limited to) the booklet you hold in your hand. Other aspects of your field of consciousness includes what it feels like to sit in the chair in which your are sitting, any incidental sounds in the background (music, kids yelling) as well as incidental experiences in your visual field besides this booklet. As you read you may be sub-vocalizing the words, and as well using your mind to seek the meaning of the text. The text itself is a code - lines of dark on white, while the meaning of the text is only created by your mind - a skill it acquired when you learned to read. Most of us dont pay any attention at all to the concepts created by our self-consciousness when we read, ... we just read and arrive at some understanding of the text. We then think (as in believe) we know what we believe the text to mean. To a certain degree, part of what is happening as you read is that the attention of your mind (of your self-consciousness as it is married to your field of consciousness) is directed to a purpose (reading), from which purpose other experiences can enter your consciousness created by some kind of a distraction (a dog barks). Notice I joined together (married) self-consciousness and the field of consciousness, for that is what we experience - their natural unity. We experience what we call mind as this union of self-consciousness and the field of consciousness. I know I am reading, as reading is my intention, and it is my I (self-consciousness) that is directing my attention to its objects. Suppose my spouse calls from another room and wants my attention - wants to change the attention of my self-consciousness to include within my consciousness his/her needs and wants. I may for a moment not want to be disturbed in my reading, but an instant of reflection may lead me to recognizing that it is better (from my present in the moment point of view) if I give to my spouse the attention he/she wants. That just described above is a brief version of the territory for which the diagrams above are maps. My self-consciousness I am naming the i-AM, and the conscience-like moment of reflection (choosing to let my reading be disturbed to pay attention to my spouse) I am labeling the i-AM. These two appear (as a map) thus: i-AM i-AM To borrow from other systems of thought, let us call these (together) the lower and the higher ego. I am relating the higher ego ( i-AM) obviously to what we experience as conscience, and the lower ego ( i-AM) to what we general think of us our self-consciousness. Always keep in mind that the map is not the territory. This is the core of our spirit - this lower and higher ego, and which are to be educated over the many incarnations of our human existence. During this education/learning process, the possibility exists for the lower ego and the higher ego to marry (unite), the details of which we will go into later. Let us next look at this symbol set (map): [sense world < soul (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) soul > spiritual world] and this sub-set within the above: soul (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) soul The core of our human nature (our spirit or self-consciousness) sits within the soul (or field of consciousness). We actually look out at two different worlds from this seat of the self-consciousness within the field of consciousness: [sense world < > spiritual world]

This sense world we are mostly familiar with, as it governs our daily existence from the moment of waking to the moment of going back to sleep once more. In our culture we dont recognize that our interior world is the entrance to the spiritual world, given the assumptions regarding the mind common to the dominate paradigm of materialistic science (all is matter, there is no spirit). [For those familiar with the last Harry Potter movie, there is a scene (which appears to take place in the world of the dead), where Harry has a conversation with his now deceased mentor Dumbledore. Harry wonders aloud whether he should believe what he seems to be experiencing, saying something like: this cant be real as it is only happening in my mind . To which Dumbledore replies, essentially: What makes you think what happens in your mind is not real?] The interior world (as against the exterior sense world) - the narrow gate (the entrance to the spiritual world) - is that world where we experience thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. Others cannot see this aspect of our existence - it only appears inwardly to us, and we often swim in it the same way a fish swims in water - we are mostly unaware of it. What a lie detector machine tries to capture by measuring certain very limited phenomena is only a vain ghost of the real nature of our interior experience. What someone who was once called a psychic, or now an intuitive, experiences is some of the surface (yet hidden) elements of this interior world. All of us have intuitive (spiritual) experiences. We just dont live in a culture that knows what to do with these experiences, given the dominance of the paradigm that all is matter and there is no spirit. Yet the fact remains that it is from this interior (spiritual) life of the human being arises that which appears to be good and evil and then enters into our shared social world, which is why it is so crucial to acquire real knowledge of the facts of this world of our interior life.
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We need to face this Shadow* or Double in a fully objective fashion. Steiner describes the reason for this in Lucifer and Ahriman, at page 21: ...the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence. [emphasis added] [*While I recognize the use of the term the Shadow by those connected to the works of Jung, I am not using this term with the same meanings to which they adhere. I actually mean (in a metaphorical sense) something more akin to an actual shadow cast by a human being when with their density and solidity they stand between something and the light. We (our I") stands in between the divine light and the world of earthly existence, and casts a shadow into that world by our density or stubbornness - the solidity or fallen nature" of the baser moral qualities of our I-am] It all gets more complicated, as the above maps included these symbols: (A/d) (L/d) [human (d)] The letter (d) is meant to refer to the double, and the structure above means to suggest that this double is in fact threefold in it nature. This structure/creation is not unknown to humanity, although for a time it had to be forgotten. Here are some references: Here is how the double (shadow) is described in a Native American work: Waynaboozoos Spirit Father advised him: You have a twin brother whom you have wondered about and whom you would seek. This I tell you: he is your other side in all things and in all ways. He is with you...do not seek him. Do not wish to know him, but understand him. You will walk in the path of peace...he would not. You are kind...he is not. You are humble...he is not. You are generous...he is not. You seek the good in things...he does not. You shall respect others...he will not. You will seek the goodness in others...he will not. You are the light...he is the darkness. Know that he is with you, understand him. ' From the Mishomis Book The voice of the Ojibway by Edw. BentonBanai, 1979.] And the story of the two wolves (my version): A young man was speaking with his grandfather, and was troubled by impulses he had inside him to be mean, in imitation of some of his friends. His grandfather taught him as follows: Inside you are two wolves. One hungers to do the good, to be kind and to be wise. The other hungers to do evil, to be selfish and make trouble for others. This you must understand. The young man then said: But, grandfather, what do I do, how do I become the good wolf instead of the bad one? To which his grandfather replied: It all depends on which wolf you feed. Let me also quote from the Quoran: Qul audhu birabbin nas. Malikin nas. Ilahin nas. Min sharril waswasil khannas. Alladhi yuwaswisu fi sudurinnas. Minal jinnati wannas, or in English: Say, I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind, from the mischief of the sneaking whisperer, who whispers in the hearts of mankind from among the jinn and mankind. Or from the Lords Prayer, traditional version: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. And from The Unvarnished Gospels, translated by Andy Gaus, this same verse: Matthew 6:13 And do not put us to the test, but snatch us from the Evil Ones clutches, ... So, the core of each of us: i-AM i-AM ... is then surrounded by this threefold double-complex, resulting in this symbol set: i-AM (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) [human (d)] Notice that the higher ego is free of the impediments attached to the lower ego. Further, via the conscience (the higher ego) the total organism of the self-consciousness and field of consciousness is connected via the Guardian Angel to the higher spiritual powers, thus: Christ Jesus Guardian Angel i-AM < i-AM > Because the human being is unlearned, and learning, it needs this threefold double-complex in order to pass through the experiences of life - that is we need both earthly help (the threefold-double complex) and heavenly help (the Guardian Angel as an intermediary to the higher power). Next, let us consider the threefold double-complex by itself, as connected to the lower ego: (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) [human (d)] Tradition gives certain names for these creatures, who lie nearest at hand to the i-AM in the soul. Here we will use that which was worked out by Rudolf Steiner, then later further developed by Valentin Tomberg. Let me repeat - as a practitioner for decades of introspective science I have direct experience of these beings. Steiner gave us these names: Ahriman for A, and Lucifer for L. Now these classes of spiritual beings are hierarchical - that is they have a pyramid like order, such that the actual Being Ahriman and the actual Being Lucifer* sit like corporate or king-like bosses at the top of the pyramid, which then via a structure like gloves within glove within gloves, or >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> brings down into the individual soul a tiny creature that can be called the ahrimaic double or the luciferic double, depending upon what role it plays within the soul or field of consciousness.
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[*Lucifer, according to some traditions, redeemed himself following Christs Crucifixion, and became then a member of the Paraclete - the community of spiritual beings whose totality we call: the Holy Spirit. Lucifers hierarchies remain at their previous tasks, however.] Now everything in the Creation is in the nature of Beings of Spirit, such that the shadow our I-am casts, because of its own unredeemed nature, results in the presence of a spiritual being. Its not a mere effect like the physical shadow we see when light does not pass through us, but as all is being, every aspect of reality that is not I is other beings - including the double. There actually are no things in the way we ordinarily think. The ahrimanic double generally mediates between the lower ego and the sense world, while the luciferic double generally mediates between the lower ego and the spiritual world. Tomberg in his Meditations on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism called aspects of the ahrimanic double the prosecutor, and aspects of the luciferic double the tempter. These are psychological (soul-lawful) functions. These are not the only functions of these beings within the soul. Because we are in need of help in understanding the sense world, the ahrimanic double causes us to believe in absolute* facts (the sense world is not actually absolute, but its paradoxes require a subtlety of mind most of us do not yet possess), and the luciferic double causes us to believe in absolute* truth, which gives us all those obsessive and fundamentalist errors of thought. *[For this language I am indebted to Catherine MacCouns remarkable: On Becoming an Alchemist.] Think of it this way. We are incomplete (fallen), although this should not be understood as what some call original sin). This incompleteness is kind of like a virginity - in our first lives (of many) we were both innocent and culpable. We made mistakes (being innocent - lacking knowledge and experience), and these had consequences which is symbolized in the Christian and Hebrew Bible by the end of the time in the Garden. We fell, out of a time in which we lived originally among spiritual beings as ourselves a spiritual being, into materiality, where for many God is now dead (the new atheism). It is only in materiality that the I or spirit can transform itself by having something (the material in all its meanings) which resists our I. Only in the density of modern existence can the newly born self-consciousness (see the discussion of the Evolution of Consciousness in The Art of God), feel so existentially involved that the I makes out of itself something it can only become through its own forces. Our I becomes clay-like and capable of being remodeled through our own wills. Our transformation is fully within our selves to accomplish, according to our own understanding of who we freely choose to become. At the same time, as fallen and incomplete, we yet lack certain capacities, and the positive side of the three-fold double-complex is that the ahrimanic and luciferic doubles provide a kind of intelligence (one directed at the sense world, the other directed at the world of spirit) that we lean on until we ourselves can carry out those tasks. We need these most intimate companions in the soul. For higher worlds (the upper vertical), we have the guardian angel. For the more earthly tasks (the lower vertical) we have the doubles. Now to the human double, or [human/d]. This is the most earthly of creatures in the soul, and Tomberg in Meditations called these beings by their more ancient name: egregores. I have found that term in-artistic, and prefer the words: self-inflicted wounds of soul. These beings are not part of a hierarchical creation, out of higher spiritual beings (not gloves within gloves within gloves: >>>>>>), but rather they are created by human activity. They are most frequently created by repeated rite-like activity such as that which leads to alcoholism or addiction. Such a rite as the ritual of shooting up used by a heroin addict is what creates, via repetition, a kind of psychic parasite in the soul, which the heroin addict has learned to call the monkey on my back and the alcoholic demon rum. Let us now return to the original symbol set: Christ Jesus Guardian Angel i-AM [sense world < soul (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) soul > spiritual world] human double (asuras) the Divine Mother ... and notice its cross-like nature. The Cross, as an spiritual symbol in itself, has both a vertical aspect and a horizontal aspect. The horizontal aspect is mostly related to our social realities - our relationships with each other, while the vertical aspect is mostly related to our spiritual realities - our relationships with the Divine Mystery. This Cross has both an upper* vertical gesture and a lower* vertical gesture. *[For this language as well I am indebted to Catherine Maccouns remarkable: On Becoming an Alchemist.] It is on those paths connected to the lower vertical gesture of spiritual development that we find this symbol set: human double (asuras) the Divine Mother Just as nature has the means by which the decaying world of matter can be taken apart and recycled (various insects, micro organisms etc.), so the decaying (recycling) world of spirit has those Beings that can take apart spirit, in the literature called: the Asuras. We only come close to seeing the activity of the Asuras when we find a human being so lost and consumed by their darker tendencies that we see that aspect of them we would normally call the human spirit disappearing.
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The most common of these are such as the heavy-use crack addicts. In addition, actors who have nearly given up their humanity in an effort to portray evil in the human can begin to find themselves deeply troubled, such as what we know as connected to the death of the actor Heath Ledger after his work in the movie The Dark Knight, or the soul-decay of Marlon Brando following his portrayal of Colonel Kurtz in the movie Apocalypse Now. When such as Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold, the actors in the Columbine tragedy, stared unprepared by their culture into the abyss of their own souls, they found that what lived in that abyss stared back at them, after which they were undone. If we get too close to fire we will burn. Tombergs Meditations says that to identify with true evil is to commune with it, and this destroys our vital elan - our creative will. Now these are some of the most terrible and profound powers of the Creation - these grave and often ancient (see the imaginative writing of H. P. Lovecraft) earthly powers, which is why they are ruled by the Divine Mother forces. Most of what we have learned to call Evil is in fact an aspect of the Creation meant to exist, and which is ruled (set within limits) by the Divine Mother and her companions. It is only the creations of the free human being, and its unruled appetites (the Beast from the Abyss) - or the human double, which lies outside the rule of the Divine Mother, and ultimately belongs to us, and thereby connected to our own fates. In granting the human being real freedom, the very Creation, with great love and vulnerability, has surrendered Itself to our Choices. All the seeming horrors of modern existence we will never understand until we take up a science of the spirit that includes and acknowledges our dark sides. Once we do that, we will discover that the I (the lower and higher ego), can be and is protected by the forces of the Divine Mother, and as well as by the nature of the afterlife. In my book The Art of God I go into the details of the afterlife, the kamaloka experience, and the meaning of karma and reincarnation, because it is there, where Divine Justice operates, that the human being most fully experiences the consequences of his deeds in the life just passed. I write this immediate above to suggest that the total structure of our relationship to Evil is full of saving graces, which however eventually require that we awake to them and participate in them in order to find our way in the world intentionally created by the Divine Mystery to have such characteristics. As we go further into these studies, more facts of this kind will become apparent. Before this however, let us consider what is called: The Day of Judgment. Religious tradition in the cultural West recognizes a time when the consequences and price of all our flaws will become due. The best writing on this I have read is by Valentin Tomberg in his Meditations on the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hermeticism, in the Arcanum: Justice. There he points out that the human community will individually judge itself after going through a Rite where it remembers all that it has done through the eons of Time. As to the question many preachers assert, that we will then be condemned to hell for eternity, Tomberg asks who can justly claim to define and limit Gods love and Gods forgiveness, suggesting that while any who chose to be impenitent (unrepentant) could spend eternity in hell, who during the Rite of the Day of Judgment, will, upon viewing their errors, would still then not seek and accept the offer of love and forgiveness. One last word on the double - the dark side, as it were ... In my other writings such as the Way of the Fool and American Anthroposophy I write in detail about certain aspects of dealing practically with the three-fold double complex. The point so far has been to let the reader realize what depth and mystery our soul life contains. These matters we may learn to empirically and scientifically understand and deal with, but only in ourselves, not in others. Our inwardness is rich and complicated, and the path to discovering that will be individual - not one of us walks exactly the same path. Not only that, we are to be helped - we are not alone. The double is held within laws by the Mother and the Son, which includes the fact that we have, in the soul-region of the heart, independence from all aspects of the dark. The most remarkable matter, which bears repeating, is that the battle ground with evil is within ourselves, not out there in the world. As we conquer and discipline ourselves, we win the battle with the dark. The Mystery of Evil then includes the fact that we are full participants in a World-wide Temple Ritual occurring on a large scale over considerable periods of time. With then these ideas, models and symbol sets in mind, let us next proceed to various kinds of common sins, error or kinds of possible evil, as a means to find some of the inherent wisdom of the whole. Often what we want to call evil, as is suggested by the Sermon on the Mount, is a projected perception - a beam in our own eye. Below we will try to find our way past these beams to the mote. The Moral Lesson of Daytime Dramas Lots of people enjoy watching what we call Soap Operas. Many people look down on those folks who enjoy watching these daytime dramas. If we stand back from these dramatic forms, view them collectively, and sense their artistic integrity, we will come to realize that these are basically Morality Plays. They have a certain excitement, given all the basic impulses displayed: love, affection, hate, murder, theft, and so forth. They also drag out various developments - a nighttime TV drama makes something happen in a couple of hours, which in a Soap might take months to unfold. We make a mistake if we believe these dramas have nothing to teach, for they all share a common lesson, repeated endlessly everywhere over and over again: the first misstep is to lie. As characters confront their life dilemmas, some of which they confront repeatedly, they have choice after choice between the truth and a lie, and as soon as the lie is uttered, all kinds of consequences flow from that deed. One lie leads to another. People hearing the lie are mislead and then themselves make mistakes of judgment because they lack the truth. If we step outside these Morality Plays, to a different literature we might find this term: The Father of Lies, sometimes referring to a spiritual Being we might call Satan, or the Devil. In Rudolf Steiners spiritual paradigm these are two different Beings: Lucifer and Ahriman. In other venues concerned with these subjects, it is often pointed out that while modern humanity likes to believe in God, we often dont bother to believe in the Devil (for some thinkers, this is a very big mistake to believe only in God and then not believe in the Devil too).
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One of the more curious matters is that while many do not believe in either the God or the Devil, the Devil clearly believes in God (see the story of Job in the Bible). This not believing in the Devil (or Satan) lets him get away with a lot of stuff he otherwise would not get away with. The reality of the Dark Side (which we are here exploring) is not at all like those spiritually immature views that humanity has had for many thousands of years - views which needed the words sin and evil to mean something unclean. Consider for a moment, modern politics. This political reality (as against the daytime morality plays) has real world consequences that flow from all the lies that live in this realm of thoughts and actions. It is not without serious consequences for us all that our governments lie to us, and that those running for President of the United States of America have so much trouble with the truth. Or, worse perhaps is that we like to live in the fantasy of their lies because that fantasy world is more comfortable than the reality we would otherwise have to face. Our lives are places where life imitates art on a very huge scale. The Daytime Drama is an escape in a way, because we can turn it off, or ignore it, or otherwise pretend there is some control over what goes on there; while our actual lives are buried under the rule of The Father of Lies as a real spiritual Being determining much that happens to us. Wars, financial woes, crimes inside and outside government and corporate boardrooms, ... the list is endless of real world consequences of the fact that each individual is a place/gateway where through us evil and or good enters the world, because the basic structure of our inner life is this: i-AM (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) [human (d)] We look out onto the world and act on this world from out of these interior realities, although we are simultaneously surrounded by even higher powers, thus: Christ Jesus Guardian Angel i-AM [sense world < soul (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) soul > spiritual world] human double (asuras) the Divine Mother We choose what comes out of us into the world . The higher Divine Powers make for the world-order that enables us to individually be morally (both in a positive negative sense) creative - to be actors in our own Dramas (...all the worlds a Stage...). Part of the Mystery of Evil is that its main battleground is not out there in the world, but rather is staged precisely where we can most directly effect it - in our own inner life of soul and spirit. Here again is how Rudolf Steiner put it in a lecture in Lucifer and Ahriman, at page 21: ...the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence. [emphasis added] For details on how this works on a world-wide social scale, refer once more to The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything. Here we are working not with the macro results of this structure, but with the personal and individual elements as appear within our own interior. The map is not the territory, and to best understand The Father of Lies we have to be self honest about our own lies. You could say that all the secrets of evil are within us, and that is where we will gain all our needed knowledge. Then it is these personal lies that we know best. The oddest reality here returns us again to The Sermon on the Mount and judge not lest ye be judged. Christ advises us to learn first about the Beam, in this case our own lies and lying. Only after facing our own lies and lying can we begin to help another with their Mote. Once more there is a kind of fools skill to be learned: to forgive ourselves. It is hard to face our own lies and lying if we judge ourselves. In the selfreflective soul the problem of the Mote and the Beam exists as well. The Beam of our unjust inner judgment of our own self disables us from really being willing to acknowledge our own lies and lying. Instead, fearing our own consciencess (our higher Is) judgment, we hide from ourselves our own truth. This is why the Fifth Step of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous reads: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. [emphasis added, ed.] A lot of self-lies take the shape of either ego-inflation, or ego-deflation. We make inner pictures of ourselves as bigger and better or lessor and worse. It is the luciferic double that encourages ego-inflation (bigger and better) and the ahrimanic double that encourages ego-deflation (lessor or worse). The former tends to excesses of the euphoric and the latter to excesses of the depressive. When the physical body is defective in some way, then the interface (the organ of the brain) between the spirit/soul and the body is lamed somewhat, and we get the phenomena: bi-polar or manic depressive. It is not something wrong with us that we do go through such changes of mood. It is merely very human. At the same time there is a huge problem with aspects of our modern culture, which we might call the fields of psychology and/or psychiatry. These forms of knowledge carry within themselves the lie that we as creatures of spirit and soul can be diseased. It is not a conscious lie, although many practitioners of these arts might inwardly have qualms about what they do. Much that happens to us in our souls and spirits is seen today as diseased, in part because the basic paradigm, natural science, is infused with what has to be called: the anti-Christ spirit. This spirit - this attitude of mind -denies the Father and the Son by believing there is only matter and there is no spirit. To the extent that the above two so-called healing professions believe a human being is only matter, and never spirit, we cannot be truly helped as we are not actually seen. Let me take a couple of cases in point, out of my own experience as someone who spent almost two decades fighting in the trenches of the field of mental health. By trenches I mean I was never a professional such as a nurse or doctor, but rather someone who might be called a psychiatric aide or a mental health worker.
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At that level I actually saw the patient more often and more directly than did the professionals. If they needed their bodies cleaned when they were incontinent, I did it. If they needed someone to sit with them in the middle of the night while they fought the voices inside their heads, I did it. If someone was to be struck, it was me. If someone had to be wrestled to the ground it was by me. Of course there are hundreds of thousands of us, fighting in these trenches, for low pay and little recognition. For us such experiences grace us with direct knowledge of what Christ taught with the washing of the feet. Case One: hearing voices. We make the assumption that when an individual reports hearing voices that this is some kind of inner illusionary state there are no voices to be heard, according to our cultural paradigms. We discount their experience, often treating this experience has having no possible meaning and as something to be gotten rid of. A lot of what we today call mental disease is actually very normal human inner experience arising in a time in which the system believes our inner life is not valid, and the only way we are to be judged is by our outer behavior. Spiritual tradition recognizes something called: the threshold. This is the boundary between ordinary consciousness and the spirit world. Certain material dysfunctions in the matter of the brain cause the I to have un wanted experiences across this threshold - experiences of the spirit, for which the so-called insane person is not prepared because our culture does not recognize these experiences as valid and real. These involutary spiritual experiences then represent an unusual kind of karma and suffering we have yet fully appreciated. Whenever we invalidate someones reported experiences, we place our judgment as superior to theirs. It is a hubris of the first order, as with only a little thought we would have to confess that we cannot see their inner world and have no idea of its real nature. Even to guess is flawed, although common. The fact is we hardly at all know our own inner life, so what makes us believe we are in a position to judge what is going on inside someone else? Case Two: intermittent explosive disorder (an example of the flaws of the DSM system of diagnosis). The Diagnostic Statistical Manual (going into its 5th edition as I write this) asserts that psychiatry can mimic physics - that is it can be scientific using number relations. So diagnosis is based upon lists of symptoms as definitions of disease - a kind of check-off list. This is an amazingly stupid idea, given that observation of human beings is far more of an art than it will even be a physical science. The drive to mimic science kills the art. At present one can find numerous discussions of how bad an idea the latest DSM is on multiple levels. But the insurance and pharmaceutical industries have something to gain from this DSM, and they also have sufficient social/political power to continue to push this false paradigm on the rest of us. Keep in mind that under Communism, the Soviet Union routinely imprisoned people of different political persuasions for fancied psychiatric illnesses. It used to be, when I was growing up, that some people had what we called bad tempers. They were socially expected to get control of this tendency to excess, and if they refused there were social consequences, usually criminal. Now that this is a DSM diagnosis (having a bad temper is now called: intermittent explosive disorder) we have taken a path which treats the person with this imaginary disease as no longer responsible for their behavior. This is a hugely dangerous tendency in modern society - to apply deterministic causal thinking to matters of inner life about which we really know nothing. Our ignorance here is colossal, and the social consequences of this ignorance unimaginable. * Everywhere lies. Self lies, institutional lies. Lies to gain power. Lies to gain wealth. Lies to hide from our own truths about ourselves. If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. John 8: 31-32. * * *

Even such a field of study as Anthroposophy confronts within itself the possibility of the lie. One must be able to confront and idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Marriage and Community Certified Copy is a filmed tale of deep understanding: A man and a woman meet, converse, and spend an afternoon together in Italy. He appears to be an English writer, she appears to be a possible fan. The movie starts where he is giving a lecture about his latest book: Certified Copy. He is a philosopher of art, it seems, and has written about whether or not a copy of some art is as artistically valid as the original piece. The movie, following his apt introduction to his philosophical questions, seems to ask us if people are art and whether relationships are art. The film, being good art, works on multiple levels and heightens its effect by suggesting at midway a delightful mystery. Are these two, this man and this woman, actually husband and wife, and are their initial encounters where they seem to never have met, actually unfolding a special stage of development of their 15 year relationship, which includes a son? The movie also demonstrates, less through concepts and more through actions, a discourse on the differences between male and female. He, ever the philosopher, is most himself when he masters the life of concepts and becomes able to define his own life on those concrete terms. She lives out of feelings, which as we know tend to the mercurial. His concept of the healthy human being is as a kind of adult child, free, spontaneous, living in the now. She lives in the responsibilities of her relationships - for example, as to her child she must be the adult. While this can be cognitive, for her this responsibility is something she mostly deeply knows through her feelings - her heart - not just her head. Clearly to her, the man is often just another child for whom she must be the responsible person. He chafes under her efforts to guide and cajole, resisting the loss of freedom in the face of another person who feels she must tell him what to think and how to live. Both desire to love and be loved, and yet have not understood in practice that one must learn to love the flaws of the other as much as the more decent parts. This ideal is given a spoken line in the tale, but little action or dramatic demonstration. Late in the tale they erupt into a fight in a public place - a restaurant. What she sees as his childishness frustrates her efforts to fix; and, her intrusions into his life - a kind of excess of mothering - frustrate his efforts to be true to himself.
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The film is very modern in its artistic appreciation of the drama in marriage of the collision between two individuals - in this case one male and one female. If I were a marriage counselor, Id show the movie to a small group of married couples, and then over food, and perhaps drink, let them discuss it for several hours. If I wanted to encourage wise discussion of community, among a group interested in living in close community, Id show them the movie The Village, by M. Night Shyamalan. Part of the reason for this discourse on marriage and community, in this booklet, is to point out the role art can play concerning deep questions, whose reality goes far beyond what is possible to consider even in this kind of text. It is the role of art to raise good questions, not necessarily to answer them. These movies also reveals how often we judge, and how those consequences play out in marriages and communities. an Animalization through Dismembering of the Astral Body Rudolf Steiner suggested one of the dangers coming toward humanity was this: an animalization through dismembering of the astral body . What the heck does that mean? Such a concept is a kind of technical term of Steiners Spiritual Science. It is one of four consequences of future evolutionary developments, that might be characterized as: the continuation of the Fall. There are some interesting (and challenging) philosophical-theological questions here, but it is not my purpose to explore them. I only want to point out a particular contemporary phenomena which is, in my experience, an aspect of these wider questions. For some time a certain kind of literature has become more popular, even reaching beyond books, and now into film and television. These are stories about vampires and werewolves, in which their lives occur as parts of extensive forms of fantasy culture and also as containing admirable character traits. While a deeper analysis could be made, here we just need to notice how it is that this attractive set of fantasy pictures, in film and books, has enveloped the imagination of many young people. We need to know why. People find today a certain emptiness in their lives. Working at a fast food restaurant, or in an office under an abusive boss - all these instances the Iam naturally finds undesirable. Since those who lead our civilization dont have a spiritual conception of the human being, they dont know what to do to bring about social health. Mostly what they do encourages social dysfunction. At the same time, the imagination is becoming more powerful, but again our culture does not understand how to teach about the imagination, so that people can be pulled in certain directions mostly out of instinct, rather than due to conscious choices. While some can see this as a terrible consequence, the reality is far more complicated. Karma plays a deep role in these changes, as does individual choices by the I-am during its sojourn in between death and a new life. Some of our young walk toward their futures and find the coming times filled with possibilities from which they recoil in horror. They want passionate engagement with life. They want to feel themselves as more powerful. These aspects of the desire-body (the astral body) for greater sensuality and power are not unwarranted. They dream dreams of power and sexuality and passion and community. The life of the mind (our inner life) begins to become more attractive than the outer world of the senses. It would be a perceptual mistake for thinking to conceive that there are only certain ways in which one learns to come awake inwardly. Such retreats into fantasy are not without their quite valid consequences. The fantasies about werewolves and vampires, who have an animal nature and magical powers, draw the imagination into the interior of our lives. We will do well not to assume this will turn out to be all bad. Again, we (if we want to understand) need to keep in mind our Beam and their Mote. Multi-Player Internet Role-Playing Games Here again is a social phenomena that can be pre-judged and mis-understood were we to only think about it in a superficial fashion. As a result, when we read in the Press about some doctor or scientist talking about Internet addictions, or addictions to games or to porn, we can have the idea that someone who retreats from the so-called real world is ill and needs to be fixed. That idea is our Beam. The truth is that in many case not only is inner activity of the soul heightened in much game play, but real world skills are being produced. Take for example multi-player role playing games of the shooter type. What happens in real life? Several people from a wide variety of physical locations come together in an imagined world. While some can complain that the visual imagination is too detailed (or bloody), the fact is that the meaning of the experience is the more intense part. An emotional bonding arises among the game players, one that may not be possible in their real lives, because in those lives they dont find anyone who shares their interests. Cooperation is required in order for the players to succeed - they cant win on their own. Quick thinking is trained, and visual acuity in making important observations of the game environment is rewarded. If one wants, its is possible to go on the Internet and find deep studies and thoughtful books about the real world consequences of so-called game play. Keep in mind that play is one of more profound ways we learn, while flipping burgers for low pay, under an abusive dominating boss, is not play - its work, which we do in order to later be able to play.

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For a wonderful literary journey into the intersections between game play and the real world, read Neil Stephensons latest novel: Reamde. The world has and is changing rapidly as the Third Millennium dawns, and what seems foolish to older people is quite likely wisdom for younger people. God does work in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. the Age of the Dark God: Ahriman Im trying to keep this booklet short, but at the same time somewhat complete - that is, not leave out matters that need to addressed ... in the above I tried to give a few examples of how to try to see past the Beam - past our tendencies to quickly judge matters we actually do not understand. Now we need some history in order to grasp deeper aspects of the present. The Persians recognized two divine powers, a God of Light - Ahura Mazda, and a God of Darkness - Angra Mainyu (also know as Ahriman). Rudolf Steiner used the name Ahriman in his works on Spiritual Science, to refer to a macrocosmic Being, who also appeared in the microcosmic (human nature) world is a tendency in human beings. We called part of this above, the ahrimanic double, or the prosecutor. Steiner also referred to what he called: the Ahrimanic Deception. Ahriman, being the Father of Lies, through the human double was able to introduce, over time, into the cultural stream of Western Civilization a massive coordinated structure of lies or untruth following the Incarnation of Christ. Why is Ahriman the Father of Lies? Is it because he takes some kind of human-like perverse pleasure in lying? No. Its because he cant see the truth. What is true or not is a mystery to him. Like many of us the only thing he observes in reality is the mirrored picture of his own nature. He sees the rest of the Creation, but only recognizes there what is like him. He is, in his own one-sided view, such an absolute perfection and power that when he goes mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest maid of all he sees only his own nature. Lucifer is different. What he saw was human imperfection, found that wanting, and in his pride believed we could not become what was possible for us without bowing to him. Having no love, no compassion and no humility, Ahriman cant see truth, and therefore cant communicate truth because he is perceiving only the warped mirrored perfection of his own being and nature. This is his attitude and it lives quite strongly in present day natural science and in all religious fundamentalism. This materialism then is everywhere in this Age of Ahriman, which itself is now marked by his incarnation. He has become human for one lifetime, and lives now, at the time that I write this, as a human being. The writer of the John Letters (I and II) in the New Testament spoke of what he called the anti-Christ spirit, or an attitude which denied the Father and the Son. Natural Science lives fully in this spirit or attitude of soul when it decrees that the world is only matter and that there is no spirit. Religion too lives in this spirit when it takes its points of view (its theologies) and declares there is only one valid system of belief, and it is theirs (that particular religions). Not only that but the system becomes a set of fixed ideas - ideas without any Life in them. Life grows and develops and changes, and systems of ideas that dont have life in them become fixed and only breed death into the souls of those who believe in them. The higher powers of the Mother and the Son, loving us, let us live in this arid cultural desert in order to experience its existential emptiness (God is dead, some declared). Ahriman serves us by creating his enchantment of the mind (the attitude of the anti-Christ spirit), which isolates us from each other and drives us into ourselves in order to pull out of ourselves the counter-spirit - the spirit of Life. The Ahrimanic Enchantment is meant to put us to sleep in our souls until such time as we ourselves - within ourselves and among ourselves - become the Prince that gives the Kiss that awakens - what Steiner called the Christ Impulse. This is not meant to be easy or without deep pain of soul and spirit. Modern Life, within the individual biography, must be excruciatingly real. Our I has to pull something out of itself - it has to forge new meaning out of its own creativity in life. In the appendix I have added some material available elsewhere, but which in this text ought to be included without those who read this having to go to another book. From my book American Anthroposophy is a long essay on Ahrimans 20th Century incarnation and its meaning: Outrageous Genius. As a companion to that we have the Return of Christ in the Ethereal (not in a physical body - but in the spiritual plane where authentic thinking takes place) and the story which leads us to our personal understanding of the Second Eucharist in the Ethereal which accompanies this Return: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul. What this shows us is that at the Dawn of the Third Millennium since the Incarnation, a great battle has taken shape. The Dark God Ahriman has incarnated in a body, inside the Life of Rights in the United States of America. This incarnation involved a birth on December 25th, 1950 in a kind of mockery of Christs own birth. It was preceded by another mockery, a Star in the form of a horrible bomb experimented on at Trinity site near Alamogordo New Mexico, and then dropped on Japan near the end of the Second Great War of the 20th Century. In this same Century it became possible for human beings to experience Christs Return in the Ethereal - the ancient Persian polar-opponents even more intimately involved in human affairs. Yet the battlefield is not earth existence itself, but rather the inwardness of the human being. We let in (or not) the Force, the moral power of the human being, by the choices of our own I, as the American story teller George Lucas intuited years ago in the original Star Wars. We take the heros journey, or fall into the dark side. At the same time we have our Yodas and our Obi Wan Kenobis - our Rudolf Steiners and our Valentin Tombergs. In Outrageous Genius I name Ahrimans earthly incarnation, but do not do that here, because unless we fully understand the context, and as well realize that the social-political world is in fact the leading edge of the Creation, we will not appreciate what is at stake, or why Ahriman is not only not unclean, but is in point of fact a kind of spiritual teacher. Recall once more our symbol set:

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Christ Jesus Guardian Angel i-AM [sense world < soul (A/d) < i-AM > (L/d) soul > spiritual world] human double (asuras) the Divine Mother

In the center is the fallen human being - the < i-AM>. Surrounding that is the coordinated might of great spiritual powers, whose full existence means via Love to make possible the <i-AM>'s eventual freely chosen goal to either rise up, via the some kind of path on the upper vertical, or to descend into the deeps of earth existence on the lower vertical, where we learn to integrate the double into our selves and into our world view. Neither path is better, and the biography itself can contain elements of both. Another marker of this Dawn of the Third Millennium is the metamorphosis (dying and becoming) of Western Civilization. As I explain in detail in my book The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything , there is profound order in the social-political existence of humanity. In fact, the Creator God named Christ in our time (in more ancient times the Creator had more ancient names), is Embodied in this Organism of the Social-Political World. We live, literally, inside the Divine, surrounded and buoyed up by this Love. There is no detail of our existence which is outside this Love, although a whole book was required to even hint at the nature of this order/organism in which we unfold our biographies. An especially important theme in that book is that: even conflict has meaning. The present day social chaos is necessary so that our individual i-AMs are confronted with fully real and existential crises from which we may not escape. The outcome (of the the choices) in those moments of crisis is not ordained, for our freedom is essential. At the same time, each biography has its own needs, and as regards moral dilemmas there are no moral absolutes that all must follow, for that would take away our freedom to choose. Thus, the Third Millennium begins with an immense social dysfunction that is required in order for each individual to face their particular moments of inner pain and doubt. Only in this way is the i-AM challenged to pull out of its own nature that which can arise in no other fashion. There are no accidents. Simultaneously, each world view is necessary for each individual. That one human being is born a Muslim and lives in Pakistan, and fights in a war against the West, is the intellectual and mental context in which their particular biography is to unfold. That another human being lives in North Dakota, and has become a confirmed new atheist, is for them the needed paradigm through which they see the world of their individual biography. While there are universal truths, there is no need for any biography to find them, for they will have precisely what they need for their personal biography, and the arguments of many - setting religion at odds with science, is just part of various individual contexts. Love cares not about whether we have the right point of view, but rather whether we have the experiences we most need in this particular life. In this sense then, Ahrimans incarnation, and Christs Return in the Ethereal, are mere details. Even my books are tiny ripples, mostly isolated in the vast oceanic streams that are the totality of Earth Existence. What Steiner called the Age of the Consciousness Soul is to run from about 1400 to 3500 AD. The dominate reality for that Age is the Rite of the Mystery of Evil , an event taking place in the World Temple that is Earth Existence, and for each participant the meaning of all of this belongs to them to determine. What I think is irrelevant for most. Love fully individualizes this Rite - it has only structural universal significance - i.e. we can name it and describe it, but no participant needs to know either that name or that description. At the same time, this is also the Age of Science, which is marked by a search for universal truths. As a consequence, certain thinkers add to human spiritual knowledge during the course of such events, in the same way that those doing research on biology add bit by bit what they can derive from their own investigations. A street child in Bombay has no need for this knowledge, for Love will see to it that all that s/he needs s/he will receive. The Rolling Stones had it right: you dont always get what you want, but if you try real hard, youll get what you need . Or, as Christ said: Ask and you will receive; look and you will find; knock and you will be admitted . appendix two from the book the Way of the Fool [For the neophyte: Ahriman's incarnation as Karl Rove in the social-political world, really only effected the Stage Setting, which serves as a background to our individual biographies. Granted this Stage Setting is far more realistic than the cardboard and paint of a theater, nevertheless the relationship, between our individual lives and the historical backdrop in which those lives unfold, is captured quite neatly by the Bard's metaphor of Stage Setting and Actors in a Role. Ahriman is a significant ruler of the characteristics of the Stage Setting, but as regards the soul and spiritual element of the human being (our inner world and life), Ahriman, through his influence via our Shadow (the double-complex), is but a small though significant part, while we ourselves can be the Star. Ahriman is also not the Author of the Play, Christ is - Christ as Lord (Artist) of Karma, and we as free choice-makers. Just as the East sometimes talks of there being something that might be called (in the human being) a Buddha Nature, so we in the West can speak of a similar characteristic of being human - the Christ Impulse. Out of the Buddha Nature of the human being comes Compassion, and out of the Christ Impulse of the human being comes Love. So the two combine: Christ Himself as Lord (Artist) of Karma, who works with our freedom, so that we can out of that freedom ourselves author human love in the form of the Christ Impulse. In this realm (the inwardness) Christ can have far more influence if we know how to choose to make that possible. The inwardness belongs to our will (we know this instinctively), but for the individual I to become the proper steward of all the potential capacities hidden in this inwardness does require that we wake up there and begin to be active. In this next essay I lay out just how Christ has made himself available to us directly when we strive to be moral - that is when we seek to know and do the Good (or as Rudolf Steiner would say: become knowing doers).

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As such the essential lesson from the story of Ahriman's incarnation can be seen in that his activities push many people in the direction of such soul pain that they are confronted by a choice as to whether to remain asleep or actually wake up to the conditions of inflamed social chaos and insane speed of life. Modern existence, for all its seeming unnecessary difficulties is actually a blessing. Just as physical illness is a transformative blessing, so are today's illnesses in the social existence of humanity. Of crucial importance is to keep in mind what was mentioned above, in that religious fundamentalism (Christianity forced into arid and dead doctrines and dogmas, by the influence of the ahrimanic double) acted in the world in recent years in such a way that made a mockery of the True Second Coming. Nothing Ahriman has accomplished is a potent as this misdirection, which has made people shy of the promise Christ made to come again. This essentially fake Christianity is simply a modern version of what a similar impulse among the Hebrew people accomplished at the time of the Incarnation - that is: People in that time were lead away from the truth by those who sought to maintain their own power and stature as religious leaders, rather than understand that Love begins with Service to the Thou (washing the feet), and then leads ultimately through trials to Love as a total Sacrifice of self for other. We live in a time in which a similar gesture permeates the Christian world. Religious leaders tend to prefer themselves over others, and being more in love with their own thoughts of what is the truth, they keep their flocks (and those who hunger for spiritual enlightenment) from knowledge of the True Second Coming. In the essay below (and those that immediately follow) I offer to the reader precise instructions as to how to experience the True Second Coming, first as a Sacrament in the Soul - a Second Eucharist in the Ethereal - in the world of thought, that arises when we authentically seek to know the Good, or what I also call: discovering the experience of Love Engendered Free Moral Grace as that arises out of the spiritual activity of the own I.] The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul *[John 16: 12-15 I have much more to say to you, but you cant bear it just yet. But when the other comes, the breath of truth, he will guide you in the ways of all truth, because he will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears and announce to you whats coming. He will glorify me, because he will take of what is mine and announce it to you. Everything the Father has is mine: thats why I said he will take of what is mine and announce it to you.] There yet remains a small effort to make a synthesis this work - to make a whole out of seemingly disparate parts. I will try to be brief. A principle aspect of the great Mystery of our Time is the Mystery of Evil, both outwardly in the structural backdrop to the shared social world of humanity, and inwardly in the depths of our own souls. I have tried above to point out how it is that the essential matter is not the outer social world, but the inner soul world, and the trials and education of the i-AM, in the biography. The context, which we need to call the maya of history and current events, and which is receptively held everywhere from below by the Dark Mystery of the Divine Mother, all passes away, and only what is Eternal, that is what becomes an aspect of the developing i-AM, continues; and, this inner realm (the whole Inwardness of the Creation, which includes human souls and spirits) only exists because of the Heavenly Mystery of the penetrating thoughts of the Father, while the whole (the outer social maya and the eternal inner mind) is created, loved, overseen and mediated (wherever two are more are gathered...), in all its Grace filled and Artistic interrelationships, by the Earthly [new Sun] Mystery of the sacrifices of the Son. We (humanity) now begin to move out of our spiritual childhood, and in making our way through the Rite of Passage that is Life as it leads us toward our spiritual maturity we need to take hold of the complex of the doubles and the karma of wounds, as these thrive within our souls, and which encourage human evil through temptation and inner prosecution. Even so, this task of meeting the Mystery of Evil within the soul is not as heavy as we think, for through the Shepherds Tale [Charles Sheldon], the Kings Tale [Rudolf Steiner], the Healers Tale [the community-created Twelve-Steps] and the Sermon on the Mount, we have all the practical instructions that we need. In seeking to understand in ourselves these three: moral grace, freedom and love [each of these is elaborated in great detail in the book], we set before ourselves what is required to be learned in this Age and it is with these three naturally unfolding capacities that we are Graced and strengthened so as to be able to meet with courage the Mystery of Evil. If we do dare this path, and seek for the deepest instruction in Christs Sermon on the Mount, then will come to us a change in the nature of our biography, such that it more and more takes on the pattern, described in the John Gospel, as the Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ ( the washing of the feet; the scourging; the crowning with thorns; the carrying of the cross; the crucifixion; the entombment and the resurrection) (for a careful exposition of these Seven Stages, see Valentin Tombergs [anthroposophical] book: Inner Development). Whereas Christ lived this in an apparently mostly physical way, those, who truly follow In His Steps [the name of Sheldons book, as well as a critical phrase** in Ben-Aharons The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century - a profound Imagination of the True Second Coming ], will in the main feel these trials in their souls, as aspects of the joy and suffering in the human biography. **[Now when they identified themselves with the situation of earthly humanity, the souls who remained true to [Archangel] Michael prefigured, in their planetary Earthly-Sun life, the great Sacrifice of Christ. They walked again in His steps [emphasis added] as they did in former earthly lives, only now the order of following was reversed. They went before Him, showing Him the way, acting out of free and self-conscious human decision, and He followed in their steps [emphasis added] only after they fully united themselves with the divided karma of Earth and humanity. Only then could He offer His sacrifice as the answer to the new, future question of human existence: the question concerning the mission and fate of evil. Jessiah Ben-Aharon, The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century.] These trials may seem difficult, but the truth is they are merely human. It was Christ becoming human that went to the Cross, for how could He place an example before us we could not do out of our own humanity (just as Sheldon wrote in In His Steps). [something written by a Shepherd (a pastor) in America, at the same time Steiner (a King) was writing his The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom)] It is the human in Christ that asks in the Garden of Gethsemane that the cup be taken from him, but if not, He accepts the Fathers will. While later it is the even deeper human in Christ that says on the Cross: My God, my God, why did you abandon me ?. Who among us, in the trials and sufferings of life, has not uttered these same thoughts? [That Steiner teaches an esoteric meaning for the end of life statements of Christ, in no way contradicts their exoteric meanings, which are also true.] It is here that Christs teachings strongly diverge from the Wisdom of the Buddha, for the Buddha would have had us overcome suffering by learning not to know it (one version of the third Noble Truth of the Buddha reads as follows: ...concerning the Cessation of Suffering; verily,it is passionless, cessation without remainder of this very craving; the laying aside of, the giving up, the being free from, the harboring no longer of, this craving ., whereas Christ asks us to embrace our human pain so that we can pass through the Narrow Gate of suffering to then know our deepest self, the true i14 of 42

AM, and then through this burning trial of knowledge of the true-self, ultimately come to Him. If we would follow In His Steps then we too must take on ourselves the errors (sins)*** of the world, and the tasks of forgiveness and love, for every love engendered free act of moral grace takes up a small part of Christs suffering, so that we too participate in the deepest creative acts of the Seventh Day of Creation - the transformation of evil into love . [This is for anthroposophists the teaching attributed to Mani, but the reason such a personality even knows this is because the transformation of evil into love is modeled for us in the deepest felt actions of the Divine Mother and the Son. When we know intimately these actions of the Divine Mystery, we know the true spiritual meaning of the Mystery of Evil, and that this Mystery is Itself the real source of the earthly doctrine connected to it that is sometimes called Manichaeism.] ***[The word sin does not appear in the original Greek, from which the Gospels were translated into the other languages. The Greek word hamartia, misused to indicate sin, actually means missing the mark (it is a term from archery). See in this regard the Unvarnished Gospels by Andy Gaus.] Is this foolish? Of course, but we need not fear this Way of the Fool, for our Faith in Christs Promises will always be fulfilled, as we ourselves can learn to become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Yes, this Way is full of trials, but whoever has lived life, and reflected upon their experience, knows that in the meeting of our biographys trials with courage we discover what it truly means to be human: to struggle, to fall, to get up and to learn - and, through this process, gently and humbly, begin to take up along side and with Him, Christs kind and light, Yoke of Love. Having said all this, it becomes necessary to make one last picture for the reader, for clearly, in that we read the news and hear of the horrors of mans continuing inhumanity to man, we ourselves face a terrible trial. How are we to understand a world seemingly so filled with Evil? Picture, for a moment, the surface of the Earth. Below dense matter and fiery substance, while above, airless space. Humanity lives out its Earth Existence only in this narrow spherical band of Life, whose diameter is just under 8,000 miles (and whose height is just three to four miles, because above 15,000 feet above sea level, the atmosphere starts to not contain enough oxygen to support our breathing). The total surface area of the Earth is 196 million square miles, and the habitable land area 43 million square miles Six billion plus human beings must find all that they physically need, which when we consider actual available arable land (land that could be cultivated for food, and other necessary resources), means that each individual only has a square 161 feet on a side from which to grow what they need. This then is the physical spacial aspect of the social organism of the whole world. Yet, we know that this spherical space is itself often unwisely distributed, for human social arrangements, whether rooted in dominance and selfishness (dominion over) or generosity and sharing ( communion with), these social arrangements seem to determine this social order. This stream of moral gestures (choices), of good and/or of evil, moves out of and through human beings, organizing the physical one. As to this moral aspect of the social organism of the whole world, it has reached in this Time a kind of climax of development, and it will be important to appreciate the true nature of the logos order in which Christ has set modern human existence, through His creative powers as the Artist (Lord) of Karma (the precise and love based placement of individual biographies in relationship to each other). Here is something Natural Science cannot do, for the meaning of existence is beyond the weaknesses of their yet fanciful and spirit-empty images. This will also help us to understand why so many (falsely, but with some degree of reason) believe we live in the End Times. In the Twentieth Century the world was woven together into a single social organism, not just via the globalization of economic matters, or the personal interconnections offered by the Internet, but most centrally by the Media. At the beginning of the 20th Century, few knew what went on elsewhere the world, in any detail or with any immediacy. At the end of the 20th Century, at the same time that the returned Kings were unfolding the New Revelations of Christ [the story of the 20th Century involves a return of the meaning-essence of the Three Kings of the Gospels - that is a return of the knowledge of Gnosis, hungering to be woven again into a single whole with true Faith - an event which clearly had to accompany the True Second Coming], the world itself was woven into a whole in the sense that no macro social event was not to be almost immediately known everywhere the same day (if not the same hour) that it happened. We live in a time when has arisen a Culture of Media - a kind of knowledge commons, in which vast resources are used to create for us pictures of the meaning of the world and of events. The more developed the country, the greater our daily experience can be saturated with the messages coming from this Culture of Media. Moreover, great effort and expense is gone into by those who would force us to believe what they want us to believe. Between advertising, political propaganda, outright lies, weak or lame reporting, and other similar failures to reach the truth, this saturation of the soul by the Culture of Media would seem to fail to offer us any service at all. What is not appreciated is that the Christ is far wiser than even the deepest believers imagine. Every evil is eventually turned to good, and next we will explore the prime example for our time. Recall what has been pointed out many times now, that the individual biography is the central reality of life on the Earth . What happens inside us as we experience life is much more important and enduring than the outer events which surround us. That Stage Setting ( all the worlds a stage.... ) is but epiphenomena to the reality of the life of the soul. To help us appreciate this then, let us explore these matters from the point of view of the individual biography. In this time, there are over six billion plus of these biographies woven into the tapestry of the social organism of the whole world. Six billion lives held delicately and exactly within the Love and Divine Justice of the Mystery. Within these biographies, all the individual i-AMs experience that precise and personal instruction that hopes to lead them to the realization of their own divinity and immortality of spirit. [The epoch (rite of passage) of the Consciousness Soul is 2100 years long, going from the time of the beginning of the on-looker separation (and the creation of Natural Philosophy Science) in the 1400s, until the years around 3500 AD.] To understand this we need to think it from the inside out, and not from the outside in. The Culture of Media only provides context, never essence. True, life is hard, even harsh, even terrible. The naive consciousness wants to turn away from this suffering, and cannot understand how God (the Divine Mystery) could allow such things as torture, child abuse and the genocidal acts which are dumbed down by the terms: ethnic cleansing. The reality is that what the Divine Mystery does is to allow for freedom. This most precious gift is essential to the immortal spirit during its Rites of Passage we are calling: Earth Existence. Moreover, the Mystery also makes certain there is a true Justice through the post-death passages of kamaloka and lower and higher devachan, in a manner no human social structure can provide. Christ has told us this in the Sermon on the Mount: to what sentence you sentence others, you will be sentenced. All this should be kept in mind as we proceed.

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As a single ego, I wake in the morning. From the night I bring the remainder of yesterday, perhaps worked over. Surrounding me, as I live the day, are the lives of those with whom I have a karma of wounds - with whom I have a debt of meaning to creatively work over. This we carry together, each bearing a part, each bearing their own wounds. These are wounds from the past, from the present and from the future. To observe the world of today, as we walk the walk of our lives, is to observe trials of fire and suffering - rites of wounding and being wounded. But not just this, for also there is healing. Where we let love thrive, wounds become healed. Thus flow all our days, often too fast to even notice the beauty and wonder of the sea of personal relationships and shared trials. Yes, there is misfortune, and evil deeds. But do we really imagine Christ and the Divine Mother lets this evil happen without recourse or justice? We may not know this directly through Gnosis, but we also can have Faith. Gnosis without Faith is empty of Life; and, Faith without Gnosis is empty of the Truth. Only when we join them together, do we get: the Way (the Mystery of living the Good), the Truth (the Mystery of knowing the Good) and the Life (the Mystery of union with the Good). This then is the wonder of the outer and inner biography, for often the wounds are not visible. Yes, sometimes the wounds are visible to our eye or ear for we see people too fat, too thin, too lamed in body, too poor, too physically or mentally deficient. Often, however, so many of us suffer in silence that we really do not know the nature and personal meaning of their wounds - only our own are visible to the eye of our heart, unless we first learn to exercise and unfold certain powers of soul and spirit. Amidst all this visible and silent suffering, we find ourselves woven into the Culture of Media. Images and sounds flow around us, pictures of a world on the verge of chaos and madness. Yes, we have the intimacy of our personal biography, but through the Culture of Media we are drawn into the painted backdrop of the whole world - a backdrop we all share. War in Iraq. Global warming. Governments out of control. Pandemics waiting in the wings. Local economic recession, and even world-wide depression. What lives in this painted backdrop - in this Stage Setting - in the wise relationship of the Culture of Media to the unfolding of our personal biographies? The answer is this: the mirror of our own inner darkness and light... Inside us the double-complex - our feelings of judgment, our temptations, our addictions and our sense of failure. Inside us the darkness that belongs personally to us, and outside us, carried to us by the Culture of Media, the mirror of that darkness. But also inside us the Good that we would author. Think on it. Do we not experience the images and sounds brought to us by the Culture of Media as something that is filled with what we like and we dislike? We live our biographies and the Culture of Media confounds our souls with pictures of dark and light to which we all respond individually. The great masses of humanity do not make the News. The great masses of humanity experience the News. What is News? News is exactly what the reporters and television personalities call it: stories. The Culture of Media provides us stories (tales) of the world, which are often presented as if these stories are true, something most of us have come to know they are not. News stories reflect all kinds of bias, and in some cases the bias is deliberate. Moreover, news stories reflect conditions of commerce living in the agency reporting them. For example, it is well understood that in the last third of the 20th Century in American television the news divisions of the major networks disappeared, and the entertainment divisions took over the responsibility for the news. The opportunity to inform and educate the receivers of news stories became secondary to the need to keep them interested so as to be able to sell commercial time and make a profit. In addition, the stories are mostly about dire and tragic events, and little is investigated or reported that is about the positive and the creative. We are right then to wonder sometimes about the News, about its harsh nature and artless excessive attention to the dark deeds of many. Humanity in general bears within it the beam that is not seen, while the mote is exaggerated. But the world itself is not this beam, is not this darkness. The greater part of darkness is inside us - in our own souls, and from there projected onto the world. The Culture of Media exaggerates this darkness further, at the same time it gives us much that also arouses our own unredeemed antipathies and sympathies. Once more for emphasis... The world in its reality is not this Media generated excess of darkness (so out of balance with the light that is also everywhere present), which we all project from within the soul - the beam. Yet, in the Culture of Media this whole processes of dark projection is exaggerated so that the mirroring nature of the social world itself begins to bother us. This logos order of the social world is complex and rich, and worth a deep study. Pictures of a distorted and untrue meaning of the world abound, and while we share these pictures, we make personal and individual our reactions. Just as the intimate events of our biographies have a personal meaning, so does the shared stage setting have a personal meaning. In a more general sense, for example, many Christians today are confronted, via the Culture of Media, with pictures of individuals whose actions as self-proclaimed Christians either inspire us to imitation or cause us to turn away in shame. The same is true in Islam. The terrorist who frightens us in the West, also causes many ordinary Muslims to turn away in horror. Everywhere fundamentalism rises, to continue the example, the great mass of humanity, that are not so tied to such arid rigidity, shrink away in antipathy. Do we not assert quietly, inwardly to ourselves: this is not me, I am not that - I will not be that! In our biographies then, we are confronted in the intimacy of our personal relationships with what are sympathetic and antipathetic reactions to that which we would choose to admire and imitate, and that which we would shun and refuse to be like. Via the Culture of Media, we are met with that which approaches us in the same way, yet on a larger scale. Just as we as individuals have a Shadow (a double-complex), so nations, religions and peoples have a Shadow, and the Culture of Media puts in our faces these pictures and meanings with which we can identify or from which we can turn away, often in shame. Christ has arranged, in this particular moment in time (the cusp of the 20th to 21st Centuries, which is also the Dawn of the Third Millennium) to place in the dying away hierarchical social forms of humanity, those biographies which do two main forming gestures within that history. This is all connected to a process in which social chaos arises in order to cause these old hierarchical [third cultural age] social structures to let go their no longer valid hold, and in many instances be eventually replaced with new social form arising out of the social commons [fifth cultural age].
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In the first instance, these biographies living in the decadent social hierarchies (such as government, corporate and church organizations) portray strong images, via the Culture of Media, to which we react equally strongly out of our likes and dislikes. For example, one of Americas wise women, Doris (Granny D) Haddoch, has said that we should be grateful for such as George W. Bush, because he causes us to awake from our sleep as citizens. As a consequence, in our individual biographies we react to the extremes of these dominant religious, business, cultural and political personalities, and this brings about in us as individuals certain inner judgments and calls to action. The second effect of those biographies unfolding in the now decadent institutional social hierarchies is to drive the social order further into a needed condition of chaos, something all 6 billion plus biographies require in order to birth the moral dilemmas necessary for the Age of the Consciousness Soul. This social chaos sweeps traditional moral authority aside, and forces us as individuals into situations where we must rely on the own I in order to properly face the moral crisis. In that human beings are incarnating in massive karmic communities in order to have these sometimes shattering moral experiences, this causes the present world social organism to have the strong tendency to completely dissolve into a condition of near total social conflagration [thus my website: Shapes in the Fire]. The moral aspect of the logos ordered social organism of the world requires crisis in order for the individual biographies to live, not just intellectually, but fully and dynamically and existentially into dilemmas of moral choice. Only true moral choice can awaken in us what is offered in this Age to the development of the Consciousness Soul. Nothing in the world is not touched by the Art of Christ, who as Lord of Karma - Lord of the Satisfaction of Moral Debt and healer of karmic wounds, arranges in majestic harmony all the biographies so that even from the smallest detail to the grandest historical event, meaning is put to the service of our development - the leaving behind of our spiritual childhood followed by our birth into spiritual adulthood. The world historical crises of this time are a complex and rich Stage Setting, against which 6 billion plus souls live out the dramas of their individual biographies. Thus, in this birth from spiritual childhood to spiritual adulthood, the Time - the Age of the Consciousness Soul - is a Rite of Mystery, a Baptismal Mass for all of humanity, just as was told to us by John the Baptist. [in Matthew 3:11] Now I bathe you in the water to change hearts, but the one coming after me is stronger than me: Im not big enough to carry his shoes. He will bathe you in holy breath and fire. (emphasis added) Consider now more closely what happens inside us as we experience the intimacy of our biographies, and the shared pictures that come via the Culture of Media. Choice confronts us. Do I be like that, or like this? From what place inside do I choose? In a time so filled with chaos that rules no longer apply, I discover that I can rely only on myself. Out of myself I must author the Good in response to the world of meaning that surrounds and confronts me. So powerful, in its personal immediacy, are these experiences, images and meanings, that we cannot turn away from them. It is as if the World itself is on Fire, wanting to burn and burn and burn until we run from it in terror, or stand up to it and give the fullest of our participation to its moderation and its healing. Yet by Grace, I contain the means to know the Good that my biography and membership in the shared fate of humanity draws out of me. What I source becomes a part of the world, and I know that this is so. I know my freedom to enact the moral grace that my heart comprehends in its deepest places. Deep inside my soul my very own heart hungers to sing: Love will I give. Love will I create. Love will I author. So now we think away the physical - the maya of the sense world, and let our picture thinking gaze only upon this inner, invisible to the physical eye, moral act. An act more and more emerging everywhere, for while in America, and the Cultural West, the Consciousness Soul is first widely appearing, it will and must appear everywhere that human beings let the world touch their wounds, while they seek to share with others the trials by fire of their biographies. Invited by the Love and Art of Divine Circumstance to look within and to reach into the depths of our own being in order to source and author that Good which we know to be right, we touch something spiritual and are Touched by something Spiritual. In this time of the True Second Coming, in the inwardness of our souls and invisible to all outer seeing, a Second Eucharist is being enacted - the Good offers Itself - Its own Being - to us (Moral Grace). For the Good we know is not just known in the soul as what we tend to think of as a mere thought, but if we attend most carefully, it is true Spirit, just as the John Gospel writer told us that Christ spoke: [John 3:6-8] Whats born of the flesh is flesh, and whats born of the breath is breath. Dont be amazed because I told you you have to be born again. The wind blows where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you dont know where it comes from or where it goes; its the same with everyone born of the breath. [The existence of a Second Eucharist, to accompany the Second Coming, in no way means to diminish or change the Original Eucharist. On the contrary, we will find that via the Second Eucharist our understanding of the meaning of the Original Eucharist (the transubstantiation of matter) will deepen. See in this regard, the small pamphlet: Radiant matter: Decay and Consecration, by Georg Blattmann. From the transubstantiation of matter we are being led onward to learning how to participate also in a transubstantiation of thought.] Thus we are being truly and continuously born again today (each act of moral grace is another Second Ethereal Eucharist and birth), from out of our spiritual childhood and into our spiritual adulthood, baptized outwardly by the fires of the times in our biographies, and by holy breath within - a Second Eucharist where Christ gives of His own Substance that biblical knowing of the Good - His own Being. For us to truly know the Good, requires we join our own soul to the Good. Our yearning to author the Good out of ourselves is how we participate in the Baptism of being truly born again, and how we participate in the sacrament of the Second Eucharist. Christ also participates by giving to us, out of Himself, this very Good - this Moral Grace. When having received within ourselves this sacrament of the Second Eucharist, an act that only arises because we seek it and form its actual application, we remain free - we create moral law - we author the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Given to us within by Christ as a capacity, we then author its incarnate nature and pass it on to the world of our biographies, - from out of us thence into the outer world (or into the inner world), do we then ourselves author this Good: love engendered free moral grace. But how does Christ do this? Is this Good offered to us in this Second Sacrament as if it was a thing, passed by hand from one to another? No. Christ as holy breath breathes upon the slumbering burning embers of our own good nature, just as we breath upon a tiny fire in order to increase its power. He sacrifices His Being into this breath, which gives Life to the tiny ember-like fire of our moral heart. The holy breath becomes within the soul of each human being who asks, seeks and knocks a gift of Living Warmth that enlivens our own free fire of moral will.
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The Narrow Gate opens both ways, making possible thereby the intimate dialog and conversation of moral deeds and thoughts that is woven between the i-AM, the Thou and the Christ (wherever two or more are gathered...), which intimate conversation leads ultimately to the consecration - the character development - of the soul. In this way our thinking can now behold the Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul : A macro-cosmic Rite, a Second Ethereal Eucharist, in which we give birth out of ourselves in the most intimate way possible, knowledge of the Good, not as mere thought, but as Life filled moral will, breathed into greater power by the sacrifice of the true ethereal substance of Christs Being in the form of holy breath. The outer world is but a seeming, and what is brought by the Culture of Media mere pictures of the Stage Setting for the World Temple that is home to our biographies. When we think away this outer seeming - this logos formed and maya based sense world, and concentrate only on the Idea of the moral grace (Life filled holy breath) we receive and then enact out of the wind warmed fire of individual moral will - as individual law givers, as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets - we create this Meaning of Earth Existence. Every act of moral grace, given greater Life within in the deepest intimacy of our life of soul, is an ethereal communion with Christ, even though we may only experience it as what to us is a mere thought of what is the Good at some moment of need in the biography. Christ gives us this Gift, by Grace, freely out of Love, and with no need that we see Him as its Author. We hunger inwardly to know what the right thing to do is, and when this hungering is authentic, we receive Christs Holy Breath. This does not come so much as a thought-picture of the Good in response to our questing spirit, but rather as the contentless breathing substance of Christs Being. We are touched (inspired) by Love, and at this touch we shape that Breath into the thought that we then know. The nature of its application and form in which we incarnate this thought is entirely our own. We shape the thought completely out of our own freedom - our own moral fire of will, for only we can apply it accurately in the individual circumstances of our lives. As the Age of the Consciousness Soul unfolds accompanied by this Second Eucharist, the Social World of human relationships begins to light and warm from within. For each free act of moral grace rests upon this Gift of Christs Being to us - an ethereal substance received in the communion within the Temple of the own Soul, freely given in Love whenever we genuinely: ask, seek and knock during our search for the Good . Our participation in this Rite, this trial by Fire leavened by Holy Breath, leads us to the co-creation of new light and new warmth - the delicate budding and growing point of coparticipated moral deeds out of which the New Jerusalem is slowly being born. This co-creation is entirely inward, a slowly dawning Sun within the macro Invisible World of Spirit. Moreover, we do it collectively (as humanity). While each of us contributes our part, it is our collective conscious celebration of the Second Ethereal Eucharist (creating the Good) that begins the transubstantiation of the collective (presently materialized and fallen) thought-world of humanity into the New Jerusalem. Thought is real, and it is as equally real as is matter. The Original Eucharist transforms the already divinely given now-dying substance of earthly matter into Life-filled Spirit through our ritual invitation of the active Grace of the Divine Mystery; and, our participation in the Second Ethereal Eucharist transforms dead thought into living ethereal Substance, through the mystery of our individual spirits active and embryonic grace, that becomes united into the collective co-creation of humanity. In the Invisible World of Spirit, we co-participate, out of the own moral fire of will, in the Dawn of the New Sun that is to become the New Jerusalem. Let us now slow down here for a moment, and take a deep breath, for these last thoughts above may seem almost too big - too idealistic - to be easily contemplated. To ease our understanding and gently ground it, let us consider this situation once again in it most ordinary aspects. The world of our biographies places each individual into the fires of experience. These are remarkable gifts that lead us toward moral questions - often deep and troubling. We yearn to know what to do, and in this circumstance we may ask, seek and knock. What has been called earlier in this book Moral Grace is available to us, yet the mystery of this practice of inner activity is where we ourselves create moral law - where we become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. In the Kings Tale, we saw that Rudolf Steiners book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity showed how to come to this knowledge through the practices of Gnosis - to knowledge - in the form of moral imagination, moral intuition and moral technique. In the Healers Tale, we saw how the 12 Steps helped us to master the soul through the elevation of the spirit, and in this way come to know Gods Will as we understand it. Finally, in the Shepherds Tale we came to understand that by asking What Would Jesus Do out of Faith, we could also come to the needed individual moral beliefs. Three different paths (among perhaps many more) all leading to those individual invisible depths that each of us must uniquely experience, which we have now seen must be properly called: the Second Eucharist of Holy Breath. So we come now to perceive the Time - this Age of the Consciousness Soul - where, if we seek it, we have made ourselves available to be baptized with Fire and Holy Breath, just as John the Baptist us told Christ would do, 2000 years ago. Even so, we still have to truly want to know the Good - to authentically ask, seek and knock.

General Renewal or Illusion of the Anthroposophical Society by Harald Giersch A lecture held in the Rudolf Steiner School, Villingen Schwenningen on 19.01.2005 giving the reasons why I left the Anthroposophical Society. Achamoth Verlag Willi Seiss E: info@achamoth.de Reproduced with the kind permission* of Harald Giersch and Willi Seiss Translated by Graham Rickett *This was sent to me (Joel Wendt) by a third party (Martin Wacey), and given the nature of the material, I have set this within my website without gaining any more direct permission than its presence in my e-mail box in January of 2010. Two Introductory Quotations from Ludwig PolzerHoditz (1869-1945)
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When Rudolf Steiner saw that the Society could only continue to exist if he makes the sacrifice of taking over the leadership himself, which he did at the Christmas Conference 1923/24, he connected his earthly destiny with the destiny of an earthly Society. When, shortly after this, a continuation of his activity on the Earth was made impossible, he died. In the spiritual world he cannot remain connected with an earthly organization, and so it became clear that the Anthroposophical movement has to be carried through the catastrophe by individual pupils of his. He can reach through to these individual human souls, he can help them, he can guide them if they are filled with the good will to work in harmony with his impulse. Communities on the earth will only be able to form with difficulty, slowly and in accordance with individual karma. His activity on earth will be kept alive in many different groups and perhaps continue further in the near future, until forces again begin to work which are able to unite the groups once more on a universal basis. An immediate continuation of what only he was able to hold together in a unity must be recognized to be logically impossible. All the lamenting over this impossibility has damaged the cause of Anthroposophy in the world at large. To come to terms with the fact of the great Teachers death and draw the consequences from it would have been necessary, and would have caused less harm to his lifes work than to obdurate refusal to accept and the expectation that some miracle will happen (From Recollections of Rudolf Steiner, Dornach 1985). The movement is indestructible, The Society upon Earth is not (..) He (Rudolf Steiner) will, from now on, only guide individual human beings. (L. Polzer-Hoditz: Pictures of Destiny from my time as a Spiritual Pupil. Thirteen scenes published posthumously, edited and introduced by Thomas Meyer, Basel 2000.) Lecturers Introduction In order to explain the necessity and the urgency of my lecture I would like to precede it with an imaginary conversation between someone with a critical attitude towards the present Anthroposophical Society and someone who is a member of this Society, which might go as follows: The critic points to failings and weaknesses of the Society, which he has observed in the behaviour of members and of the Vorstand or which he has heard reports of. The defender of the Society replies somewhat as follows: I refuse to listen any longer to all this old nonsense. I feel personally connected with Rudolf Steiner and the spiritual Goetheanum. The things the people do in Dornach at the Goetheanum, the earthly centre of the Anthroposophical Society, are of little concern to me. The main thing is that I remain faithful to the impulse of the Christmas Conference 1923/24, when the Anthroposophical Society was newly founded, as a spiritual fact, because it was the will of Rudolf Steiner to hold this Christmas Conference. All the quarrelling between the karmic streams ought finally to be consigned to the past and to the process of decomposition. We have more important things to do at the present time than to worry about the constitutional question of the juristic existence or non-existence of the Christmas Conference Society. Let us leave all this to the eternal mischief-makers who, from dust-laden writing desks, import their own gall problem into the Anthroposophical Society. An attitude of this kind in defence of the Anthroposophical Society is possible, it is even universally present among the members, otherwise the pseudo-Christmas Conference of 2002 would not have been able to take its course in the way it did. And I am also quite sure that here in this hall there is a majority of Society members whose heartfelt conviction is echoed in the worlds of our imaginary defender of the Anthroposophical Society. This was how I myself spoke two years ago. I fully realize, therefore, that with this subject I am reaching into not just a wasps nest, but at least into a hornets nest. But let us recall the fact that two years ago, at this pseudo-Christmas Conference, there were four plaintiff groups, who prevented the intentions of the Vorstand from sailing through unchallenged. I do not wish to express a judgement on this, as I am not one of the plaintiffs but in February 2004 a Swiss court of law pronounced in favour of these plaintiff groups against the Vorstand according to Swiss law of association. The Vorstand must now pay at least 60,000 Swiss Francs, because it appealed against the verdict. And now we ask the following question to the members who defend the Christmas Conference of 2002 by referring to the cosmic mystery of the eternal Christmas Conference of 1923, with which they feel connected, together with Rudolf Steiner with whom they feel themselves in the best of company: Could it be that, despite my firm conviction that all is well up there in Heaven, things down here on the earth have unfortunately not gone in the way they should? Could it be that the Vorstands mistaken view in matters of association law, now exposed in court, needs to be examined in a quite different way than is possible for a secular court of law in relation to a Society which understands itself to be esoteric in nature? For now in the appeal procedure the Vorstand is citing its responsibility towards the spiritual world. * According to the Members Supplement of Das Goetheanum of 5.5.2006 the costs from 2003 to 2005 amounted to SFr.821,315. And now one would need to inquire whether, in the words of Goethe, it is the spirit of the ladies and gentlemen in question or whether we really have to do with the spirit of truth, which is the spirit of Anthroposophy. But here the four plaintiff groups are open to scrutiny just as much as anyone who dares to approach this subject. My aim, therefore, is not to engage in monkish wrangling and dissension, but to address certain facts which are completely ignored and evaded, and are even obscured, by the litigating parties in Dornach. For how would you respond if it were established as a fact that Rudolf Steiner himself had declared the Christmas Conference a failure? If it turned out that the object of contention, namely the Christmas Conference, had long ago evaporated into thin air? If it turned out that, in place of the facts, a Christmas Conference ideology has been propagated, which may well provide my soul with a soft pillow of repose, but which has not more than the name in common with the Anthroposophy intended by Rudolf Steiner (as little as the C in CDU Christian Democratic Union has in common with Christianity)? If the teeth, so to speak, had been extracted from Anthroposophy, and it had been turned into a drawing-room Anthroposophy which benumbs my sense for reality and truthfulness and makes impossible for me certain thoughts and deeds? (see lecture of 18.03.1916). If it should turn out that the cause of Anthroposophy since Steiners death has fallen into the wrong hands, continuously right up to the present day? For according to a statement of Rudolf Steiner: ..the possibility exists that those exalted powers which stand at the beginning of the Anthroposophical movement, are falsely represented. For it is a normal occurrence in occultism that powers wishing to pursue their own special interests assume the form of those which previously gave the actual impulses (11.4.1912). And suppose it were to be discovered that the Heavenly things whose striving it has always been to be fought out on Earth, and only on Earth, had been diverted by a comfortable and illusory conception of the Earth, into an other-worldly consolation provided by the eternal Christmas Conference and the heavenly Goetheanum? Just as the social question of the fair sharing of goods between rich and poor demands a solution on the Earth, and to console the poor with the prospect of Heaven must be dismissed as hypocritical. With regard to the situation of the Society today is it not a highly revealing phenomenon that very many Society members explicitly declined to concern themselves, even on an elementary level, with the Constitution question and, uninformed as they were and are, swore a blind oath of support for the Vorstands plans for a socalled new constitution? Supposing it were established that my personal need for harmony and my personal good will do not suffice as arguments where questions of truthfulness here on the Earth are concerned. What have my need for harmony and my red and blue cards to do with the sword which Michael would
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wish to place in my hand, or rather my brow, and the sharpness of which consists in the demand that I should be truthful? Truthful also in the way I perceive the history of the Society to which I belong. Rudolf Steiner stressed repeatedly that the cause of Anthroposophy stands or falls with truthfulness. To avoid any misunderstanding I would emphasise that I feel committed to the cause of Anthroposophy more than ever. I ask the reader to look upon what follows as an admission of the mistaken view I have held hitherto with regard to the Anthropophical Society. In what I say I will try to be guided only by the facts. These facts are, in part, completely unknown and also very unpleasant. Only in the last two years have they dawned for me with such clarity. It would have been dishonest of me not to draw the logical conclusion from my insights and withdraw from a Society whose necessity I can no longer acknowledge. I maintain no less than the following: Even if the Dornach Vorstand had won the case in a Swiss court of law, or should do so in the future, it would nevertheless be in the wrong from the standpoint of the spiritual world. I hope to justify this unheard-of claim in the pages that follow. One can very quickly correct errors on the physical plane by referring to the real world. If one wishes to establish proofs on the level of thought, then one is advised by Steiner to ensure that the thoughts support one another. My lecture is corroborated by very many sources, and I will mention these as I speak. With my statements firmly anchored in this way, you will surely recognize that I am not just speaking out of the top of my head. And another possible misunderstanding: My intention is not to start off a senseless argument. My sometimes sharp-edged formulations arise from the deep inner concern that I feel, but can also be justified in terms of the immense importance of the matter under discussion. To understand what I mean, everyone should answer for himself the following question: How can an infected wound over which a skin has formed be healed? Is not the only way, to open up the source of infection so that it can be cleansed? And this generally requires the use of a sharp knife. General Renewal or Illusion of the Anthroposophical Society I. What were Rudolf Steiners intentions with the Christmas Conference? II. The Failure of the Christmas Conference III. The Meaninglessness of the New Constitution IV. The Consequences V. A comment regarding the Free High School for Spiritual Science in Dornach. I. What were Rudolf Steiners Intentions with the Christmas Conference? To understand this it is advisable to take a closer look at Steiners opening lecture of the Christmas Conference. This lecture was held on December 24th 1923 starting at 11.15 a.m., in the hall of the carpentry shop, as the Goetheanum had burnt down a year before, through an act of arson. In this lecture Rudolf Steiner speaks of the Anthroposophical movement and the Anthroposophical Society as separate entities. Steiner would wish now to bring these two distinct phenomena to a new unity under his own personal leadership: The Anthroposophical movement is to have as its sheath the Anthroposophical Society. This motif of the drawing together of such contrasting phenomena as are embodied in the Anthroposophical movement and a sheath that might be appropriate for it, is one that extends throughout Steiners biography from the very beginning. The process of the drawing together of movement and Society, very problematic from the beginning, is described by Steiner in the lecture cycle held in 1923 with the title The History and Conditions of the Anthroposophical movement in relation to the Anthroposophical Society, and also in many lectures held in 1923. Rudolf Steiner as representative of the Anthroposophical movement, which has its origin in heavenly realms, tests a number of forms that are already in existence and have an earthly rigidity of structure, to see whether they are able to receive the new revelation that wishes, through him, to descend from heaven to earth. Steiners activity embraces philosophy, Theosophy and Freemasonry. (The latter cannot be discussed here owing to lack of time.) The following is a passage from the inaugural address of the Christmas Conference: There has opened up for humanity a revelation of a spiritual reality. And it is not out of the arbitrariness of earthly will, but in a beholding of the majestic pictures that have arisen from the spiritual world as contemporary revelations for the spiritual life of mankind; it is out of this that the impulse for the Anthroposophical movement has flowed. This Anthroposophical movement is not an earthly service; it is in its totality and in all its single aspects a Divine service, a service of the Gods. And we find the right mood for it when we look upon it in its entirety as a Divine service of this kind. And as such we would receive it into our hearts at the beginning of our Conference; we would inscribe it deep into our hearts, so that this Anthroposophical movement may unite the soul of each individual who dedicates himself to it with the primal source, in the spiritual world, of all that is human, so that this Anthroposophical movement may lead the human being to that latest illumination, which can provide him with satisfaction for the present period in the development of humanity and which, regarding the revelation that has begun, can clothe itself in the words: Yes, that am I as a human being, as a God-willed human being on Earth, as a God-willed human being in the cosmos .. (GA260 24.12.1923. Dornach) With these worlds Rudolf Steiner is referring to the Michael School experienced before birth, which he described somewhat later in the 1924 Karma lectures, and to which all belong, who later seek Anthroposophy during their life on Earth. The first earthly form, in which Rudolf Steiner as representative of the heavenly movement clothes Anthroposophy, is philosophy. According to an autobiographical communication of Rudolf Steiner, he was assigned the task (in about 1880) by an anonymous master, of clothing Anthroposophy in the garment of German Idealism. In the course of this work there arose the early epistemological writings, which finally led to the Philosophie der Freiheit in Weimar in 1894. The next sheath into which the Anthroposophical movement was brought by Rudolf Steiner was the Theosophical Society, whose German Section he entered in 1902, although he had previously criticized it very radically as being out of keeping with the present age. As late as 1897, in his Magazin Fr Literatur, in an article entitled Theosophists, he had characterized them in the following terms: .. nothing but empty formulations. without a trace of content. hypocrisy empty phrases.. knowledge they do not possess .. no idea whatsoever.. obscure chatter.. (GA32) When Steiner nevertheless entered this Society, his friends questioned his sanity. Yet Steiner knew what he was doing, in accordance with the Masters instructions. In essence, what he had said to him was the following: If you wish to engage the enemy in battle, you must first understand him. You can only conquer the dragon by clothing yourself in his skin. One must take the bull by the horns. In the greatest misfortune you will find your weapons and your fellow-warriors. I have shown you who you are; now go and remain true to yourself. Rudolf Steiner was thus faced with the dual task on the one hand of working his way conceptually into the outer, materialistically coloured activity of contemporary culture and science, and engage within it. This he did through newspaper articles, lectures and work as a teacher in the Berlin School for the education of workers, with its communist leanings. On the other hand he took on the task, in the Theosophical Society, of transforming the esoteric
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terminology with an Indian character stemming from the British colonial tradition, into one that was appropriate for the western consciousness. In addition to this it was necessary to set over against Anglo-Indian Theosophy which had remained untouched by Christianity: (Quote R, Steiner) The spirituality of Western Civilization with the mystery of Golgotha as its central point. (GA257. 06.02.1923. Stuttgart) Here an important role was played by Marie von Sievers later to become Steiners wife as his fellow fighter for the cause and companion on his lifes path, when, at the right moment she asked a question during a tea-party held at Graf Brockdorffs home in Berlin in 1901, thus setting in motion Steiners public activity for Christian-Rosicrucian esotericism. Rudolf Steiners inner connection with Marie von Sievers to the very end came to expression in a letter from him to Marie on 27.02.25: Only with you can I experience a shared feeling and thinking in the act of judgement. (GA262) Considering Steiners esoteric calling, the Anthroposophical movement represented by him was a Cuckoos egg within the tradition-bound Theosophical Society. And it was only a matter of time before the one would no longer be able to tolerate the other, because their strivings were in conflict with one another. This moment arrived when in 1909, within the Theosophical Society under the leadership of Annie Besant, the Indian boy Krishnamurti was proclaimed to be the reborn Christ. Steiners criticism of this impossible claim was used as a pretext for expelling Steiner and his followers from the Theosophical Society. On the 2nd and 3rd February 1913 what was now the Anthroposophical Society constituted itself anew in Berlin. But Steiner himself was not a member or functionary of this Society. He remained outside it as a spiritual adviser and teacher from out of the Anthroposophical movement. As a result of this the Society developed an independence of its own, albeit with negative consequences. The hopes which Steiner attached to an independent Society were not fulfilled. What he called the inner opposition within the Anthroposophical Society became ever more tangibly a paralysing obstruction for the Anthroposophical movement, and thus for Steiner himself. Despite the growth in numbers of members of the Anthroposophical Society, a hollowingout of the esoteric core within the Society was apparent. The burning down of the Goetheanum in 1922, the Stuttgart state of affairs, socalled, the splitting of the German National Society into young members and conservatives, the general state of inner passivity of the Society members, characterize the picture of a Society that had been a failure right up to 1923. There are damming characterizations of the Society in the letters to Edith Maryon, an English sculptress who had helped with the work on the first Goetheanum. Here are a few outstanding examples: Stuttgart 25.03.23: As to the Society I have actually no more to say than that I would prefer to have nothing to do with it any longer. I am repelled by everything its executive Councils do. Stuttgart 11.05.23: . The Anthroposophical Society remains asleep. It refuses to be woken up.. Vienna 30.09.23: Otherwise, everything went well, leaving aside the albeit significant fact that our Viennese members are also asleep. The Hague 16.11.23: here, too, the Society is in a parlous state, disunity, inadequacy etc. In autumn 1923 Rudolf Steiner was faced with the difficult question whether he should sever his connection with the Anthroposophical Society altogether, or completely unite himself with it. On Nov. 17th, in an internal circle in Holland, Steiner considers whether he should withdraw with a few followers who understand him, into a community something like an Order Ita Wegman and Marie Steiner tried to dissuade him from retreating in this way. Steiner himself describes in retrospect the seriousness of the decision confronting him: But I would like, also in the circle of our dear English friends, to stress quite emphatically something that definitely needs to be stressed in connection with the decision to take on the Presidency of the Anthroposophical Society. With respect to the movement as a whole it was a deed that was fraught with risk, because by acting in this way one faced a quite definite eventuality. For the Anthroposophical movement rests upon the fact that there flows down from the spiritual world real revelations concerning the content of spiritual cognition. If one wishes to do the work of the Anthroposophical movement, one cannot do human work alone. One must be open for that which flows down out of the spiritual worlds. The laws of the spiritual world are very exact and they are inviolable. They have to be strictly observed. And it is difficult to contrive all that an outer function requires in our time, be it even that of President of the Anthroposophical Society, with the occult duties towards the revelations of the spiritual world. So that one had at that time to place before ones soul the question: Will the spiritual powers who have, up to now, given as a gift of grace to the Anthroposophical Society all that can flow down from them, will these spiritual powers continue to bestow their gifts upon the Anthroposophical movement in this way? (GA240. 12.08.24. Torquay) Rudolf Steiner did decide to unite his destiny as representative of the movement with the destiny of the administrative Society, but he attached quite definite conditions to this union. Were these conditions not to be fulfilled, the impulse of the Christmas Conference would fail; that is to say, the union of esoteric movement and exoteric administrative association would have to separate again. One condition was the forming of an esoteric Council, which was to be responsible to the spiritual powers for what it does. The other condition was that the consumer attitude towards the communications from the spiritual world, which was generally typical of Society members in the year 1923, would have to stop. An esoteric trend would need to take hold among Society members. From now on, Anthroposophy would have to be done. For the cause of Anthroposophy is not just a personal matter for private indulgence. It is a concern for mankind as a whole, and for the Gods. As the opening lecture of the Christmas Conference is addressed to the members, it has to do with the conditions attached to this new beginning, which the members must, from now on, be careful to fulfil. In Steiners words: Only if, in this way, we can make the Anthroposophical movement into the deepest concern of the heart, within our own being, only then will the Anthroposophical Society continue. If we can not do this, it will not continue. For the most important thing of all that has to be done in the days ahead, must be done in the hearts of each and every one of you, my dear friends. What we say and what we hear, will only be made by us in the right way into the starting-point for the development of the cause of Anthroposophy if our hearts blood can beat for it. And it is actually for this reason, my dear friends, that we have called you here, so that in a truly anthroposophical sense a harmony of hearts may be awakened. And we cherish the hope that it will be possible for this appeal to be understood in the right way. (GA260) Steiners wish is that (quote): The spiritual-esoteric must form the basis for all our activity. This means: Truth that unfolds to the full, divine and spiritual life that unfolds to the full, in our inner being. Anthroposophy must live out in daily life all that is recognized as truth within it. And further on in this opening lecture Steiner describes how, before the Christmas Conference, when young people wanted to join this Anthroposophical Society, they always shrank back from the dogmatic demands made of them by the old Anthroposophists who had belonged to the Theosophical Society. Young people were always taught to feel that it was necessary to make a declaration of faith in a dogmatic way. Of this, Steiner says: This is something that has absolutely no place any longer within the fundamental disposition of human souls in our time. Human souls today feel an aversion to everything of a sectarian nature. And it cannot be denied that it is difficult to eliminate these sectarian qualities from the Anthroposophical Society. But they must be eliminated. And not the slightest trace of them must remain in future, within the new Anthroposophical Society that is about to be founded. It must be a genuine World-Society. Whoever joins it must have the feeling: Yes, here I find something that really stirs me. The older person must have the feeling: Here I find something that, throughout my life, I have striven for in association with other people. The young person must feel: Here I find something that comes to meet me as a young person. Quite consistently through the further course of this opening lecture the word General, which precedes Anthroposophical Society, is interpreted to
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mean: universally human. On this basis there is no need for guardians of the true teaching, so-called dependable people, who in practical terms would be snoopers who keep Dornach informed of whatever is going on. National Societies should regard themselves as independent. (Quote) But then these national societies will be really autonomous. Then every group that forms within this Anthroposophical Society will be really autonomous. In this connection Steiner points out that everything of a bureaucratic or dogmatic nature and all clinging to abstract principles is out of place in this Society, because everything is based on the purely human. And then Steiner speaks about two difficulties that have to be overcome: 1. No more secrecy internally or externally. Unrestricted availability of the teaching of Anthroposophy. This must be accompanied by the capacity to form sound judgements in Anthroposophical questions. In another connection Steiner says what amounts to the following: So long as a person still clings to Anthroposophical terminology, he has not yet found the essential nature of Anthroposophy. 2. The other difficulty to be overcome is: cowardly denial of Anthroposophy where one ought actually to step forward in open acknowledgement of it. Also, the spiritual traditions that are flourishing everywhere although they belong to the past should not be indiscriminately mixed up with what Anthroposophy brings, which is essentially new. Elsewhere Steiner says: Courage where Anthroposophy is concerned is learnt quickly or not at all. At this point I will break off my reference to the opening lecture. Steiner begins then to discuss very carefully the Statutes of the new Society. From this brief summary of the opening lecture of the Christmas Conference one can recognize two basic features of action in the spirit of Anthroposophy, that is to say, of an attitude that is universally human and in keeping with the demands of the present age. They are: unconditional love of the truth inwardly, in relation to oneself; and unconditional love of tolerance outwardly, in relation to ones fellow human beings. Love inwardly and outwardly needs to be developed, from the heart, by everyone who wishes to belong. Truthfulness inwards and tolerance outwards, borne by the capacity for love, are the fundamental demands of the contemporary, universal human consciousness, and hence of the consciousness-soul age. Whoever stays behind has (or will soon run into) problems. He should ask himself whether he is in the right place in this universal human society if he does not want to be someone who is striving towards these ideals. That this striving is bound up with inner work, of this there is no doubt. Thus Steiner explains: Simple membership of the Society (pink card) places one under no further obligation than to wish to become familiar with Anthroposophy. Elsewhere he says: to wish to be a decent human being. Membership of the High School for Spiritual Science (blue card) requires that one should wish to be a representative of the cause of Anthroposophy before the world. Instead one can and could observe, then as now, how many members of all descriptions have lain down upon what Steiner calls the snug couch of spiritual science and the snug couch of confident belief. This attitude stems from the feeling that, just because one thinks one has found what is right, one is better than others. Instead of feeding ones lower ego, this is where the work of the heart should surely begin. II. The Failure of the Christmas Conference. All the statements made by Rudolf Steiner in 1924 after the Christmas Conference on the subject of the Christmas Conference are filled with hope and with deep concern as to whether the Christmas Conference impulse was being taken up by the members of the Society. Thus, even in the opening address the following is said: Only if, in this way, we can make the Anthroposophical movement into the deepest concern of the heart, within our own being, only then will the Anthroposophical Society continue If we cannot do this, it will not continue. Soon after this, on the 18th January 1924, he says: If this Christmas Conference is taken in the way people were so inclined to take earlier Conferences, then it will gradually evaporate, it will lose its content and it would be better if we had not met together. A similar statement is made in Stuttgart on 06.02.1924: This Council, which was formed in Dornach at Christmas, rests upon a kind of hypothetical judgement. If the Society is willing to take up what it does, then it will be the Council; if the Society is not willing to take it up, it will be nothing at all. But it will also be possible to take it, so one might say, as the centre of a living activity. With this I can only indicate (..) that the attempt has indeed been made to introduce a new spirit into the Society by way of the Christmas Conference. But it is essential that one should understand what is the nature of this new spirit: that it is a spirit of living activity as opposed to a spirit of abstraction, that it is a spirit that would speak, not to the head, but to human hearts. The consequence of this is that, for the cause of Anthroposophy, this Christmas Conference is actually either nothing or everything. It will be nothing if it finds no continuation, if it was a festive gathering that brought a little joy and satisfaction; then afterwards one forgets the whole thing and life continues as before, in the same old fashion. Then it has no content, nothing radiates back towards it. It can only receive its content from the life in the different areas of the Society; it is only a reality through what happens through it, what happens continually in the life of the Anthroposophical Society through it. The Christmas Conference only becomes real through that which develops out of it. To turn ones gaze to the Christmas Conference gives rise in the soul to a certain responsibility to make it real, which otherwise it will withdraw from earthly existence. Whether as the Christmas Conference it will prove effective for life depends upon whether it is continued further. Formally speaking, we have brought it to a close, but actually this Christmas Conference should never come to an end, but should always live on in the life of the Anthroposophical Society.. Even when Steiner reports positively on the Christmas Conference, he never says it has been accomplished, completed or has succeeded. He always points to the conditions that need to be fulfilled, the programme of inner work that ought to be carried out. On 23.05.24 R.St. points to Ahrimanic demons that are beginning to make their influence felt. On 24.08.24 Steiner also makes a remark about the inertia of the Council, Which so far has only made half a step forward. And Steiner asks patience of himself and his listeners. The Christmas Conference is a process that is in danger because, in spite of the Christmas Conference, the members are continuing on in their old lethargy. Even in Steiners remarks on the Christmas Conference on 05.09.24, the positive statement to the effect that through the Christmas Conference an esoteric impulse had entered the GAS is followed by the qualifying remark that the Christmas Conference will only continue if human beings find in their hearts the strength to remain faithful to it. The Christmas Conference is active only where this more esoteric trend is present. Even at the end of his final address on 28.09.24, which he had to break off because of illness, there is a sevenfold repetition (only then ..provided that) of the conditions which must be fulfilled if the Christmas Conference is to succeed. Also in his final word of greeting to the members from his sick-bed at the beginning of 1925 Steiner writes the following: in the fervent hope that the Christmas Conference will have received a new impetus in the hearts (of members). None of this sounds like a proclamation of victory, as it later came to be spoken of and implanted itself firmly in the minds of members as though the Christmas Conference could be treated as a finished product. To these expressions of Steiners deep concern and hope in his lectures to members we will now add some less well known communications from the circle close to Steiner. According to the priest Rudolf Meyer the following statement was made by Rudolf Steiner long before his illness: The Christmas Conference is not being taken up. There is still time. But if it is not taken up by the autumn, the Ahrimanic powers will launch their attack. The Stuttgart state attorney Dr. Bruno Kruger has testified that as early as June 1924 Rudolf Steiner said to him personally with firm insistence: This impulse has failed. Come back to Dornach in October. Then everything will be arranged differently including the situation in Stuttgart. A member who wishes to remain anonymous received from Rudolf Steiner, in response to a question about the Christmas Conference and its effects within the Society, the answer: the spiritual world allows nine months to see whether an echo comes from the members. If no echo comes, the impulses of the Christmas Conference have come to an end. When the nine months had passed, this member asked Rudolf Steiner about it again. He replied: No echo has come. The Society has not taken up the Christmas Conference.
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The eurythmist Ina Schuurman testifies to having received personally from Rudolf Steiner the following statement, which she reports thus: It was during a eurythmy dress rehearsal in the course of the Christmas Conference. That Rudolf Steiner was walking past on his way from the auditorium, stopped in front of me and said: Now let us hope that things can continue in this way for ten years. In September 1924 there was again a dress rehearsal in Dornach. When Rudolf Steiner came by and stopped in front of me. He said with great emphasis: the Christmas Conference has failed, and walked on into the auditorium. There is also a communication said to have been received by Countess Keyserlingk after Rudolf Steiners death. Countess Keyserlingk had attained certain degrees in occult training. She writes as follows: It was on the morning of Rudolf Steiners cremation, which I did not attend. The earthly body of the great Teacher was still laid out near to where I stood in the room of the carpentry shop, when close to me the aura of the beloved Teacher appeared. From this aura the instruction came that I should write. I took paper and pencil and from his presence came the following words Often I could not write quickly enough, then he stopped and waited until I had caught up with writing, as Rudolf Steiner had done on earlier occasions when he was dictating something to me: My mission is ended. What I was able to give human beings at their present level of maturity, I have given them. I go away, because I found no ears able to hear the spirit-word behind the word. I go away, because I found no eyes able to behold the spirit-pictures behind the earthly pictures I go away, because I found no human beings able to bring my will to realization. The Mysteries remain veiled or hidden until I come again. I will come again and unveil the Mysteries when I have succeeded in establishing in spirit-worlds an altar, a place of worship, for human souls. Then I will come again, then I will continue to reveal the Mysteries. Responsibility for my death is borne by those who have suppressed the culture of the heart. If human beings had gone through their hearts and penetrated into the depths they would have found the strength to fulfil the tasks of the present age. Ita Wegman had asked Rudolf Steiner some time after the Christmas Conference what would happen if it were not to succeed. Steiner had replied: Then Karma will prevail. Anti-Michael demons would become active if the Michael impulses, which had entered so powerfully, are unable to achieve a breakthrough. From January 1925 onwards Steiner no longer spoke to Ita Wegman of exhaustion, but, instead, of the effects of Karma. Dr. Ita Wegman who, together with Dr. Noll, gave Steiner medical care until the very end, reports as follows: In full consciousness, but without saying anything about the future, without leaving behind any instruction or message for this or that personality, the Master has left us. And a direct question put to him on these matters was consciously answered in the negative. Why was this? Somewhat later, Dr. Noll told Johanna Mcke: Shortly before his passing, Frau Wegman asked Dr. Steiner whether there was any arrangement he wished to make in connection with the Society he looked very intently at her and then turned away! To sum up what we have said so far, one could state the following: In the new Anthroposophical Christmas Conference Society contrasting Karmic streams which had once been in conflict with one another were to be brought together into a new Christian movement. In order to neutralize the negative personal element and the Karma of the different streams the exercises had been given, in self-knowledge, character training (subsidiary exercises) and the meditations (main exercises). For a similar reason the Karma lectures had been held by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, to foster a general awareness and a better mutual understanding of the Karmic situations within the Anthroposophical Society. Because the members did not heed the Christmas Conference and thus failed to do the inner work required, taking the Christmas Conference with the same lack of commitment as they had done with earlier conferences, the Christmas Conference impulse evaporated and the karmic streams began again to gain the upper hand. Negative astral beings used the opportunity to take possession of un-purified astral bodies and intensify weaknesses of character. On May 23rd 1924 Rudolf Steiner reported on the Christmas Conference before a lecture given in Paris, and described the situation as follows: It is connected with the fact that I mean from the spiritual aspect very powerful forces of opposition, demonic powers are attacking the Anthroposophical movement. But we can well cherish the hope that the forces of the alliance that we were able to form with the good spiritual powers will be able in the future to defeat all those powers of opposition in spiritual realms which make use of human beings in order to achieve their aims to defeat all these powers of opposition. The spiritual background of the Christmas Conference was that Steiner, in taking on as an esoteric Master the leadership of a hitherto exoteric administrative Society, also had to stand responsible before the spiritual world, for the unredeemed Karma of the members of the Council and the Society. Thus he said: This leading function entails the following, and I have often, particularly since the Christmas Conference, had to point out what this function of leader of the Anthroposophical Society entails. It entails that all that happens in connection with me, I am able to carry, myself, up into the spiritual world. And you see, if you want to be actively involved in the true sense, if you want to be actively involved in that which the Anthroposophical movement has become since the Christmas Conference, you must be able to enter into the thought of what it means to stand responsible for the Anthroposophical movement before the spiritual world.. All that is represented on the Earth as something of a personal nature is, when it mixes itself into what has to happen for the cause of Anthroposophy, an element which, if it remains personal, cannot be justified before the spiritual world. And what difficulties arise for the one who has to represent something or other before the Spiritual world in a responsible way, if at times he has to bring, together with that for which he must stand responsible, all that comes out of the personal aspirations of the people involved. What consequences this has, of this you ought to be a little more aware. It results in the most terrible setbacks from the side of the spiritual world Here is someone working with others in the Anthroposophical movement. but he weaves into what he is actively contributing, personal ambitions, personal intentions, personal qualities. And so, there they are, these personal ambitions, these personal tendencies. Most people dont realize that they are personal; most people regard what they do as impersonal, because they deceive themselves as to the personal and impersonal. This must then be brought along. And it results in the most appalling setbacks from the spiritual world for the one who has to carry with him into the spiritual world these things that have their source in the personalities. These are inner difficulties, my dear friends, which arise particularly for such a movement as Anthroposophy within the Anthroposophical Society. Certainly it is terrible that we have such terrible opponents, but with respect to the inner question of how Anthroposophy has to be represented, it is far more terrible when it is necessary to carry the fruits of work that is done within the Anthroposophical movement, to carry them into the spiritual world with the encumbrance of the personal interests of this or that individual. And, actually, very little thought is given to this fact. The risk inherent in the initiative taken by Steiner lay in a promise made to the spiritual world, that he would unite the karmically opposed streams. Steiners own words: There is also in a certain sense a promise that has been made to the spiritual world. This promise will be fulfilled with the utmost resoluteness, and one will seem that in the future things will happen as have been promised to the spiritual worlds. So that a responsibility has been placed not only upon the Anthroposophical movement, but also upon the Anthroposophical Society, towards the Council. That is to say: In order to keep this promise Steiner depended upon the cooperation of the members. This would also explain the appeals made continually through the year 1924 to the members, that they should, at long last, take the Christmas Conference seriously. Steiners last attempt to rescue the Christmas Conference impulse, while bypassing the existing Council, occurs at the close of his final address, for the sake of which he summoned all his strength and left the sick-bed to which he had already been confined: If in the near future there are at least four times twelve human beings in whom the Michael-thought becomes fully alive, in four times twelve people who can be recognized as such, not through themselves, however, but through the leadership of the Goetheanum in Dornach, if among four times twelve people of this kind there emerge leaders for a festival mood of Michael, then we can look upon that light which will spread abroad in humanity in the future, through Michael-stream and Michael-activity.
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These four times twelve human beings could not be found, however. Retrospectively Ita Wegman wrote words to the effect that it was Steiners sacrifice in taking upon himself the Karma of the Society that led to his death. A similar view was expressed by Marie Steiner von Sievers. How did the Council act after Steiners death and what were the consequences of this for the Society? After the esoteric vessel had broken, the Council found itself in a state of bewilderment and helplessness. A general meeting of all the members ought to have been called. The perplexing situation should have been declared openly. One should have discussed with the members what further steps might be taken. Instead there began the playing with esotericism, which Rudolf Steiner in the 3rd letter to members had expressly characterized as a form of untrue behaviour and thus as the opposite of Anthroposophy. There he describes the two fundamental evils of pseudo-Anthroposophical behaviour: playing with esotericism on the one hand, and on the other the cold impulse to teach others. So now there was the wish to appear to be more than they really were. They felt themselves to be still the esoteric Council, and let the members continue to look up to them as such. Marie Steiner was the only one who was clear about the whole situation. There is a letter from her to Eugen Kolisko, in which she writes: I have clearly recognized that our Council, as it now is, has been orphaned in the stage of infancy, and is a complete nothingness. She stresses that this has been written after the most painstaking reflection and that she has weighed everything up in the fullest sense of responsibility. It is in the ideological usurpation of the Christmas Conference for reasons of vanity and the retention of power that the true motives lie for the inclination shown very soon by Marie Steiner, to withdraw from the Council after Steiners death. In various letters she later expresses herself very clearly regarding the spiritual decline in the heads of the Council members. By way of characterization she chooses typical concepts, well-known from the Catholic Church. She speaks, for instance, of the dogmatizing of the Christmas Conference, of the Papism of Steffen, Wachsmuth and others, of the authority principle basing itself on installation and the Petrine succession emanating from this. She tells how people who wish to live according to free spirituality are branded heretics in true ecclesiastical fashion. How the infallibility dogma of the Steffen party dominates the Society and how the wisdom of Rudolf Steiner, withheld in secrecy, and the First Class of the Free High School for Spiritual Science are misused as instruments of power, causing Marie Steiner to feel in the end that the endless talk about the Christmas Conference is no more than empty chatter. A further example of playing at esotericism on the part of the remaining Council was their failure to inform the members of the Christmas Conference Society that on the 8th February 1925, in the absence of Rudolf Steiner owing to his illness, the Christmas Conference Statutes had been replaced by those of the Building Association in order, so it was claimed, to make possible, after constant postponement, the entry of the Christmas Conference Society in the Swiss trade register. At any rate, this was how Gunther Wachsmuth, who held responsibility for the decision, justified the action retrospectively in 1950. It emerged, however, from later inquiries addressed to the Confederate trade register office, that in 1924 the statutes of the Christmas Conference Society could have been entered in principle, as there were no prescriptions attached to the formulation of association statutes. From then onwards, the Christmas Conference Statutes were known as Principles, and no-one really knew what he had committed himself to. This is also the reason why it was possible later to bring about expulsions by means of majority voting. The Statutes of the Christmas Conference would not have allowed for this at all. Now the Christmas Conference members, without being informed of the fact, had become members of a Building Association with exoteric administrative Statues. The fact that Rudolf Steiner had agreed, through his own signature given on his sick bed, to the transformation of the Christmas Conference Society into an exoteric administrative association with the Statutes of a Building Association is, within the whole context of events, further proof that Rudolf Steiner had abandoned the Christmas Conference of 1923 and thereby again separated the Society from the movement. Especially considering with what meticulous care he had discussed the Statutes during the Christmas Conference. Now he simply puts his signature to the statutes of the Building Association. Illusionistic wishful thinking has, to this day, obscured peoples perception of the fact of the failed Christmas Conference; and it is this, and this alone that made possible the entire constitution debate, including the pseudo-Christmas Conference of 2002 and its pointless legal processes. The pro and contra of the many painstaking and commendable investigations, and the courageous opposition of the Gelebte Weihnachtstagung group to the two Societies theory, which the Goetheanum Vorstand quickly took over from the researchers into the constitution, thereby triggering the avalanche of legal battles from 2002 onwards, - all this dissolves into nothing if one learns how to think the thought that Rudolf Steiner himself, on the 8th February 1925, confirmed with his own signature the final separation of movement and Society, shortly before his death on 30th March 1925. For Building Association statutes are simply not the statutes of the Christmas Conference (Principles). And the Administration (08.02.1925) is simply not the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense (29.06.1924), meaning the esoteric stream within the Society, in so far as it is cultivated by members, hence the movement. To this day neither a report nor minutes have appeared of the preliminary meeting for the members of the A.S., which took place one hour before the 4th extraordinary general meeting of the Goetheanum Association on the 8th February 1925. In the meeting itself Rudolf Steiner was represented by Emil Grosheintz, who in 1912 had placed his land in Dornach at Steiners disposal for the building of the Goetheanum. He held several leading positions within the Society and can be regarded as a close associate of Rudolf Steiner. No message of greeting from Rudolf Steiner was read out to those assembled! Darkening of consciousnesses appears to have occurred; confusion in a number of matters seems to have arisen. On the evening of Sunday 8th February, from 9 11 p.m. to 0-11 a.m. an astronomical partial eclipse of the moon occurred. [Footnote: Marie Steiner also had no precise memory of what happened at the meeting.] Although because of illness, Rudolf Steiner was not present at the meeting on the 8th February 1925 and he only received the document for signing afterwards, there is no doubt whatever that he knew what he was doing. On the contrary, the following is an account of all his activities right up to three days before his death: Rudolf Steiner was weakened physically, but fully awake and alert and still full of amazing energy for work. Every week until his death excerpts from his Autobiography appeared in the Wochenschrift, and the essays for members, with the Leading Thoughts, in the newssheet. Everything was written by hand and then the proofs were corrected. Until three days before his death the applications for membership of the class were read by him and responded to with written comments At the same time, until close to the end of March, Rudolf Steiner was correcting the proofs of the book Extension of the Art of Healing. In addition to this there were letters, the signing of residence permits, visits from Council members. A photocopy of the last letter to members, From Nature to Sub-Nature, shows the clear, conscious and steady handwriting of Rudolf Steiner It is also quite unthinkable that anyone should have tried to hide something from him, because everyone, Rudolf Steiner included, was hoping for a speedy recovery. (Manfred Schmidt-Brabant, Newssheet 04.05.1997). As to the possibility that on 8th February 1925 a conscious act of deception was carried out behind the back of Rudolf Steiner, extending as far as manipulations with Steiners signature, I would stress quite clearly that according to my research into the ways in which the Councils from then until now have acted, there is no evidence of any deliberately corrupt behaviour. What we are dealing with is only the result of an unconscious calculation related to vanity and power, flattering itself that it stands in the centre of world-evolution and has the very best at heart. Again, the error lies only in a lack of truthfulness with regard to oneself and the facts. Rudolf Steiner could have intervened, himself, when he saw the decisions of the 8th February published in the Newssheet, if he had not been in agreement with the content. It seems to have dawned on Albert Steffen when, in his diary on 9th February, he noted with regard to the curtailment of the
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powers of the existing Council: Now every member has a vote. The Society can now say: No building! No clinic! A different Council etc. Instead, Rudolf Steiner now tried bypassing the restricted Council to rescue the movement by writing a letter on 19th March (eleven days before his death) to seven personalities of the Free High School for Spiritual Science, appointing them as leaders of the Administration of the Goetheanum Building. At the head of this group of seven new administrators we again find Emil Grosheintz, appointed by Rudolf Steiner as Chairman of the group. The letter bears the official stamp of the Free High School for Spiritual Science, and the signatures of Rudolf Steiner as President and Ita Wegman as Recorder. It is an appointment and not an open request, as the dethroned Council later declared it to have been. As the appointment was made by the esoteric High School, it has to do with the continuation of the Goetheanum building in the spirit of the Christmas Conference as a permanent spiritual construction project. However, after Rudolf Steiners death on 30th March 1925, the Council that Steiner had himself curtailed, rejected the collaboration, as equals, of the seven administrators appointed by Steiner on 19th March 1925. Through this action the dethroned Council of the Christmas Conference of 1923 demonstrated that it had understood nothing of the things in which it was involved and which were of concern to Rudolf Steiner. To this day, all the Councils at the Goetheanum have been similarly unaware of their situation. That is to say: there is no consciousness of the fact that movement and Society were condemned, from that point onwards, through a decision of the spiritual initiators, to go their separate ways again. In this connection, the situation of the Gelebte Weihnachtstagung group must be viewed as a tragedy: On the one hand it has prompted, thanks to its grandiose stubbornness, the present Goetheanum Council and the dreaming Society members to take a new look at themselves and try to understand their position. This is highly commendable! On the other hand, they have also succumbed to the illusion that the Christmas Conference Society of 1923, after all that has happened, still has some meaning today. Immediately after Steiners cremation, the karmic streams come into irreconcilable collision with one another. The crowning points of this unworthy culture of conflict in the history of Council and Society, which has gone on for years and continues into the present, can be quickly enumerated. Those wishing to know the details should read the Rckblick of Fred Poepping, in which he describes from his own experience the events in the Anthroposophical Society from 1923 to 1963. The events described are a complete mockery of the heart culture striven for by Steiner. The first to happen, directly after Steiners cremation, was the conflict over the urn between the women on the Council, who could not agree on where the urn should be placed for the members to pay their final respects. If you read Fred Poeppings description you can see how a relatively trivial misunderstanding causes the various emotions to flare up with explosive force. Here, as in all subsequent cases of conflict, what was lacking were the subsidiary exercises of the path of inner development, which control and transform the astral body. The distressing thing about this and all the conflicts that followed is that they had to do with shortcomings of the representatives of the cause of Anthroposophy, who upheld at the same time their lofty claim to be leaders, vis--vis the Society and humanity as a whole. Through this fundamentally untruthful and sectarian mode of behaviour of individual Council members, the disintegration of the Council was only a matter of time. In 1935 Ita Wegman and Elisabeth Vreede were expelled from the Council. Together with the expulsion of other leading personalities, the English and Dutch Societies seceded from the control of Dornach. Following closely upon the first conflict over the literary estate came the second, in which Herr Steffen and Herr Wachsmuth wished to challenge the testamentary rights of the widow of Rudolf Steiner. Interestingly enough, they tried to justify their legal position on the grounds that after the Christmas Conference everything was different and even earlier testaments should no longer be regarded as valid. The conflict came to an end when in 1952 a Swiss court declared Marie Steiner, who had died in 1948, to be in the right. As a result of this conflict the books of the complete edition (Gesamtausgabe GA) of Steiners lectures and written works, published by the Nachlassverein (Literary Estate Association) which had been founded in Marie Steiners lifetime, were no longer sold in the bookshop of the Goetheanum. The whole atmosphere within the Anthroposophical Society was marked by dogmatic disenfranchisement of the members by the residual Council, servility of the members, and by conflict between the most varied interest groups, which gathered in party-political style around the most varied personalities. It should be realized that all this was going on while, all around, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the dropping of atomic bombs was throwing the world into chaos. What was meant to bring healing to the world had itself become a prey of the counter-forces. In the post-war period from the sixties onward, voices were raised for the first time, pointing to a discrepancy between the statutes of the Building Association and those of the Christmas Conference. In full consistency with the Dornach policy of retention of power, these critical inquirers were branded immediately as opponents. Fred Poepping, as a witness over a long period, cites the Parable of the Ring from Lessings drama Nathan the Wise as proof and as a touchstone for the failure or success of the Christmas Conference. According to this parable, only he has the true ring, who also manifests the virtues of the true ring. If we sum up all the impressions from 1923 up to and including the events connected with the so-called new constitution of 2002, we must regretfully conclude that the Council of this Society, at any rate, despite widespread illusions to the contrary, was no longer in possession of the ring after 1925. III The Meaninglessness of the New Constitution We will now discuss an aspect of the Christmas Conference which has so far not been taken account of in the entire constitution debate and which will show up this debate in whatever shape or form as a complete waste of time. It proves those members to have been right all along, who felt that this debate was unnecessary. But what follows we will be dealing, not merely with vague intimations, but with facts. And it is also to be hoped that this will remove, for all time, the basis of the Christmas Conference ideology which is so widespread in the Anthroposophical Society today. In the above-quoted address of Steiner to open the Christmas Conference 1923, words are spoken which one can pay insufficient attention to in reading: and it is . not out of the arbitrariness of earthly will, but in response to the call that has sounded from out of the spiritual world. that the Christmas Conference is taking place. Now there exists a hitherto unpublished report written down by the stenographer Helene Finkh (who was employed at the Goetheanum at that time). Copies of this report are in circulation among many members of the Society. It is said not to be traceable in the archives, where the claim is made that no such document has ever existed. It contains notes of a discussion held by Rudolf Steiner with the esoteric Council which was about to be formed, on Sunday 23rd December 1923 at 6.00 p.m., that is, on the evening before the beginning of the Christmas Conference. In it, words are recorded that were spoken by Rudolf Steiner to the future Council. I quote: Thus, with this third and final attempt, the question is again asked of human beings, whether there is a group willing to come together to form a new spiritual leadership, where the impulse proceeds not from an earthly community, with the wish to found something, but where from out of the spiritual world a Stiftung (Foundation) is inaugurated, which one may propose to join in full responsibility. This act of joining a Stiftung inaugurated from out of the spiritual world can be something of great significance for humanity as a whole, but it will bring calamity if later those who make such a resolve for earthly evolution break faith with their decision. So here the reference is to a third and final attempt to form a Stiftung from out of the spiritual world. In order to grasp what this means, we must cite the explanatory words spoken by Rudolf
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Steiner, as they have been passed down to us by Marie Steiner in connection with the second Stiftung, Berlin 15.12.1911. Marie Steiner describes the phenomenon of the Stiftung as follows: It has to do, as it were, with a direct communication from the spiritual world. It is said (by R.St. Trans) to be like a call that goes out to humanity; and then (the spiritual world) wants to see what echo it receives. Such a call generally sounds three times. If the call goes unheard for a third time, it is taken back again into the spiritual world for a long time. This call has already gone out to humanity once. Unfortunately, it found no echo. This is the second time. It is purely spiritual things that are involved here. Each time a call goes out in vain, the conditions and circumstances to be confronted grow more difficult. It becomes clear from the report of 1911 that the three calls are identified with three Stiftungen, whereby a Stiftung is not a human creation, but an initiative from the spiritual world which is hoping that human beings will decide to adopt a certain way of working. Rudolf Steiner said in 1911: It is therefore to be announced to you that, among those human beings who will come together for this purpose in a corresponding manner, a way of working is to be inaugurated (gestiftet) which, through the way in which the Stiftung comes about, has as its direct starting-point that individuality whom for ages past in the Western World we have called by the name Christian Rosenkreutz. Just as this second Stiftung impulse, inaugurating a Stiftung of a Society for Theosophical Style and Art (Art und Kunst) in 1911 failed owing to human inadequacy, so the first Stiftung impulse in 1905 had also failed. What was intended with the first Stiftung impulse becomes apparent from a lecture held by Rudolf Steiner on the occasion of the general meeting of what was still the Theosophical Society, in Berlin on the 22nd October 1905. He said: If, however, the Theosophical Society were to forget that there is the pulsing of this blood within it [Steiner had previously admonished his listeners to cultivate occult teachings and occult living], then it may well be an interesting Society, but that which is intended with it by the exalted powers who presided over its beginnings, it will not succeed in accomplishing. One should also quote here the conversation with Rudolf Steiner reported by Alexander Strakosch, the handicrafts teacher at the first Waldorf School: In a personal conversation while we were walking together Rudolf Steiner pointed out in the most earnest way how much depends quite directly upon the way human beings respond to a call that has gone out from higher worlds. This was in 1923, when events in the Anthroposophical Society were a source of great concern for him. He asked me, Do you know where the difficulties in the Society come from? They come from the fact that there is not a sufficient number of people who have reached the levels of higher knowledge described in the book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds. When the spiritual world had assigned me the task of writing this work, it had expected that many people would progress so far. Thus I was instructed to write a second volume. After an interval of most solemn silence he continued by saying: The expectations have not been fulfilled. Every so often, the spiritual world casts out a line. This time nothing was caught on it. But because there had been talk of a continuation I had at least to bring out the short work Stages of Higher Knowledge. So Part II of Knowledge of Higher Worlds. was never written. But now, back to the Christmas Conference: If, therefore, we seriously consider the Christmas Conference of 1923 as the third attempt at a Stiftung from the spiritual world, it should be evident from this, that the so-called New Constitution of the A.S. in 2002, and all activities connected with it, have nothing whatever to do with the Christmas Conference of 1923, as this New Constitution rests only upon human activities and wishes. In the report quoted above, the following is also said about the esoteric Council: But we will always need to place before our souls the fact that a centre of this kind will only be able to work in the right way if each individual who is here entrusted with a task of leadership, should really feel and take on in practice the commitment towards the spiritual powers. This solemn commitment will not only place demands upon the individual, which he may be quite unable to meet, it will place them above all upon the whole Council in its entirely. If this harmony and solidarity is not renewed ever and ever again, the central Council will soon disintegrate and it would really be better if its members had never come together to undertake a solemn commitment of this kind. And the following is also said: If this attempt to connect to a Stiftung, and thus to begin a new spiritual leadership on Earth, were again to fail, then no-one in our circle will find the strength again during this earthly life to connect once more in this way to a 'Stiftung from the spiritual world. It should also be clear from these words that with Rudolf Steiners death, at the very latest, the Christmas Conference had finally come to an end, because from then onwards the united character of the Council as emphasized by Steiner disintegrated, not to mention the withdrawal of Marie Steiner already in 1925 and the expulsions in 1935. In the report quoted we see also how the individual Council members were placed in a relation to one another, what meditations they would need to work with in order to overcome their own weaknesses, and in what way they would stand in a special relation to the truth. This unity or totality (Gesantheit), drawn together in a bond with Rudolf Steiner, would have been able to fulfil the function of an organ of spiritual receptivity. As to what has happened in Dornach since Steiners death and right up to our own time, the situation is entirely different. Here, according to a quote from Steiner, the following law applies: Where the dissemination of the occult life is concerned, the Masters speak. Where one is only concerned with the organization of the Society. Then error is possible, because the Masters are silent. (GA93 22.10.1905. Berlin) Seen against the background of the fact that the Christmas Conference was a Stiftung out of the spiritual world, it is evident that the present Council and broad sections of the membership of the Anthroposophical Society have a connection to reality that is insufficient. In the entire New Constitution debate it is either not known or the fact is simply ignored, that the third call also, like all calls from the spiritual world, are limited to a certain window of opportunity. The way of working demanded by a Stiftung could not be continued beyond Steiners death. Instead, the idea was already propagated by the First Council and all too readily believed by the Society members, that Rudolf Steiner would now lead the Goetheanum from the other side. But if we renounce all illusionistic glossing over of the facts, then the symptoms of the failure of the Christmas Conference are unmistakable: 1. The character of the Christmas Conference as a Stiftung (third and final attempt). 2. Steiners words in 1924 about the failure of the Christmas Conference. 3. His signature put to the Building Association statutes, out of resignation. 4. His turning away despite explicit requests for instructions in the event of his death and concerning a successor. 5. His early death, brought about by the Karma of those involved. 6. The entire history of Council and Society right up to the present time. 7. The absence of Anthroposophy in contemporary cultural life, although Steiner had anticipated a culmination of Anthroposophy in cultural life at the turn of the millennium. IV The Consequences for the Anthroposophical Movement Today The result of our inquiry is, unfortunately, clear and beyond question. The new spiritual leadership of humanity intended with the Christmas Conference failed to materialise. The Anthroposophical movement, with the death of Rudolf Steiner, separated again from the Society. Since that time the Council of the Anthroposophical Society has tried to create the impression that it has the blessing of Rudolf Steiner. We of later generations, who belong to the Anthroposophical movement and who, as homeless souls, sought Anthroposophy on the Earth, can be overcome by sorrow, when we consider the ideals of truthfulness and tolerance cherished by us, which have clearly led us, out of ignorance and nave trust, into a Society which, in Steiners words,
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may well be an interesting Society, but which will not accomplish what was intended with it by the exalted Powers, which stood at its beginning. That it has not accomplished this for 80 years also comes to expression in the fact that Council member Manfred Schmidt-Brabant, shortly before his death, in the opening lecture of the Michaelmas Conference in 2000, spoke of the occult imprisonment of Anthroposophy, in view of its lack of influence in the world. The constitution activists in the Society and the modernized Council now thought that they could rescue the Anthroposophical Society, in the spirit of the Christmas Conference and of Rudolf Steiner, from its state of ineffectiveness by freeing it from the Building Association statutes and consciously reuniting it at last with the Christmas Conference statutes. Here, the Council, modern and self-sufficient as it was, also allowed itself to make a number of changes to the Christmas Conference statues of 1923, though this was brought to a standstill by the four plaintiff groups, who challenged the entire New Constitution process in a court of law. After its defeat, the Council avoided taking the case to the highest possible court of appeal. I will not go further into the disaster of the New Constitution, and instead refer the reader to Die verordnete Denkpause by Detlef Olaf Boehm, which summarizes it all in a concise and readable form. Underlying the idea of the New Constitution are a number of illusions which anyone who cares deeply for true Anthroposophy should firmly resist. Here the illusions are listed briefly, and the reader can try to identify the points that apply to him: 1. The illusion that, by altering its statutes, one can help an association which regards itself as esoteric to achieve greater effectiveness in the wider world. 2. The illusion that the administrative association which continued to exist after Steiners death, is in reality the esoteric association intended by Rudolf Steiner at Christmas 1923. 3. The illusion that a Stiftung from the spiritual world, bound to a limited timeframe and to a particular circle of people, can be brought to life again through an arbitrary human act that is the product of human wishful thinking. 4. The illusion that in staging the Christmas Conference anew one is standing in a direct line from Rudolf Steiner who, from the spiritual side, is continuing to lead the earthly Goetheanum; and that this New Constitution is something we owe to him, or alternatively that we have this high obligation towards the so-called spiritual world, which we conceive in a way that suits our own purposes. 5. The illusion that, with the Christmas Conference, Steiner created an entirely new esotericism, which must be distinguished from the esotericism before the Christmas Conference. An educational drive is needed to counter these absurd pseudo- Anthroposophical ideas, which live not only in the Council, but also in the Society. There may well be people who feel quite comfortable in this undoubtedly interesting Society. But for anyone who feels a deeper commitment to the cause of Anthroposophy than to the eighty-year-old spectre of an administrative association with false pretentions, and who has recognized the appalling situation in which the Living Being of Anthroposophy finds itself; three fields of work promptly arise which in the present context can only be given in outline:a) Bringing clarity regarding the illusionistic Christmas Conference ideology (Free Spiritual Life in thinking). b) A re-ordering of the relation between Anthroposophical Society and Anthroposophical movement (the Life of Rights in Responsibility, concerns the Feeling) c) Taking initiative action on ones own responsibility in the spirit of the ethical individualism of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. (The meditative deed inwards, in balance with working upon the world, outwards. Both involve the will). The Consequences A. Bringing Clarity regarding the Illusionistic Christmas Conference Ideology The Christmas Conference Ideology is based upon the assertion that only those are true Anthroposophists who subscribe to the following dogma, which is adhered to like an article of faith: the work of Rudolf Steiner continues, but only through the Society directed from Dornach, because the Christmas Conference succeeded in accordance with Steiners intentions and the Council stands in spiritual succession to Steiner. The fact is suppressed and passed over in silence, that already in Rudolf Steiners lifetime the Council failed in its task and thus played a decisive part in the failure of the Christmas Conference. It ought to be clear to the Council members at the very least, that with Steiners death the third attempt at a Stiftung had to come to an end. Instead, the first generation of Council members (Steffen, Wachsmuth) contributed substantially to the obscuring of the facts. Thus the revealing but embarrassing fact that from the 8th February 1925 onwards the members had, with Steiners agreement, belonged to a Building Association with exoteric statutes, was not divulged to the members, as this would have made apparent the dethronement of the once esoteric Council. Only through the persistent archival research of individuals into constitutional questions did it become clear decades later that there is an irregularity here, which remains puzzling only so long as the character of the Christmas Conference as a Stiftung is left out of account, or kept secret. (see Ch.III) However, this veiling of the truth did not happen through evil intent, but through weakness of character. The deeper, unconscious reason for unwillingness to admit the failure of the Christmas Conference lies in the inability to face up to ones own failure, working hand-in-hand with the flattering sense of having been elected to play a role of the highest importance. The two things in combination give rise to a vain belief which strives to maintain the situation unchanged for oneself and ones close associates, ostensibly for the good of humanity. The un-purified, illusionistic life of feeling (Luciferic) opens the door to Ahrimanic intelligence, which calculates as follows: If we succeed in keeping the Anthroposophical Society after the Christmas Conference free from the stigma of failure and, instead, sanctify it still further by distinguishing it as clearly as possible from the Anthroposophical Society before the Christmas Conference, we can avoid facing up to the painful fact that with the failure of the Christmas Conference the Anthroposophical Society fell back again into the unsatisfactory state it was in, in 1923. We can thereby avoid having to apply to ourselves the sharp and unsparing criticism directed to the Anthroposophical Society by Steiner in many lectures during 1923. In reality this criticism of the Anthroposophical Society by Steiner has remained, to this day, of the utmost relevance. Esoterically speaking, it is the unredeemed double of the Society which places itself as a shield before the Council and many members. In the slumber in which they are plunged to this day, the Sleeping Beauty, in order to save them from the terrible and sobering experience of waking up to the reason for the occult imprisonment and their ineffectiveness in the world. The reason is the unconscious self-deception underlying the Christmas Conference ideology. This self-deception is incompatible with the fundamental principle of truthfulness, with which Anthroposophy stands or falls. Rudolf Steiners own words: Actually, nothing has greater power to tempt and mislead as than when we say that an action was done in good faith. For this good faith is the snug couch of idleness for a humanity who, in its extreme lethargy, does not feel the responsibility to first find out, before it makes a statement, whether it is true or not, whether or not it corresponds to the facts. There needs to be a correspondence with facts in the world as a whole, not just with ourselves; otherwise what comes about in the external world as a result is forsaken by Angels, and handed over to Ahriman. And everything of an untruthful nature that is asserted in good faith, is what drives human beings most strongly into the Ahrimanic, is the strong rope that draws them inexorably into the Ahrimanic. And to appeal to good faith in the case of untruths is the best way, today, of delivering world civilization
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over to the being of Ahriman. For it is really so, that human beings lose the assistance of the world of the Angel or when they lie down on the snug couch of good faith in the case of statements which they have not verified. And elsewhere Steiner says the following: One must break the habit of a certain there is no other way of putting it dream-like longing, a certain sleepy-headedness, which so easily overcomes the person who approaches our spiritual-scientific movement and wants something soft and comforting for his soul, something that carries him through lifeenveloped in a nice warm feeling, something that you listen to and let work upon you in such a way that it warms you through and through, that you can believe in the higher calling of the human soul, all of which is quite right, but which can also be bound up with a certain lulling of the soul-life into complacency. This can be observed all too often, especially in those who let spiritual science work upon their soul and who do not strive at the same time to find, through what spiritual science can be, a clear and certain judgement regarding the events of life, regarding the complex interconnection of the facts within which each individual human being stands. A particularly disastrous role in the creation of the Christmas Conference ideology was played by Council member Rudolf Grosse with his book The Christmas Conference as a Turning-Point of Time, which first appeared in 1976 and in a short period was printed in three editions, because it was devoured uncritically by the members. But if one wishes to characterize the book and the reaction of the Society members as seen at this much later point in time, there is again no conscious bad intention, but the subtle working of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic forces which we spoke of earlier. The book came as a gift to the uninformed minds, the complacency, the lack of spiritual independence and the wishful thinking of many people. I myself recall that it provided substantial arguments which today I can no longer accept leading to my joining the Anthroposophical Society. Rudolf Grosse, as representative of the Society, skilfully exploited a number of publications of Steiners Complete Works (Gesamtausgabe FA) which the Literary Estate Association (Nachlassverein) of Marie Steiner formerly opposed by Grosse had meanwhile published, and made us aware of the ideas that were now made available to all in an unprotected form, for the benefit of the then vegetating Anthroposophical Society. In Grosses book the failure of the Christmas Conference is kept hidden behind a glorification of Rudolf Steiners death through its transformation into a sacrificial death for the sake of the continued existence of the Society. The fact that Rudolf Steiner did not appoint a successor but turned away in silence when asked about this, is interpreted to mean, entirely in the tradition of Steffen, that from then on he would lead the Goetheanum from the spiritual world. The Christmas Conference is celebrated as a triumphant victory, as a new beginning at a world-turning-point of time. Actually this concept comes to us from Steiner, just as does the concept of the spiritual Goetheanum, but the clever mixture of Steiner quotes, wishful thinking and unmentioned facts would require a more exact analysis than is possible in the present context. The people who belong to the Anthroposophical Society and are drawn to Grosses book imagine that they are joining the Christmas Conference Society, oblivious of the fact that the Association they are in may well be an interesting one, but is actually no more than a Bau-verein, whose Council also has no knowledge of this fact, as it has been since 1925 in a line of succession of playing at esotericism. The book resulted in a growth in membership, because it invites anyone to receive, with no effort required, the consecration of the Christmas Conference. In the Christmas Conference ideology the element is decisive, according to which simply to be a member of the Society is a guarantee of the fact that one stands within the sacred stream of true Anthroposophy. That this basically conservative-Catholic conception of an Institution that alone can bring salvation is shared and defended with inner satisfaction by most members of the Anthroposophical Society, sheds light upon the snug couch of good faith on which many Society members are reposing. In contrast to the message of victory of the Christmas Conference as proclaimed by Rudolf Grosse, which so many Anthroposophists myself included fell for, it is salutary to take stock of the true situation of the Anthroposophical cause. - The Goetheanism further developed by Steiner has not been recognized by official Goethe research. - The Philosophie der Freiheit has not been taken up by universities. - The first Stiftung out of the spiritual world was not taken up between 1905 and 1909 - The second attempt at a Stiftung, The Society for Theosophical Style and Art, 1911, was declared a failure by Steiner in autumn 1912. - The new Freemasonry for men and women had to be discontinued by Steiner in 1914. - The Social Threefolding movement was withdrawn by Steiner on the grounds that it had failed for the present. - The burning down of the Goetheanum on New Years Eve 1922/23 was a consequence of the disintegration of the Anthroposophical Society. - The third attempt at a Stiftung, the Christmas Conference 1923, resulted in the death of Steiner. Anyone who would ignore all this or recast it into a victory has lost touch with reality. In the Council of the Anthroposophical Society at the beginning of the 21st century it is above all Sergei O. Prokofieff who promotes the Christmas Conference ideology in his writings, and in thick volumes transports the feeling of his readers into an illusory heaven through numerous Steiner quotations, many of which are applied in a questionable way. In addition Prokofieff, standing entirely in the Albert Steffen tradition, treats the Foundation Stone, given by Rudolf Steiner during the Christmas Conference, as a finished product. This is clearly in contradiction with Steiners intention to open up a field for individual meditative work. As an inducement to sober reflection I would quote here a statement of Rudolf Steiners which is attested by Herbert Witzenmann to have been made to Guenther Wachsmuth: It could well be that when I return I will have to fight against the Anthroposophical Society. If one wishes, in a constructive way, to oppose the presentation of the Christmas Conference in false colours, it must be made quite clear that the new attempt at a Stiftung from the spiritual world in connection with Rudolf Steiner, wanted to descend from heaven to earth in order to inaugurate a new Mystery Centre on the Earth. Steiner was prevented from doing this by the Karma of those involved. And now the death of Steiner which resulted from the hindrance to his work is used in order to disseminate the legend of his continued spiritual leadership of the Goetheanum. To this, one must say first of all, that in this way of treating Steiners death a mode of thinking becomes visible for which the Councils playing at esotericism, is more important than consideration of the tragic situation in which Steiner stood to the very end. And, secondly, the question arises why Steiner made such great efforts on Earth when spiritual leadership from beyond the Threshold would have been just as effective. Regarding the claim that an entirely new esotericism arose after the Christmas Conference, it can be shown right down to single details that Steiners body of Christian- Rosicrucian teaching forms a hermetic unity. B. Re-Ordering the Relation between Anthroposophical Society and Movement Here too we can give only a few indications. The Anthroposophical Society would not exist at all without the Anthroposophical movement. The movement is of primary importance. The only reason why Rudolf Steiner united himself with the Society at the Christmas Conference was that he hoped to provide a protective sheath for the movement which he represented. From Steiners death onwards, at the latest, the Council of the Anthroposophical Society instead used the movement for its own purposes. For the sake of the retention of power, the movement was, from 1925 onwards, harnessed to the wagon of the Society. Since then it has had to serve under a false guise, held fast in the grip of the dogma of the eternal Christmas Conference and thus turned into its opposite. It is hardly possible to imagine a more sinister and subtle way of separating Steiner from his work. During his lifetime Steiner had warned of the possibility of the separation of his name from his work.
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In the light of this knowledge, the movement now has the task of freeing itself from the grip of an element that is foreign to its true nature. The Anthroposophical movement can only exist in the free atmosphere of truthfulness and tolerance. Thus the Anthroposophical Society since 1925 may well be an interesting Society that provides satisfaction to many people because it gives them what they want. The movement will always tolerate this, but has, itself, nothing to do with such a situation, because it feels committed to the cause of Anthroposophy. The Anthroposophical movement is committed to the work of Rudolf Steiner, which is published by the Association of Rudolf Steiners Literary Estate (R.St. Nachlassverwaltung). It is in no way my intention to open up the old battlefront between the Council of the Society and the Nachlassverein. It is a matter of looking as soberly as possible at the way things have developed. Everyone in the Anthroposophical Society today was, to begin with, interested in the hearts concern of the Anthroposophical cause, and thus in the movement. If Rudolf Grosses seductive and misleading book had not appeared, hearts would have turned, in their movement, not to the Anthroposophical Society but to the Nachlassverein, for it is there and there only that, to this day, the wellspring is to be found, of Rudolf Steiners spiritual bequest. As a result of the obscuring of the facts, people who were actually seeking the movement unwittingly entered a Building Association with exoteric statutes, whose Council went so far, between 1943 and 1952, as to take legal action against the source of the movement in order to obtain possession of all the documents. It would then have been possible, through selective and incomplete publication of the Steiner texts, to further perfect the game with esotericism. The Council of the Anthroposophical Society has always viewed with suspicion the Complete Edition, which has meanwhile become available on CD, DVD and HDD, because on the one hand it fears that revealing and therefore unwelcome facts might come to light, and on the other hand there is reflected in this suspicion the tendency of the sectarian game of esotericism to keep things secret. But now also the Internet brings with it, depending on ones point of view, the risk or the opportunity of a free Anthroposophical movement independent of Dornach. If in this connection one leaves out of account the Ahrimanic counter-school which uses for itself and distorts the original Michaelic intelligence, then one will not estimate rightly the danger to which the Anthroposophical cause is exposed. Not even full pages of quotations from Steiner can mislead one as to the danger of distortion of the facts. Steiner explains this as follows: For it is a normal occurrence in occultism that powers wishing to pursue their own special interests assume the form of those which previously gave the actual impulses. (GA 158 11.04.1912). That it belongs to the essential nature of the Anthroposophical movement that a battle, such as is suggested here, could be fought over the future of the cause of Anthroposophy, of this Rudolf Steiner spoke as early as 1912: Only those who adopt an attitude of testing, towards what is given from out of the spiritual world, can remain loyal to Christian Rosenkreutz.. In your closest circles, too, many a trial will beset you. (GA 130 17.06.1912 Hamburg) Steiners words on 19.07.1924: What is essential now is that the Anthroposophical Society should take hold of this, its inner task; the task which consists in not allowing Michaels right to human thinking to be challenged. Here, there is no room for fatalism. One can only say that human beings must work in collaboration with the gods. Michael fills human beings with enthusiasm for Michael himself, so that on the earth there may appear a spirituality that is equal to the individual intelligence of human beings, so that one can think and be at the same time a spiritual human being; for this is what is implied in the rulership of Michael. This must be fought for within the Anthroposophical movement. Thus it is a struggle that must take place within Anthroposophical circles. If now we look with undistorted vision at the situation of Anthroposophy today, we see a joining together of two unhealthy attitudes of soul in the Society: Luciferic Christmas Conference mystification and Ahrimanic dogmatism. The one makes a person flee reality and remain inactive, but be filled with conceit in an elitist sense; and the other paralyzes free activities through dogmatic adherence to principles, and makes one servile in ones acceptance of the authority of Dornach. It is a puzzling fact that within the Society people are unaware that through acting in this way they provide direct evidence of the failure of the Christmas Conference although, amusingly enough, they believe themselves to be in possession of the Christmas Conference. If one wishes, from the standpoint of the Anthroposophical movement, to resist these tendencies, one must find the courage to re-examine, without prejudice, the relations between Society and movement: The movement has shown, through all the years since it became manifest through Rudolf Steiner, that it can exist despite hindrances stemming from the Anthroposophical Society. Why, then, should it not be freer and more capable of action without the present ideological imprisonment, than if it is bound hand and foot by a superfluous so-called new constitution created at Christmas 2002? Rudolf Steiner made the following observation: On the ground provided by spiritual science people unite through differentiation, individualisation and not centralisation. (GA 259 28.02.1923. Stuttgart) All the many initiatives carried by individuals working together from kindergartens to schools, agriculture, medicine, the Christian Community, the Jugendkreis, the High School, the publishing houses, banks, buildings and organizations such as national societies, working centres, branches etc. all arose, so far as their essential nature is concerned, from out of the movement or with its help, because people became active where needed, with their intelligence, their heart-forces and their initiative. The Council in Dornach and the Society structures were not necessary for this and, seen in relation to the initiatives, resemble a superfluous hydrocephalus. All of them can carry on working as before but now more conscious of their independence, no longer needing to keep one eye trained on Dornach, working in free responsibility towards the spiritual world and their fellow human beings. There will be in the future many decentralized centres, held together in friendship because they feel committed to the same idea. The flow of gifts and subscriptions must be reconsidered. Maybe in future more funds will be available locally than before I can imagine the present Council functioning as the administrative Council of a conference centre, which is what the Goetheanum building is. Whoever feels a relation to the building should be free to connect on to it. C. The Specific Inner Work of Those Who Feel They Belong To the Anthroposophical Movement Here we must reflect upon the ethical individualism as described in the Philosophie der Freiheit. Only in this way will it be possible in future for work to proceed on the basis of geographical location and subject matter. Words from the Philosophie der Freiheit are relevant here: To live out of love for the deed, and let live out of an understanding of the will of others, is the fundamental maxim of free human beings. (GA4) Following the law of the attraction of like by like, the people who wish to work together will find each other. As a result of the failed attempt at a Stiftung in 1923, the Anthroposophical movement is now returning, one hundred years later, consciously to it germinal state of 1905. Standing at the centre of individual strivings will be the first call from the spiritual world the manual for inner training, How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds. This concerns the development of the individuals vertical connection to the heavenly realms. It is quite obvious that neither a Pope nor any kind of
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Council is necessary, nor is it able to take away from me my own responsibility or make prescriptions for me in this matter. Only in this way will it be possible to retrieve the living being of Anthroposophy from the condition of latency * in which it has predominantly been since Rudolf Steiners death. Outwardly nothing changes at all, apart from the flow of money inwardly, a turn of 180 takes place either one holds fast to the Societyillusion, maintaining the situation as it has always been, or thinking is renewed in the spirit of the Anthroposophical movement in other words: general reform. We are living today nearly 600 years after 1413. The entire consciousness-soul epoch has a duration of 2500 years. Today, therefore, one quarter of this period has passed, and all is not lost. Anthroposophy will certainly not be made to disappear from the world. But it could, for decades or longer, sink back into what one might call a condition of latency and then be taken up again. But this would entail a tremendous loss for the development of humanity. (Dornach 17.06.1923.) V A remark concerning the Free High School for Spiritual Science in Dornach According to a statement of Rudolf Steiner the High School is to be regarded. as an institution of the spiritual world for the present time. (GA 270. 18.04.1924) But, like the Christmas Conference Society, it too is subject to the condition that it must develop. In Steiners words: this school must develop into what can be a real Mystery School in our time. It is through this, that it becomes the soul of the Anthroposophical movement. (GA 260a. 07.07.1924. Dornach. GA240. 06.02.1924. Stuttgart) Maybe it is interesting to note that Rudolf Steiner continues, after the Christmas Conference, to make a clear distinction between movement and Society. The union of the two is conditional upon their development. This applies both to the Council which understands itself to be esoteric, and to the High School, and also to the individual members of the Society. Steiner emphasizes that it is only on the precondition that everything becomes different that there is any meaning for him to bring movement and Society together. Rudolf Steiners aim was to let the primal source of the movement, the supersensible Michael School, flow into an earthly institution, the High School, in order from thence, in connection with Council and Society, to further human beings. We have already explained that the striven-for goal was not achieved or, if so, only to a very limited extent. Today, the Society together with its Council clings to the High School as its one source of hope. However, the High School itself, owing to Steiners premature death, remained a fragment. And, what is more, this fragment has rigidified into a questionable tradition. However, the Christmas Conference impulse is bound up in the closest possible way with the High School, since it comes directly from the super sensible school of Michael. And we have to face up to the bitter truth: according to a number of statements of Rudolf Steiner, the Christmas Conference will evaporate if the conditions are not met. That they were not met is amply demonstrated by the conflicts, expulsions and lawsuits. Thus the same applies to the High School as to the Society: It will be an interesting Society, but it will not accomplish what was intended with it by the spiritual powers which stood at its very beginning. The First Class of the High School, which was usurped by the Council of the Society through the excommunication of Ita Wegman became, in Bondarevs words, a Flying Dutchman, suggesting a phenomenon that is more appearance than substance a ghost-ship, in other words. How far this applies also to the esoteric Jugendkreis is for those who belong to it to decide for themselves. Rudolf Steiner, at any rate, wanted to see the Jugendkreis integrated into the High School. These unpleasant facts raise the question for anyone seriously concerned about the cause of Anthroposophy: How can one find, today, the living school of Michael, which Steiner called the Fundamental source? The answer is simple: The laws that applied then are still valid one hundred years later. The method that is of central importance was made known by Rudolf Steiner in his basic work Die Philosophie der Freiheit, and esoterically deepened in How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds. He himself makes no distinction between the book How to Attain. and the High School which he tried, but without success, to bring into being: It is really so, that the esoteric deepening of which you can read so much in my book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds and of which so much is spoken, is now to take place through the three classes. (GA 260a. 07.07.1924. Dornach) As, however, the three classes did not materialize and the one class was used more for playing at esotericism, mystery-mongering and sailing in cloud-cuckoo-land (all in lecture 30.01.1924 Dornach) than for a High School activity worthy of the name, there is only one remaining option serious individual work in esoteric striving. Plenty of material providing stimulus is available. We who feel connected with the Anthroposophical movement owe a debt of gratitude to the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, to the extent that, in the spirit of the later Marie Steiner von Sievers, they made their editorial work subject to the test of truth, although doubts about this have been raised recently. Let us hope that the Nachlassverein is not overtaken by the Karma of Untruthfulness. It cannot be, that later generations, who also belong to the School of Michael, must suffer the consequences of the failure of the first generation and that the tradition of inefficacy and untruthfulness resulting from this should hinder real development. Do we not see a clear message in a declining membership and in young peoples lack of interest in joining the Anthroposophical Society? Of crucial importance from now on is the direct, vertical connection with the spiritual, which can be achieved by any individual. And working out from this basis, likeminded people can join together to carry out their various tasks. The rest is history. Translators Note: In this English version most of the 173 references (to Steiner lectures and works of other German authors) are omitted; also H. Gierschs frequent underlinings of words and sentences. Harald Giersch shares G. Bondarevs conviction that nothing underhand can have taken place at the meeting of 8th Feb. 1925, which Rudolf Steiner was unable to attend owing to his illness Commentary by Joel A. Wendt on this lecture Some comments on the Giersch Lecture by Joel A. Wendt I confess to not agreeing with certain aspects of the lecture, which I find requires some remarks in order that my having placed it on my website does not leave the impression that I find it completely satisfactory. I do find that it should be shared, given that it offers considerable insight into the story of the Anthroposophical Society in the 20th Century, but aspects of it trouble me, and in a few pages I hope to explain my perspective.
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My principle concern is with the Idea of the Call from the Spiritual World, which is named in this document a: Stiftung. A whole can of worms arises in relationship to this when (or if) we grant to Rudolf Steiner any kind of absolute correctness as regards the truth. Now I am not casting doubt on what is reported in the Giersch lecture, and attributed to Steiner, but I want to clearly suggest that the disciplines of the Living Thinking, with which I am intimately familiar, require that any Idea gained from reading be initially held at a distance from the I and contemplated, in order to follow correctly the practice described in the last sentence of the original preface to Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom: One must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will fall into its bondage . Let me next give some quotes, from the text, through which the idea emerges , as described in the Giersch lecture: a Stiftung is not a human creation, but an initiative from the spiritual world which is hoping that human beings will decide to adopt a certain way of working how much depends quite directly upon the way human beings respond to a call that has gone out from higher worlds The expectations have not been fulfilled. Every so often, the spiritual world casts out a line. This time nothing was caught on it If this attempt to connect to a Stiftung, and thus to begin a new spiritual leadership on Earth, were again to fail, then no-one in our circle will find the strength again during this earthly life to connect once more in this way to a 'Stiftung from the spiritual world All this is connected to the idea in the lecture that the Christmas Conference was such a Stiftung (in fact the third such call that was related to the anthroposophical work - the first arose even when this work was still connected to the Theosophical Society), concerning which the leadership of the Society is said to have had about 9 months to respond to by increasing their inner activity in the right way: This impulse has failed. Come back to Dornach in October. Then everything will be arranged differently including the situation in Stuttgart. A member who wishes to remain anonymous received from Rudolf Steiner, in response to a question about the Christmas Conference and its effects within the Society, the answer: the spiritual world allows nine months to see whether an echo comes from the members. If no echo comes, the impulses of the Christmas Conference have come to an end. If we have read carefully Steiner's A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception , we will be aware that there he describes an Idea as a: complex of concepts. In presenting the above quotes from the lecture I want to point out some details of this complex of concepts, which then lives in the reader as an impression of a certain Idea which is/has been laid into the meaning that hovers over the text of the lecture. If we just read passively, we will not notice these ideas as they arise within us from the overall meaning of the text. At the same time, we might well uncritically accept them, or at least our interpretation of the meaning of the text. Giersch, in creating the text, even though it is filled with quotes of Steiner and others, has woven in the central meaning, through his own words, and through how he arranges his sentences and paragraphs. He has a point of view about what it all means and he marshals his "evidence", in the forms of quotes, in order to make clear what he believes it all means. This meaning could be represented as follows: the Christmas Conference failed and Steiner said this was so. The reason it failed was that individuals, especially members of the Executive, did not answer the call of the Stiftung by failing to engender certain inner disciplines which would have resulted in a purification of their astral bodies. This failure continues to this day, with the consequence that a quite undesirable illusion has arisen among the membership and the leaders of the Anthroposophical Society. My view is that this is a narrow interpretation of events, one in which no responsibility for this situation can be laid at the feet of either Steiner or the socalled: spiritual world. Only the Executive and the members are to be blamed. I find that this aspect of the idea (that human beings are solely responsible for the so-called failure) itself fails the tests of truth in the form of reason, and next I will offer why I put forward this idea. As a preliminary, the reader of this needs to know that my view of "reason" is not merely that something is logical, but rather that there is as a quality of reason itself a kind of moral aesthetic, which is more akin to the harmonies we experience in various kinds of music. In a sense, in the contemplations via living thinking of an Idea, the aspects of truth, goodness and beauty unite in the qualitative nature of the experience of the Idea in its relationship to the totality of the thought-world (the ethereal world as experienced in its living and becoming thought-content). Now I have no basis for knowing exactly what Steiner meant when he used the word Stiftung. All I have is the way Giersch represented this idea in the totality of his lecture. This representation seems to leave the causal failure of the Christmas Conference solely in the failing of members of the executive and the Society. Here is the flaw in this as appears to my own thinking, in my contemplation of the moral aesthetic of the Idea. As a human being, in my interactions with other human beings, I have found through many years of experience (I am 69 at the time of this writing) that it is unwise to expect people to do something, even though in my imagination I can believe they might do the particular deed. Nor can I expect to coerce or otherwise cause them to do a certain action, especially if I hold as my own moral ideal that they should be free to make their own choices. I may express my view of the matter, but I make a fatal error in thought if I expect them to change their behavior or otherwise conform that behavior in any way to something I suggest. I have to keep a kind of thoughtful and emotional distance between my own I's view of things, and the free and independent views of the Thou. Otherwise I am in danger of abusing their freedom, something in myself I seek to protect at all costs (I don't want my freedom abused). Now with respect to this situation of the Society and Christmas Conference, and Steiner and the call of the "spiritual world" (whatever that is, for there is no evidence that the communities of higher beings ever act as a unity - although there is a lot of evidence many act as a harmony of different voices), I have to wonder what they were contemplating in their efforts to create the Anthroposophical Society, and forming it in such a way which required certain specific behaviors by the executive and the membership in order for it to carry out its tasks
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My own experience of Christ, for example, is that He has no expectations of me at all, and loves me however flawed I may be. It is rather an aspect of the somewhat cooperative relationship of my higher I (my conscience) and the three-fold double complex, that produces expectations and the sense of potential failure. How does this arise? It is the nature of mind to make comparative judgments, which occur in large part because the fundamental nature of our feeling life is rooted in antipathy and sympathy. I have likes and dislikes (even about myself), according to my own fallen character as a human being, and I view the world through the lens of these feelings and make comparative judgments as to whether a specific behavior or thing has value or does not. I primarily order the world according to these likes and dislikes, up until the time I become their master through my own efforts at inner discipline. Given this universal situation (true for all human beings) how did it come about that Giersch thought that, and perhaps Steiner and the "spiritual world" tried to create, an earthly Society that had to be filled from within by human beings who achieved a certain state of inner perfection (the purification of the astral body), in order for this earthly Society to fulfill its tasks? This, in a situation where the opposing powers were in fact nearing a moment of considerable triumph in Central Europe. Let us step back a bit and consider these questions from another point of view. In my life I have learned many lessons, one small one is that certain people (two women I have known are good examples) can't help but be judgmental in the right circumstances. In the case of these two women, who found my behavior lacking in certain specifics, they shared a particular quality namely both had been raised in the Catholic Church, although both in their maturity were no longer members. In contemplating this situation I came to the conclusion that while the girl could take herself out of the Catholic Church, you could not fully take the Catholic Church out of the girl (thus the instinct for moral judgmentalism). It is my view that the same is true with regard to those souls who are born into, and or spend a lot of time involved with, Central Europe. The qualities of soul that go with being born a Central European include a kind of strong affection for the Ideal. The mind of such individuals naturally creates ideal images of what should be, and then seeks through various means, to incarnate those ideals into social reality. But because of our feeling instinct for sympathy and antipathy, that which does not comport with the egotistically manufactured Ideal is found wanting (in my writing I call this comparative thinking). Now the Rosicrucian impulse is quite definitely Central European in origin. Which means that to the extent that Giersch, Steiner and perhaps even the mysterious Christian Rosenkreutz are related to this impulse, they tend to form ideal images of what should be and then seek to have the social conform to these ideals. We can take (or try to take) the human being out of Central Europe, but can we really take Central Europe out of the human being. Steiner's Knowledge of Higher Worlds, for example, is full of idealistic admonitions regarding moral behavior, which is an approach that is quite distinct from that of The Philosophy of Freedom which considers the forming of a moral idea something entirely within the freedom of the individual I. It is this aspect of soul life that in my view then inhabits the way Giersch represents the Idea of Stiftung. Steiner finds, for example (and this is true throughout his life and writing), that he again and again must admonish his students with the Ideal in order to urge them to accomplish certain tasks that possibly can have a good end. He applies this to himself as well, and no doubt is strongly influenced by those aspects and communities of the spiritual world (which is not a unity remember, but a harmony) that align themselves in this concrete similar direction: the want to incarnate the ideal into the earthly social. As I explained carefully, from multiple directions in my book American Anthroposophy, this won't work for Americans, nor in the Cultural East as well. The given nature of soul life does not operate either in the West or the East, the same way it operates in the Center. We could then legitimately asked why the anthroposophical impulse was born then in Central Europe in the first place, given that, from the point of view of those inaugurating it, people are flawed and will not necessarily achieve the ideal regardless of our hopes otherwise. The answer to that question I have addressed in my essay: Saving Anthroposophy: from the anthroposophical Movement and Society. That said, however, I should here say this: In Valentin Tomberg's remarkable Studies of the Foundation Stone, he reports that spiritual movements incarnate in a direction that proceeds from East to West. Spirits of Form (according to him) move in this gesture following the gesture of the rising sun. We can then form the thought that this "incarnation process" takes place in such a way that it is less incarnate in the cultural East, more incarnate in the cultural Center, and then fully incarnate (fully earthly) in the cultural West (which is how he describes it using other terms). Let me now address more specifically the matter of the so-called spiritual world itself, especially with regard to the Movement which Steiner characterizes as an aspect and impulse rooted in the spiritual world. Again I need first to make a digression and introduce some additional material in order to provide a context for the next thoughts, keeping in mind that we are looking to how then Anthroposophy becomes fully incarnate in the cultural West, particularly America. In the 1990's on American Television, there arose a television series called: Babylon Five, the creation of an American writer J. Michael Straczynski. This was a kind of Tolkien Lord of the Rings in space, being a science-fiction television show in which a five-year story arc attempted to consider the problems of the battle between good and evil more typical of literary fantasy. Near the end of Season three, a kind of climax of certain aspects of the story was reached when a crucial space battle was pending between the human beings, and their peers and allies in other space-faring races, and two elder races (millions of years older than the humans), called the Shadows and the Vorlons. Up to this point in time, the Shadows and the Vorlons had worked in the hidden background of matters galactic, pushing and influencing various younger races (the humans and their allies) in different ways according to the views of these two elder races. For the Shadows, their principle question was: what do you want? For the Vorlons, their principle question was: who are you? The Shadows were depicted as invisible beings (that could in the right circumstances be made visible), which when visible looked like living mechanical spiders, with
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multiple limbs and eyes. The Vorlons were depicted as beings who hid themselves in "encounter suits" so as not to be seen, because if seen it would be discovered that each of the younger races saw them as angel-like beings, but differentiated to accord with the different religious views common to that particular race ( for example, humans saw them as winged angels, with human like faces). Preliminary to this particular battle coming into being, the humans and their allies noted that the Shadows and the Vorlons avoided direct conflict with each other, and seemed to use the humans and their allies as surrogates, creating alliances and manipulating conflict, while withholding a great deal of information. On the cusp of the battle, the human leader was able to force a representative of both groups (the Shadows and the Vorlons) into a meeting on the bridge of one of the starships present in this solar system. All forces in this very climatic moment had large arrays of spaceships, with both the Shadows and the Vorlons possessing far far superior capacities and numbers, including ships that were called: planet killers, while the humans and their allies understood that if the Shadows and the Vorlons directly fought, the humans and their allies would probably be crushed between them and completely annihilated. The human hero-leader gives an impassioned speech in which he says basically that it was time for the Shadows and the Vorlons to leave the humans and their allies alone, and stop using them as surrogates for the resolving their (the Shadows and the Vorlons) own differences. In effect the humans and the other younger races wanted the Shadows and the Vorlons to step away, and go "beyond the rim" of known space, and make peace with each other, leaving the younger races to resolve their own differences without being used as surrogates for the differences between the elder races. The leaders of the Shadows and the Vorlons were not unwilling, but they did not want to go beyond the rim alone, as there was present, at this time of the meeting on the human spaceship bridge, the First One, an individual toward whom both the Shadows and the Vorlons showed great affection and honor. They asked if the First One would go with them, and he said that he would. As a consequence the greatest potential battle did not happen, and the Shadows and the Vorlons, in the company of the First One, left the humans and their allies to the working out of their own difficulties with each other. Once this was settled and the television series entered its fourth season, it took up political questions on the Earth and the need for a rebellion there against abuses of power. The fifth season concerned the effect on various cultures of the existence of psychic powers and how that was to be dealt with among the various groups. Now in putting this forward I mean to suggest that here is an artist working in the modern media of America, who had an highly accurate instinctive imaginary vision of the real condition of humanity in the present, and his version of the resolution of the problem of good and evil at this level can be very instructive for our appreciation of the relationship between the human I and the higher angelic realms and the lower so-called demonic realms. About eighteen months ago, I was in prayer while in retreat in New Hampshire. I was actually very angry. I was not happy to have my soul be a war zone between the activity of the complex of doubles (the demonic) and the presence of the angelic via the intuitions of my conscience. I was tired of the presence in my soul life of the Shadows and the Vorlons, whose existence and relationship was very very old, but which managed as the Creation developed to place me in between them. Now lest you think this is false, just consider. Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture cycle that was published under the title: The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness. In it (among a great deal else), he describes how around 1879 a battle between the forces of Archangel Michael and certain other forces of opposition, resulted in the latter forces being forced out of the spiritual world and sent to earth. The earth then became the field of activity of certain Dark hierarchies that previously worked elsewhere, who then also became even more capable of participation in human affairs, and in particular were to have a strong influence on the dead. Now in the 20th Century we have had these phenomena appear in the social-political world: two world wars, the creation of the atomic bomb, the materialization of biology such that we don't understand it at all, the creation of a technological civilization which has no idea of the real nature of electricity, and now the falling apart of civilization such that great pain and suffering is emerging everywhere in the guise of financial collapse, loss of jobs and homes and more and more egregious abuses of power by corporate and government officials. The so-called War of All against All seems almost present, and there appears to be no end in sight for human against human conflict. A system has evolved in which human beings are the surrogates for points of view of higher communities of beings (Vorlons) and lower demonic entities of opposition (Shadows). All this in a time where knowledge of this matter is kept from us. These problems as seen from the Idealism of Central European soul life are accepted - matters are as they should be according to this view. Steiner, for example, apparently believes it is right for the Vorlons to rule on the Earth, via human beings, who should (if they were properly wise according to Steiner) strive for perfection in response to the Stiftung or Call. The American Soul doesn't approach matters in this idealistic way. The ideal is of little use, for this soul wants to help, not admonish. Anthroposophy, in the light of this approach then, is far different than the approach made in Central Europe. Giersch and Steiner, and excarnate "masters" such as Christian Rosenkreutz, are of little use as regards the practical problems of human beings helping each other, accepting each other and loving each other - to the extent that they foster the idea that the only solution is to copy on the earth social forms in accord with the vision of higher beings (the Vorlons), by creating a School run by initiates. It seems to me that the structure of things spiritual and their relationship to the earthly is being more and more forced upon us as a given, and while we are made to be responsible for deciding in the war that goes on in our souls between or light and dark, we haven't yet been much allowed (at least in a conscious way) to design the structure itself. My angry prayer in New Hampshire was that the highest gods maybe should not be so hands off (Christ and the Holy Mother), and do something to lessen the raising of the temperature of things, that seems to be happening as a consequence of the unrestrained influence of the excesses of the angelic and the demonic in terms of their ability to influence human choices and actions. Are we the only ones screwing things up? So what that the Executive in 1925 screwed things up. So what that the Executive today is still screwing things up. Its not my business to judge, although it is my business to point out the truth (I can say: Look current executive, you are screwing things up big time). But the truth is not the good, nor are either of those alone able to contain or become beauty. So what that the higher worlds (both angelic and demonic) might be screwing things up too. But in that case, they shouldn't be surprised if down here on the ground and in a physical body, I might have a complaint or two. Sometimes in my
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prayers, when the doubles and the conscience are particularly frisky, I challenge them to take on a body and come into my room and face me directly instead of screwing around in my mind. So, during my prayers lately I include thanks and gratitude and a little attitude as well. Lets all be responsible for what goes on here, and I for one don't want to give any being in the cosmos a free ride on that level. Walk in Beauty say the Navajo. Amen, say I, but just don't expect me as a human being to take all the blame for things on myself or my neighbors and friends. You invisibles need to come out from behind the curtain more, and dialog with us about the future. No hiding behind initiates and enlightened ones anymore. Show up. Follow Christ and take on being in the body. Angels or Demons, Vorlons or Shadows - show up on the bridge of life and lets talk about it face to face, in front of everyone else. Otherwise, ... maybe we don't need to pay too much attention to you anymore at all, since you are seemingly leaving us all alone (except when you violate the temple of our own soul), waiting for us to become perfect before you deign to speak to us. That's my song ... however sour some might think is the melody ... see my little story: the Zen Potter, for details ... The Social-Spiritual Organism of a Waldorf School Community - an essay on micro-threefolding A healthy social-spiritual organism for a Waldorf School community is threefolded in two ways - a spiritually integrative gesture in which the threefolding takes a form analogous to that already known structure, which describes the human being as simultaneously spirit, soul and body; and, in a socially integrative gesture, similar to that of human physical form, which is so organized that functionally it displays, as aspects of a whole, those capacities which are realized in head, heart and hands. Thus, there are two gestures in the social-spiritual organism of a School, which integrate in such a way that morphologically they can be symbolized in the image of the Cross combined with the image of the Circle. The Circle is the social body of the school, and has the qualities of a Chalice. The Cross is the soul-spiritual body of the school and has the qualities of a Radiant Sun. The various human beings associated with the organism of the school have different roles depending upon whether they are, in any given moment, contributing to the Life of the School, as an aspect of the Chalice, or as an aspect of the Radiant Sun. In one kind of meeting or action someone will be acting in one way, and then two steps and a minute later, in another. Much of the social confusion that arises in Waldorf School Communities comes about because these rapid changes of role are not understood. I came to understand the above, in part, because I was a member of the Pine Hill Waldorf School (in Wilton N.H.), shortly after the moment of its own spontaneous social threefolding. This generative social event occurred as a response to a large tuition increase from one year to the next (on the order of 25%, as I recall), which drove the parent body first into a state of panic, and then to an organized attempt to grasp more firmly their relationship to the school. As a result there came to be three functional, and predominately, social organs, each of whose individual role in the social and spiritual life of the school was different. These three bodies (after the third added itself) were: the Board of Trustees, the College of Teachers, and the Friends of Waldorf Education (the parents). The Friends had a rather narrow conscious focus in that, within this essentially social organ, an attempt was made to equalize and mediate, among the parent body itself, the burden of the huge changes in tuition. The Friends, as a whole, contracted with the School, to carry the tuition of all its members (all those parents who joined the Friends); while among themselves, the Friends distributed the costs in a way compatible with individual incomes. Nonparents could also be members of the Friends, but the core group were (and had to be, as a social necessity) parents of children attending the School. Now those familiar with Rudolf Steiners social ideas might easily think that because the Friends dealt with economic matters (funding the tuitions), that this body would be analogous to Steiners Economic Sphere. But this is a mis-perception of the social facts. The core problem the Friends dealt with was only incidentally economic. Its true center was the social life of the school - namely, how to help people get along with each other in the turbulent and dynamic social tensions of the school community (following the large tuition increase). The Friends mediated and balanced the social pressures, in the course of their meetings and through their relationships with the other functional organs of the School: the Board and the College. At a functional level, the Friends were the social heart of the school, the middle element, analogous to Steiners Political-legal Sphere. The Social Life of the School is the Chalice, which itself supports the Spiritual Life, the Radiant Sun. What is involved in Teaching - that is, what is predominately involved in the Spiritual Life - cannot be accomplished without this support. Let us now look more closely at this supported activity. The teacher stands upright in the classroom as a human being. It is this example, as much as anything, that teaches. The student first imitates (kindergarten to 4th or 5th grade), then walks beside (4th through 9th or 10th), and finally meets this teacher, this particular human being (l1th and 12th), as another ego being, another individuality. Now it is not the teacher, or the student, who is the Radiant Sun. Rather it is what happens between them, what is born in the relationship, which is the Radiant Sun. Thus, as a spiritual organism, the school is organized as follows. Analogous to the individual spirit in the human being, one finds, above the social body of the school, that there exists a community of spiritual beings: the angels of the children, the dead who have an interest, the hierarchies that inspire and so forth (one should not think of this above as toward the sky, but rather that this above represents a qualitatively finer form of existence).

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Below this purely spiritual community exists a second community, which is analogous to the soul of a single human being. Thus, the Soul of the spiritually integrative gesture of the School Community is centered in the community of teachers, whose inner discipline and work is necessary for the spiritual life of the School to exist. It is the teachers who consciously carry the work of integration between the community of spiritual beings hovering over the school and the needs of the children. The teachers are the spiritual heart of the school, in the same way that the parents are the social heart. Now both the parents and the children are inspired by the spiritual world as well, but their spiritual role is different and does not require the same degree of consciousness - the same attendant responsibilities as carried by the teachers. At the same time, the parents social role is greater and more central then that carried by the teachers. It is here, where this difference is not perceived, that much that brings illness to the social life of the Schools is born. The parents responsibility is the Chalice, the social organism of the school, and the teachers responsibility is the Radiant Sun, the relationship between student and teacher. Let us now review the two primary threefoldnesses. In the vertical-like gesture, the school is organized as follows: Above, the purely spiritual community of inspiration; in the Middle, the Soul-full community of the incarnated - centered in the inner work of the community of teachers; and Below, the social community, the social organism (body) of the School. The vertical-like gesture is an integrated organism of three communities. In the horizontal-like gesture (that is socially), the school is organized as follows: the functional head, the directing and deciding organ, is the Board of Trustees; the functional heart, the social mediating and balancing organ, is or should be an organized parent body (Friends of Waldorf Education?); and the functional hands, the actualizers of the art of education, is the College of Teachers. The horizontal-like gesture is an integrated organism of three socially functional organs, within the lower, or most nearly physically expressed, community. It may occur to some readers to ask where do the children fit into this picture. I would describe it this way: The Children drink (absorb) the wisdom of the Radiant Sun from the fount that is the Chalice. The combination of the Circle and the Cross serves the Children. [Now, some students of the Steiners threefold social order may wonder about this picture, and well they should. At the same time it may help them to reflect that we are here looking at micro social dynamics, rather than macro social dynamics. At the macro level, the ideas associated with the Economic, Political-legal and Cultural Spheres have validity, but at the micro level one has to be able to clearly see the purely functional relationships, free of any abstract associations in thought.] For example, in practice, this is the way the school social body might work. The teachers express a need for something in order to carry out their work, the trustees decide to meet that need and plan how to carry it out, while the parents make sure the whole social community understands - feels integrated with - the totality of the process. Each organ carries out a different role, but each is necessary to the other. Neither the trustees or the teachers should carry out the understanding function; that is, the social health of the school community is not their problem. At the same time, both the hands and the head must understand that the heart, the social middle, is the central necessary organ in the social life of the school. If this organ is unhealthy, which it most often is in modern Waldorf Schools, then the social functioning of the school is lamed, and all the many related problems going on in Waldorf Schools cannot be solved, because the social heart, the Chalice, is not vitally organized. It may help some of the naturally arising confusion here to recognize that the parent body is a free association, and that teachers and trustees can participate in it, according to its rules. The inspiration of the Pine Hill parent body, to call their newly born association: The Friends of Waldorf Education, should not be passed by without deep consideration. The social life of the school has a heart, and it is in the social organ dominated by the activities of the parents (but not necessarily exclusively theirs). The total social body of the school includes the Trustees and the Teachers, but the most intuitively correct knowledge of what is socially right to do, rests within the central organ, the Friends. Let us continue our examination of the spiritual-social organism of the School by exploring more deeply the symbolism of the Circle (the Chalice) joined to the Cross (the Radiant Sun). The Cross is the symbol of vertical-like integration, between the upper and lower aspects of spiritual life (inner, psychological life) and the relationship between that act (of vertical-like integration) and the possibility of horizontal-like (or social) integration - participation in the life of Community. The Circle is the symbol of social integration, the cojoined purposes uniting the different individual members of a social community, yet having (absent the Cross) an empty center, recognizing the simultaneous autonomy of each individual member. As individuals (as Cross bearers) we can sacrifice in a vertical-like gesture - upward toward the higher aspirations of our own individuality, and downward, by accepting our individual flaws. We can also sacrifice with a social (horizontal-like) gesture by holding back our individual perceptions and intentions on those occasions where the needs of the whole, the community, seem to require it. As members of a community (as Circle bearers) we can hold within ourselves the nature and needs of the other members (individually and as a group), while at the same time, along with this inward beholding - an act carried out together - we unite ourselves in common purposes and processes. We combine these two symbols, when through acts of unification we create the Chalice, and when through acts of sacrifice we create the Radiant Sun. These acts are not independent of each other, but have a reciprocal reinforcing nature, so that the stronger and more effective the social organism is (the Chalice), the more support there is for the act of sacrifice which allows the spiritual organism (the Radiant Sun) to arise in the relationships between individuals. Conversely, the stronger the act of sacrifice is carried out inwardly, the more capacities the individual develops in support of participation in the Chalice (the social community). From this then we can see just how, in the Waldorf School Community, Rudolf Steiners most poignant social insight is made manifest: The healthy social life is found when in the mirror of each human soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the community the virtue of each one is living.

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Let us next carry forward this contemplation, by considering again a problem noted at the beginning, concerning the fact that in one instance an individual may be acting as an aspect of the Radiant Sun, and in another instance, moments later, an individual may be acting as an aspect of the Chalice. A teacher is teaching in a the classroom, and as he or she moves among the children, the teacher is, to the degree able, consciously open in a spiritual gesture, inwardly empty and calling forth inspiration, while simultaneously humble, realizing they are also human and flawed. In between the teacher and the child, as this goes forward (the child does instinctively, in the beginning, what the teacher has to strive to do consciously) the Radiant Sun is born. Now class ends, and the day is over, and parents enter the class room to conduct their necessary part of the activities. The teacher and parent converse and the subject concerns the social life of the school, not the nature and practice of the pedagogy. At this point the teacher defers to the intuitions of the parent, because it is in the vertical-like gesture of the soul life of the parent that the intuitions concerning the social organism are most present. Between them, the parent and the teacher, a Radiant Sun is active, while at the same time, in the acceptance of the different roles (for the parent defers to the teacher as regards matters of classroom activity) the Chalice is carried. When the individual parent tries to dominate the pedagogical (spiritual) aspects of the school life, they are interfering in the necessary upward and downward stream which needs the teacher for its focus. When the individual teacher tries to dominate the social aspects of the school life, they interfere in an analogous way. If there are pedagogical concerns among the parents, these can be refereed to the College of Teachers, but what parents need to recognize, is that in the organism of the School, it is the teachers who must be free to determine these matters. Without this freedom, the vertical-like integration with the community of inspiration is impossible. On the other hand, when a pedagogical problem needs to be explained to the parent community, it needs to be translated through the consciousness of the parent body itself, because it is there that the inspiration exists for how to mediate common social understanding. For example, when there are crisis meetings where teachers are sitting facing parents (creating an us and them social environment), at that moment the social-spiritual organism of the school is dead, and cannot carry out what it needs to, regardless of how much talk or other efforts are expended. At that point the needed living social process (the Chalice) has been fractured into pieces, and without its support the Radiant Sun cannot properly shine. Perhaps it will help to think of it this way. In the social organism of the school, as distinct from the spiritual organism, there is an interpenetration between the active element (the hands) and the mediating element (the heart). What are the healthy processes, socially, within this field of interpenetration? The heart element needs to empathize with the needs of the hands element, to understand those needs. The hands element needs to defer to the heart element to distribute this empathic understanding to the whole organism. The hands are incapable of carrying out the function of the heart. Now a crisis may contain more than one characteristic. The pedagogical characteristics (the art of teaching) belong to the College to define. The decision making characteristics (the art of making policy and long term goals) belong to the Board to define. The understanding making characteristics (the art of social integration) belong to the Parents to define. Social leadership in a crisis belongs to the Parents, who then enable, through their mediating function, the head and the hands to act in the ways best suited to those organs. But all must work together, because dominance by one or the other will mean disease and disorder. The heart might say: this is what is right to do. The hands might say: this is what we need in order to do what is right. Then the head can say: this is how we shall go about doing what is needed and is right. So at Pine Hill, the hands had said, this is how much we need to live and to operate the school according to our pedagogical goals, and the head had said, okay this is how much the individual parents are going to have to pay to meet these needs - both leaving out any truly balanced dialogue with the parents - balanced in the sense of understanding what the social organism of the school needed in order to deal with the huge tuition increase. Then the parents said, ouch, and afterwards solved the social problem out of their own insight, saying that what is right is that the money needs of the school should be handled among the parents in a particular social way (The Friends of Waldorf Education). Accidentally then, they ended up working together in a more or less healthy social way, but over time, there was insufficient consciousness of how to carry this into the future, and the old habits reasserted themselves. Social processes, in this age of family emancipation from community, and individual emancipation within the family, are very difficult. Where these difficulties intersect, in the social life of a school, all the worst tendencies manifest themselves; and, Waldorf Communities struggle constantly to live in a ocean of mixed and confused social realities. Hopefully, these words above will provide some small bit of a map for the future navigation of these turbulent seas. Remember, however, that the map is not the territory, and each School will have an individual manifestation of the general socialspiritual configuration described above, and therefore have highly particular and individual social and spiritual needs, which must be perceived, understood, and healed. The crux, such as it is, is to remember that the school organism is both social and spiritual in nature, both Chalice and Radiant Sun, simultaneously (a cojoined Circle and Cross). In one sphere the intuitions of the parents need to lead, and in the other the intuitions of the teachers. [It may well be that this social -spiritual organism, in its micro-nature, is an archetype for all other micro community threefolding dynamics. It remains for the future to discover if this is so.] One final point, speaking as a former parent. The College of Teachers and the Board of Trustees need to very carefully free the parent body to follow its own intuitions in the creation of its own (the parents) social structure, intentions and purposes. All that arises needs to come from the initiative of the parents themselves. They only need be shown this article, or otherwise inspired to begin to express themselves as the stewards of heart of the Chalice. In many schools the parent body already carries a great deal of the social life - school parties and celebrations, and the social structure and nature of fund raising events. More crucial, and not well developed, is the role of the parent body in relationship to the wider community in which the School community finds itself. This as well, this outreach gesture, belongs to the parent body to initiate and mediate - it is a gesture of the social heart of the school community. The teachers must trust that the parent body will, over time, find the appropriate healthy way to organize the heart relations of the school community toward the other surrounding communities. Teachers and Board members should make themselves available to serve certain roles at the request of the parent organ, but the initiation of outreach is a social matter, not a spiritual one.

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Moreover, as some students of Waldorf School dynamics may know, Christopher Budd has criticized the Schools (and anthroposophical organizations in general) for failing to appreciate the needed economic relationship for the funding of the schools. The school, as a cultural form, must be funded out of the surplus capital generated by viable economic enterprises and not by what is essentially a tax on the parent body. The use of tuitions from the parents to fund a school is a major underlying factor in the social disharmonies, because many parents intuitively recognize that something is unfair here. But lacking the necessary idea on which to understand what should be done, and desiring the education for the child above all else, the parents undertake to financially support the school. [Of course, this is different in countries where the State provides funding, but even there the school is not financed in the appropriate fashion. There still results a social disharmony. It is just displaced into another arena. In American this has manifested in the activity of PLANS, which opposes (correctly) public funding of Waldorf Schools. Truly free Waldorf Schools should not be funded by parents or by the State, but directly from surplus capital. [PLANS by the way (while an understandable social response to certain excesses with the Waldorf community in the present), is itself an excess of displaced passion and anger. But a deeper discusion of these problems belongs to a whole other essay.] It is essential to the future social health of Waldorf Schools, that not only should the parent body organ become more highly developed and socially active, but the fundamental financing arrangement of the school itself needs to change. This financial change can be one of the first matters set before the parent body, as the arbiter of what is right in the social organism, not only within the school, but in terms of the school communitys relationship to the wider social life. For it is within the entrepreneurial spirit of this wider social life that the needed excess capital is to be found. The contribution of this capital to the school is a social deed, as is the seeking after it. Just in this then, the hidden social genius of the newly developing strong parent bodies can make a giant step forward in the future life of Waldorf Schools [try to remember why the schools are called Waldorf - the original school was funded directly from the excess capital of an active business organization]. Then, through this social deed, will the Chalice discover its path to maturity as the support of the Radiant Sun. Joel A. Wendt, in the Season of Michaelmas, 1998 Appendix One A discussion of the Prokofieff/von Halle conflicts, in the light of Peter Tradowskys book: The Stigmata: destiny as a question of knowledge. I hesitate to repeat myself endlessly, but as this point is so crucial I will once again refer to Steiner (just keep in mind that thoughtful observation of the Society, coupled with knowledge of what he means here, fully confirms his prediction): "Steiner lamented in Awakening to Community (lecture three, Feb. 6th, 1923), on the consequences of failing (which has happened) to properly take up The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (or Freedom) : The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things....The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophys conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict! Above, in Bitter Medicine, I pointed out that both the idea of the evolution of consciousness, and the basic idea of Steiners book The Philosophy of Freedom, presuppose that the human being, as regards his own mind, begins in an unfree state. If this was not the case, everything would be fine and no development necessary. So ... lets not pretend otherwise - the reader of this needs to confess that in all probability they do not know how to control their thoughts very well or how to master their feelings - that is they have not succeeded in the fundamental goals of the Six Basic Exercises. This is not a wrongness, but rather it is karma of the deepest kind. Nor does this mean we are incapable of knowing the good and true as an aspect of living in the Age of the Consciousness Soul. It just means that Rudolf Steiner, following the inherent obligations of his own development, had to place before us the highest possible ideal goals. There are still opportunities to follow him. All the same, one result of this situation is that people mostly sleep through the inner processes by which they formulate their own conceptual life. For example, we have been taught that our will is generally not accessible to the consciousness of our I. This is true to a degree, but not true in the sense of what lies potential within us that can be called: the will-in-thinking. This will manifests in that we can determine what objects about which we will think (the attention), and what reasons we will chose to have regarding how and why we think (the intention). In my Living Thinking in Action (which essays are also throughout most of my major books), I discuss this problem very carefully and exactly. The more consciously we apply the intention and the attention, the more accurately will we think in the new Way. The intention is the essential aspect of the will-in-thinking. We must learn to face, with humility and honesty, why we are thinking about what we are thinking about. Steiners The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity begins with the problem of desire: can we want what we want? Or, are we prisoners of our appetites, ambitions, hungers and needs for love and recognition? What drives our thinking? What goals does it really seek? In The Philosophy, right from the beginning, Steiner reveals the essential secret: We learn to place a freely chosen moral ideal in the front of the desire, and we learn how with that moral idea we can move all feelings and thoughts in the service of others. Do not believe this to be easy, by the way. If it was there would be no problems, and everyone would have already mastered the problem of knowledge as solved by The Philosophy. Below I will go into details. In my most recent book, The Art of God: an actual Theory of Everything, I discuss various modes of thinking and various moods of feeling as these relate to how concepts are produced. Modes of thinking include (but are not limited to) figuration, theorizing, reflection (Barfield), comparative, associative, hot, cold, organic, pure, about, with, within and as. Moods include (but again are not limited to) antipathy and sympathy, desires rooted in pleasure and pain, various semi-conscious wants and desires, and, at a higher level, cultivated (intended) moods such as awe, reverence and the like.

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To be able to manifest these moods and modes by choice (mastery of feelings and control of thoughts) is to achieve the goals of GA 2, 3, and 4 ( A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World Conception ; Truth and Knowledge - Steiner dissertation; and, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity), that is: to become spiritually and inwardly free. The absence of success here is what then manifests in the confusion arising in the General Anthroposophy Society that leads to partisanship and conflict - just as Steiner predicted in the above quote from Awakening to Community on the results of failing to realize in practice the changes in consciousness (in will and in thinking) connected to learning to properly read his The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way. What is the proper way to read this book? Each sentence, where possible, must be used to direct the thinking observation (introspective activity) of our own I at the phenomena of our own mind. We read this text, but to understand and appreciate it we have to more or less simultaneously look at our own mind. The text is map, the mind is the actual territory. Through this observational process we then become a scientist of our own mind. Nor do we practice scientific introspection just when reading the book - but rather we learn to be reflectively introspective all of the time - that is awake from moment to moment to those inner processes regarding the relationships between the will-in-thinking and feelings and thoughts themselves. We still have a sense life, we are just more and more awake to how our thinking and feeling effect our understanding and knowledge of what we experience, both inwardly and outwardly. What happens when we fail to learn these lessons? Our thinking becomes the victim of semi-conscious impulses often related to moods of feeling that are not mastered, such that the Opponents, via the doubles, are able to turn our own thoughts away from the good and the true. Because this unfree condition is normal (revisit Kuhlewinds From Normal to Healthy), and common (we all share these tendencies), no one notices that just here conflict is produced because we dont know how to find, collectively - in community, the good and the true. We believe we seek these, and I dont doubt for a moment the sincerity of Tradowsky, Prokofieff and von Halle. The problem is that without a mastery of mood and control of thoughts, the thought content we will produce will be extensively infected with unredeemed impulses of antipathy and sympathy, and un-noticed non-logical trains of thought rooted in semi-conscious thinking mostly determined by the thinking modes: comparative and associative thinking, which are themselves generally driven (when semi-conscious) from antipathy (comparative) and sympathy (associative). For example, antipathy leads us to compare that this object of thought (such as a person toward whom we might have a lot of sympathy) is better than that differing object of thought (such as a person we dont favor). So Tradowskys book is littered with sentences that prefer von Halle over Prokofieff, via the sub-consciousness moods (feelings), something toward which we would find more truth were we less asleep and less possessed by our unredeemed antipathy. (This is all laid out in Christs Sermon on the Mount, especially such as Chapter 7 in Matthew on: judge not least ye be judged.) An example of semi-conscious associative (sympathetic) thinking is found right from the beginning when Tradowsky starts to write of von Halle as having received the stigmata. He uses this term received everywhere after, borrowing it (apparently) from the usages made of this term in the discussion of their Saints by the Catholic Church. We can understand why the Church used this terminology (for its beneficial - spiritual bragging rights - view of the phenomena). Yet, in the fields of disciplined logic and reason (that is when we bother to be scientific) we would say that this usage - received - begs the question, for it is precisely the missing fact of the cause of the stigmata that we seek/need to know. Once we characterize it as received we have jumped to and implied the idea that positive spiritual beings have given this as a gift*, and the question Prokofieff seeks to pursue (in a very lame way apparently - I have not read his book and only know of it through Tradowskys references to it) is not really clearly asked. A conscious thinker, familiar with organic and pure thinking, would never use such a term as: received, precisely because it assumes an answer to the underlying question. *[Consider for a moment, the idea that the stigmata is a gift. Would a God of Love give as a gift suffering? The person with the stigmata is also not free. They are not given a choice. The wounds appear without apparently being asked for. In a somewhat overly done horror movie called Stigmata, a young woman, who believes herself to be an atheist, asks the Priest who tries to help her with her stigmata, whether she can give this gift back (which the Church believes to be precious). Again, would the God of Love give suffering to someone without their conscious consent?] In phenomenology (organic thinking, or Goetheanism) we simple describe what is/was observed, such that we could say that on such and such a day von Halles body appeared to have wounds on it, in accord with the traditions connected to the idea of the stigmata. It is very important to acknowledge the existence of that idea, by the way. That the appearance of the wounds (the experience), and the idea (the thought or meaning) arise at the same time is part of the phenomena. Keep in mind what Ive quoted from Steiner many times above: One must be able to confront an idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage . We are not to leap to any conclusion, especially received. While Tradowsky refers to Goethes dictum that the senses dont deceive, only the judgment, Tradowsky doesnt know how to apply it to this event. Seeing the wounds is one thing, deciding the cause is a matter for the thinking judgment and that is where we can fall into error. Now I am not taking a position here on the cause of this aspect of von Halles life destiny, by the way. I am just suggesting that, if we are to follow Steiners example in thinking, we must proceed very carefully. The rest of Tradowskys book is a kind of argument between him and his observations of the structure of Prokofieffs book. Both individuals seem to endless quote Steiner, which is in itself a complete misuse of what Steiner taught. This use of Steiner as an authority, as if in Steiner we can find a justification for our sympathy (Tradowsky) regarding von Halle, or our antipathy (Prokofieff) regarding von Halle, is unworthy of all true students of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner himself was very explicit: dont use me as an authority! For example, Tradowsky goes into a lengthy discussion of the differing interpretations of a ancient word, one by Steiner and the other by von Halle as well as many scholars (the specific word is not relevant here). Both Tradowsky and von Halle treat Steiners reports as to this words meaning as not to be doubted. This is not justified to a real scientific thinking, even though Tradowsky concludes that since Steiner read it in the so-called Akashic Record, that it must be true.
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Again, this problem is a clear result of the Society in general not learning to read The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way. Both Tradowsky and Prokofieff, and most of the rest of the members and friends, treat the writings and lectures of Steiner as if in reading them we gain knowledge of spiritual realities. Tradowsky uses that term - knowledge - in reference to something he is quoting from Steiner several times in fact. No one, who has succeeded in mastering their feelings and controlling their thoughts, in accord with the goals of GA 2, 3, and 4, would ever use Steiner as an authority for knowledge of the spiritual world. Why? Steiner was a very precise and careful thinker. As a consequence, in the introductions to both Theosophy and Occult Science he explicitly uses over and over again the term understanding*, but never knowledge. The term knowledge is almost exclusively used only in GA 2, 3, and 4. (He does use it in Knowledge of Higher Worlds and How to Attain It , but if we think about that use it is clear - the book is about how to get spiritual knowledge through direct experience, not how to find knowledge through reading a book. One studies as a preparation, but study only gets the soul ready for its supersensible experiences.) *[See Appendix Two below on the nature of spiritual research for a deeper discussion of this issue of the significance of the term understanding.] Let us see if we can shed some more practical light on this problem of how thinking-cognition needs to relate to experience in order for knowledge to arise. In A Theory ... (which Barfield calls the least read most important book Steiner ever wrote ), Steiner begins with making clear distinctions between experience and thought, although he also calls thought (after a while): a higher experience within experience. In The Philosophy..., Steiner makes a distinction between percept and concept (or experience again and its idea - that its thought). Once more, ... it is not so much a matter of understanding the books (the maps), but of learning to look carefully at the territory of the own inwardness. Knowledge, we learn through practice, requires the union of thought and experience, or percept and concept. Reading a book, while itself an experience (a percept of a book), the concepts expressed by the words in the book are absent their related and necessary experience or perceptual groundedness. I can read and read all manner of things about Christ, via Steiners reports on his spiritual research, but the direct experience of Christ is something so completely different from what I read, that this direct experience dwarfs entirely my Steiner-derived ideas (understandings) about Christ. Even von Halles apparent memory* pictures of Christ, cannot be the same as Steiners Intuition experiences (a few of which I have had) where we are united and within Christ in the present moment - we dont know in this way His past, but rather we know (as in participate in) His Eternal Present. *[Above I wrote of the problem related to Steiners advice to keep the Society and the Christian Community separate, given that the Rite of Consecration of Man, through the descent of spiritual memories into those present, creates social harmony and warmth. If the Society is not to lose the hunger for such harmony and warmth in its Branch and Group gatherings, there needs to be not only this separation of the Society and the Christian Community, but a counter-Rite: the Reverse Cultus. Yet, was it as a member of the Christian Community that what is essentially an involuntary mystical** experience happened to von Halle? Or are many of her fans" members of the Christian Community? The record (at least what can be found via the Internet) on that question is not clear. All the same this should give us sufficient reason itself to look carefully at the totality of the personal and social effects of the whole phenomena - not just at von Halle, but at her surrounding companions as well.] **[Steiner indicates that true supersensible experience does not enter into earthly memory, such that we have to go back to the source again and again in order to gain deeper insight. My own experiences confirm this. In the light of this caution, how are we to understand that von Halle has memories of the events at Golgatha. Again, I am not drawing conclusions, but I am insisting that we think very carefully about what this all means, especially as regards advancing or inhibiting the future development of the Anthroposophical Society. Also keep in mind that von Halle describes her experience of traveling back in time as involuntary. Steiners spiritual research was not involuntary.] When Tradowsky tries to write of Steiners visits to the so-called Akashic record, Tradowsky has no actual knowledge of what that experience is like, but rather he believes and understands" only the way he interpreted what he read - the ideas and concepts his mind has created while reading. Such an idea is best described as a perceptless concept - a concept or idea disconnected from the actual and necessarily-related experience. Tradowsky has never visited himself the experience Steiner called: the Akashic record. Most of what people write, based on the reading of a Steiner text, is a collection of far to frequently ungrounded perceptless concepts. These can easily become mere beliefs in the soul, such that we create a kind of religious-like philosophy of the world of spirit. Because Steiner was so rigorous in his research efforts and in the deliberate nature through which he expressed himself (his careful choices of words and terms), we can receive through reading an understanding (that is, we can acquire more than a mere belief). When Steiner described the reports of his research as related to the work of natural scientists, he was referring to this creation of understanding. When a physicist tells his tales of his experiments and what he thinks they mean, he is transmitting his understanding, but not his actual direct experience. The same with Steiner. To him his experience is knowledge because it has both percept (experience) and concept (thought), but he knows that to us the best that can happen is he helps us understand the spiritual world and the spiritual history of our world. He also hoped, through his books and lecturing, to inspire us to pursue our own direct knowledge of the Divine Mysteries. Given that he didnt expect the influence of Anthroposophy on Civilization to arrive in less than 400 years, we can see that we do have time to understand our errors, and perhaps understand how to proceed into the future - the object of most of my anthroposophical writings. As to the question of what it means that von Halles body shows the wounds and as well that she has stopped needing to eat (which seemed to happen before the wounds - again the record one can obtain via the Internet is weak and I apologize for any mistakes or unwarranted assumptions), - these phenomena are not even barely or adequately developed* in Tradowskys book, which simply becomes a polemic by a partisan in an unfortunate dispute between Prokofieff and von Halle that is rooted completely in the failure of the culture of the Anthroposophical Society to take up the right way to read Steiners The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

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*[Mostly Tradowskys thinking in this book is overridden by his understandable assumptions already present once he characterizes the stigmata as received. In the discipline of a true science of the mind, fostered by Steiners works on real thinking, this is called a pre-thought thought. The effect of an assumption or pre-thought thought is to color over the experience and essentially then not see it at all.] Missing so far from the dialog on these issues, is the lecture cycle of Steiners called: Pastoral Medicine, where he brought together priests and doctors to give them indications regarding the treatment of specific kinds of problems where a physician was needed for the physical problems and a priest needed for the spiritual problems. In these lectures he describes how the subtle bodies can become grossly disharmonious in their relationships (such as the astral too far embedded in the physical), and that these extreme conditions tend to produce madmen on the one hand and saints on the other. Steiner also speaks there of suffering as related to spiritual experiences. To have a certain supersensible experience will bring with it, for the human being having the vision, suffering. The problem, as it were, is to not lose sight of what it means that we bring the impulses of natural science into our cognitive activity regarding our spiritual experiences. Am I suggesting that something is wrong with von Halle by this statement? Of course not. I am suggesting, however, that the Stigmata might disappear if the right kinds of therapy (both physical and spiritual) were applied simultaneously, and that through such a process we might gain insight into the causal element, rather than assume she received something - that is assume she is being blessed by the divine. She could become a better spiritual scientist if there was more discretion applied to reporting the results of her experiences (recall that Steiner waited 17 years before sharing with the wider world, in The Riddles of the Soul, his discoveries regarding the threefold nature of the human being). I also think we should ask: why upon the appearance of the Stigmata did von Halle not retire to private meditative life, instead of becoming a public personality, sharing her visionary experiences in books and lectures, implying that it constitutes a kind of trust worthy spiritual research? I know from my own experiences the temptation offered by being surrounded by adoration and affection, and I can well picture von Halles dilemma - do I step into the limelight of this adoration, or do I retire and seek thereby to deepen what has arisen ( semi-retirement being a path previously common to most all other mystically inclined stigmatics). From my own biography (see Biographical Necessity) it is clear that certain kinds of experiences are temptations for the I. We could realize that for both Prokofieff and von Halle personally, this situation can easily magnify their own egotism, especially considering the fact that they both have acquired fans. People think of such personalities as special (for Prokofieff for his intense and voluminous scholarship, and for von Halle for her stigmata and visions), and gather around not only to worship them, but to often to surrender their own thinking to the pronouncements of such types of personalities. This surrender of the own thinking of the I is the antithesis of what Steiner taught - and I have in other contexts gone so far as to call it the presence of an anti-Steiner spirit. Tradowsky does quote Steiner to the effect (recall that this from Steiner is for our understanding and does not provide knowledge), that the spiritual world, is offering to us, with such figures as Kaspar Hauser, a kind of important lesson. This means, at the least, that we are right to pay attention to von Halles life destiny. However, and this is a very big however, we are not justified (again a questionable judgment - as pointed out by Goethe), in thinking that the spiritual world means by this to anoint as authoritative any concept which she seeks to express. This spiritual world certainly did not mean for us to treat Steiner that way (although we did and do), so perhaps part of von Halles gift to us is to remind us of just how important it is to think exactly and carefully and not to leap to conclusions based upon excesses of unredeemed sympathy or antipathy. Tradowsky also writes a number of sentences which logically speaking he has no justification for writing, given that there is no possibility of him having the necessary experiences related to such thoughts. Ill just give one example that comes during his long, and wandering, discussion of the fact that stigmatics generally stop eating - continuous fasting* (which von Halle has apparently done): This process occurs as a creative act of will in the deepest subconscious of those concerned, and can neither be invoked nor affected by the conscious awareness; it manifests as a continuum of life. *[Fasting, by the way, does commonly induce mystical states (sometimes called belly clairvoyance), but this certainly cannot be a process for producing what Steiner meant when he used the terms: spiritual research (otherwise Steiner would have encouraged all of us to become religious ascetics).] Keep in mind what we know about Steiners biography, and the fact that he spent a great deal of time on personal development, and did not just come to us blessed by the world of the spirit. We have to earn the ability to know spiritual matters in the Age of Science, otherwise we become just imprecise (unscientific) mystics, something Steiner urged us again and again to avoid. Like much else that happens in this Age (see my work above on the meaning of the descending social chaos), the purpose of such events is to drive us toward being more awake through raising the temperature of conflict (certainly a consequence of the discord between Prokofieff and von Halle). If it was all peaceable and nice nice, we would just sleep. In fact, to disagree (conflict) with Steiner (Wendt, how could you do that?!?!?), I find his constant usage of the term spiritual world (dont know what the German is/was) to be misleading. Even using his works (as well as my own experience), I dont find there is any unitary nature to the world of higher Beings that would justify our speaking of them/it as a coherent thing in itself, which acts upon us in a likewise coherent and purposeful or organized fashion. The world of spirit is a complex of diversified communities, who among themselves often dont particularly cooperate. Its not that they compete, as we do, its just that for us to assume this world of spirit is universally cohesive to the point of having a large common and shared specific and clear intention is just plain wrong. The evidence, once we ask the right questions, is otherwise. But that my friends, is a whole other level of discussion, although we can begin to end here by asking a few good questions: What spiritual communities oversee the Christian Community? What spiritual communities oversee the Anthroposophical Society? Do they have the same agenda? Why didnt Steiner receive the Stigmata? Why did not Emerson, or Goethe or Coleridge or Barfield or Kuhlewind or Ben-Aharon? Why von Halle and not these? Perhaps the primary message from the Mystery is to von Halle herself, and not one that suggests she is approved the way an Oscar might be given to a movie star. On the contrary, in terms of the Christian-Rosicrucian Path, she is only now crucified, leaving two more stages yet to be endured. The Stigmata are not an end, but a sign of a phase. What happens next?

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Next is the Entombment, which in the case of St. Francis, who received the Stigmata late in life, signified his coming death. Perhaps for von Halle the stigmata is a suggestion that if you want to achieve the highest, it is time not for more speaking, but for silence. It is not what she has done or is now doing that is important, but what she can become precisely through renouncing her public spiritual life. The Jew who received the stigmata, Richard Pollak that Tradowsky mentions, kept his condition secret for years. All surprising acts of destiny in our biographies are two edged swords. In that they suggest we have arrived somewhere or become something spiritually important, only means we are to face powerful temptations to self-pride - it is the luciferic double that is brought forth. Inwardly in this state we receive in our thinking all manner of seemingly wise thought, but often hardly the truth. That is why we experience Entombment and can by choice enter entombment (the silence). Only in this state can our thoughts and feelings cook in the right way, becoming thereby far more than they otherwise would be were we to immediately present them to the world. Again: Steiner waited 17 years before presenting the idea of the threefold man. In paths of sacred magic it is the virtue of silence that realizes the highest powers. What von Halle does or does not do is only part of the problem. We who would love her have our own dilemmas (the other edge to the sword) to face, but that is another story entirely, given that it belongs to each of us individually to decide. In this book report, I have done what I could in this moment.

Events in Dornach - and their relationship to the logos order of the world In order to understand social life, and see the place of individual social forms in the totality of this social world, it is necessary now to raise our sights so as to appreciate the logos order of the world itself - that is to see the organism of the social world that has arisen through the Creation, and then the Incarnation, and now the true Second Coming. The first obstacle to such seeing lies in a common error, shared by large portions of humanity, that sees history and events as central, when in fact these matters are merely the stage setting or backdrop against which the individual biography finds its own drama unfolding. From the standpoint of the Creator, the individual human spirit is the meaning-moment of the Creation, and all order (in its higher sense) comes into existence so that individual biographies can gain what they need. To understand this requires only that we think about the universal characteristics of a biography carefully from the point of view of any individual as a center. This can be done as follows. Each is born into a physical body in a specific place and time. This organization of birth actually has four bodies: warmth or ego body, astral or desire body, ethereal of life body, and material or physical body. These bodies are the home and temple for the spirit. From another point of view we also can see this structure: spirit, soul and body. Both are simultaneously true, it is just the different questions we can ask that brings out the different details. Already at birth the substances of these bodies are determined by various rules, although the substance nature of the different bodies varies (spirit and matter for example are highly different in a qualitative way). When we are born we are also born into a social context. This includes a specific family constellation, a particular (local) community and certain features such as language, culture and geographical location. The incarnating spirit also brings a kind of past, which we can call karma, but even that term hardly gives us the dynamic nature of these features. Each I-am is different and unique from every other I-am. While we can look at the universal features of all human beings as sharing many similarities, the most profound and powerful aspects of any incarnation are individual and unique. There is only one of each kind of human being - in fact that is an essential feature of being a human being - we are truly and profoundly individual - we are like no other. The ways we are the same determines much of the details of how our lives are lived. The ways we differ determines our deep past (prior incarnations) and our ultimate destiny. As we live out our biography we encounter many different kinds of communities, in the broadest sense, in which that term can have meaning. Family and village and town are only one such characteristic. If we have a certain limit due to a physical or mental lack (such as deafness), we will also be a member of that community - the community of the deaf. These sources will bring about a specific world view - a set of ideas that is carried by the language and culture which we are born into. That we can overcome this birth-given necessary characteristic is also a fact of no little importance. The world view can be too parochial, and thus a prison for our I. Because of who we are as a unique kind of being (being human is only one of several possible universal shared characteristics), the biography is organized in order to give us various types of experience. This meeting of the I-am during incarnation, with its particular and unique experiences, is what life is for. Thus we can say that a unique and individual kind of spirit incarnates in order to have a unique and individual experience. Granted there are many superficial types of experience, but the reality is that the totality is not the same for anyone. With language we also get ideas. The spoken word and the conceptual world bear particular connections, whose details are worth appreciating. One of these is that meaning itself is individual and unique. When I use the word love, for example, I mean it in a way that is completely different from the meaning given to this word by any other being. The differences may on occasion be slight, but they are inescapably there. One of the many consequences of seeing this logos order is the realization that to be on the Vorstand of the GAS, or in one of the Sections of the School of Spiritual Science located in Dornach, is to have an individual meaning in the eyes of Christ that is no more important or no less important than a criminal on death row, or someone dying of AIDS in Africa. In a similar vein, the idea of anthroposophy is not any more or any less significant than the ideology of a terrorist in Pakistan. It is not that meaning is relative or not relative - it is that meaning, along with all that is, just is. Members of the GAS do a work that they have incarnated to do, and it is no
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more and no less important than what a brothel owner in Thailand is doing. Christ loves each kind equally, and has made a world which accommodates each kind equally. No doubt some members of the Vorstand were in previous lives more like the criminal on death row, than like the priest leaders of a modern mystery school they might today believe themselves to be. Properly understood, the appreciation of this aspect of reality gives us a great deal of freedom. This is because when we consider our work more important than it really is, we make a prison for our own I - we dig a kind of rut in which our biography will have to run, because we have conceived our work in a way far out of proportion to what it actually is. When Rudolf Steiner encourages us to do something out of the love of the deed he is pointing us in this direction. We only gain problems by raising the deed up in relationship to the deeds of others, which is why Christ modeled for us the washing of the feet. Dornach is not a special place. It is just a place. Anthroposophists are not special people, they are just people. Now it is possible that if anthroposophists conduct themselves in certain ways in Dornach, that other people will find what is done there for the love of the deed useful to them. At the same time there is nothing to compel them to find what we do useful. And we cant act in such a way that they do find it useful - that is we cant force their interest. That interest belongs to their freedom. At the same time there is what we might call human nature. So human nature could not help but make evaluations of Steiner, and of what he taught, as regards this specific quality: more important than other deeds. Then because his students had egos, they then attached themselves to this more important thing they thought really existed, and which allowed them to feel more important by teaching Rudolf Steiner to the world. This is not a new attitude. The Creation in fact takes account of this possibility, which is one reason why we get to have many lives in order that eventually we will get over ourselves. This is also one of the reasons Christ said that unless we become again like little children, we cannot get into the kingdom of heaven. A child is a being that is so completely egotistical that it passes beyond egotism. To be spontaneously child-like is to risk social censure, yet that is precisely what saves us from the excesses of gravitas (the ahrimanic) and the excesses of selfishness (the luciferic). The more true we are to self, the less we are self, for the real nature of the I-am is selfless. Here is Christ again - pay attention particularly to the last lines: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a mans enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. Dornach needs to get over itself. Dornach is just a social collection of individual human beings that have shared karma. At the same time, we all live in a cultural frame in which comparison is so common, most our words have such a quality. There is no up without down. There is no better without worse. If one can be more moral, one can be less moral. If we have a region of the Earth where people gather to celebrate the work of a particular human being, in this case Rudolf Steiner, then there are also places where he is not celebrated. If one has learned of him, one can teach about him. The problem comes when we form the idea that others should have the same affections toward him and his work that we do; or, if we form the thought that because we can imagine the world as a better place if everyone was just like us, then clearly the world should go in that direction - that is people ought to learn of Rudolf Steiner, as they will be better for it. Though common, such thoughts are not quite right. Why? Because they violate the very freedom which was the core of Steiners own work, and which is at the core of Christs Love. Anthroposophy not only cannot be imposed upon the world - to seek to impose it would destroy it. A lot of people get this, however, and realize it is by example that we must live. Then our life demonstrates, and others are free to take from that demonstration, or not. Yet, what does Dornach demonstrate? It demonstrates an infatuation with all things Steiner, and makes itself into a Center of Steiner thought. Is that really what Steiner himself hoped from Dornach? Obviously, I dont think so, or it would not have been possible to write about: The Conscious Death, and Conscious Resurrection, of the General Anthroposophical Society. Joel A. Wendt in the Season of St. Johns Tide, 2010

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