being human Winter 2013

anthroposophy.org

personal and cultural renewal in the 21st century

“Calendar of the Soul, week 48” by Sophie Bourguignon-Takada INITIATIVE! Social Forums and New Ventures

Remembering Fred Paddock

Painting the Calendar of the Soul

–

Week 1:

June 23rd to June 28th

Christof Wiechert

Autism and Integrating Children in the Classroom: Advanced Studies in the Understanding of the Human Being for Educators

Laura Summer Drawing from the Face of God : Devotional Painting in the 21st Century

Frederick Amrine, Elena Efimova

The Renewal of the Social Organism: Rudolf Steiner as a Social Activist

Rudiger Janisch, Penelope Baring

From Meditative Work to Outer Deeds: A Path of Service through the General Anthroposophical Section and the First Class

Margot Amrine, Elena Efimova

Russian Spirituality: Intimations of a Future Epoch

Eleanor Winship Experiencing Music as a Path to the Spirit: Singing through the Grades

Lorey Johnson, Kati Manning World Languages:

Active Learning and Awakening the Intellect in Grades 4, 5, and 6

Peter Snow

Storytelling - The Teacher's Greatest Tool: The Art of Storytelling in the Classroom

Elizabeth Auer Romans, Renaissance, and Revolutions:

Academic Learning through Handson-Curricula for Grades 6, 7, and 8

Wendy Bruneau

Shakespeare with Adolescents: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

Welcome to Renewal 2013!

For Waldorf teachers and administrators - along with parents, trustees, artists, and thinkers seeking to deepen their lives through Anthroposophy

Week 2:

June 30th to July 5th

Michaela Gloeckler

Destiny in Health and Illness and the Development of Consciousness and Conscience

Janene Ping

Peacemaker Spirit: Honoring Native American Image through Puppetry Arts

Eugene Schwartz

Severance, Storm, and Serenity: Grades 3, 4, and 5 in the Waldorf School Setting

Charles Andrade Light, Color, and Darkness: A Collot-Inspired Approach to Pictoral Imagery

Patrice Pinette, Paul Matthews With Grace and Gravity: Creative Writing in the Play of Opposites accompanied by Eurythmy and Spacial Dynamics

Aonghus Gordon and Craftsmen

Thinking with our Hands: Mastering Material; Mastering the Self

Spoon Forging - Andy West

Willow Weaving - Lucy Miekle

Rose & Gold Balm - Jonathan Code

Jamie York

Teaching Math in Grades 6, 7, and 8: From Survival to Success

Signe Motter, Douglas Gerwin, Hugh Renwick, Elizabeth Auer

Self-Education through Intuitive Thinking and Artistic Perception

Register online at: www.centerforanthroposophy.org

Renewal Courses sponsored by Center for Anthroposophy Wilton, New Hampshire

Karine Munk Finser, Coordinator 603-654-2566 • info@centerforanthroposophy.org

Visit us online for details of our part-time Foundation Studies in Anthroposophy and the Arts

Barbara Richardson, Coordinator

Clusters available on demand around the U.S. www.centerforanthroposophy.org

June 30th to

July 27th

Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program

Douglas Gerwin, Director

Three-summers program specializing in Arts/Art History • Biology

Math • Physics & Chemistry

• English • History

• Pedagogical Eurythmy

“Rising Angel”

Painting by Karine Munk Finser

ANTHROPOSOPHY NYC

the New York Branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America

138 West 15th Street, NY, NY 10011 (212) 242-8945

The School of Spiritual Psychology

A Center for the Cultivation of Spiritual Heart Attention

TALKS

spirituality, health, education, social action, esoteric research, human & cosmic evolution

WORKSHOPS

self-development, biography, therapies, rhythms & cycles, threefolding, economics

VISUAL ARTS

exhibits, workshops, talks, museum walks

EURYTHMY

Rudolf Steiner’s therapeutic art of sacred movement

EVENTS

music, theater, festivals, community celebrations

STUDY GROUPS

free, weekly and monthly, exploring transformative insights of Rudolf Steiner, Georg Kühlewind, Owen Barfield and others

SOME UPCOMING PROGRAMS at 7pm except as noted; details at www.asnyc.org

David Lowe “Raphael’s Stanza Della Signatura” – Thu 3/21

Easter Programs – Sun 3/24, 2pm, Thu 3/28 7pm, Sun 3/31 4pm

Eugene Schwartz Harry Potter/Secret Brotherhoods – Sat 4/6, 5/11

Kate Temple Watercolor Workshop – Sa-Su 4/13-4, hr tbd

Linda Larson Monthly Eurythmy Workshop – Mon 4/15, 5/13

David Anderson Rhythms & Cycles of the Logos – Wed 4/17, 5/15

Phoebe Alexander Seasonal Painting Workshop – Sun 4/21, 1-4pm

Gail Langstroth Weekend Workshop – Sa-Su 4/27-8, hr tbd

Walter Alexander “From Babel to Pentecost & Beyond” – Mon 5/20

Lisa Romero on Meditation, Its Practice & Results – Wed 6/5

RUDOLF STEINER BOOKSTORE

Browse dozens of works by Steiner and many others on education, science, health, art, spirit, biodynamics. Open Tues-Wed & Fri-Sat, 1-5pm.

“The word ‘anthroposophy’ should be interpreted as ‘the consciousness of our humanity.’” – Rudolf Steiner www.

asnyc .org centerpoint gallery

spiritual, therapeutic, world, & ‘outsider’ art

The School of Spiritual Psychology serves the invitation to develop spiritual capacities of the heart. Spiritual development here is always in integral relation with Earth, assuring deep intimacy with creating spiritual presences. The various sessions themselves are communal demonstrations of the dimensions of heart presence. What one can anticipate with any of the programs offered are intense openings of creativity, presence, Earth-awareness, fluidity of action, emotional healing and a capacity of spontaneous doing.

The School of Spiritual Psychology offers courses at its Center in North Carolina, online courses, soul retreats, group and individual spiritual therapeutics, and book publications.

Courses

Beginning January 24–28 (two sessions), Healing Through the Twelve Stones of the Apocalypse

Beginning April 18–22 (four sessions), Christ, The Chambers of Heart, and the Awakening Earth Presence

Beginning May 2–8 (Four Sessions), Spiritual Therapeutics: Healing the Emotional Body: The Way of St. Francis and St. Claire

Soul Retreats

February 7–10, Soul Retreat. Santa Barbara, Ca., Lady of Guadalupe: Apocalyptic Mary-Sophia of Earth

Beginning June 6–10 (four sessions), Spiritual Therapeutics: Healing Spiritual Abuse

October 24–27, Soul Retreat: Burlington, Vt., Where is Christ?

Online Courses

Contemplative Living with Earth • Heart Initiation • Healing Fear

Recent Publications

Icons of a Dreaming Heart by Renee Coleman

Heart’s Oratorio: One Woman’s Journey through Love, Death, and Modern Medicine by Mary Oak

All offerings under the direction of Robert Sardello, Ph.D. and Cheryl Sanders-Sardello, Ph.D.

For Complete Information on all offerings plus free ongoing writing, audios, and videos, see our website: www.spiritualschool.org

Embr o In Motion y

with Jaap van der Wal, PhD, MD

This seminar explores how human prenatal development expresses the essence of human spiritual unfoldment. Understanding the stages of embryological development provides a basis for therapeutic recognition of embryological forces in all later stages of life. This seminar is a rare opportunity to hear a world authority on modern embryology through a unique synthe-

Available exclusively at

See Christ Differently

The Christian Community is a world-wide movement for religious renewal that seeks to open the path to the living, healing presence of Christ in the age of the free individual. Learn more at thechristiancommunity.org

August 2013 Mystery Drama Conference

The Souls’ Awakening

Threefold Auditorium

Chestnut Ridge, NY

Conference:

Wednesday, August 14

to Sunday, August 18

Full Performance:

Saturday, August 17

INFORMATION

845.352.5020 x18 events@threefold.org

www.threefold.org

Integrating Spiritual Practices into Daily Life

arch 15–16, 2013 Kimmel Center, New York University

60 Washington Square South, New York City

Gertrude Reif Hughes : The Most Profound Experiment

Jon McAlice : And the world became a riddle…

To register, please contact: SteinerBooks

610 Main Street

Gt. Barrington, MA 01230

www.steinerbooks.org

email seminar @ steinerbooks.org phone 413 528 8233

Robert Sardello : Time, Presence, and Contemplative Action

Jane Hipolito : Practicing Wonder, Compassion, and Conscience

Christopher Bamford : Life, you lift me up and carry me: you make certain I move forward.

Marie-Laure Valandro : Uncovering our Spiritual Lives with musical preludes by Diane Ingraham Barnes

Performances of The Souls’ Awakening will take place, along with lectures and workshops.

Receives

A residential community for adults with developmental challenges

We are a Rudolf Steiner inspired residential community for and with adults with developmental challenges. Living in four extended-family households, forty people, some more challenged than others, share their lives, work and recreation within a context of care.

Daily contact with nature and the arts, meaningful and productive work in our homes, gardens and craft studios, and the many cultural and recreational activities provided, create a rich and full life.

• COMMUNITY SPIRIT •

• THE ARTS •

• MEANINGFUL WORK •

• RECREATION •

For information regarding placement possibilities, staff, apprentice or volunteer positions available, or if you wish to support our work, please contact us at:

PO Box 137 • Temple, NH • 03084 603-878-4796 • e-mail: lukas@monad.net

lukascommunity.org

On Our Website

• Go through the year with R. Steiner (What did he talk about on that week 100 years ago - and other events and season appropriate excerpts). A great companion to help guide us through life!

• Weekly, the Calendar of the Soul, in a “line by line” new transla�on, plus its eurythmy form;

• Updates on our medical research – and more.

I believe that miso belongs to the highest class of medicines, those which help prevent disease and strengthen the body through continued usage. . . Some people speak of miso as a condiment, but miso brings out the flavor and nutritional value in all foods and helps the body to digest and assimilate whatever we eat. . .

—Dr. Shinichiro Akizuki, Director, St Francis Hospital, Nagasaki

Your interest is vital to our con�nued work! There is no obliga�on, but every tax deductable dona�on, no ma�er how small, would be much appreciated! www.truebotanicafoundation.org

NOTES, REVIEWS

THRESHOLDS

50 Gilbert Church, 1914-2012; Patricia Jeanne Gilmartin, 1945-1912; New Members of the Anthroposophical Society; Members Who Have Died

“Calendar of the Soul, week 48” by Sophie Bourguignon-Takada

From the Editors

Our “being human” weaves together the development of individual human beings, which is biography, and their interactions, which are history and society. Each issue we look at individual lives from the perspective of their earthly completion. Gilbert Church retired as head of Anthroposophic Press in 1981 and thought his work forgotten by now. On the Five Wishes living will form, he wrote: “If anyone asks how I want to be remembered, please say the following about me: I have attempted to be a human being.” Patricia Gilmartin, remembered from Seattle, lived also on the East coast and, like every leaf lifted in the breeze, expressed the power of the human spirit to a large family and many friends. Our Rudolf Steiner Library editors speak of Fred Paddock below.

Life stories inspire us, but readers also ask, what about people still living? That raises the question of initiative. It seems that for every three people touched by anthroposophy there are four or five social initiatives. Everything in this issue is really about “Initiative!” and we see people meeting the challenges of today on page 16. The archetypal challenges of seeing the divine in others who strive toward freedom and love, who need and give help; of taking on each other’s suffering; and of raising our consciousness into a higher culture of the future.

Translating Rudolf Steiner’s work, in this case verses, can also be a heroic deed, and occasion for many misunderstandings, as Walter Alexander tells us. Dr. Alicia Landman-Reiner describes how the social initiative of anthroposophic medicine is a healing path also for the soul of the physician. Sophie Bourguignon-Takada shares her on-going work of translating Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul into form and color. And two accomplished people of initiative, Patricia Kaminsky and Gertrude Reif Hughes, praise the noteworthy deeds of Cynthia Hoven’s Eurythmy and Eve Olive’s Cosmic Child

John Beck

In this issue we honor Fred Paddock, emeritus director of the Rudolf Steiner Library, who died in November, with loving tributes from friends Christopher Bamford,

Douglas Sloan, and William Hunt, along with some of Fred’s own writing. Together they describe a complex individual with a great sense of humor; a dedicated teacher; a passionate scholar; and a loyal, openhearted friend.

Bill Hunt, the society’s membership secretary and Fred’s office mate at the Carriage House in Harlemville during the library’s early days, says: “Fred always welcomed a person who spoke from the heart. He always spoke from the heart.” Chris Bamford, who lunched with Fred almost weekly for decades, observed: “He sought unremittingly to make his thinking, in fact his whole life, poetic, and he did so, and so his life makes sense.” And Douglas Sloan, longtime library trustee, notes that “[t]he life and health of anthroposophy in North America owe a deep debt of gratitude for the presence and influence of Fred. Fred was convinced, with Steiner, that anthroposophy should always entail an active engagement with the world—with the world’s needs and conditions, and with the thought and work of others in the world.” Fred’s article on Yiddishe Kop reveals his not-so-hidden rabbinical bent. His introduction to Ten Rules for Dialogue expresses a conviction that imaginative dialogue can lead to a new understanding of truth. And his history of the library depicts a living conversation that he will always be a part of.

We also feature two short reviews. Jane Hipolito reviews the remarkable new novel, SancXtuary, by Bruce Donehower, a rare specimen of the “anthroposophical thriller.” I had planned to read SancXtuary piecemeal at night, but became hooked and finished it in a weekend. This is magical realism, mystery (in every sense), and a multilayered journey of becoming. Then Jean Yeager reviews Partnerships of Hope: Building Waldorf School Communities, by Christopher Schaefer, a practicum for navigating the various worlds of schools, businesses, and enterprises, and a bridge to an entirely new way of looking at organizational life. Coming out of a wealth of experience, it is both a treatise on Rudolf Steiner’s thinking in the social sphere and an introductory “portal” to those new to Waldorf education and anthroposophy.

How to receive being human, how to contribute, and how to advertise

Sample copies of being human are sent to friends who contact us (address below). It is sent free to members of the Anthroposophical Society in America (visit anthroposophy.org/membership.html or call 734.662.9355).

To contribute articles or art please email editor@anthroposophy.org or write Editor, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. To advertise contact Cynthia Chelius at 734-662-9355 or email cynthia@anthroposophy.org.

Frederick J. Dennehy & Judith Soleil

being human digest

Our “being human digest” covers news and ideas of interest from the wide range of holistic and humancentered cultural initiatives. Items are brief, suggestions are welcome. Please write editor@anthroposophy.org or “Editor, being human, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104.”

Waldorf Education

“Children and Nature”

RSF Social Finance’s Reimagine Money blog (link below) has a fine essay by Richard Louv, adapted from his The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age. Richard is co-founder of the Children & Nature Network (C&NN); here are a few of his observations: The natural world is by definition an incubator of creativity... Creative genius is not the accumulation of knowledge; it is the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links between what is and what could be.

In 2006, a Danish study found that outdoor kindergartens were better than indoor schools at stimulating children’s creativity. The researchers reported that 58 percent of children who were in close touch with nature often invented new games; just 16 percent of indoor kindergarten children did. One explanation, for adults as well as children, is suggested by the “loose parts theory” in education, which holds that the more loose parts there are in an environment, the more creative the play. A computer game has plenty of loose parts, in the form of programming code, but the number and the interac-

tion of those parts is limited by the mind of the human who created the game. In a tree, a woods, a field, a mountain, a ravine, a vacant lot, the number of loose parts is unlimited.

These ideas are not new to Waldorf teachers or other nature-based educators. But, because of recent research and a growing movement to connect children to nature, a wider public is coming to that conclusion—even as children’s daily experience is becoming more virtual.

Optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking and texting is creating the smartest generation ever, freed from the limitations of geography, weather, and distance—all those pesky inconveniences of the physical world. But Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, in his book, The Dumbest Generation , reels out studies comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that ‘they don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events,’ despite all that available information.

Do read the whole essay, if not the whole book.

Links:

http://rsfsocialfinance.org/2013/01/nature-smart/ www.richardlouv.com

www.childrenandnature.org

Waldorf at Bioneers

In an earlier digest we picked up a passing notice of Waldorf school presence at the annual Bioneers conference, but it gave only a hint of the scope of the initiative. Teresa Ferrari wrote to give us a fuller picture. “By way of

Open positions for 2013-14:

• Pedagogical Administrator

• Class Teacher

• High School Chemistry/Math Teacher

We offer competitive salary & bene ts, generous retirement & health insurance contributions, & subsidized housing in an established anthroposophical community, near state parks & less than one hour from NYC.

Please send resume & cover letter to Tari Steinrueck at tsteinrueck@gmws.org.

307 Hungry Hollow Road Chestnut Ridge, NY 10977 845.356.2514 • www.gmws.org

being human digest

explanation, I am the person individually responsible for the collaborative hosting of a booth at the Bioneers conference for all Northern California Waldorf schools. Last year, I came up with the idea that hosting a booth at the very large Bioneers conference would be a way to spread the word about Waldorf education to a larger audience, both in Northern California and beyond since Bioneers is also hosted in over 22 other locations and even has an international presence. I brought this proposal to the Board of Trustees of the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training (BACWTT), of which I am a member. The Board agreed to the project and I agreed to spearhead it for 3 years. This was our second year attending Bioneers.

“The impulse was always a collaborative and inclusive collection of schools in our region to showcase Waldorf education. Schools were invited to participate and to the degree that they expressed interest and willingness, they did.... Although the participation in 2011 conference came from the Bay Area schools exclusively, it was definitely a collaborative booth, one that was clearly showcasing Waldorf education in all of Northern California and included materials from all the schools. We tracked the visitors to the booth that year and realized that many came from the Sacramento area.

“This year, to increase participation, especially in the Sacramento area, I not only attended the AWSNA delegates meetings, but took the time to attend the meetings of the Development and Administration arm of that group to speak to individuals personally about the event. By doing so, I was able to gather enthusiastic support [which] means that our region’s 13 schools and 2 teacher trainings all participated in Bioneers to the degree that they were able, either financially and/or offering booth staffers on the weekend.”

Bioneers has included biodynamics for many years

and is indeed a fantastic place for a Waldorf presence. Congratulations to Teresa, BACWTT, and all the schools involved in this outreach.

PS: Bioneers is scheduled for October 18-20, 2013.

Link:

http://www.bioneers.org

Nature

Bees in Winter

Ever wonder what happens to bees in areas where there is a “hard” winter? Noted biodynamic beekeeper Gunter Hauk gave a picture in the newsletter of the Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctury in Virginia. We saw it on the Biodynamic Blog. Here’s a taste:

“Cold wind drives a dust of snow over the stark winter landscape, whistling around the hives, which stand like sculptures between the trees, adding a bit of culture to the frozen nature.

“The colonies are tightly clustered, the individual bees forming a drop-shaped globe engulfing a number of honeycombs. Metabolic processes are low and movement of the individual bee is hesitant, in slow motion. Thus the cluster inches its way along the honey reserves, feeding enough in order to keep the little bodies from freezing.”

Follow the links; the BDA blog has the winter bees story; the Spikenard site has wonderful bee pictures and details on their capital campaign.

Links:

www.spikenardfarm.org

biodynamicsbda.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/midwinter-dreams/

#1 BD Farm in China

The Biodynamics Blog also reported in January on the first Demeter-certified farm in China, in Beijing:

“A ten-day seminar on biodynamic and organic agriculture was held September 19-28, 2012, at a Biodynamic farm in Beijing, Phoenix Hill Commune, which is the first Demeter-certified farm in China and the only one to date.

“The seminar, which was organized by the Demeter China Association and Phoenix Hill Commune, consisted of three parts: a biodynamic and organic training course lasting six days, a two-day forum on the management of organic farms and green marketing, and a twoday tour of organic farms in the Beijing region. Forty-five

being human digest

people from all over China came to the ten-day seminar, and more than 140 people came for the two-day forum.

“Thomas Lüthi from Demeter International and Steffen Schneider from Hawthorne Valley Farm in the U.S. were key speakers for the biodynamic training course and forum. Some other Chinese speakers were invited as well to talk about holistic ways of thinking and practice in both traditional farming in ancient China and traditional Chinese medicine.”

Main product—Chinese Yam

Following the links we found our way to the English side of the farm’s website, and discovered that they are specially concern to raise Chinese Yams. This rang a bell; at the SteinerBooks Research Seminar in NYC a couple of years ago, Dr. Ross Rentea of True Botanica had discourse on this unusual tuber. The Chinese farm site quotes Rudolf Steiner during his agriculture course:

“On its own this (biodynamics) will not be enough,” he replied. “The Chinese Yam Dioscerea batata will need to be introduced into Europe so that it can eventually replace the potato as a diet staple. This is the only plant which can store ‘light ether’ and in the future these light forces will be absolutely vital to human nutrition.”

The True Botanica store gives a bit more information.

Links:

http://biodynamicsbda.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/ biodynamics-in-china-a-good-start/ http://www.phoenixcommune.com/EN/gywm.htm

http://store.truebotanica.com/store/product/ SRW0303/LightrootComp.aspx

Personal Growth

Biography Work

The Center For Biography And Social Art is beginning a three-year certificate program in July 2013. What has less elegantly been called “biography work” is in some ways the natural adult companion to the Waldorf schools curriculum for children. Waldorf stresses “developmentally appropriate” learning—what is right for the child’s stage of development. That stands in opposition, of

course, to the anxiety of parents and teachers and politicians about their children being ready to get into the next “good” school and compete for the “good jobs.” Waldorf stands by the individual child with attention and confidence in her individual growth.

But who does that for adults? Well, “self-help” and counseling has been a huge field for decades now, and to this area the anthroposophical biography and social art practice brings insights about the life-long development of individual human beings.

Some themes from the upcoming certificate program give an idea of its breadth and depth: life gestures in nature; gender and temperament; phases of human development; biographical conversations; the senses; the uses of enchantment; the evolution of consciousness through art; and threshold and destiny.

The program is a part-time professional development program for individuals interested in inner development and social questions, it begins in July 2013, and enrollment is now open. The program meets at Threefold Educational Center over the course of three years, three times per year: two weeks in summer, one week each in fall and winter. Each block focuses on a particular aspect of the mystery of human life. Artistic practice, including the art of conversation, is central to the learning process. Nature observation, painting, modeling, drawing, writing, singing and movement encourage deepening capacities of perception, communication, spirituality, and more.

Former students have brought their experience and education into a variety of professions including life coaching, biographical counseling, art therapy, elder care, parent education, health work, death care, adult education, among others.

Links:

biographysocialart.org

center4biography@gmail.com

being human digest

Health

Learn-Work-Share at Rudolf Steiner Health Center

From July 9-21, the Rudolf Steiner Health Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan will be hosting the Learn-WorkShare Summer program, a new youth initiative for 16- to 30-year-olds.

All participants will take part in the Learn portion of the program, July 4-8, where they will be introduced to anthroposophical medical, nursing, therapeutic, and biodynamic principles while building a community of anthroposophically oriented youth. A smaller group will stay for the Work program, caring for low income patients who otherwise would not be able to attend a Retreat session. The session will run from July 9-14 and will give the young people an opportunity for hands on work experience in an anthroposophical setting.

The next section, the Share program, is a week long day camp program for 10- to 14-year-old girls, teaching them about healthy lifestyle, movement, nutrition and gardening. The participants will work together with the girls on a variety of activities including preparing a healthy meal each day.

As many participants as possible will be housed in the Rudolf Steiner Health Center, a large beautiful building on the historic West side of Ann Arbor. Simple vegetarian meals will be provided.

The youth program is free and was accepting participant applications online until the end of February. Interested professionals who would like to work with the young people as mentors in disciplines such as medicine, movement, nursing, art, music and nutrition should contact Sara at 734-663-4365.

Link:

www.steinerhealth.org/events/youthconference

Psychology

MA in Transpersonal Psychology

David Tresemer sent along a flyer and these thoughts about the new course in Transpersonal Psychology, with an anthroposophical concentration, to be offered at Rudolf Steiner College. It has been years in the planning and is the only English-speaking course in Transpersonal Psychology/Anthroposophic Psychology. Willie Bento (Director of this new MA course in California) recently attended the Anthroposophic Psychology conference in Dornach with 900 people from all over the world.

The virtues of the program are:

• A degree on a career path toward licensed counseling psychologist (that is, something beyond the excellent courses and workshops that help you mature as a human being)

• A path that understands that the therapist must grow before taking clients (this may sound obvious but is not common in psychology training)

• A path that includes a working and practical understanding of anthroposophy in action (much more comprehensive than most transpersonal or regular psychology trainings)

• An approach that comprehends the individual as more than a biochemical bundle of habits – as having soul, purpose, and heart!

The website is still in process of completion and beautification. As a pioneering effort, that may take some time. However, much of the information is there. (As well as my thoughts on whole-soul conversation as a basis for understanding the therapeutic encounter.)

This cohort starts July 29 2013; the next cohort would begin the summer of 2016. For those in Englishspeaking countries outside the USA: This could be contemplated by someone from afar, as the travel is only twice per year: The on-campus requirement is a one-month intensive in August (each of three years) as well as a one-week intensive in the late autumn (of the northern hemisphere). The in-between course work is handled through internet conferencing and telephone.

Link:

http://anthroposophic-psychology.org

Arts

Mystery Dramas in Spring Valley and Dornach

The Threefold Mystery Drama Group continues its acclaimed conference/performance approach to Rudolf Steiner’s mystery dramas in English with Taking Responsibility for Destiny: The Souls’ Awakening

They have reached the fourth and last completed drama (seven were contemplated, but World War I intervened). The conference will run from August 14 to the 18th. As before, scenes of the drama will be given along

being human digest

with lectures and workshops, with a complete performance on Saturday, August 17th.

Link:

http://www.threefold.org/events/index.aspx

The Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, is of course the home for these mystery dramas. The building was created in part to house them, and they have been presented there in German for decades. With construction work on the stage starting soon (see inside back cover) this summer’s performance of all four plays will be the last before a hiatus.

Dr. Virginia Sease has written to invite English-speaking friends and describe special steps being taken to enhance their experience of the four dramas.

“This summer Rudolf Steiner’s four mystery dramas will be performed for the last time before we close the Large Hall for renovations to the stage. We will have a simultaneous English Conference during this time. The theme of the conference is Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas and the Renewal of Rosicrucianism in the Spirit of Michael. The four dramas will be read in English simultaneously to the performances on the stage. All lectures will be simultaneously translated as well. Before the conference begins, we will have a gathering of the friends who speak English and during the conference we will have the opportunity for a English conversation groups which will deal with the performances and the lectures.”

Along with the dramas themselves, the schedule includes conversation groups, artistic groups, and lectures:

• Rosicrucian Wisdom in Goethe’s Fairy Tale and Steiner’s Mystery Dramas – The Figure of Maria; by Michaela Glöckler

• Johannes Thomasius – an Artist’s Destiny at the Threshold; by Michael Debus

• Capesius – Sunrise, Tragic and Transformation in Thinking; by Bodo von Plato

• The Temple Scenes in the First, Second and Third Drama; by Christiane Haid

• Strader – the Technology and the Destiny of the Technologist; by Johannes Kühl

• World Midnight and the Mirroring of the Egyptian Mysteries; by Oliver Conradt

• The Soul’s Awakening As a Modern Principle of Initiation; by Paul Mackay

And there will be a special English Conversation Group with Virginia Sease. The conference details will be posted soon at the link below.

Link:

http://www.goetheanum.org/5438.html?L=1

Online Audio

Dennis Klocek’s New Alchemy Downloads

Dennis Klocek gave one of the keynote talks at last fall’s wildly successful “Sacred Agriculture” conference of the Biodynamic Association. A sought-after workshop leader, Dennis has an excellent website where essays and audio recordings are available. It’s set up as a store, but we were surprised to find that some notable talks have the price set to $0. Currently in this “free download” mode are three items: the Sacred Agriculture keynote; the keynote for the 2012 Psychosophy Conference at Rudolf Steiner College; and something many can identify with, “Parenting as Initiation,” a talk given to parents and faculty at the Sacramento Waldorf School. Enjoy!

Link: dennisklocek.com/

Peter Selg Seminar Audio

SteinerBooks is also generous in providing audio recordings online of its annual Spiritual Research Seminar held at New York University. It also offers seminars with its leading authors and last August there was great interest in a weekend with Peter Selg, “Reclaiming the Heart of Anthroposophy,” given in Great Barrington, MA, and in Sacramento, CA. These talks are also online: “Rudolf Steiner and Christian Rosenkreuz”; “The Spiritual Task of the Anthroposophical Society & the School for Spiritual Science”; “Ita Wegman’s Social Impulse for Anthroposophy”; and “Ita Wegman’s Task in the School for Spiritual Science.”

Link:

http://steinerbooks.org/n.php?id=432

SancXtuary: A Novel

By Bruce Donehower. Xlibris, 2012, 727 pgs. Review by Jane Hipolito.

We are all journeying, we are all singing, we are all weeping. We know each other as deeply as we can see.

If I do not know you, I am blind or you are bound. Let my warmth thaw your bonds. Create my eyes with your light. Silently and together We are all journeying: like the rivers underground, like trains through the tunnels, like stars through the evening. Let us look at each other and know it.

From “Chorus: All of Us,”

by Christy MacKaye Barnes

These words by Christy Barnes could serve as an epigraph for SancXtuary, Bruce Donehower’s deeply humane new novel. Set in 21st-century North America, it is the story of the modern-day quest for “SancXtuary,” a mysterious entity toward which each of the novel’s several principal characters is urgently journeying. At first, the novel traces their separate travels; they set out from very different places, contend with disparate challenges, and are unaware of each other. Gradually, however, their paths converge, and their journeys become a shared adventure. SancXtuary ’s wealth of characters is one of its greatest strengths. Each of the characters in the novel is a distinct individual with a unique and fascinating biography which Donehower sets forth in rich detail. He also provides abundant, wonderfully clear descriptions of how the characters look, sound, move, and think, and thus from the outset the reader can “look at” each character clearly.

“All real living is meeting,” Martin Buber famously observes in his classic work of modern spiritual philosophy, I and Thou. Both for the reader and for the characters themselves, SancXtuary is alive with such meetings—moments of awakening to each character as an individual self, a “Thou.” This is important, indeed vital, because as Donehower deftly discloses step by step, truly recognizing one another is the key to finding “SancXtuary.”

The first travelers we meet are Mattie Rivera, a beautiful and resourceful woman in her 20s, and Zack, an enigmatically imperturbable seven-year-old. They are joined by the tow-truck driver Elijah Bean, who quickly becomes their chauffeur and protector, and the three make their circuitous way together through upstate New York and on to Ohio and “SancXtuary” on the campus of Dedham College, Mattie’s alma mater. Their journey is shadowed by a G-man, Peter Ashe. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in a desert in the American Southwest, Joey, a teenage boy, musters the strength to free himself and his fellow captive, Angie, from their abductors. Joey’s actions are inspired by his memory of a “magic word”—SANXTUARY—which he once saw spray-painted on a wall and which reappears to him, variously spelled, at crucial junctures. Following its leadings, he and Angie also come to Dedham, Ohio, as does one of their captors, Dwane, whom they are unable to elude.

Tremendous courage, dedication, and inner resilience are needed throughout these journeys, which are acutely perilous. There are the elements to deal with: ferociously bleak winter weather in the Northeast, and in the desert Southwest, harsh and unforgiving aridity. And the travelers must contend with the active malice of those who are determined to thwart their quest and spare no efforts to do so. In this respect, SancXtuary is a thriller, an engrossing page-turner in which crisis succeeds crisis with breathtaking speed.

At the same time, SancXtuary is a work of magical realism where the realistic and the fantastic wonderfully interweave and tall tales abound. This fascinating dimension of the book is most intensely realized in two groups of characters and the events involving them. Mingo Aihouauk and his sister Hettie Starkey are shamans; endeavoring to solve a murder that has baffled Hettie’s husband Raymond, who is a New York State Park Ranger, Mingo, Hettie, and Raymond journey to Dedham College. On the way to Dedham, they encounter supernatural phenomena and engage in battles with supernatural beings. The culmination of this trio’s quest, the journey’s end for them and for all the other travelers, is the epitome of magical realism—Dedham College, its residents (who are, we discover, on both sides of the threshold) and everything that happens there. It is a true mystery site.

The mystery of becoming is at the heart of SancXtuary, which is set in the season of Advent. During eight eventful days, from December 17 through December 24, Mattie completes what has been unfinished for her

Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter: Reviews

at Dedham College and she and Elijah become a couple; Joey matures from boy to man; through the efforts of Mattie, Elijah, Joey, Mingo, Hettie, and their allies, evil is recognized and vigorously combatted, and promising initiatives are born; and a little child, Zack, points the world toward a future where all is possible for those of good will.

Note: Readers who want to sample the novel can download the first third for FREE (135 pages) as a PDF at www. SancXtuary.com. The ebook is available from Amazon and other sites for $3.99. Bruce Donehower’s other books include The Singing Tree , ICE , and The Birth of Novalis , all available from the Rudolf Steiner Library.

Partnerships of Hope: Building Waldorf School Communities

By Christopher Schaefer, PhD. AWSNA Publications, 2012, 208 pgs. Review by Jean W. Yeager.

I wish Chris had written this book 30 years ago when I first came across the work of Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf education. I was self-employed and working in advertising and marketing, raising three small kids, and new to Waldorf. This is just the sort of book I would have read with great relish and interest because it gives a broad context to many things that Waldorf and anthroposophy can “get you into.”

The book could be a portal, a bridge from practical, corporate, business life to a new understanding of organizational/social life that is just as practical, but somehow involves the heart in a way you didn’t know was possible.

On the one hand, this is a very practical book I found myself reading certain chapters because I am busy with several nonprofits, each of which is at the moment in some state of change, crisis, or transformation. Anyone involved in the practical life of schools, business, and enterprises of all sorts will find very helpful and stimulating insights here. I found an exercise for small groups that I used a few days after having read it. Good stuff.

On the other hand, it is a very uplifting and motivating book After all, the title is Partnerships of Hope. Chris’s examples are drawn from more than 40 years’ experience consulting with businesses and nonprofits, and

advising Waldorf schools at every stage: as new initiatives, struggling enterprises, community engines; in the crises of maturation, and even in some desperate situations filled with conflict, strife, and hard feelings. The kind of “hope” Chris writes about is nothing “airy-fairy,” but is hard won. You can trust it.

This book is also a compilation of Rudolf Steiner’s “social development thinking”; you’ll find everything on that subject covered here except economics and the threefold social order. The beauty of a book from a researcher and academic like Chris is that the references provided in the bibliography and endnotes are a not-to-be-overlooked treasure in their own right.

If you are not entirely familiar with anthroposophy, this book will help you make your way from the very practical to the very esoteric . As I said, Partnerships of Hope is something of a portal from the practical life into the social mysteries that are our challenge in this era, and a reminder that two quite different worlds, that of the truly practical life and that of the spirit, can come together in us. One of his final chapters, on the “Mysteries,” is well worth several reads. You might even find that one or two of the topics Chris introduces prompt a desire for more information and a bit of research. I hope so!

Illuminating Anthroposophy

CLASSICS FROM THE

Robert McDermott series editor

Alongside the basic books, these “Classics” collections explore the tremendous cultural and social innovations of anthroposophy and its contemporary development in North America.

INITIATIVE!

Welcome to a special section. In the next several pages we will look briefly at two recent social forums, in Los Angeles and in Manila, each representing many different initiatives. And we will look at two initiatives just reaching up their hands to get our attention and invite participation. One supports those wounded in the “battle for the soul,” the other aims to discover and develop the next higher stage of human capacities.

Torin Finser, General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, recent wrote a book called Initiative: A Rosicrucian Path of Leadership. He spoke at the Society’s annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, in 2011 and recalled a powerful exhortation from Rudolf Steiner’s last lectures:

Why are we at times afraid to use the “sting” of initiative? What holds us back? Perhaps we are afraid of being noticed, for with that comes the potential for attack. Or are we afraid of success and what that might bring? It seems to me that we are at a time when the world is crying out for the wisdom-inspired initiative that anthroposophists can offer. We need to ever more recognize the potential in others, and transform what others may see as impossible realities. With moral intuition , imagination and moral technique, we can use the social architecture Rudolf Steiner gave us to be inwardly and outwardly active. As one of the youth section members said at the recent symposium, is not every human being an initiative?

To quote once again the words of Rudolf Steiner: “Verily, this is written in the karma of every single anthroposophist: Be a man of initiative, and beware lest through hindrances of your own body, or hindrances that otherwise come your way, you do not find the center of your being, where is the source of your initiative. Observe that in your life all joy and sorrow, all happiness and pain will depend on the finding or not finding of your own individual initiative.”

Indeed, the number of initiatives and social ventures inspired by anthroposophy is amazing. Waldorf schools and kindergartens, Camphill villages and intentional communities, biodynamic farms and community-supported agriculture are becoming well known, and each one is an extraordinary human undertaking. Hundreds or thousands more serve, do research, build experience,

and change lives out of artistic, medical, therapeutic, spiritual, psychological, or social impulses. Initiative expresses the will—the field of action and intention in the human soul. Thought, knowledge, research, insight, judgment are required, and there should be feeling, empathy, artistry, expression and imagination. Will carries the need to make a difference, to do something that brings healing, new life, and joy to human interactions, the social dimension of our lives.

All four of the initiatives described here reflect images shared in these pages a year ago, in Rudolf Steiner’s remarkable lecture on “The Work of the Angel in the Human Astral Body.” Images for our evolution are being drawn in our souls at an unconscious level by the spiritual beings, beings of higher consciousness, who are closest to us. They show us that we are not really separate from each other, should feel another person’s suffering as our own— and act accordingly. They show that each human being is a divine being, a being of cosmic creative capacity and unlimited potential, if we will let ourselves see it. And in the third instance they show that, beyond today’s science with which we produce both abundance and devastation on a vast scale, there is a higher science within our reach, if we will grow ourselves toward it. Every human being senses these; it is anthroposophy that works to make them consciously apparent, so that we can choose a path into the future that is “worthy of the human being.”

Social Initiatives Forum, Los Angeles reported by John Beck

Last October a “social initiatives forum” took place at the Westside Waldorf School in Pacific Palisades, California (on the northwest edge of Los Angeles). It was part of a series of forums inspired particularly by global activists Truus Geraets and Ute Craemer to gain recogni-

“Inner Fire - Claim It!”— the provisional image of the initiative Inner Fire, Inc.

tion for social initiatives inspired by anthroposophy. The Los Angeles forum was endorsed by the Social Science section of the School for Spiritual Science and was an outstanding event in many dimensions.

Truus Geraets who convened it lives in nearby Orange County, and a number of participants came from among her local community. It was also received wholeheartedly into the Westside Waldorf school community, with parents and staff and even young students carrying key parts of the organization, preparation of delicious food, and hospitality. There were two very capable facilitators, Orland Bishop and Seth Jordan. There were artists bringing eurythmy and music and ceremony. There were great spirits invoked to join us in the gathering.

Along with remembrance of the life and work of Tim Smith, the opening evening had a profound offering from Orland Bishop on “Initiation in the Modern World.” The first morning looked at many initiatives, including a longer review by Robin Theiss on the destiny of the Waldorf school movement. The afternoon brought workshops on artistic therapy for addiction, ideas for and from Occupy Wall Street, NonViolent Communication, insight into poor communities and to work in prisons, community development and traditional crafts.

Sunday was spent in action, in service, at a community garden and at the Elderberries community café created by Dottie Zold. Rap artist and community activist Matt Sawaya led a stirring conversation on “Hip Hop, Healing and Change” which flowed into an evening community arts event which showed just what he had been talking about.

The very best thing, of course, was just the individuals of diverse backgrounds and ages, from teens to the ninth decade of life, and everything in between.

This outstanding event was also trying to address key questions, for which we had not yet found the words. Younger people often seemed to be asking, where and how do I commit myself? Older people seemed to carry the question, how will the work I’ve started carry on, mature, bear all the fruit I hoped for? And there was the question, I believe, trying to form itself, what do we really have to do with each other? Why is it just us who are here, and not others? What do our hopes and goals have in common with each other? How can we achieve a measure of solidarity and recognition so that necessary resources will flow?

The unifying element, of course, is “anthroposophy.” That was our common connection; but is the meaning and intention of this word “anthroposophy” clear enough to bring coherence and unity to many, many small and particular impulses? Isn’t there still work to be done with communicating the central vision and mission of anthroposophy, before it can be the “big tent” for so many diverse impulses? When it is clear that anthroposophy proposes a general renewal and elevation of global culture, with the human being returned to a central place, then perhaps this impulse of social initiative forums will move into a new phase. We didn’t find that unifying element, but we spent wonderful days together experiencing its absence along with the presence of many decent and committed individuals, working each on a panel of the mysterious great fabric.

LA Social Forum: Truus Geraets opens; the invitation; community gardening; food prep at Elderberries Café; rapper Brandon at a local community event.

Photos: Albina Molina, John Beck

INITIATIVE!

Truus herself reports below on the more recent forum in the Philippines. If there is a contrast in the two forums, it is that Nicanor Perlas has accomplished two things. He has built a wide public involvement in events that speak to global questions, and at the same time has laid out a particular challenge to the people of the Philippines to raise their own cultural standards to meet the future.

More anthroposophical social forums are in planning, leading to a global event at the Goetheanum in Dornach in 2014. It, too, looks to be a great gathering of remarkable people and extraordinary projects. What will it take, then, for it to become an event for humanity? Can we perhaps find a unifier in the three very esoteric pictures mentioned above, that flowed from Rudolf Steiner research almost a century ago? Of our inseparable needs and sufferings, of our unlimited individual potential, and of a higher knowledge, a unifying higher culture, beginning to shine through to us from humanity’s future?

Inner Fire: Rekindling the Individual Spirit

Interview with Beatrice Birch

One participant at the LA Forum was a woman named Beatrice (Bea) Birch who is carrying an impulse called “Inner Fire” or even, “Inner Fire – Claim It!” It has taken shape in her life out of decades of therapeutic and educational experience in the US and UK. The program will be based in Vermont, two key collaborators have stepped forward, and the organizational form is taking shape.

Inner Fire is taking aim at is the tremendous epidemic in which individuals with psychological disorders and addiction problems are being met with a single practical choice: lifelong treatment with consciousness-altering drugs. It asserts, and will demonstrate, that these sufferers have a real choice.

Inner Fire is just at the stage of incorporating, taking a physical location, attracting anthroposophical therapists to collaborate, and raising funds. The last is a special challenge since the

whole rehabilitation field is strongly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, “big pharma,” which must be biased for economic reasons against attempts to reduce dependency on prescription drugs.

Inner Fire’s initial documents call it “a proactive, healing community offering a choice for people with addictive and mental health challenges.” Its mission is “to offer a choice by exemplifying through insight and understanding, love and patience, commitment and perseverance, that there are safe, alternative approaches to recovery from mental health and addictive challenges other than through pharmaceutical medication.” Of the key vision, Beatrice Birch has written: “At Inner Fire, the key to recovery has to do with the image of the human being. Anyone who experiences the human being as consisting of a body, soul and spirit must recognize and appeal to the creator within. In the mental health world, one refers to ‘maintaining’ the human being. I dare say, ‘maintaining’ should be limited to trucks, not to human beings!”

On the “action day” of the Social Initiatives Forum we met with Bea at Elderberries Café and asked her to share her life path, the questions and experiences by which has now reached this very serious undertaking.

I started life in Concord, Massachusetts. I was able to do independent study for my last year in high school so I traveled with an international organization, 150 people in the cast, called “Up With People,” an amazing experience. We performed for the opening of the Olympics in Munich—which means we experienced the murders of the Israeli athletes by Palestinians. Afterwards the question was, will the show go on, because we were going to perform in the Olympic Village for the athletes. And it did go on. So the experience was singing to an audience which was sobbing.

During that year I realized I wanted to teach in a form of education I had not had. So I worked in Montessori and other alternative schools, searching for something but not finding it. During my first year of college my mother sent me an article about what’s

Beatrice Birch, interviewed at Elderberries Café in Los Angeles

now the Lexington (Mass.) Waldorf school, then in a church basement in Porter Square in Cambridge. At the top of the article she wrote, “This sounds like you.” Indeed, after being there I was struck by an element of truth; I didn’t know what it was, but there it was. So I got in touch with Emerson College and saved a place.

My year at Emerson was a “coming home.” And there I heard of the social impulse of the Bristol Waldorf School, first of a new generation of schools which felt Waldorf should be available regardless of the parents’ financial situation. You did not go to teach in Bristol by mistake. You knew what you were getting into, you knew that this is the way you wanted to work. I taught there for eight years.

To deepen the artistic within myself, I left Bristol to do the Hauschka Artistic Therapy training in Gloucestershire. Over the years, I kept my foot in schools while working in the Blackthorne Trust in Maidstone, St. Luke’s in Stroud and finally at Helios when the doctor asked me to come back to Bristol and joined them, this was where my son Martyn had his first four years in school, before I came back to the States in 1989.

Thirteen of my 25 years in the UK I practiced artistic therapy with people wrestling with cancer and other conditions. These last ten years most of my clients were fighting psychiatric and addiction issues. Many have been to other rehab programs before. When I would ask, what did you do while you were there— well, it was clear that people didn’t know how to help these struggling souls. One young man was told he needed time by himself, so he played his guitar while his parents paid thousands of dollars a week. Another, angrily, told me how his parents gave him money, oblivious that he’d spend it all on drugs.

I started getting phone calls from mothers and

aunts, concerned about a son or nephew, fearing he would end up in prison. While in England, I had been involved in the early days of Ruskin Mill, a very successful will-based initiative working with at-risk youth. I knew what these boys needed, but I couldn’t find a place like that here in the USA.

When I returned to the United States, I’d had two wishes. One was to find colleagues and create a place for people at the end of their lives which would really honor this stage in life. I had worked in nursing homes in England with people sitting around waiting to die, and knowing it. Yet they were curious. One woman would want to follow me into another client’s room. I would say, “Let her come.” But instead she was medicated. My other thought had been, to create something like a Ruskin Mill. So hearing what these concerned women were asking of me for the boys in their lives, I began to do some exploring. I visited rehabs and just felt emptiness. It was disheartening, but I heard about a place in Vermont. The executive director was very open and interested in my work and urged me to come. But I had the chance to go to Arta, in Holland, a dream I’d had for thirty years, and was able to spend six amazing weeks engaged in their program around addictions. Upon my return, I visited the community in Vermont, and have been working there since with the Hauschka Artistic Therapy. It has been a very valuable and a very painful experience. I’d always worked with anthroposophical clinics. So I was naively disbelieving when the organization’s psychiatrist talked about the human being devoid of soul and spirit, and about brain chemistry and which medications to add to the cocktail.

I work for an hour a week with these same individuals, and when you work artistically you go very, very deep. My colleagues began to notice a whole new

Creating clay faces locates in one’s own experience feelings like the difference between sadness and depression.

INITIATIVE!

part of the resident begin to unfold. One psychiatrist came up to me and said, “I’ve been working with Steve for over ten years, and I never expected to see any change in him. Since he’s been working with you I see things I never imagined.” I was impressed with his humility, but I also asked myself, “How can a practitioner never expect to see any changes?” Wherever there is a spirit, there is room for change.

I also work in prisons. In the USA, “you are your crime”; the system doesn’t expect anything different from you. I’ve met the most extraordinary human beings “inside.” When I first began going in to paint with the men or facilitate AVP (“alternatives to violence” programs), and someone would share his story, I would feel, I can’t imagine how you could have done that. I came to realize that you didn’t commit that crime; but you under the influence of cocaine or another substance did.

A young man from a privileged background experienced his parents’ nasty divorce just as he was heading off to college. His foundation was shifting and he felt very vulnerable, and he latched on to a freshman. The relationship was okay for a while but it became too intense. She finally asked him to stop phoning or she would call the police. He had no one else so he phoned again, and she called the police. He was scared when they knocked on his door so he resisted. They took him to a psychiatric hospital where he was medicated. He’s been highly medicated since then, for twelve years. There was nothing wrong with him, he only needed support. But one medicine leads to another, to another, to another. Today he walks around like a zombie and says he’s unable to think clearly or feel his feelings. He hates being medicated but no one will listen to him. He is unaware that there is a choice.

So many people are grateful to read Robert Whittaker’s book The Anatomy of an Epidemic. But it is a tremendous shock to see that “big pharma,” the pharmaceutical companies, are hiding results on the effects of psychotropic medicines. I’m working with people—I don’t want to say they’ve lost their inner fire, but I feel sometimes like a fisherman, I’m searching for their divine creative self.

The beautiful thing about artistic and other anthroposophical therapies is—they cannot be done to you When I was moving from the Blackthorn Trust in Maidstone, one woman I worked with said, “You can’t go, you healed me.” And I could turn to her and say, “You picked up the paintbrush.” I’m not interested in healing people, I’m interested in facilitating their healing process.

Whether it’s cocaine, a therapist, or yard sales, addiction is addiction. One man I’ve been working with in his mid fifties, he’s been on three different anti-depressants at the same time for years. I asked, do they help, and he said, “I didn’t ask to be fifty-seven and a vegetable.” We know now that our life span may be shortened by 25-30 years by medications, that diabetes is linked to Ritalin, and so on. Many psychotropic medications shrink the frontal lobe of our brain, the part which makes us distinctly human. An excellent documentary, Generation Rx, shows what we are doing to our future generations. The wish to homogenize, to make all children the same so that they’re easy to teach—it’s a tremendously serious situation.

I have not yet found a rehab center which will not medicate people. Yet I know people who have gone through severe psychological stress with no medication. Of course you can’t take the meds away without putting something in its place. A website, mindfreedom.org/personal, shares stories of how people got off these medications. Four things helped them come off medication: friendship, family, art, and music. Nothing mind-blowing. Just being in human company they could trust, and having support to go through the eye of the needle.

My tremendously valuable experience at Arta in Holland has guided the development of Inner Fire. We say “inner fire—claim it,” because without claiming our inner fire, proactively acknowledging that we have it, we will not recover.

This community of healing will involve a year’s commitment. There’s some flexibility on that, but the daily schedule involves a strong intention. Arta has a conscious and focused schedule and achieves a 50-

Working with clay moves consciousness into the hands and directs intention into purposeful change.

60% recovery rate. I understand the rate is 10-15% in the rest of Holland, and 2-3% in this country.

Inner Fire will be a wonderful opportunity for therapists who’ve been working out of anthroposophy. There the chance to develop the wisdom, working with colleagues, and it’s an opportunity to step further out into the world with the larger picture of the human being. Besides the Hauschka artistic therapy which I do, we need speech, music, eurythmy, rhythmical massage, and Spacial Dynamics therapists, a biography counselor, anthroposophical nurse and doctor, and a sympathetic psychiatrist.

Individual and group therapies will happen in the afternoon; in the morning, there’ll be a work program to exercise intention: the gardens or the woods; cleaning and caring for the house, and in the kitchen. Everyone will learn good nutrition and the ability to cook to take back out into the world with them.

Inner Fire is all about choice. I would never tell somebody not to be medicated, and if with awareness of the side-effects a person chooses medication, that’s fine. The tragedy is that people don’t realize there’s a choice.

There have been initiatives like Soteria House and Diabasis House in California where they showed that you can work with people suffering from schizophrenia without using medications. It was a threat to the system, so funding was withdrawn. This is the main reason why Inner Fire must be privately funded.

A very important thing: because the opportunity for recovery is a right and cannot be a privilege, Inner Fire will be available for people regardless of their financial situation. It will be a place where all kinds of people can strive together for inner healing and balance. That means we’re going to have to raise a lot of money. We definitely need donors who believe in this.

And I know it will spread. It will spread like wildfire.

Inner Fire, Inc., is now developing documents to tell its story, which will also soon be available at www.innerfire.us; Beatrice Birch can be reached at beatrice.birch55@gmail.com or at 518-444-4828.

The Event & The Global Event College

by Paul Zachos

Since the 1930’s and more forcefully since the middle of the 20th century, a highly creative force has been streaming into human becoming. I have variously referred to this in-streaming force both here and in my other books as “the Event” of our age. The same can be characterized also as an influx, that introduces into our being as a whole, and also specifically into thinking, a new creative impulse and force. It is a power of growth, transformation, metamorphosis, in short a powerful impulsion that on the one hand destabilizes and shatters existing structures, and on the other enables wholly new horizons of creativity.

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy, and Art, p.143

The Global Event College was formed as a collaborative endeavor to reveal pathways of human development on which new educational foundations may be built. The College is a gathering of individuals inspired by Dr. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s investigations into the great transforming event of our time, which he refers as the event of human becoming, the event of the 21st century or simply as the Event. The fruit of Ben-Aharon’s research is reported in his book, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy and Art Members of the Global Event College work closely with Dr. Ben-Aharon, pursuing their own research into the Event and its implications. Their work spans and often integrates several disciplines (e.g., medicine, education, literature, music, philosophy, social activism, cognitive science). Until now they have shared their work in their circle of friends and colleagues. In 2013 the College will begin to share its work with the public at large.

About “the Event”

The magnitude and significance of the Event has not been lost to the great thinkers of our time. Late-20th century philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari declared that, “Philosophy’s sole aim is to become worthy of the event…” (What is Philosophy, p.160). Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil has delved deeply into this great transforma-

Since the 1930s a highly creative force has been streaming into human becoming: “the Event”

INITIATIVE!

tion with insight and effectiveness, and he is able to take deep looks into the future based on his findings. Kurzweil refers to this great transformative event as The Singularity: What then, is the singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

The Singularity is Near, 2005, p. 7

Kurzweil directs our attention to the law of accelerating returns (the discovery that the rate of acceleration of technological progress is itself accelerating) and tells us that:

Within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself. (Ibid . p. 8)

By the end of this century the non-biological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence (p. 9). Extrapolating from the explosive growth of technology, and particularly that of information technology, Kurzweil predicts that we will soon be able to “reverse engineer [i.e., decode] the human brain’s principles of operation.” This will allow us to transfer our consciousness to machine bodies and in this way to transcend the limitations of our biological origins (disease, injuries, aging, suffering, death). Interfaces with machine intelligence would give unprecedented speed and power to human intelligence.

The law of accelerating returns will continue until nonbiological intelligence comes close to “saturating” the matter and energy in our vicinity of the universe with our human-machine intelligence. By saturating, I mean utilizing the matter and energy patterns for computation to an optimal degree, based on our understanding of the physics of computation. As we approach this limit, the intelligence of our civilization will continue its expansion in capability by spreading outward toward the rest of the universe. The speed of this expansion will quickly achieve the maximum speed at which information can travel. Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe. We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current “dumb,” simple, machinelike forces that rule celestial mechanics. (p. 29)

Kurzweil’s project has been taken up in earnest by the Singularity University, to my knowledge the only institution of its kind, aside from the Global Event College, that is devoted entirely to the study and actualization of the event of our time. While the Singularity University is focused on the mastery of the material universe, it recognizes at the same time the priority of information over matter. This is already a profound spiritual recognition. The principal players of the Singularity University have directed their efforts to riding (and indeed to intensifying) the wave emerging from the operation of the law of accelerating returns and to bringing humanity to a state bordering on immortality, omniscience, and omnipotence in its relationship to the natural world.

While acknowledging the impressiveness of the outcomes associated with this evolutionary trend, Ben-Aharon offers a perspective on the underlying phenomenon that is quite the reverse of Kurzweil’s. Ben-Aharon recognizes that science and technology are indeed working creatively with the formative forces that underlie physical matter and life, moreover that the next phase of humanity’s evolution will require freedom from biological determination. But what if the technological “explosion” is only the symptom or effect of a much greater event—rather than its cause?

Contemporary innovations in the sciences, philosophy, and the arts give evidence of profound transformations in human consciousness for which technological innovation is an insufficient explanation. These changes herald a future in which humanity can become an active co-worker in the creative forces underlying historical and even biological evolution. We need not feel constrained to follow Kurzweil’s indication that our destiny lies in the transfer of our consciousness into more durable and efficient information processing devices. Describing the salient features of the Event, Ben-Aharon offers:

This “creative impulse” causes powerful organic-psychological and cognitive transformation of the human being as we know it. It accelerates and intensifies an already operating and advancing separation process between the physical body and its organic life- and formative-forces. This separation is felt strongly by creative people… It was a profound source of human creativity in the 20th century and is turning into something even more potent in this century.

What if the technological explosion is only the symptom or effect of a much greater event?

The Event, p. 143

Technological change will be so rapid that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

The Global Event College, inspired by Ben-Aharon’s insights concerning the Event, directs its attention to taking advantage of the opportunity that arises from this separation process to develop enhanced cognition and the exercise of moral imagination which will provide the basis for the coming round of human development. Instead of the path of transferring our accumulated memories into more durable electromagnetic processors, we seek to employ our moral and cognitive capacities to go beyond the limitations of subjectivity and organic bodily processes. Perhaps the Singularity is already here!

The Reversal

An additional problem must be faced by modern consciousness if human development is not to take a disastrous direction. This has precisely to do with the question of why, in the face of exponential growth of technology and scientific knowledge, we do not see corresponding progress in humanity’s social and moral accomplishments.

Through his research Ben-Aharon has uncovered a cognitive social phenomenon that he refers to as the modern reversal and also as the ur-phenomenon of modern history. It is just this, that:

The more humans become individualized, the more they desire to universalize…The human individuality feels and experiences herself as a universal human being precisely by dint of experiencing herself as a private personality… This amounts to an appropriation, individuation and privatization of the universal by turning it into a personal private possession. (Ibid . p. 83-84)

Thus even though our actions may be driven by our highest (universal) ideals, we find ourselves, when applying them to the social and natural environments, committing “inhuman” deeds towards our neighbors and our environment as we attempt to bring our desires to realization.

A private ego that controls the forces of God, Nature or Idea, makes them its own, and uses them for its personal priorities in social life and nature. (Ibid . p. 84)

In his introduction to the lecture series published as The Boundaries of Natural Science, Saul Bellow calls our attention to the fact that Rudolf Steiner’s work was directed to building a connection between natural science and social life. Similarly Ben-Aharon’s unique examination of science, history, philosophy, and art in his book on the Event is directed to a renewal of social life. The Global Event College aims to realize this same goal.

Several years back, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon made a statement, simple, even mathematical in its clarity. Pointing to a necessary foundation for the renewal of social life he proposed:

I meet myself I meet you True revolution!

Grounded in the deep seriousness of these insights, the Global Event College works to elaborate theory and practice for the emerging arts and sciences of a truly human becoming. Putting the phenomenon of technological acceleration and mastery of matter into proper perspective, we seek not an escape from the frailties of physicality, nor the promise of a fantastic ride on the vehicle of simulated realities. Rather we seek to become true students of the origin, progress, and destiny of the universe, and conscious and intentional collaborators with its creative forces in the framework of a worthy social existence.

The Global Event College will make its debut public presentation at Forum Drei in Stuttgart, Germany, at the end of October 2013. The Event in Science, History, Philosophy, and Art is available at Amazon.com in paper and Kindle versions.

Paul Zachos is the Director of the Association for the Cooperative Advancement of Science and Education (ACASE) located in Saratoga Springs, NY. He has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Statistics. ACASE works to foster creativity in educational settings and to provide constructive alternatives to destructive testing practices in schools.

To elaborate theory and practice for the emerging arts and sciences of a truly human becoming.

We seek moral and cognitive capacities to go beyond subjectivity and organic bodily processes

The Liwanag World Festival and the Threefold Society Concept

by Truus Geraets

The initiator of this festival, celebrated January 29–February 2, 2013 in Davao, Philippines, is Nicanor Perlas, who ran for the Philippines presidency in 2011. Nicanor is a networker per excellence as shown in the contributions of hundreds of presenters, artists, and volunteers behind the scenes, all of whom gave their time and expertise without remuneration. Nicanor has been introducing the idea of MISSION (Movement of Imaginals for Sustainable Societies through Initiatives, Organizing and Networking, see www.imaginalmission.net) with seminars for Personal Mastery and Social Transformation across the Philippines’ 7000 islands.

The five-day Liwanag festival brought political, cultural and economic presentations like “The Strategic Importance of Independent Media” by Maria Ressa, for 20 years a journalist with CNN; “Climate Change” by an Al Gore-trained presenter; and Gina Lopez on “Mobilizing Business to Defend Nature.”

To the logo of three interweaving petals, for the three spheres of society, is added an inner flame, the inspiration that carries us forward into the future. For details of the program see liwanagworldfest.net.

Many anthroposophists know Nicanor’s book Shaping Globalization but not

its impact far beyond the anthroposophical world. His latest book, MISSION POSSIBLE! has the subtitle, “Sow Courage; Harvest a New World.” Here we have an anthroposophist who is at the same time a man of the world. Under the Marcos regime he chose to follow his conscience and so faced the possibility of death. The strength of this decision is tangible. This grand “social forum” and these specific approaches want to prepare us for the very different tasks we will need to fulfill in the future. Are we prepared to face attacks to our humanity through genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence? So far this work has developed mostly in the Philippines but the name World Festival expresses already the scope. Yet, it is not for nothing that this grand scheme could unfold in the Philippines. I experienced the people as genuine, ready to overcome their tumultuous past.

Social Initiative Forums have been made now in Brazil, South Africa, and California. In preparation are Social Forums in Bogota, in India (November 2013), and at the Goetheanum in Switzerland where all the different sections of the School for Spiritual Science will cooperate to host a World Social Forum October 16–19 in 2014.

Costa Mesa, CA — E-mail: truus.geraets@gmail.com

by Christopher Bamford

I speak as a friend. We first met in the seventies, but it wasn’t until the late eighties that we began our philosophical lunches together once a week, whenever we could. We shared many things—an abiding interest in thinking and how we might transform it; a love of the Judeo-Christian tradition, its teachings, spiritual practices, and theology, its troubled relations with philosophy; and above all, a passion for questions rather than answers. These were not just intellectual matters to Fred, but the one thing necessary: life-and-death matters of the heart.

Fred was a great, wise, loving, sensitive, vulnerable soul, who approached whatever he did with the profound understanding that, in Rilke’s phrase, “You must change your life.” And he understood, too, that to do so always involved a risk, a leap. All his conversation, all his teaching, all his vast reading and study were centered and focused on this possibility of changing one’s life. He gave his life to it, and it gave his life meaning. It enthused him; and his enthusiasm was infectious. I can’t remember how many books I had to read because they would change my life. As he told me, a friend at Drew University had once said to him, clapping his arm over his shoulder, “When Paddock bubbles the whole world bubbles.” He had that quality.

He was also, despite many setbacks and difficulties, a person of deep faithfulness and faith. He called it “trust in spite of.” That was the big faith, but Fred was also faithful in little ways. He was faithful to his Midwestern, Methodist origins, which, despite his shyness, gave him his sense of humor and love of people, as well as the best kind of simplicity, directness, and openheartedness—always expect-

ing the best of others and saddened and disappointed when they let him down. He was faithful to his beloved Psalms, which he first encountered as a ten-year-old in Sunday School, and returned to again and again throughout his life, and was still talking about a month ago. He was faithful to his mentors at Hamline University, Russell Compton and Keith Irwin—the first instilling in him a deep sense of personal responsibility and the ethics of pacifism, peace, and justice, the second introducing him to the Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart, de Caussade, and Kierkegaard became companions to whom he would return all his life. Indeed, perhaps he would have become a Kierkegaard scholar had not the professor who would have taught him left, leaving a hole in his life.

He remained faithful, too—and returned all his life—to the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, which he encountered in the deepest way at Garrett Seminary, giving him a lifelong love of the Jewish tradition and Wisdom Literature. Again, this might have become his vocation had another professor not abandoned him, leaving a second hole in his life.

Above all, perhaps, he remained faithful to Martin Heidegger, the philosopher he first began to study for a doctorate at Drew University, an experience that ended tragically, but left him with an abiding passion. Once he found him, he never left him. At Drew, too, he met and became the assistant to the Lutheran theologian, Friedrich Gogarten. Then avant-garde, now virtually forgotten, only last year Fred, ever faithful, still “bubbled” about Gogarten, and we had to study his book on faith together.

In many ways, Drew, for Fred, was a destiny moment. Besides Heidegger and Gogarten, there was Owen Barfield, whom he helped bring over from England; there was Rainer Maria Rilke, who became a deep love; and above all, at Drew, Fred faced yet another great hole. A week before his orals, he was told he could not take them with Heidegger as his main topic, as had been agreed. The blow was too much: Fred left the world of academia to enter the maelstrom of the sixties, and divorce, and, finally, to find anthroposophy, as whose faithful librarian he served for many years with patience and love.

But all that is only one side of the Fred I knew. He was the most empathic person I have ever met. He had the ability to feel the pain of others as his own. If you told him of some bad news, someone’s suffering, there would be swift intake of breath, a deep rumbling groan, and his face told you that he was feeling that person’s burden as his own. Related to this was his deep feeling for our common humanity. He loved helping people, setting them on their way. Indeed, I think he saw it as part of teaching, which he felt was his true vocation: to work with others on what he considered the only things that mattered. He was also in his own way humble, eschewing pretension, always aware of the overwhelming mystery in all things—in a text, a piece of music, other people, or a landscape. Looking mystery in the eye, with what he called “awe and terror,” always feeling inadequate to the task, he would accept himself as a little one, a laborer in the vineyards, and carry on—in spite of. He found this mystery everywhere, especially in the language of great poetry, which he always claimed not to understand. Yet, following his beloved Heidegger, he sought unremittingly to make his thinking, in fact his whole life, poetic, and he did so and so his life makes sense.

In the last months, it seems to me, that poem of his life was nearly perfectly completed. When he was in hospital with his last heart attack, he told me that he had a dream. He was approaching the pearly gates and St. Peter came out to meet him. He asked him, “What have you done with your life?” Fred answered: “I have read Heidegger.” And St. Peter replied, “That’s not enough.” Then, in the days following, as if to complete this dream, each morning when Fred awoke, for what seemed quite

a long time, he had an extraordinary experience: he had the sense that everything was real—fully, utterly real—in a way he had never before experienced. Though this experience of reality gradually faded, he kept talking about it: how he could not really remember it, how he regretted not having written anything down, how in some sense it was the high point of his life. At the same time, he slowly began to leave behind all the philosophy that had interested him before.

Witnessing all this, I thought of Thomas Aquinas, how at the end of his life, having written his great Summa, he declared it all to be “straw,” turned to God, and never wrote another philosophical word.

Fred, too, for me, finally, was a great God-seeker. Even though he spoke much of the absence of God, and wrestled with it constantly, what he sought all his life was really God’s presence.

Rilke has a wonderful poem, called “The Man Watching,” that makes me think of Fred. Writing—appropriately enough—of great storms, Rilke says:

I can see that the storms are coming by the trees, which out of lukewarm days, beat against my anxious windows. And I can hear the distances say things one can’t bear without a friend, can’t love without a sister.

Then the storm, the great transformer, comes, through the woods and through time and everything is as if ageless: the landscape like verses of the psalter is weight, and ardor, and eternity.

How small what we wrestle with is, what wrestles with us, how immense. Were we to let ourselves be conquered, the way things do, by the great storm, we would become wide and nameless.

What we triumph over is the small, and our success itself makes us petty; what is eternal and unparalleled will not be bent by us.

Such is the angel, who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when his opponents’ sinews stretch like metal in that contest, he feels them beneath his fingers like strings making deep melodies.

Those whom the Angel, who so often declined to fight, overcomes,

walk upright and justified and great out of that hard hand which, as if sculpting them, nestled around them. Winning does not tempt them. Their growth is: to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things.

Dear Fred, you have made the final leap. Bless you, dear friend. We love you.

Introduction to “Ten Ground Rules for Dialogue”

by Fred Paddock

1

Way back at the origins of Western consciousness, at a time when imagination was still considered an integral aspect of thought, Logos referred to the Word that illuminated a true aspect of being, and dialogue (dia-logos) referred to a sharing of true aspects of being, thus allowing more aspects of being to manifest. Then a strange thing happened: imagination (in the form of mythos) was expurgated from thought and became the source of illusion, and Logos became logic, with the implication that there is one true way of seeing things based on the fact that there is one true structure of the world. Once one had insight into this one true way, dialogue was no longer necessary; it was no longer a way of enhancing the true, but signified uncertainty, and possibly even a willingness to compromise the truth. This transformation has had consequences that persist even today, from which none of us—including anthroposophists— is immune. It has become part of our destiny.

One could trace the results of this in an infinite number of ways, but within the framework of this short introduction I can only choose one thread, that of religion, and condense it to the point of caricature. Here, the disastrous results of this narrowing are clearly evident. If Christianity was the one true religion, then Judaism had to be seen as false, and from this, as an apparent necessity, arose the

1 Fred originally introduced Professor Leonard Swidler’s Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious, Interideological Dialogue, in a 2002 issue of the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter.

concept of “supercessionism” (the new covenant with the church supercedes, and cancels, the old covenant with Israel), which laid the ground for centuries of persecutions, pogroms, inquisitions, and finally, attempted genocide. It was also the basis for the brutal religious wars at the time of the Reformation. These wars had several effects: one was the division of Europe along religious lines so that the one true religion would be separated and distanced from all false religions, thus saving people from having to deal with “other truths” on a daily basis, and thus postponing a crisis in thought and consciousness. The revulsion evoked by these religious wars led to the Enlightenment, the secularization of Europe, and the rise of science. But because at the very heart of this science lay the narrowing of the Logos, it in its turn became the one true method for attaining knowledge of the one true structure of the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century—fed by the thought of Goethe and the German Romantics—anthroposophy arose (as spiritual science) and challenged both the methods and results of modern science on the basis of an enlarged sense of Logos—a thinking that included the imagination.

Although Rudolf Steiner saw the implications of this for dialogue, the Anthroposophical Society as a whole seems not to have done so. The general belief in the Society was that anthroposophy had superceded both the old religion and the old science, and was the one true way to the one true structure of the world. That even we anthroposophists—with our enlarged sense of Logos—so often find ourselves thinking we have the one truth and that everyone else lives in darkness, is a clear indication that this perspective is not a simple error or a product of spiritually ignorant or malicious individuals and institutions, but is, rather, a profound malaise lying at the foundation of Western consciousness.

I have spoken of the narrowing of the concept of the Logos and the resultant questioning of the value of dialogue, and I have indicated that this has led to the concept of there being but one true way of seeing the one true structure of the world. Lying hidden in plain sight in all of this is the question of truth. One can think of no more fateful or difficult question: How can one question the concept

of truth? It is the basis of all thought and must be presupposed for cognition to take place. Where is the Archimedean point upon which to stand in order to question the very possibility of one’s questioning? In the search for the truth about truth, what is one searching for, and how would one know if one found it?

All this is far beyond my capacities and the limits of this introduction. I can say that some of the greatest minds in the West have wrestled with this question and have risked vertigo, as well as condemnation and ridicule. Think of Meister Eckhart and the danger he faced from church authorities.

And recall Martin Heidegger in our own time, who spent his life wrestling with the question of what truth is, which clearly caused him to suffer at times from a vertigo that led him into dark and morally murky places, and also caused him to be the butt of ridicule from other philosophers.

And, of course, we are led back to Rudolf Steiner, who has been marginalized by our culture and misunderstood and failed by his followers—precisely at the point of his wrestling with the concept of truth. One thinks of the lecture series Human and Cosmic Thought, where he speaks of the twelve—surely a symbolic figure—different ways that reality can be interpreted. One looks in vain for commentaries on this, or effects of it on the ethos of the Society. Another example is the great series, The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul, where Steiner makes the startling contrast between the West, where the truth cannot be held complete by any one person, but only emerges as the invisible center pointed to by the convergence of many spokes (representing the many different individual takes on reality), and is thus by its very nature dialogical, and the East, where the whole truth is held to be available to the individual sage. I don’t recall these ideas being taken up in any serious, philosophical way.

But as I said above, our not pursuing these indications doesn’t imply that we, among all the people on Earth, are uniquely dense and obtuse. Quite the contrary! That we have not struggled in depth with the question of the nature of truth or even with what a valid criterion would be—a

problem that even a Wittgenstein couldn’t resolve—just shows how mysterious and perplexing this question is. (The fact that a few anthroposophists answer this question concerning the criterion of truth with a simple: The criterion of truth is “did Steiner say it?” should not be taken as representative of anthroposophists as a whole.)

Where does all this lead? “Time is long but the truth happens in it” (Hölderlin). The common (to the West, at least) concept of truth developed over a long period of time, and we can assume that the overcoming of it—which has indeed already begun—will take a long time. It has clearly started not only in the few thinkers I mentioned who have struggled in a deeply philosophical way with the question of truth, but in the questions, doubts, and vague sense of unease in huge numbers of ordinary folk, largely because they find themselves in contact with different religions—different claims to truth—in the form of friends, family members, acquaintances, and shelves of books in bookstores and libraries—including the national library of the Anthroposophical Society in America. This pluralistic world is not the product of a person or persons sitting down and planning it, but is rather the result of mysterious movements, multitudes of them, some stretching back centuries; some of them economic, some political, some brought about unwittingly by religious institutions—in other words, this situation is the result of higher forces beyond our ordinary thoughts or our control.

So it has started, this slow movement toward a new understanding of truth, and we are in the midst of it, and can either try to go along with it or struggle against it. I would like to suggest that one of the best ways to move into the risk in which spiritual forces are risking us, and to trustingly use what insights into the spiritual world we have been given and have developed through exercise— and here, finally, is the point of this introduction—is to enter into dialogue with other claimants to the truth. How better to actively wait for a new concept of truth to emerge? How better to enter into the risk that we are as human beings than to risk ourselves in dialogue? What if in this time—a time that is “between the times”—through the use of our imagination we picture ourselves not as incarnating within our individual selves the whole truth, the one truth outside of which there is nothing but degrees of error, but rather as embodying a truth, a truth that must be preserved and made known to other truths so that the whole truth, which is beyond all individual truths, can emerge? What if we could feel both called by the truth to be responsible for our truth while somehow at the same

time, and as part of the same call of truth, being responsive to other truths? Would this not be true dialogue? Would not dialogue then be an integral part of truth? Would not Logos and dia-logos be brought together again?

From the book Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, Leonard Swidler, editor, Orbis Books, 1987, part of the “Faith Meets Faith” series. Also available from the Rudolf Steiner Library: After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection, Leonard Swidler. Fortress Press, 1990.

Gratitude for Fred Paddock

by Douglas Sloan

Fred was a dear, best friend—a conviction that I am sure is shared by many, many others in many different places, because Fred took a genuine interest in others and connected deeply with many persons in the course of his life.

I first met Fred in the early 1970s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at what were then the national offices of the Anthroposophical Society of North America and the Rudolf Steiner Library. At the time I had just come upon the name of Rudolf Steiner in my reading and had the desire to learn more. So I decided to visit the odd little storefront building on 211 Madison Avenue that had in its windows a display of books by Rudolf Steiner and others about aspects of anthroposophy—a number of them with intriguing, and, for me at the time, somewhat strange, even perplexing titles. Trying to maintain what I considered then to be a proper, critical academic attitude, I entered the building with some trepidation about what I might find, and full of questions and doubts.

The first person I met was Fred Paddock. He was not only the head of the Rudolf Steiner Library but was also in many ways the main organizer of the various activities carried out by the library and by the Society in New York—lectures, study groups, concerts, and so forth. He was also the main person to first meet and converse with individual inquirers like me. I was a total newcomer to Rudolf Steiner’s work. From the beginning, it was talking with Fred that assured me it would be well worth my efforts to learn more. Fred’s openness, his knowl-

edge in many fields, his good humor, his willingness to be questioned, and to ask questions of his own—all showed me in a living way that if Steiner’s work and anthroposophy could capture the respect and imagination of a man like this, they would be truly worth exploring. That first and subsequent meetings with Fred, and, of course, our friendship and conversations that followed, were the main influence that enabled me to begin to explore seriously the work of Steiner and his contributions to the world. Many, many people I am sure have had a similar relationship with Fred. The life and health of anthroposophy in North America owe a deep debt of gratitude for the presence and influence of Fred.

In 1982, the Anthroposophical Society moved the national library to Harlemville, New York, and Fred came with it as head librarian. I want to underscore two of Fred’s central contributions to the development of the Rudolf Steiner Library. The first is his vision of what an anthroposophical library can and should be. Fred was convinced, with Steiner, that anthroposophy should always entail an active engagement with the world—with the world’s needs and conditions, and with the thought and work of others in the world. He tried to build the library such that the collection of Steiner’s and other anthroposophical works would be organized to reflect directly this “conversation” with the world. I also want to mention Fred’s individual and indispensable presence in the library as a skilled and wise resource for countless persons seeking help and guidance in pursuing their own questions and research in Steiner’s work and related areas.

On hearing of Fred’s death, Arthur Zajonc, formerly General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in North America, wrote to me of Fred that he was “so learned, so passionate about the life of the mind and of the spirit.” This learning, this passion, constituted a central core of Fred’s life. He was deeply knowledgeable in many areas—philosophy, religion, literature, theology, the arts, and many different spiritual paths. He wore this learning lightly, but, in pursuing a question or topic in conversation with Fred, one quickly sensed the depth of his learning and the passion that fueled it. Nor was he narrowly

intellectualistic, for Fred was highly cultured, with a love for music, art, poetry, and literature—and he enjoyed exploring many different forms and expressions in all these areas. Perhaps especially worth mentioning was Fred’s deep interest in and love for the work of the 20th-century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Not too long before he died, I asked Fred what it was about Heidegger that so captivated and engaged him. His answer was not what I expected. Fred replied, “He helps me learn to think.” More than the content of the philosopher’s ideas, which, of course, Fred highly valued, of most importance for him was what he considered to be the philosopher’s help in developing his own capacities for thinking, and for understanding his own thinking.

No one who knew Fred can forget his sense of humor and, especially, his unique and engaging chuckle—a chuckle that would often end in a burst of full-bodied laughter from the depths.

Many years ago, Fred wrote an essay simply entitled “Death.” I will close with the concluding paragraphs from this essay:

Death is so old. It seems to have been there from the beginning. Beginning and end are poor ways of speaking about that which has always been growing with us, even as children.

If we knew death we would know life. Life, though, just as death, may not be a what that we get to know, but rather a call: the sound of the violin singing, and asking us to listen; the voice of a woman—mother, daughter, wife—saying, “I was afraid you were not coming.”

Love and death have always been so close. The ancient Etruscans used to picture this in the image of the burning lamp. The more passionately the flame burned, the more quickly it extinguished itself. This wisdom stands at the center of the world of antiquity. But we are here saying something different. Death, we are saying, indicates to us what love and passion were all about in the first place. Perhaps the exercised heart, the glowing eyes, the walk in the garden, the spring evening out of doors, were not for our pleasure alone, but rather the first call of life and death to us to help in creation; the

first practice in turning the visible world into the feelingful invisible world, where things come to shine in a glory which the deathless angels could never give them. Thank you Fred for your presence, your wisdom, your caring.

A Memory

by William Hunt

Those of us who knew Fred Paddock over time learned that he embodied a special combination of learnedness and modesty. Throughout the thirty years of our friendship I encountered this aspect of learnedness, but always in the context of great modesty. His modesty veiled the extent of his learning. His modesty often functioned as a kindness that might or might not draw a person to speak to him from the heart, to speak without hesitating to consider how speaking from one’s heart is not always welcomed by people. Fred always welcomed a person who spoke from the heart.

He always spoke from the heart and to illustrate this I want to tell a story that he once told me—the story is both deeply sad and yet amusing because of its setting. A friend of Fred’s, a man that he knew when they both attended university and seminary, grew disappointed with religion and after a time joined an ethical society. Years later, the friend contracted a terminal illness and the ethical society scheduled a farewell event for him, a kind of celebratory roast. Fred was invited along with others to speak words of upbeat praise about the character, ambition, and societal

utility of the dying friend who was to be present on stage propped up in a portable sickbed alongside the various speakers. Several people spoke and their remarks were greeted with cheers and laughter.

Fred’s turn to speak came. In telling about the event, he said that he was unable to speak in the manner of the others. “I couldn’t do that. I knew I would miss my friend and that a broader and deeper note needed to be struck.”

Fred had to speak from the heart and so he had prepared remarks about the sorrow he felt about the imminent loss of his friend. He had also sharpened his remarks with quotes from the poets Rilke, Shakespeare, Hölderlin, and others. But the audience interrupted him. Their interruption began as a hissing and then broadened into loud booing. Fred stepped back from the podium, left the stage, and then the hall.

I told Fred that what he had experienced was both deeply sad and excruciatingly funny. I can’t recall his reaction to my reaction. He told the truth. He spoke from the heart. That is how I want to remember him today at this moment.

Yiddishe Kop

by Fred Paddock

(2004)

Many know that Steiner felt that Judaism has even today a mission toward Christianity, namely, to spiritualize it. But what is hardly known at all is that this task was to be accomplished through teaching Yiddishe Kop! You ask, what in the world is that? Yiddishe Kop is one of the great pearls to come out of Judaism—thanks to generations of Christian persecution. It is a way of thinking “outside the box,” a proclivity to observe reality with caution, to see many facets of reality rather than just the normal one, a way of “reframing” situations in new and surprising ways, a way of seeing amazing options where others see none, a capacity to see possibility where it seems like there is only impossibility. A good illustration of Yiddishe Kop comes from the Middle Ages:

A child was found dead in a village. A Jew was immediately accused of committing the crime and of using the victim in some macabre ritual. Thrown in prison the man knew he was a scapegoat and stood no chance at the forthcoming trial. He asked to see a rabbi and was granted his request.

When the rabbi arrived, he found the man in despair over the death sentence that surely awaited him. The rabbi comforted him: “Don’t ever believe there is no way out. The Evil One, God forbid, will tempt you with that thought.”

“But what shall I do?” asked the anguished man.

“Just don’t give up, and you will be shown a way out.”

When the day of the trial arrived, the judge wanted to pretend that the accused would be allowed a fair trial and a chance to prove his innocence, so he said to the prisoner, “Since you Jews have faith, I will let the Lord decide this matter. On one piece of paper I will write the word ‘innocent’ and on another one, ‘guilty.’ You will pick one, and the Lord will decide your destiny.”

As the Jew guessed, the judge prepared two pieces of paper with the word “guilty” on both of them. Normally we would say that the chances of the accused had dropped from fifty to zero percent—there was no way he could select the piece of paper saying “innocent” since there was no such paper.

Recalling the rabbi’s words, the prisoner meditated for a moment. Suddenly his eyes lit up with a new spark. He grabbed one of the pieces of paper and swallowed it in a gulp. The witnesses were upset: “Why did you do that? How will we know your destiny now?”

“Easy,” answered the Jew, “Just read what it says on the other paper, and you will know that I chose the opposite.”

From this illustration, one can see how important it can be to be able at times to think with Yiddishe Kop. For anthroposophists to learn Yiddishe Kop would mean that we could think well not only within and according to the basic principles of anthroposophy, but also “outside the box” in new and surprising ways. We would become “lighter,” countering our proclivity toward heaviness—a tendency that even the library newsletter is not immune from. This lightness would extend into our conversation, which would become permeated with humor and unpredictability; it would leap, flash, and dart like fireflies. We would become true Goethean conversationalists, amazing our friends and confounding our enemies.

Oh, felix culpa ! Oh, great mystery! The very result of centuries of Christian persecution of the Jews becomes the means for spiritualizing Christianity. Who but Ru-

dolf Steiner could have discerned that?

Sadly, this great tradition, this finely honed way of thinking, is hardly known today—even within Jewish circles. Fortunately, there is in the library a wonderful book by Rabbi Nilton Bonder called Yiddishe Kop: Creative Problem Solving in Jewish Learning, Lore and Humor (Shambhala Press, 1999, 101 pgs.).

The Rudolf Steiner Library A [Very] Short History, 1972-2002

by Fred Paddock

This is the story of my thirty-year quest to conceive a true anthroposophical library, one that in its structure and operation would reflect the nature and tasks of living anthroposophy. It is a tale of transformation: the evolution of a 2,000-volume library into the collection of 25,000 volumes that we know today, when an average of 3,000 books circulates to a growing list of readers. Evolution is the operative term here; the library developed organically before I truly recognized its design.

My work at the library commenced with a part-time job in 1972 or 1973; I took on full responsibility in 1974 at age 44. My background gives clues as to the direction I was to take building and structuring the library: an undergraduate degree, with a major in philosophy and minor in literature; five years in a Methodist seminary majoring in philosophy and Hebrew Scriptures; four years of graduate studies (Drew University) in philosophy, literature, and depth psychology (ABD). It was at Drew that I became acquainted with the works of Owen Barfield (and also with him personally), which led me to anthroposophy and 211 Madison Avenue in New York City (home to the library and the Society for many years).

Most of my time was spent taking care of the bookstore; keeping up with address changes (you can’t imagine how primitive our system for doing this was); and

explaining what anthroposophy was to the large number of people who would come up the stairs at 211 out of curiosity. (I should mention that a certain amount of time was also spent just watching suspicious people who would come up the stairs and hang out for no apparent reason. Not only were books stolen at an alarming rate, but also... things like cash boxes, typewriters, calculators, and so on—very cleverly and right under our noses.)

A huge turning point came in 1982 [when the library moved from] New York City to Harlemville, New York. Several things that happened as a result of this move were decisive in the development of the library. Foremost was that we moved into a space where the library could expand. There was no more space left for any growth in the library at 211. I was already piling books and journals from floor to ceiling in our one closet.

The move allowed me to turn all my time and attention to the library. At the very beginning I had to install shelves, unpack boxes, decide how to arrange space; get packages to a post office six miles away and so on. Then there was, for whatever reason, a big jump in use of the library—part but not all of which could be attributed to the fact that the library was now in the middle of the largest anthroposophical community in America. One must also take into account that by the mid-80s, the Anthroposophical Society had doubled from what it was in the early seventies. And probably most important in terms of library usage is that in this period, the number of Waldorf schools had grown tremendously, and more and more teachers were discovering the library.

I don’t want to give the impression that I could see from the beginning what the final structure of the library would ultimately become: I really had no idea. It would be years and many events later before the final structure of the library took shape in my mind. [Eventually] I divided the library into about 26 sections. My hope was

that this “shape” would actually mirror the anthroposophical movement of which it is a part: a living, creating anthroposophy, embedded in the world, receiving from it and interpreting it—thus transmuting, transfiguring, and giving it back. The categories are the library’s chief bulwark against the Ahrimanic tendencies built into libraries. They also make us unique among all anthroposophical libraries in the world.

I began to see that within the different sections, a conversation was going on.

As I slowly filled out the different sections of the library, I began to notice something; over time, these sections began to call out for particular books that they seemed to need. When you apply the concept of “life,” of “livingness,” to texts, what you are really referring to is “conversation.” I began to see that within the different sections, a conversation was going on. I noticed this first in the philosophy section. Descartes was carrying on a conversation with Scholasticism (and ultimately, with Thomas Aquinas). Aquinas was carrying on a conversation with Augustine and Aristotle; Aristotle was carrying on a conversation with Plato and Plato with Socrates, the pre-Socratics, and the poets. Proceeding from Descartes we hear the British empiricists, especially Hume, carrying on a conversation with Descartes, and hear Kant being “awakened from his dogmatic slumbers” by Hume. We then experience Hegel in deep conversation with Kant, and Marx conversing with Hegel. Nietzsche (as well as Montaigne and Pascal) can’t be understood outside his conversation with the great Stoic thinkers. And today, Heidegger can’t be grasped outside his struggles with Nietzsche, Kant, and the Greek thinkers. This is a simplistic one-line account—for each of these thinkers was conversing with dozens of contemporaries and predecessors. But I wanted to emphasize the historical timeline, because this is what I noticed first. The ancient texts remained alive because those who came after them, right up to our contemporaries, kept conversing (struggling, arguing) with them—interpreting them. It was the living conversing with the dead that gave the dead life. And the dead (the earlier texts) gave the living “understanding” (the pre-knowing that makes thinking possible) as well as “freedom” (freedom from the confines of their contemporary culture). If the conversation ceases, not only the current, most topical texts will be missing, but the early texts will begin to die because they depend upon the living to keep them alive through conversation. It was almost as if when I walked into the library, if I could only lis-

ten with the ear of my soul, I could hear the thousand murmurings of the living texts conversing with each other. In listening carefully to the different conversations and trying to discern who might be missing, I felt I was part of a living process, caring for a living spiritual entity that spanned the centuries—a living entity that like all living entities desired to continue living and flourishing. And like all living entities it needed to be cared for and nurtured—to be loved—ultimately, as something alive. The library stands as a witness to the fact that as a human race we are a single conversation. It is living libraries that preserve texts in such a way that they can become a conversation; and very special libraries, indeed, that preserve these texts as parts of a single conversation.

“Continuing the Conversations”

As previously reported, the Rudolf Steiner Library is evolving in order to engage members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society in 21stcentury extensions of the “living conversations” Fred Paddock describes above.

The Society’s new database will make it possible to share your interests and to collaborate with others in developing them. As you explore the library’s physical and online resources, you’ll be invited to further enliven the conversations by suggesting additions from your experience and from your searches on the internet.

Visit anthroposophy.org this summer to help launch these extended conversations, and please respond generously to the ongoing library appeal that supports this evolution!

Gently abridged by Fred Paddock’s successor, current library director Judith Soleil.

Photos of Fred Paddock courtesy of Winslow Eliot. On pages 31-33 respectively Fred is seen with his wife May, daughter Rachel, and son Paul.

The Perils and Power of Translating Steiner

by Walter Alexander

Dizzy Gillespie, the pioneering bebop trumpeter and jazz ambassador, was known to have responded to the question “How do you improvise?” by saying words to the effect—“I intentionally make a mistake and then I work my way out of it”—and “If you make a mistake, repeat it, and then try to find your way back.” Well, for those of us who hope to be moving forward along what is called “the path of error” or the Parsifal path—it is an interesting statement—although it seems I actually make errors often enough quite spontaneously that I don’t have to invent them. But the statement does confirm the experience that errors can be portals to new possibilities.

For my own part, I can say unequivocally that my decades long relationship to “The Foundation Stone Meditation” was impelled by an error—a translation error. I do not speak German fluently or understand conversational German, but I did take four years of German in high school (because my older brother took French) and completed a year of German Lit as an undergraduate. So Steiner’s verses, with their limited vocabulary, and with the aid of a German-English dictionary, are not unapproachable for me. When I first read the widely used translation by the venerable Ernst Katz (1913-2009) and saw in the first panel: Practice spirit-recalling/ In depths of soul,/ Where in the wielding/ World Creator Being/Your own “I”/ Comes into being/ Within the I of God” —I wondered what a “wielding world creator being” was, and consulted the German text. There I saw the word waltenden. I have a personal connection to this word through the fact that it and my first name share the same root. And, though I know embarrassingly little Yiddish for a New York Jew, Oy gewalt! (Oh, you Powers!) was probably the first Yiddish expression I ever heard.

For walten, the dictionary says “prevail, rule, reign, control, govern,” so the choices would seem to be in this context “reigning, ruling or governing.” Wield , in English, has to take a direct object. You wield something : an axe, a knife, authority, power. But you can’t just wield . So how odd, even decades later, to see recently a marvelous eurythmy performance of this truly momentous set

of meditative verses—one in which a phrase is repeated by a speaker, and moved to by an entire troupe—despite the possibility that neither the speaker nor the movers are grasping the phrase’s meaning.

When we recite, hear, or watch a performance of a meditative verse like “The Foundation Stone,” we strive to reach the realms of meaning out of which the words/ movements descend (as Georg Kühlewind described it). But when we come to something that our understanding can’t embrace and merge into, there is—let’s call it—a cognitive dead spot. Most of us have the good sense not to die there, and move on as best we can, making a mental note and leaving a question mark for follow-up. The worst in us pretends to understand and affects a knowing mask.

So I am grateful for that error, because my discomfort with wielding led me to go and look at the “Foundation Stone” more deeply. I have read books and pamphlets on it, and given workshops myself on it—all of which have been helpful, but nothing more so than personally engaging and wrestling in and with its rhythms and depths, again and again.

Recently, a second bothersome translation issue has led me into fruitful engagement—with the wonderful Steiner verse: “Quiet I bear within me”— Ich trage Ruhe in mir. At a Holy Nights event this last year at Anthroposophy NYC, a friend and fellow member recited the verse as follows:

Quiet I bear within me

I bear within me forces to make me strong

Now will I be imbued with their glowing warmth

Now will I fill myself with my own will’s resolve

And I will feel the quiet pouring through all my being

When by my steadfast striving I become strong

To find within myself the source of strength

The strength of inner stillness, quiet, and peace

Here’s the German:

Ich trage Ruhe in mir, Und fühlen will ich

Ich trage in mir selbst Wie Ruhe sich ergiesst

Die Kräfte, die mich stärken. Durch all mein Sein, Ich will mich erfüllen Wenn ich mich stärke, Mit dieser Kräfte Wärme, Die Ruhe als Kraft

Ich will mich durchdringen In mir zu finden

Mit meines Willens Macht. Durch meines Strebens Macht.

I was moved by it and when later I was sitting in our bookstore and looked across to the shelf opposite me, I saw Rudolf Steiner’s Verses and Meditations. I found the verse and a very similar translation with the German on the facing page. I was puzzled to find the German verb will , meaning “want” or “desire,” translated as “will” with respect to a future action. Also, I noticed immediately that the original has nothing in it about finding the source of strength. Rather, the entire verse seemed principally to equate the capacity for stillness with strength of will and striving.

Well, soon after that I mentioned to the member who had recited the verse that I had seen some aspects of the translation that seemed “off.” The member/friend “went ballistic”—and I emphatically and boorishly insisted that I was right. In retrospect, I explained to myself that my excessive multitasking had exhausted me—resulting in a really inexcusable outburst towards a friend. The friend, in turn, spoke to other friends who gave reassurances that the translation that said friend had been using for decades was the best “American” version, and that soulless intellectuals are always nitpicking over translations. A day or so later the abused friend came up to me still distressed but gave a hug, and I offered a note and apologies, and went about thinking about improving both the friendship and the verse.

By this time, I hope readers are duly “charmed” by the notion of a verse on “inner stillness, quiet and peace” precipitating a pathetically pedestrian squabble between longtime students of anthroposophy. In studying the verse more closely, I could see that the translation was not overtly “wrong.” I reminded myself of Owen Barfield’s The Year Participated , his translation of Steiner’s The Calendar of the Soul , in which he explicitly set out to avoid the disastrously repeated habit of trying to make translations of German into German-like English. The underlying rationale goes like this. When I speak or write, I have an intended meaning in service of which I employ language, assembling signs (words) according to rules of syntax. The listener/reader hears/reads the signs and if they have been successfully assembled and attended to, the listener/reader ascends to the very same realm of meaning accessed by my (the speaker’s/writer’s) intention.

Translation is an interesting case. The fact that it can be accomplished at all, Georg pointed out, proves the existence of the meaning realm , lying above the particulars of specific languages, but accessible through languages by human understanding. This post-Babel passage through

the individual language region is hardly a neutral one. The contribution of the folk-language genius to the “original” language is essential cognitive feeling (Georg’s brilliant term), highly communicative flavors and nuances that the translator can’t lightly ignore. But these are often hard or impossible to capture, and translators often err in a variety of directions.

Owen Barfield was a great student of the evolution of consciousness, especially as evidenced in language changes over time. He said that he had, in The Year Participated , “paraphrased” Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul “for an English ear.” He was recognizing and attempting to call into alliance the legitimate differences between English and German in service of the original meaning intention. In his introduction, he wrote appreciatively about other attempts (including his own) to translate the soul calendar into English, but stopped short of endorsing them:

On the basis of a familiarity with the text extending over more than half a century I have been forced to the conclusion that there is one thing about these verses that no English rendering, literal or near-literal enough to be dubbed simply a translation, can hope to convey. And that is what I can only call their ‘thrust’.

While I can’t say that Barfield always succeeded to present day American ears,1 I think this example below showing the Ruth and Hans Pusch (1961) and Owen Barfield (1985) translations of the Steiner verse in Calendar of the Soul for the eleventh week (16-22 June) is telling.

Pusch:

In this the sun’s high hour it rests With you to understand these words of wisdom: Surrendered to the beauty of the world, Be stirred with new-enlivened feeling; The human I can lose itself And find itself within the cosmic I.

Barfield:

This warm and sun-drenched hour a sermon holds if thou hast ears to hear: Absorbed into the world’s fair show Live thou thy feeling through and through, Within thee say, “I lose myself as man And find myself to be the World I am.”

Attempts at preserving the “thrust” of a verse may well justify wide departures from what a literal translation would allow. But why set oneself up as judge and jury

1 In reading Barfield’s essays, because of the gift of his stunningly crystalline elucidations of anthroposophical concepts, one often finds oneself forgiving him for assuming that we all went to English grammar schools and have Greek and Latin under our belts.

Translation is an interesting case that proves the existence of the “meaning realm.”

over what is a creative fling at capturing the spirit of a verse and what is simply a bad translator’s pedantry? And remember, too, that a translation truly capturing one aspect of a work may miss another in doing so. The answer has to be: Only if something worthwhile is at stake. Here’s a fairly literal translation, but aimed at preserving the ‘thrust,” of Quiet I bear within me, for comparison with the one commonly used. See the German above and a translation guide in the footnote.2

I bear quiet within me, And I wish to feel I bear in myself How peace flows Forces that strengthen me. Through all my being, I wish to imbue myself If I strengthen myself, With the warmth of these forces, To find in myself I wish to permeate myself Stillness as a force, With the strength of my will. Through the power of my striving.

It’s still possible to look at these two (and the translation in Rudolf Steiner’s Verses and Meditations which is very close to the first one above) and say the differences are inconsequential, the meaning is clearly there, just alternately phrased. What about the thrust of the original?

A few statements are worth considering. In German, the noun Wille, while still associated with the English will as in will power, is closer to desire and want than it is in English. Again, will does not occur in German as a verb indicating the future, but rather as to want, wish or desire. Wenn means if. Also, in German, unlike English, the end of the sentence bears special significance. I’m aware of two personages as divergent as Mark Twain and the mystic George Gurdjieff who have commented on that. Mark Twain in a speech on “The Disappearance of Literature” said of the Germans, “They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.” Gurdjieff, in Beelzebub’s Tales to His

2 VERBS:

tragen: carry, bear; will (willen): want, desire; stärken: strengthen; durchdringen: imbue, permeate, infiltrate; fühlen: feel; ergiessen: pour; finden: find.

NOUNS:

ich: I; Ruhe : quiet, stillness, peace; Kräfte : forces, powers, strengths; Wärme : warmth, heat; Will : want, desire, will; Macht : power, strength, might; Sein: being; Streben: striving, ambition.

OTHER : mir, mich: me, myself; selbst : self; sich: oneself; durch: through; zu: to; dieser : these.

Grandson, in a chapter entitled “Just a wee bit more about the Germans,” complained about German grammar that allows expectations to arise in the listener until at the end of the sentence “they pronounce their famous ‘nicht.’”3

Comparing the two translated verse endings, there is a definite shift when we move from finding “the strength of inner stillness, quiet, and peace” in the former to finding “stillness as a force through the power of my striving” in the latter. This is the essence of the variance perceptible overall—a shift to a more active—you could say, a more masculine stance. Something less about peace and more about how peace and inner quiet can only come through strength and striving.

If that’s the case, a further question is—why did two translations (George and Mary Adams and the unidentified translator of the first) end up choosing a more placid tone? The answer, I suspect, has to do with the date of the translations, both of which are of similar vintage (the Verses and Meditations volume is from 1961). To imagine the mood of that time in America you may note that Bob Dylan’s first album came out the next year with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and in the next two years came Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer” (“I’d hammer out freedom…justice, love between my brothers and sisters,” etc.) and “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

What sense of the German language did non-German speaking Americans have at that time? Most likely they had heard of Mein Kampf (my battle), the Wehrmacht (defense force), the Luftwaffe (air weapon), and Blitzkrieg (lightning war). And seen endless footage from documentarian Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (triumph of the will) about the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremberg attended by 700,000 with ranks of goose-stepping soldiers, adoring masses, Heil Hitlers! and the rantings of Der Führer. And beyond that newsreels of the desecrated, hollow-eyed human forms of the camps, and of the Auschwitz gates, inscribed with their hymn to death mocking all values, Arbeit macht frei: work sets you free.4

The picture is of an idealism gone mad, of a melding

3 Undocumented accounts have it that Gurdjieff met or wanted to meet Rudolf Steiner and was rebuffed. David Eyes related as apocryphal the story that Steiner ejected Gurdjieff from the Goetheanum, mentioning also a suggestion that they met more amicably, but with a recognition that their missions were divergent.

http://www.awakenings.com/jcms/anthroposophy-and-goethean/39steiner-gurdjieff-connections/49-steiner-gurdjieff-notes.html

4 An anthroposophical conference sponsored by SteinerBooks with Chris Bamford, Michael Lipson, and Peter Selg at Auschwitz planned for midNovember 2013 is important, and even long overdue.

Something about how peace and inner quiet can only come through strength and striving...

of head and limb, a shortcircuiting of the middle feeling realm, which itself has been gouged out entirely and replaced by fanaticism and self-inflation so fevered that they cross borders into the sexual and even pornographic. It is all about strength and force and will and purity and triumph—and certainly, at least in part, about obliterating, without ever mentioning it, the German national memory of the humiliations and degradations of the years following the Great War.

The effect for many of these often reinforced associations in films, television, and print, is forever to associate the German language, especially as expressed with clipped, precise, northern diction, with arrogance and cruelty. To imagine that from this the being of the language has received a deep wound does not take imagination too far. To overcome this widespread and deep recoiling there have been attempts to remind us of the more gemütlich moods and tones of the language—Volkswagen’s Fahrvergnügen (driving pleasure) ad campaign, for instance—but as far as I can tell these have not been able to budge the common consciousness.

Let’s say simply that in 1961 the West was about to undergo upheavals and radical abandonings of the seemingly failed values and top-down social structures of the 20th century’s first half—towards what seemed to promise freedom, brotherhood, naturalness and creativity. It is easy to believe that shading a verse heavy on Macht and Kraft and Streben (power and force and striving) toward quiet, peace and stillness did not seem like a bad idea, not that it’s likely that the notion was ever entertained consciously. There may well have been an element of justifiable political correctness working then that has now outlived its rationale.

To make some effort of rescue towards that language being, and at the same time sparing the great liberal movements of the 1960s and 1970s from the pitch black brush of their failures and excesses, it will be good and necessary for us to extricate strength and power from their dark and complex linkages with domination, violence and abuse. Instead, we can reconnect them with the willed strivings that this verse speaks of—as prerequisites for love and freedom—the true goals and sense, according to Rudolf Steiner, of earth evolution.

For the postwar generations of the self-indulgent, distraction-seeking, materialistic West, the notion that we can find strength and peace in ourselves implies a reality to our being that the science and culture of our time would deny us. If the saying “a word to the wise is suf-

ficient” is a true one, then for the rest of us the 6,000 lectures, 65 books and fistfuls of inthe-world initiatives of anthroposophy may be what it takes to convince us finally to give up on waiting for the world to draw our wills out comfortably.

In the Prologue to Faust, Part I, Goethe has the Lord say to Mephistofeles, “Man errs so long as he strives.” And here we have Rudolf Steiner saying that we find peace only through the power of our striving. Well, long before, Shakespeare had the head witch Hecate say in Macbeth (Act III, scene v) “Security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”

I guess, with Dizzy, we have to risk it then. And along the way, with grace, we may find and create each other— and our own translation.

And yes, there’s a final question, directed to Dizzy and us? An elephant in the room kind of question:

How do you know when you’ve made an error? The answer to that is a mystery—or the mystery—pointing us to the source of our knowing and our being.

It will be necessary to extricate strength and power from linkages with domination, violence and abuse.

The Path of Anthroposophic Medicine

by Alicia Landman-Reiner, MD

A young woman I know, a college senior, had always wanted to become a doctor. After a conversation with a disheartened doctor she met in a café, she wrote that the doctor had conveyed “the most dismal vision of medicine as a practice, discouraging me from pursuing this path. He had lost his vision. He spoke with an arrogance and disrespect I never thought could come from someone who has been so highly educated and who works with people for his career.” She ended, “I know that I want to go to medical school and I know I want to reach cancer patients. I need to talk to some MD’s who care about patients, who love their work, and who believe that they can make a small difference. Any suggestions?”

We don’t think of automobiles as “healthy”: they are mechanically sound or they need fixing.

What can enable doctors to develop and sustain warmth towards their patients, love of their work, and an indomitable will to make a difference in the course of their patients’ illnesses under the challenging conditions of today’s medicine?

In being human for Fall 2011 Christopher Bamford describes how thirty doctors gathered in Switzerland in March, 1920 for Rudolf Steiner’s first lectures to a medical audience (now published as Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine1). Steiner begins with Hippocrates of the 5th century BCE who is invoked at medical school commencements as the father of western medicine. Steiner argues that, on the contrary, Hippocrates represents not the beginning of modern medicine but “the last remnant of ancient medical traditions, clairvoyantly acquired.” Steiner describes Hippocrates’ teaching that physical, or earthly forces—embodied in the organic fluid or humour “black bile”—must be balanced by cosmic forces embodied in three humours called “yellow bile,” “mucus,” and “blood.” Well-balanced forces were in crasis or harmony, imbalanced forces in dyscrasis. Direct experience of the balance of earthly and cosmic forces was given in ancient mystery sites, which were centers of both religion and healing. Hippocrates was their last great student.

1 Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1999.

Over the centuries, Hippocrates’ teachings were less and less understood. Modern Western science began with the articulation of physical laws in the Renaissance, but still carried remnants of the old views. Isolated individuals such as Paracelsus in the 16th century and van Helmont in the 17th recognized and pointed to the existence of “something whose possibilities are not exhausted by the merely earthly element,” but their peers could not understand them. When proponents of vitalism, having lost all real experience of the living, put forth “arbitrary, empty concepts,” the scholarly community appropriately rose up against them. In the late 18th century, the autopsy became the decisive diagnostic authority: medicine was defining living organisms and processes by the non-living.

As late as the 1840’s, says Steiner, traces of a sense for organicity could still be found in medical writings. But by 1858 atomism, as Steiner calls it, or reductionism, achieved a decisive victory when the pathologist Rudolf Virchow posited that the cell was the basic unit from which organs and organisms are built, and therefore the key to understanding disease.2 This reductionism “lives on and now permeates all of official medical science.”

Today our culture is imbued with a concept so deep in our language and habits of thought that it appears self-evident: that life is built upwards not even from cells but from lifeless biochemicals—DNA, RNA, and proteins,—and we can understand health and cure illness by understanding the biochemical and physical properties of these essential building blocks. Disease is seen as malfunction of the mechanism, and health as mere continuation of function. Health as a positive force or quality has no definition at all in our western medical model. We do not, after all, think of our automobiles as “healthy.” They are mechanically sound—or they need fixing.

In regard to health and disease processes Steiner pointed out in 1920 that “our entire philosophy of medicine suffers from the absence of...a comprehensive view.” Today Andrew Weil, MD, Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, and others point this out and add many corollaries.3

2 Cells had been described before Virchow’s time (1821-1902), but he successfully identified the cell as the relevant unit, over the reigning theory of Bichat which viewed tissues as key.

3 Weil, Andrew, Health and Healing, Understanding Conventional and Alternative Medicine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Remen, Rachel Naomi, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Healing is viewed as combat. Medicines and surgeons actively “fix” disease while patients play the passive role. Lacking a concept of the organism’s integrity, “superfluous” organs such as tonsils, thymus glands, and uteri may be removed, while “deficient” hormones like estrogen and testosterone are supplemented after their time. Emotional factors in illness are given lip-service, or treated with an anti-depressant. Healing power drawn from self-awareness and from the exploration of meaning are routinely overlooked. Health care occurs in brief encounters. Medical practice is more and more about managing a bureaucratic and financial environment.

Health professionals can fairly be accused of colluding with or being responsible for these deficiencies. Yet as individuals caught in a dysfunctional system, they often suffer from disillusionment and burnout. A recent poll reported 40% of primary care physicians consider leaving practice.4 And the one-sidedness of our views of the human being in health and illness—pointed out by Steiner, Weil, and Remen—is at the heart of these problems.

Another look at human beings

Steiner suggests we look at human beings “in a way that really leads us to their essential nature.” He points to a kind of practice, a Goethean-style engagement in scientific activity:5 to observe—precisely, persistently, and with an open mind—the forms of the human organism. Allow them to reveal to us the earthly and the so-to-speak nonearthly, anti-gravitational qualities manifesting there.

First, look at the forms of the human skeleton. Specifically, “deduce the form-creating element” in the human skull. There Steiner points out a kind of vector in the form of the skull that pulls us upright, out of gravity. Next, study the musculature. In this case we are to study not the form but activity, “changes appearing in active muscle.” Observing movement in the devoted, Goethean method we may discover how physical and chemical lawfulness interfaces with informing forces and lawfulness of another kind.

Steiner suggests, in this very condensed way, that we embark on a scientific but not reductionist exploration of both form and activity in the human organism. We are to step back from the microscope and get the perspective

4 http://www.hcplive.com/articles/Poll-Underscores-Continuing-JobDissatisfaction-Among-Primary-Care-Docs/ accessed 6/3/12. Especially see physicians’ comments under the article.

5 Bortoft, Henri, The Wholeness of Nature; Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature. Hudson, NY: Lindesfarne Press, 1996.

from climbing a mountain and look over the landscape. We need to get out not the magnifying but the “minimizing” lens and see the “cohesion of the phenomena rather than the analysis of matter.”6 We are to look at the form of the bones so as to read their gesture. Then we come closer in our understanding to organicity, to a living wholeness expressed in the organism itself.

These observations about morphology on the one hand and quality on the other will have to constitute our point of departure if we want to discover what actually lies within the human being… if we are not willing to accept a mere formal definition of disease that is useless in actual practice.7

We cannot fruitfully return to Hippocratic medicine where a view of the whole human being was once present, but we can—fully in the spirit of modern science—use this observational practice as our point of departure to “re-open the way back to something that has been lost.” Each investigator uses his/her own faculties to grasp the gesture or forces inherent in what is living. Steiner refers to “earthly” and “cosmic” or “non-earthly” forces acting in the human being. Those may not be modern terms,8 but the scientific-medical discipline he outlines in a masterful, visionary sketch is utterly modern.

Four years later, in the last months of his life, Steiner wrote with Ita Wegman, MD, a second essential anthroposophic medical source, Fundamentals of Therapy 9 This book begins by outlining a practice, beginning with the activity of ordinary thinking, through which the health professional can achieve a multi-dimensional understanding of the whole human being. While taking the form of a medical text, Fundamentals of Therapy functions as a kind of workbook for training observation and enlivening medical thinking. It is a challenging book, but if one seeks a scientific, integrative concept of the human being, this book can be a great help

We need to see cohesion of phenomena rather than the analysis of matter.

6 Quoted of Louis Bolk in Mees, LFC, Secrets of the Skeleton, Form in Metamorphosis. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984; page viii.

7 Steiner, Rudolf, Introducing Anthroposophical Medicine. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1999.

8 Same, Lecture 6: “…what I am presenting here has not been taken from ancient medical works but is based on present-day spiritual scientific research. Some of my terminology... harkens back to this ancient literature because modern medical literature has not yet developed a terminology of its own in this field. But you would be very mistaken if you were to believe that anything presented here is derived exclusively from ancient writings.”

9 Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1999.

in walking the path which Steiner sketches in his first medical lectures.

The movement in practice

Today, over 15,000 doctors practice anthroposophic medicine (AM) in 24 hospitals in Europe and outpatient settings worldwide.10 Care is multidisciplinary wherever possible. Each anthroposophic health professional masters and certifies in a field of health care according to current standards: an anthroposophic medical doctor has an MD or DO degree, an anthroposophic nurse an RN, etc. The anthroposophic dimension is integrated into that standard training.

If you visit an anthroposophic doctor, you will be asked for your medical history. But the doctor will also ask about your energy level, warmth or coldness, sleep pattern, something of your personal background, and what is meaningful to you. Blood tests or x-rays might be ordered, but the goal is to put together a qualitative picture of your health, not just a quantitative one. Anthroposophic medicine sees the human being as a whole organism of differentiated, interacting forces, which play out on a physical level as well as in living processes of growth and repair, feelings, thoughts and ideals.

For the anthroposophic doctor, each child comes to live out his or her unique life. The “I” of the child—that part in which we recognize ourselves as ourselves—inhabits a body which acts as an instrument for living that life. Health and illness is part of our molding that bodily instrument to our intentions. Our path through health, illness, and healing is intimately part of who we are and can become. To be in development is essentially human.

Steiner drew medical attention to form and activity, polar principles active in each of us in ever-varying states of balance. To express it simply, too much form in us tends towards crystallization and fixity—and we may tend to have health problems like vertebral disc degeneration or osteoarthritis, marked by mineralization, a lack of fluidity and regeneration. If we have too much activity —marked by warmth production, excess fluid, and movement—we may suffer from streaming hay fever, recurrent sinus infections, or diarrhea. The “form pole” is more dominant as we age; the “activity pole” in the young.

Treatments used in anthroposophic medicine cover a

10 See http://www.ivaa.eu/ for facts and figures.

wide spectrum: from allopathic medicines (conventional prescriptions) to herbs and homeopathics, nursing compresses to the abdomen or chest, and prescribed massage, therapeutic eurythmy movement, or music or art therapy. Three anthroposophic pharmacies in the US supply medicines; their conscientious sourcing, biodynamic or organic cultivation, and specific processing to enhance medicinal properties are an art and science in itself.

True medicine is about a relationship between doctor or therapist and a person who comes to them as a patient. The patient’s wish to be healed is met by the doctor’s will to heal. A medicine “which nature laid down as basis, and human insight brings to realization,” is given and taken.11 With these three—the patient, the medicine, and the doctor—something occurs in the therapeutic moment through which suffering is relieved. A new level of freedom of functioning is seeded. Development unfolds. This is what anthroposophic medicine is meant to be.

Our current internationally-based training has been held in the USA since 2008. One hundred doctors and nurses enthusiastically took part in May 2012 in California.12 As well as teaching practical medical and nursing care, training involves re-awakening questions long held close and ideals kept quiet. In groups of ten, we study one medicinal plant and one short text over an entire week. We explore gestures in eurythmy movement and seek them again in plants and in the archetypal forms of organs like kidney and heart. The week’s plan encourages a meditative mood, new ways of looking and thinking, healing will, and warmth of community.

Doctors in this US training have called it “deeply stirring and transformational,” “profound and life-changing,” “extremely clarifying and hopeful for my professional development.” “I see a path before me that transforms my work on every level in a way that aligns with my heart and its thinking… I am so thankful to be walking this path with this very special group of people.”

To a young person aspiring to a health profession, like the earnest pre-med mentioned at the beginning, anthroposophic medicine can offer a way to view the human being and nature as whole and meaningful—a way toward transforming modern medicine without losing an iota of rigor. This starting place, real, and vivid, is what we can make available.

11 Ascribed to Paracelsus; personal communication from Albert Schmidli. 12 Doctors took part in the IPMT (International Postgraduate Medical Training; www.paam.net). Nurses took part in Foundations of Anthroposophic Nursing certified by IFAN (www.aamta.org).

Painting the Calendar of the Soul

by Sophie Bourguignon-Takada

Isn’t it interesting that the word “art” is embedded in “earth”, “heart”, “hearth”? It is a place of life, activity, creativity, where we are truly human and not merely animal or robot. This is a place from which we truly connect with others, and it is also where we can really meet ourselves, in all our light and shadow. Art is beauty, but not especially in its outward form. When coming from the heart, it is truth longing to be met. It is also love in its ability to take the world in and transform it. (Decaying cities keep being redeemed by artists.)

Art is a sacred path, and anthroposophy gives us means to walk it in a more conscious way. The rich wisdom and knowledge offered by anthroposophy opens up new spaces: the more objective the quality of the lines, colors, shapes, the better we can grasp highly spiritual ideas and make them visible. The artist becomes a bridge between the spiritual world and the earthly existence as much he lives in the selflessness to be found in the heart (not to be confused with egoless intellectualism).

This exhibition is the telling of a journey through the yearly cycle of the earth in the cosmos. It is an attempt to understand oneself in relation to the world, and the world’s happenings inside oneself; then to translate the feelings arising in colors and dynamics. During the year, we pass through many moods that we take for granted: it rains and everything seems gray and sad, the sky is blue and we feel exhilarated, and so on. Being aware of the influence on our souls of our place in time and space helps us be more responsible and helps us be more free human beings. We live in a precarious balance between light and dark, warmth and cold, lightness and gravity; the Calendar of the Soul illumines our hearts for our humanity to blossom in an ever more spiritual direction.

Rudolf Steiner brought these pictures of cosmic activities in German words and poetic form. They are not easy to understand, in German or in any of the many English translations available. The best we can do at first is to notice certain words which appear at certain times and that others are related across the year at cardinal points. In our study group, led by Michael Brewer, we read, discuss, comment on them. Michael has put a lot of effort into bringing a translation as close as possible to not only the meaning, but also the rhythm, the musicality of the vowels and the consonants in the German. This body of work owes a lot to Michael Brewer and the study group: reading, studying, living these mighty verses together and yet each of us bringing our own personal experience, has been a deep nourishment for my soul.

An exhibit of the author’s paintings was held in February 2012 at Rudolf Steiner House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with speech and eurythmy and weekly talks by Michael Brewer.

The Calendar as an Initiatic Path Verse for Week 48

In light that from the heights of worlds Would flow with might upon the soul Appears, resolving soul enigmas, The certainty of cosmic thinking Assembling all its radiant might To waken love in human hearts.

Translation from the German of Rudolf Steiner by Michael Brewer

As a journey through the year, the Calendar of the soul is a path of initiation. The name of Christ not being mentioned even once, He is yet at the core of it. He is in this recognition of our being one with what is going on around us. What is going on outside our windows is a reflection of the cosmos , which is received in us and expressed in our lives as we are nourished by our perceptions.

Some words appear at some particular times of the year and not others. For example: the word “love” appears for the last time of the year, this week 48; we’ll have it again on week 40, next year.

The verse for week 48 is part of a quartet of “light verses.” They express four different “light” gestures: inward, outward, from the cosmos, from the spirit depths.

Questioning how to express the different gestures, moods, dynamics helps one live even deeper into these verses. How to show the light? It is invisible by nature, isn’t it? Some, though, say it is green (from latest physicists’ finding as well as Hildegard of Bingen), but sometimes it creates definitely a yellowish hue. Which color for the soul? Rudolf Steiner mentions: “blue is the luster color of the soul”, but he says also “peach blossom is the image color of the soul”. And isn’t the whole painting we are working on an image of the soul? Or is it the spirit? And then, how does “The light from the heights of worlds” flow into my soul? Do I feel it? How do I recognize this gift? What is “certainty of cosmic thinking”? And, which “soul enigmas”? How do I feel love differently now than, say, in June or October?

Here are some of my works, the same week 48, painted in different years, with different stand points and choices. I hope they can be nourishment and inspiration for further deepening.

A complete volume of paintings, photographed by Tatsuo Takada, with new translations of the verses by Michael Brewer, was published but is out of print. A new edition will be available soon. Contact sophiegmbt@yahoo.com for more information.

Paintings for Week 48 from three different years; the center image is on this issue’s cover.

Suggested Dates for the Calendar of the Soul, Easter 2013 to Easter 2014

by Herbert O. Hagens, Princeton, NJ, USA

Rudolf Steiner first published the 52 verses we know as the “Calendar of the Soul” in 1912. The adjusted dates listed here for 2013-2014 are intended as a guide for those who follow the practice of beginning a new verse on the Sunday of each week. In keeping with Rudolf Steiner’s instruction, we start with Verse 1 at Easter (March 31, 2013). This format matches the way in which the 52 verses appeared in the original 1912-1913 edition, and it adheres to the seven-day astral rhythm of the soul. In addition, this approach takes into account the seven preparatory verses (Lent) leading up to Easter, and the seven mirror verses that follow, from Easter to Whitsun.

SPRING

March 31, 2013: verse #1 Easter Mood

April 7: verse # 2

April 14: verse #3

April 21: verse #4

April 28: verse #5 Light from Spirit Depths

May 5: verse #6

May 12: verse #7 Luciferic Temptation

May 19: verse #8 Whitsun

May 26: verse #9

June 2: verse #10

June 9: verse #11

June 16: verses 11 and 12

June 23: verse #12 St. John’s Mood

June 30: verse #13

SUMMER

July 7: verse #14

July 14: verse #15

July 21: verse #16

July 28: verse #17

August 4: verse #18

August 11: verse #19

August 18: verse #20 Luciferic Temptation

August 25: verse #21

Sept. 1: verse #22: Light from Cosmic Widths

Sept. 8: verse #23

Sept. 15: verse #24

Sept. 22: verse #25

Sept. 29: verse #26 Michaelmas Mood

There are 55 weeks from Easter 2013 through to Easter 2014, but we have only 52 verses. This calls for an adjustment, especially if we wish to keep in sync with the major Christian festivals. The solution being proposed here is to work with verses 11/12, 40/41, and 45/46 as pairs for an extra week and to concentrate on the metamorphosis from one verse to the next.

The cosmic dating of Easter requires the meditant to reset the course through the Soul Calendar each year, since there are never just 52 weeks between one Easter and the next. It becomes an exercise in self-renewal as we trace all the subtle threads that weave in and out of these mantric-like verses. hohagens@aol.com

FALL

October 6: verse # 27

Oct. 13: verse # 28

Oct. 20: verse # 29

Oct. 27: verse # 30

Nov. 3: verse #31 Light from Spirit Depths

Nov. 10: verse #32

Nov. 17: verse #33 Ahrimanic Deception

Nov. 24: verse #34

Dec. 1: verse #35

Dec. 8: verse #36

Dec. 15: verse #37

Dec. 22 verse #38 Christmas Mood

Dec. 29: verse #39

2014 Jan. 5: verse #40 Epiphany

Jan. 12: verses 40 and 41

Jan. 19: verse #41

Jan. 26: verse #42

Feb. 2: verse #43

Feb. 9: verse #44

Feb. 16: verse #45

Feb. 23: verses 45 and 46

March 2: verse #46 Ahrimanic Deception (March 5: Lent)

March 9: verse #47

March 16 verse #48 Light from Cosmic Heights

March 23: verse #49

March 30: verse #50

April 6: verse #51

April 13: verse #52 Palm Sunday

April 20: verse #1 Easter Mood

Eurythmy

Movements and Meditations – A Journey to the Heart of Language,

by Cynthia Hoven

Review by Patricia Kaminski

Eurythmy Movements and Meditations – A Journey to the Heart of Language came into being, as perhaps all worthy writing should, not by pre-formed answers, but by a daunting question posed earnestly to Cynthia Hoven from one of her students: “What do you really do when you do a sound in Eurythmy?” Answering this question required Cynthia to draw upon decades of her work and training in eurythmy—as performing artist, medical therapist, and teacher at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California. Cynthia’s reply to her student, “I have learned to experience every sound in language as a spiritual being,” became the inspiration for a unique book that she describes as “a celebration of the beings whom I love deeply; the sounds of language.”

The organizational “template” for Cynthia’s book is true to the root meaning of the word, for it is indeed a kind of “temple” honoring the stars and planets themselves as mighty cosmic forces. Rudolf Steiner’s research gave birth to eurythmy exactly one hundred years ago in 1912. His discoveries are based upon the understanding that each constellation in the zodiac emanates formative shaping forces experienced as consonants in human language, while the vowels express the rich inner landscape of soul feelings. Eurythmy schools us in the Logos Mystery that human speech is a sacred microcosm reflecting and radiating the creative impulses of the stellar macrocosm; thus this book is organized into 24 essays celebrating the consonants of the Zodiac and vowels of the planets.

This temple-like quality of this book graces every page; one feels an underlying reverence for the Word that reaches deep into the strata of the soul. At the same time, Eurythmy Movements and Meditations imparts practical and precise exercises incorporating the specific colors, gestures, images and movements of each consonant and vowel, accompanied with illuminating color illustrations by Renee Parks. Each essay is mighty in meaning and yet

continued on page 54

Cosmic Child

Inspired Writing from the Threshold of Birth, Selected and Arranged

by Eve Olive

Review by Gertrude Hughes

Cosmic Child , a book of wisdom and surprises about the “threshold of birth,” offers a wealth of insight into an area of human knowledge that has been rarely visited until recently. Eve Olive, eurythmist, architect, and founder of the Emerson Waldorf School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has selected and arranged with care the content of Cosmic Child . In her acknowledgments she thanks Maurice York, her editor at Wrightwood Press, for the pleasure of working with him, and the contribution of “his ear for language and his aesthetic sense,” which this reviewer certainly agrees does indeed grace the book. So, by the way, does the cover: a gorgeous painting by Ninetta Sombart.

Compared to the threshold of birth, the threshold of death pre-occupies people more readily. When we think of our coming death, we look back over our physical life and ask ourselves what mixture of promise and punishment we might encounter once we have left physical life. We are poorly equipped for meeting what comes next because, if human beings are to understand the mysteries of the threshold, we need to know higher, supra-sensory worlds—a capacity that Steiner devoted his life to demonstrating for human beings of the 20th century and beyond. In the first lecture of his beloved 1923 lecture course, Evolution of Consciousness, delivered at Penmaenmawr in North Wales, Steiner contrasts two sides of consciousness. One side is the ordinary consciousness of death or post-earthly life. The other side of immortality, “which is never brought out today” according to Steiner’s lecture cycle, is the consciousness not of death but of “unbornness,” the pre-birth side.

Life after death holds mysteries, and so does life before birth. The latter is the main vein of Cosmic Child , a daring and absorbing book about pre-birth consciousness. The titles of the book’s various sections give a sense of what is included: “Around the World, Across the Ages”

continued on page 52

The Anthroposophical Society in America

General Council Members

Torin Finser (General Secretary)

Virginia McWilliam (at large)

Carla Beebe Comey (at large)

John Michael (at large, Treasurer)

Regional Council Representatives

Ann Finucane (Eastern Region)

Dennis Dietzel (Central Region)

Joan Treadaway (Western Region)

Marian León, Director of Administration & Member Services

being human

is published four times a year by the Anthroposophical Society in America

1923 Geddes Avenue

Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797

Tel. 734.662.9355

Fax 734.662.1727

www.anthroposophy.org

Editor: John H. Beck

Associate Editors:

Judith Soleil, Fred Dennehy

Cover design: Seiko Semones (S2 Design)

Layout: John Beck, Seiko Semones

Please send submissions, questions, and comments to: editor@anthroposophy.org or to the postal address above, for our Spring-Summer 2013 issue by 4/1/2013.

©2013 The Anthroposophical Society in America. Responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

Looking Back on Our Clipper Ship Days

America had a formative influence on the development of those tall, beautiful vessels we know as Yankee clipper ships. It was Joshua Humphreys, for example, an American born into a Quaker family, who made many significant design changes that helped the United States prevail in the revolution of 1776 and survive the blockades of 1812. Using both inspiration and steady, incremental improvements, others were able to evolve ship building in stages until the majesty of a swift, fast-moving vessel emerged that was particularly suited for trade and navigating in and out of our harbors. Both necessity and dreaming combined to create the wonderful clipper ships the 19th century.

During the week of August 8-12th, three clipper ships sailed forth from port Ann Arbor. They had unusual names: the first and largest had the name That Good May Become, another was known as Leadership Colloquium, and the third had unusual letters on its side—AGM. In this report, I would like to describe a few qualities of these three sailing ships.

That Good May Become

With approximately 230 people on board, this ship contained a variety of talented individuals: presenters, eurythmists, speech artists, vendors, conversationalists and others all eager to learn, understand and meet one another. There were six formal presentations, some of the content of which will appear in being human in this and other issues in the year ahead. The Foundation Stone Meditation was performed and spoken each day, resplendent in color, form and movement. The innovative practice of small trio groups was warmly received: the groups of three met repeatedly throughout, showing the power of intimate conversation and the need to process experiences. The discussion groups featured lively conversation and many of the salient parts were recorded for future dissemination. We were treated to a humorous, insightful presentation by Jonathan Stedall on his new documentary, The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner, and a comedy evening with Professor Herr Dreier.

In the weeks after the conference we received many expressions of gratitude for an

enlivening, rich experience. The work and cultivation of anthroposophy was foremost in this members conference.

The Leadership Colloquium

This vessel had a very different quality. In an effort in egalitarianism, there were no formal introductions or presentations (except by the facilitators). Instead, the 128 participants spent most of their time over two days in small groups at tables that seated seven to eight people. Through a variety of activities, participants were able to meet each other out of mutual interest, sharing stories, mapping our connections and imagining future scenarios. During the second day we were given an opportunity to look at the “back space” of those who stand behind our work, individuals who may have crossed the threshold who had a formative influence on our lives. We then worked with partners to suggest concrete tasks for the future. Many of these were recorded on post-its and flip charts which the facilitators promised to collate and share with the General Council.

During the colloquium some participants expressed frustration with the methodology used, and some felt the second day could have been more focused on direct needs of the Society and the movement. Yet from the final sharing and review, it was clear that much good work had been done and that the benefit of this two day engagement would have to be judged by the outcomes in the next year or two. Suspending judgment is not always an easy task, even for sailors working with a self development path called anthroposophy.

AGM

On the final day, members gathered in several large concentric circles on the deck of our third vessel. I began by sharing a brief description of the flotilla of three ships that were sailing in the same direction even if it was not always apparent. We had a moving

reading of names of those who had crossed the threshold, and then a question and answer plenum session with members of the Executive Council of the Goetheanum. The questions asked were penetrating and varied, from interest in the personal lives of executive council members to the health of Sergei Prokofieff to the working of the sections. The Vorstand members answered with warmth and the depth of their humanity. We had several reports, one from our Admistrative Director and another from our Council Chair, as well as many announcements and a brief time for small group discussion. The AGM had more people on board than any recent one I can remember, and most left feeling we had really met one another as members. In many ways, the whole week was a kind of destiny encounter made possible through anthroposophy.

One final note: As conference participants will remember, I introduced each of the speakers at the conference by placing them in a particular position on a clipper ship. So it only fair to say a few words as to where I was on each of the three vessels. By virtue of the nature of an AGM, from the earliest stages of planning right through the day itself, I acted as captain with a strong support crew. During the conference I was part of the leadership team, working closely with our dedicated conference committee (Beth Dunn-Fox, Marian Leon, Dennis Dietzel and Leslie Loy), and taking up the tasks that were assigned to me by the committee. Roles and responsibilities, I felt, were quite clearly understood. With the colloquium it was yet

again different. From the beginning, I was asked by the facilitators to just be a participant, and it was not until after lunch on the second day that they called me over to plan what they called the “hand off” for the last hour. As a result, I was able to enter into many engaging group conversations over the two days. Thus over the week, I had the most varied of experiences, from captain to cabin boy, from lightning rod to part of the crew in the rigging. The whole was an exercise in flexibility and reaffirmation that

indeed “good would become.”

Our work together in August will bring new impulses into the work of the Society for months and years to come. The council and other leadership groups have been working with the material since October. Online at conference.anthroposophy.org many reports have been posted. May the winds be favorable to our future sailing.

Torin M Finser General Secretary

What’s Happening in the Anthroposophical Society in America

Our New Treasurer

In a written report shared at the August members’ conference I thanked Jerry Kruse for four years’ service as Treasurer of the Anthroposophical Society in America. Throughout his tenure as Treasurer, Jerry sought to alert us and keep us awake to a structural problem, namely, that despite having cut back sharply in 2002, the Society’s operating expenses exceed its operating income, so that the overall financial health is dependent on the uncertainty of legacy gifts and bequests. In the anthroposophical understanding of money, these special gifts should be funding new initiatives, and regular on-going activities should find their own, regular support. Jerry hoped ways could be found not only to be efficient, but to invest and grow programs and services so as to win support to make them sustaining. So I want to thank

Summary of a Year of Travels by General Secretary Torin Finser

January 2012: Branch meeting in San Francisco; Lectures in Sydney, Australia

February/March: Talk/workshop in Mumbai, Auroville, India; Dornach General Secretaries meetings

April: Louisville, KY branch meeting; New Orleans group meeting, Tulane University panel discussion, CAO meeting; Wilton, NH branch meeting; Washington, DC talk and branch meeting

May: Montpelier, VT group meeting and talk; Cape Ann, MA, GC meeting

June: Society outreach at Renewal courses

August: Ann Arbor, MI Leadership Colloquium, Conference and AGM

September: Chicago, IL branch meeting; Keene, NH presentation on Kasper Hauser

October: Kimberton, PA talk for members and friends at Camphill; Wilton, NH, branch meeting; Ann Arbor, MI – two visits, for office staff, for GC meeting

November: Dornach GS meetings; Austin, TX branch meeting and presentation

December: St Louis, MO talk and workshop

January 2013: Phoenix, AZ members meeting

Total of 13 states, four countries, contact with about 1500 members during 2012

him again for his service and for his confidence in our potential.

At this year’s AGM, General Secretary Torin Finser briefly introduced Jack Michael, the Society’s new Treasurer and

member-at-large of the General Council. Jack was born, raised, and lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he works in commercial real estate. Jack and his wife Connie are founders of the Cincinnati Waldorf School and active with the Sundays with Steiner Study Group and a parent study at CWS. They met anthroposophy in New York City in the 1980’s. Among Jack’s particular interests in anthroposophy are education and social economics.

As Treasurer Jack identifies his first goal as helping put the Society on firm financial ground. “Besides attention to the expense side of the ledger, the income structure must change. Much has been said in the past as well as at the August colloquium and AGM about financial sustainability.

The goal within 2-3 years is to bring the budget in balance with prudent cuts, member retention and realistic development and fundraising goals.

“With this year’s budget the General Council has adopted a ‘financial participation’ model (described in the special December report to members). It is our hope that you will join your fellow members and friends by contributing to the best of your ability to ‘a future worthy of the human being.’”

Marian Leòn, Director Administration & Member Services

Showing a Film for Community Building (and Economics Lesson)

Many communities throughout the country are taking advantage of Jonathan Stedall’s new film, The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner, by hosting public events to view the film and introduce the local anthroposophic community to friends and neighbors. In Sebastopol, CA, Daniel Osmer shared his approach. (Note: the Economics Conference Account mentioned below is held within the ASA to receive and disburse funds for independent research of associative economics.)

In 2006, I began a weekly gathering entitled Science Buzz Café. We meet at a local restaurant, and the average attendance for these events is about forty-eight people from the broader Sebastopol community. I decided to include the Stedall documentary to the autumn 2012 schedule. In the film, Dr. Steiner is referred to as a ‘scientist of the visible and invisible.’ Why not introduce him to this audience? Additionally, I wondered if the individuals from the Waldorf schools, biodynamic farms and vineyards—all in the surrounding three-county area—would like to learn something new about Rudolf Steiner and related initiatives from around the world, including Sonoma County. I decided to

show part II of the film because I wanted to bring awareness of the many grounded activities featured in the documentary. All of the enterprises meet human needs in the world, and are a result of spiritual scientific research and the inner capacities of the colleagues. I had a hunch that it would be possible to fill a very large room if I could only get the word out to all these various groups. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get together and celebrate and marvel at the myriad of individual initiatives showcased in the film, demonstrating activities that work well in the world?

Rather than the usual café venue, I secured the use of the local Masonic Center for this special event. The Masonic Center is well known throughout the West Sonoma County community. I wrote, visited, called or emailed all seven area K-8 Waldorf schools, the two area Waldorf high schools, the Christian Community, The Thinking of the Heart Branch of the Anthroposophical Society, county newspapers, the science café mailing list, and the local web-based community bulletin board. Tickets were made available through a favorite local bookstore as well as through the initiatives cited above. By pre-selling tickets, it was possible to get a sense of the total number expected, as well as accumulate revenue and cash flow to cover the earliest expenses without utilizing outside funds. Live music welcomed the attendees, along with display booths from crafts people and a few of the schools. Refreshments were also served. After gathering and mingling for awhile, everyone then moved into the main room to view the film.

One question I carried was: is it possible to compensate the event organizer and still create a surplus that can be made available for others? As a beneficiary of the many outcomes of research from the School for Spiritual Science over the years, I wished to share a portion of any profit with the Goetheanum. Portions of the resulting $1,000 surplus were shared with the Economics Conference Account (held through the Section for the Social Sciences at the Goetheanum); the Thinking of the Heart branch, and the 11th grade class of the Summerfield Waldorf School.

The students were given the one-page

event budget (with actual/variance explanation) and were introduced to the story revealed by the figures and accounts. This is part of a project entitled ‘Financial Drivers License,’ which includes: Economics from the Ground Up; Money-in-a-Nutshell; Taking Initiative, and Renaissance Accounting. It offers teens an understanding of the economic and financial “rules of the road” so they can steer their life and land their dreams (initiatives). Economics, finance, money, accounting, everyday life and the relationship to the world are integrated into a comprehensible whole that incorporates both theory and practice. This three-to-five day “fast path” workshop is adaptable for classroom use as well as professional development. Material for the course comes from colleagues from around the world working together out of the Section for the Social Sciences and the Economics Course given by Dr. Steiner in 1922.

Daniel Osmer

Partnering Our Groups, Branches

In January, the Society hosted a series of four conference calls with representatives of our groups and branches. The intent of these calls was two-fold: to create closer partnerships with our groups and branches, and to begin to create programs which serve our newer members.

The topic for these four calls was how to extend a warm welcome to new members of the Society, beginning with a phone call from someone in their local community. This welcome would also introduce that new member to the study groups, festival celebrations, and lectures which might be available, and briefly describe the relationships between the local branch and the national and world-wide societies.

We were very happy to have 53 representatives participate in one or more calls. The subject is clearly important in many of our local communities, for there was lively discussion, sharing of practices already in place, and many questions. How we meet, welcome, and orient a new member is critical for creating a vibrant anthroposophical community.

Future topics we are planning include

how groups can reach out locally to those interested in anthroposophy (and see the previous report from Daniel Osmer!); how to carry forward the imagination of the heart and study material for this year’s AGM; and reports on the work of the leadership at the Goetheanum and the General Council of the US Society. We invite all interested members to join in these discussions. Contact the representative of your group or branch to receive a schedule of the calls.

Cynthia Chelius Membership Services Office

Parzival In The Desert

“Hell’s darkness and light of Heaven Alike have their lot and part.”

This past November the Manzanita Branch of the Anthroposophical Society, in Phoenix, Arizona, offered a 2 day workshop entitled “Parzival: A Weekend Exploration in Healing What Ails Us.” The idea was to create a living experience of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival,” by focusing on three key scenes in the story, utilizing choral speaking, eurythmy and dramatic enactment.

Each scene was briefly introduced by MariJo Rogers, who sketched in for us some basic historical information and some of the soul-spiritual implications of that particular moment in Parzival’s journey, but just enough to help us form a picture of it. Then, enthusiastically led by speech artist Kim SnyderVine, and utilizing Russell Pooler’s “Parsifal,” a play taken from the text, the group of 35 attendees spoke and preliminarily enacted each scene.

On the final day these three scenes were then acted out at different prepared spaces on the grounds of Desert Marigold, with all participants dressed in costume, led by a white horse ridden by one of the school’s tenth

graders and accompanied by Gabriel Riegner, an amazing 16 year old minstrel on the mandolin. It was quite a moment when the young Parzival and his noble steed appeared and waited for everyone to follow him to the first scene.

Many of those who participated commented that the pictures of the story came alive in some surprisingly powerful and very moving ways, especially in the final enactment of the three scenes.

the past 100 years inherent in our spiritual movement.

It was acknowledged that the originating impulse for the Society was based in part on the recognition of Rudolf Steiner’s foresight about the nature of the reappearance of Christ in the etheric. Vivianne, Eliah, and Arthur Edwards of the Centre for Associative Economics in London explored “what happened” after the original founding of the Society and why the Society was in need of refounding a decade later at the Christmas Conference.

The heart of the rest of the conversation revolved around the following statement by Rudolf Steiner:

You could feel the soul of the group moving as one, everyone was so absorbed. Someone said afterwards, speaking of the presence of the horse, and how it quieted after the speaking of the Alleluia, that it brought a mood of “This isn’t play-acting.” Indeed, there were no on-lookers.

To prepare for the weekend an eight member preparation group took turns telling each of the 16 chapters of von Eschenbach’s tale over a six month period by teleconference. They then chose three scenes from Pooler’s to work with for this conference. Actually, this is the first of three workshops, two more over the next two years, devoted to Parzival, planned by the branch.

For the Manzanita Branch, Betsy Evans-Banks and Peter Rennick

Support to Birth the Threefold Spirit Child of Anthroposophia

On the 100th anniversary (December 28, 2012) of the original founding of the Anthroposophical Society, nearly 40 individuals from Canada, the UK, New Zealand and a good many states in the US gathered via teleconference to explore how best to form a social body worthy to serve the full threefold presence of Anthroposophia. The call was sponsored and facilitated by Vivianne Rael and Eliah Rael of FifthStream.com. The aim of the call was to explore the wounds and the gifts of

A certain responsibility in the soul is involved when attention is directed to the Christmas Conference—the responsibility to make it a reality; otherwise it will withdraw from earthly existence. ...Whether the Christmas Conference will become effective in life depends upon whether its impulse continues. We brought the meeting to a formal conclusion, but actually this Christmas Conference should never close. It should continue perpetually in the life of the Anthroposophical Society... Then it will have been much more than a festival week; it will be an impulse affecting the whole world and the destiny of human beings.

-Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships, Vol. 6

From various perspectives the presenters strove to see what Rudolf Steiner intended at the Christmas Conference and what actually happened just before and after Rudolf Steiner left his earthly body, less than 15 months after the Christmas Conference.

During the course of the call, the deep karmic connection of Ita Wegman to Rudolf Steiner was explored through the content of the evening lectures of the Christmas Conference when Rudolf Steiner revealed, “to those who had ears to hear,” his own destiny and the destiny of Ita Wegman in the evolutionary development of human consciousness. We touched on the inability of the Vorstand to stay together after Rudolf Steiner’s death, the possible consequences of Ita Wegman’s expulsion, as well as the dissolution of the threefold form intended for the Movement.

We explored some of the healing ges-

tures that have taken place and what is still needed to bear responsibility for the past and to fully embody Rudolf Steiner’s intentions to co-create a threefold social vessel for Anthroposophia. Arthur Edwards, eloquently described a full imagination of the potential latent within the Christmas Conference Meeting. It is that imagination along with what was brought forward by the other contributors that we intend to nurture in the coming years between now and the 100 year anniversary of the Christmas Conference in 2023.

All this we heard in the context of the current cosmic gestures as delivered by Mary Adams. Our call took place as the moon waxed full as it opposed the Sun conjunct Pluto and squaring Uranus. The cosmic gesture Mary described is not easy to be with, but supportive for surfacing unresolved issues from the past with the transformative forces present to metamorphose them in new and innovative ways that may mature to reveal themselves more fully next Michaelmas.

Patrick Kennedy, Christian Community priest in Washington DC, offered suggestions to help us listen and speak on behalf of something greater than ourselves. John McManus underscored what Patrick said by helping us speak from a place of balance in ourselves. John and Kathryn Rycroft opened our call with the verse for the week from the Calendar of the Soul and closed our call with the Foundation Stone Meditation.

Here are what a few people who were present on the call shared:

> Yiana Belkalopoulos, British Columbia: A wonderful conference call with an international community of folks... It was wonderful to hear voices together on these discussions. It felt very human, respectful and loving considering the distance between us and the type of technology. The voiced conference with the immediacy of time and all of the soul sounds brought etheric value into discussions which on-line written dialogue can’t match. I would definitely participate in such conversations again...

> Judy Halprin, USA: I cannot tell you how much it meant to me to be a part of the call, and am so looking forward to the recording when it is available. To all that made it possible, how can I express such deep gratitude? It was, indeed, a sacred space, divinely guided.

> Arthur Edwards, UK: There were the tremendous deeds of the Christmas Conference of 1923-24 which was a beginning. My hope is that this teleconference is an example of a stimulus to imagine how we can continue, not just to take what’s been received and handed on from the past, but to go back to the origins and see how we can renew the impulses as they were intended... a genuine interest awakening in members from all over the world in this very topic at this time. For those who would like to work with the Spirit of a co-creative pioneering endeavor over the next 11 years as we anticipate the 100 year anniversary of the Christmas Conference, please download a lengthy preparatory article at fifthstream.com/holy-nights-2012 we wrote in preparation for this event; the recording of the 2 hour call is available at that same link for $5.

Vivianne Rael viviannerael@gmail.com

SEND CONTRIBUTIONS FOR “WHAT’S HAPPENING” to editor@anthroposophy.org

What’s Happening at the Rudolf Steiner Library

z We started off the new year with a lively presentation by Frederick Amrine, Arthur F. Thurnau Chair in German Studies at the University of Michigan, for members and friends in the Harlemville area: “Moving into the Mainstream—Anthroposophy in Dialogue,” on public reception of Rudolf Steiner’s work and anthroposophy. Fred’s visit was sponsored by the Society’s Traveling Speakers’ Program.

z Audiocassette tape conversion: We are still seeking volunteers to convert Rudolf Steiner lectures translated by Rick Mansell in the 1980s from cassette to MP3 format. These are lectures that have not yet ap-

peared in print in English. This is work you can do at home with equipment you may already possess: call us with questions!

z Judith Kiely and her helpers (William Furse, Rich Lumma, and Martin Miller) have waded into an important cataloging project: the library’s journals collection. We are eager to publicize the scope and value of these holdings, all of which may be borrowed. Here are just a few titles, current and vintage, to pique your interest:

Ambix: The Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry

The Cresset: Journal of the Camphill Movement. 1954-1972 Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice. 1998Journal of Anthroposophic Medicine. 1982-1999

Point and Circle: Magazine for Curative Education and Social Therapy. 2011-

Renewal: A Journal for Waldorf Education. 1991Shoreline: Journal for the Working Spirit. 1988-1992

z The library sends out a monthly email newsletter; call (518-672-7690) or email (rsteinerlibrary@taconic.net) us to subscribe!

z Fred Paddock’s wife, May Paddock, is planning to sell some of Fred’s books. Many of them are underlined and annotated by him. If you are interested in more information, please contact May at maypaddock@yahoo.com

z Roger Lundberg, a California eurythmist, sent us the following: “Was he a genius? I would like to call attention to the poet, philosopher, and Christian Community priest, Berthold Wulf. Even in Europe he is not well known as a poet. He published 23 volumes, mostly of poetry. Some of these books are 600 pages long. It is time to try to evaluate his work, because he died last June. If he is consigned to oblivion, oblivion will be the richer for it! I will mention only one book, his Parsifal (in two volumes). Wulf clairvoyantly accessed the reality of the Grail events as described by von Eschenbach, then put his perceptions into poetry, over 1200 pages! His style is like that of no one else. He would meditate and the results would descend to earth as poetry, clothed in word-ness. Berthold Wulf’s work is only available in German, and cannot really be translated. Any artist working from anthroposophy who would like to experience more can contact me: (RLundberg7@Sonic.Net).”

Judith Soleil, Librarian

Gilbert Church

August 4, 1914–September 8, 2012

Gilbert Church entered this world on August 4, 1914 in New London, Connecticut. He was the second son of Florence Benham Church and Frank A. Church.

He graduated Robert E. Finch High School in Groton, CT in 1932. He was interested in everything, especially music, and aspired to be a concert pianist. That longing took him to New York City to study at Columbia University and take piano lessons from and elderly lady near Carnegie Hall. She was an anthroposophist. And across the street from Carnigie Hall was the Threefold Resturant where he met the the most significant and most enduring friends of his life. Some afternoons he went to the Anthroposophic Press at 211 Madison Avenue to help Eleanor Minne pack books for shipping, and have the great wealth of Steiner’s works all around him.

When World War II finally forced Gilbert, a CO, to enlist, he did so with the assurance he did not have to carry a weapon nor kill anyone. His proficient guardian angel arranged for him to have an apartment in Teheran, Persia where he traveled and wrote manuals for the soldiers of all the marvelous places they could visit in the Holy Lands when they had their leave. It was in essence an astounding Art History Education in the midst of misery. So, he rarely spoke about the life-altering ex-

periences which happened then. After the war Gilbert spent as long as he was able in India. Ghandi had inspired him but being an American, Gilbert had to return.

He graduated from University of Chicago in 1948, no longer a musician but a research scientist. He then earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Stanford Field Service sent Gilbert to Indonesia to start the Bilolgy Department for the new Medical School. He was there and taught for until the political situation forced the Americans and other Europeans to leave.

He returned to Southern California and was given the position of Associate Dean and Secretary of the Research Committee in 1964 at the San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge, California. As an administrator, he was separated more and more from the students and the research labs which did not hold his interest.

One Sunday afternoon Ann Stockton a member of the Society in New York City and a close old friend telephoned Gilbert to say the day before at a Council Meeting, Eleanor Minne announced she needed to retire; would Gilbert consider returning to the East coast and managing the “Press”?

He replied, “Of course.” Gilbert built up the Anthroposophic Press and devoted himself for the next 14 years to this important anthroposophical work. With Clopper Almond he founded the Rudolf Steiner Institute which had it’s first sessions in Spring Valley, NY.

Gilbert retired in 1981 and moved with

his family to Southern California. Because of circumstances we were separated when Gilbert went to the tropics in Mexico to do research for a book for five years.

Gilbert moved to Denver to be once again with his son, then when he was almost completely blind, moved to a retirement home for a few months before he died. Everyone who cared about and loved Gilbert were with him and reminded us of one of his favorite poets, Walt Whitman.

Near Gilbert on the little table by his bed was an old copy of the New Testament he had been given in the Army, Theosophy, the Bhagavad-Gita and The Christian Mystery by Rudolf Steiner.

Margot Church

Lines marked in The Forerunner (Fall 1942) by Gilbert Church in an article “Walt Whitman and Reincarnation” by Clifton Joseph Furness:

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led toward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And it ceas’d the moment life appeared. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier!

Whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenoned and mortis’d in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time. To be in any form, what is that? Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither!

Gilbert Church joined the Anthroposphic Press as Managing Director on July 1, 1965, and retired on December 31, 1981. Gilbert succeeded Eleanor Minne, who had started at the press as an assistant to Henry Monges who founded the press in New York in 1928. Gilbert was so devoted to anthroposophy that he left a tenured position as Dean in the School of Arts and Sciences, and a full professorship in the Biology department, at California State University in Northridge.

The Press was then in a small office at the Anthropsophical Society of America headquarters at 211 Madison Avenue in New York City. But Gilbert soon outgrew his small space and chose to move to Threefold Farm in Spring Valley, where he had been offered office space in the Auditorium. While there Gilbert gave a chance to work at the Press

to a number of people growing up and living around Spring Valley, including Michael MacPherson, Bill Lindeman, Charlotte Driggs, Sally Burns, Patrick Stone, Mark Finser, and Margot Church.

Gilbert soon expanded the Press’ output and vastly increased the number of new titles. When he took over there was only one translator working on Dr. Steiner’s books –Lisa Monges. Gilbert expanded the circle of translators and editors to include Daisy Aldan, Marjorie Spock, Norman Macbeth, René Querido, Carlo Pietzner, Arvia McKay, Henry Barnes, John Bledsoe, Floyd McKnight, Sarah Kurland, Alice Wolfsin, Kari van Ordt, Fritz Koelln, Gladys Hahn, Doris Bugbey, Dietrich Asten, D.S. Osmond, Hans and Ruth Pusch, Steward Easton and Maria St. Goar.

When Gilbert took over the Press there was another publisher dedicated to Dr. Steiner’s work and anthroposophical literature. That was Rudolf Steiner Publications of Blauvelt, NY, started by Bernie Garber and Paul Marshall Allen, who had been frustrated at the slowness of the Anthroposophic Press to get materials translated. But Bernie and Paul and Gilbert soon found they liked each other and developed a good working relationship. Their attitude was that the vineyard was so big there was plenty of room for many laborers! So they met frequently and kept each other informed of what they were doing and jointly tried to build the audience for anthroposophical literature.

I first met Gilbert in the fall of 1973 in his office in Spring Valley next to the Auditorium. He looked every inch a distinguished New England academic: a tall, thin, handsome man, with a wonderful head of white hair. His eyes sparked during our conversation—he had a very sharp wit and laughed a lot.

One immediately knew that you were in the presence of a deep thinker. I had heard of his back-

ground and I told him I was astounded that he had left a solid university position to come to the Press, but he laughed and said words to the effect that “the real thinking in the world is in anthroposophy—so coming here was a no-brainer!”

I visited Gilbert when he was living in California in retirement; when I arrived I would ask him what he was doing. “Thinking,” he would reply! I followed that up by asking Gilbert of all the many books by Dr. Steiner he edited was there one that he felt that was really significant or very close to him. Immediately his answer was The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric. He said as anthroposophists we are so priveledged to be able to read Dr. Steiner and to have this knowledge of Christ—to be able to think and know more about Christ! From these remarks you can get an idea of what lived in the heart of this remarkable man.

Gene Gollogly

During August of 1980 I started my career as Managing Director of the Anthroposophic Press. My predecessor, Dr. Gilbert Church, stayed on for six months to show me the ropes and during that time and the following years I got to know Gilbert pretty well. He was born in 1915 in Connecticut. While putting himself through college he partially supported himself by becoming a tattoo artist though he had no tattoos himself. He spent the Second World War in the desert. It was there he underwent a significant spiritual experience.

Many of the soldiers, including himself, came down with sandfly fever, a disease little understood by American doctors. Gilbert recalled that some men registered temperatures of 110° F., from the disease and the desert temperatures. Gilbert explained that in his fevered state he underwent significant experiences in relation to Christianity. This, I understood, was why he placed great emphasis on the seminal idea of Christianity, “Not I but Christ in me.” When I last visited him in Denver in 2010, he was still talking with great animation about this ideal. When my wife asked him what was most important to him, he responded, “Looking into people’s eyes and experiencing the Christ in each of them!”

During his years at the Press, Gilbert met his wife Margot and they had a son,

Toby. The family moved to California after Gilbert had taught me the ropes, and they lived there for some years. Between 1980 and his death Gilbert lived in a number of places, including Austin, Texas, where he pursued studies of the South American Indian civilizations, and Cholula, Mexico, where ancient pyramids and other historical sites are located. Eventually, he found his way to Denver, where he spent the last years of his life.

In 1980, an employee of the Anthroposophic Press characterized Gilbert as “the most good-natured irascible person I’ve ever met!” As I write, I can see Gilbert, standing before me, tall and lean with his white hair and mustache, shouting and laughing at the same time: Why can’t more people understand the central significance of the Christ Impulse!

Stephen Usher

Patricia Jeanne Gilmartin

December 21, 1945-December 28, 2012

From the Seattle Branch:

Three days after Christmas, longtime community member Patricia J. Gilmartin passed away unexpectedly. A trained dancer and eurythmist with post-graduate degrees in psychology, she was employed as a vocational rehabilitation counselor for the Boeing Corporation in Everett. Although she had lived with chronic illness, her death came as a shock to many friends and family who had seen her very recently and remember her vibrance. She is survived by nine younger siblings, her three children, Alice Gilmartin, Jennifer Leonhardt and Aaron Gilmartin, and her grandchild Juliet Tondowski. Her family was what she was most devoted to and sacrificed for in life; although she lived some distance away she was a part of their daily lives.

Originally from Fort Worth, Texas, Patricia was the eldest of ten children born to an artistic family. Music, dance and theatre were part of her daily life from an early age. She began training in ballet and turned professional before marrying and raising a family and eventually moving to Washington, DC. There she encountered anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner when

going in search of a nursery school for her children; she was a part of the founding of the first Waldorf School in Washington, DC/Maryland. The same summer that she met Waldorf kindergarten teacher Louise Miller and enrolled, her husband met anthroposophy on the campus of the University of Maryland via economics professor Clopper Almon.

This encounter began her work with anthroposophical study and the Christian Community, and a lifelong commitment to social and spiritual work in the world. She also began a love affair with eurythmy, which she studied first at Eurythmy Spring Valley in New York and later in Sacramento and Portland.

Her resolute involvement in community eurythmy groups was in spite of numerous illnesses and injuries, and made her devoted movement an inspiration to her teachers and peers. She was about to begin rehearsals for an upcoming performance in the spring.

Please direct any enquiries to Alice Gilmartin at (941) 237-7678.

Members Who Have Died

Gregor Barnum, Moretown, VT; died 9/26/12

William Bryant, Olympia, WA; died 10/3/12

Clare Coriell, Franklin, NC; died 11/12/12

Patricia Gilmartin, Schwenksville, PA; died 12/28/12

Fred Paddock, Copake, NY; died 11/1/12

Allyson Anthony, Pahoa, HI

Donna Atkins-Parks, Elrosa, MN

Lance Brisbois, Somerville, MA

Annia Y. Castillo, Hayward, CA

Irene Chlysta, Mogadore, OH

Cat Gilliam Cunningham, Edmonds, WA

Claudia Miriam Duchene, Natick, MA

Lisa Edge, Standish, ME

Franz Eilers, Spring Valley, NY

Kristi Fackel, Saint Paul, MN

Carin Fortin, Santa Cruz, CA

Chuck Ginsberg , Chicago, IL

Lynn Harroff, Nashville, TN

Susan Heineman, Wyndmoor, PA

Alicja Jacob, Soquel, CA

Barbara Jimenez , Miami, FL

Catie Johnson, Nashville, TN

Seth Jordan, Great Barrington, MA

Geoff Landrum, Oak Creek, WI

Bianca D Lara, San Diego, CA

Cosmic Child, continued from page 44

collects poems and questions that ask George MacDonald’s “Where did you come from, baby dear?” or murmur longingly in a poem called “Unsated Memory,” “Where is that world that I am fallen from?.../Ah, Surely I was rather native there/ Where all desires were lovely….” The sections titled “Speaking of Angels” and “Meditations and Prayers” give insight about pre-birth existence in direct, sacred language;

Ursula Leonore, Northport, ME

Melissa White Marino, Encinitas, CA

Angela Macke, Traverse City, MI

Denise McCluskey, Los Altos, CA

Ashley Moore, Carpinteria, CA

Pam Moore, Nichols, NY

James Pyanoe, Lake Como, NJ

Gabriel Rollinson, Hadley, MA

Rebecca Rugo, Ipswich, MA

Michael Shope, Seattle, WA

Susan Stone, Davis, CA

Natalia Strattman, Homestead, FL

Chris Tebbutt , Boonville, CA

Paul Turner, Hayward, CA

Tosha Walper, Pinole, CA

MaryBeth Weiss, Redding, CT

Wendy Willard, Corvallis, OR

Tony Williams, Marietta, GA

Wendy Wong , San Jose, CA

and two farewell sections provide a final view with “Coda,” a single poem, and “Postlude,” a brief piece of prose describing connections between returning to heaven from earth, and coming to earth from heaven.

In my two favorite sections, “The Things Children Say” and “Glimpses Across the Threshold,” mothers and other grownups tell how children themselves speak of “unbornness”.

New Members of the Anthroposophical Society in America, recorded by the Society 9/29/2012 to 2/18/2013

These feel like the very soul of the book, and they are delightful to read.

One mother’s report from “The Things Children Say” tells us, simply, “My two-and-a half-year-old son was sitting on the bed with his little legs stuck out in front of him, watching quietly as I tied his shoes, when he said thoughtfully, “‘I used to be able to tie my own shoes.’”

Another mother describes being suddenly informed on one “glorious day near midday, in Durban, South Africa, back in 1971” by her four-yearold son, Tom about past times: “Our two young sons, ages three and four, were playing happily in the garden; I was hanging the washing on the line to dry in the kind of sun that only Africa can provide. Suddenly there was a tug on my blouse. Tom, our four year old, was standing beside me looking earnest, apologetic, and a little rushed, having briefly broken away from his game with Simon. ‘Mommy, I don’t want you to be sad,’ he said, ‘but you’re not my first mommy. I have had many mommies before you.’ That said, he dashed back to his game with Simon and never referred to the matter again.”

The mother of a six-year-old daughter and a four-year-old adopted son describes a day when her “usually quite delightful” children could not stop grumping as she walked them to school. Even when she returns later to take them home, they are still fighting. As they leave the schoolroom, the mother hears the daughter saying “some triumphant statement which she [the daughter] obviously thought would outdo anything her brother could think of and then she stomped off ahead of us.” The brother just stood there watching the sister go and then said to his mother, “I was so glad when she got borned and left me in

peace in heaven.” The mother ends the tale saying, “I have loved this story ever since it happened, particularly because of the adoption involved and the fact they certainly believed they were together before they were born.”

Birthday stories from Waldorf school kindergarten or nursery teachers, can be found in Eve Olive’s book. So can scenes from children’s story books, including one from P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins. In a Jewish legend retold by Louis Ginberg (1873-1953) an angel gives a tour to a soul before setting it back in the womb of its mother for nine months:

Between morning and evening the angel carries the soul around, and shows her where she will live and where she will die, and the place where she will be buried, and she takes her through the whole world, and points out the just and the sinners, and all things. In the evening, she replaces her in the womb of the mother and there she remains for nine months.

In 1898 at the age of 23, the playwright Percy Mackaye (1875-1956) wrote in a notebook found after his death a charming little piece on how angel and man need one another. Man, Mackaye thinks, is more helpless than an angel, but then again, an angel needs man in order to become perfect, which the angel does “through his revelation in the flesh”; but then again “man needs angel in order to become perfect through his resurrection from the flesh…”

I hope these examples have shown the width and depth of Eve Olive’s book as well as its joyous moments. She has arranged its content in a sensitive way that is both humorous and reverent, as behooves the quoting of children. But Cosmic Child does more. From beginning to end it shows

that a consciousness of “unbornness” has come into its own. In this time of the Consciousness Soul and of the astral body’s transformation into Spirit Self (also called Manas)—as Steiner has named and valued the current situation—children can speak their knowledge if we listen. When grownups heed seriously as well as lovingly what small children want to tell, we can expect to hear it and adjust to its greatness as well as its charm. If we do that, we will be on the way to learning what “unbornness” has to teach and exercise our supra-sensory consciousness.

Having failed to praise, as I wanted to, the translations, including those of Elaine Maria Upton, and failed also to include an especially beautiful poem, “Angel of the Twilight” by Eve Olive herself—which ends with, “Be near me in the darkness of earth light/ Meet me in the light of heaven’s night”—I end this review with words from Steiner’s Evolution of Consciousness once more: “Understanding for the ideas of the spiritual world has to be won by our coming to know in our own being all that was forgotten on entering earthly life.” Meanwhile, Grandparents, mothers and fathers, teachers, and all people who love children, should be given Cosmic Child as a present, for reading this book will be an excellent way for adults to start retrieving the essence of the capacity that children still have. Cosmic Child announces clearly the full truth and value of both post- and pre-incarnation. Steiner summarizes both in four lines in the book at the end of the first section:

Life After Death

Life after death—

Life before birth; Only by knowing both Do we know eternity.

Eurythmy, continued from page 44

distilled into an essential and concise wisdom that only comes from years of devotion and practice—a style of writing that is both prose and poetry. As each “spiritual being” of sound is presented, we are led to understand its potent and creative origins, its intention for the human soul, and the inner feelings, colors and movements that can help us actively experience its reality. Each essay concludes by describing a culminating transformational soul response that is itself a kind of “speaking to the stars,” a path of consciousness Rudolf Steiner deemed so crucial in our age. The result is a book that is not so much to be read as to be engaged; not a book to peruse but to use. The following are three examples based upon my own active exploration of its contents:

Nature Study —I initially read this book in my garden and other venues in the High Sierra of northern California. A longtime student of nature, I was delighted to discover how every essay in Eurythmy Movements and Meditations enlivens my imagination and perception for the phenomena of Nature. For example, the towering trees above my head imbue me with the Leonine forces of “T “as the “the lightening power of the Creator” that directs “Creative Will into the core of my Being.” When I behold the buds of plants, I am moved to contemplate all that is rounded and held womb-like in the mothering forces of Virgo, the “endless mantle of maternal love.” As I encounter the reeling motions of mountain rapids and rivers, the Taurean dynamism of the Bull is revealed in the rolling sound of “R” as “the vibrant joy of movement” impelling my own soul

“beyond inertia”.

The Alchemy of Stars and Planets —Popular astrology typically offers rather wooden, inert definitions of the Stars and Planets, bypassing the alchemical processes of dynamic polarity that are at the heart of all creation. This book led me into a more living consideration of how the creative forces of the stars and planets work. For instance, the Ram (Aries) is associated with fiery intensity and bold initiative but works through the “delicate breath” of “W”—the waving forces of water and wind. On the other hand the Crab (Cancer) is related to the water element but manifests through the being of “F” a “fire of spirit” that fans the flames of creative will. Or the Lionized Leo who is exalted in an upward blaze of solar conflagration, but is grounded in the consonantal forces of “D” and “T” so that this power of Spirit lives right into the very matter of the earth.

Meditation —Perhaps the concern of any modern student pursuing a path of meditation, is how pale and stale one’s inner life can become when routines descend into ruts. The meditations and movements outlined in this book are elixirs that can reawaken and re-enliven one’s inner life. Each essay is a meditative force in its own right, enormously revivifying for the soul. Furthermore, this book has inspired me to set a kind of mood of soul before entering into any other form of meditation. For instance, I might invoke the mood of Venus, opening myself to the “ah” of wonder and making my heart a pure chalice to receive Spirit Wisdom. If I am working with a meditation that leads my soul from its inner reality to the wide world, then the Jupiter “O” might set the stage, for as Cynthia writes, “the roundness we hear

in the sound Oh embodies the circle of connection we create when we embrace the world and others in love.” If I am reading a particularly challenging lecture I might invoke the Being of “G”, to open the gate or door of the soul from its cocoon of unconsciousness into the bright, golden luminosity of insight.

Cynthia Hoven points out in the forward that her book is not intended to replace actual movement work with a trained eurythmist. However, few of us are fortunate enough to have this in-person access on a frequent basis. And even if we have had many satisfying experiences doing eurythmy at conferences, in groups or in private curative sessions we still are not likely to have pondered sufficiently with our hearts the intricate depth and limitless soul vistas that this great Logos teaching holds. As the art of Eurythmy celebrates its centennial year, I cannot think of a more appropriate gift to all of us who travel the spiritual path of anthroposophy. Eurythmy Movements and Meditations is a marvelous work at once honoring the essential wisdom of eurythmy that has flowed into the world during this past century, and all that it still has the potential to become in future centuries, if anchored ever more solidly in the creative core of each human soul.

Patricia Kaminski is Executive Director of the Flower Essence Society (www.flowersociety.org ) a worldwide collegium of practitioners devoted to the research and study of plant essences for healing. She also coordinates the development of Terra Flora, a 27 acre biodynamiccertified garden and herbal cottage industry in Nevada City, CA.

How can you join us?

The leadership of the General Anthroposophical Society has announced a program of maintenance, renewal, and empowerment for the Goetheanum building. For full details go online at: http://www.goetheanum.org/fileadmin/aag/BauspendeEN.pdf or at anthroposophy.org – short URL: http://goo.gl/EclPW or request a copy of the booklet by calling 734.662.9355 or emailing info@anthroposophy.org We are asking you to help with small or large donations depending on what you feel is possible — with one-time gifts or regularly during the construction. Every contribution helps, and as soon as possible. See the booklet also about loans.

The Goetheanum maintain renew empower

maintain:

Roof, Façade, and Terrace

With its striking forms and gleaming roof of Norwegian slate, the Goetheanum stands out in the landscape as a work of architectural art. But—like other early concrete buildings—it has been affected by the passage of time and environmental factors. Weather, structural fatigue, and moisture have made renovation unavoidable.

renew: Large Stage

During its 84 years the Goetheanum stage has made artistic history. At its center stands the development of eurythmy as a stage art, but there have also been a stream of performances including the “classics,” the works of Albert Steffen, and modern pieces. Of particular importance are the performances of Rudolf Steiner’s four Mystery Dramas and Goethe’s Faust. Basically, the stage is still as it was in 1927 … such intensive use must lead to structural fatigue.

empower:

New Spaces for the Work of the School

More rooms and meeting places are needed to empower the work of the School for Spiritual Science.

To provide this, the area with the sculpture of the Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman will be adapted for use by Goetheanum events... and further spaces will be opened up [in the upper area of] the wings on the right and left of the stage [which] are 9.90 meters high.

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