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Research not Revelation

from being human (Evolving News) 2010-02

by Anthroposophical Society in America

from being human (Evolving News) 2010-02, page 46

Article from: being human (Evolving News) 2010-02

Joan Treadaway of Arizona

by the editor, John Beck

The following introduced a special 2010 research issue of being human magazine’s predecessor “Evolving News”.

Research! A word that is so strongly associated with natural science for the last several centuries, and secondly with the new fields, the humanities, the human sciences, which blossomed as disciplines in the 19th century.

Research is also at the heart of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. But anthroposophy does not see limits where natural science has placed them. It takes those limits as demands for enhancing human capacities. Our sophisticated mechanical instruments provide wonderful data, but first and last anthroposophy looks to disciplined human observation, imagination, inspiration, intuition. So it charts new paths in research in many directions, making much of very limited resources.

And despite the impression that anthroposophy all comes from Rudolf Steiner himself, we find both outstanding predecessors to whom he pointed, as well as a remarkable number of capable individuals and groups carrying on where Steiner left off. As detailed on subsequent pages, research generally begins in self-examination and meditation. It then evolves either in conversational settings like study groups and branches of the Anthroposophical Society, or in the very conscious activity of initiatives like Waldorf schools, biodynamic farms, Camphill villages, medical and therapeutic practices, social finance organizations, and countless artistic and community undertakings. And ideally it finds its way then into the work of sections of the School of Spiritual Science, an institution Rudolf Steiner created in 1924 for this purpose. For over two decades the school has had a unifying collegium in North America, and the good effects of this collaboration are being felt even with shoestring budgets.

Only a few segments of the range of anthroposophical research are represented in this one issue, but we hope it will allow you to begin to imagine the true scope of Rudolf Steiner’s intentions for anthroposophy: that it should seed the culture of our times with an abundance of living and healing impulses and thereby renew the consciousness of our humanity.

Anthroposophy as developed by Rudolf Steiner a century ago is distinguished by truly holistic breadth and by commitment to a path of objective, scientific research. It does not accept the so-called “limits to knowledge” which still mark off the boundaries of modern natural science— specifically the limits to our understanding of “matter” and “consciousness.” These are not real, unsurpassable limits, Steiner insisted, but stage-markers in human development which are calling for new techniques based in the cultivation of the potentials of human consciousness.

Rudolf Steiner’s own life path is filled with new approaches and new beginnings in the search for real knowledge and experience. Gifted in childhood with what Hollywood has popularized as the ability to “see dead people,” Steiner turned away from this spontaneous gift and sought to find a path to the same and further experiences by methods appropriate to the Western scientific tradition. An early discovery was that the true contemplation of geometric forms involves a “sense-free thinking.” Lines without width and planes without depth, the stuff of geometry, are no more perceptible to the physical senses, and no more materially real, than human beings who have left their bodies at death; but they can be known in contemplation. Steiner continued with intensive studies in Vienna which for its time would equate to a course at MIT or Cal Tech today. He learned to review the most uncongenial and dogmatic lectures over and over again— backwards. In that way he discovered how their hidden logical failures could unlock more living insights.

In the years before 1900 Steiner explored many paths: psychological phenomenology (which became essential to 20th century philosophy); the dynamic morphological and evolutionary science of Goethe (still slowly being recognized as fundamental to true ecological and life sciences); the esoteric wisdom of a “simple” folk herbalist; and the popular occult spiritualistic streams like Freemasonry and Theosophy. He engaged the most serious scientific research of a triumphant time which had unlocked the vast force fields of electromagnetism, unrolled the time dimension of life in biological evolution, and opened the doors of the unconscious mind. He also immersed himself in the arts and humanities, and in the intense social questions arising at the end of aristocracy. Most importantly, however, he was developing capacities for introspection, meditation, and contemplation, until he arrived at the little understood point of “initiation.”

As he described it just short of a century ago, “We must gradually accustom ourselves to the necessity of submitting our ideas, concepts and modes of thought to a certain change before we are able to form correct ideas of the higher worlds beyond the senses.... Anyone really pursuing the practical path into the worlds opened by initiation, anyone having actual experience of life beyond the sense world, knows well that one must not only transform many things in oneself...but also lay aside many habits, representations, and concepts before one can enter the higher worlds.” (Lecture of August 27, 1912)

Research and personal growth

So the path of anthroposophical research is at the same time a process of personal growth and transformation. And everyone who undertakes this challenge is immediately faced with the rather overwhelming abilities and accomplishments of Rudolf Steiner himself. How could he know so much, critics ask, and why has he had no equals? The first question can be met by pointing to persons of unique gifts in many fields. For the second, the answer lies in human evolution itself, the evolution of consciousness which is both an individual matter and an aspect of the life of humanity. There are many researchers following Steiner, but anthroposophy recognized that we are all becoming, never finished. And so the very most essential requirement for this path of research may simply be humility. In T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “Humility is endless.” Submitting ourselves to humility’s power, we become capable of attempting whatever needs doing.

The following pages, then, offer some aspects of the present work of research among anthroposophists today. What we do not capture at all in this first look is the working of the three emerging higher senses for which Rudolf Steiner used the names Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. He meant them in a specially disciplined and intensified form, but imaginations and inspirations and intuitions such as we all have give us a clue: private, intimate moments of wonder, fresh perception, insight, realization. Experiences of that sort are contemplated and then perhaps taken into the conversations of study groups and branches, into the teachers’ circles of schools and the life of all kinds of initiatives. With special intention they are also shared in the work of the sections of the School for Spiritual Science, established by Rudolf Steiner in the last months of his life.

And so what is won individually and humbly is shared, heard, pondered; and it becomes, in Michael Howard’s phrase in an article we will publish in the next issue, vital threads in a living fabric. — The Editor