Patri's journal

Awakening to Community Redux

Submitted by Patri on Wed, 07/09/2008 - 9:46am.

From: Awakening to Community” Rudolf Steiner, Lecture IV of X:

For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit is an outgrowth of pain and suffering. It is perhaps just those individuals with the deepest sense of the Society's mission who have to have the most personal experience of pain and suffering as they take on that mission, though it is also true that real human strength can only be developed by rising above suffering and making it a living force, the source of one's power to overcome. Para 13.

The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.” Para 14.

A theoretical or doctrinaire approach is therefore out of place in this situation. What those who want to help foster anthroposophical life need instead is loving hearts and eyes opened to the totality of that life. This is a capacity one must work to develop. Otherwise, the right heart and feeling are missing in one's relation to anthroposophy, with the result that though one may scorn and look down upon doctrines and theories in other spheres of life, one's efforts to foster anthroposophical life cannot help becoming doctrinaire. This does serious damage to a thing as alive as an Anthroposophical Society ought to be. Para 17.

These are a very worthwhile group of lectures to read. Especially for those looking to build a larger and stronger anthroposophical movement in our world, as these lectures were given after the burning of the first Goetheanum and before the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society at Christmas 1923 and New Year 1924. All of us truly interested in seeing Steiner's concerned gift flowing out into the larger world, should read these series of lectures. Herein Rudolf Steiner calls for a "searching of conscience." He explains that in anthroposophical communities we can experience our first awakening to the spirit in our encounters with others, and describes how the "reversed cultus" (returning to Spirit in community) forms the foundation for a new community life.

Best regards to all,
Patri

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Love and Divine Grace in The Philosophy of Freedom

Submitted by Patri on Thu, 07/03/2008 - 9:23pm.

If Rudolf Steiner considered the purpose of human evolution to be the development of the mutually interdependent qualities of love and freedom, and expressed love as the “moral” sun of the world (“Love and It’s Meaning in the World,” lecture of RS, 17^th Dec. 1912),[1] how does this apply to his “The Philosophy of Freedom”?

Without the presence of love, can there be real freedom? If we divide the world into those we love and those we don’t love, and perhaps even allow ourselves to indulge in hate of the other, can there be real freedom for us in our own individuality? It is so easy to dismiss the other if they do not conform to our own view of the world, but does that kind of emotional antipathy allow us to achieve the real freedom that is spoken to in Rudolf Steiner’s “Philosophy of Freedom”? How do we understand what we view as wrong, or perhaps even evil, in the other, without indulging in the ugliness of hate within ourselves?

Our sympathies and antipathies say a lot about who we are as human beings. A lot of what we feel antipathetic about that we think we see in the other, may actually live within our self, the part of our self that we do not like, or have not overcome through meditation and understanding. Steiner shares that a Spiritual Science without love would be a danger for humanity. He speaks of a deed being free when we act in freedom out of pure love for the deed, and he speaks to “ethical intuitions” as that intuition that arises in our own soul through love.

In the Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner states:

”To live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other person's will, is the fundamental maxim of free men.” (chapter 9).[2] My favorite translation of this is:

“To live with love for the deed, and to let live in understanding the will of the other, is the fundamental attitude of the free human being.”

“While I am performing the action I am influenced by a moral maxim in so far as it can live in me intuitively; it is bound up with my love for the objective that I want to realize through my action. My action will be “good” if my intuition, steeped in love, finds its right place within the intuitively experienceable world continuum" (chapter 9). Does not our pure love for the deed come from our ethical intuitions warmed by love.

As anthroposophists or friends of spiritual science, holding in our hearts the support for PoF, do we not need to be careful that we not become bitter if things are not as we think they should be, which could be a sad story that may have nothing to do with esoteric striving and everything to do with achieving status. Is it not possible to express our disagreement with the other and still hold the other in respect and freedom. The grace of the Philosophy of Freedom resides in our understanding ourselves in truth that we may live in forgiveness and give the respect to the other that we would wish for our self.

“Ethical individualism builds on the foundation of man’s attainment of freedom as he transforms ordinary thinking into what The Philosophy of Freedom calls pure thinking, a thinking that lifts itself into the spiritual world and brings to birth from union with it impulses to moral action. It does this by spiritualizing the love impulse otherwise bound up with man’s physical body. In that moral ideals are drawn from the spiritual world by moral fantasy, they lead to acts as vital as their origin, becoming the energy of spiritual love.”

- The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1932.

The Philosophy of Freedom is not only the primal source of a new thinking, but of a new willing, issuing from that new thought. This gives rise to a willing that is love as well. Ethical individualism thus becomes the foundation of true social action.
- Otto Palmer.

Best regards to all,

Patri