In a recent post on another thread, I said,

“If we work with memory and its extensions rightly in functioning communities, preferably those built around a Farm and a School, I think we'll get physical places and spaces where that cosmic memory is available for people to walk into, imagine and learn from. Ultimately, those places and spaces will materialize into a City of light and color, form and substance.”

What I’m saying here is that because all people want some kind of Ideal World for themselves, and because that World is really inside people’s minds and imaginations, that World will come eventually into a physical existence in space and time. This coming about will be as lawlike and predictable as the falling to earth of a stone or the induction of an electric current in a wire moving through a magnetic field.

Kant is important in this respect because his object is to make metaphysics, the domain of all Ideal Worlds, into a science. His claim appears to be that human experience, when it is focused and trained in the right way on certain concepts, is a law of nature. “The highest legislation of nature must lie in ourselves,” and “the principles of experience are the very laws of nature.” I believe that focus and entrainment, generally speaking, is spiritual meditation, whatever that is, and that the legislation of nature in ourselves will be a new form of language and conversation based in a species of meditation. Out of this, new natural laws will be discovered by science, and the outer world will be transformed in a positive way according to those laws.

Rudolf Steiner, who saw into this process more deeply and more explicitly than anyone I am aware of, was concerned above all to come to terms with Kant. The Philosophy of Freedom, which is a confrontation with the Kantian position on science, metaphysics, spontaneity, law, rationality and determinism, is fundamentally about this basic Idealist trajectory in the mind we all are aware of and to which we all respond at a fundamental level. I believe if we can get the principles of contemplative conversation right, we will move ourselves and our world simultaneously in the direction of Kant’s scientific metaphysics and Steiner’s anthroposophy.