I personally have experienced many personal gains in the study of The Philosophy of Freedom in an increased intuitive capacity and the ability to create inspired moral imaginations to drive my practical life. I also recognize that anthroposophical community based on these principles can transform the world.

While the world continues repeating past mistakes a person naturally would like others to experience the benefits of the book. That would be the only motivation I had for this website. The next question is how to draw interest to the book that has been ignored or found to be of little value. After many attempts I am still stumped by this question.

Between The Philosophy of Freedom and Steiner's writings on community building you have all you need for a movement that can transform the world. The Anthroposophical Society abandoned this task instead choosing a multiple-guru based authoritarian approach which is obvious to anyone who has studied what anthroposophical community really is. There institutionalized top down rejection of any attempts at reform indicate they will not likely ever change  (see Awakening To Community lecture 6). If I could find a community that was striving for the freedom Steiner taught I would join it and put all my effort into supporting that.

This website has made a good first impression on viewers but hasn't contained anything to maintain public interest except for a handful of people with assorted motives. So I am lost at this moment as to what the point of this website is and would be pleased if someone were able to find one or set a new course.

Tom,

Before dismissing it out of hand, I think you need to look at the problems that the anthroposophical Center has. They are responsible for maintaining the material forms left in the world by Rudolf Steiner, including the Goetheanum and the Waldorf Schools, together with the spiritual indications and forms that came directly from him. This maintenance takes a tremendous amount of capital, both financial and human. Certain laws have to be obeyed, such as the laws of rent and of supply and demand. There are other, spiritual laws that also have to be obeyed if you're going to try to administer something like worldwide anthroposophy.

People materially committed to anthroposophy, with their livelihoods depending on it, just don't have the kind of freedom that a peripheral reader of PoF, with no other institutional or material commitments has. An authoritarian arrangement is the only practical way to organize anthroposophy given the realities of the current epoch.

It follows, I think, that the purpose of this website is to organize an approach to anthroposophy that the hierarchy in the Center just can't accomplish. It's to begin to produce some movement at the Periphery. Once the Center recognizes a movement at the Periphery, it will try to link with it.

The way to produce movement at the Periphery is to work out or begin the agreements necessary for anthroposophical conversation. Conversation, after all, is the unit of all society. If we can get a scientific handle on this basic unit, a great deal of social power will follow.

Another way to produce movement at the Periphery is by approaching the Center and asking it for explicit participation here. What this website needs are posts from the anthroposophical Center. We need to get Helen Lubin and Patrick Wakeford-Evans in Sacramento, for example, to participate here. But they won't do this if they detect a negative attitude toward them coming from someone in your position.

We need the Center, and we need to reach out to it.

If we can get our act together here, the Center may see that it likewise needs us.

Hi all,

I think the thorny problem being circled around here is the element of freedom.  After all this website has "freedom" in its URL, so even at that level if Tom were to sell the URL to someone else tomorrow and turn off his servers whoever inherited that would probably feel some obligation to encourage an understanding of freedom even if they no longer referred to Steiner's book.

So our starting point seems to be the website www.philosophyoffreedom.com.  What drew me to it in the first place was the fact that it was dedicated to study of Steiner's central philosophical work.  That is because I was lucky enough to find the book at a turning point in my life and work through it multiple times on my own.  Finding this website fifteen or so years after that was an opportunity for me to reenliven that experience in a different way.

Then what kept me here? 

Three things - firstly and most importantly that I could share thoughts, feelings and experiences related to the book here, my own and those of others and thus increase and deepen and challenge my own understanding of the book. 

Secondly, that Tom invited me to be a "featured writer".  But his invitation to me to commit to this made it clear to me that I could renege on this commitment at any time with no ill will on his part.  And I still have an outstanding commitment to moderate a discussion group here which I have yet to bring to fruition but still intend to very shortly.

Thirdly, that this is a community of people who have an interest in Steiner's work more generally but are not as a rule subject to what I call "anthromentalism" which I define as the tendency to take Steiner's words as gospel and/or rigidify social structures and thought forms arising from what he did in the early decades of last century.

Now to more personal reflections simply because I hope they may help in this discussion.  As I have mentioned before, I am a member of the Christian Community here in Canberra, have been since 1996 or so.  I experience a similar commitment to freedom there as is manifested on this website.

Now it seems there is a paradox or contradiction in my experience that freedom is encouraged in our Christian Community - after all, our sacraments are very formed, the words were given through Rudolf Steiner all those years ago in German, we have a Creed, ordained priests and a church hierarchy (though that is a rather flat hierarchy compared to some churches...).

But the freedom I find is not in the adherence to forms, rather it is in the respect for the individual - individuals come to the Christian Community freely because they see something in the Sacraments.  They may then freely commit to become members arising from their experiences also.  But equally they may come a few times and decide it's not for them, that is acceptable also. 

Part of the art our priest here has to practice is treading the fine line between caring for community members and controlling them - does she call up someone who attended one service and never attended again or not?  And if so, why?  And the same for other Community members, we shouldn't leave everything for the priest to do!  There are no rules here, where the freedom of the individual is and must be paramount.  But there is commitment, despite the fact that people move on, don't have enough time, have other priorities in different periods of their life, etc. etc.  The Community has a life of its own that is self-sustaining despite appearances to the contrary sometimes.

At no stage are members asked to adhere to any form of dogma, prescribed morality, political orientation or similar.  Those elements are still present as they are in any social grouping but they are not elevated to divine status within the organisation.  The Creed is given for the contemplation of members, not for their unwavering commitment to belief in it regardless of their own feelings and beliefs.

So enough digression, what relevance has this to the Philosophy of Freedom website?  I can see for example that Tom has very kindly not pushed the financial aspect at all - I see no popups, website sponsors or benefits for subscribers who either pay an annual amount or get added to some kind of "spam" list.  Neither is there an online bookshop, link to Amazon or anything like that.  I recall there used to be a link to donate to the website but Tom seems to have removed that - Tom can you comment on that?

These are all examples of ways that other websites maintain their being in our global economy.  A very real danger I think is that pushing the economic barrow becomes an end in itself and the real spiritual striving encouraged by the website in its current form could become obscured.  So I personally appreciate that Tom does not take that path.

But then if this website is valuable, does it have a life beyond Tom?  If it is to be sustained how is that to be?  Is it just to remain a website with a broader group of committed people maintaining it and contributing to it as per Tom's vision of the Staff Group?  Does it have a life outside the Internet as people have suggested in various ways?

Economically the principle that our Community here espouses is that "the Christian Community has no other source of income than your freely given contributions".  I've spoken of some of our work in that area elsewhere on this website.  I am wondering if a level of sponsorship and appeal for support as is found, for example, on the Rudolf Steiner Archive site might be adopted on this website?  I don't find the approach of that website overbearing and I really value that website greatly and its purpose seems very simple - making the works of Rudolf Steiner available to the widest possible audience.

Now, many people here seem to be expressing a desire to establish a real community based on something like what PoF sets forth so clearly.  This I believe would have to be a community of free individuals.  There also seems to be a desire that this find expression outside the Internet.  For example, the study groups in California Tom and others have started - I'm not sure how those are going?  And do people feel that our online community here constitutes the core of such a community or not?  If not how could the core of such a community be created?

Finally, the idea that PoF is a difficult book that many of us have nevertheless found valuable and lifechanging.  How can this enduring value of PoF be made accessible to a wider audience?

I don't have answers, only questions but I think that's OK at the moment!  My thoughts above are quite enough of a challenge for me to reflect on for the moment for a start - what is my commitment to the core values of this site, for a start?

Lastly I would encourage patience and persistence most of all - Tom your website is full of fantastic initiatives like the use of sound and video, pictures etc.  The history of human striving again and again teaches us that patient persistence is required to reach our goals, what is meant to happen will happen.  I am sure the right form will evolve and I wouldn't despair - perhaps something that has already started on this website will suddenly lead to the hoped-for breakthrough, whatever people believe that may be - just give it time!

I would just say this:

The website will have to have a space for geeks to explore their own idiosyncratic questions and concerns. That is just a given. We don't ever want to control who gets excited about having a conversation on the site and we don't ever want to even hint at suggesting that somebody may be excited in the wrong way. It would be embarrasingly awful if people came here only to find that they needed to learn how to talk or think in a new way.

But there lies the rub; there will always be people on a site like this hashing out their interpretations of not only Steiner's text but basic human experiences. This is good and healthy and can be done with healthy communcation.

But what about growing the site?

I think there would have to be a fundamental shift in what new people experience as the "center" of the site. I've emailed you about this before, Tom, but now that it's an open topic, I'll just say a little.

I can imagine a site that attracts people interested in Waldorf or alternative healing or new ecological ideas. I can imagine them coming to the website and immediately reading a brief statement tying PoF to a wide range of social impulses (not explictely via waldorf, biodynamic and threefolding; those would have to be off in the wings). The people would be captured by the direct call for individual experience. They would read enough to see that this site assumes that they already are living with rich intuitions that only they can explore and develop.

They would not come to this site and get excited because they've found yet ANOTHER ANWSER. No, they would have the strong sense that this site is highly interested in the jumbled knowings that already live, unexplored, inside their bodies.

There would be some way that people could immediately connect with each on various topics. But more than that; they would instantly have an opportunity to play with stating their passion in new ways. These new sharing would be treated with HUGE respect. Jeff and Carl and Joel wouldn't come in and try to relatet these sharings to their various projects and essays. Nope. That could happen in a OTHER part of the site.

When people first come and begin to excitedly explore/play with their intutions, they would be met with curiousity and questions. They would be drawn out by geniune interest in their own mystery. In this way, the "center" of the site would be pooling creative/playful conversations in which people step to their own edge safely and see that there is a wider community that has no interest in putting PoF in their hands or teaching them that there really are not percepts or teaching them how to talk. It would be active listening.

Other conversations (like the ones we have) would continue on the sides. Many people would jump right into those and get into that.

But the center would be generative. In my opinion, there would be NO hope if the "center" explicitly tied itself to PoF as text. PoF needs to be a powerful footnote that many people will wish to explore, but it can't be that people come here and their rich set of unexplored intuitions are met with a block of information (especially when that block of information is coming from a bunch of enthusiastic freaks who insist that a certain book needs to be read in order to take the next step in their evolution). I love the book. I'm still inside the book...but I'm also aware of the limitation that arises when content is placed before process.

People will come here and fall in love with the

S P A C E......they feel and recognize is being provided.

I don't have hope for a site that tries to do it from an alligence to text. At best, it might become a place where folks who already have enjoyable associations with Steiner will mingle. That would be great in and of itself. But my sense is that Tom wants something much more than a healthy PoF club.

It's late....my comments are not meant to imply that something is wrong with the way it is; as many of you know, I very much enjoy jumping into conversations and journaling outloud. I'd be find with just that. It fits into all my other life activities in a way that is managable. But, that said: I'm not opposed to the site taking on various new forms and shapes. If it is to become an actual expression of PoF, I simply think it needs to have a living center that has pure faith in what is already alive and free in anybody who comes to the site. I think they need to feel that recognition in a living, bodily, concrete way. Much would depend on what they encounter in that first chunk of reading....and doing.....

Jeff

just to keep you informed... I am inviting folk to the eurythmy group.

I have just uploaded some new pages to DISCOVER EURYTHMY www.eurythmy.org.uk and have taken the liberty of linking them directly to Journal topics mirrored in the group. An article publicising the the group will hopefully appear in the UK newsletter for eurythmists in the coming month or so. 

By increasing the number of links to PoF the ranking on Google will be positively improved. I repeat a plea to others with their own sites to add links to PoF. Tell others who have related sites too! It is free and it creates open paths for seekers.

Incidentally, I am amazed and delighted by the upsurge of synchronicity across the site recently. Something is happening!

There are lots of new links today Tom - why not save promoting some to the front page until later in the week when the source slows down?