Jeffrey has asked me about ideals so I am writing contemplatively to find out what is knowable. This journal journey is a walk in progress, footprints tracing exploration. It certainly has a destination in the region of the ideal. I do not recognise it yet.

PoF (MW, p87) A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.

 

I am grateful to Sebastian for raising this quote from the pages of the Michael Wilson translation. Only if an idea has lived truly in thinking can it be laid with confidence into a book. I have fallen so in love with the idea of walking as thinker through a rich afforested region of the ideal, that the time has come to give up the 20-trees-a-day habit. The region grows its own way and I am trying to surrender that wooden imagination. 

 

Ideal purpose is not a finite aim. Ideals are not just goals to be attained by force of will. A goal is a net for a football and not a place to set up shop. Ideals are not merely moving targets that skip to the mountainous horizon like some capricious goat. Ideals point with the integrity of the unicorn to an infinite capacity for creative evolution. One of the greatest of our ideals is Spirit Everyman – Geistes Mensch – the archetype of the freely human individual. Perhaps it would rather be called Free-Spirited Human.

 

A concept may represent an ideal. It informs the child that is born as percept of an archetype. Our recently excavated percepts of dinosaurs are leading us towards concepts that have feathers, according to a recent newspaper report. Concepts that speak to us of spiritual ideals will grow wings for our souls. The region of the ideal is the habitat of archetypes. There they may live and grow as long as they are not dragged down to earth by materialistic thinkers that wrench the leaves from spirit trees as they amble past. It is an unconscious habit that is hard to give up!

 

An archetype is a spirit that may or may not have entered temporal existence in earthly life. This may not involve physical manifestation. Equality is an example of a non-physical manifestation of an evolving archetype. An ideal has archetypal capacity for further fulfilment and realisation.  It is an evolving being that maintains its integrity in its inner promise. Ideals are active guardians of intention who offer direction, with or without an already carved out karmic path. 

 

Daisy Aldan has written: Every morning begin anew to carve in granite the Resurrected God. I apologise for my inability to preserve the elegant layout of this poem online. My anthroposophical commitment is a striving to incarnate ideals to the fullest measure of my changing karmic capacity to perceive and act. This may be summarised as: Thy Kingdom come. The anthroposophical and Rosicrucian gesture of human striving is to make straight the way, to create earthly capacity to embody Free-Spirited Human Ideals that they may participate fully in the course of evolution. It may be said that I become my ideals and I have been my convictions. The convictions that have been are not the ideals that are to come. Freedom calls me to walk ever further, and the ability and motive to carve are ever dying and ever newly reborn.

 

Many years ago I was given a snippet of poetry, author unknown. To enter common mind, substitute ideals in the place of birds. I quote from memory:

 

 

An ideal that is snared may become a conviction. The position of being convinced is a temporal footprint in the healthy mind. Convictions that become rigidified into dead concepts incarcerate and bind our capacity for loving action until we can escape from such restraining karma. Steiner has pointed out that an idea that is not ever and again lifted up to the region of the ideal becomes burdensome. Such dead weight may further crystallise into unconscious assumption and possibly insidious dogma. Dogmas are the dinosaurs of human evolution. Let us not fear the potential fanaticism of dogmasaurus who substantiates the Lower Guardian. Securely chained dogmatic convictions may lead to life imprisonment, living death for any one of us who is absolutely sure. Let us tame dogmasaurus with loving understanding through spirit-remembering and heeding the true teaching hidden in its origins, and thus free it for good future work. We can lay all our certainties into the testing and transforming embrace of the Soul of the Earth where ever renewing life in common will ultimately reunite truth with truth, reality with ideal. 

 

Reflections please?