that's a bizarre way to compare and contrast them, I think.  I guess if by "destroy" you mean it in the Christian sense of "May Thy will be done"....

But, hey, these things can be defined for any convienence and I guess there can be use in setting up Anthroposophy as somehow less about destroy the individual will.  It will always just depend upon the purpose of the "definer". But have you ever hung out with a solid practicing Buddhist and a solidly practicing Anthroposophist?  That's when this kind of setting up becomes kind of acedemic.  But, hey, you are a professor!!! 

Tom,

For those of you who have seen some of my postings, I've mentioned going through a period many years ago of getting involved with multiple spiritual paths at the same time and getting burned. One of these was a Buddhist path and a very deranged one. Yet as I found my way back to spiritual health I had the good fortune of meeting some Tibetan Buddhist practioners who seemed to reallly have their feet on the ground. All the same, if I read books by Buddhist writers it puts me in a place that feels a little off balance. As a Westerner, I don't feel like it matches what I need in my life, and maybe that has something to do with what you are saying, Tom, about the negation of the will.

There are so many sub-paths of Buddhism, and I believe that there are some that have a very sophisticated view of the human being, are based on a deep and ancient wisdom and even of the human "I". The cultures of Tibet and Thailand have an incredibly rich spirituality, although I wonder if some of what Tibet is suffering has to do with holding on to a spirituality that has some rigidity. The few Tibetans I met are working hard to integrate their practice with the needs of the contemporary world.

Then there are writers like Ken Wilber. I don't know if I trust where he's coming from, but I would have to give him credit for being an incredibly subtle and deep thinker. I don't know what his practice is, and I don't know if this involves anything like the thinking I am striving to learn here, but I certainly don't see him as someone who negated his will. Or, if you've ever seen Richard Gere dance in the movie Chicago in sheer delight and flexibility, you see someone who has developed a deep spiritual life without sacrificing his personality and ability to be a fully functioning human being who can keep up with all the demands of a contemporary life.

Finally, I have the experience of an acquaintance who has become a real friend who is a follower of an Indian guru. When I first met her I thought she was insane and that her vibes would infect me, partly because I developed neuroses about the "purity" of Anthroposophy. As I've relaxed, we've had a couple of wonderful discussions about spirituality. I have to honor the deep devotion she has to her path, the incredible effort she's put in over 35 years and the way she's balanced it with her life in the world. I realize now that my fear and prejudice were distorting how I saw her.

But I do wonder if there is something limited in all of these paths. For where I'm at I am drawn to the Philosophy of Freedom. I see it as a path that really points to the future rather than to the traditional wisdsom streams of the past. I want to see what I can discover here and make real in my life. I'm hoping that if I hitch my wagon to the star of clear and living thinking as I approach middle age I can carry it with me into old age and beyond!

P.S. As for Steiner's "invented religion", I am looking forward to attending a service of the Christian Community while I'm in the L.A. area over the next three weeks. I don't know enought about it at this point to comment one way or the other.

Mark

First, I can assure you that "negating the will" (in the way it seems to be used here) is no more a part of actual Buddhism than actual Anthroposophy (PoF).  You can certainly find people within both Anthroposophy and Buddism who are working in that manner, but we can't let such folks be the defining elements of these sacred traditions.  The Dali Lama probably isn't a great example of what a human life is like when one has destroyed personal desire. 

Language is slippery and it can be very easy to simply allow different terms to throw us off.  But it's good to remember what we typically say about all the different terms that Steiner threw out during his life as a teacher.  We don't call him a liar or a man full of contradictions.  We say that his varied language reflected different cultural contexts, different purposes, different stages of his teaching and an attempt to cover issues from a wide variety of perspectives.  Just as it isn't fair to try to pin Steiner within a phrase here or there, it is equally unfair to take a phrase or perspective from one of the many Buddhist traditions and pretend that it can stand for more than a highly limited illustration. 

But like you say, at various stages of our lives we get "drawn" to this or that practice/tradition. That is wonderful. 

My experience is that Anthroposophists are still trying to figure out clear ways to talk about Anthroposophy. Therefore, I'd hold a bag of salt whenever you here one of us make clear cut comments about any other tradition.

I liked how you spoke about your friend's teacher.   It would be healing if all of us associated with Anthroposophy would happily come together and share stories about how we have acted in various phases of our childish stage of relating to Steiner's work.  What a joy that would be!!!  I've experienced that in smaller circles of Anthroposophists, but it seems that the movement, as a general whole, is still not yet aware of the nature of its clinging tendencies. 

Hey, best of luck hitching your aging wagon to good clear thinking.  In my opinion it is a wonderful thing when people take up any kind of real cognitive disapline as they move in the waning bodily phases.  Keep us posted!

Well, who does Steiner, specifically, say he is referring to...?  It's a fair question.  See, if we find quotes from Steiner lectures in which his language border's on talking about the necessity of "destroying" or overcoming or obliterating one's own personal will, we might find ourselves thinking that the quote you provide is speaking against Steiner.  I'm sure most who read Steiner lectures (and, Tom, you've always been very honest that such reading is not relavant to your pursuits) wouldn't be shocked to rather easily come up with a list of ways in which Steiner describes the esoteric disiplines with such language.  And, of course, he always speaks in other ways as well.

But who does he say he is referring to?  Well, PoF makes it fairly clear.  PoF is about welcoming the natural and utterly concrete and direct intuition that can only be re-cognized whenwe have stopped getting in our own way.  In this sense, PoF is "against" any method that involves the forceful opposition of one desire against the other.  The words "destroy his own personal will"- from the perspective of PoF- is being directed at any tendency to set up such force-based (ego dominated) practices.  Now, this goes for PoF as well.  Steiner is speaking against anybody who reads PoF in such a way as to think that there is some kind of moral ideal that is attainable if they simply learn to obliterage their lower natures/habits.

And, of course, this goes for any eastern path as well.  But, fortunately, we find brilliant teachers of eastern paths who are able to speak of the "welcoming" of our true activity as Steiner does. 

Anybody can read Steiner and make him out to seem like a harsh guy who was all about disaplining oneself to become a strong super spirit.  It's not hard to use some of Steiner's words to make him out in all sorts of less than pleasant ways.  You can do that to Buddah and any tradition.

To answer your question, Steiner was referring to anybody who is attempting to obtain Truth by forcing down certain of their intincts to obtain a mentally represented moral ideal.  Buddhists fall for that trap (even some of their most loved teachers) just as often as anthroposophists (even some of their most loved teachers). 

That's what I think, at least.  And I think it can be observed in both groups.  His quote is wonderful in how it can only really make sense within the wider teaching of PoF, which is anything but forceful.

Interesting article, I didn't read this approach on buddhism before. I believe that buddhists aim to reach the ultimate state of mind and they do that through intense meditation and by their own choice. Every religions "fights" in one way or another the animal instincts, that's something they have in common. Buddhism comes with it's own principles, with it's own churches and it's own buddha maitreya, these are some of the things that make this religion different.

When I came to visit the PoF wesbite this morning (8/6/10), I ran into a comment vector (Bothwell's 8/2/10 "Interesting article") that lead to this older discussion on Buddhism.  My own take is as follows:

Whatever Buddhism or PoF is about, in order to be discussed one must take recourse to language.   What might be our personal meaning in or through which we grasp experience, in the end we can't write or speak about without using words.

For example, in Choygam Trungpa's (a Tibetan Lama) book: "Meditation in Action" he speaks as follows, in the section on Gautama Buddha's path (The Life and Example of Buddha), "Buddha discovered that there is no such thing as "I", ego.  Perhaps one should say there is not such thing as "am", "I am"."  Then in the section called: Transmission, Trungpa writes about the function of the Guru, which is to create a certain "situation" and which some might call "the awakened state of mind", such that the following experience is had at the "moment" of transmission between the Guru and the pupil: "But somehow the actual moment is very simple, very direct.  It is merely the meeting of two minds.  Two minds become one."

In Buddhism there is something called "mindfulness meditation".  One can read a very cogent description of this activity in the appendix to Catherine MacCoun's book "On Becoming an Alchemist" (she is a student of Trungpa's, - but in this book she has sought to unite what she calls Christian Alchemy with Tibetan Alchemy.   In mindfulness meditation one's attention is on the breath, and the thought life is let go of - the thought life becomes secondary to the direct experience of Being at rest.

Tomberg, in his "Meditations on the Tarot", points out that there is a radical difference between pure Being, and pure Essence, and that the goal of the esoterics of the Cultural East, which is a seeking after a condition of pure being within Being, is not the goal of the esoterics of the Cultural West - which is the Intuitive meeting (one within the other One) of our personal essence with the archetype of Essence.   There is in the latter no unification such that the I of the student cease to be of value, but rather this I is necessary in the meeting with the Archetype of the I.  If being meets and join Being, then we can have Compassion, but only if essence meets Essense can we experience Love.   There is no Love unless there is a Lover, and Beloved and the Love that is between them.

That we are forced to use the word "I" or "I am", for both essence and Essence from a certain point of view, does not mean there is an identity.  Each "I" or "I am" is unique - individual.  Patrick Dixon, in his remarkable "America: the Central Motif" writes: "For this 'all seeing eye' to become an all being I' it must set into the darkest, most separate place, die to itself as the seed in the soil, give itself to the deepest purpose of all, then by a mysterious alchemy, the Will of all shall surrender to the one, and there shall arise a type of human being who will perceive the Universe as being an Individual while they and other human beings are experienced as being universes within themselves." (for the whole wonderful essay, go to the appendix of my book American Anthroposophy http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/AmericanAnthroposophy.html

It has been a puzzle for me to understand how this difference arose between Depth Buddhism and Depth Christianity, but in the last couple of years I have been intimate friends with a Vedantist (who is also, oddly enough, also a Christian.   She has many books and many friends concerning the teachings of the Cultural East, and what I eventually discovered is as follows.

The teachings of the Cultural East, even Buddhism, were by necessity transmitted in part by language (the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Heart Sutra, etc.).  Wrapped up in the language of these very ancient cultures is ancient meaning - meaning connected to the cultural memory of time when we were united with the spirit (Steiner's "ancient clairvoyance", Barfield's "original participation").  Included in the meaning of the term or idea that gets translated as "ego", when put into Western languages, is this memory of the nature of the ego during the time of prior unity within the All.  When Eastern teachers teach about the ego, their "tradition" limits the meaning they can give to the idea or term ego, in such a way that we in the West do not mean the same thing when we use that term.

All the same, our idea of ego can be polluted by the Cultural East's assumptions as to the deep nature of the "I".  Many people in the West end up using terms that can't actually teach the truth here, as the cultrual heritage of the East also does not contain the idea of "the evolution of consciousness".    The idea of the "I" in the East is not modern, or scientific - it is "traditional".  This traditional meaning determines the experience of the Guru - that is, to borrow from PoF: the Guru is captured by the idea, and comes to be in bondage to it (see the original preface, the last sentence).  Students of Living Thinking would also call this the pre-throught thought.

When we meet experience, we can bring an altready acquired thought to the experience, or we can have the experience first, and derive the thought then from the experience itself.  Thinking, in PoF, is trained to do the latter - and this includes experiences of ideas or concepts as separate from the experiencing "I".  The Buddhist in mindfulness meditation abandons "thinking" to live only in "being".   The student of PoF lives fully in "thinking" in order to discover its present day reality.

During the evolution of consciousness "thinking" became something different than it was in the ancient past.  In point of fact, it wasn't until the Incarnation that thinking fully became possible for human beings in the form we can now apply it.  The same is true (and these are directly related to each other) of the ego.   Christ, as Creator, has evolved the "I" itself.  The ego that Eastern Cultural traditions remember is not the present ego that humanity currently possesses.  At present, Buddhism is a luciferic pollution of the needed ideas of the meaning of the "I" or "ego", and works against the incarnation of Anthroposohy, which is a modern Path to the unfolding of the true nature of the "I".

One of the curious things to my experience is that many Buddhist students have a healthy instinct for the new potential of thinking, and the only difference is not so much the true nature of the mind of present day human beings, but the conceptual pollution of the meaning of the experience of the "I".   The Buddhist is taught to turn away from this in his meditative life, but in his practical life he will use the real nature of thinking.  This is why when Buddhists and Anthroposophists are together, there seems to be so much in common in "behavior".  Inwardly, however, a Real Anthroposophist can go places a Buddhist cannot, because we have a different conceptual background as regards the "meaning" of thinking.

The world of thoughts, ignored in mindfulness meditation, is for the Real Anthroposophist a field of activity, in which the "I" is an artist.  We sculpt thought - we spiritualize it.  What this brings about is discussed by Tomberg in his Early Writings, as follows: "Today, when many writings on occult themes bring much knowledge to men, it is necessary that every European who has an interest for true spiritual life should carefully consided the choice between the ideals of Indian Yoga and the ideals of the more deeply penetrating Christian spiritual direction - between "self-liberation" and " Washing of the Feet".

The impulse to Anthroposophy then consists of coming awake to the real nature of thinking, and the capacity then arrises in the human being to consciously sculpt thought (the Living Thinking) in such a way that all human "knowledge" becomes open to being "spiritualized" through the moral gesture arrived at by moral imaginaiton when it asks of the I itself what is the right thing to do with the New (or metamorphized) Thinking Mystery.

Buddhism has yet no conception of this potential of the "I" in thinking, or the role this thinking can play in the future evolution of humanity.  All the same there is one curious development that should not go un-noticed.

The original goal of Buddhism was to achieve the state of Nirvana, and to leave behind thereby the Wheel of Existence (karma and reincarnation).   This the Buddha achieved.  However, Steiner has pointed out that when the Incarnation was in process, even though Gautama Buddha was not incarnate, he participated in this event.   Living Thinking (or clair-thinking) comes to realize that Gautama Buddha changed his "point of view" due to his experience of Christ's Sacrifice during the Incarnation.   As a consequence, and due to the fact that Buddhist saints could commune with the excarnate Buddha, there arose following the Incarnation, what is called "the bodhisattva vow".   This "vow" is that the student of Buddhism, even if he reaches the state of Enlightenment, and thus becomes capable of leaving the Wheel of Life, nevertheless such a student of Buddhism chooses to sacrifice this potential and to remain on the Wheel of Life until all sentient beings can become enlightened.

This shows that Buddhism is evolving, and even today one can find a few Buddhist teachers stretching the "meaning' of the teachings in the direction of making them compatable with Depth Christianity.  Anthroposophy and modern (less traditional) teachers of Buddhism have a lot to say to each other.  Unfortunately, the Society does not appreciate these matters yet, having lost the connection to PoF and the scientific impulse it fosters.

Something important can happen if people take up PoF in the right way, - something very important for all of humanity.  This something is not exactly predictable, however, for those who succeed at PoF nevertheless remain Free.