It has always been easy for myself to sit down and imagine for myself how the outer world could be better, whether on a global scale or in my own life. The imagination I produce is easy, but problems come up in it's implementation into the world. Often I look back after a disastrous attempt to change a life situation, and realize my plan was doomed from the start. That was because I did not understand the existing situation well enough to properly implement anything.

Iraq is a great example of young Republican idealists who were put in charge having a "magnificent thought-picture of the world, without any content of experience." If you add the "absolute idealism" of George W. Bush's Christian fundamentalism and ignore those who do have experience in that region of the world to the mix, you have a guaranteed disaster.

My life experience teaches me to examine my idealistic imaginations with a critical eye in regards to the possibility of implementation. But it was only because I was naive in my youth that I started a business knowing nothing about the field, but figured it out along the way and made a 30 year career out of it.

You find the extreme spiritualists on the fringes of society holding onto Utopian visions with no chance of happening. I do often find them inspiring though. Being closer to the pure ideal without worldly compromise, they have a power of conviction and confidence of purpose about them. But to remain in this one-sided state not much changes, or things may even get worse, as happened when the uncompromising Ralph Nader refused to drop out of the presidential race causing the election of those controlled by the corporations he so opposed.

Imaginations need to remain true to their ideal impulse but creatively molded to have a chance at implementation. This takes creative thinking where high ideals mingle with existing facts and knowledge of the world. As section 2-3 says, you can't argue away the outer world.

In the previous section 2-2 a conflict occurs by the one-sided spiritualist who finds spiritualistic theory cannot cope with the world of the senses. Considering ourselves solely as spiritual beings can lead to a renunciation of the world and isolation from its sensual temptations.

Next, in 2-3 the extreme spiritualist finds a way to deal with the external world while maintaining independence from it by projecting onto it the ego's own imaginary world structure. Facts are not allowed to get in the way. This is a way to feel the power of the absolute certainty of our own thinking without having to struggle with the gap between our thoughts and facts on the ground. This abstract projection is sustained solely through the power of the ego and maintaining a one-sidedness ignoring life experience. This sets up a conflict with facts. World facts need to be suppressed to maintain the imagination. On the other hand real innovation may require this ignoring of what others have done if something new is to be advanced.

It takes imagination to implement our ideals into the world. If this imagination is constructed in a one-sided idealistic way it may not be helpful. This comes up with working with my teenage son. After constructing a plan for him it usually quickly vaporizes in discussion as being disconnected to his own thoughts and feelings.

Leaders exhibiting this independent powerful certainty can attract follows who are looking for answers. It is always amazing how even the most ridiculous imaginations somehow can find a large group of ready believers if it promises a solution to the painful separation between "I" and world.

This relates to the controversy with the Anthroposophical Society. Has it become a rigid and fixed institution projecting an old form that suppresses the free exchange of ideas from the members or is it upholding its intended role? Both sides hold their vision of how to operate. The facts from my experience indicate a poor job being done advancing anthroposophy with many members feeling disconnected according to my unscientific survey. For myself, I think a new organization is needed built upon the principles of individualism rather then authority. Built on the principles of The Philosophy of Freedom.

I must be an idealist in my approach to The Philosophy of Freedom because when studying I look for an idea to give the reading meaning. There is an idealistic progressive tendency at work because with each new reading I look for a new idea to learn something each time. In parts of Chapter 1 I have spent years contemplating some of the same sentences, hundreds of times, and still find new ideas that give meaning. This makes me think that there must be no limit to gaining further insights. All ideas have a connection with all other ideas so the idea world to explore is endless.

This must be one reason why the unfoldment of ideas through thinking can be so bewitching. It is drinking from a well that never drys up, an eternal spring that "strongly rises from the gloom" of everyday existence. This drink fills a need for individual spirit as they are my individual intuitions that arise within myself through my effort.

It was through the study of The Philosophy of Freedom and this 2-4 section where I recognized how this feel good intoxication with ideas can be a one-sided trap. By becoming absorbed in the world of ideals a split develops with the world. Ideals are helpful for recognizing potential and what something can develop into in the future. But it can disconnect from the present and what is relevant in the moment. An ugly duckling may develop into a swan but today it has to confront being an ugly duckling.

There is something greater than the world of ideas. Something greater lies beyond concepts in the spiritual world. In Human and Cosmic Thought Steiner explains how Beings of the cosmic Hierarchies think through us. Each world-view is related to a great spiritual being. The logic of the Spiritual Hierarchies is indicated in the world-outlook diagram.

Great comments!

Your point can move in many directions. It's amazing to notice that every possible idea comes from the one self-sustaining activity of thinking.

I think the drama surrounding the Anthroposophical Society could be understood within the frame of one-sided Idealism. Instead of loving the mess of things for what it is, groups form out of an identification with one aspect of the whole, an ideal that might be 100% wonderful, but to the degree that it is an avoidence of what is, it must lead to these dramas of blame.

I'd be weary of forming any new group that isn't founded in a deep love for the mess. If you can start from there, then you'd only appreciate the further mess that each human member brings as the group lives onward. You wouldn't need to start finding those who "don't get it" or who "aren't on the right path" or whatever.

If some group comes along trying to ground the Society in The Philosophy of Freedom, I sure hope they don't start from a set of shared principals. I think it would need to start from the Freedom of each member because the various articulations of principals will come and go, but the freedom of the individual is gonna stick around and it's right there to be observed/loved from the beginning. How could splinter groups ever form within such a system? The Society doesn't need a society. It needs PoF. I guess that means it needs you to find yourself. I mean "you" in the PoF sense of the term. I mean when "you" means "the Love that is always Free"...or something like that...

Jeff

Didn't Steiner project that the Society would have a membership of around 500,000 by this time?

It is currently a paltry 50,000 or so...

Have we done something wrong? Are we failing as people with a feeling for the truth of Steiner's principles?

Could the apparent failure of the Society to become a real world force be due to black occult influence? (something that no one ever seems to talk about) If so, how is it countered?

Why do we expect young people not to have an interest in Anthroposophy? I was not brought up in anthroposophy (quite the opposite) but when I discovered it, I felt I had found something I had been looking for all my life - someone who actually KNEW what he was talking about!

Why shouldn't we expect young people to recognize Truth?

The fact that Steiner wore a geeky black suit (which actually I think is kind of cool, but anyway...) should have nothing to do with the acceptance of 'his' principles.

I know the quote is based on an interaction with Walter Johannes Stein - other than that I don't know where exactly to find it...

Assuming that quote is correct what you are saying makes perfect sense.

The phrase 'good intentioned intimidation' is an interesting one...

Having been around martial arts for a long time, and martial arts competition, and seminars, etc I have noticed a somewhat interesting phenomenon. At these events there is always an unspoken question -'Who can beat who up?' or 'Who is tougher than who?' No one ever really voices it, but the thoughts are there in everyone's mind and it creates sort of a weird 'fog' in which it is difficult for people to see who the other person really is (the recognition of the 'Other'), because it magnifies one's egotism.

Strangely, at the few anthroposophical conferences I have attended, I have (at times) felt the same thing. Although, the question now is not who is tougher than who but 'Who has true spiritual perception?' and a HUGE deal is made out of the answer to that question.

Such a big deal is made out of it that no one talks about any experiences they have had (even if, I imagine, they have them regularly). I gues we could say that this is a sort of spiritual egotism.

And I think we could say the same thing to the average anthroposophist as I could say to the average martial artist: "Get over yourself, already - we're all just here to learn (sheeesh)."

(And by the way - I say that to myself as often as not)

Yea, Jay, I've had that experience as well. I like how you use Martial Arts competitions as an analog.

In Anthro circles you get so much pride in NOT talking personally, but letting everybody infer that you are "there." I see that as part of the conditioning that came from Steiner himself. I'm sure you read lectures where Steiner makes a point to aplogies for what he is about to say because it is overly personal and then he says something like, "Once I knew a lady down the street who treated ill birds and I found her to be very amusing."

In one sense I think people are just imitating Steiner and trying to be very careful to not talk in ways the he would not have.

However, we know it goes deeper than that because Steiner did throw out principals of right speech and he stated the importance of not speaking too eagerly or early about one's experiences.

I remember what a relief it was at Steiner College 9 years ago when Jesiaha Ben-Aharon asked people from the audience to come up and speak about their spiritual experiences. He said that any community that was at all grown up would be able to handle hearing its members talk about things they have been through. Of course, he also stressed that Anthroposophy failed the first time and that it's no big deal because it would have as many chances as it needed. He said, "What did you expect?"

That's what I often feel when I hear people sounding surprised that Steiner's philosophy books haven't been "discovered". Who in the word is going to discover them except for wierd people? Do we really expect many mainstream philosophers to talk about the trends in philosophy and then say, "oh yes, I almost forgot to mention Steiner. His book is outstanding."

We get this every now and then by wonderful thinkers, but there is no sign of it increasing and I expect it to become less and less. However, I am happy to say that I see the point of PoF being taken up more and more all over the world and being intuited and embraced in wonderful ways...in both mainstream arenas and off the road spots. It would be worrying indeed if the actual book was suppose to become more beloved over time as opposed to the conditions of its practice. Anyway, Jay, thanks for giving us the picture of "fog". That was useful for me.

Jeff

Chapter 2 begins with the attention away from the "I" and on the material world. This is followed with the opposite perspective of putting the attention exclusively on the spiritual nature of the "I". Both these views exclude the other. So now the "I" builds up a thought-picture of the world in an attempt to connect the two. Then the attention is directed solely to the idea production activity.

Here are four realms of existence; material world, spiritual world, thought-picture world, and world of ideas. To enter each the "I" turns away from itself, toward itself, toward the picture it produced, and toward the activity of producing ideas. This is how the "I" enters each realm.

For the "I" to know how to direct its attention to work within each realm is good to know. The problem is the one-sided view of life that will occur if a person remains fixed in one perspective. We can observe our attention to determine the extent of our own one-sidedness.

Are our thoughts dominated with issues of material life? Or are we absorbed into our spiritual nature and spiritualistic theory? Do we live according to a grand picture of the world we have produced? Are we infatuated with producing new ideas? By consciously directing our attention to fit the realm we need to work in we can get better results.

Say we want to build a house. In working in the material world, actual construction, it is helpful to have our attention away from our "I" and in the material world and its laws or we may hit our thumb rather than the nail. Underlying the building project would be the higher intentions of our individual spirit which we are in touch with by directing our attention away from the construction process and upon ourself. We would give the architect our carefully built up plan for the home. He would modify it according to his experience. The plan we gave the architect was the result of many ideas we produced by reflecting upon the project.

If we were to build our own home would we be more interested in the actual construction, our individually inspired conscious intentions, the picture we have built up, or the idea design process? If we balance the various aspects of the project we may end up with better results.

Only by ceasing to regard my own nature as exclusively spiritual will I ever cultivate my desire to know the world and to act effectively in it. For if I don't understand the world, how will I be able to do anything in it?

We've had so far in Chapter Two the polarities of thinking vs. matter, and the spiritual "I" vs. the sense-perceptible world. Now the polarity of purposes vs. realities is presented.

As a naturally lazy and day-dreaming person, the intention/reality dichotomy has been one of the longest-running and most difficult lessons of my life. How confident I was in youth of the great things I would do someday! But even the ordinary tasks of daily life that others mastered so easily, such as learning how to drive a car, were so thorny with difficulties in the actual doing that I kept them in the theoretical realm for as long as possible.

I didn't know how to use my own body to grasp the material things and forces of the world, so my relationship to most of material life was awkward and unsatisfying.

About the only thing I could do well was to communicate my thoughts and inner life through writing. Even that is an activity that requires the help of material things and forces: not just pen and paper, but the actual setting down of words, which have actual relationships that mean something, not always exactly what you intend. There are relationships of meaning and relationships of sound to be mastered, and even more important is the relationship of what you write to reality.

So I can identify with Fichte in Steiner's criticism of his work, that in trying to derive the whole edifice of the world from the "I", he made a huge blunder, no matter how elegantly he arranged his sentences. He tried to create one thing but ended up creating another, like the carpenter who tried to build a house but wound up with a gigantic bookshelf instead. The carpenter didn't grasp that the nature of a house is to have walls, doors, a roof, etc. And Fichte, Steiner shows, didn't grasp that the nature of the world is that it must be experienced, not merely spun out of our thoughts.

So we are left at the end of this paragraph still looking both ways: outward toward the material world, and inward toward our own spirituality, without yet having successfully combined these two realms in a monistic view.

Just as I must master some part of the material world to translate my purposes into realities, I must also master some part of the world of Ideas in my thinking.

Turning inward toward myself, I perceive the work that I've done in thinking, in elaborating concepts. I feel my own inner voice as it expresses this work when I set down a series of thoughts on paper.

This work may consist of the simplest of thinking tasks, such as forming a series of thoughts about a pencil. I can perform this task on paper, starting with a realization that I had the day before about the transformation, over time, of the shape of the pencil's graphite core, and progress step by step to a new realization of how the wooden pencil shaped the hands of generations of school children.

Looking over these thoughts afterwards is like looking over the record of a short foray into unexplored territory in the world of Ideas. I can feel myself as the one who makes this foray, and also as the one who records it. And I can also feel the reality of this world of Ideas as it spreads out all around me, infinitely large, holding my own thinking in it the way the ocean holds one drop of water.

Now Steiner gives us an instruction: Stop here. Acknowledge nothing of spirit except this world of ideas. Identify this world of Ideas as the spiritual world, and leave it at that. Live as a one-sided Idealist for a while.

But at the same time, Steiner describes this experiment in language that falsifies the very position he seems to be asking us to take up.

Our Idealism is the result of a temptation. It's one-sided. The world it lives in is not the whole spiritual world, but is like a front porch that we mistake for the whole house. This mistake becomes a compulsion for us, as if it were a spell laid on us that keeps us from looking past our own noses.

How can I concentrate on thinking like an Idealist if at the same time I have to hold in my mind the near-sightedness of this approach? It's as if I were being asked to walk around in special glasses that block a good part of my vision, just to see how someone with an actual visual impairment sees the world.

What is the source of this impairment? Is it simply that there's too much "I" in Idealism?

Reflecting on my own "I", latching onto its conceptual work as the be-all and the end-all, making assumptions about the entire spiritual world based on what I find when I look at my essential self, I'm thereby tempted, compelled, bewitched.

Perhaps that's what happened to Fichte as well, since he tried to derive the whole edifice of the world from the "I."

I can't help but feel that Steiner is here giving us a series of exercises to put us through the transition from Spiritualism to one-sided Idealism, and to experience for ourselves, in the most direct way, the limitations of the Idealistic view when it focuses too much on what we ourselves think. It's as if in the spiritual as well as in the material world we have to look beyond ourselves and our own point of view if we want to do or to understand anything.