This article, if read at all, will likely be read by people who already know something about Anthroposophy and others who are just curious. As readers I am more interested in reaching them in reverse order. This innocent group probably heard the Word from contact with a Waldorf school or with someone who went to one or had a child who did, or teaches in one. Or from anthroposophical medicine and real physicians who practice it for patients who are open-minded (or intelligent) enough to confide in them. And there is also bio-dynamic agriculture. And, of course, there’s Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-scientific teaching.
However you may have come across the Word, I think it would be helpful if there were a place where you could get at least a general idea of what it’s all about. If it then interests you more than just enough, you can easily begin more detailed study. I hope to provide that general idea here, rent free – at least my understanding of and feeling for it.
There has been and still is much criticism and even ridicule of Anthroposophy and of its founder Rudolf Steiner, especially in Germany. And why not? We live in a materialistic age in which the opposite – spiritual-science or Anthroposophy – is condemned by the kind of academics and natural scientists and philosophers who are unable to accept anything as remotely true if it is not measurable or observable through the physical senses. The subject may be evolution or astronomy or birth and death, good and evil or much more, such as a spiritual world and spiritual beings behind it all.
Then prove it, damn you!
That would make it too easy, for it’s necessary to work your way through to the actual proof—to yourself.
“The preliminaries leading up to the conditions under which spiritual observation is possible have to be furnished by the soul itself and by the total disposition of the soul”, Rudolf Steiner maintained. “This will of course be indignantly denied; but the only real reason for insisting on ‘external proofs’ is the fact that they can be obtained in reasonable comfort, whereas the authentically spiritual-scientific method is a laborious and disconcerting one.”
I remember a TV interview program in which the interviewer asked his expert guest – the physicist director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York – to explain certain complicated aspects of the starry and planetary movements. After he had done so, the interviewer said, “And it’s random?” “Yes, it’s all random,” the physicist replied.
Then prove it’s random, I mutter from my couch.
The existence of nature as we know it today must then also be random: microbes and elements and such stuff bounce and join together over the millennia until they randomly merge into trees and flowers and rivers and chipmunks and tigers and apes and, yes, human beings, that is, human beings’ bodies – which will also, inevitably, wither away like everything else living. Exceptionally, however, humans, some or many, wonder about the meaning of life, or rather wonder if life has meaning. It’s worrisome really. The human body returns to nature in ashes, but what about the rest of him/her? Well, if you think everything is random, the only logical answer is nada. When all those nerve cells and the brain itself revert to nature and dies, randomness takes over and you cease to exist. Period!
“Wait a minute. I’m not an atheist,” you’ll say just in case someone or something is listening. “What if when I die – yeah, I know, can’t avoid that – it’s not nada and I’m still conscious … somehow?”
Good for you; at least you’re thinking.
Reincarnation and karma
One of the basic elements of Anthroposophy is the reality of reincarnation and karma. This is not unique to Anthroposophy, it is in fact accepted by the various schools of Buddhism and other oriental religions and philosophies. But it is neither accepted nor even considered by Christian churches or western philosophy. Why not? After all, there is no proof either of the resurrection of Christ. Ah, but the resurrection is described in the Gospels and that is proof enough for the priests and the faithful.
“But that’s not proof, it’s blind faith!!” you counter.
Well yeah, and it’s not Anthroposophy either. There are several ways to consider reincarnation. One is to use your capacity for logical thinking: Does life have meaning? Does human life have meaning? More personally: Does my life have meaning? You don’t know? Why in God’s name are you wasting time here? Hamlet asked himself the same question – poetically:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor’s wrong, the poor man’s Contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make With a bare Bodkin?
Who would these Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn away,
And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.
He decides against suicide, but at the end he dies anyway: All he had to do was be ready for it. ‘Readiness is all,’ he says as he prepares for his final hour. Stabbed with a poison-tipped rapier, he dies and utters his last words:’The rest is silence.’
Horatio is left alone with the bodies all around him. He looks down at his friend and says,
‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’
In Anthroposophy flights of angels do indeed exist, and archangels, archai and on up, good and evil ones. All in a process of development or, if you prefer, evolution. The human being under the best of circumstances can live from eighty to a hundred years nowadays. Some die younger, others never even grow to maturity. How much can the long-lived develop in such a short time, let alone the short-lived? And to what extent can we become free of the constraints of nature? We can’t fly like birds or swim like fish – despite our airplanes and submarines.
If you decide that you need concrete (material) evidence that something exists, then you will never find the meaning of life or even be able to determine that such a meaning exists. And if it doesn’t? Then you may as well give up the ghost now. What’s the point of all the suffering and worry? Really?
Is suffering also random? Or is there meaning in it? What about the innocent children killed in warfare. As I write, genocidal murder is still going on in Gaza, Israel. Is it the dead children’s end? Or will they be reincarnated? And what about all those murdered in the holocaust? If life has meaning it must include reincarnation and the justice of karma, or destiny. If not, it is meaningless.
Casey Stengel said “It’s not over ´til it’s over”. He was talking about a baseball game, but we can extend his wisdom to “...and even then it’s not over” when referring to life. Just as a new game with the same team is played another day, a new life is born of the same person – and the game goes on.
There are not only good angels in Anthroposophy. There are also evil ones. Rudolf Steiner calls the two chief ones, or types, Lucifer and Ahriman. Both try to influence human beings negatively, but in opposite directions. Lucifer wants you to be over-spiritual, that is, to not let your feet touch the ground, rejecting the earthly physical world in favor of a mystical never-never land of fairies and drug-induced fantasy. Ahriman’s ambition is to sink humanity into materialism, causing us to believe that matter is the only reality. Also, and more importantly, he induces us to substitute machines for human contact. I sit here typing away on my computer as I condemn Ahriman for helping to invent it. I also buy many of the goods I used to buy from people in stores with an internet “app”. I also pay most of my bills on it, when I used to interchange greetings with other people in banks or the cooperative in our village. I see none of these people anymore. Actually, I have no real need to have contact with any living human.
It hasn’t gotten that far yet, but it’s on the way with “artificial intelligence”. In the newspaper I read on the internet I have become aware of an increasing incidence of suicides in the United States, and elsewhere, especially among adolescents. The “experts” have so many theories as to the reason that they betray their desperation. They blame social media, for example.
How about materialism as the cause, when young people have a dire need for a conviction that life has meaning beyond whatever level of depression they are experiencing? In other words, a spiritual shortcut.
The Nature of Man
Humans have physical bodies, as do animals and plants. They are composed of the same elements as Nature is: solids, liquids (mostly) and air. These elements are shaped by a formative life force, aka etheric force. Animals and humans have more than a life-force, they also have astral bodies, or souls, with which they are conscious and have feelings. Human beings also possess individual selves; each human being can only say “I” when referring to him or her self. Therefore, a human being possesses a life-being, which he shares with the vegetable kingdom, an astral-being, which he shares with the animal kingdom and an individual “I”.
When a person dies, his physical body decomposes and returns to nature. Nature can only disintegrate or destroy a physical body. It does so when the etheric or life force leaves it upon death – and returns when the individual’s spirit or I is ready to reincarnate after a sojourn in the spiritual world. It returns carrying its karmic baggage, so to speak, accumulated during many previous incarnations.
Christianity
An essential element of Anthroposophy is Christianity. Not the organized churchly kind, where everything seemingly illogical is explained away as a “mystery”. Ah yes, God’s work is indeed mysterious, but not in the way the churches mean. Rudolf Steiner wrote a book entitled “Christianity as Mystical fact”. If you’re interested in Christianity, it’s a must read. In it he explains that the Gospels were written as mystery documents, that is, by initiates in the ancient mystery cults. Only other initiates were allowed to read them and only they could truly understand them. Therefore, the Gospels are literally true, but they were not meant to be easily understood by the uninitiated. For example, Mary the mother of Jesus is claimed to have been a virgin. The meaning is that she had a pure soul. It does not mean that there was no sexual relationship with Joseph. After all, Jesus had brothers – and perhaps sisters as well.
The Gospel of John begins, according to the accepted translation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” You don’t have to be an initiate to realize that this is a contradiction, even an impossibility. How can the Word [logos] be with God and be God at the same time? In the original ancient Greek, there is no grammatical difference between “...was God.” and “...was a God.” Common sense tells us that the correct translation must be “and the Word was a god. Or a divinity or a divine being. There are many such apparent Biblical contradictions and impossibilities also clarified in Anthroposophy.
Did you know that there were two Jesus children? Actually there were. If you were to take the time to compare the Luke Gospel with the Matthew Gospel, you would note that the birth stories are completely different. First of all, Jesus’s genealogy (A was the son of Y, who was the son of X, etc.) is completely different from David to Joseph in the Matthew and Luke Gospels. There was no room in the inn for the Luke Jesus, so he was born in a stable and the shepherds came to adore him. Hardly the setting for the future king of the Jews. Why? Because the future king of the Jews was not born in a stable, but he was sought and found by the Magi, who adored him and gave him precious gifts worthy of a king. But he was so feared by King Herod that he and his parents had to flee to Egypt in order to avoid being massacred along with the rest of the “holy innocents” under the age of two. Once Herod had died, they were able to return to Nazareth. This is related in the Gospel of Matthew, but not mentioned nor even hinted at in the Gospel of Luke.
There is much more to all those paragraph headings. But please be kind and remember that this is a mere introduction.
The Triformation of the Social Organism
This will take more space to describe, even cryptically, all the above – by me at least. So it will be dealt with separately – as Part Two – in case you are interested. When? To be announced.
(Symbols clanging announce an opportunity for eyebrow arching.)