By Susan Junge

The uncertainties of our particular time in history seem magnified by the enhanced technologies of communication and information. We hear news and see images faster and in greater quantities than we can process with our thinking. This can create questions which come in the absence of trustworthy guidance. Should we prioritize our worries about the rising oceans predicted from global warming, the imminent collapse of our top-heavy financial system or the heartlessness of a for-profit healthcare industry? To be processing all these woes at the same time feels overwhelming.

But what if - like “Alice through the looking glass” - there is another perspective that can relieve the gridlock of thoughts and calm our fears? We might expect such a perspective to be celebrated and sought after by everyone. Instead, people seem to have habits of thinking and feeling that fight against change, especially one that involves looking at our individual soul life as part of the vast cosmic process. Suddenly, all talk of soul life and the cosmos is not ‘scientific’. It is not founded in the solid, practical realm of what these critics define as human life. But, it is becoming increasingly clear to many hopeful people that only by enlarging our view of who we are as moral human beings can we find the tools to work fruitfully in our particular times.

We can see, by studying recorded history and the evolution of art and language, that human beings have held vastly different perspectives on our relationship to the cosmos, and the moral grounding that comes when we feel aligned with it. Only in our modern times has this discussion been relegated to religious life and the ‘God conversation’. Rudolf Steiner, and his work of describing anthroposophy, provides the opportunity to return our thinking, feeling and willing (or acting) to a new harmony with the cosmos.

He was not laying down a dogma to be learned and upheld rigidly. Rudolf Steiner spoke as a human being who fully acknowledged that the cosmos was both the spiritual world and the world of matter we perceive with our senses. He researched how our human capacities to experience this truth could be enhanced, and then become a scientific inquiry that will reinvent our life in the world. Waldorf education is one of the many initiatives that were born from his research.

While many people are influenced by them, the primary focus of Rudolf Steiner’s work  is often obscured by these initiatives - caught up as they often become with the materialistic thinking of our time.  His focus was (and still is) on the growth of human capacities woven together in conversation and community throughout the world. He founded the Anthroposophical Society as both a manifestation and a support for this new reality on the earth. Any time people gather and are able to open the door to this larger thinking, feeling and willing in harmony with each other, it creates the possibility to be in harmony with the cosmos,  and individual souls can experience this new connection.

When these meetings occur under the auspices of the Anthroposophical Society, strength from the spiritual world can pour in to both the participating individuals and to their interactions. This is not something that depends on belief. It is more about openness to observing other types of experience, which can include an inner knowing that something is true. Often we can remember having this type of experience when we were children, before we acquired the intellectual trappings of facts that blend into opinions without our being sure of that distinction.

Studying and working with anthroposophy is available to everyone, no matter what their circumstances. Some people seem to be part of this work from the moment they first meet Rudolf Steiner. Others spend years as Waldorf parents, and slowly take up an interest in the ‘philosophy’ behind their children’s education. The universally accessible path is the one that he laid down in his books, lectures, and the momentous action that he took in founding the Anthroposophical Society. It is easy to take the Society work for granted today. It can seem like any special interest group, but on close inspection, it has a much deeper taproot.

Those of us who have come together for Anthroposophical Society group work are looking for ways of stepping outside of rigid forms, and creating opportunities for lively conversation informed by each of our inner explorations in the context of our current world. By sharing thoughts and enthusiasm as a group of seeking individuals, we know that an enlarged perspective for each of us can be discovered and maintained. Whether our gathering involves a festival celebration, a book study or a guest presentation, our common feeling for the truth that flows from spiritual sources will enhance our capacity to address the questions of our times without worry and fear.

November 16, 2009

Midcoast Anthroposophical Society Group

Camden, Maine