People like explanations they can trust. That is why they need history and worship physics. People get frightened without them. But who to trust in the Big Bad Wolf World?
Let me mention a few in our flock you never quite know what to make of, but would somehow love and somehow hate to trust. It’s extreme like that with these darker shades of sheep. You’ve been warned. I am not sure what they are wearing. I think it is their own fleece.
But first, the whiter sheep.
Life Flows From a Solar Power Bank
In “The Song of Trees” by David George-Haskell, a darling piece of ecological journaling, we learn that the chickadee bird’s brain grows in late, Summer/Autumn to accommodate all the sensory impressions of the abundant season. This is how they store information on all the rich-pickings and create handy memory maps. They must have cut one or two open to know, but that to one side.
Non-Surgical Deduction
I could have told you without a scalpel since I trust matter responds to the etheric. We all know by now that what we see effects our brain; not always with overt increases in mass, granted, nor in predictable ways (try finding the “ music centre” in any given brain: it’s not pinned to any anatomical map); but generally this has been known since whenever and is what makes TV bad for you.
People love a bit of tangible proof, though. It makes them feel more secure about their chances of survival: the body cooperates! Only, does the physical body actually respond to what you do? Or does it anticipate? Afterall, we come with egg-cells whether we desire a child or not. Because we have them we check out pecks and plumbing skills (my next one might as well be a live-in plumber). Then when the larder is empty we turn to books and crochet. Or a frustrated game of croquet: off with their useless spanners!
Who is ever really doing the thinking!?
The body seems to do our thing and then we go, hey! We might as well exploit that. That’s our inclination. The desert rose just sits around a lot. The bristle cone pine is what it is, in full bristle or as a few stumps. Plantlife vegetates - from our standpoint. It is passive and merely acclimatises, adapts,surrenders to its environment. Or so it seemed until recently, when a new intelligence has been discovered (already known to Steiner). Non-sentient organisms seem to sense anyway, if only partially; and they do talk, if only on a need to know basis. They have extraordinarily complex communication networks, symbiotic relationships and unspoken deals. Still, they don’t manage to do any creative thinking (they follow very predictable patterns) which goes to show that self-impelled decision making and independent mobility go hand in hand (and is dependent on something more than a primary "idea of an" electro-circuit plants share with animals).
Astral bodied beings (with an independent nerve-sentient system) carry internal programmes. They have chips we call neurons and a motherboard we call the brain. They define their likes and dislikes, after which they, next, go or spend a life-time avoiding. It suddenly makes life step up its pace and makes living it a lot harder: they (we) constantly have to be on the move, chasing after what they (we) want with their (our) desire bodies.
I have no objections to seeing evolution as a pyramid with man on top. Only it's not about climbing up the steps (a real pyramid is smooth on the outside) but about the alignment as a whole. If anything the base is more important than the shiny top!
It if goes too far to say that the astral body alone tends to make headless-chickens out of us, even in organised herds or proud prides, it is fair to suggest that without more direction we are right to ask, what are we doing here besides sitting out time? Enter the I! This systematic organiser or captain of the ship, this Odysseus and Gilgamesh and Noah and leader and inventor, explorer and discoverer, this Valkyrie is a man with a plan! (Illustration here.)
Flap-Flap or Crack-Crack?
What came first: the bigger bird brain or the yummy sense-impressions. It’s a bit of a mystery like it is with my Christmas Cactus, who knows when it is time to flower (around Christmas), even when it’s been taken out of its natural habitat and locked up in an over-heated, under-hydrated, randomly-lit room.
How best to put it? Do our bodies cooperate to accommodate our greatest chances of survival (like a magic trick) or is our natural intelligence an accommodation for prior intent? Yikes, the latter already comes too close to some kind of pre-destination…. But aren’t certain elements destined to bond into atoms?
In a magic trick the hat accommodates the rabbit, even the sleeve may manage, even thin air can try (but we soon catch on to the illusion).
Under spiritual charter, natural intelligence draws up the blueprint for its accommodation, bearing in mind the limited resources at any given circumstance. I thinks therefore it is.
This posits that we are not here to make do but after a desired effect. However God-like that may sound, considering all the wakefulness and on-going renovation that involves, most of us would prefer the Faustinian dream of having our own magic show.
Note-
We tend to go round in loops of chicken-egg scenarios, getting trapped in a mesh of semantics along the race track. I decided therefore to check out an alternative approach. I have chosen to suspend my disbelief for a new language to be found in metaphysics. This does not bring the relief to the boggled brain as mercifully as one might hope, with crystalline expositions of the Cosmic Order. One must be careful to double check the internal logic proposed and always do background checks on the spokespeople. Your street cred precedes your credibility, but to judge its value one must be highly trained in people knowledge without bias and well informed about contextual variables. Who can say they qualify and if so by what certification? Ultimately, it's all a matter of following your gut, I guess, which if left unindoctrinated comes with a refined palate, nose and eye for detail.
More Research Sources
There are some Anthroposophic-scientific sympathetic ideas in “The Song of Trees” which remind me of the works publishd by the thoroughly scientific and academically trained founders Holdrege and Talbott (who are as thoroughly respectful of Steiner’s Goethean-inspired morphology and ecology as of conventional science) of the Nature Institute in New York. I recommend you read whatever you can find by them as the most level-headed, biologically evidenced and experiment based introduction to Steiner’s leading thoughts on the Etheric World.
George-Haskell speaks in terms of a living memory network that is the unison of nature. It is full of intelligence including at the synamorphic-node-level of plants. This approximates the Anthroposophical understanding of the etheric world. This is not a vegetative world exactly, giving intelligence to plants on a cellular level only, but more like a plant-like interweaving tapestry or a geometric dance of the four ethers (of warmth, light, tone, and life corresponding to the consolidated elements respectively of fire, air, water and earth). This gives us the interface of the World Ether. It is this sheath that is the resurrection body of Christ after his Ascension. Important to know with Pentecost coming up. Oh, darn I’ve gone and spoiled the simple facts again! But if you just call it a solar energy system you’ll get pretty far into the spirit of things for now. (Seeing as the Christ is a Solar Entity.)
→Thamarassery Churam pass with NINE “thrilling hairpin bends” - and a rewarding view at the end
Trim the Frills, Already!
Surely, surely, all those esoteric add-ons with mythological figures and Biblical heroes are just frills for the fairy-tale lovers? Designed to keep the hordes of posh and formerly repressed ladies in any Steiner lecture audience ready to throw their corsets at the liberal-minded and exotic Croat? You can’t go all Herr Doctor Technical Engineer on them, now, can you? He sure knew how to captivate his audience: some nasty slurs against his manipulative charms do exist.
Sadly, however, - please put down your pinching shears - no can do. It wouldn’t be Anthroposophy otherwise. It would be (but) the blissful but limited relief of modern-day ecological awareness and the new-found respect for an integral, unified biological intelligence. A marvellous start. Just a few hairpin bends that worry me.
The blacker sheep
Life Alone Is All You Need
Even I, however, have my limits as to how far I take on board every new revelation presented by an Anthroposophic author. Some, besides, are quite controversial within the inner circle - which probably makes me want to understand where they are coming from all the more.
Amongst these there is Judith von Hallé, the woman with the stigmata, who doesn’t eat anymore, since the past 12 years or so. Really not a morsel? Apparently not. Not a drop to drink either? I am not certain on that account. I know she is allergic to toothpaste - but I think she means fluoride and who isn't nowadays? Also that the bleeding palms are quite inconvenient - I worry about her iron levels.
There is another Anthroposophist who also is an inedian (or breatharian, otherwise known as the Light Diet - or when Yoga ruled the world, we called it living on prana, now aka “orgone”), Dr. Michael Werner, who tries to explain what is going on for him without being mystical or heroic - trying to find answers within his field of Anthroposophy. His fellow people are not all that inclined to listen very closely. None of it sits 100% well with me, either. But why not? (Apart from the good hope that I might not have lost all my marbles.)
Breathe to Eat
I first heard about Breatharianism from a man called Genesis Sunfire (at the time, now Jericho Sunfire). He was a former professional Rugby League player. [Find his story in an interview here.]
I think I stumbled upon him during the time I was studying alternative diets and anthroposophic nutritional theory and cosmic nutritional streams. His videos captivated me somehow. It would be too easy to consider the man a charlatan. Or at least, someone who is too psychologically damaged and now deluded to keep proper track of how much he actually does eat - even if it is only liquid fruits (he went through the progressively more sober stages of veganism, fructarianism and liquidarianism). I wanted to listen to him with an open mind. As I was doing so, to my absolute surprise, I found out about these (highly controversial) Anthroposophic Breatharians. A pdf file written by Werner (in a Germany-English) gives an overview of his understanding of the miraculous phenomenon as considered in Anthroposophic terms (breatharian.info/texts/Light-Nourishment.rtf). Jericho, I hasten to add, initially attached no spiritual meaning to his coming off food - but over the years has deepened a personal spiritual practice. Arguably with too much free time on his hands, with no shopping, eating, and dinners to attend anymore.
I don't mean to be cynical, let alone sceptical. Can't help it. It's frustration! It's decades of academic schooling. I wish I knew what it was all about!
Scientifically Inconclusive
The only other thing I know for sure about Werner’s example is that he subjected himself, for a substantial time (a week or more), to independent scientific laboratory experiments, staying in a highly restricted and fully monitored environment (an observation room) for that period of testing. I am sad to say: the results - as always in these cases and now too - were inconclusive.
We may ascertain for sure he did not get hold of any food sneakily (there were no windows, no visitors), but the claim that this would have zero impact upon his health stats and his fitness was not convincing. He seemed to loose weight, become dehydrated and, over-all, lost vitality. He wrote that off to the unnatural circumstances in which he was kept without sunlight and fresh air. In a way, I found this a reasonable argument, since this would affect anybody’s health negatively in only a few days; and this man’s diet was supposed to consist ONLY of fresh air and light, stimulating the pituitary gland and the nourishing hormones in that manner. They were starving him!
My Empirical Pragmatic Investigation
I have not written Werner, Judith or Sunfire off as nutjobs. In fact, whether they are (unwittingly) cheating or not on the surviving on thin air front, is not all that interesting to me. It is far more relevant to my research purposes to accept they are doing what they say they are doing and explain how this is just another life-choice as perfectly possible and scientifically explanitory as any other.
Above all, I want to understand why on earth this would be a necessary or good thing and a spiritual step in the right direction to becoming a better human being (given the current digestive system we are currently born with). How is this a handy modification? Is is not rather a terrible disorder that begs a cure!?
I will spare you the furious polemic between those who believe Steiner had the potential for the stigmata but refused to carry them (inconvenient to travel with as much as he did) and how this does not disprove his enlightened state and put von Hallé a step above him.... One could argue the suble differences between reaching the Enlightened Manas, or Buddhi or Atman state and the pros and cons of becoming a Bodhisattva instead of reaching Buddhahood until one sounds like a rabbi blue in the face.
Eat Me
← ”Gathering the Manna” from the Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves; Thursday, noon, NY The Morgan Lib & Mus. M. 945. F. 137v
It’s a funny old world if you come to think of it: it looks like we eat to live nowadays; but we used to live to eat before the combine harvester and milkingsheds. End up on a desert island and begin with a goat and a bunch of turnips all over again. Stone soup for Sunday lunch while we waited for the ewes to lamb.
When the Christ broke bread at his last supper it was not to feed our bellies or our minds, but our souls. This is a miraculous way of feeding oneself with manna - just like it used to fall from heaven, each morning, like dewdrop-hailstones, “white as corriander seed, and sweet as honey cake” to sustain the Jewish Exiles for 40 years. This describes an ether substance, a spiritual nutrition, but also the etheric body of Christ (see Luke 22:19: And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”) Since we have already established, at the top of this monography, that Christ lives in our World Ether and is the Lord of the Elements that makes perfect sense, thank God.
Meditation -
This Ether is as old as the Logos. Maybe, since the first Pentecost it has become a little denser. A little more "our own"ready source for eternal life - that memory stuff that can spin the necessary yarn to keep us alive. Maybe time is very elastic, or multiple multi-dimensional and exists for our consciousness only really in a linear narrative. Only really because of our consciousness which preceeds all our memory and our knowing - hence all our plants and our creatures.
Hitting Nails On the Head
ALL this to one side now, for what prompted me to write any of this at all is my afternoon read in the nippy but sunny garden.
It wouldn't have been a productive day had I not felt tempted to take a flamingo head to one of those bricks I have spoken of earlier, which looked precariously higgledy-piggledy, and if I had not wanted to give it a good smack to see if I could dislodge it from my pile of assorted research materials.
I found myself resisting - and this is not the first time - something Judith von Hallé had written in regard to her psychic reading of the the non-spatial sanctum-sanctorium that is the figure-head wooden sculpture made by Steiner and Edith Maryon (see also Musing 18). One thing lead to another and soon she was rattling on about these three anti-kings who had come from South-America, Africa and Asia with evil ore to cast a set of four nails to be used for the crucifixtion. This extra evil ingredient tossed into the atrocious mix of all that went into making the sacrifice of God's only begotten Son an agonising ordeal, was meant to ensure the end of project Brotherhood of Man and his aspiration to becoming the Tenth Hierarchy. I'm better with Gnostic symbolism, but this here concerns, apparently, a vision.
Apparently this posse congregated not long before the Goglotha event. I pause and find myself protesting the logistics involved. But I'm also a bit disappointed that von Hallé cannot reveal what the fourth nail will be used for (in the future). Then again, she only ever relates what she (physically) saw/witnessed in the past (in a former life at the time of and very close to Jesus Christ). Fair enough. We'll have to learn to live with that cliff hanger.
Dream of Three Kings; Autun Cathedral 12th C. ↑
I am still hung up on the unrealistic sea voyages that had to be undertaken. Think of the impossible arrangement - in the year 33 AD - well before America had even been discovered…. Oops, Tommy-girl, there you go again! Stop thinking with your left brain and see with your right! Such meetings are spiritually coordinated of course. Aha, yes. Of course. But that means I cannot research this. I can only work with my own observations and I can only see physical manifestations (or energetic patternings).
Anyway, part and parcel of my research is to listen to the story as it is delivered into the midst of fellow anthroposophists - kidding myself not that this does not equate a group of highly intelligent scientists. I can only calmly take on board that three baddies met in the Palestine, one day, to forge a few nails by means of some black magickal, eternally mystical and darkly moonlit powers. I am trying to “see” what she is saying but it is at times like these that I really feel my time would be better spent sticking to fiction.
My Last Best Read
I can highly recommend David Grossman’s “A Horse Walks into a Bar” - a not so funny read about a stand-up comic doing his one-off special show. Or as the Guardian sums up: “This isn’t just a book about Israel: it’s about people and societies horribly malfunctioning.”
