Anthroposophy

Anthroposophy, also called spiritual science by its founder, Rudolf Steiner (or, as some opponents claim, a religion), sprung from the Theosophy movement. The word is derived from the Greek words meaning man-wisdom. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with Anthropology, the scientific study of humankind.

A Few Aspects of Anthroposophic Thinking

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists out of which the material one gradually condensed, so to speak, and evolved. The spiritual world, Steiner held, can in the right circumstances be researched through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline. Steiner described many exercises he said were suited to strengthening such self-discipline. Details about the spiritual world, he said, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, not infallibly, but with approximate accuracy.

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Yet Steiner was periodically at pains to discourage taking his research reports as either accurate or inaccurate 'information' -- an interpretation he considered relatively superficial. Steiner preferred for readers to enter into the process of his thinking and not cling too rigidly to the fixed results, i.e. the thoughts that crystallized out of that process. He often said there was a hidden life in thinking and advised people to attend more to the spirit or 'drift' of his words than to the letter. Otherwise readers would fall into an excessive literalism and turn his work into a doctrine, a result he wanted to avoid.

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Those of Steiner's students alert to this distinction tend to affirm Steiner’s claim that remaining actively within the process, as opposed to the results of Steiner's thinking, can have the effect of awakening one gradually into forms of superconscious spiritual awareness. Steiner appears to offer a gradual experiential path from ordinary conceptual thinking into forms of thinking perceptive of living spiritual beings and mobile realities in the spiritual world. Because the spiritual path Steiner offers is based in many ways on the gradual transformation of thinking into a wholly new activity of the whole person -- an activity of thought, feeling and will seamlessly integrated into a form of spiritual awareness that eventually leaves the body and peregrinates through spiritual worlds -- Steiner's teaching has attracted a fair number of trained scientists, physicians, and scholars in various fields.

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Gaining access to the unusual forms of consciousness embodied in some of Steiner's works is not a matter of believing in or having faith in whatever Steiner chose to say about spiritual beings. It is rather that Steiner's thinking, if adequately penetrated with one's own active questioning, thinking and feeling, eventually reveals itself as a sort of spiritual music full of aesthetic tensions and relaxations and various kinds of spiritual dynamism, and this spiritual dynamism, full of complex metamorphoses of form and color, can itself eventually be perceived as the speaking and singing of living spiritual beings and of a real spiritual world.

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It should be emphasized that this consciousness of the spirit is not so much related to the content of Steiner's statements, where he tells us the characteristics of this or that spiritual being (or something similar) that he says he has perceived. It is not so much such content that is effective but rather something a bit deeper, within the content, that leads one to begin to enter higher states of awareness and 'hear' or 'see' spiritual beings as one reads Steiner. The mere content is so to speak thrown up to the surface of Steiner's thinking by the style, or better, by the movement and metamorphic-metaphoric process of his thinking, and it is this underlying formative process (or portions of it in some of his lectures and books) that can gradually lead to a sort of superconsciousness awareness of living in spiritual worlds at least as real and persuasive as the physical world. Whereas mere content can be memorized like recipes, and then parroted mindlessly, formative process can only be experienced if one actively recreates it from within.

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An obstacle to 'getting' Steiner, in the just mentioned sense, is that reading for people today is rarely a process where the dynamic birth of the conceptual out of a pre-conceptual background is felt and recreated as we read each word. When reading is creative today, that creativity tends to be confined within conceptual life, and only rarely extends to the threshold between conceptual and pre-conceptual life, the threshold where not just this or that concept, but conceptuality itself, can be experienced in the process of its creative origination, and seen at its core as fundamentally an imaginative birthing activity. Lacking awareness of this particular threshold, we also lack consciousness of the elastic poetic dynamism at the very basis not only of our most 'literal' ideas and scientific terminologies, but at the basis of the world process itself.

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Thus one way of remaining within the process (as opposed to the results) of Steiner's thinking, is to gradually learn through his works how to live consciously at the threshold where conceptuality comes into being. There one no longer is confined to observing things that already are -- one begins to see realities emerging into being, and that means seeing to some extent into 'non-being' itself, and discovering there more than mere nothingness: a hidden life of creative non-material beings and processes in a non-material world.

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