various short groups of words, that I dropped onto Facebook, among friends
The old man put down his carving knife. He set the yet to be finished piece off to the side, and began to clean up the work space of shavings and wood dust. Then he cleaned, sharpened, and oiled this favorite tool,
While he did this, the sun pattern on the work table altered, with the moving/changing angle of the sun and clouds outside. The shape of the pattern distorted as time passed.
He then cleaned his hands, and moved to the part of his study where he wrote poetry. His mind then carved/altered the latest poem, which act itself left behind in his mind shavings and dust of a spiritual nature.
These he gathered together, and then set them afire in the coal-brazier nearest at hand in his soul, opening thereby the gate of forgetting into the dream-time, while zen-gazing at the quantum magic which accompanies all word conflagrations.
Poetry is meant to self-destruct. Prose – on the other hand – if too structured&crystallized, breaks against the iron of the reader’s own aesthetic.
This is why shamans tell stories, the metaphorical aspects meant to be nothing more than a brief summer rain to the spirit. Life gifting magic. Perishable by choice.
The world changes, often, and sometimes very fast. In such moments it is not unreasonable to seek to find a spiritual anchor with which weather the storms.
Sometimes, the world has other “ideas”, and we may on occasion find out that there is – in that moment – no spiritual anchor to be had, for the reason that Wisdom needs us to leave these fine nests of beautiful thoughts, and stumble around, alone in the darkness, applying the cutting edge of the mind’s heart to the learning stone of life … producing our own spiritual poetry.
I have mixed dominance, and no issues other than being an unrecognized genius. Write with left hand. Kick with left foot. Throw with right hand. Played tennis and basket ball as a right-handed person. In college the tennis coach said I didn’t do the strokes right (I was self taught). My left side has been the source/locus of “breakage”, such as broken left ankle in 6th grade, Dislocated left shoulder in college. Being working poor, I had little dental care, so instead of root canals, I had the molars pulled, mostly on the left side. I’m a leftist politically, and for appearances sake, we’ll leave aside which hands do more intimate excursions.
Sorry for the mental imagine, but these kinds of articles quoting Steiner as an authority make me want to act out. Throw stuff. Get up from my chair and dance widdershins. “… in a direction contrary to the sun’s course, considered as unlucky; counterclockwise. My one Wicca visit, had me dancing naked … counterclockwise.
Then there is square dancing, line dancing, salsa, …. did the twirling dervishes have a favorite direction?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkuimX1bh6g Ecstasy through counter-clockwise movement.
Periodically, on Anthroposophical/Rudolf Steiner love nest/lists, I raise this question in many different ways: Of what use are his words and writings, if they are offered as a final view on anything?If they are – that truth-trustworthy, than for what purpose have the gods&goddesses given us the capacity for thinking.
The literature of his students is extraordinary. But do we discuss the Goethean scientists’ works? Nope. We like reading Steiner, endlessly Steiner. Plus, mostly we want to use Steiner terminology to give us powerful labels to apply to aspects of contemporary reality, throwing words around (such as: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, Asuras, Sorat), with little care for precision and exactness in thought.
Which excess of carelessness, and the inability to understand “judge not”, is a win for the very bad guys anthros love to hate.
Until the various Admins kick me off these lists, I’m here for the duration. I know stuff Steiner didn’t know (as do a lot of us). Yet, here where a community of wise-seeming folk ply their trades in Steiner-quotes, the heretic has a home. A thorny rose has found just the fertilizer&soil needed.
This is in-your-Facebook, in cyberspace. Steiner wanted us to learn to think for ourselves, especially given humanities needs for such new thinking. A personality that is mired in the swamp of Steiner-thought, has a problem. Me.Why? Because Michael has Bosses, and I’m with Them: Christ, the Holy Mother, and, the Burning Bush. I’m also stoned, and in the dreaming (you know, that pagan-wisdom place), daily. Steiner didn’t do magic and mysticism, but that doesn’t mean they are not viable gates to the realities of the spiritual deeps, where Mom&friends hang out.
He warned about the karma of the Aristotelians and Platonists – welcome to the party. Residents of Faerie will be fully in attendance.
https://thecollectiveimagination.com/
Eros – fires of provocation and intoxication
The idea of there being a “new” masculinity, implies … implies what exactly? Are women dragging men – kicking and screaming – to keep up with their running ahead of us via their “new” femininity?
I’m using the “inity” way of looking at this – on purpose – to go from using a static noun/thing to something, that while still a noun can imply characteristics more like a verb. A quality on display? The word “display” needs to be handled with care as well.
Take the term: feminist, for example. A word that acquired so much confusion, there has come to seem to be several different types/classes/doctrines.
A wrestle over the meaning of terms has artistic value, in the rites of writing, unless one wants to reduce thought to bumper stickers and placards at rallies, for example: “women are assholes too”.
Next, after this writer’s contemplation of the meaning of terms – some explosive, let us take a careful look at the word: passion.
The ancient Egyptian priests knew that the human will was a manifestation of primeval elemental fire, the same fiery Will via/from which the whole of the Creation spawned itself into uncountable bits and pieces. A simple observation, each day teaches. During the Day, the Sign of One, wholeness. During the Night, the Sign of Many.
In their magic codes, which had become lost to us, there is expressed: the doctrine of the Elements, which the modern physicist considers nonsense. This ancient view was simply based on a caring and intimate Way of looking at what is right in front of us. I&Thou. We were part of a Whole. All that we are, all the Rest Shares, including an interior life invisible.
The element fire is sacred code for the force of will. The element water is code for the life of feeling. The element air is code for the order giving acts of the intellect, that reduce fire&water to form, through which then the manifested unity of all four becomes named: the element earth, or conscious experience.
The essence of the human being, in their science, was not sexual, for which “spirit” they would use the term: hermaphrodite. The fiery spirit of the human will was, in their time as well as ours, cursed to incarnate in bodies that were of a different nature than the essence of spirit&soul. Bodies of matter. Avatar bodies, in which the sexless fire-divine of the single human being, could play in the worlds generated by arts of immortals – elemental fires, producing – a not at all virtual – game of life. In this game you die, and the do-overs are only won through the afterlife hall of mirrors of how we lived our days, or so the ancient priests understood the matter.
A more modern priest/scientist of the spiritual – Rudolf Steiner – suggested that we alternate the sexuality of these avatar bodies, male in one incarnation, female in another. Reality has always been “what goes around comes around”, given that “vengeance is mine saith the Lord”, so as to help us think about whether or not we really want to be the judge and jury and executioner of another human being.
Meanwhile, down the hall, in 5B, those two elemental fires, one named Ted and the other Uncertain, have been screaming at each other again, throwing stones made of words.
Now we can consider further the examination of the nature of “passion”.
We are immortals. Born from immortals, nursed by immortals, we are on a phoenix grail mission, where fires are from the “In the Beginning …, followed with the waters of life, in the Father’s school of hard knocks, which itself is married to the Mother’s school/community of shared pain, aka civilization … ours now transforming into something new, yet …
… in these passion-creating fires&ashes we now live, faced with the trials of being embedded in matter, in order for all our elemental fires to learn. This level of change cannot be hurried. We will endure it one day, one tweet, at a time.
Mostly what we’ve learned about reality, as our modern scientific Western Civilization, is how to be skilled at death – we are very good at killing – each other, the planet etc., … so far. If we don’t I&Thou our world, a gift to us from the Divine Mystery – who in generating human freedom (the Beast from the Abyss) declared: Our children must be free to run too fast, color outside the lines, and really learn that there are consequences for everything. Apparently it is not uncommon for many folk to “not give a damn” about consequences, so our world burns in the divine fires of the Hopi’s called: “the Day of Purification”.
When I was growing up, we would have dates where we went to drive-in movies (in the ‘50’s), while the guy would try to make moves on the girl, in a forest of emotional confusion, a rite which everyone endures, unless we have decided – as a culture – to be amazed by what we are being Taught in this conflagration, tending to complete social chaos. Remember hard knocks school?
… here is how it works, if we consider the whole of it filled with divine purpose, = we are watched over with the loving justice of the Mother, who tempers the vengeance of the Father. We play the game in the Avatar physical/matter bodies, moving toward a time which Steiner predicts will arrive in a few thousand years, during which drama of the one day at a time prelude, there will arise the disappearance of fertility among women’s avatar bodies.
I’m pretty sure that means we can still like sex a lot, but maybe saving getting good at sex for a later life, not so good a bet in my view. Strike while the iron of passion is hot, and don’t screw it up with more games.
Intimacy is about eliminating games, in a world which was consciously designed for males to hunger to plant seed in any ripe female. Time to make adolescence a both-sex journey into wisdom – no feminists, no masculinity required, we all being, in the immortal words of the Captain of the Serenity, Malcolm Reynolds: “just plain folk”.
Passion is about surrender to feelings. To the ancient Greeks, this surrender was given the name Eros, which duality includes both the sensual and the erotic, together recognized as an earthly form of love. In my experience there are three other forms: Selfless human love (Agape); comradeship (Phileo); and nurturing in love (Storge).
What happens when we display our masculinity, or femininity, … our differences, before authoring the vulnerability&sharing of our common humanity? Isn’t emotional closeness of greater value than just getting your rocks off? That we can do by ourselves. Human closeness, however. We don’t do that alone. Choices have consequences, after all.
Still: the display can be provocative, and the response can be intoxication. If anything, Love is Art, which maybe needs to become celebrated once more in our religious temples. No more priests tho’. Each of us has to make their own choices, otherwise freedom is a fraud, and life a prison.
According to tradition, and even Rudolf Steiner, the folk of the elemental kingdoms have no free will. They do, however, have complicated given-natures – the tasks in which the engage require remarkable natural talents in their realization.
Many phenomena reflect the given-nature of elemental beings involved in the complicated requirements for maintaining regularity and rhythm is all living systems.
No physical phenomena appear that is not sourced in invisible to the senses beings. Applications of these “talents” requires an I & Thou relationship with a world of intelligences we imagine live out there among the stars, when in fact they are right there in your garden, your car engine, you sons broken ankle, … everywhere consciousness, and laws that govern living beings in action. By the way, the body of an elemental is only visible to someone with clairvoyant vision, while the consciousness is right there in the screen on which you are reading this.
https://thecollectiveimagination.com/…/letters-about…/
Steiner used to write/say that when matters were not right in the Society, etc., what was needed was more Anthroposophy. Or, he would phrase this same idea this way: All the daughter movements need to not forget the Mother, Anthroposophy.
A good read is Awakening to Community, which is a collection of lectures in January and February following the burning of the Goetheanum. He was very frank about what was already “off” back then, and after the situation did not improve, he sought to do the needed healing via the Christmas Conference.
That failed as well, as evidenced by the ten years after his death, during which the ladies got into fights with each other, the various national Societies took sides, and people were “excluded”.
Afterwards various leaders in Dornach lived on, pretending the Christmas Conference was some kind of miracle, that saved all the flaws. To any careful observation, this is a kind of madness – to be a spiritual scientist and think Steiner performed amazing supernatural feats.
There is false history all over the various anthroposophical endeavors, and at the same time amazing deeds of bringing into incarnation farms, and schools and all the rest, in spite of most Steiner students standing lost in an epistemological swampland.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/oajnr.html
Fake Ancient Alien Theorist Foolishly Visits the Collective Imagination 