The Practical Role of Anthroposophy
On the 15th of May, my wife Chandre’ and I attended a Leadership and Ethics Summit in Johannesburg. It was titled ‘From Chaos to Consciousness’. It was streamed all over the world. It was attended by business and other leaders interested in contributing to a better world. The link to the recording is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seg5TzUrqy4&pp=ygUaY29uc2Npb3VzIGNvbXBhbmllcyBzdW1taXQ%3D. The recording is nearly 5 hours long. I give this only so that you can, if you wish, check for yourself whether my comments and suggestions are valid.
I sat there and listened with all my capacities of listening, remaining still inwardly, also open and observant of my own inner responses. I was looking to see what would arise in me through my active and present soul. I was looking for what was not being said that would have added value. I was dissecting what the contributors were really saying and what they were not saying because of choice or blind spots within them. I was being attentive to what my soul was sympathetic to and how this related to what I was having to follow in their inner lives through their communications.
What I heard was the following in essence:
- Most were there purely as a PR exercise for building their personal brands, their initiatives or businesses;
- Some were there with the very best intentions;
- Some were there to share their personal experiences and what they had learnt from this in the hope that it would inspire others;
- There was little in principle that connected what one said to the other. They were not building a unified set of orienting concepts;
- The most productive inputs came from analogies or parables where it became possible for the souls of those listening to connect and fly with;
- Many descriptions were those of a sense of things rather than having a map of understanding behind what was sensed. People were describing aromas from a very personal perspective rather than describing them against something more specific and attainable.
Had I, as a representative of Anthroposophy, been asked to intervene in the whole process, I would have found it very difficult. I felt like a rabbit in the headlights of a car.
Where to now?
How do I connect?
There were very few gateways to common concepts. There was a lot of individual opinion, people talking about what they knew or had experienced, where they felt safe, what they could say or contribute that would give them the admiration of others. There was little expression of what one needs to do to allow a higher intention into what we can be and become. Humanity seemed separated from any God.
In summary, I felt like I was in a different world if it related to human consciousness as a topic for consideration. I could certainly have left the theme and simply spoken for myself. I could have told a story of earthly existence and connected to others in this way. That I could have done.
- How could I have brought in some of the centering concepts that anchor the human being to truth?
- How could I have enabled souls to be open to anything but what already lives in them?
These were the questions that confronted me as I sat there hearing more and more unsatisfying expressions of where others were suggesting that orientation to consciousness lived. I found no science behind any of these. There was no logic that could connect anything to anything. It was all somewhat sentient in nature.
As a Christian one knows that we have been given our individual freedom to garner our own self-awareness through the offering and sacrifice of Christ. We know that we are gently being let go of – freed from – the direct influence of the angelic world and having to take this on ourselves. We are being asked to find our own way to our spiritual adulthood. This is an onerous task. Being accountable to self is not going to come to us as a gift. It is a real act of free choice to want this and to take it on out of freedom. Many of us wait for someone else to do it for us, but this leads us to having to suffer even more as we have to eventually stand up out of it ourselves. This was not presented, or even hinted at, at the summit. This freedom that has been offered us as the next requirement for our development comes with accountability and consequences. As a whole we need to see this and take it on. This is surely such an anchoring point in our orientation to where we are today and how we can connect to the truthful reality of our time and how we must relate to it.
Spiritual Science, in the form of Anthroposophy, offers many orientation points where we can take hold of this freedom.
- It gives a skeleton of concepts that allow one to build one’s conceptual life around.
- It takes one out of random into logic.
- It grounds one because the concepts have a ‘scientific’ base. We are able to follow them with logic. (We have been given them which frees us from having to find them.)
- One can test their logic with everyday consciousness, but they then can lead us into further insight and understanding because they are truthful in essence.
- If we do find these anchoring points, we can become accountable because we get onto a conscious path towards a real end.
Anthroposophy should be researching how these orientation points can be used to connect to people like those present at the summit; how to make it more poignant to the reality that to be accountable to taking on our freedom we need such points, and they need to be clearly visible in concept.
What would a few orientation points look like and how would they be made clear within the mists of modern denialism?
Here are a few examples.
Spiritual Science contains the concept of the evolution of consciousness. Human consciousness shifts with time and progress. This reality gives us the orientation that we can and should discover our own consciousness at this point in time. It would exclude all thinking that assumes people of the past and people of the future would orient themselves in exactly the same way to us now or to each other. Such thoughts would be ridiculous.
Tied into this, the thought of reincarnation and karma would explain why there is a shifting of consciousness as time moves on.
On a more detailed look at some anchoring concepts of spiritual science, we can see how dualistic thinking encourages a certain way of existing while monistic thinking leads to another, the latter being the correct one. All sorts of insights become possible with monistic thinking that are unachievable with dualistic thinking.
In summary, it cannot be considered as realistic that spiritual science could have had any effect on those attending the summit if presented as an alternative or contra view. However, witnessing it with an inner clarity of why it adds value to such a situation would clearly make an impact over time. Just the fact that spiritual science gives us these concepts so that we can be grounded and logical in spirit, is a reality that has a strong corrective effect on the societal organism. As we become to be perceived as correcting in nature amongst this chaos, the living souls of others, so starved of truth, would nudge up to this mothers’ milk of understanding and suckle accordingly. This might happen once there has been disasters beyond contemplation or before. We have a task that is worth taking on.
Excellent report and article. I have already taken part in a few similar events, sometimes more, sometimes less with a mock esoteric spirit. The organisers usually have their own agenda and no higher values to guide them. People who are into self-realisation and ego are difficult to reach with anthroposophy. That is my experience. I would like to see more heartfelt, open encounters and events in which the work on anthroposophy – the wisdom in people – is at the centre and not any particular interests or fashionable topics.