August 15, 2020

Dear Members & Friends,

Greetings in the “dog days” of summer. Our summer-fall print issue of being human is at the post office, on its way to members, though the speed of delivery may be slower than usual.

 It will be posted online in a couple of weeks with the new feature that main articles will be separated out and readable on your phone. That is being done now for past issues, at www.issuu.com/anthrousa. Just click the box to show stories.

The new issue features several articles related to our present moment. Paul Gierlach writes on “Four Domains of a Healthy Culture,” a real find in Rudolf Steiner’s lectures. Dennis Dietzel takes on “Virtual Presence, Social Distancing.” Boyd Collins explores “How can we master the flow of our attention online?” And Christopher Schaefer addresses “Sacramental Conversation: Experiencing Our Humanity,” an article based in part on a talk to members of the North American Council for Anthroposophical Curative Education and Social Therapy. 

There are also contributions to help engage the Foundation Stone Meditation from four Sections of the School for Spiritual Science.

ESSENTIAL ANTHROPOSOPHY

As we ripen in the individuality that makes us human, we pass through stages that are not cooperative, not compassionate. We are trying to think our own thoughts, feel our own feelings. As the great rabbi Hillel asked in the first of his three questions, “If I am not for myself, who then will be for me?”

But of course there is a second question: “If I am only for myself, what good am I?” Just so the two “great commandments” Jesus affirmed were to love God (the cosmic, creative “I am”) with your whole heart mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

That interaction of ‘I’ with ‘I’ is the most essential teaching-learning process in the development of true selfhood and full humanity. And Hillel had a third question: “If not now, when?”

There are great historical stages of the ‘I’-becoming-present in human beings at large. Back in Egyptian times, three and four thousand years ago, we were living into our sense experiences, a penetration into one’s “astral” body. This is reflected in the Egyptian way of expressing the divinity, the higher consciousness, behind day and night, in animals, in phenomena of all kinds.

In the time of Greeks and Romans the ‘I’ came into relationship with the “etheric” body of life and formative forces. Then we felt our own being and awoke to its relationships – and the relationship of things outside ourselves. We began to think, to have intelligence.

The current stage, about six hundred years into its two-thousand year span, brings the ‘I’ into relationship with our physical and mineral body. We are awakening to the different qualities of consciousness itself. And we have become materialists in our thinking, explaining everything out of matter and its characteristics, developing the discipline of objective thinking.

But we must not get stuck in materialism; we can compensate for its amazingly powerful but narrowed perspectives with a new awakening to the reality of consciousness, spirit, and the heights we have still to climb to gain our full humanity.

The pictures this time are from August out west, in California, above, and Wyoming, the Tetons, further up.

Thank you for reading, and for being part of this community!

John Beck
Editor, being human
editor@anthroposophy.org
Anthroposophical Society in America