The archetypal idea of the threefold nature of the social organism in its macro- and mesosociaal form as well as that of the human physical organism is, as has been indicated in this sketch, a polarity divided or rather harmonized by a double middle of active neutrality. This underlying idea is not, however, limited to those areas; it is also in other forms to be found in Man himself as a triune being consisting of body, soul and mind (spirit), the components of which, as Rudolf Steiner in one of his basic books Theosophy has described, are also threefold themselves. It is further to be found in the world consisting of its East, West and Middle and in the divine realm in three choirs of the celestial angelic beings up to the triunity of the Godhead Itself. This basic compositional principle of everything is therefore not a duality e.g. that between good and evil, because evil has two faces, namely Lucifer (the devil as he is called in the Bible) and Satan (or Ahriman as he is called in the ancient Persian teachings of Zarathustra and in the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner) with the third figure of Jesus Christ standing in the middle and holding them apart (see the image of The Representative of Humanity on the back cover). It is even found in the ground plan of the Second Goetheanum building. See Appendix) with a polarity between, on the one hand, the sloping West side (corresponding to the 4 outward-going statutes 1, 5, 9, 13 of the Anthroposophical Society, representing its goals or motives to the general public) and, on the other hand, the steep vertical East side (corresponding to the 4 inward-going statutes 3, 7, 11, 15 representing human beings as the driving forces to realize these goals). This polarity is connected by the symmetrical East and West sides (corresponding to the 7 even numbered statutes 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, representing the double middle of the organs of the societal I or Ego, connecting the outwards- and inwards-going statutes. This corresponds in human consciousness, as can be learned from in Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, to the human I connecting a motive with a driving force to produce an individual deed, which if the motive and driving force are drawn from pure thinking constitutes a free deed.
It is now further up to humanity itself,
via the nations, governments and communities of the world, to finally come to recognize
this and to draw up and implement a constitutional order that is in line with
this universal threefold principle for its own good and the survival of the
earth.
With the following sentence, “May this sketch become a small contribution to that noble goal”, I ended the article of my lecture at the Moscow University in 2017. Here in the hope that it will lead to action, this appeal is supplemented by a text by Herbert Witzenmann elaborating on the advice given to young people by Rudolf Steiner during his course in 1924 on bio-dynamic agriculture in East-Germany to start "Oases of Humanity". He envisaged this as spiritual schooling and meditation centers on biodynamically-run farms to safe-guard and protect the culture of Central Europa of the likes of Goethe, Novalis[1] and Hieronymus Bosch[2], that Central Europa which alas Rudolf Steiner successfully predicted would become a culturally and physically devastated wasteland. A first attempt to realize this was made by the Swiss poet and president of the General Anthroposophical Society Albert Steffen in 1946 to turn Switzerland into an Oasis of Humanity as a haven for hapless victims of war and oppression. Exactly 33 years later it was given a new impulse by Herbert Witzenmann in a social-scientific conference entitled "Contributions to the World Situation" (Beiträge zur Weltlage) in Arlesheim, Switzerland in which he developed the idea of a setting up such interconnected oases of humanity, beginning with a model-oasis, in order to develop a threefold peace, i.e. peace with oneself, peace with one's neighbor and peace with the earth, which would not only benefit the endangered physical but also the spiritual climate and offer a perspective on a World Peace Union. He motivated this further in many of his writings, such as his already mentioned book The Virtues – Seasons of the Soul[3], which is a handbook for the new nobility of the spirit to be developed in such oases, and his essay "The Basic Social Idea of Our Time", incorporated in a blog entitled "Social Organics - Basic Guidelines for a New Earth Trusteeship"[4], which together with his essay “Crisis and Alternative – Contextual Right and Righteous Contextuality in Rudolf Steiner’s Social Organics” was submitted as a working paper to the International Gathering "Earth Trusteeship - Governance, Law, Advocacy and Practice" held from June 22 to 24, 2018 in The Hague. Part III of this essay "Biodynamic Agriculture - Care Communities for Spiritual Life and the Quest for a New Meaning of the Earth" reads as follows:
“Lastly,
let us also consider agriculture.[5] We
have seen that cognition, i.e., the meditative experience of the material state
of consciousness leads us to discover the meaning of the world and man. The
task and meaning of cognition is to give us contextual certainty. The meaning
of the world and man is freedom. We have further seen that social life, i.e.
the meditative cohabitation with the dead leads to productive justice. Social
life has the task and meaning to raise our awareness of being united with
people in a free cultural, spiritual life (of the living and the dead). This
unison is the equality of people, for in that commonality all are equal. And we
have also seen that the basic concept which similarly leaves its stamp on
cognition and social life, such as it is understood here, is the idea of
reincarnation, the transition of contraction and expansion of the spiritual
energies into one another.
The contextual certainty (freedom)
about the material state of consciousness provides an understanding of the past
evolution of the world and humanity. Experiencing justice in living and sharing
together with the dead provides an understanding for the present in the
evolution of the world and humanity. What understanding can we now create for
the task and meaning of agriculture, of care for the earth in the most
comprehensive sense?
Increasingly, the original supply of substances and
energies from the earth is being depleted. With the advancement of human
civilization her substances are increasingly being consumed or processed into
life-threatening waste. In the most ominous way this comes to the fore through
the nuclear energy that dissolves the material basis of our life, which has
developed parallel to our bodily organism, and leaves waste products behind
that are not in harmony with our bodily functions, but rather pose a severe
threat to their very survival. The vitality of the earth’s creatures
degenerates more and more, for which above all man himself is responsible due
to the way he treats them and changes the general living conditions. And
precisely this change in the environment, the pollution of the earth, the water
and the air and thereby the related change of the light and heat development in
the earth’s atmosphere exert the greatest impact on the total state of the
earth and removes her more and more from her original condition and destiny.
Man increasingly destroys the original state of the earth and thereby increasingly
alienates her from her original destiny.
What was this original destiny? We
have seen it: Bringing forth human organisms and with them and through this
material consciousness in the first place the creation of matter. This destiny
becomes exhausted by itself. Because, as we have seen, it has no meaning in and
by itself. Rather, it has fulfilled its task when free human consciousness has
arisen.
With this development of
consciousness, man is assigned the task of giving the earth a new meaning. From
this viewpoint, it therefore absolutely belongs to the nature of man and his
task to collaborate on the exhaustion of the original meaning of the earth and
the dissolution of the original state of the earth. Because after all, man
himself is this exhaustion.
However, current humanity does not
bring about this dissolution of the original meaning of the earth by
endeavoring to create a new sense of destiny for her and thereby a trans- and
reformation of the state of the earth (which would be its highest task).
Instead it causes this exhaustion in an even accelerated way by clinging to the
old meaning of the earth. Through the progressive multiplication of needs
arising from material consciousness and its ever more desirable pursuit of
gratification, humanity is evolving into a shameless exploiter of the earth,
thanking her for her maternal care through devastation with ruthless, cruelest
ingratitude.
Today’s humanity has maneuvered
itself into a situation which forces itself under the threat of catastrophes to
regulate the exploitation more systematically than ever before and to start
restoring the self-inflicted damage through a caring behavior. A task that
through the scale of the damage, its continuous causation through the advancing
inflation of needs and the lack of ideas of materialistically orientated science makes it extremely
difficult, if not at all impossible to come up with a solution.
No matter how questionable this may be, something else in this
connection is even more questionable, which is hardly recognized today, not
even by those who endeavor to care for the earth with the very best of
intentions. This unrecognized factor concerns the insight into the meaning of
the task that faces us with unrelenting urgency. And this lack of insight basically determines the wrong direction of these care
efforts. For everything that is being done today to reduce and restore the
environmental damage, to bring about a healthier overall condition and to slow
down and more rationally manage the depletion of our natural resources, all
that strives after all towards a recovery or at least towards the longest
possible extension and life span of the fertility of the earth for our
materially determined needs, thus an adherence to the original meaning of the
earth or a return to it.
However, this is the most serious
mistake that we can make. And we must deal with this without any bias. If you
have followed my argument, you will have understood that we can glean from our
own nature what man’s destiny is, what destiny he gives himself, if he but
really understands himself. He is destined by his bodily organism (i.e. through
the earth and its development, from which, after all, his organism originates),
to initially develop the material state of consciousness that separates
thought, the spirit from percepts, the singularities. As a result, this state
of consciousness is material, it causes
matter to arise. And only through this unspiritual state of
consciousness can man attain his individual, free state of mind. With that, the
mission, the meaning of the earth (nature) in its present condition is
fulfilled and the consumption of this present condition of her is justified,
not however the destruction of it. Man must give the earth a new meaning,
because she has given him the meaning of his existence.
Therefore agriculture does not in the first instance
have a purpose for man in the sense that its proper use holds a healthy and
long life in store for him. It has, in the first instance, a purpose for the
earth: It must give thanks to the earth. What can this thanksgiving be? It can
exist in a conscious awareness as well as in the following practical behavior
resulting from it. When we follow the needs and habits that arise from our
subconscious, we follow the old, vanishing meaning of the earth without
contributing to its metamorphosis, to a new meaning of the earth, to the
salvation of the earth. However, when we develop the holistic awareness that
earth, cosmos and man are a spiritual unity and proceed to act from this fully
cognitive consciousness, we give the thanks to the earth that we owe her. For
then we adopt in our care for the earth (agriculture) such measures by which we
bring the earth in conjunction with the cosmic forces, from which she was
created with her old meaning and, after her old meaning is fulfilled, from now
on work to give her a new shape, a new meaning.
How can we represent this new
meaning? In the old sense of the earth, natural and cultural development were
and still are separated, as this is necessary to allow a free, individual human
consciousness to emerge. The new meaning of the earth must consist in natural
and cultural development forming a unity. This means that the spiritual forces
that man has obtained will become directly active in nature. And this again
means that man, by virtue of the spiritual forces that he has obtained through
the creatures of nature because of their regression from his humanity, will
contribute to their new meaning, thus humanization and salvation. He must not
create matter, but give rise to a spiritual world-of-beings. To this end, man
is not yet fully capable. But he can, however, begin by working in his care for
the earth not only with the forces of her own disintegrating nature from the
past, but with the cosmic forces that transform her into her future nature.
In this, the disposition, the mindset from which action
is taken, is of decisive significance. For thoughts are already by themselves,
not only by their application in actions, reality-forming forces. It is pernicious
to do agriculture for the sake of human health. This desired result can and may
be only secondary. Rather, agriculture must be a religious service of thanks to
the earth. It must therefore have a festive character, as was the case in
ancient times, but it must from now on be raised from a more instinctive
behavior to full consciousness. Agriculture must be research into the cosmic
laws of metamorphosis that gives the earth a new meaning. In this way,
agriculture must form care communities for the cultivation of the most
intensive spiritual life. In the festive aura of earth change, it must
incorporate spiritual communities consisting of intellectually active human
beings, who freely manifest the future meaning of the earth, that is the only
meaning that agriculture can have. Agriculture only makes sense, if all its
measures are supported and are themselves the bearer of the threefold
denomination of artistic-religious festivity, research into the cosmic sense of
the earth and the formation of thinking spiritual communities that fathom the
spiritual nature of the world and man. Here again the reincarnation idea
emerges as the basic idea. In his cognition, man must comprehend cosmic
impulses that transform, thus contract the earth, and transfer them to the
earth, thus causing her to expand. He thereby predisposes impulses of
incarnation thus of contraction in the spiritual world.
* * *
[1] See his essay: CHRISTENDOM OR
EUROPE: The Prenunciation Of Future Spiritual Community In The Work Of Novalis
(https://willehalminstitute.blogspot.com/2019/07/christendom-or-europe-prenunciation-of.html)
[2] It was at the beginning of the
celebration of the Hieronymus Bosch-500
year in 2016 in The Netherlands that his tryptich "The Garden of Heavenly
Joys" (generally but mistakenly called "Garden of Earthly
Delights") was adopted as the figurehead of the project "World Peace
Union of Oases of Humanity through Social Organics" and first proclaimed
as such during a reading January 27, 2016 on Dam Square in front of the Royal
Palace in Amsterdam by two petitions in Dutch and English (the latter called
"Social Organics - Turning our Mother Earth into a Garden of Heavenly
Joys") to the Dutch and Spanish kings, which can be seen on my Robert
Kelder Channel on YouTube, but which, as could be expected, elicited no more
than a polite response that they were received in good order.( See: https://wereldvredesbond.blogspot.com/2020/04/petition-to-king-william-alexander-of.html)
[3] See: http://Power-to-the-Virtues.blogspot.nl/
An exhibition of the painting by Jan de Kok for the title page of this book and
his illuminations for the 12 meditations on the mood of the months of the year
was opened on May 23 at the Elisabeth Vreede House in The Hague as part of the
international conference “The New Knowledge Christianity” on May 27, 28 and
29.
[5] See also Herbert
Witzenmann: Über die Erkenntnisgrundlagen
der biologisch-dynamischen Wirtschaftsweise (On the Cognitive Fundaments of Biodynamic Agriculture, not translated).
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