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Today’s Global Crisis & the Need forSocial, Ecological & Spiritual RenewalCommunity Building: Meeting the Challengeof Time through Creative CooperationWith Robert Karp. Profound new social and spiritualimpulses are emerging within humanity. In the last thirtyor so years, for example, thousands of new “communitiesof interest” have sprung up that are working in oneway or another for the ecological, economic, social and spiritualrenewal of civilization. The coming decades will determinewhether these communities can evolve and work together insuch a way as to forge a worldwide movement capable of givingcivilization an upward turn, or whether they will prove toofragmented, competitive, narrow and sectarian to meet the challengeof the times. In this course we will draw on the insightsof Rudolf Steiner as well as contemporary thinkers in order topenetrate the mysteries of this decisive time and what it is askingof us.Some of the questions we will take up include: Where dowe see new social and spiritual impulses emerging in twentyfirstcentury America? How can those who carry the impulseof anthroposophy best work together with those from othermovements who share our goals? What are the principles ofcommunity building and social transformation from a spiritualscientific perspective? How can we begin to embody these principlesmore fully in and between our initiatives, businesses, andorganizations? Can a new community building impulse emergefrom the heart of the anthroposophical movement?Re-Imagining Capitalism:Surviving the Current Economic TsunamiWith Jerry Schwartz, Clemens Pietzner, Robert Hill. Ifever there was a part of our societal structure that criesout for change, that urgently needs to be re-imagined,it is western free-market capitalism. How could it havegone so wrong, become so out of balance as to requiremassive governmental intervention around the world toprevent global depression? The complexity and scale ofthis gargantuan economic network would seem to defyone’s efforts to understand or re-imagine it. However,if one examines this aspect of societal life, as Rudolf Steiner, incontext of the spiritual/psychological make-up of the threefoldhuman being, the picture that emerges is remarkably straightforwardand instructive of what must be done to create balanceand stability not only within our economic lives, but morebroadly within the human community.Think OutWord at Rudolf Steiner Institute, July 5-11This summer’s Rudolf Steiner Institute presents a special block of three classes, coordinated with Think OutWord, a peer-led trainingin social threefolding. Each course will meet separately for two sessions of each day to address pressing societal challenges fromone perspective. Participants from all three courses come together in the third session to work artistically and collaboratively inprototyping of new social forms, led by Laura Summer. Evening programs during this first week are in the format of a community colloquiumthat integrates artistic presentations, talks by guest speakers, and two panel discussions. Those participating in the courseconcentration will present the explorations and findings that arise from their collaborative efforts. The courses are open to all, witha special invitation to the young and to anyone interested in starting, continuing, or connecting with socially progressive initiatives.There is a special discount for Waldorf graduates age 18-35. Go to steinerinstitute.org, call 410-358-0050 or email reg@steinerinstitute.org.Using the framework and insights of the threefold socialstructure, we will address the questions that both experts andlaypersons are asking: what lies at the roots of the currentfinancial chaos; what attitudes, knowledge and practices mustone acquire in order to navigate in this economic turmoil; whatare the inner and outer remedies called for if we are to createa healthy social order; what new ways of thinking and financialhabits or behaviors should one adopt to become part of thesolution; what must change if western market-driven capitalismis to be prevented from destroying itself? The course will be ledby three individuals who represent a broad spectrum of experiencewithin the economic world: Jerry Schwartz has been a WallStreet broker and is president of Arista, a financial managementfirm; Clemens Pietzner is founder and president of Triskeles,a non-profit foundation that manages philanthropic donoradvised funds, works with youth who are struggling to find theirway into the economic world, and provides an organizationalumbrella for start-up non-profits whose mission is communitybuilding; Robert Hill was president and CEO of a mid-sized managementconsulting firm that served a wide range of companies.Water, Energy, and Changes in the Climate:Outer and Inner Manifestations ofEnvironmental Problems and SolutionsWith Michael D’Aleo. Each one of us regularly hearsstories about environmental destruction in the dailynews. We long to do something about these problems but oftenfeel overwhelmed by the magnitude of what is reported. Mostof us find ourselves accepting the stories as reported and wefeel ourselves ill prepared to deal with both the outer and innerissues that arise from such a startling and often bleak picture.The course will offer three approaches to help establish arenewed and healthier relationship between our self and ourenvironment. The first morning sessions will focus on helpingourselves to reconnect to the foundation for knowing the world:the relationship between the sensory and conceptual elementsof our experiences. This activity will help us to breakthroughthe limited view that we are encouraged to accept by manyelements of our modern western culture. The second set of sessionswill involve an investigation of some of the contemporaryenvironmental issues: what is really happening, what needsto be done and what aspects do we need to be less concernedwith. The third aspect of the course will consist of a group artisticactivity in the sculptural arts.16 Evolving News for Members & Friends
From Consumer to “Producer in the Spiritual Sphere”Herbert Witzenmann[Republished from Revisioning Society & Culture: The Journalfor Anthroposophy #77, which is third in the series of “Classics”available at anthroposophy.org. The original article was probablywritten in the 1960s or early 1970s.]When we regard the situation of today, we see that it comesto meet us with a particular demand. Concerning this particulardemand, the historian Toynbee has made a significant statementin a recently published essay. He points out that oneof the most characteristic and serious symptoms ofthe present is the increase in violence in all areas ofthe earth and that, alongside this symptom of theincrease in violence, there exists yet another symptom,the increase in pitilessness, which is evidencedamong other things in the fact that nowadays thereis no longer any underprivileged class of society, butthat in all classes and levels of the populace thereare underprivileged people; that is to say the old,the weak, such people who are not provided for bylarge-scale organizations. These two symptoms ofviolence and lovelessness are drawing humanity intoa constantly worsening state of brutality. Toynbeestates that every government is really based on force and that noimprovement can be expected as long as nations do not discardthe two principles of force and pitilessness.In response to such an utterance, we can feelthe challenge of the times appealing to our ownhearts to find a style of working that can confrontthis violence and pitilessness with a positiveexample: the working together of free individualities.Certainly, Rudolf Steiner has said that peoplewill and must become more and more individualizedand differentiated, that this will and mustbring about an increasingly greater danger ofestrangement, that there will be no guaranteeof safety in the future—this future has in themeantime become the present—and that therewill only be one remedy, to live with trust in thespiritual world, which expresses itself in singlehuman beings as the impulses of the individual.Now, to these symptoms I have mentioned with referenceto Toynbee, I should like to add a third that is significant andcharacteristic for everyone, but particularly, I think, for youngpeople, and that is the wish to escape from being a consumerand being part of a society consisting of consumers. This dissatisfaction,this wanting to escape from a society of consumerswith its forced production and its surplus of goods, is one ofthe deepest impulses of our time, especially in young people.Here we encounter a situation similar to the one that confrontedRudolf Steiner at the end of the First World War with regard tothe proletariat.The proletariat at that time wanted to escape from a societybased on property and commercial interests and it possessedtremendous forces, impulses of will, to do so, but it only had theold manner of thinking and habits of feeling. It wanted to escapefrom this old situation with old forces. That was the tragedy atthat time. And the whole of present-day humanity is in a similarsituation. The whole of humanity has actually become the proletariat.Fundamentally, everyone wants in his innermost being—even those who are at home in this society of consumers—toescape from it, particularly young people. But they do not yetknow how to do so, and consequently they slip back again andagain into the old habits of thinking and feeling, into the veryattitudes that brought about this consumer situation. Progresscan only be made when people learn to overcomethe consumer situation in themselves and insteadof being consumers, become producers in thesense of Rudolf Steiner’s words: “My whole work isonly the apparatus on which one learns gymnastics.”The consumption of this work has no value.If one wants to help, and particularly to helpyoung people, the first thing is not necessarilyto provide answers—of course, one must alsoin a tactful way provide answers, as far as onecan—but it is much more important to try to leadpeople to the point where they create the prerequisitesin themselves, whereby they can answertheir own questions and provide their own counsel.Wilhelm von Humboldt said that if you really want to counselsomeone you should not give him advice. If young people areto help themselves through an inner exertion ofwill, through inner discipline and exercise, thenit is just the overcoming of the consumer mentalitythat is urgent. In this sense, I should like toattempt a brief contribution. I should like to takeas my starting point something one often meetsas a question particularly from young people.This is the question concerning the path ofinner training, of meditation. I intentionallychoose the most delicate question just becauseit cannot receive a direct answer, since the bestand most productive course is not to speak ofthe results and experiences of meditation if onewishes to make progress in one’s meditative life.Nevertheless, in the preparatory stage leadingto meditation one can make significant observations. I shouldlike to present observations of this kind as they might emergein a living way during the course of a conversation, observationsthat need in no way be adopted by others, but may serveas a stimulus to develop out of oneself whatever corresponds toone’s own nature.Let us consider the seed meditation, which you all know. Notonly can it be meditated, it allows one to observe the preparatorystage of consciousness—that which precedes supersensibleimpressions or presentiments—with the sober, reflectivecalmness of the scientist. Out of a seed, we can let the plantappear before us in an inner formative process in somewhat thesame wonderful way in which it occurs in Goethe’s elegiac lineson metamorphosis. Then we see rising before this inner, activeprocess a growing, a striving from the darkness of the earth intolight, from the formless to the formed, from the colorless to theSpring-Summer 200917
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Page 11 and 12: Farmer-Mentor Workshop:Growing a Fa
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