Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

with technology, the drug scene with its often brutal human exploitations,the crass materialism in thought, feeling, and ruthless will—but it also helpsus to realize that it may be precisely in the existential struggle to overcomethe double that the Western soul comes closest to the threshold and to thereality of spiritual life. Consciousness of this fact can become the strongestspur of conscience to do everything in one’s power to strengthen the healingwork of art and the healing knowledge of anthroposophy and its practicalmanifestations in medicine, education, science, and agriculture.In the West, it is almost always the practical application of anthroposophythat one meets first, and it is often a second or third meeting thatinspires the question as to the world-picture that works as a formative forcein the practical activities. Although by no means uniquely Western, it is,nevertheless, the characteristic Western experience and points to the greatimportance of how anthroposophy lives in the practitioner: as an external“method,” or as a wellspring of insight and creativity that enlivens its application.It is precisely here that the Westerner can experience the truth ofRudolf Steiner’s observation that the danger for the being Anthroposophiaas she moves westward is that she become “a wooden doll”! Once again, thehealing power that can overcome and transform this tendency is the activepractice of the arts, deepened and enhanced through meditation. It is herealso that the Westerner finds help in the work of those great forerunnerswho ploughed the ground of the Western soul in earlier times and plantedseeds that are waiting to be re-discovered today, to be transformed andmade to grow.The American, in particular, who sets out on the path of explorationto find his own contemporary roots in the past, will turn back to a peacefulMassachusetts village of sturdy farmers in the nineteenth century that harboreda company of pioneering explorers of a continent of inner experience.They blazed new trails, seldom traveled by the men and women of their day,but which just at this time are waiting to be re-discovered and to be followed.Here, in Concord, the American will encounter that spirit-eagle,Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose thought was as transparent and clearly formedas the quartz crystal, about whom Rudolf Steiner remarked that his thinkingwas so penetrated by the fire of his inner experience that the double wascompletely overcome. It was, indeed, through the lens of his purified powerof thought that Emerson observed the universe, the human soul and spirit,giving expression to his observations in daring, revolutionary terms, as, forinstance, in his essay on Self-Reliance:268