Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

and gardening to Waldorf schooling and from anthroposophically extendedmedicine to the most basic questions governing the conduct of life, makeoutstanding examples of how a spirit consciousness changes all kinds ofcultural practices.Farmers and gardeners, for example, notice that it makes a differencewhether you think of the earth as a living being or as just dirt. Decisionsabout how best to enhance the land’s fertility become not just commercialquestions but topics for serious scientific research and development; the useof pesticides is closely studied; organic waste materials are treated differentlyfrom inorganic ones. Spirit consciousness changes the practice of medicine,too. The relation of patients to sickness and health becomes rich with bothmystery and complex possibilities for meaning when physicians, nurses,psychotherapists, and other caregivers think of their charges as beings ofbody, soul, and spirit. They see that the physical bodies of their patients mayexpress inclinations and decisions that have their sources in a body-free,spirit existence where definite intentions have been conceived in urgent,if now unremembered, activity. When spirit is considered real, intimate,subtle relations between humans and their environments—natural, physical,or psychological—can be taken into account. Then correspondingly subtlediagnoses and treatments can start to result, and hitherto neglected areasreceive new interest. Nutrition, childbirth, geriatrics—a spirit consciousnesssheds light on those relatively neglected areas of medicine and shows theirimportance.In schools, teachers change their classroom practices when they thinkof their students as beings whose feelings and intentions can be educated aswell as their minds. When one pictures the learning processes of childrenand young people as a gradual incarnation by a spiritual being into a physicalbody, virtually every school subject and every teaching technique getsa revitalizing new impulse. Qualities are as important as quantities, andartistic work comes into its own. Instead of being reserved for enrichmentor relief, music, painting, or movement turn out to be the most appropriateand effective ways to study and learn a knowledge-discipline experientially,be it history or physics, arithmetic or grammar. Spirit-aware parents andteachers see that a curriculum should not just fit children for the society intowhich they are born but should fit them to take up their earthly missions.As everyone knows, whatever we imagine a human being to be, thatidea generates how we live with one another. Fewer people, however, knowthat it takes both spirit consciousness and gender consciousness to form aviable idea of what a human being is. My women’s studies students andcolleagues rarely acknowledge spirit as a category. My fellow anthroposo-303