Rudolf Steiner's Vision for the Future - Anthroposophical Society in ...

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Book Review reveals divine presence. Naydler warns us that the meaning of ancient Egyptian art will escape us unless we deliteralize our thinking and perception and open ourselves to the powerful energies that the Egyptians were able to access through the realm of images. The Egyptians lived with an understanding that since we are cosmic beings, our spiritual fulfillment is possible only in a cosmic setting, and their well-known orientation toward the world of the dead discloses a profound wisdom of the world of the living as well. If we are to understand the Egyptians, we have to see the realm of death not so much as a destination after we die but as a realm that inhabits us. It is a realm without dimensions, but accessible to consciousness— in fact, it is the source of consciousness. Part three, “The Path of Consciousness,” tries to confront directly the importance of the ancient world for people today. The first essay, “Being Ancient in a Modern Way,” describes ancient divination practices, particularly extispicy, or the examination of aberrations in animal entrails. This lost practice once provided a glimpse into spiritual causes, provoking intuitions of forthcoming events. Naydler’s descriptions are rich in detail, and will certainly be new to most readers. In the chapter entitled “The Future of the Ancient World,” Naydler stresses that the boundaries between “inner” and “outer,” between “subjective” and “objective,” are conceived entirely differently today than they were in ancient times. He suggests that ancient cultures and religions, at the very least, remind us of “something” at the depths of our own psyches and prompt us to attempt to regain it consciously. The gods no longer speak to us because we’re not present for them. If we are to regain our connection with divinity we can’t just think about things; we have to live them, viscerally, and confront evil with open eyes. He cites Hegel, who tells us that spirit can only be effective when we look negation—death and destruction—in the face and live with it. Dwelling with the negative is the magic power that converts the nothing into being. In probably the most difficult chapter of this book, “Christ and the Gods,” Naydler acknowledges that modern understanding of the polytheistic nature of the unconscious may lead us to de-emphasize the incarnation of the Logos. 56 • being human Relying largely upon the Gospel of Thomas, Naydler distinguishes the conjunction of the divine and the human in ancient Egypt, which he identifies with ecstatic ascent, from the incarnation of Christ, which he sees as the descent of the Logos into a human soul that always retains its self-identity. In this connection Naydler explores the related concepts of gods and angels. The gods, he finds, are genuinely “astral,” in the sense that they are part of the psychic world in which we live. The angels, on the other hand, are not so much psychic energies as “super-astral” pathways through which psychic powers are transcended. Their existence raises the question of what our point of contact with the divine can possibly be if it is not identifiable with any god. Naydler finds the answer in the ancient Greek concept of nous, translated into Christian terms as the “eye of the heart” and manifested as the higher “I am.” Those familiar with modern meditative traditions may understand this to be the “attention” or the “witness.” To attain this “eye of the heart” we first need to recover from the old polytheistic “awareness of the gods” and realize what cannot be reduced to any specific god, because it is the human energy of transcendence that connects us with the One. Finally, in “Pathways into the Future from the Deep Past,” Naydler speaks directly to the evolution of consciousness, the penetration of the divine into time. Naydler sees this as a self-realization of Spirit in the manner of Hegel, but again chooses to see it through ancient sources, particularly old star wisdom. Both the Egyptian and ancient Mesopotamian chronologies were linked to the rhythms of the stars, so that the procession of deities can be seen against an astral background. Human spiritual realization was seen to depend upon an initiatory journey that took one beyond the earth to the realm of the stars. Ancient images depict kings and initiates ascending on sacred animals or ladders made by the gods, an “out of the body” experience leading to a clearly “higher” level of being. This tradition, which culminated in Plato, has been replaced by a spirituality that sees a descent of the spirit, and its engagement everywhere in the natural and the human. The modern path, which begins with Aristotle, does not look back to an original unity, but forward to a reunion based upon independent self-consciousness rooted in the finite.
While Naydler frequently urges a forward-looking use of the past, the exotic feel of the past is what fully captures his attention. Some may think that Naydler is subject to what Ken Wilber has called the pre/trans fallacy—the tendency to see in what is merely primitive a genuine embodiment of transcendence. Naydler tries to preempt this sort of criticism, but one may find his attempts to be more formulaic than realized. The extreme fragmentation of modern consciousness provokes a longing for ancient forms of spirituality—what Sean Kelly, in Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era, approaches the evolution of consciousness schematically, as an arc of time that includes a series of “fractal” arcs recurring in everdiminishing cycles. Kelly, a member of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), is a Hegel scholar intimately familiar with the triadic system of thought best known to readers in the dialectical movement of thesis—antithesis—synthesis. In Kelly’s view, the Hegelian dialectic is more helpfully expressed as identity—difference—new identity. Kelly swims against the academic tide by seeing history as unfolding in a metanarrative. William Blake once referred to this as the Great Code of the Bible, Naydler calls the Platonic path. But the Platonic path has to be seen beside the Aristotelian path, of which Hegel (and Rudolf Steiner) are modern representatives. Although spirit has become divided from itself into materiality, that very division must form the basis of reunion. In Naydler’s words, there is a wound that we carry within our own nature, the “healing of which is at the same time the realization” of the “spirit’s self knowledge within us.” One hopes that how to accomplish that healing today may be the subject of future writings from this gifted author. Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era by Sean M. Kelly Lindisfarne Books, 2010. 199 pages Review by Frederick J. Dennehy moving from the Creation to the Fall to the Redemption, or from Innocence to Experience to Higher Innocence. Kelly, of course, is only one of many to view the history of ideas or the evolution of consciousness as triphasic. In addition to Hegel, Kelly cites Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, William Irwin Thompson, and Richard Tarnas, among others, as perceiving the unfolding of history in a largely similar pattern. This history has more idea-orientation than Barfield’s consciousness-orientation, but the themes sharply intersect. While Kelly’s perspective includes all of history, the focus of Coming Home is the evolution of consciousness from the first axial age (c.550 B.C.E.) to what Kelly envisions as the imminent second axial age. The first of these fractal first issue 2011 • 57
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The Nature Institute: Growing Holis
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From the Editor There’s much more
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Contents FEATURES 6 Discovering a G
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Page 10 and 11: Discovering a Genius: Rudolf Steine
Page 20 and 21: The “Class of 1861”: Rizal, Tag
Page 22 and 23: The Search for Humanity in Contempo
Page 32 and 33: The Radical Re-Visioning of Psychol
Page 34 and 35: The Radical Re-Visioning of Psychol
Page 36 and 37: The Nature Institute: Growing Holis
Page 38 and 39: XXXXXXX The Language of Organisms T
Page 40 and 41: XXXXXXX The Language of Organisms i
Page 42 and 43: XXXXXXX The Language of Organisms T
Page 44 and 45: Money and Social Transformation Mon
Page 47 and 48: What’s Happening in the Rudolf St
Page 49 and 50: healthy social boundaries as a basi
Page 51 and 52: The least common model Large presen
Page 53 and 54: Like other commentators, Tantillo s
Page 55 and 56: The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistic
Page 57: Though he does not acknowledge Barf
Page 61 and 62: The latest turning of the gyre, the
Page 63 and 64: arrival. Iphigenia is laid on the a
Page 65 and 66: New Members of the Anthroposophical
Page 67 and 68: Members Who Have Died Helen Angerma
Page 69 and 70: Being Human in the 21st Century We
Page 71 and 72: etween the concept of animal and hu
Page 73 and 74: life between birth and death. And i
Page 75 and 76: something karmic. But suppose you o
Page 77 and 78: produces from out of the ego? They
Page 79 and 80: So we see the coming of the Christ
Page 81 and 82: News & Events The Vision of Rudolf
Page 83 and 84: to a different one. It is good to p
Page 85 and 86: Camphill is a worldwide movement of
Page 87 and 88: the Hagens Recording Studio on Harr
Page 89 and 90: theme of the conference, “The Tru
Page 91 and 92: to be continued over time. The co-w
Page 93 and 94: upon which the city was built. We f
Page 95 and 96: Library Annotations by Judith Solei
Page 97 and 98: Immunology: Self and Non-Self from
Page 99 and 100: young man who learns of a dreadful
Page 101 and 102: first issue 2011 • 99
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