BIO-DYNAMICS IN TASMANIA

1. Spiritual Science

2. Conscious Participation

3. Spiritual Being

4. Meditation


SPIRIT


Spiritual Science What we must come to understand is the following. If you look at the needle of a compass, you discover that one end always points more or less to the north, while the other end points to the south. If you want to explain this, you don’t look to the needle but to the whole Earth. It would be ridiculous to try to explain the behaviour of the compass needle by looking for the cause in the needle itself. The position of the needle cannot be understood unless you know the needle’s relationship to the whole Earth. For many people, however, what is nonsense with regard to a compass needle makes perfect sense in relation to other things. For example, take a beet growing in the ground. It makes no sense to restrict our attention to the narrow confines of the physical beet, if its growth actually depends on countless conditions present not only on the Earth but also in the cosmos. People today explain all kinds of things, and also arrange their practical affairs, as if they were dealing only with self-contained entities, and not with influences coming from the entire universe. We have to commit ourselves to a much broader way of looking at the life of plants and animals, and also at the life of the Earth itself. We must widen our outlook to include the cosmos. When we look at what makes our life on Earth physically possible– in other words, at agriculture – we need to look a bit farther than we are accustomed to nowadays . We have seen that in order to arrive at spiritual-scientific methods applicable to agriculture, we need to look at nature, and the spirit’s activity in nature, in its entirety, in its most encompassing dimensions. Materialistic scientists, on the other hand have increasingly tended to narrow their scope and investigate ever more minute entities, the microscopic level so often being the focus. But it is impossible to assess the world of human beings and other living things solely from such narrow perspectives. The way current science deals with the realities of agriculture is equivalent to trying to reconstruct the totality of a human being from just a little finger or an earlobe. Today there is an absolutely urgent need to counteract this tendency with a genuine science that can encompass the large-scale cosmic interrelationships. Spiritual science enters into practical life and is obliged to consider life’s larger relationships and to investigate not just the forces and substances that are crudely material, but also those that are more spiritual. This certainly applies to agriculture. - Rudolf Steiner. Extract: Agriculture. What is "spiritual science"? An analysis is offered on the page titled 'Methodology'. The following material, taken from the work of Rudolf Steiner, addresses the development of perception necessary for accessing a wholistic worldview and engaging spiritual science.


Our world view is that the core of the world flows into our thinking, that we do not think about the essential being of the world, but rather, that thinking is a merging with the essential being of reality (Steiner, 1886). Conscious Participation by Rudolf Steiner, 1904 One of the first qualities that everyone wishing to acquire integration in a wholistic paradigm has to develop is the unreserved, unprejudiced laying of oneself open to what is revealed by human life or by the world. If the person approaches a fact in the world around the person with a judgment arising from their life up to the present, the person shuts oneself off by this judgment from the quiet, complete effect that the fact can have on them. The person must be able, each moment, to make oneself a perfectly empty vessel which the Whole may pervade. Knowledge is received only in those moments in which every judgment, every criticism coming from ourselves, is silent. Complete inner selflessness is necessary for this yielding of oneself to the revelations of the world. Those who wish to tread the path of higher knowledge must train themselves to be able at any given moment to obliterate themselves with all their prejudices. As long as one obliterates oneself the revelations of the whole pervade one. Only a high degree of such selfless surrender enables a person to receive the higher spiritual facts that surround us on all sides. We can consciously develop this capacity in ourselves. The seeker for knowledge places oneself in a condition that allows what is really present in the world around one to act upon oneself without disturbing influences from one’s own peculiarities. In everyday life people allow their actions to be decided by what satisfies them personally, by what bears fruit for themselves. In so doing they force upon the world's events the direction of their personality. They do not bring to realization objective truth, rather do they realize the demands of their self-will. Renunciation of the fruits of action for one’s personality, renunciation of all self-will; these are the stern laws that one must prescribe for oneself. Then a person treads the path of the spiritual world, one’s whole being penetrated by these laws. A person becomes free from all compulsion from the sense world; one’s spirit self raises itself out of the sensory sheath. The seeker thus makes actual progress on the path towards the spiritual and thus one spiritualizes oneself. The important point is that one should not presume to decide on one’s aims in accordance with one’s own egotistical views, but that one should selflessly yield oneself up to the guidance of the spirit itself. It is not the self-seeking will of a person that can prescribe for the true. On the contrary, what is true must itself become lord in the seeker, must permeate one’s whole being, make one a copy of the eternal laws of the Spirit. One must fill oneself with these eternal laws in order to let them stream out into life. As long as we live in a personal relationship with the world, things reveal only what links them with our personality. This, however, is their transitory path. If we withdraw ourselves from our transitory part and live with our feeling of self, with our “I,” in our permanent part, then our transitory part becomes an intermediary for us. What reveals itself through it is an imperishable, an eternal in the things. The seeker of knowledge must be able to establish this relationship between his own eternal part and the eternal in the things. Even before he begins other exercises of the kind described, and also during them, he should direct his thought to this imperishable part. When I observe a stone, a plant, an animal or a man, I should be able to remember that in each of them an eternal expresses itself. I should be able to ask myself, “What is the permanent that lives in the transitory stone, in the transitory person? What will outlast the transitory sensory appearance?” We ought not to think that to direct the spirit to the eternal in this way destroys our careful consideration of, and sense for, the qualities of everyday affairs and estranges us from the immediate realities. On the contrary, every sparkle, every shade of color, every cadence will remain vividly perceptible to the senses. Nothing will be lost, but in addition, unlimited new life will be gained. It depends upon the attitude of mind we acquire in this direction. What stage we shall succeed in reaching will depend on our capacities. We have only to do what is right and leave everything else to evolution. It must be enough for us at first to direct our minds to the permanent. If we do this, the knowledge of the permanent will awaken in us through this. We must wait until it is given, and it is given at the right time to each one who with patience waits and works. A person soon notices during such exercises what a mighty transformation takes place within him. One learns to consider each thing as important or unimportant only insofar as one recognizes it to be related to a permanent, to an eternal. One comes to a valuation and estimate of the world different from that one has hitherto had. One’s whole feeling takes on a new relationship toward the entire surrounding world. The transitory no longer attracts one merely for it’s own sake as formerly. It becomes a member, an image of the eternal, and this eternal, living in all things, one learns to love. Extract: Theosophy, Ch IV.


Spiritual Being by Rudolf Steiner April 3, 1912 In these studies I wanted to draw your attention to certain things which can lead us back to a more concrete study of the Universe than is contained in the cosmology of Copernicus. We must not forget that the Copernican cosmology arose during the epoch after the middle of the fifteenth century when there was an increasing tendency towards an abstract conception of the Universe. It came indeed at a moment of time when the tendency to make everything abstract was at its height. We must also remember that it is essential now that we should get free of this tendency and bring to our thought about the Universe concepts that contain something more than mere abstract ideas. It is not my wish to do anything in the direction of a similar cosmology. What I want rather to do is to present the relation of Man to the Universe. If we thus seek in the world outside what we experience inwardly, we come indeed to the feeling that we are not really within ourself at all, but that with our real Ego we are in the Universe, poured out into the Universe. When we are aware of ourselves as Man standing on the Earth, surrounded by the planets and fixed stars, we begin to feel ourselves as part of all these. If we understand the processes in the inner being of the organism, we can also understand from them the processes in outer Cosmic space. They understand the Sun who understand the human heart; and so it is with the rest of Man’s inner being. Thus it is a matter of supreme moment to take the saying ‘Know Thyself’ seriously, and from that to pass on to the comprehension of the Universe. By a self-knowledge which embraces the whole Man, we shall understand the Universe outside Man. The corporeal man counts as only part of the whole man. The physical body as the coarsest structure lies within others that mutually interpenetrate it and each other. Our theme will compel us to touch upon a realm that is very far removed from all the knowledge given to man today by the external world, the intellectual world. From the very beginning we shall have to allude to a domain, the reality of which is denied by the external world of today. As time goes on, we acquire an understanding for the fact that behind our sense world, behind the world which we as men experience, there lies a world of spirit — a spiritual world. Whoever looks for paths that lead beyond this world of the senses will soon learn to realize that human life only gains in worth and significance through insight into another world. Through a new power of vision one learns to know the causes of life. Without this power of vision one gropes like a blind man through their effects. Spiritual science does not merely signify the acquisition of knowledge; it signifies most pre-eminently an education, a self-education of our souls.This self-education to a perception of what lies behind the physical facts is a fruit of the spiritual scientific movement in the world, and is the most important part of spiritual understanding. We are more and more able to recognize the life-world behind physical nature when we begin to have a moral perception of the world lying around us. What is meant by perceiving the whole world morally? What does this imply? Suppose that we are able for one moment to forget all the external impressions, all our memories, all the cares and troubles of life. A certain moment then comes, a moment in which an infinity arises before us, and in this infinity a quite definite mood in our soul; a quite definite feeling, a quite definite perception pours itself into the emptiness which arises. If we would give a name to this soul perception, to that which would soar out there into infinite distances, there is only one word for it; it is a devout feeling in our soul, a feeling of pious devotion to infinity. All the religious feelings in the evolution of humanity have fundamentally a nuance which contains within it what I have here called a pious devotion; a moral perception. When within our souls the sense impressions have disappeared, a moral perception of the external world springs to life. In the same way that we might let the most varied sense perceptions work upon us; we could in this way let all that we perceive in nature through our senses disappear, as it were, so that this sense-veil is removed; then moral perceptions of sympathy and antipathy would arise everywhere. If we accustom ourselves in this way to eliminate all that we see with our eyes, or hear with our ears, or that our hands grasp, or that our understanding (which is connected with the brain) comprehends — if we eliminate all that, and accustom ourselves, nevertheless, to stand before the world, then there works within us something deeper than the power of vision of our eyes, or the power of hearing with our ears, or the intellectual power of our brain-thinking; we then confront a deeper being of the external world. Then the immensity of Infinity so works upon us that we become imbued with a religious mood. We grasp the world through something deeper within us than we had hitherto brought into play. And therefore in this way we come into touch with something deeper in the world itself. Then, as it were, the external veil of nature is drawn aside, and we enter a world which lies behind this external veil. Extract: The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature. Lecture 1.


*MEDITATION* When by means of meditation, a person rises to union with the spirit, one brings to life the eternal in oneself, which is limited by neither birth nor death. The existence of this eternal being can only be doubted by those who have not themselves experienced it. Thus meditation is the way which also leads a person to the knowledge, to the contemplation of one’s eternal, indestructible, essential being. It is through meditation that a person can attain to such knowledge. In right meditation the path is opened. Everyone can attain this knowledge; in each one of us lies the faculty of recognizing and contemplating for ourselves what outhentic spirituality imparts. Through such meditation a complete transformation takes place in the individual. One begins to form quite new conceptions of reality. All things acquire a fresh value for the individual. It cannot be repeated too often that this transformation does not alienate one from the world. A person will in no way become estranged from their daily tasks and duties, for one comes to realize that the most insignificant action one has to accomplish, the most insignificant experience which offers itself to a person, stands in connection with cosmic beings and cosmic events. When once this connection is revealed to a person in one’s moments of contemplation, one comes to one’s daily activities with a new, fuller power. For now one knows one’s labouring and one’s suffering are given and endured for the sake of a great, spiritual, cosmic whole. Extract: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Ch.1, pp 30- 33. Steiner, R. (1986) Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. N.Y. Anthroposophic Press.

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