Retrospective 2024-42

This is a retrospective of week 42, 2024 (2024-10-14–2024-10-20).

I’ve seen The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner (part 1 & part 2) this week. Rudolf Steinder said we shouldn’t “accumulate learning” as our own “treasure of knowledge”, but “place this learning in the service of the world”.¹ He called Goethe the “Copernicus and the Kepler of the organic world”.² Jeremy Naydler explains:³

Goethe was a huge influence on Steiner and Steiner felt that he discovered the kindred spirit in Goethe, because he was approaching the natural world with an open heart and not as an object to be studied and measured and quantified, but rather as a world that was still imbued with something sacred. I think Goethe was very aware of the sacredness of Nature, and that’s why he wanted to approach it in a different way, with empathy rather than with objectifying consciousness. … He was interested in knowledge and a type of knowledge that was a direct knowing, really a perceiving, to actually see into the spiritual workings of nature. So he was focused much more on the world of qualities than of quantities…

Craig Holdrege asks:⁴

Our minds are captivated with certain kind of abstract ideas, and we have all these explanations of the world, but do we see the world? Do we experience the world anymore?

I’ve also started reading Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America by Mary C. Richards. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Reading it raises many thoughts and questions. Below are some notes so far:

• There is a living connection between nature and person.
• The intellectual values to which I have been conditioned have proved to be insufficient to sustain the wholeness of life.
• It’s unwise to make clear, in an intellectual way, what is barely sensed, still vague and fragile, yet giving off an unmistakable scent.
• I have had enough of intellectual talk. It’s a reaction against something.
• I represent an impulse of life and learning.
• I have been slow to learn that I cannot cling to the words of others.
• I’ve been copying what others do.
• I am ready to do things my own way.
• I will no longer adapt to the mythos of my upbringing.
• I am learning to part with old loyalties.
• I need to follow my own path.
• Not only ask questions. Grow to answers.
• What is the form and flow of my thinking? What are my basic observations and premises?
• Ideas grow out of the preceeding ones.
• The picture builds up organically.
• From abstract ideas to living pictures.
• How do we develop a sense of inner authority?
• How do we know what it is to be a good friend to ourselves (and to others)?
• How do we become a truthful observer?
• Feeling is the experience of valuing.
• What we do take on its quality from the being who does it.
• Life is not to be solved logically, but to be lived artfully.
• Cultivate a philosophy of life so that it is possible to have spontaneous impulses, to be naive (as a child) again.
• Learning is based on sensory observation and imaginative participation.
• Art guides us into reality.
• I want to approach life artistically, not intellectually.
• There’s a knowing in my own being.
• The human being is a living picture.
• I’ve been submerged in external adaptation.

Update 2024-10-21: Text updated.

Notes:
1. steinerfilms, “The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner Part One: English Subtitles”, 20221225, YouTube Video, 1:23:23, https://youtu.be/UGIi6GRuVs4?t=2872
2. Ibid., https://youtu.be/UGIi6GRuVs4?t=2923
3. Ibid., https://youtu.be/UGIi6GRuVs4?t=2928
4. Ibid., https://youtu.be/UGIi6GRuVs4?t=3471