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Good Mountain Press Presents DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#164
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~ In Memoriam: Sara Lee Mills Martin, (1946-2015) ~~~~
~~~~~~~~ Friend and Wife of Glenn Martin, Yorba Linda, California ~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


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WELCOME TO   DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#164   April, 2016
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Quote for the IRS Month of April:

Just look at us. Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality, and (so-called) governments destroy freedom.
Michael Ellner Author of Hope is Realistic (RJM EMENDATION)

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DIGESTWORLD

GOOD MOUNTAIN PRESS Presents ISSUE#164 for April, 2016
                  Archived DIGESTWORLD Issues

             Table of Contents

1. April's Violet-n-Joey Cartoon
2. Honored Readers for April
3. On a Personal Note
       Rainbows & Shadows Poems
       Movie Blurbs

4. Cajun Story
5. Household Hint for April, 2016 from Bobby Jeaux: Hanging Paintings Straight
6. Poem from A Psychology of Body, Soul, & Spirit:"A Poem Without Words"
7. Reviews and Articles featured for April:

8. Commentary on the World
      1. Padre Filius Cartoon
      2. Comments from Readers
      3. Freedom on the Half Shell Poem

9. Closing Notes — our mailing list, locating books, subscribing/unsubscribing to DIGESTWORLD
10. Gratitude

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DIGESTWORLD ISSUE#164
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ARCHIVED DIGESTWORLD ISSUES ON THE WEB  
~ ARCHIVED DIGESTWORLD ISSUES ~
2000: INAUGURAL YEAR: Jun  
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1. April Violet-n-Joey CARTOON:
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For newcomers to DIGESTWORLD, we have created a webpage of all the Violet-n-Joey cartoons!

This month Violet and Joey learn about Begging.
"Begging" at http://www.doyletics.com/images/160328vj.jpg

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2. HONORED READERS FOR April:
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Each month we choose to honor two Good Readers of our DIGESTWORLD from those all over the World. Here are the two worthy Honored Readers for April, 2016:

Arline Cocoran in Connecticut

Carrol Devine in New Orleans

Congratulations, Arline and Carrol!


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3. ON A PERSONAL NOTE:


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Out Our Way:

NO HOT WATER ON A COLD DAY

This month began with Del and her daughter Kim driving up to our son Jim's new home outside Memphis for a visit while I stayed home to finish my DIGESTWORLD Double-Issue for Jan-Feb. While she was gone, I remembered my friend AAA Wayne, who fixed appliances, heating, and AC stuff, joked about my saying "Hot water heater". He said, it heats cold water not hot water, so it a "Water Heater." Well, our whatamacallit stopped heating water, and that was no joke! When we heard how it much it would cost to upgrade the heater installation to code, which was not covered by the home warranty, that was no joke either! For about a week, while we waited for the repair we trudged upstairs to the guest bath for a hot shower. The washing machine and dishwasher operate off the same water heater, so it only affected our master bathroom. The old microwave I had moved into my dressing closet made hot water, enabling me to shave in our master bath.

THE EASTER GOOSE

Never had seen an Easter Goose until we went to visit our grand-daughter Jennifer Terranova in her new home near City Park. There it was beside the steps to the front porch, a large white Goose with pink rabbit ears standing next to a basket of Easter eggs! She showed us around, pointing out the many features she had implemented in the house while it was being designed and built.

The doggie area under the stairs was ingenious. Her desk in the great room off the kitchen fit neatly into a corner area with a cushioned bench for storage next to it. Two beautiful hanging chandeliers graced the stairway to the second floor. And the painting of the Terranova Supermarket that we gave her is prominently displayed. Then she took us to Pavo Real, the Royal Peacock newly opened by her friend Lindsay. I enjoyed the Huevos Ranceros and Guacamole, but the black bean soup and fried plaintains not so much. Her home is next to Bayou St. John and the new Deutsches Haus is being built about a hundred yards away. The various German festivals that will be held there will undoubtedly keep the sausage-maker husband at Terranova's busy.

VISITS

Being back in town has given us a chance to visit with several friends we haven't seen for two months because of our month long cruise, followed by a month long DIGESTWORLD production schedule. Friends like Del's brother Dan and his wife Karen. Del doesn't have a sister, but after Dan moved back to the New Orleans area with his wife Karen, it's like Del now has a sister. She and Del have done some shopping things together. One Sunday morning Dan Karen came over and I made Crawfish-Eggplant-Dressing omelets for us. Then a few days later, Karen joined me to attend her first GNO, INC Annual Meeting. She was an executive with Horizon Lines in the shipping business and although retired, she wanted to hear all the good news about the booming business climate in the Greater New Orleans area. Then Del and I visited them at their home across the lake and we enjoyed some boiled crawfish together at Mandeville Seafood. Karen's work in the shipping business has moved them all around, New Jersey, Chicago, Puerto Rico, Miami, and Charlotte. Now that she's retired, we get to see them more often than just once every year or so, and we enjoy it.

David and Maddie live in the French Quarter in the winter and Jacksonville in the summer, and we had missed them since they came back in October. David hosted a scotch whiskey tasting at their home for the guys this month, and a week or so later they fixed dinner for us. They have a reserved parking spot for us outside their place on St. Ann which makes it easy to get to them. Unfortunately I passed their home and had to negotiate through crowded one-way streets to get back to their place.

This month I went to my second meeting of the Crowns, a group of guys about my age from Westwego where I grew up, who meet at a different restaurant on the West Bank each month. This month it was at Empress of China, one of the few remaining Chinese restaurants that has not gone buffet-style. We each ordered from the menu and were served.

The size of the shrimp fried rice amazed me, enough for four meals for me. I took home a large container for Del, quite a turnabout, as it's usually she who brings home food from one of her club meetings. These are guys who talk the way I do, having grown up together, and it's a pleasure to talk and listen to them because it was the first community of language I belonged to and it feels comfortable being with them.

We got up early to drive to Alexandria for a Good Friday crawfish boil at Wes and Kim's home. Stopping at my usual PJ's Coffeeshop, an amazing this happened. I had been thinking of sharing a Sunrise muffin with Del. As we drove to PJ's together, she mentioned she was hoping to have one also, like the large capped Sunrise muffin we had a week or two ago. I asked the barista for one and he said he had just sold the last one, to that guy over by the microwave. The 40ish male with glasses resembled a teacher of some kind, said, "I'll split this one with you." I thanked him saying, "I was hoping to share one with my wife." Then he walked over and said, "Take this one." and asked the barista to get him a blueberry muffin.

I thanked him for his kindness, saying "You are truly a gentleman and a scholar." He commented something to the effect, "It's what I do." Then I paid for my muffin, which was really paying for other guy's muffin, as he had already paid for mine. I made sure to remember the name of this fine man. The world needs more men like him.

We caught Paul and Joyce at home in Opelousas on our way to Alexandria and stopped by for a visit. Paul will be celebrating his birthday on Easter Sunday, something I don't remember happening before. Del said it has because her brother Dan's birthday is the same as Paul's and it has been on Easter several times. We caught up on family affairs. Our brother David will posthumously become a great-grandfather when his oldest grandchild, Mindy, gives birth in a few months. Paul's oldest grandchild, Andie, is going to school at the University of Oklahoma now. A Matherne as a Sooner.

LOST TWO GOOD FRIENDS

On one day, I got word about two friends who died, Perryl Gassen and Edmund Gros. I first met Perryl when he retired from the service in 1955 and opened a Gulf Service Station which anchored the turn into Mimosa Street on which my parents moved to and lived in for over fifty years. His was the only business place in the subdivision of Luling for a decade or so.

On a hot summer's day we could walk with our buddies and girl friends to Perryl's and enjoy an ice cold Coke for a nickel from his vending machine. Anything else you wanted to buy, you had to drive a mile or so to Boutte or Luling. Perryl kept the temperature of his Cokes so cold that when you removed the cap from the bottle and hit the top of the 6.5 oz bottle sharply with your palm, the Coke inside would almost freeze. It would turn into a delicious and refreshing icy mush that would later be produced by a machine and called an "ICEE". His brother-in-law Earl Dean came into business with him, so one could repair a car out back in the service bay while the other one served customers gas, oil, etc, and chat with the Coke drinkers. From Earl I bought my first road worthy car, a 1951 Plymouth which got me through my senior year at LSU and carried me to my first home in Oak Ridge, Tennessee right out of college.
I remember the challenge of driving a stick-shift auto up the steep hills of downtown Knoxville. Starting off in first gear with your car pointed upward at the stoplight was a thrill of accomplishment, if you got the clutch out without stalling. So much of a challenge I soon traded it in on a brand-new Oldsmobile sedan with automatic transmission, with which I explored the Smoky Mountains with my nascent family.

Ed Gros, which is pronounced "Grow" outside of Uptown New Orleans where it is "Gross", I first met when Del worked for Southeast Medical Alliance in Metairie. He was their accountant and I was delighted when about ten years or so later, I met him at my club and he was president. A gentleman and a good friend, Ed will be greatly missed and thought of fondly. We went to Ed's memorial service and among other people, we met Barbara Louviere who was Ed and Del's boss at SMA. We hadn't seen her in over a decade and she explained that she had just moved back after living in Germany for about 15 years. Great seeing her again.

OUR SECOND UPTON WEDDING IN TWO YEARS

One day Del received a very loud, squawking on her cell phone which announced that I-10 was closed between Texas and Louisiana. I didn't think much about until the time approached for our oldest grandson's wedding.

Our two daughters Carla and Yvette avoided the problem by taking their daughters, Molly and Evelyn, on a swing through SEC colleges, going through Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, both private and public colleges. So their route into New Orleans was down from Jackson, Mississippi the day before the wedding. Their husbands and sons would have to drive through to us the night before and decided to leave early on the morning of the wedding and go through Port Arthur over the large bridge there. I was at my club breakfast meeting during midday and left to return home where the house was full of people in various states of sleeping and awaking getting ready for the evening wedding in Mandeville.

Two years ago, Del's oldest grand-daughter Katie married Stephen Upton in Alexandria, Louisiana, and this month my oldest grandson Chris married Sara Upton in Mandeville. Upton is not a common name around here and the two families are not related, so far as we know. Maureen has two daughters married, but this was her first son to get married. Usually this is easier because all she had to do was provide the Rehearsal Dinner. I heard that it went well.

The wedding was at Benedict's in Mandeville, and the ceremony was held outside on a chilly and breezing evening. Somehow the candles stayed lit and the ceremony was short, so we quickly went inside to warm up when we were marshaled outside for the wedding photos of the bride and groom's family. Wonderful thing about being grandparents is that we can leave whenever we want without needing a special reason. We had to say goodbye to my daughters' family who were all heading back to Texas that night to avoid the heavy traffic along I-10 in the morning as the bridge had not been opened yet.

LAST MINUTE EVENTS

On the penultimate day of the month we had a collision of eating engagements. Our grandson Weslee was in town visiting his girl friend Laurel during his Spring break and we took him to lunch at Restaurant des Familles in Crown Point. That morning Del informed me that we also had a long-standing dinner engagement with Ginger and Buster that evening, so I ordered a small shrimp remoulade as an early appetizer for my dinner meal at the lakefront. I chose the Crown Point restaurant because I wanted Weslee to see new areas of the West Bank outside of our home in Timberlane.
We drove down the Lafitte-Larose Highway and I explained to him this highway was intended to connect these two towns, but some obstructionary activists scuttled a highway that is as necessary for South Louisiana as the Everglades highway in Florida is today, and probably less environmentally hazardous. Heck, we wouldn't need any Panther pathways under our highway like the Everglades has. The nutria could easily crawl over the highway. We had a great meal and got Weslee back in time for him to pick up Laurel.

Del's high school chum Ginger flew into New Orleans from Naples, Florida and we met her and Buster at Landry's Seafood Restaurant on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain for dinner. Their mutual friend Janice joined us. We three guys, Bobby, Henry, and Mark chatted on our side of the table while the gals caught up on their side of the table.

As you may know, chatting is a hobby for hubbies, but it is serious business for wives. The food was great, Hunter served us well, and Landrys' food was great. I had a Mahi stuffed with crabmeat over cheese grits. By the looks of the empty plates, everyone enjoyed their food. The dozen oysters on the half-shell should have been left in the shell for another year, but the tiny suckers were a little bit tasty anyhow. Luckily Del reminded me to take photos before we left, so we have a record of our fun night together. Hunter got a nice group shot of us as well.

EVERY GOOD THING MUST COME TO A NEW BEGINNING

The past month has been cold rainy at times, with periods of summery sunshine as a harbinger of Spring around the corner. The Mississippi River has behaved during March, keeping New Orleans safe from flooding, but the rest of the state has been experiencing tornadoes and flooding during most of this blustery and wet month. Till we meet again in May, enjoy the dry, glorious Spring days and festivals of April in New Orleans, and whatever you do, wherever in the world you and yours reside, be it in warming Spring or chilling Autumn,

Remember our earnest wish for this new year of 2016:

MAY THE WORLD BECOME PEACEFUL AND SERENE IN TWENTY-SIXTEEN

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Quotes Selected from quotes.htm this month:

  • Never explain — your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
    — Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)
  • Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
    — Victor Hugo (French poet, dramatist, and writer)
  • Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
    — C.S. Lewis, addressing all religious and political institutions
  • New Stuff on Website:
  • This is a fascinating set of maps showing a variety of similarities — and differences — in the world as we think we know it.
    Click on this new Tidbit.
    Thanks to Jeff Parsons for sending this Tidbit on Nov. 22, 2015 to DIGESTWORLD! ! !

    From Rainbows & Shadows, A 1995 Book of Poetry by Bobby Matherne




    Preface

    My heart leaps up when I behold
    A rainbow in the sky.

    William Wordsworth

    What is your substance, whereof are you made,
    That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

    William Shakespeare, Sonnet 53

    Why rainbows and shadows? One reminds us of joyful occasions and the other of things that go bump in the night. First, rainbows.

    In 1995 I stood in the open doorway of my garage before driving to work on my last day before retirement from the Waterford 3 Nuclear Power Plant, and I saw a beautiful double rainbow in the morning sky before me. My heart lept up like Wordsworth's when I saw that omen. I remembered that the source of the rainbow is in my heart, and was in the heart of everyone who took the time to observe a rainbow that morning. We each saw a different rainbow, and each one we saw was truly our own rainbow.

    In 2015 a double rainbow appeared as I looked out my garage door in the morning of the same day I celebrated twenty years of working full-time as a writer, publisher, photographer, cartoonist, and poet. The beat goes on . . .

    Likewise, each shadow we encounter is truly our own shadow, created by the materialistic stuff of our world blocking the light of the Sun. Shadows are the dark colors of the artist's pallette of our lives, without which there would be no texture, no structure, no light. As I reviewed my poems for this volume, I found some were naturally rainbows and some naturally shadows, and I separated them into one section called Rainbows and one called Shadows. My wife Del likes me to read to her one Rainbow followed by one Shadow — they seem to complement each other, she says. I have put the section titles in the header to facilitate such a manner of reading.

    In addition to the poem, I have included a short note (where available), which notes altogether contain a panoply of information about my poems: when they were written, what I was doing at the time, what I was reading that inspired them, and on what scrap of paper I wrote them. Poems do not "form in their own water" (as my friend Calvin said of volcanoes), but they may form in the water of ideas suggested by others and completed in some fashion by me. In gratitude, I include in many of the Notes the authors' names and sometimes a brief reference or quote of the source of the inspiration. By reading the Notes, one may readily discern my favorite authors and assorted sources of inspiration during the five-year period of writing this book.

    There is an ambiguity in the phrase driving to work that leaves unspecified whether I was alone in the car at the time. Believe me, I could never think these thoughts if I were not alone in the car. Sometimes I listened to jazz on WWOZ, sometimes to classical on WWNO, and sometimes only to the thoughts of the writer of the book I was reading and my own thoughts, but always moving on. Like rainbows and shadows are always moving, so was I.

    Read on.

    You may have a moving experience also as you join me in my carpool of one on the highway of life. Welcome Aboard! What would you like on the radio, classical or jazz?


    These poems are from Bobby Matherne's 1995 book of poetry, Rainbows & Shadows, most of which have never been published on the Internet before. Here near the beginning of the new millennium, we are publishing five poems until all poems have been published on-line.

    1. Rainbow Poem

       Does One Mind?

    Does one mind
           exist?

    If minds are joined
           and bodies are not,
           the many are one.

    An ocean of tides
           that washes the shores
           of every land

    Deep and shallow
           currents flowing through
    Unfathomable reaches
           carrying myriads of denizens,

    and I
      a child on the beach
        carry a teaspoon
          full of water
            and call
              it
                God.


    NOTE: "Does One Mind?":
    Does One Mind?: This poem was written on November 26, 1991. It was inspired by reading "A Course in Miracles Text" while driving to work at 7 A.M. on this day. The inspiration came from page 359 of the Course's Textbook.

    The quote: "Minds are joined; bodies are not." During an earlier reading I had scribbled, "Does One Mind?" That became the inspiration for the title of this poem. The teaspoon of water reference is from a metaphor told by Richard Bandler (founder of Neuro Linguistic Programming) about Socrates on the beach carrying a spoonful of water from the sea and putting it in a hole in the sand. A friend stopped by and asked what Socrates was doing. He said, “I’m moving the sea into this hole in the sand.” “But, Socrates,” his friend objected, “that’s impossible. The sea is too big and the hole is too small.” “Yes,” Socrates responded, “but aren’t you doing the same thing when you try to understand the entire world with your thoughts?” The world is more mysterious than we can ever know, and the best philosophers in the world are but moving the sea one teaspoon at a time.




    2. Shadow Poem

       Prayer of Forgiveness

    Forgive me for my illusions
           as I forgive others
           for their illusions.


    NOTE: "Prayer of Forgiveness":
    This poem was inspired by page 546 of the Course in Miracles Textbook which states, "When you forgive the world your guilt, you will be free of it. Its innocence does not demand your guilt, nor does your guiltlessness rest on its sins." It was written in the margins of page 546 on September 18, 1986.

    3. Rainbow Poem

       Bareback Rider


    We straddle the past and future
           like a Bareback Rider standing
           on two separate horses in a circus.

    The Historian focuses on the left horse — the past,

    The Futurist focuses on the right horse — the future,

    The Sensate focuses on both equally as he rides
           the wave of the present.


    NOTE: "Bareback Rider":
    This poem written on May 13, 1995. Taken from notes in the new revision of The Idea of History by R. G. Collingwood, the poem refers to my insight that we remember the past and the future in the present. That we get inputs from both the present and the future, but in this society, we are only conscious of inputs from the past. Unconsciously we live, move, and have our being in the midst of constant inputs from the past and future, the nearer, the stronger. The bareback rider metaphor is based on the coordination of the two horses necessary to keep riding while standing on the backs of both horses. Later this idea was incorporated into
    Matherne's Rule #36 .


    4. Shadow Poem

       Sermons in Stones

    Step gingerly among
            these headstones
            these markers of the dead
            signposts of half-forgotten
            half-remembered journeys
                   into consciousness.

    Step gingerly among
            the quick and the dead
            the written and the read
                   wresting meaning from its bed.

    Step gingerly among
            these gaping holes
            these cavities most willing
            to free their desiccated bones
            for one more festive tarantella.

    Step lively among
            these agile dancers
            on this resurrection day
            for while you dance
                   the undertaker with a critical bent
                   surveys unbroken ground
                   for a sacred dedication.

    Step gingerly among
            these stones
            when the music ends
            the bones know where to go
            and eulogies will be intoned
            while meanings are entombed
            in this semantic cemetery.


    NOTE: "Sermons in Stones":
    This poem is about words. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Every word was once a poem." The dictionary may be considered a “semantic cemetery” where formerly brilliant and fresh metaphors lie buried with one word on their headstone: the word itself. See also the poems "Either Twist" and "Looking Glass" in the volume, Rainbows & Shadows.


    5. Rainbow Poem

       Huh? Entropy, What’s That?


    Entropy is a signaling process,

            A communication from the world

    About the relative presence

            or absence of life.



    NOTE: "Huh? Entropy, What’s That?":
    Without life, entropy increases; with life entrogy decreases. Life is an agent of negentropy, i. e., negative entropy.







    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Movies we watched this past month:

    Notes about our movies: Many of the movies we watch are foreign movies with subtitles. After years of watching movies in foreign languages, Arabic, French, Swedish, German, British English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and many other languages, sometimes two or three languages in the same movie, the subtitles have disappeared for us. If the movie is dubbed in English we go for the subtitles instead because we enjoy the live action and sounds of the real voices so much more than the dubbed. If you wonder where we get all these foreign movies from, the answer is simple: NetFlix. For a fixed price a month they mail us DVD movies from our on-line Queue, we watch them, pop them into a pre-paid mailer, and the postman effectively replaces all our gas-consuming and time-consuming trips to Blockbuster. To sign up for NetFlix, simply go to http://www.netflix.com/ and start adding all your requests for movies into your personal queue. If you've seen some in these movie blurbs, simply copy the name, click open your queue, and paste the name in the Search box on NetFlix and Select Add. Buy some popcorn and you're ready to Go to the Movies, 21st Century Style. You get to see your movies as the Director created them — NOT-edited for TV, in full-screen width, your own choice of subtitles, no commercial interruptions, and all of the original dialogue. Microwave some popcorn and you're ready to Go to the Movies, 21st Century Style. With a plasma TV and Blu-Ray DVD's and a great sound system, you have theater experience without someone next to you talking on a cell phone during a movie plus a Pause button for rest room trips.
    P. S. Ask for Blu-Ray movies from NetFlix, and if it says DVD in your Queue, click and select Blu-Ray version.
    Hits (Watch as soon as you can. A Don't Miss Hit is one you might otherwise have missed along the way.):
    "Mr. Holmes" (2015) writes a story about a glass, a bee, and Roger. Marvelous story of Sherlock's last years as he puzzles about the case of a vial of poison, a perfume, and a woman. A DON'T MISS HIT! ! !
    "Marie's Story" (2014)
    heart-rending story of a French Helen Keller and the nun who helped her to become literate. A DON'T MISS HIT !
    "The Mighty" (1998)
    Sharon Stone as the mother "Freak" who knighted himself and his friend, the son of Killer Kane, as "Freak the Mighty" as they went from being ridiculed to being respected for their good deeds. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! !
    "Little Boy" (2015)
    , showing the atomic power of prayer, stopped the war and got his father home. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! ! !
    "The Story of Us" (1999)
    dissolving into me against you, but can such a relationship last with two people in love with each other? Even Bruce and Michelle?
    "Before We Go" (2014)
    reprises Ethan Hawke's "Before Sunrise" but in New York City. Two lost souls find each other in Grand Central and wander the city trying to find themselves.
    "Heist" (2015)
    DeNiro as the bad good guy in a casino heist gone bad, er, good.
    "The Waterhorse" (2007)
    a myth comes to life in an eleven-year-old boys hands.
    "Selfless" (2015)
    - a man with multiple personalities finds a selfless one.
    "House of Cards, Season 4" (2015)
    which ends with "We do not submit to terror; we create terror."
    "Deep in My Heart" (1954)
    Amazing performances by big stars in this musical reprise of Sigmund Romberg's life and work. A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! ! ! !
    "Our Brand is Crisis" (2015
    ), our candidate is a fighter, and Calamity Jane has a great ass. A DON'T MISS HIT !

    Misses (Avoid At All Costs): We attempted to watch these this month, but didn't make it all the way through on most of them. Awhile back when three AAAC horrors hit us in one night, I decided to add a sub-category to "Avoid at All Costs", namely, A DVD STOMPER. These are movies so bad, you don't want anyone else to get stuck watching them, so you want to stomp on the disks. That way, if everyone else who gets burnt by the movie does the same, soon no copies of the awful movie will be extant and the world will be better off.

    “The Night Before” (2015) Christmas and all through the souse, no Christian activity could be found in the vomiting on the floor of the cathedral during Midnight Mass. The rest of the movie got worse.
    “Cop Car” (2015)
    bad cop played by Kevin Bacon would have gotten away with his nasty deeds if two ten-year-olds hadn’t taken his cop car for a joy ride which was anything but joyful.
    "War Room" (2015)
    had nothing in it that we liked.
    "Descendant" (2003)
    of Poe is a dark loser along with the rest of the movie.
    "Ant-Man" (2015)
    provides minuscule enjoyment from a comic book gone wild. Loved comic books when I was <15.
    "The One I Wrote for You" (2014)
    a song for movie about a TV Reality Show.
    "Momentum" (2015)
    everything moves in this movie but the plot.
    "Crimson Peak" (2015)
    is bloody not worth a peek!

    Your call on these — your taste in movies may differ, but I liked them:

    "Red Lights" (2012) DeNiro movie, who's the psycho and who's the psychic?
    "Shelter" (2014) Homeless couple find each other and both go home.

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    4. STORY:
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    Le Boudreaux Cajun Cottage, drawn by and Copyright 2011 by Paulette Purser, Used by Permission
    Thanks to Verne Rainey for inspiring this Cajun joke.

    Boudreaux was on his deathbed, knowing that his end is near. His nurse Estella, his wife Marie, his daughter Clothilde and his two sons, T-boy and Cooyon, were there also.

    Boudreaux told them, "Brought me some witnesses and dat tape recoder so Ah can tole ya'll mah last wishes."

    When everyone was in place, Boudreaux said,

    "For mah son T-boy, Ah want him to took mah Breaux Bridge houses.

    For my daughter, Clothilde, Ah want her to took mah apartments over in Abbeville.

    For my son, Cooyon, Ah want him to took mah office buildings in Lafayette.

    And for Marie, mah dear wife, Ah want her to took all mah apartment buildings on the banks of Bayou Teche."

    Estella and Claude, the two witnesses, are amazed to hear this because they had no idea how rich Boudreaux was. As Boudreaux slipped away, Estella said to Marie, "Mrs. Boudreaux, your husband must have been such a hard-working man to have accumulated all that property".

    Marie turned to Estella and said, "Mais, wat you t'ink? De asshole had a paper route.”

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    5.Household Hint for April, 2016 from Bobby Jeaux:
    (click links to see photo of ingredients, preparation steps)
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    Hanging Paintings Straight

    Background on Hanging Paintings Straight: Do you hang framed paintings and photographs and then notice that they have gone crooked? Like the one shown at right? If so, you can straighten them, and a few weeks later, they're crooked again. Does this sound familiar? This happened to me a lot until I discovered this simple trick. This works best on heavier paintings and photographs that are hung on a wire using a simple nail or clip.

    How It Works
    When you hang a new framing, the wire will over time develop a slight bend in it. If you hang it incorrectly in the beginning, you may have difficulty re-hanging it since you will have a tendency to rep-hang on the nail at the place of the bend.

    If you haven't chosen the exact balance point for the painting, then, over time, due to slight vibrations in the house, the painting will move to one side or the other.

    How to Get it Right the First Time
    The idea is simple: If vibration will cause the framing to find its balance point if it's hung off balance, then simulate the vibration yourself when you first hang it.

    How to Simulate the Vibration

    1. Hang the framing as close to the balance point by whichever method you currently use. Perhaps you simply guess by how it looks, or perhaps you measure the center of the framing.

    2. Once you're satisfied with how it looks, gently lift both sides of the bottom of the framing about an inch or two from the wall, and release the framing to bounce against the wall.

    3. Let framing come to rest and notice if it seems off-balance. If so, repeat the lifting motion and try it again. If it seems balanced after a couple of tries, you've got it right and you're done. But if it's off-balance, go to Step 4.

    4. Move the framing so that the wire slides a bit on the wire. Then repeat Steps 2. and 3. until you're satisfied with how it looks after you 'vibrate' it a couple of times.

    5. Your framing will now stay put in spite of the vibrations from traffic in the house or heavy traffic from trucks and cars around the house. Each time it bounces a slight bit away from the wall, it will return to its balance point. It will stay looking like the one shown at left.

    Other options
    If you have problems with an already long-hanging framing, it may have created a slight crease at the wrong spot where it likes to hang. You can replace the wire or move it an inch or so either direction by taking up one side of the wire on the frame a bit. This mostly happens for thin, single-strand wires. A thick, multiple strand wire may not show the nail mark from a long hanging painting.



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    6. POETRY by BOBBY from A Psychology of Body, Soul, & Spirit:
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

                          A Poem Without Words

    Let me speak to you
          for this once
          without words
    Let me speak to you
          in the now
          without a word
    For words exist
          in the then
          of crystalline form
    Let me raise the volume
          of my speech
    And remove
          the words.
    Let the trembles of my heart
          tremble in your heart
          just now . . .
    Let no words, no shadows of the past,
          block the pass of spirit
          heart-to-heart
    Let us keep this channel clear
          where spirit passes near-to-near
    And words like knocking on the pipes
          only disturb our reverie here.
    Let me speak to you
          just once
          without a word
    And you will not
          be able to tell me
          what you heard.

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    7. REVIEWS and ARTICLES for April:
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    For our Good Readers, here are the reviews and articles featured this month. The second and fourth reviews this month will be ones which were published in early DIGESTWORLD ISSUES but only as short blurbs so the full reviews will be of interest to our DIGESTWORLD Readers. The rest of the items, Reviews 1 and 3, will be new additions to the top of A Reader's Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, new additions to A Reader's Treasury, or Essays previously unpublished.

    NOTE: some Blurbs may be condensations of long Reviews, possibly lacking footnotes and some quoted passages. For your convenience, if you wish to read the full review or to print it out, simply CLICK on the Book Cover or choose Printer Ready option on the top line of a review page when it opens.



    1.) ARJ2: Awakening to Community, GA#257 by Rudolf Steiner

    These lectures in Stuttgart and later Dornach followed only weeks after the disastrous fire which leveled the Goetheanum on New Year's Eve. Steiner had planned these meetings in Stuttgart for some time to work on the future of the Anthroposophical Society. These lectures, seen from our perspective almost a hundred years later, were the groundwork for the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference at the end of 1923.

    Several independent groups were threatening the Society as it existed in early 1923, namely the Waldorf School, the Christian Community (still called the Movement for Religious Renewal), the various threefold organizations, and the youth sections, all of which were feeling disenfranchised by the cataloging and paper-pushing Society. Steiner did not want to begin work on building the new Goetheanum until the Society had been reformed and strengthened. He felt terrible about the delay but felt that, unless the Society were first transformed, no rebuilding of the Goetheanum could proceed.

    [page 25] But the work must progress; otherwise, we would obviously have to leave the situation of the Goetheanum as it is. Resuming work on it depends entirely on strengthening the Society and freeing it of misunderstandings that sap its very lifeblood.

    People who make spiritual judgments using processes better suited to observation of the physical world and logical deductions from it will arrive at such misunderstandings. One cannot defend spiritual judgments using those physical world processes. Steiner explains how one arrives at a spiritual judgment.

    [page 26] Now let me continue in the spirit of my previous comments and go on to consider how a spiritual-scientific judgment is arrived at. I am speaking now of judgments that express spiritual-scientific truths.

    While one can form judgments of physical truths directly and express them to others, forming judgments of spiritual truths will require several stages of internalization before one can express them to others. One simple example brought this home to me. I was sharing about the importance of an internal spleen massage to a brain surgeon friend of mine and he imagined that I meant that one cut open the abdomen below the diaphragm to massage the spleen. The spleen is the spiritual center which regulates the body and the very act of breathing and digesting food creates a gentle internal massage of the spleen.

    [page 26] It can give one a strange feeling to observe how little aware people are of the seriousness with which the communication of spiritual truths is weighted. All one has to do to form and express judgments about things of the everyday world of the senses is to practice observation or logic at a given moment. Observation and logic are perfectly adequate bases for forming judgments about sense-derived and historical data. In the realm of spiritual science, however, they are not adequate. There, it is not enough to deal just once with forming a particular judgment. What is required is something quite different, something I shall call here a twofold re-casting of a judgment. This re-casting usually takes more than a short period of time; indeed, the period tends to be quite a long one.

    In 1996 the Internet arrived and my first question was "What Rudolf Steiner works should I be reading?" I had read about ten small books of lecture cycles, but gathered little useful information, only a lot of unanswered questions that I sought answers for. I was told to read An Outline of Occult Science (1996) which I bought, read, and reviewed.

    My typical review at that time was about half of a typed page, and that's how my review came out. I understood a lot about the spiritual realities of the formation of the cosmos and the human being, but I had no idea how to share that in any detail with others.

    [page 27] At this point one is obligated to keep this conclusion to oneself and not to express it. Indeed, one is even obligated to regard it simply as a neutral fact which, for the time being, one neither accepts nor rejects. Then, perhaps even years later, one comes to the point of undertaking the first re-casting of this judgment in one's own soul life; one deepens and in many respects even transforms it. Even though the content of the judgment may remain the same after its re-casting, it will have taken on a different nuance, a nuance of inner participation, perhaps, or of the warmth one has spent on it.

    Some seven years later in 2003, I had read many more Steiner books, and I was ready to re-read and re-review his classic work. This time my review of An Outline of Occult Science (2003) extended for over 120 pages, and still lacks the last few chapters. As I worked my way through the expanded review, I felt exactly as Steiner reports below, that the meanings had formed themselves in me and had become part of me in its seven years of gestation, all of it outside of my awareness.

    [page 27] If it has taken a matter of years to accomplish the first re-casting, one cannot, of course, have been turning the judgment over in one's mind every minute of the time. The judgment naturally disappears into the unconscious, where it carries on a life of its own quite independently of the ego. It has to have this independent life. One must stay away from it and let it live all to itself. Thus the ego element is eliminated from the judgment, which is then turned over to an objective faculty in oneself. When one first makes an observation and draws a logical conclusion from it, the ego is invariably involved. But when — possibly after a lapse of several years — a judgment is re-cast for the first time, one has the distinct experience of its emerging from the soul's depths to confront one like any other fact of the surrounding world. All this time it was out of sight. Now one comes across it again, one re-discovers it, and it seems to be saying, "The first time you formed me imperfectly, or even incorrectly, but now I have corrected myself."

    For someone to read this classic book and make immediate judgments on it would be a complete folly. It is that kind of person that Steiner wished to keep members of the Society from debating in forums of any kind. Not only would it be non-productive, but it is counter-productive because it would take time away from one's absorbing further spiritual truths. For the most part I have avoided secondary material explaining aspects of spiritual science until I have assimilated all of Steiner's works. Why should I strive to assimilate something that the person might be in first stage of developing a spiritual judgment about? Or perhaps the second stage? Because there is a third stage or form of the judgment. Sometime around 2010 I felt that new form or outlook arrive in me with a degree of objectivity that it earlier had lacked.

    [page 28, 29] When one then arrives at the third form of the judgment, one knows that the judgment has been in the realm of the thing or process under study. In the period between its first forming and first re-casting it remained within one's own being, but in the second such interval it plunged into the realm of the objective spiritual fact or being. One sees that in its third shape the thing or being itself gives back the judgment in the form of a certain outlook one now has. Only now does one feel equal to communicating this view or judgment of a spiritual-scientific fact. The communication is made only after completing this twofold re-casting and thus arriving at the certainty that one's first view of the matter has pursued a path directly to the facts of the case and returned again. Indeed, a judgment of supersensible things that is to find valid expression must be sent to the realm where the relevant facts or beings dwell.

    This material, which would have been puzzling to me before 2010, seems clear to me now. My working through the Agriculture Course and the Anthroposophical Medicine lectures helped me to utilize and confirm my maturing judgments about the reality of the spiritual realms which underlie and shape the physical world in which we live.

    [page 29] Of course, a person who reads lecture cycles just as he would a modern novel will not notice from the way it is presented that the all-important thing, the real proof, lies in this twofold re-casting of a judgment. He will then call such a statement a mere assertion, not a proof at all. But the only proof of spiritual facts is experience, experience conscientiously come by and based on a twofold re-casting of judgments. Spiritual things can be proved only by experiencing them. This does not hold true of understanding them, however. Anyone with a healthy mind can understand any adequate presentation. But to be adequate, it has to have supplied that healthy mind with all the pertinent data, so pertinently arranged that the very manner of the presentation convinces of the truth of a given conclusion.

    The more familiar I became with anthroposophy, the more certain I became of its inherent reality. Nothing about it can be discerned in a flash.

    [page 29, 30] The truth of a mathematical statement can be discerned in a flash, but it is correspondingly lifeless. Anthroposophical truth is a living thing. Conviction cannot be arrived at in a single moment; it is alive, and goes on growing. Conviction about anthroposophy might be compared to a baby just starting out in life, uncertain at first, scarcely more than a belief. But the more he learns, the more certain one's conviction becomes. This growing-up of anthroposophical conviction is actually proof of its inner aliveness.

    Around the first third of the fifteenth century, humans evolved from a picture-based intellectual capacity to an abstract logical intellectual capacity. This led a rapid development of sciences of how the sensory-perceptible world works and a rapid development in the abstract mathematical abilities which have grown in parallel with our scientific understanding. What has remained outside the ken of most scientists is how our pure thinking abilities have brought us freedom as individuals. Steiner's classic book, The Philosophy of Freedom, was written to bring notice to this important connection between abstract thinking and freedom.

    [page 32] But these abstract concepts educate our souls to the pure thinking described in my Philosophy of Freedom. It is they that enable us to become free beings. Before people were able to think in abstractions they were not free, self-determined souls. One can develop into a free being only by keeping the inner man free of influences from outside, by developing a capacity to lay hold on moral impulses with the aid of pure thinking, as described in the Philosophy of Freedom. Pure thoughts are not reality, they are pictures, and pictures exercise no sort of compulsion on us. They leave us free to determine our own actions.

    In his book, Steiner developed systematically the ideas which I first encountered as a youth of 18 in Ralph Waldo Emerson's great essay, "Self-Reliance". At age forty, I paid dearly to attended lectures by Andrew J. Galambos in which he produced an amazing operational definition of freedom. Then about ten years later, I found and studied Steiner's "Philosophy of Freedom" which brought the ideas of my earlier readings together in a great syzygy of freedom.

    When I read each new Steiner book, I always encounter some new and mind-boggling concept. People near death are known to have seen their entire life "flash before their eyes", and Steiner has in many places referred to this phenomenon. We retain our etheric body for several days after we die and during that time we see our life, back to our earliest memory, spread out " in mighty pictures, in an undetailed, comprehensive and harmonious panorama." (Page 32) What surprised me is this next passage where he reveals this panorama was a recent event in historical times.

    [page 32, 33] That is the way it is today, my dear friends. But in the time when people living on earth still possessed a picture consciousness their experience immediately after death was that of a rational logical view of the world such as human beings have today, but which those who lived in earlier times did not have in the period between birth and death.

    The import of this is awesome. The abilities humans experienced during earlier lifetimes of a pictorial thinking was followed by their after-death experience of abstract, logical thinking of the type that forms our current life experiences. Since these earlier humans had no previous experience of such a consciousness, this ability must have been pressed into them by the spiritual world to prepare them for the upcoming change in a future lifetime, the one we are living in now. Steiner says, "This constant pressing through of supersensible experience into earthly experience is one of the great secrets of existence." He continues:

    [page 33] The capacity for abstraction and freedom that presently extends into earthly life was something that came into an earlier humanity's possession only after death in the form of the looking back I have described; whereas nowadays, human beings living on the earth possess rationality, intellectuality and freedom, exchanging these after death for a mere picture consciousness in their reviewing of their lives. There is a constant passing over of this kind going on, with the concretely supersensible thrusting itself into sense experience.

    What awaits us in the future? What might the next transition be? A rational, logical thinking combined with an active pictorial thinking ability, perhaps? I am thinking of the amazing abilities of exceptional people such as Nicola Tesla who had such an ability. He could form a novel electrical motor or generator with his logical rational thinking and then project an image of it in completed form in front of him on a table and watch it operating. He might, as he observed the bearings wear down, figure a way to redesign the bearings. Yes, we have computers that can do such visual projections today, but that kind of ability may be pressed into us as a human experience in some forthcoming future lifetime.

    [page 33, 34] You can see from this example how anthroposophy obtains the facts it speaks of from observation of the spiritual/and how subjectivity has no chance to color its treatment of a fact. But once we arrive at these facts, do they not affect our feelings and work on our will impulses? Could it ever be said of anthroposophy that it is merely theory? How theoretical it would sound to say merely that modern man is ruled by freedom and abstraction! But how richly saturated with artistic feeling and religious content such a statement becomes when we realize that what gives us modern human beings freedom in our earthly experience and a capacity for abstraction is something that comes to us here on earth from the heavenly worlds we enter after death, but that makes its way to us in a direction exactly counter to the one we take to enter them! We go out through the gates of death into spiritual realms. Our freedom and capacity for abstraction come to us as a divine gift, given to the earth world by the spiritual. This imbues us with a feeling for what we are as human beings, making us warmly aware not only of the fact that we are bearers of a spiritual element, but of the source whence that element derives. We look on death with the realization that what lies beyond it was experienced by people of an earlier time in a way that has now been carried over into the modern experiencing of people here on earth.

    How can we as humans learn to accept these gifts from the supersensible world and use them wisely? To do this we needed to receive the greatest gift of all, the Christ impulse, the Gift, the Deed, the Mystery of Golgotha.

    [page 34] The fact that Christ came to live on earth enables him to hallow elements of heavenly origin that might otherwise tempt man to arrogance and similar attitudes. We are living in a period that calls on us to recognize that our loftiest modern capacities, the capacity for freedom and pure concepts, must be permeated by the Christ impulse. Christianity has not reached its ultimate perfection. It is great just because the various evolutionary impulses of the human race must gradually be saturated by the Christ impulse. Man must learn to think pure thoughts with Christ, to achieve freedom with Christ, because he will otherwise not have that relationship to the supersensible world that enables him to perceive correctly what it gives him.

    This is like a roller coaster ride. Can you feel the rumbling underneath your reality? Get ready for another great swoop downward and upward.

    [page 34, 35] Studying ourselves as modern human beings, we realize that the supersensible penetrates into earthly life through the gates of death in a direction directly counter to that that we take on dying. We go one way as human beings. The world goes the opposite way. With the descent of Christ, the spiritual sun enters from spiritual heights into the earth realm, in order that the human element that has made its way from the supersensible to the sense world come together with the cosmic element that has taken the same path, in order that man find his way to the spirit of the cosmos. He can orient himself rightly in the world only if the spirit within him finds the spirit outside him. The spirit that an older humanity found living in the world beyond death can be rightly laid hold upon by people living on the earth today only if they are irradiated by the Christ, who descended to earth from that same world whence rationality and intellectuality and freedom made their way into the experience of incarnated human beings.

    How can we find warmth in abstract, logical thought? By going through it, by following the path that Rudolf Steiner lays out for us in his anthroposophy.

    [page 35] So we may say that anthroposophy begins in every case at the scientific level, calls art to the enlivening of its concepts, and ends in a religious deepening. It begins with what the head can grasp, takes on all the life and color of which words are capable, and ends in warmth that suffuses and reassures the heart, so that man's soul can at all times feel itself in the spirit, its true home. We must learn, on the anthroposophical path, to start with knowledge, then to lift ourselves to the level of artistry, and to end in the warmth of religious feeling.

    When we think with passive thoughts there is no warmth in our thoughts; such weak thinking leaves a corpse of dead thoughts in our soul.

    [page 41] When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness.

    What is the answer? How does one create living thoughts? One way is to read Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom differently from the way one reads other works.

    [page 45] The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

    The key to discussing anthroposophy is the process one uses, not the content that one chooses to focus upon. It is not some out-there world view to be projected upon others that is important, but the very process of one's soul attitude that communicates to others.

    Steiner reveals the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. It began in the womb of the Theosophical Society. It was a western idea growing inside the mother of eastern traditions, a move that began with the Tao and ended with the MoG. Its gestation phase lasted about seven years. The birth of the new Western Society came about when the old Eastern-oriented Society announced the reincarnation of Christ in a young man, which was unacceptable especially to Rudolf Steiner who had come to a realization of the Mystery of Golgotha and a detailed interpretation of the four Gospels "that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present." (Page 48)

    [page 48] The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917 [RJM: another seven year period], was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels.

    This second phase ended with the Great War which filled Europe and became known as World War I as it concerned civilization across the world. Steiner used a beautiful metaphor to characterize this period of hardship for him, "It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period." (Page 49) The construction of the Goetheanum went on by virtue of it being in a neutral country, Switzerland, and the workers which came together from many countries cooperated with each other even though their own countries were warring with each other. This was truly a time of war and peace.

    [page 49, 50] Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through.

    Most important among these initiatives, using their recent names, were the Waldorf Schools, the Christian Community, and the Threefold Society, the first two covering the areas of education and religion and the last the appropriate interaction between the State, Economy, and Religion areas of life.

    As a physicist I began to be puzzled by life. I saw life as a puzzle with an enigma on each end. How can the three be reconciled? What happened before we were born? What happens during our life. What happens after death? My search for answers led me productively to find answers to the questions of life in psychotherapy, neurophysiology, biology, archaeology, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics, but nowhere could I find answers to the first and third questions. Until I found Rudolf Steiner's writings. The eastern mysticism jargon with its polysyllabic bafflegab about metaphysics was unreadable and incomprehensible to me. I needed someone who knew how to explain to me in words and concepts I could understand, and Steiner does that admirably. He understood how to bring physicists to anthroposophy, and showed me how. He answered the two remaining questions.

    [page 50] I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics to anthroposophy.

    This respect for physics and all the other sciences was one of the amazing aspects of Steiner's work which endeared him to me. Apparently the journal Die Drei developed a different approach, one which attacked science, and this disturbed Steiner greatly.

    [page 51] I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in unfruitful polemics.

    Steiner's approach to the sciences and all other fields of work was to respect their work and to show how anthroposophy, rightly understood, does best to avoid degrading their works by instead building upon their work in the various fields of human endeavor. His charge to anthroposophists was: 'Don't argue, Study". Such attacks by anthroposophists was a huge problem in Steiner's last years, and his efforts have borne fruit today. In my experience, I have found few anthroposophists belittling any other fields of human endeavor.

    Here's a clear statement of the charge he gave to anthroposophists in Lecture 3, February 6, 1923.

    [page 52] . . . always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics. . . . I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that take us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

    What is anthroposophy? Steiner's preferred definition is "the consciousness of one's humanity." (Page 61) How do we arrive at anthroposophy? The easy answer is that we seek to tear ourselves away from the strictures of the past.

    [page 58] The kind of life and practice that civilized man has developed in recent centuries is just exactly the kind from which an anthroposophist longs to free his moral, ethical and religious nature. Even if he makes compromises with the life about him, as indeed he must, his real desire is to escape from what the civilization of recent centuries has produced, leading as it has directly to the catastrophic present. It may be that this desire exists only as an instinct in many of those who seek out the Anthroposophical Movement, but it is definitely present.

    To escape from the strictures of the past requires one to reverse the direction of will forces from externally driven to internally driven. This is not an easy concept, but it is one of the key things which leads people to anthroposophy. The reversing of external will forces needs to be understood and acknowledged.

    [page 58, 59, italics added] The real truth is that what we have had drummed into us from about our sixth year onward is the product of externally influenced will and religious impulses that have evolved during recent centuries. But when a person seeking anthroposophy wants to escape from these will impulses and from the religious forms in which man's moral life finds its highest expression, he cannot help asking at the same time for a way of knowledge in keeping not with the world he wants to leave behind but with the new world of his seeking. Since he has turned his will impulses inward, he must, in other words, strive for the kind of knowledge that corresponds to his in-turned will, that takes him ever further away from the externalized science that has been an outgrowth of the externalizing of all life in the civilized world in the past few centuries. An anthroposophist feels that he would have to be inconsequential and reverse the direction of his will again if he were not to change the direction of his knowledge. He would have to be a quite unthinking person to say, "I feel my humanity alien to the kind of life and practice that past centuries have brought us, but I feel quite at home with the knowledge they produced." The kind of learning, that the world he wants to escape from has acquired, can never satisfy a person with an in-turned will.

    Here are the three aspects of the path which leads people to the Anthroposophical Society: reversing will from external to internal, experiencing supersensible knowledge, and finding one's own destiny in the present time.

    [page 60] The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one's will; secondly, in experiencing supersensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one's time to a point where it becomes one's personal destiny. One feels oneself sharing mankind's evolution in the act of reversing one's will and experiencing the supersensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time's true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness.

    Often Steiner has us remember how the ancients perceived the world so that we may appreciate how we have arrived at our present consciousness. In Lecture V he tells us of a typical man of the ancient Orient who perceived divine-spiritual beings as clearly as he saw his fellow humans. For him religion was not a belief, but a certainty, and we do ourselves ill if we pretend this ancient man was a dabbler in animism and mystical fantasies.

    [page 72] This was the source of his inner religious certainty, which differed in no way from his certainty concerning things in nature round about him. He saw his god, and could therefore believe in his existence just as firmly as he believed in the existence of a stone, a plant, clouds or rivers. What modern science dubs animism, picturing the ancients relying on poetic fantasy to endow nature with a living spiritual element, is an invention of childish dilettantism. The fact is that people beheld spiritual beings in the same way they beheld the world of nature and the senses.

    We can only understand the artworks of ancient Orientals rightly if we accept them as accurate portrayals of the reality they experienced as much Canaletto experienced the Venetian canals he painted so well.

    [page 72] The reverence they felt in inner soul relationships to their gods was the content of their religious life. When they imprinted on matter what they had beheld in the spirit, that was felt to be their art. But the techniques and the physical materials at their disposal for expressing what they thus beheld fell far short of their actual visions.

    Their relationship with their visions was immediate, and they made artworks for others who could not behold it for themselves. You might say that they were painting for you and me today, so it would be disrespectful of us to call their visions flights of fancy.

    [page 73] This relationship to the divine-spiritual was so immediate, so real, so concrete that people felt that the thoughts they had were a gift of the gods, who were as present to them as their fellow men. They expressed it thus, "When 1 talk with human beings, we speak words that sound on the air. When I talk with the gods, they tell me thoughts that I hear only inside me. Words expressed in sounds are human words. Words expressed in thoughts are communications from the gods."

    This above passage inspired me to write this poem.

    Modern Wisdom

    Ancients would say —
    Humans speak words
           as sounds in the air

    Gods speak words
           as thoughts in our heads

    Moderns would say —
    Humans speak words
           as sounds in the air

    And create words
           as thoughts in our heads

    When did we moderns replace
           the gods' words with our own?

    Did we do so?

    Or did we join the chorus
           of gods' voices
    And with our voices
           drown them out?

    Keep quiet . . .

    Let the gods' voices
           form thoughts in our mind.


    The ancients lived the three ideals of religion, art, and science in parallel as if it were one ideal. We moderns separate these three and suffer from the separation.

    {page 73, 74] We can say, then, that men's beholding of the gods became the inner life of the religious ideal. Their symbolical-allegorical expression of divine forms through the various media was the life underlying the ideal of art. In their re-telling of what the gods had told them lived the ideal of science. These three ideals merged into one in ancient Oriental times, for they were at bottom one and the same.

    Steiner reminds us what Goethe said, "What you call the spirit of the times is just your own spirit with times reflected in it."

    As humans evolved from the ancient Orientals to the ancient Greeks, they went from seeing the past cosmos in man to seeing the present cosmos in man. We moderns are beginning to see the future cosmos in man, rightly understood.

    [page 76] The Greeks' feeling that man was evidence of divine creation was matched by their feeling that works of art, like temples and statues, also had to bear witness to divine governance, though that was now conceived as acting through the agency of human fantasy. Looking at a temple, one could see that its builder had so mastered all the laws of his medium that every least details of their application reflected what he had experienced in this intercourse with the gods.

    To understand why we might be seeing the future cosmos in man, we need only look at how the Greeks saw plants as completed, perfect entities, where we moderns see plants as evolving structures at many levels. Even the proteins created inside plants have been proven to change in response to stimulants in the air, water, and soil left by human presence. (See my thesis Plant As Doctor.)

    [page 80] We have learned to look much more precisely at nature. The Greek saw the bird where we see the egg. He saw the finished stage of things; we, their beginnings. The person who feels his whole heart and soul thrill to the seed aspects, the seed possibilities in nature, is the man who has the right outlook on it.
           That is the other side of modern natural science. Anyone who starts looking through microscopes and telescopes with a religious attitude will find seed stages everywhere. The exactness characteristic of the modern way of studying nature allows us to see it as everywhere creative, everywhere hastening toward the future. That creates the new religious idea.
           Of course, only a person with a feeling for the seed potentialities that each individual will live out in other, quite different earthly and cosmic lives to come can develop the religious ideal I am describing.
           The Greeks saw in man the composite of everything there was in the cosmos of his own period. The ancient Orientals saw in man the composite of the whole cosmic past. Today, we sense seeds of the future in human beings. That gives the new religious ideal its modern coloring.

    Community building for the anthroposophical movement was Steiner's primary concern as he entered Lecture VI.

    [page 90] Community building! It is particularly noteworthy that the community building ideal should be making its appearance in our day. It is the product of a deep, elemental feeling found in many human souls today, the product of a sense of definite relationship between person and person that includes an impulse to joint activity.

    It was not surprising in retrospect that the Movement for Religious Renewal would result in the formation of the Christian Community which thrives to this day as an anthroposophical-based religious service with rites appropriate to a consciousness soul age. Steiner did not want abstract sermons which had so filled Protestant churches of his time.

    [page 91] What I had in mind was to develop a religious and pastoral element capable of really uniting people. I told these friends who had come to me that religious community could not be effectively built with abstract words, the usual kind of sermon, and the meager remnants of a divine service, which are all that most contemporary churches have to offer. The prevailing intellectualistic trend that is increasingly taking over the religious field has had the effect of saturating a great many present day sermons with a rationalistic, intellectualistic element. This does not give people anything that could unite them. On the contrary, it divides and isolates them, and the social community is reduced to atoms. This must be easy to see for anyone who realizes that the single individual can develop rationalistic and intellectualistic values all by himself. Simply attaining a certain cultural level enables an individual to acquire increasingly perfect intellectual equipment without depending on anyone else. One can think alone and develop logic alone; in fact, one can do it all the better for being by oneself. When one engages in purely logical thinking, one feels a need to withdraw from the world to the greatest possible extent, to withdraw from people. But the tendency to want to get off by oneself is not the only one man has. My effort today to throw light on what it is in the heart's depths that searches for community is called for by the fact that we are living in a time when human nature must go on to develop the consciousness soul, must become ever more conscious. . . . Becoming more conscious is not the same thing as becoming more intellectualistic.

    Reading this brought to my mind a note in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Journal written on August 27, 1836: "A great licentiousness seems to have followed directly on the heels of the Reformation. Luther even had to lament the decay of piety in his own household. 'Doctor,' said his wife to him one day, 'how is it that while subject to papacy, we prayed so often & with such fervor, while now we pray with the utmost coldness & very seldom?' Remember Luther's wife!" Steiner was remembering Luther's wife. Perhaps it wasn't the papacy so much as the rites and the community participating in them instead of listening to intellectualistic sermons.

    At the basis of community, Steiner saw a community of speech.

    [page 92] In a child's early years it is introduced into a human community that is absolutely real, concrete and human, a community without which one could not exist. I am referring to the community of human speech. Speech is the form of community that we might say nature presents to our contemplation. Speech — and especially our mother tongue — is built into our whole being at a time when the child's etheric body is not yet born, and it is our first experience of the community building element.

    When my mother was nearing 80, my wife and I went with her to Donner Reunions. These annual reunions were for a town in which she grew up as a child, a sawmill community which disappeared shortly after the old growth cypress it clear-cut from the swamp surrounding it had disappeared. I was amazed to watch my aging mother morph into a six-year-old school girl again she scooted around the floor of the reunion building talking animatedly with her old school chums from 70 years ago. In more recent times, I have attended monthly luncheons with friends from Westwego I knew as a schoolboy that I haven't seen in over 60 years, and I experienced the stirring of deep memories filling our communal experience. Alumni reunions provide a similar experience, and often attendees cannot express the feelings they experience. When I encountered this next passage by Steiner, it spoke directly to my own experiences of these various reunion activities.

    [page 93] At certain moments of our life on earth we can become aware of another community building element that transcends that of language. A person feels it when his destiny brings him together again with others whom he knew as children. Let us take an ideal example. Someone finds himself in later life — in his forties or fifties, say — in the company of several companions of his youth or childhood whom he has not seen for decades but with whom he spent the period between his tenth and twentieth years. Let us assume that good relationships prevailed among them, fruitful, loving relationships. Now imagine what it means for these individuals to share the experience of having their souls stirred by common memories of their youthful life together. Memories lie deeper than experiences on the language level. Souls sound more intimately in unison when they are linked by the pure soul language of memories, even though the community experience they thus share may be quite brief. As everyone knows from such experiences, it is certainly not just the single memories that are summoned up to reverberate in the souls of those present that stir such intimate soul-depths in them; it is something quite else. It is not the concrete content of the particular memories recalled. An absolutely indefinite yet at the same time very definite communal experiencing is going on in these human souls. A resurrection is taking place, with the countless details of what these companions experienced together now melting into a single totality, and what each contributes as he enters into the others' recollections with them is the element that awakens the capacity to experience that totality.

    Sermons, rationalistic talks, make us forget the spiritual world, Steiner tells us, even in our subconscious soul depths. But in a cultus, a community engaged in a rite, there is a real presence of the spirit which is shared by those present.

    [page 95] In the cultus he has it right there before him in a living, power-pervaded picture that is more than a mere symbol. Nor is this picture a dead image; it carries real power, because it places before man scenes that were part of his spiritual environment before he was incarnated in an earthly body. The community creating power of the cultus derives from the fact that it is a shared, comprehensive memory of spiritual experiences.

    On page 97, he adds, "Yes, it is indeed necessary to base our understanding of anthroposophy on what can be called a waking up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of another person."

    In February, 2013 I attended a Mi-cha-el Conference at the Goetheanum, in a large hall abutting the Carpentry Shop where Steiner held his lectures (four of the lectures in this book), after the first Goetheanum had burnt down. Some forty-plus people from as far away as California, Moscow, South Africa were gathered there. Together we made sculptures of clay, performed eurythmy, acted in plays, sang and danced, listened to lectures, engaged in speech lessons, and prepared food and ate together for almost a week. We felt the presence of the supersensible in this wonderful celebration of community, in our cultus.

    [page 99] Divine powers are present in sense perceptible form in the cultus celebrated on the physical plane. Our hearts and souls and attitudes must learn similarly to invoke the presence of a real spiritual being in a room where anthroposophy is being talked of. We must so attune our speaking, our feeling, our thinking, our impulses of will to a spiritual purpose avoiding the pitfall of the abstract, that we can feel a real spiritual being hovering there above us, looking on and listening. We should divine a supersensible presence, invoked by our pursuit of anthroposophy. Then each single anthroposophical activity can begin to be a realizing of the supersensible.

    By the age of fifty, I was yet to have met a single person who knew who Rudolf Steiner was. I had been reading small books of lecture cycles he gave to people who were already familiar with his work, and though I found them interesting, I felt I was missing something. When the Internet began to provide direct connection with the rest of the world, I searched for Rudolf Steiner and found a group of people who told me which books to begin studying in order to learn about anthroposophy. Within a decade, all the various studies of my life began to make sense: I had been preparing to meet Rudolf Steiner and his works, he was here to answer the many unanswered questions that I had been holding onto for most of my life. And most importantly I had found a community of like souls and spirits independent of the Anthroposophical Society.

    [page 101] But anthroposophy is independent of anthroposophical societies and can be found independently of them. It can be found in a special way when one human being learns to wake up in the encounter with another and out of such awakening the forming of communities occurs. For one undergoes ever fresh awakenings through those with whom one finds oneself foregathered, and that is what holds such groups together. Inner, spiritual realities are at work here.

    Two people can sleep next to each other and each will dream separate dreams. When some noise from outside, a rooster crows, say, they are awakened to the presence of the natural world. As they sit down to eat together for breakfast, they become awakened to the presence of others, to the presence of community. This are natural occurrences. They can become skewed if one person takes a dream and begins to create the dream in the waking world.

    [page 108] At the moment when the state of mind prevailing at this lower level of consciousness is carried over to a higher level, a person becomes a crass egotist in his relations to his fellow men. You need only think this over to see that a person of this kind goes entirely by his imaginings. He comes to blows with the others because they cannot follow his reasoning. He can commit the wildest excesses because he does not share a common soul world with other human beings.

    How are people who come versed in supersensible based-science to meet with those who come versed only in ordinary sensory-based science? It is a problem which can cause physical confrontations between them.

    [page 110] That is the root of the problem of reaching any understanding and agreement between the everyday consciousness, which is also that of ordinary science, and the consciousness anthroposophy makes possible. When people come together and talk back and forth, one with the ordinary consciousness exemplified in the usual scientific approach and the other with a consciousness equal to forming judgments that accord with spiritual reality, then it is exactly as though a person recounting his dreams were trying to reach an understanding with someone telling him about external facts. When a number of people meet in an ordinary state of consciousness and fail to lift themselves and their full life of feeling to the supersensible level, when they meet to listen in a merely ordinary state of mind to what the spiritual world is saying, there is a great — an immeasurably great — chance of their coming to blows, because all such people become egotists as a natural consequence.

    In Steiner's day as well as ours people hardly pay attention to what others are saying. The worse ones are those who begin talking before the other person can finish a sentence, giving the impression that their opinion is the only one worth talking or hearing about. An old saying goes, "We were given two ears and one mouth because we were meant to listen twice as much as we talk." My motto is: One can only learn when one is listening. This ability to listen is difficult to acquire, and few people overcome that difficulty. But good listeners are indeed a treasure. How can one best deal with such a one-sided conversation?

    [page 110 - 111, italics added] It has become a habit nowadays to give only scant attention to somebody else's words. When a person is part way through a sentence, someone else starts talking, because he is not the least interested in what is being said. He is interested only in his own opinion. One may be able, after a fashion, to get by with this in the physical world, but it simply cannot be done in the spiritual realm. There, the soul must be imbued with the most perfect tolerance; one must educate oneself to listen with profound inner calm even to things one cannot in the least agree with, listen not in a spirit of supercilious endurance, but with the most positive inner tolerance as one would to well-founded utterances on the other person's part. In the higher worlds there is little sense in making objections to anything. A person with experience in that realm knows that the most opposite views about the same fact can be expressed there by, let us say, oneself and someone else. When he has made himself capable of listening to the other's opposite view with exactly the same tolerance he feels toward his own — and please notice this! — then and only then does he have the social attitude required for experiencing what was formerly merely theoretical knowledge of the higher worlds.

    Steiner mentions two sets of lectures he gave in which he felt no need to mention the word anthroposophy. The first set was in Oxford, 1922, and can be found in the book, The Spiritual Ground of Education, GA#305. The second set of lectures was in Vienna1922, and can be found in the book, The Tension Between East and West, GA#83. After his Oxford lectures, some wrote that Steiner gave the impression of simply talking about pedagogy from a different direction, not as someone speaking about anthroposophy. In the Vienna lectures, Steiner spoke without mentioning the word anthroposophy at all. In my copy of the book, the index show only one reference to the word. It was by Owen Barfield in his Introduction. But Steiner says, "Of course, what I presented was pure anthroposophy." (Page 116) He did these things to stress that anthroposophy is a process one uses in understanding the world and one's understanding best shown not by talking about anthroposophy as a content, but by using your understanding as a way of helping others to find the insights into world of the supersensible from which the everyday world of the physical senses originates. Newcomers are often eager to spring content upon others because all they understand is pieces of superficial content.

    What is the relationship of the soul of man to truth? Steiner says that people who insist on proof are requiring a "special way of using thought as a mediator".

    [page 122, 123] Something in the physical world can seem just as right as a dream content does to the dreaming person. But the carrying over of things of one's dream life into situations of everyday waking consciousness nevertheless remains an abnormal and harmful phenomenon. It is similarly harmful to carry over into the consciousness needed for understanding the spiritual world convictions and attitudes quite properly adopted in ordinary waking consciousness.

    When a mathematician completes a proof, the answer is laid out logically on paper for all to see and understand. When an anthroposophist come to a spiritual understanding, the result can be seen and understood in the person. No proof is necessary because the understanding exists in the person; it can only be personally understood by others who work towards and arrive at an equivalent understanding.

    [page 123] I can give you an instructive example. As a result of the way modern man has become so terribly caught up in intellectuality and a wholly external empiricism, even those people who are not especially at home in the sciences have taken up the slogan: Prove what you are saying! What they are stressing is a certain special way of using thought as a mediator. They know nothing of the immediate relationship the soul of man can have to truth, wherein truth is immediately apprehended in just the way the eye perceives the color red, that is, seeing it, not proving it. But in the realm of reason and intellect, each further conceptual step is developed out of the preceding one.

    When I read page 123, I remembered a book by Nicholas Humphrey called Seeing Red. In my study of his book, I came to the conclusion that it is impossible to prove that a color is red, if you mean by color the experience of color one has in one's soul. Why? Because you cannot see into another's soul; you can only correspond what you see in your soul with what they say they experience in their soul. The following poem was inspired by Steiner saying what intellectually strait-jacketed thinkers require of others, namely, "Prove what you are saying!".

    Prove What You're Saying

                         I.
           "Okay, this color is red."
    Do you mean you see this color as red?
           "Yes."
    Well, I cannot perceive nor measure the color you see.
    Can you prove the color you see is red?
    Can you share with me
           what your soul experiences as red?
    Can you share with me
           what you dreamed as red?
    What is the spectral wavelength of red, Mr. Physicist?
           "I can measure it."
    Well said, but can you measure the spectral wavelength
           of the red you see in a dream?

                  II.

    If you can't prove
    this color is red,

    How can you prove
    that God is dead?

    Your very existence,
    Your very ability to prove,
    Proves God is alive.

    Steiner goes into detail below showing how it is good for spiritual investigators to prove things to investigators of the physical world, but it is dumb for materialistic investigators to demand proof from spiritual investigators.

    [page 123] Where the physical plane is concerned, one is well advised to become a bright fellow who can prove everything, and to develop such a good technique in this that it works like greased lightning. That is a good thing where the physical plane is concerned, and a good thing for the sciences that deal with it. It is good for the spiritual investigator to have developed a certain facility in proving matters of the physical world. Those who acquaint themselves closely with the intentions underlying the work of our Research Institute will see that wherever this technique is applicable, we, too, apply it. But if you will permit me the grotesque expression, one becomes stupid in relation to the spiritual world if one approaches it in a proof-oriented state of mind, just as one becomes stupid when he projects a dreamer's orientation into ordinary waking consciousness. For the proving method is as out of place in the spiritual world as is an intrusion of the dream state into the reality of waking consciousness. But in modern times things have reached the point where proving everything is taken as a matter of course. The paralyzing effect this trend has had in some areas is really terrifying.

    The need for proof for materialists have grown so great that now atheists are claiming to have proved the non-existence of God. Theology has become an applied science which hobbles itself when it attempts to become a proof-based discipline. Religion, which originally was direct knowledge of the spiritual world, has now become proof-oriented, and proofs can be disputed. Steiner said famously, "When knowledge ceases, discussion begins." That is the current situation of religion, up until now.

    [page 123, 124] Religion, which grew out of direct vision, and in neither its modern nor its older forms was founded on anything susceptible of intellectual-rational proof, has now become proof-addicted rationalistic theory, and it is proving, in the persons of its extremer exponents, that everything about it is false. For just as it is inevitable that a person become abnormal when he introduces dream concerns into his waking consciousness, so does a person necessarily become abnormal in his relationship to higher worlds if he approaches them in a way suited to the physical plane. Theology has become either an applied science that just deals practically with whatever confronts it or a proof-minded discipline, better adapted to destroying religion than to establishing it.

    Materialists who wish to have proofs need only copy out Steiner's writings where he shows how proof stands when it is applied to supersensible facts. He says clearly on page 125, that an Apop (student of higher worlds) need "not wander about like a dreamer in the physical world; one will relate to it as a person with both feet set firmly on the ground." (Page 125) In my diagram at right, I show the Materialist with one foot on physical reality and the other foot dangling on the void, and I show the Apop with one foot on physical reality and one foot on spiritual reality. The only real choice for the full human being is to be fully grounded on both worlds.

    CONCLUSION

    At the end of 1923, Rudolf Steiner called a conference for organizing the Anthroposophical Society to align it with the community forming principles he laid out in this series of lectures. This Christmas Conference adopted the name General Anthroposophical Society in a set of statutes "tuned to the human being" which contained nothing administrative, nothing of principles or dogmas, nothing that could be turned into bureaucracy. Someone objected to stating in the statutes that "anthroposophical spiritual science will be cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach as the center of its activities" because there was no such building present. Steiner responded, "We are not of the opinion that we have no Goetheanum. . . . we are of the opinion that we have no building, but that as soon as possible we shall have one. We are of the opinion that Goetheanum continues to exist. For this very reason, and also out of the deep needs of our heart, it was necessary last year, while the flames were still burning, to continue with the work here on the very next day, without . . . having slept. For we had to prove to the world that we stand here as a Goetheanum in the soul, as a Goetheanum of the soul, which of course must receive an external building as soon as possible. . . . what we see with our physical eyes therefore does not prevent us from saying 'at the Goetheanum' . . . The Goetheanum does stand before our spiritual eyes!" And four short years later the new Goetheanum stood before our physical eyes, bigger, better, and stronger, built upon the spot sanctified by the original one, and stands today as a testament to Rudolf Steiner's vision and hard work.



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    2.) ARJ2: A Psychology of the Soul by Rudolf Steiner

    Lectures 5 to 8: Psychosophy — A Psychology of the Soul

    These lectures are being presented in the order suggested by Robert Sardello in the Introduction: A Psychology of the Soul, A Psychology of the Spirit, and A Psychology of the Body. In succeeding Issues, we will present the Spirit (9-12) and Body (1-4) lectures. Here's Steiner description of what he means by "psychosophy":

    [page 77] Psychosophy is to be a deliberation on the human soul, beginning with the soul's experiences here in the physical world. It then rises to higher realms to demonstrate that whatever we encounter in the physical world as the manifest soul life leads to the perspective where the light of theosophy comes to meet us.

    [page 79] If we meet someone and form a mental picture of that person — hair, face, expression — we do not include that in our soul life. But if we feel an interest in a person through sympathy or antipathy, or if we think of that person with love, all of these feelings must be considered soul experiences. You know that I don't like definitions: I prefer to characterize instead. I don't want to define soul life for you, since definitions accomplish little. I prefer to characterize what belongs to soul life.

    He gives us the two essential characteristics of soul life: judging and love/hate. When we are judging we are making some rational calculation using our thinking, and when we are loving or hating we are making a rational calculation using our feelings.

    [page 80, 81] Every aspect of the soul is either a making of judgments or a life in love or hate. Basically, these are the only concepts that pertain to the soul; all others refer to a vehicle for something coming into the soul, either from without through the body or (due to causes we will learn later) from the spirit within. Thus, on the one hand, we have judgment, and, on the other, love and hate.

    Jung's Typology Diagram Copyright 2004 by Bobby Matherne

    In Carl Jung's attempt to describe the same soul processes above, he distinguished between the rational and irrational soul functions. See Typology Diagram: the rational functions are the two horizontal functions, activities or processes and the two irrational the two vertical ones. The rational processes are those that Steiner says, "pertain to the soul", namely 1) judging and 2) feelings of love and hate. The two vertical processes come directly from outside the soul, either from the sensory physical world or the super-sensible spiritual world. [Note: Intuition to Jung refers to direct super-sensible perception of the spiritual world, whereas to Steiner Intuition is one of three processes for direct perception of the spiritual world, namely, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.]

    In the section on Psychosophy Steiner will be describing the processes that Jung called the rational functions. Later on, in the next section on Pneumatosophy, he will be describing what Jung called the irrational processes, by which term Jung meant those processes not mediated by the rational processes of thinking or feeling, but directly experienced, either from the physical world below or from the spiritual world above.

    Another distinction we must make is that in talking about judging, Steiner is dealing with the soul activity of judging, and he specifically excludes the logical aspects of judgment from consideration. Those aspects of thinking having to do with logic, he excludes from his process of judging.

    [page 81] My characterization is not about logic but about the psychosophic nature — strictly from the perspective of inner activity, or soul processes — of judging. Everything you can learn about judgment through logic is ruled out. I am not speaking of "judgment" but of judging, the activity of judging, using the word as a verb.

    When you say "the rose is red" you are in the activity called judging. If you are walking through a beautiful landscape and feel delight, you are experiencing the process of loving or attraction. If you are walking down a street and see some activity that disgusts you, you are experiencing the process of hating or aversion. This goes on all the time: "You are continually judging and continually experiencing love and hate every moment of your waking soul life." (Page 81)

    Another aspect of judging that is very important is that it "always culminates in mental images." Two tendencies coming from different directions merge into a mental image in our soul experience. Steiner gives the simple example of the "red rose".

    [page 82] The judgment consists of what we might call two tendencies converging from two directions — one the rose, the other "red." These two then become one: the red rose. They converge into a single image that you carry through life.

    This might seem too simple to be important, but it is essential if one is too understand what Steiner means by the process of judging and to distinguish it from the process of desiring which includes the polarities of loving and hating (attraction and aversion). With loving and hating we can ask where is it coming from and with judging, where it is going to, but not vice versa. Thus judging leads to a mental presentation and loving and hating come from a desiring in our soul.

    [page 82] The phenomena of love and hate require that we ask . . . not, "Where are we going," but rather, "Where do they come from?" With judging, it is a matter of where to, of where is it going; whereas for love and hate, it is a question of where from, of where it comes from. As the soul gives birth to love and hate, we will always discover something there that enters the soul life as though from another side. As soul experiences, loving and hating can always be traced back to what could be called desiring. If we put desiring on the other side of soul life, we can say that behind the love and hate that appears in our soul, there always stands desire, which radiates into our soul life.

    People commonly think that desire arises from something that they observe in the external world, but when pushed to explain why the same object of their desire will evoke no desire in another person or in themselves at another time, they have no coherent answer. Steiner says that we are likely to be unaware of the cause of the desire that arises within our soul — that would lead us to attribute the desire to some external cause, simply out of the scientific habit we have been immersed in since the 1500s. Judging, he says, also originates in our soul, "in the wellsprings of its own being, sharpening judgments to mental images and aware that if judging is being done in a certain way, the image can be valid." In other words, the "image must have an outer validity and significance to be of any value to us." (Page 83)

    Physiology labels some of the nerves between the brain and the sensory organs as sensory (afferent) and motor (efferent) neurons. The existence of such "motor neurons" is shown to be an error by Steiner. He does not deny there are such neurons, but avers that they are afferent, that their function is only proprioceptive, or allowing us to be aware of body position and movements.

    [page 84] To a spiritual scientific perspective . . . what natural science refers to as "motor nerves" do in fact exist as physical structures, but their purpose is not to stimulate movement but to perceive it, to verify it, to become aware of self-movement. Just as we have nerves for receiving color impressions, so we also have nerves that allow us to check on what we are doing and convey it to our awareness. The prevailing view is a gross error that does widespread damage; it has ruinous to the whole field of physiology and to psychology as well.

    The next subject that Steiner describes in his lecture of 1910 (pages 85, 86) foreshadows an insight that came to me years before I first heard of Rudolf Steiner or anthroposophy, his spiritual science. It evolved out of my study of the brain and perception. It began as cryptic formulas I sketched in the margins of various books and it finally ended up in this review of Jerome Bruner's book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Bruner said it in his own words, "it means that perception is to some unspecifiable degree an instrument of the world as we have structured it by our expectancies." My formula states, in effect, that our Perception (Now) is a function F of the combination of our perceptual Inputs(Now) and of a function G of our accumulated perceptual Inputs(Past), summarized in a formula:

    P(Now) = F[ I(Now), G( I(Past) ) ].

    If you consider that G( I(Past) ) accumulates at every instant the P(Now) into itself, you can see the recursive nature of our perception at work. The recursion can be made visible in the formula by substitution of the function G with P thusly: P(Now) = F[ I(Now), P(Now) ] — which means that the Perception at this moment is a function of the Inputs coming in at this moment and a function of the Perception experienced during the immediately previous moment. Perception is constantly updated and modified by new information coming in. In other words, our perceptions at any moment are conditioned by the sum of our previous perceptions. Thus, it can be understood why two people can look at the same event in the external world and create two completely different perceptions.

    My favorite story which illustrates this process involves the crew of Charles Darwin's ship the Beagle when it anchored offshore South America. It was a large ship, larger than the natives had ever experienced before. A sailor asked a native what he thought about his ship and the native replied through the interpreter, "What ship? All I see is a large bird out on the water." Same sensory stimulus, different accumulated perceptions, different perception in the now. [For more details, see The Remembered Present.]

    [page 85, 86] Now, how does what sense experience gives us behave within the soul life? For soul life, what is the significance of our perceptions and what we then continue to live with — the sounds our ears hear, the colors our eyes see, and so on? What does all this mean for the soul? These experiences are usually studied in a truly one-sided way, without realizing that a combination of two factors, or elements, is encountered at the boundaries of soul life. One is perception, the direct experience we necessarily have of the outer world. We can have an impression of colors or sounds only when the sense organs that convey those impressions are exposed to them. Such impressions last only as long as we are exposed to external , objects. An outer impression, or interchange between the outer and the inner, stops as soon as the eyes no longer look at an object or the ears no longer hear it making sounds. What does this prove?

    Consider this along with the other fact — that we carry something of these experiences of the outer world with us. You know the sound you heard or the color you saw, although you no longer hear or see them: What happened there? There is something that takes place completely within, something that belongs totally to your soul life and must absolutely occur within. If it belonged to the external world, you couldn't carry it with you. Sense impressions of a color that you have received by looking at the color may be carried within you afterward only if they dwell in your soul, if they become an inner experience of the soul so that they remain in the soul.
           Thus, we must distinguish between sense perception [RJM: the I(now)], which happens between the soul and the outer world, and that which we separate from our interaction with the external world and continue to carry within us [RJM: the I(Past)]. We must sharply distinguish between these two things; this is vital in such matters. Please do not think that I am being pedantic by saying these things; a foundation must be created for what follows.

    It should give readers confidence that Steiner's insights about the world of perception are right on point when that which he talked about almost a hundred years ago is substantiated by independently by modern researchers into perception, such as Gerald Edelman, Jerome Bruner, etal.

    Now we are better prepared to understand the distinction that Steiner makes between a perception and the sensation it produces. His term perception refers to the Inputs (Now) and his term sensation to the Inputs (Past) in my equation above.

    [page 86] You can clearly distinguish (for future reference) between the experience you have as long as you have an object before you and that which you carry with you in the soul afterward, if you call the first experience a sense perception and the latter a sensation. In this way you distinguish between the perception of a color and the sensation of it. Color perception is finished when you look away, but you continue to carry the sensation of color within you. Usually such distinctions are not made in daily life, nor are they necessary. We need them to prepare for coming lectures, however, and they will prove very useful to us.

    There is another distinction to make which is crucial. What originates in your soul is the activity that your body underwent in the process of perception, and that activity will include stored physical body states or doyles which are triggered during the act of perception.

    [page 86, 87] Our souls carry within them, then, sensations acquired through exposure to external scenes and objects. Should we consider them to be a completely new element of soul life in addition to the elements of judging and love and hate? If that were the situation, you would have to say, "Well, you have forgotten something that is also an element of the soul's life — you failed to mention the sensations derived from the senses, which are found there." That is not the situation, however; such sensations are not a distinct aspect of the soul life. We must distinguish between the subject matter of the sensation and something else. For instance, when sensing the color red, we must separate out the red. If "red" were an inner soul experience, the whole color perception of it as "red" would be meaningless. The subject matter, or color, of the perception is in no way an inner experience of the soul. The object that stood before you is red, but its redness is not produced by your soul. What originates in your soul is something very different — that is, what you did, or your activity while the red object stood before you, so that you could carry the impression with you. This activity is the inner soul experience, and it is actually nothing other than the converging of the two fundamental elements of the soul life to which we have been referring.

    This activity is collectively called sensation by Steiner and it "is the convergence of judging and desiring within the life of the soul." (Page 89)

    [page 89] Sensations are nothing more than what flows tegether out of inner unconscious judging and the unconscious phenomena of love and hate, which strive outward but are hindered and retained. Whatever the soul carries as a sensation arises in this way.

    Currents Figure adapted from figure on page 43 by Bobby Matherne

    Sensations arise from perceptions in the physical world, and even in the case of concept of a triangle, we will attach the immaterial concept to a material triangle in the physical world. But there is one mental image that arises within most of us that is independent of the physical world, even though it can be connected with it — the "I- image" or "I". That is the name that no one can call us but ourselves, our "I". It is this "I" that we push against the sensations of desiring and judging and one can see in the Currents Figure the pushing up from the Soul (Astral Body) and pushing down by "I-being" from above. What is the origin of the uniqueness of the I-image and how does it relate to judging and desiring, the basic soul elements? (Page 92)

    Steiner leads us to see that the external world acts a master over us because we are only able to see of the external world what comes in through our perceptions and sensations. "The outer world controls our sense perceptions." but he adds that when we look at "the dramatic contradictions of our soul life" we "recognize that we are subject to a master there" as well, an “inner master”, if you will. (Page 97) The master he is referring to is our "I-being" or "I" — it is a master in the sense of the famous poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) — it is the "master of my fate", the "captain of my soul."

    Invictus

    Out of the night that covers me,
    Black as the pit from pole to pole,
    I thank whatever gods may be
    For my unconquerable soul.
    In the fell clutch of circumstance
    I have not winced nor cried aloud.
    Under the bludgeonings of chance
    My head is bloody, but unbowed.
    Beyond this place of wrath and tears
    Looms but the Horror of the shade,
    And yet the menace of the years
    Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
    It matters not how strait the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll,
    I am the master of my fate:
    I am the captain of my soul.

    One should note that "captain of my soul" presupposes something that exists outside of the soul and directs it — and that is a fitting metaphor for the "I" — the immortal spirit that lives in each human being as a legacy to the spirits who raised its body into a vertical position to readily receive that immortal I. The I enters from above and opposes the Astral body rising from below as shown in the Currents Figure above.

    An interesting thing about our mental images is that they possess a life of their own. Steiner proves this by calling to mind in us a rather commonplace example that anyone over 30 or so can relate to: something we know we know we cannot bring into our thoughts at some moment when we earnestly desire to, then a few minutes, hours, or days later, there it is. If this were a child of ours acting this way when we called it into our presence, we would likely say, "It has a mind of its own," would we not?

    [page 97, 98] The soul is really subject to the independent mental images and to longings and desires. You can easily see that mental images live a life of their own in our souls when you consider, for example, that the soul is powerless to easily call a previously formed mental image back into memory. A mental image formed only yesterday may sometimes refuse strongly to allow itself to be recaptured. In ordinary life we then say that we have "forgotten," that it simply will not rise to the surface and resists recall. A battle takes place between something that lives in us as an undeniable soul power wanting to force an image to the surface and something else that is also present in the soul. A battle is waged in our souls with the mental image, thought it will eventually return without any external cause. It was present all the time, but refused to reveal itself at the desired moment. You know further that this battle between our own soul forces and the mental image to be called up is different with different human individualities. The mental images indeed live in the soul, but as opponents, so to speak, of our own soul forces. The difference between the two is frighteningly great.

    Surely you've been in a conversation with someone and been interrupted while they attempt to recover some incidental person's name to mind. They can go on for a minute or two, and the smooth conversation almost gets completely derailed by their insistence on recovering a name which is not at all important to the subject of the conversation. Carl Jung did a long experimental study of the time delays involved when a patient of his tried to come up with a word by free-association. Invariably the slightest delay by the patient in response to a word indicated some psychological load or energy bound up with the word. Steiner may have had access to such experimental evidence when he spoke these words in 1910:

    [page 98] Some people, for example, never seem to suffer the embarrassment of being unable to recall what lives in their souls when needed. Such people can summon in an instant all their memories and knowledge. On the other hand, there are those so incapacitated by forgetfulness that they have absolutely no power over their reservoir of images, and they cannot recall them to consciousness.
           A true psychologist finds it very important to know how quickly a person can remember — the speed with which the images of past experiences assert themselves against the forces trying to recall them. Psychologists use this as a measure of a deeper element in the being of the human. They see evidence of inner health or illness in the degree that we are removed from our mental images. Since the nuances of health and illness blend into one another at their extremes, we may say that, from a psychologist's viewpoint, we have subtle indications right into the physical nature of the human constitution in these intimate details. We can even assess just where an individual has a problem by the way a soul must battle with mental images in order to remember them. We look, as it were, right through the soul into something that is other than soul when we understand the soul's experience in battling with the realm of mental images.

    I have mentioned on many occasions how little I understand of Rudolf Steiner's works when I first began reading them. Most of my reviews of those early books were very short, especially the Steiner ones, about half a typical webpage in size, as you may confirm for yourself by looking at my Steiner reviews in my first book of reviews, "A Reader's Journal".

    [page 98, 99] Another way of picturing the way mental images lead a life of their own in our souls is through the fact that we cannot completely control the mental images we have at any given moment; we are at their mercy. Certain experiences can convince us of this. It depends on us, on the nature of our soul life, whether or not we understand someone who is speaking with us, for example. You understand me when I am lecturing to you. If, however, you were to bring a person who is unfamiliar with such matters to hear my lectures, such a person would probably get nothing from them, regardless of how well educated that individual might be. Why is this? It is because you have been acquiring the needed mental images over a period of time. You have built up mental images in your souls that now come to meet the new ones in today's talk.

    When this happens, you are amused, entertained, comfortable, and you are not bored. You get along swimmingly with the person's talk, you lose yourself in what the speaker is saying and the thoughts which arise in you during the talk. You lose your "I", in other words, in times like that. One might also add, you don't learn anything much that is new.

    [page 99] Here you have an example of how we really have very little control over our soul life. There is no point in trying to understand something for which we lack a store of background images. In this case, image comes to meet image. If you observe your soul life, you will be able to notice that your I plays an extremely minimal role in it. You have the best opportunity to forget your I while you are listening to something that fascinates you. The more intently you listen, the more you forget your I. Try, after the lecture, to recall such a moment when you were absorbed in something you understood. You will discover that you must confirm that something was happening in you, with which your I was not very involved, whereby it had indeed forgotten itself. At such times, we say that we were as if given over to it, as if we had lost ourselves. We always lose ourselves when we understand something particularly well. We shut out our I and hold our reservoir of images up to meet those entering the soul. A sort of battle ensues between the old and the new, and we ourselves become the battleground for their confrontation.

    Newness creates a sense of discomfort because of this battleground within us between the old and the new. The old is already there and doesn't like being supplanted by the new one little bit.

    [page 99] In relation to our soul life, something very important depends on whether or not we already have the mental images needed to understand something. Imagine listening to some matter without already having the mental images needed to understand it. We listen "unprepared," as they say. Then something peculiar appears. At the moment we listen unprepared, when the state of the soul life makes it impossible to understand, something demon-like approaches us from behind. What is it? It is the I dwelling in our soul life. It appears to attack as if from behind. As long as we are absorbed, are lost to ourselves, it doesn't show itself, but it arises whenever we lack understanding.

    Here Steiner is discussing the process known by modern scientists as "cognitive dissonance", which is defined as "a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation." He gives us a beautiful metaphor with which to understand cognitive dissonance, our I is attacking us from behind. The methods we use to avoid cognitive dissonance are amazingly deceptive, but Samuel Hoffenstein reveals them a few of those ways in this next quatrain:

    Little by little we subtract
    Faith and fallacy from fact,
    The illusory from the true
    And starve upon the residue.

    The starving of our soul life appears as boredom, does it not? It is the very subject, boredom, to which Steiner is leading us in the course of the next several passages. Given the prevalence of boredom in the world today, and its concomitant symptoms, depression, let's follow his line of thought carefully and see where it leads us. He asks us how does the presence of our I reveal itself in actual operation within us — within, in other words, our soul life:

    [page 99, 100] How does it announce itself there? Those who pay close attention to soul life soon notice that what plays into it brings it discomfort — the soul fills itself with some element that brings it discomfort. With this as a background, we may say that this discomfort shows that, in the soul life, the mental images already present affect new mental images trying to enter. Their way of acting is not a matter of indifference. It either brings a sense of comfort and satisfaction into soul life or it brings exactly the opposite. Again, we see the degree to which we are given over to our mental images. Although it is not obvious, this is of vital importance to psychologists. This discomfort is a force created in the soul when confronted with the unfamiliar. It continues to act in the soul's life in such a way that it goes beyond that life and takes hold of an even deeper element of human nature. The results of this misunderstanding and discomfort can have a damaging consequence, even affecting the body's constitution. In diagnosing the finer degrees of sickness or health (those connected with the soul life), it is very important to notice whether or not patients understand the matters they must frequently contend with in life. Such considerations are far more important than is generally believed.

    Especially by 21st Century doctors who spend very little time questioning patients about what's going on currently in their lives and are content to prescribe a medication first and ask questions later, if the patient survives. Those doctors of the past century who made house calls would find out answers to questions about what their patients had to "contend with in life" the moment they arrived at the house. What was the condition of the house and yard? What did the persons opening the door look like, their clothes, their facial expressions, their tone of voice? What did the rooms the doctors walked through look like: disheveled or overly neat and orderly? What were the conditions of the patient's room: signs of caring or neglect? Add to this the actual content of what the person greeting the doctor said about what was the problem, and you have an jam-packed description of what was going on in the patient's lives — all of this before the doctor actually arrived at the patient's bedside! Those who look at house calls and see "inefficiency" are succumbing to the patient as a thing syndrome which infects so much of what passes for modern medicine. In some ways, modern medicine is worse than mediaeval medicine. Its drugs may be more efficacious in many cases, but they are often administered for bodily healing when soul-healing is called for instead.

    If your body is experiencing problems, you need physical therapy, and you would look for a physical therapist, someone guides you through the proper movements to get your body's muscles operating smoothly again. If your soul is sick, you need someone who is an expert in healing in your soul or psyche, and then you would look for a psyche-iatrist, a soul-doctor, or psychiatrist. If your soul is experiencing problems in operating, even though it is not sick, you would look for a psyche-therapeutis, or psychotherapist. Since psyche problems have usually assorted body problems, you have the choice of where to start, and if you're not sure which one to choose, any one of the three disciplines should be capable of directing you to the proper discipline. One of the three will resonate with you — the term resonate means, rightly understood, it fits with your soul's wishes — which makes it easy to know without having to ask someone else, who might have their own axe to grind and lead you astray. A malpractice settlement is little compensation for the life-disasters which can result from advice which is contrary to your soul's desires.

    [page 100] Let us move on now. It was stated that our mental images have an independent life, that they are like beings within us. Further consideration will convince you of this. You will remember moments in your soul life when the external world seemed to have nothing at all to offer you, despite a desire on your part to be stimulated by it, to receive impressions, to experience something. It simply had nothing to offer. It passed you by without leaving any impressions. You then experience something as a result — boredom. Boredom causes desire in the soul. It gives birth to a longing for impressions, and the soul life is surrendered to it; yet there is nothing to satisfy that desire. Where does boredom originate?

    If you answer the question, "Where does boredom originate?", by saying, "A lack of things to do." you have clearly not read nor understood what Steiner said above, so let's re-state it or rather let's allow you to do a little introspection. Think of times when there were sources of stimulation going on all around you, but you were uninterested in pursuing or getting involved in them. You declined invitations, you left the television turned off, books and magazines unopened, left the phone off the hook, phone messages unanswered, and you retreated from going out. If you ever did that, even once, then you must admit that boredom does not originate from a lack of things to do. Look at your household pets. Do they ever appear bored? By that I don't mean what you feel when you project your own "no-things-to-do" criterion of boredom. When they're hungry, they eat. When they're tired they sleep. Animals are not subject to cultural conditioning; only humans are. The reason for this is that animals are not capable of "time-binding" as Korzybski explained in his master work, "Science and Sanity", and laid the foundations for a science of sanity called "General Semantics" during the last century.

    [page 100, 101] If you are truly a good observer of nature, you might have observed something not often noticed — that only a human being can become bored. Animals never become bored. Only superficial observers believe that such a thing is possible. You can even become aware of a strange aspect of human boredom. If you investigate the soul life of a simple, primitive people, you will find that they suffer far less boredom than is found among the more cultured people with their more complicated soul life. Those who go about the world and tend to be observant will notice that country people are much less prone to boredom than city dwellers. Of course, you should not think here of studying how bored city people become in the country, but only the degree of boredom country people experience in the country. Your attention should be on the more complex cultural conditioning of soul life. Thus, there is a real difference in the degree to which human beings are prone to boredom.
           . . . Why are animals never bored? When the gates of their senses are open to their environment, animals continually receive impressions. Now picture those impressions. The soul life of an animal flows out to the environment and is stimulated. What goes on outside as a continuous external process keeps pace with the inner flow of animal experience. Animals are done with the one impression when a new one is presented, to which they surrender themselves. Outer events and inner experience coincide.
           The advantage we have over animals is that we can establish within ourselves a different measure of time. The sequence of mental images that surfaces in our soul life can be based on a time element other than the one in our environment.
    [RJM: what Korzybski called, "time-binding"]

    When you came into this lifetime, you set the banquet table for your life, rightly understood. If you then enter this lifetime, become an adult, and ignore the banquet table you set for yourself, then out of your soul life will arise a desire to sit down at the banquet table, and until you do, nothing else you do will satisfy you — as a consequence, you will feel bored. People who set for themselves a country table for this lifetime are content with simple table fare and the stimulation of the natural environment. They have fewer mental images carried over from their previous lifetime — they feel over-stimulated in a city environment and long to return to the country. Some who leave the country for the city and vice-versa will acclimate very well, and some may choose a seasonal switching of country-city life. All these choices are a consequence of the banquet table they have laid for themselves for this lifetime.

    Boredom, when it arises, indicates something simmering on the back-burner, a succulent dish which is ready to be served on that banquet table, a dish which requires some action immediately. That "succulent dish" I conjured up is a metaphor for what Steiner calls "the independent life of our mental images".

    [page 101] Then, too, boredom does not emerge from soul life without cause. Why are we bored? It is produced by the independent life of our mental images! The old mental images in us are the source of our desire for new impressions; they want to be re-enlivened and refreshed, to have new impressions. People have little control over boredom, because mental images received in a previous life develop their own life in the soul and seek re-enlivenment. They develop desires. If they remain unsatisfied, their unsatisfied longing — an attribute that we must study in the soul life itself — is expressed as boredom. Therefore, people who have fewer mental images also have fewer desiring images. The fewer desires for new impressions they develop, the less bored they are. We should not conclude, however, that a lasting state of boredom characterizes a highly developed human being. Those who constantly yawn are not among the most highly developed in terms of soul life, though they are more developed than those who can never become bored because they have few mental images. Boredom can be cured, and when the soul has developed sufficiently, boredom is no longer possible.

    Thus, if you experience boredom, it is a sign that your soul needs development. If your soul were an automobile (in a real sense, it is auto-mobile), and it started shaking when you pushed down the acceleration pedal, you'd know it was time to do something different. Perhaps you need to downshift to a lower gear. You try it, and the shaking stops, and you speed up. What you want is an "automatic transmission" which automatically senses the need for a lower gear and does it before you are aware of the need. But soul-development is different from buying an automobile: you start off as a child with standard shift, and you must learn to develop an automatic transmission. When that development occurs in one's life is different for any individual — all we can say in general is this: when things start getting shaky in your life, it's time to shift to a new gear, and later to work on developing an automatic transmission for yourself.

    [page 103] This is the difference between those who can cure their boredom and those who cannot. Such an inability indicates the independent life of one's mental images, a life that cannot be controlled and to which one is subject. If we do not make certain that our mental representations have meaning, we become bored. Only through meaningful mental images can we protect ourselves from boredom.

    We each have an I, a Soul Captain inside of us to assist us with making the proper decisions when a soul-filled desire arises in us. The I assists, the I cannot compel. If we choose the right decision, our soul lightens up immediately. If we endlessly vacillate, pondering decisions over and over again, our Soul Captain hovers over us like the buzzard who told his fellow buzzard who was circling over a couple of near death humans crawling on the desert floor below, "Patience, Hell! I say, 'Let's kill one!'" Your I knows you'll get it in this lifetime or the next — it is immortal and doesn't have infinite patience, only infinite resolve for your well-being as a soul. It is the Captain of your Soul, not Captain of your Body. One's motto should be, to avoid soul stagnation, "Do something. Even if it's wrong!" If it's right, you'll know soon enough. If it's wrong, you'll learn from your mistake, and do something else. It's called learning by doing, try-and-error leads to try-and-success, rightly understood. Steiner offers us this encouragement about the efficacy of our I or spirit:

    [page 107, 108] We will see in the coming days how this self-contained life of mental images, enclosed within the boundaries of the soul, is the source of both our greatest bliss and our deepest suffering, to the extent that they originate in the soul. We will see, too, how the spirit is the greatest healer of the pain and suffering mental images cause in our souls. We may also say that just as hunger must be stilled in external bodily life, and that such stilling is healthy, the same must be done for the inner life of the soul; mental images require, in a certain way, inner nourishment through other mental images. When we overburden ourselves by eating too much, our health is undermined. Thus, the destiny of the soul plays out in such a way that new mental images may promote health or illness. We will see how the spirit functions not only as a health-giver in terms of our hunger for new mental images but also as healer when we suffer from an excess of them.

    If we have desires which arise from our souls which are fulfilled, they will exert a healthy influence on us, but any unfulfilled desires will exert an unhealthy influence and lead to disease and sickness.

    [page 120, 121] Imagine a soul approaching an object; desire for it is generated, but the object is unable to gratify the desire. The desire then remains in the soul and is ungratified.
           Let us investigate the situation very precisely and compare it with the one where a desire achieves its goal in the soul's life. There is a considerable difference between the situation where a desire attains its goal within the soul and one where it does not. A desire that has attained satisfaction and is then neutralized has an effect on the life of the soul in such a way that it has a healthy influence on it. When desires continue to live in the soul without satisfaction, because the objects cannot provide it, after the object is removed, the soul retains a living connection to a void, so to speak. Consequently, the soul lives on in unsatisfied desiring, as though in an inner fact without any basis in reality. This fact alone is enough so that the soul life has an unfavorable, illness-causing influence upon that connected to it, namely, the spirit and body, owing to the unsatisfied desires. Feelings based on satisfied desires are, therefore, very different for direct observation from those built upon frustrated desiring. In a flagrant case, it is a simple matter to discern this; in subtler cases, people do not always realize what they are confronting.

    Thus a person with an unsatisfied desire who has waited way too long will have developed an illness and now has need of a physician because they have passed the point where a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist might have helped. A psychology of body, soul, and spirit allows you to heal problems long before they reach the body, which they are being addressed at the soul and spirit level.

    One excellent example of as satisfied desire which Steiner develops in detail and we will summarize briefly here is when one encounters beauty — when "desire coincides with judging" — then one experiences "an endlessly warm satisfaction throughout the soul." Steiner cautions that he is not recommending that human beings "wallow continuously in the enjoyment of beauty" or "thinking is unhealthy". Instead he says, "the following should occur in the soul.

    [page 125] Since seeking truth is a duty that furthers the progress of culture in general as well as that of the individual, we are forced to suppress our desiring in favor of truth. Since the decision concerning the truth does not lie with the life of desire, truth forces us to suppress it. We must do this without hesitation in striving for truth. Consequently it is essentially striving for truth that restrains our self-love to the appropriate degree. When we consider the matter objectively, we can gain a certain satisfaction from our inner experiences of how our search for truth continually encounters the boundary of our capacity for judging.

    [page 125, 126] This is where the activity of aesthetic judgment comes in. The life of aesthetic judging is such that we bring back what we have taken to the soul's border. . . . It is the peculiar attribute of aesthetic judgment that it encompasses the moment of selflessness just as it does the truth, while asserting the sense of selfhood that, in the two previous lectures was referred to as "the inner master." We are given back to ourselves like a free gift in the aesthetic judgment.

    If I may paraphrase what Steiner is saying: When we pour out our love for a work of art, we are given back the gift of ourselves. And we do well when we consider this to ponder the famous ars langa, vita brevis saying of Goethe:

    Art is long, life short;
    judgment difficult,
    opportunity transient.

    The eighth lecture in this series begins with a recitation of Goethe’s poem “Thoughts about the Descent into Hell of Jesus Christ” which was written in 1765 when he was only sixteen years old. The poem was omitted from the text because “it is quite long and adds little to the lecture itself,” but for completeness this review makes it available to read at this time if you wish at Thoughts on Jesus Christ's Descent into Hell.

    [page 131] Where ever we look in Goethe, we encounter something that may be described as a flow of intensely vivid images. And how full of images is this poem of the young Goethe that we have just heard! The flow of that vivid life of images was an aspect of him, we can see that a powerful soul life living itself out in vivid imagery overcame the problems that still disturbed him in his earlier poem.

    Do you know anyone who seems to be bored all the time? Garfield the comic strip comes to mind. It stars a cat who is bored most of the time. He is simply not interested in the outside world very much. Steiner tells us on page 132, “A soul is interested in the outer world according to how the experiences of love and hate are working.” It is easy to see in people who are bored all the time that there is a paucity of love and hate working into their lives. Love and hate comprise the two polarities of desiring which we will examine now.

    Recall now that perception is instantaneous — it comes in from the outside world in the now. Mental images are complex combinations of previous perceptions, so they come into the soul on a stream of time from the past into the future as shown by line AB in the Page 135 Diagram. In order to recall a mental image, some attention must be paid to it. As Steiner puts it, "Consciousness must illuminate it." And he asks and answers, "How does it happen that this continuous stream of mental images in the soul can be illuminated so that parts of it become visible to memory or in some other way?"

    Soul Currents Diagram, From page  135.

    [page 134] Human beings possess a tremendous variety of feelings. I will point to just a few, some of which were mentioned yesterday, and a few others — feelings, for example, that express themselves in longing, impatience, hope, doubt, anxiety, and fear. What do all of these various feelings tell? If we examine them closely, we find that they all share a peculiar element. They are all related to the future — something that may happen or something that we hope will happen. In our souls, we live in such a way that our feelings are interested not only in the present but also in the future. In fact, they have a very lively interest in the future.

    If you look at the CD line, you'll find that there is a time stream from the future which enters our soul.

    [page 135] All desires, wishes, and interests, the phenomena of love and hate, represent a current in the soul life that flows not from past to future, but toward us from the future. It flows from the future into the past.

    Now we can answer the question we asked above about what becomes visible to memory or conscious to us at any moment. Given that we have two streams of memory going through us, one of memory or mental concepts flowing from the past, and the other of desires involving love and hate flowing through us from the future — where they meet when they pass through our souls, in the place where they overlap, consciousness exists. In studies of consciousness in the works of Ornstein, Tart, Pribram, Edelmann, Dennett, Searle, and others, no where have I seen a simpler or more elegant statement of what conscious is than here in Steiner's words. Consciousness exists when a stream of memories from the past meet a stream of desires from the future. Is this true? Ask yourself. You are a human being. Ask if it is true of you. This is how Steiner describes consciousness, not defining it, but describing what its effects are within a human being.

    [page 135] You can say, wherever you look into your soul life, that you are involved with an interpenetration of those two streams — what flows from the past into the future and the opposite flow of desires, interests, wishes, and so on. The two streams interpenetrate each other.

    These are experiences we all have if we examine our lives. What Steiner does next is to name the stream of memories from the past the "etheric body" and the stream of desires from the future the "astral body." How does adding these name prove useful? Because they allow us to grasp other aspects of human lives that we may have encountered before for which we had no explanation. For example in the immediate period after death we have been told that we enter a time of moving backward through the memories of our lives, a process the Orientals call kamaloca. Plus we know that the astral body has completely separated from the physical and etheric body after death. With the absence of the pressure of the time stream flowing from the past into the future from the etheric body, the only stream in action is the time stream from the future into the past from the astral body which creates the condition we have known as kamaloca, in other words, the unhindered flow of time backwards through our previous lifetime.

    [page 136] You see, then, that we rediscover in psychosophy what we have learned from spiritual science. I hope, though, that you will notice one thing. There can sometimes be a long road to travel from knowledge of spiritual scientific truths gleaned from clairvoyant research to confirming experiences on the physical plane, for that must first be put in order. When that is achieved, you will see everywhere you look, clairvoyant research is always confirmed by findings made on the physical plane.

    To use a metaphor I like: a clairvoyant is using the most delicate instrument known to humankind, the human being itself. But it is only an instrument, who dials and responses can be misinterpreted due to certain desires, wishes, interests, and so on of the human being using the instrument. That is what I suggest Steiner means "must first be put in order" — the human being using the instrument of clairvoyance must be calibrated or "put in order" or the results will seem to be confusing or contradictory to the results of other instruments. Put in order, however, two instruments will produce results that are mutually confirmatory.

    Ever try to give a surprise birthday party to someone? Was it easy to pre-arrange everything without the loved one finding out what you were doing? No, it's hardly ever easy, is it? That's why really good surprise parties are such a rarity — they seem to depend upon good luck mostly as much as advance preparation. If we examine the phenomenon of surprise or spontaneous activity of any kind, we are led to an understanding of the process of judging which shows us that it is orthogonal to the two currents from the past and the future, that is, it is in a different direction from either one.

    [page 137] When are we surprised? It is only when something confronts us that we are not immediately able to judge as it makes an impression on the soul life. In that moment when we able to judge, surprise or wonder vanishes. At times when we are immediately able to judge, we feel no surprise, no wonder.

    No wonder we feel no surprise. From my studies of spontaneous activities, I have confirmed that it is impossible to perform a spontaneous activity by conscious command or will. It was Paul Watzlawick who first called this phenomenon to my attention in what he called "The Be Spontaneous Paradox" or BSP for short. Sneezing is a spontaneous activity. Try sneezing at this moment if you doubt it. You can't do anything but feign a sneeze upon command. No matter how hard you try, you know what you have done is not a real sneeze. Going to sleep is another one: no matter how hard you try, you cannot make yourself go to sleep. Smile! How many times have you heard some amateur photographer say that? It puts you immediately into a BSP, doesn't it? If they act cute, or smile at you genuinely, you may smile because smiling back at someone is a spontaneous activity. But try to smile on command, and you get an artificial smile of the kind you see in so many amateur photographs. You plan a surprise party and the person discovers your plan. So what happens when the big moment comes? They cannot be genuinely surprised, but may feign being surprised which will likely fool none of their close friends. The person is immediately able to judge what's happening when you all yell, "Surprise!" and thus they are not really surprised. Doing any spontaneous activity on command allows you to judge it and that prevents you from doing it spontaneously.

    [page 137] Judging occurs in consciousness but cannot assume control of the ongoing flow of soul life. We do not always have all of our mental images at our beck and call. Judging, therefore, cannot coincide with the soul's onward-flowing current, neither can it coincide with the current coursing from the future into the past. Otherwise, that would render it impossible to experience such feelings as fear, surprise, and astonishment. So we must conclude that judging coincides with neither of these directions.

    In the mid-1960s I brought home from the public library on loan a copy of Fragonard's famous painting, "Young Girl Reading". I later purchased a copy of the painting on canvas and it was my favorite. One day in the 1990s I was in the National Gallery and turned a corner and there in full, living color was the original painting. I was surprised, delighted, and filled a flow of all the mental images I had ever made of that painting, none of which rose to the beauty that filled my eyes in that moment.

    [page 138]Consider a moment when mental images that have escaped us become conscious in a very unusual way. I will suggest such a moment. Assume, for example, that you are touring a picture gallery. You notice a picture and look at it. At that moment the same picture surfaces in your consciousness. Let us assume that you have already seen it. What has evoked that memory? It is the impression of the new picture; the impression of the new picture conjured into visibility within your soul the old mental image of the picture that had continued to live within you. If you had not seen the picture, the old mental image would not have surfaced.

    That is fairly straight-forward - you see something it calls to mind a mental image of something you'd seen earlier. But let's follow Steiner as he leads us into the process of connections we make internally.

    [page 138] What happened when you saw that new picture? Your I-being wanted to approach the picture, and it used the senses as a medium. Because your I received a new impression and absorbed a new element, which had a curious effect on something in the ongoing flow of your soul life, your soul life became visible.

    If you ponder these words and concepts you will begin to understand why you think of the things you do, and will have new power in your life to sort out the wheat from the chaff of your soul experiences.

    We know through the science of doyletics that the onset of cognitive memory (mental image) capability is about five years old. Before that what experiences we have are stored as doylic memories or physical body states which can be recapitulated for the rest of one's life given the appropriate stimulus or until the original event of storage has been uncovered through a conscious or unconscious speed trace. Steiner says explains the onset of cognitive memory as the present of I-awareness. It is clear that the development of the neocortex to it full capacity coincides with the presence of I-awareness and its concomitant cognitive memory or mental image capability.

    [page 139] I have said before that memory goes back to the moment a child gains the capacity to conceive of the self as "I," when a child develops I-awareness. Ordinarily, we are able to recall only those mental images with which the I was actively engaged, in which the active power of a self-aware I-being was involved.

    What happens to the impressions a child receives before five years old during the various experiences it encounters? In doyletics we postulate that these impressions are stored as physical body states or (doyles). Thus events before five go into doylic memory and post-five go into cognitive memory. As the child begins to form these cognitive or mental images at the age of three for the first time, these images may be transient and ephemeral, eluding permanent storage, but they provide a background of mental images with which the child can begin to form an I-awareness.

    [page 139] What happens in an I-being in the process of being "born" during a child's second or third year? Before that, children unconsciously absorb impressions without the I being truly present in them. They then begin really to develop I-consciousness, relating to it all the mental images that they absorb from the outer world. That is the point when the human I situates itself in front of its mental images, placing them behind it. It is an almost physically perceptible event. First, the I was within its life of mental images; it then steps out, free and armed to accept everything coming to meet it from the future, while placing past mental images behind it.

    Time Current  Diagram, Adapted from figures on pages 133 to 148 by Bobby Matherne

    The I-being steps out of the flow of the mental image currents from the past via the etheric body and the flow of the desires from the future via the astral body. To understand this is to begin to understand the essence of the I-being as it operates independently of the etheric and astral bodies. In the Time Current Diagram, the I-being is shown coming down into the soul, perpendicular to the mental images from the past and to the desires coming from the future. We can easily understand now that the process of judging we spoke of before is directly related to the I-being.

    Steiner tells us that the etheric body has a "mirror coating" for the purpose of reflecting back to us our stored mental images. Our sense organs in our physical body also have such mirror coating for the reflection of our sense impressions. (Page 143) He tells us how to picture the function of these mirror coatings.

    [page 142] Imagine standing before a mirror and gazing into it. If the back of the mirror isn't coated, you see nothing reflected back at all. You would be staring into the unending distance. Our perception of the future is like that. This is indeed how we look into the current that approaches us from the future. It flows toward us but we don't see anything. When do we see something there? We see only what is there from the past. We do not see the future, of course, but we do see the past. You don't see objects in front of you as you look into a mirror; you see only what is behind you.

    If you study Steiner's works, one particular item recurs as a pattern. It is a pattern that Arthur Young calls his theory of process. Every process takes a certain number of steps downward, reaches a minimum and begins moving upward. If you look at the Great Epochs of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth, you'll find downward trend into materialism culminating in the fourth Epoch of Earth followed by a rise back into spiritual realities progressing futher upward through Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. A similar V-shape diagram happens during the Cultural Epochs of Old India, Old Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Roman with the downward thrust coming to an end in the middle of the fourth Epoch again, followed by a rising into spirit in the fifth, sixth and seventh Cultural Epochs. If imagine an image of a seven candled Menorah before and numbered them from left to right as 1 through 7, you would see that 4 stands alone, with 1 matching 7, 2 paired with 6, and 3 with 5. These pairings show up in the traits of the various Great Epochs and Cultural Epochs, with our current fifth cultural epoch having some of the traits of the third or Egypto-Chaldean Cultural Epoch.

    In developing one's memory it is useful to use this mirrored sevens pattern and Steiner explains how one might design an elementary curriculum based on this pattern.

    [page 144, 145] These things can thus show that if the I really wants to improve memory, it must strengthen itself out of the astral time current flowing opposite to the etheric current. These things are all extraordinarily important for practical life. If educators paid more attention to them, it would result in tremendous blessings. If, for example, schools with seven grades were to arrange studies so that the fourth grade existed by itself, after which the fifth grade reviewed on a different level the material taken up in the third grade, the sixth grade reviewed the studies of the second grade, and the seventh grade reviewed the content of the first grade, great benefits could result. There would be a definite strengthening of memory, and people would see how beneficial such practices are, simply because they come from the laws of real life.

    One of the reasons I bought this book was because of a reference Robert Sardello made to it in his Introduction to Gerhard Wehr's book, Jung & Steiner, "In his most profound work on the soul, A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit, he describes how soul functions. Among the most significant aspects is the soul's apprehension of a time current from the future." Here again is the operant passage with which Steiner introduces the concept of a time current from the future:

    [page 135] All desires, wishes, and interests, the phenomena of love and hate, represent a current in the soul life that flows not from past to future, but toward us from the future. It flows from the future into the past.

    In my review of Jung & Steiner I discussed in detail how useful such a concept is to interpreting otherwise inexplicable feelings one has at times, feelings which may be described as "love at first sight", a "weird attraction", etc. Let's see what other understandings we can bring out of Steiner's time current from the future concept. I have adapted what I call the Time Current Diagram from the diagrams on page 133 to 148. Note how similar this diagram is to the Typology Diagram from above, which is included here for easy reference. By inspecting the two diagrams, it should be easy to see why the time current future from the future shows up in us as a feeling. It is this feeling, I call the "Remember the Future" feeling, also known as Matherne's Rule #36, which I discovered many years before I encountered this "time current from the future" of Steiner's. I say "Remember the future. It hums in the present." Why "hums"? Because a hum is something you can feel directly in your body when you or something around you is humming.

    The various arrows and their meanings are contained in the book on page 133-148. It should be clear that the astral and etheric body oppose each other on the horizontal. Steiner sums up the Time Current Diagram this way:

    Time Current  Diagram, Adapted from figures on pages 133 to 148 by Bobby Matherne

    [page 147, 148] I can assure you that innumerable riddles of the soul will be solved for you if you refer to this diagram. You will see that this cross, cut by a circle, provides an excellent picture of the life of the soul, showing how it borders on the spiritual world above and on the physical world below, on the etheric to the left and the astral to the right. This requires rising to a concept of time as a current that does not just flow quietly along but that meets with something. The life of the I and the senses, on the other hand, can be understood only when they are seen coming into contact with the stream of time at a right angle. If you keep this in mind, you will understand that very different forces really meet in our souls, which is the scene of an encounter of forces moving in the most varied directions.

    Jung's Typology Diagram Copyright 2004 by Bobby Matherne

    Rudolf Steiner apparently developed his understanding of the Time Currents Diagram from studying himself experientially and reporting what he found. Since his understanding matches so well with the Typology Diagram of Carl Jung who developed his understanding from studying many individuals experientially, we have evidence that the works of both men support each other and report on the situation of currents flowing in every individual. In the next passage Steiner develops the Thinker and Feeler distinctions in a way that follows Jung's description of the two modes of rational types in operation.

    [page 148] Let us assume that we are dealing with an individual (since these forces manifest themselves in a great variety of ways in the great variety of human beings) in whom the judging I prevails. Such a person will find it extremely difficult to fill abstract thoughts with enough lifeblood so that they appeal directly to the feelings. Thus, we can expect that it will not be easy to get something life-filled to engage our feelings out of what a person says whose primary soul activity is judging [RJM: the Thinker].
           On the other hand, the kind of individual whose soul life tends toward a flow rich in interests and astral abundance, which encounters the opposite ongoing stream of physical life, brings a disposition for vivid concepts into life. Such individuals will not turn up on the physical plane as thought people, but they may be characterized by the ease with which they express inner experiences in ways that capture our interest [RJM: the Feeler].

    We get another indication of the independent life of mental images and the deleterious effects which can show up if these remain completely unconscious. It is the goal of Jungian analysts to assist their clients to bring these free floating images to consciousness as part of their maturation and healing process. Left unchecked, they pour all their power into the physical body, which then manifests it as illness and disease.

    [page 149] Much will become clear if you keep in the background the fact that the stream of soul life flowing from the past into the future — that of the etheric body — contains the unconscious mental images, which are present despite their unconscious state. If you know from spiritual science that the etheric body is the architect of the physical body, you will be able to see that these mental images are indeed present, even if unconsciously, for the etheric body carries them along. And the mental images present there are capable of developing a lively activity toward the other side, especially if they are unconscious. Anyone versed in physiology and psychology is aware how profoundly disturbing mental images can be when they cannot be summoned from the soul's depths into consciousness, but instead continue to swim along with the etheric current in those unconscious depths of the soul life. They then generate all their strength into the physical body.

    Many discomforts of adult life are due to stored physical body states or doyles which were stored before the age of five years old according to the tenets of the science of doyletics. These doyles can be triggered by various events in one's adult life and without knowing why, suddenly our heart will start racing, or our breathing will stop, or we feel nauseated, or experience vertigo, or feel like we're going to fly off into the sky, or our mouth will go into a grimace, etc. If we have the first one, a doctor will call it an anxiety attack. The second one may require us to yell an obscenity before we can breath normally again. The third may cause us to think we're getting the flu. The fourth to think we have acrophobia. And the last one to think we can never eat a certain food — how could we eat it if our mouth were in a perpetual grimace?

    What's happening is that certain mental images are active below the surface of our consciousness. These mental images were not stored in our neocortex because before five years old, our neocortex is not fully operational. As a result the primitive mental images were stored in our limbic region which also mediates the homeostasis of the conditions of internal organs and muscles of our body. The states associated with the mental images are activated in our body and cause the effects mentioned above, among many other effects not mentioned.

    And like Steiner mentions below, there is a help for it. The speed trace is a powerful way of taking away the power of such images. What it does is allow you to convert the unconscious doylic memory into a conscious memory (what doyletics calls a "cognitive" or "conceptual" memory to distinguish memories in the neocortex from memories in the limbic system). During a speed trace, the images of the original event during which the doyle was stored rises to the surface as soon as a cognitive memory is formed from the previous doylic memory. Thereafter only the cognitive memory will arise when the triggering event occurs. The heart race, yelling, vertigo, acrophobia, nausea, food dislike, etc, will never recur.

    To assist yourself by bringing to consciousness these mental image over which you were previously powerless can truly have a curative effect in your life.

    [page 149] Here is a relevant fact in life. Let us consider, for example, someone between the ages of ten and twelve who has experienced an event that has been totally forgotten and simply cannot be recalled. This experience nevertheless continues to work in the etheric body and can make the person sick. Below the surface of consciousness, many mental images are active that can cause illness. Those who are aware of this fact also know that there is, in a certain way, help for it. It consists of taking away the power of such images. This means leading them in another direction by trying to provide to the sufferer who is not strong enough to do this alone reference points that allow those images to surface. This is of tremendous help. To assist a person in bringing to consciousness mental images over which the individual is powerless, images that continue to work in, the etheric body, can have a truly curative effect.

    When I was studying the phenomena which led me to formulate the science of doyletics back in 1996, I was unaware that I was doing spiritual science research in what Steiner calls psychosophy, but it is clear to me now that is exactly what I was doing.

    [page 150] Thus, the basic feeling — that of certainty in relation to spiritual scientific research — can also give you confidence in the research of psychosophy. This is why I occasionally try to give you a dry, dispassionate account of supersensible matters in such a way that it meets the criteria of objective scientific investigation of the physical plane. As a result, we are obligated to note that human beings are put on the physical plane for the purpose of understanding it. Our time has two tasks; one is to study, in selfless objective thinking, this physical plane on which the great cosmic laws have placed us for a purpose.

    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/psychbso.shtml



    3.) ARJ2: On Writing by Stephen King

    What brought me to this book was a quotation from it about the overuse of adverbs. I could have written it this way, "What quickly brought me to this book" and used an unnecessary adverb. Yes, I know that I came quickly to this book, but who else cares? Quickly was an unnecessary adverb. I got his point that good writing rarely needs adverbs and decided it was time for me to read my first book by Stephen King.

    In his C.V. section, King reveals the horror story of his early life, incidents that sound like stories from his novels. His baby-sitter story, e. g., should help any writer to cope with abusive critics. She was a big fat sixteen year old named either Beulah or Eula.

    [page 20, 21] Was she as hard on my brother David as she was on me? I don't know. He's not in any of these pictures. Besides, he would have been less at risk from Hurricane Eula-Beulah's dangerous winds; at six, he would have been in the first grade and off the gunnery range for most of the day.
           Eula-Beulah would be on the phone, laughing with someone, and beckon me over. She would hug me, tickle me, get me laughing, and then, still laughing, go upside my head hard enough to knock me down. Then she would tickle me with her bare feet until we were both laughing again.
           Eula-Beulah was prone to farts — the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. "Pow!" she'd cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marsh-gas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

    While his babysitter prepared Stephen for his future critics, his mother prepared him to deal with people dying. Around age six he asked his mom if she had ever seen anyone die. She said she had seen one and heard one. The first one was a drowning girl caught in a rip tide, screaming for help. The second one was a sailor who jumped to his death and landed in the street.

    [page 23] "He splattered," my mother said in her most matter-of-fact tone. She paused, then added, "The stuff that came out of him was green. I have never forgotten it."
           That makes two of us, Mom.

    Then he had measles which led into strep throat which required multiple ear drum lancings, all of which taught him about excruciating pain, of a type he would encounter much later after he is run over by a van as a mature adult.

    His mother was also the first buyer of his stories. Stephen sold her four short stories about Mr, Rabbit Trick and she paid a quarter each. "That was the first buck I made in this business." (Page 29)

    Sometimes you can have so much fun thinking about doing something, you don't have to do it. That has been my life-time rule once I realized that practical jokes hurt other people, and I could enjoy the thought of them without hurting anyone. King's mom inspired the first story he submitted for publication, "Happy Stamps." She was licking S&H Green Stamps to put into a book to get a lamp for her sister for Christmas. At one point, she stuck her tongue out at Stephen, and it was the color of S&H green. He thought how someone might counterfeit such stamps and could buy anything with them, and wrote that up. In his rejection slip from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, there was a personal note, "Don't staple manuscripts." No sale, but useful advice. A good start.

    Stephen wrote a satirical magazine called The Village Vomit in school and was sent to the principal's office several times for hurting people's feelings. One day the guidance counselor sent him to see John Gould who needed a sports reporter for his weekly newspaper, the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise. From Gould, Stephen received the following great advice.

    [page 57] "When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story," he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."
           Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

    For me, the door becomes open when I publish it to the Internet. As soon as it goes to the remote site where anyone can read it, my juices start flowing to re-read it as folks out there are reading it. I make sure I remove those glitches, fix typos, put in missing words, and generally polish off my finished piece so I can be proud of it sitting on the bookshelf for the world to read. My best editing gets done about three days after I finish the writing and copy-editing phases. I call this "playing with sentences" from a question Annie Dillard once gave a wannabee writer, "Do you like sentences?" I like sentences, and when I come back after three days to my own writing, I have fun reading my sentences, and if anything strikes a sour note, I change the sentence. Sometimes, after only three days, I'll read a sentence and wonder what I meant by that. I knew what I meant when I wrote it, when it was hot from my pen, but now it's cold, and its meaning escapes me. So . . . its meaning will escape my readers, too, and it must be reshaped, cleaned up, and polished before I put it back on the shelf for others to read.

    When the local Worumbo Mill shut down, Stephen volunteered for the time-and-a-half clean up job, but luckily the jobs were gone by the time they got to the high school kids. What Stephen did get was a great idea from one of the dyehouse men, "The rats down in the basement were big as cats, some of them, goddam if they weren't big as dogs." (Page 60) The idea went into his story, "Graveyard Shift."

    When my second child came, I was working offshore in the oil field and they called on the radio saying they were sending a copter for me. When Stephen's second child was born, he was working too, attending a Memorial Day Triple at a local drive-in, featuring three horror films. He and his friend were on the third movie (The Corpse Grinders) and their second sixpack when the loudspeaker on the stand outside their car blared, "STEVE KING, PLEASE GO HOME! YOUR WIFE'S IN LABOR!" (Page 66)

    Stephen was hired to move furniture for a schoolmate's mom in her trailer home. Here's how he described the crucifix there.

    [page 78] Dominating the trailer's living room was a nearly life-sized crucified Jesus, eyes turned up, mouth turned down, blood dribbling from beneath the crown of thorns on his head. He was naked except for a rag twisted around his hips and loins. Above this bit of breechclout were the hollowed belly and the jutting ribs of a concentration-camp inmate.

    This is a common sight in Catholic Churches in South Louisiana, but it may have been the first time Stephen had seen one. He can be forgiven for mistaking the body of Jesus portrayed on the cross for the Christ Spirit that Jesus was carrying to the Cross to save all of humanity. When his friend's mother asked if he'd been saved, Stephen answered, mistaking the bodily vessel for the spiritual Savior it carried.

    [page 79] I hastened to tell her I was saved as saved could be, although I didn't think you could ever be good enough to have that version of Jesus intervene on your behalf. The pain had driven him out of his mind. You could see it on his face. If that guy came back, he probably wouldn't be in a saving mood.

    The above comment comes from a writer who had his character John Coffey (J. C.) in The Green Mile save the life of the warden's wife by exorcizing her demons in a rather dramatic fashion. Did the Christ Spirit enter John Coffey when he performed his miracles? Stephen says he writes 'em, not explains 'em. "Mostly I don't see stuff like that until the story's done." (Page 197)

    Stephen grew up with kids who lived in one of his horror movies, wearing the same clothes for the first year and a half of high school.

    www.best

    [page 80] I went to school with kids who wore the same neckdirt for months, kids whose skin festered with sores and rashes, kids with the eerie dried-apple-doll faces that result from untreated burns, kids who were sent to school with stones in their dinnerbuckets, and nothing but air in Thermoses. It wasn't Arcadia; for the most part it was Dogpatch with no sense of humor.

    In his own personal horror story of addiction, his wife Tabby, his family and friends intervened; telling him to get into rehab or get out of the house, that none of them wanted to watch him kill himself. What did Stephen do?

    [page 98] I bargained, because that's what addicts do. I was charming, because that's what addicts are. In the end I got two weeks to think about it. In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time.

    Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of the helicopter's door shouts. Guy on top of the burning building responds, Give me two weeks to think about it.

    Stephen was afraid he couldn't write anymore without his chemical crutches. Somehow he summoned enough neurons together to make a decision.

    [page 98] I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided (again, so far as I was able to decide anything in my distraught and depressed state of mind) that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up. If it came to that.

    Well, he survived rehab and was soon able to write again. He had broken through the "pop-intellectual myth" that one had to drink or do drugs to be creative. No matter if creative people are more likely to become addicts, he thought to himself, "We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter."

    His describes returning home after rehab as someone returning home from a long vacation.

    [page 99, 100] Little by little I found the beat again, and after that I found the joy again. I came back to my family with gratitude, and back to my work with relief — I came back to it the way folks come back to a summer cottage after a long winter, checking first to make sure nothing has been stolen or broken during the cold season. Nothing had been. It was still all there, still all whole. Once the pipes were thawed out and the electricity was turned back on, everything worked fine.

    One thing had to be changed, that huge desk, behind which he sat for six years mostly drunk or drugged, had to go. It was his dream desk, but it was like a huge ship whose "captain was in charge of a voyage to nowhere." (Page 100) He needed a smaller desk with a corner of its own. I'm sitting here in a corner of my own. My workstation is a L-shaped desk and my chair facing the corner of the room. There are few distractions when I'm writing, although I sometimes feel I need a sign for the back of my head which says "BRAIN AT WORK".

    [page 100, 101] A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living-room suite where it had been, picking out the pieces and a nice Turkish rug with my wife's help. In the early nineties, before they moved on to their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat pizza. They usually left a boxful of crusts behind when they moved on, but I didn't care. They came, they seemed to enjoy being with me, and I know I enjoyed being with them. I got another desk — it's handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. That eave is very like the one I slept under in Durham, but there are no rats in the walls and no senile grandmother downstairs yelling for someone to feed Dick the horse. I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more that I didn't), and now I'm going to tell you as much as I can about the job. As promised, it won't take long.

    Here's the advice he gives to writers after he found it out the hard way.

    [page 101] It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

    He tells us "Writing is telepathy". By this he means that writing is transferring what is in your brain as writer to the brain of your reader. You may be sitting in a corner writing as I am, and your reader may be sitting on a porch swing as I was when I was reading this chapter. He explains that he always carries a book with him when he's spending time in purgatory, you know, those waits in line in the grocery store, the pharmacy, the DMV, etc.

    He tells us, "Look — here's a table covered with a red cloth." There's a cage on the tablecloth with a number 8 on its back. And in our minds, we create our own shade of red, maybe an old-fashioned red plaid as diners use to have. It's his words, our tablecloth, but each of our cages has the number 8 on it. That's how the telepathy between writer and reader works. If we describe too much detail, our work becomes an instruction manual, too little and we lose our reader.

    [page 106] This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room . . . except we are together. We're close.

    That is telepathy. Communication between two people without speaking a word aloud, two people separated perhaps by thousands of miles and thousands of years. Telepathy pales in comparison to writing. Take Stephen's advice when you prepare to write: "Do not come lightly to the blank page."

    [page 107] I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else.
           Wash the car, maybe.

    On page 113, King gives us a wonderful metaphor about the "big'un" toolbox which any craftsman should always carry with him. Young Stephen asked his Uncle Oren why he carried the large toolbox around the house when all he needed was a screwdriver.

    [page 114] "Yeah, but Stevie," he said, bending to grasp the handles, "I didn't know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged."

    This is great advice for writers. For myself, I have several toolboxes and a shelf full of miscellaneous parts. I strive to complete some minor repair job using the tools I planned to use and have carried with me, and count it as a Handyman Hole-in-One if I do. The next level is to complete the job using only parts I have around the house, or raw materials which I can shape into the missing part. Completing a job without a trip to the hardware store is like a Tennis Ace. Extra trips to get an additional tool, I count as a golfer might count the exercise he gets walking to his ball for a second or third shot to the green. Par for the course.

    I love King's selection of writing tools, especially this one: "Remember the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful." (Page 118) Trust your unconscious to provide some lively words and don't second guess yourself or your internal censor will squeeze the life out of your sentence.

    Grammar is another important tool.

    [page 121] Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn't they? Even when he was drunk on his ass, he was a fucking genius.

    Now for the adverb, the quotation about its overuse which brought this book to my attention. "Aren't adverbs necessary?" you may be thinking. Yes, but they can be deadly for writers of fiction who use them to describe abstractly what is better shown directly.

    [page 124] The other piece of advice I want to give you before moving on to the next level of the toolbox is this: The adverb is not your friend."
           Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They're the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish mustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy's high heels.

    King reminds us of the Tom Swift novels which were filled with sentences with adverbial dialogue attributions, so many that it led to a parlor game in which people created "Swifties" with witty double-meanings, like: "Hurry up," Tom said swiftly. King gives us three sentences to inspect (Page 125):

           "Put it down!" she shouted.
           "Give it back," he pleaded, "it's mine."
           "Don't be a fool, Jekyll," Utterson said.

    Note how "shouted" and "pleaded" could be replaced by "said" without losing any coherency. The exclamation point indicates that she shouted. And the very sentence's content indicates he was pleading. Want to make it worse? Add adverbs of dialogue attribution like this rewrite on Page 126:

           "Put it down!" she shouted menacingly.
           "Give it back," he pleaded abjectly, "it's mine."
           "Don't be a fool, Jekyll," Utterson said contemptuously.

    King advises would-be writers, "I suggest you ask yourself if you really want to write the sort of prose that might wind up in a party game." (Page 26) And sums it up cleverly on page 128: "All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine."

    No one's perfect, King, tells us, "there are lots of bad writers."

    [page 141] Some have scribbled their way to homes in the Caribbean, leaving a trail of pulsing adverbs, wooden characters, and vile passive-voice constructions behind them.

    Clearly Stephen King is not one of those writers. Plus his muse is a cigar-chewing bum in the basement. Go figure.

    [page 144, 145] He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he's on duty), but he's got the inspiration. It's right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There's stuff in there than change your life.
           Believe me, I know.

    What is the secret of Stephen King's success? His short answer is: A healthy body and a stable relationship.

    [page 154, 155] It's a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.

    Amen! Well said and well done, Stephen. My health and my wife are crucial to my writing. We both eat healthy and exercise. She is my Ideal Reader. I eagerly await her comments when she reads my latest piece of writing. At times we confront each other in what we call "Loud Learning Opportunities". And we give each other space to do our individual work and enjoy our time together with family and friends.

    Literary Viagra — that's what King calls the process of judicious cutting between the first and second drafts of a work, the scrapping parts of the writing that are not parts of the story. In his senior year in high school, someone gave him this comment, "Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%. Good luck." (Page 222)

    [page 223] The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing — literary Viagra. You'll feel it and your I. R. [Ideal Reader] will, too.

    A good place to find cuts is in the back story. Stephen took out two or three pages from Bag of Bones, when his wife Tabby complained. He resisted removing it (all writers hate removing pieces of their hard work), saying about the character's writing block, "This block goes on for a year, maybe more. He has to do something in all that time, doesn't he?" "I guess so," Tabby said, "but you don't have to bore me with it, do you?"

    [page 226] Ouch. Game, set, and match. Like most good I.R.'s, Tabby can be ruthless when she's right.

    King received about four thousands letters about Bag of Bones and he says no one ever asked what Mike was doing for community service work in the year he had writer's block.

    Do you need a writing class or a book on writing? I did. I could write, but my writing was mostly technical manuals for new computers and scientific articles for Datamation Magazine. I needed help getting free from the carping critic in my head, and I found help in Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers. He told me to write for ten minutes without stopping or lifting my pen from the page. Fill up two pages of writing every day. Use any content which comes to mind, even if it's only, "I can't think what to write next". After several weeks of this, my carping critic packed his carpetbags and drove off without waving goodbye. I could write without criticizing myself as I wrote. This was a breath of freedom in my world.

    It was how I got started reviewing every book I read. One day as I sat down to do my daily writing exercise I realized that I had just finished reading a book earlier that morning. CONTENT! I thought, and began writing about the book I had just read. Some 360-plus reviews later, I had written an entire book of essays which I published as A Reader's Journal. Shortly this review of On Writing will be added to the on-line extended version of my book. My advice to all wannabee writers is: Start Writing Now. If you think it's something you'll do later when you get to it, you'll never get to it. If you're not sure if you can be a writer, I offer you Annie Dillard's question, "Do you enjoy sentences?" If you do, you can be a writer. And the sentences you write can become the ones you love most.



    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/onwritin.shtml



    4.) ARJ2: From Beetroot to Buddhism by Rudolf Steiner

    In this collection of lectures, Steiner was answering questions asked to him by the workers on the Geotheanum in Dornach between March 1 and June 25, 1924. These questions ranged over a great variety of topics, from the influences of living near a cemetery to comets, the Kaballah, and the Klu Klux Klan. The title comes from two of the diverse topics covered, beets and Buddha.

    Asked about why people living near a cemetery seem pale, Steiner replied that living near to a cemetery can be helpful to clear thinking because of the destructive processes it promotes. Why are the powers of destruction helpful? He says:

    [page 3] . . . if we did not have those powers of destruction we would be stupid all our life.

    The harmful effects of the cemetery are best countered by planting walnut and lime trees in the vicinity. I note that when we moved to Timberlane in 1989, about the time I decided to make writing a career, we found that there was a small cemetery about 800 feet from the edge of our property. About three years or so later, I planted four types of citrus: navel orange, grapefruit, satsumas, and lemon trees adjacent to the house. There was already a medium size pecan tree growing in the front yard. I don't know for sure whether the pecans and lemons make an apt substitute for walnuts and limes, but that's the condition I find myself in without any conscious planning. Whether my thinking is clear now, the reader is in a better position to say that than I am. Maybe it's due to the carbonated beverages I occasionally drink, which Steiner says are helpful to one's thinking. Amazing how the soda industry took off shortly after he said these things in his public lectures at the beginning of the 20th Century. And how people pay premium prices for carbonated spring water at the beginning of this 21st Century.

    One can easily be fooled into thinking that the ancient Indians had a disregard for their physical bodies because they were so spiritual. In fact they were so spiritual that they saw all the components and organs of their physical body as spirit. With the Egyptians it was a different story. Living in an arid region, it was the water of the Nile that was of utmost importance to their survival. They focused their thoughts on the nature of water.

    The Indians who came to Egypt knew about the physical body, but in their new home came to appreciate the beneficial effects of water and came to realize that water acts, not on the physical body, but on the etheric body. Osiris was the god of water and his enemy was Typhon, the hot air from the desert. One day when Typhon killed Osiris [hot air is known to carry away water in evaporation], Osiris's wife, Isis, brought back his body burying parts of it in different places. This is an apt metaphor for the appearance of springs in the various oases in the desert. When one confronts Typhon in the desert, one is brought back to life by arriving at an Osiris spring prepared in advance by Isis. To the Egyptians, the ether body was the essential spiritual part of the human being. Thus, they preserved the physical body in mummified form so that the etheric body may one day return to it and bring it back to life. (Summarized from page 13.)

    The Babylonians lived in a region where clear skies at night made star gazing very popular. They built great towers to observe the stars. They looked to the stars the way Egyptians looked to the river, and calculated the influence of the stars on human life. They created the science of astrology which later came to be known as astronomy. Thus the Babylonians were the first people to discover the astral body of the human being, that part of us that arrives in our physical and etheric bodies every morning after its nightly journey to the stars.

    The next major component of the human body came from a people who never seemed to be satisfied, and were always roaming from one place to another, looking for a promised land. As in the Jolson-Rose-Dreyer song, "You'll find that happiness lies right under your eyes, right in your own backyard," they went to the east, then to the west, and found happiness right under their "I's" in their own backyard where they started from. Here's Steiner version of the story of the Hebrews:

    [page 15, 16] You can read it in the Bible, in the Old Testament, how the Jews were never satisfied and came to a spirit who is completely invisible. The physical body is, of course, completely visible. The ether body came to expression in the floods, in the watery activities of the Nile; these were tangible. The astral body of the Babylonians would not be visible on earth, but could be found by studying the stars. The Jews wanted none of that, they wanted an invisible god. This invisible god influences the human I. The Jews found the I as a spiritual principle and called it Yahveh.

    Here we have the great story of humanity laid out before us in the story of the four parts of the human being. The Indians discovered the physical body; the Egyptians, the etheric body; the Babylonians, the astral body; and the Jews, the I or ego body. This is the course of human development that lies behind the fable convenue that passes for history, up until now. In his Lecture on Dec 13, 1919, The Michael Impulse, Steiner writes about this aspect of history thus:

    What is exteriorly and academically called "history" is only a fable convenue, for it records external facts in such a way as to make it appear that the human being was essentially the same in the 8th or 9th century as, let us say, in the 18th or 19th.

    To this tale of the development of the four human bodies, I'd like to add a chapter that has been written only in the past twenty-five years. In discovering that all emotions and feelings are stored before one is about five-years-old, Doyle Henderson has in effect discovered that our astral body which contains our emotions and feelings is seeded by our etheric body and physical body. Those sensory experiences of our etheric and physical bodies that occur before five-years-old are stored and recalled later during our life when some associated event triggers them. These re-triggered events are what we call our emotions and feelings. This process is the key tenet of doyletics, a nascent science of the new century.

    One theme about Roman rule is that the Romans did not replace the gods of the people they conquered, but simply added them to their own pantheon of gods. This was a very practical way of keeping peace in the conquered territories, but it had a deeper, spiritual significance. The gods of the conquered people were able to exert their influence on the Romans as well. Thus it came to be that Rome conquered Greece, but Grecian culture overran Roman culture.

    [page 28] What was the significance of this Roman rule? It was full of the Greek spirit. Educated Romans would all know Greek, and the educated people in Rome knew Greek as a matter of course. The Greek spirit had the greatest influence everywhere.

    In the Bible we find variously the titles of "Son of God" and Son of Man" applied to Christ Jesus, without any apparent distinction between the two titles. The reason is that people had forgotten the distinction between someone who was an initiate in the Mysteries, a Son of God, and someone who was not, a Son of Man. Now read the words of Christ Jesus with this distinction in mind:

    [page 31] 'You do not become a son of God, a child of the spirit, through another person. Everyone becomes this through God himself. It is only a matter of being aware of this. You have the seed of the divine in you, and you merely have to make the effort and you can find it in yourself.'

    In days when there were free Romans and Roman slaves, the difference in class was very important. In later centuries, the difference between the aristocracy and the common man was very important. And here was Christ Jesus telling us that people all over the world were the same in their souls, that sons of the gods were equivalent to the sons of man.

    The period of pregnancy is ten lunar months, a lunar month being defined as the period of the Moon's orbit around the Earth, or 28 days. Twenty-eight days is also the period of time between two appearances of an egg ready for fertilization in the womb of a female. When fertilization occurs, the nascent human being is nourished in the womb for ten cycles of the Moon. These mundane facts about human fertilization should lead us to realize how deeply we each have been influenced by the Moon by the time we are born. There was a people who were intimately aware of the Moon's influence on them - to such an extent that they felt, "we bring the whole of our human nature, the way we are, and so on, with us when we come to earth."

    [page 57] And this is what we find in the old Jewish Yahveh religion. If you had asked one of the ancient Jews who had got ill, let us say, why he got ill, he would say: 'Yahveh has willed this.' If his house was set on fire, he would say it was the will of Yahveh, and so on. He recognized only the one God through whom human beings entered into life on earth and would ascribe everything to him. This gave the Jewish religion a certain rigidity. All their lives people would feel dependent on what they had brought with them on coming to earth.

    When Christ began to teach He wanted to give human beings an inner freedom from that "seed of the divine" that each of us have in us, a freedom that allows us to steer our own paths in freedom throughout our individual lifetimes.

    [page 58] The most important thing Christ Jesus brought into the world was that human beings are not just like a ball that keeps rolling, continuing the momentum given by Yahveh when they were in the womb, but that they have an inner will during life and with this are able to make their own inherent nature, their individual nature, better or worse. . . . It was a significant deed when Jesus of Nazareth, pointing first of all to the sun, not the other stars, said: 'Human beings are influenced not only by the moon but also by the sun.'

    But Jesus of Nazareth was born of a woman and nurtured by the Moon in her womb till birth, his first birth. Only later was he born again, when at baptism by John in the Jordan, the great Sun Spirit Christ entered his body.

    [page 60] Among initiates, the individual who was Jesus of Nazareth was known as Christ Jesus from that moment. And they would say: 'Like other Jews, Jesus of Nazareth has become a human being, a Jew, through the moon powers; but because he received the sun influence at a particular moment in his life he was born again as the Christ.'

    In my native church, the Roman Catholic Church, this dual influence is embodied in a special altar piece that is only taken out for display on special occasions, the monstrance. In the center is the pale white host and surrounding the host are the golden rays of the Sun radiating outward in all directions. At its deepest level it represents the pale disk of the Moon surrounded by the Sun, and thus displays for all present the two births that we must each undergo to become fully human. The Moon influences our astral body and the Sun, our "I" or ego body.

    The image of Christ Jesus on the cross is ubiquitous in Christian churches everywhere today, so much so that we may find it difficult to imagine that that way of representing Christ only came into being after the 8th Council in Constantinople in 869 A.D. Before then, the universal symbol was Christ Jesus as a young man carrying a lamb on his shoulders. That Council decreed, established by law, that the human being consists only of a body and soul, not a separate spirit, and in its wake, humans could no longer remain in the Church and imagine that the Christ spirit entered Jesus of Nazareth's body at baptism at age 30. It must have been there at his birth. Thus came the idea of the Immaculate Conception, an ad hoc retrofit essentially, to help explain how a God can be born of a human being. And with this demotion of every human from their status as a spiritual being came a preference for using the name Jesus Christ, as if Christ were Jesus's surname at birth. Also a preference for showing this God, born as a human, crucified on the Cross as a new symbol. This symbol was not one stemming from the beginning of Christianity and the deed on Golgotha, but one stemming instead from the jurisprudence of the Roman emperors like Constantine and the hierarchically-minded church fathers that followed him when they laid down the law for all the faithful to follow in that 8th Council.

    What happens if you eliminate the spirit from the human being? Well, one might expect that materialism would be the natural result of such an action, and it was. Soon church-goers found themselves, or better said, lost themselves debating whether the communion host contained the body of Christ or not!

    [page 106] But you can literally see materialism arise. The earliest Christians did not have to dispute over flat flour cakes being physically transformed into real flesh, for it would have never occurred to them to think about such a thing. It was only when people wanted to think in material terms that this matter, too, became material. This is altogether rather interesting. Materialism has two forms. Initially everything spiritual was seen in material terms, and then the spirit was denied. That is the route people follow in materialism.

    When the Church began to take the attitude that its job was to take care of human souls, it submerged the ability of people to let the sun spirit be born within themselves without external help. Is this such a big deal? Inquiring minds want to know.

    [page 111] Today we have a situation where the principle according to which human souls must not care for themselves but be cared for by the Church has taken the life of the human souls. If this principle were to continue it would not take long before souls would die with their bodies. Today, human souls are still alive; they can still be woken up if there is the right knowledge of the spirit. In a century or two this will no longer be possible unless there is a science of the spirit.

    The word "beetroot" is the same as our English word "beet" and refers to the usually red tuber that grows underground. Several weeks ago, Ray, a gardener in his 70's told me that if you planted potatoes during a waxing Moon, you got mostly green stuff above the ground and few potatoes. It was only if you planted potatoes during a waning Moon that you got what you were after, lots of potatoes under the ground when you dug up your crop. He attested to having found this out the hard way one year and carefully planted according to the phases of the Moon thereafter. I remember as a college student in Philosophy 101 having a class discussion about the phases of the Moon. One student who grew up on a farm claimed that if you dug fence holes during a full Moon, you got extra dirt left over, but if you dug the fence post holes any other time of the month, all the dirt went back into the hole with the post. We debated whether to perform an experiment to confirm this report that the Moon had an effect on the soil or not. We didn't, but I remembered clearly the discussion we had about forty years ago.

    In the May 5, 1924 lecture (page 147, 148) Steiner tells us about a doctor who touched his tongue to the tip of the rootstock of a poisonous, medicinal plant (monkshood, a herb with a tuberous rootstock, which the dictionary says is "extremely poisonous in all its parts") This had a very strong effect on him. It caused him to lose all sensation above his shoulders, to "lose his head" and caused great changes in his life. He attained his goal of removing his head as "an obstacle to seeing the world of the spirit." (Page 148) Later, when he performed exactly the same application of his tongue to the same roots, it had no discernable effect. Steiner says that the missing part of the story was the report of the phase of the Moon during each tasting of the poisonous root, that the effects of the root of any plant is stronger during a Full Moon. He goes so far as to recommend that mothers feed their children beets, potatoes, and other root crops during a Full Moon for greatest nutritive effect. He says that eating beets at a Full Moon will kill any worms that one might have.

    [page 149] You see, gentlemen, it is like this. When you eat the root of a plant, this is under the influence of the moon just as much as a poisonous root is. . . . Beetroot is a good food for people who easily get worms. When the beetroot gets to the intestine the worms get upset; they are paralysed and are then eliminated in the stools.

    When I was in my twenties, I had problems with amoebic dysentery and got tired of taking the medicines and the weekly treks with stool specimens to my doctor who examined them for traces of the amoeba. To think that eating beets and potatoes at the Full Moon and avoiding them at the New Moon might have eliminated all the trouble and expense!

    [page 150] People who have certain illnesses may even be helped a great deal by giving them a root diet, arranging things in such a way that the diet is taken at the time of the full moon and not at the time of new moon. . . . Children who have a tendency to stay small could also be brought on a bit with such a root diet . . . between birth and the seventh year of life. . . . And the moon's influence is mainly apparent on the earth's suface. It does not go deeper. It goes just far enough to stimulate the roots of plants. It is not down in the earth itself.

    After all these years, I encounter Steiner telling workers at the Goetheanum that the Moon has effects on the soil up to the depth of the roots of plants, which is about how far one digs to plant fence posts into the ground. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, Steiner tells us, did not think of the Moon as dry, cold body in space, but rather saw the Moon's influence everywhere they looked, up to the depths of the roots of plants. In the next passage he offers proof of the effects of the Moon. Can anyone attest to this from their own experience?

    [page 150] You can find proof that the moon forces do not go down into the earth if you talk to people who go for a swim in the moonlight, for instance. They'll soon come out of the water again, for they feel as if they are sinking.

    Like the farmer knows about the effect of the Moon on potatoes, so also the Arab in the Middle East knows about horses. Steiner says that it has to do with the Sun's rays coming down vertically, which it does more in the Arab region than in Northern Europe. The Babylonians knew about this effect people had on horses and noticed that it was greatest during the month of August, the month when the Sun was in the sign of Leo the Lion. It was from effects such as these that people began to plot and map out the ancient science of astrology, one that has fallen into disrepute among the materialistic skeptics for whom the spirit no longer exists. The most amazing thing to me about these skeptics is that they are mostly boring. At least it was amazing to me before I encountered the following passage in Steiner:

    [page 161] This is the great mystery with modern knowledge, that each knows a piece of the world and no one knows the whole. This is also why science is so terribly boring when it is presented in public lectures. It has to be boring, of course, gentlemen, if people tell you only a little bit about something.

    In his May 10, 1924 lecture, Steiner was asked about the Sephiroth Tree which is the basic diagram of the Kaballah. He explains it simply in a diagram that appears on page 165 as what everyone knew to be true in the time of the ancient Hebrews, that there were ten forces that influenced the human being. Three forces hovered around one's head called Kether, Chokmah, and Binah and they represented the forces of crown, wisdom, and intelligence respectively. Three forces act on the chest and influence the circulation of the blood, Chesed, Geburah, and Tiphereth, which represent freedom, power of life, and beauty respectively. Three forces act on the human limbs, Netsah, Hod, and Jesod, or overcoming, sympathy, and foundation respectively. And one force coming up from the Earth, Malkuth or the field force. These ten words were like a shorthand alphabet to the ancient Hebrew in which it was possible to describe a human being intimately and succinctly using only a few words. When you have studied what the ten Sephiroth are, you are as equipped to use them as a child is to speak who has only studied the alphabet. For example, if one had said, kether, chesed, binah, he would have said:

    [page 173] In the world of the spirit the most sublime spiritual power [kether] uses freedom [chesed] to bring about intelligence [intelligence].

    In this last section I want to include something from Steiner's insightful discussions of words, especially how their sounds are related to realities. At one point in the discussions he mentions how, when people still experienced the spiritual world directly, there was only one language because there was still only one way of experiencing reality directly and they all felt it the same way. With the ability to think about things differently and the simultaneous moving away from direct experience of the spiritual component of reality, people began to use different words for the same things and organize their thoughts and words differently. The Bible story of the Tower of Babel tells this same story metaphorically. What evidence does Steiner give us for his claim of there having been only one language? Simple, he appeals to the universal feeling that remains yet in the sounds of our languages, no matter which one we consider.

    A television sitcom of the seventies portrayed a family living in the fifties. It was called Happy Days. In it an upper teens character named Fonzie was ultra-cool. If he did something or said something cool when his lower teen groupies were around, he'd lean back and say, with a flair, "AAAY!" I saw recently in one of the first episodes of the series that the first person to say "AAAY!" was one of the younger groupies who was taken slightly aback in fear by something Fonzie did. From then on, Fonzie took it as his trademark saying, but said it with his devil-may-care flair. In the passage below Steiner tells us how the ancients in the time of only one language understood that sound, "AAAY":

    [page 239] When one would say E [more or less like the 'a' in 'gate'] - just feel it: I shrink back a little. That does not suit me; E - I am a little afraid, something like fear!

    Note the translator from German to English has to explain that E in German is like our English word A with the sound as in 'gate', which is exactly the sound that Fonzie made when he said, "AAAAY!" And Fonzie leaned back as if in fear, but said the AAAY so loud and with such a flair, that the younger kids were cheered by his simultaneous expression of and overcoming of fear.

    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/fbtbrvw.shtml

    Read/Print at:
    http://www.doyletics.com/arj/fbtbrvw.shtml

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    I hear often from my Good Readers that they have bought books after reading my book reviews. Keep reading, folks! As I like to remind you, to obtain more information on what's in these books, buy and read the books — for less information, read the reviews.


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    8. COMMENTARY:
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    In this section I like to comment on events in the world, in my life, and in my readings which have come up during the month. These are things I might have shared with you in person, if we had had the opportunity to converse during the month. If we did, then you may recognize my words. If I say some things here which upset you, rest assured that you may skip over these for the very reason that I would likely have not brought up the subject to spoil our time together in person.

    1. Padre Filius Finds Himself Exposed to the Real Mardi Gras this Month:

    Padre Filius, the cartoon character created by your intrepid editor and would-be cartoonist, will appear from time to time in this Section of DIGESTWORLD to share with us some amusing, extraordinary, or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.

    This month the Good Padre is SHOCKED, SHOCKED by a Sudden Exposure:


    2. Comments from Readers:

    NOTE: I love hearing from all my Good Readers and including your missives here (slightly edited).
    If you prefer any comments or photos you send to be private, simply say so and they will not be published.

    • EMAIL from Benzion Porat in Ofaqim, Israel:
      Dear Bobby,
      I like very much your Book Review:
      Becoming the Archangel Michael's Companions, GA#217

      The book has been translated to Hebrew and published in Israel by Ms. Shuni Tooval: Click Here

      I would like to translate your review to Hebrew and to post the translation in the internet site of our friend Daniel Zehavi, next to the Israeli modest version of the Rudolf Steiner lectures archive, in the new section of works by other writers: Click Here

      There your work will be in good neighborhood, Among works by our friends Adriana Koulias, Michael Roboz and your review of the book Rudolf Steiner's Mission and Ita Wegman, by Margarete & Erich Kirchner-Bockholt: Click Here

      I hope that you will approve this translation and posting.
      All the best,
      Benzion Porat

      ~~~~~~~~~~~~ REPLY from Bobby ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      Yes, I do approve and am happy to participate in your endeavor.
      in freedom and light,
      Bobby

    • EMAIL from Stewart in Virginia:

      I've read your piece on the Agriculture Course several times. It has a lot of useful information. I appreciate your term "macroscope."

      Best, Stewart Perennial Roots Farm

      ~~~~~~~~~~~~ REPLY from Bobby ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      Dear Stewart,
      Thanks for writing. And for acknowledging my term "macroscope", always great to meet another macroscope user!
      Bobby

      ~~~~~~~~~~~~ MACROSCOPE DEFINITION ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      What is a macroscope? It's a name Bobby Matherne coined for Steiner's technique of looking at the big picture, explaining how to understand agriculture holistically. Contrast Steiner's approach to that of the horticulturist with a microscope identifying minute parts of plants or a chromatograph to identify minute percentages of zinc or lithium or silica, etc, and prescribing chemical sprays to combat fungi and wilt, insecticides to combat pests, and herbicides to kill weeds. Click Here to Read More.

    3. Poem from Freedom on the Half Shell: "It Isn't Fair"


    I first meet you in 'Freedom on the Halfshell?" ALIGN=left>

    Give me your poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free and I will give them taxes, regulations, restrictions, and every manner of unfairness ever created by persons saddled with the illusion that they can decide what is best for someone else's welfare. The individual, like the business professional, knows what's best in a given situation and, given the freedom, will take that action. The forces of coercion are prying open the shell that contains the living muscle and spirit of the American people — will we resist those forces and keep our muscles and spirit alive, free to open at will, or will we give up like the oyster and settle for "freedom on the half shell?" Here is another poem from Freedom on the Half Shell:


                           It Isn't Fair

    The sweet smell of success
          has a subliminal lean
                            SNAP! CRACKLE! POPCORN!
    In the marketing business
          only dollars are seen.

    Demographically designed odorants
          waft about retail concourses
                            PFFFFT! Brand new Cadillac!
    Activating our buying muscles
          and emptying our purses.

    IT ISN'T FAIR, the conscious mind says,
          to bypass my total control,
                             SNIFFFF! SHALIMAR!
    Ain't gonna let no unconscious jazz
          mess with my bankroll.

    Laws are passed prohibiting smells
          from use in increasing sales
                            MMMmmm! HOMEBAKED BREAD!
    The conscious mind can rest content:
          for why it buys it has no hint.

    What kind of perfume did
    Bridgette Bardot wear
    when she wore
    nothing at all?
    An industrial nation that doesn't trust
          its unconscious mind
                            AHHHH! ROSES!!!
    Will find itself not boom, but bust,
          A decade and a half behind.

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    9. CLOSING NOTES:
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